Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Oh there were parties, all right… Christmas trees, weddings. People had affairs with other people’s wives… — You don’t have a corner on that. I don’t know about my mother and father — I doubt it. Although Lionel was very attractive to women. You probably saw that at the trial — I think most good doctors are….There were terrible rows and antagonisms between people…—

— But between the faithful; yes, political ones.—

She continued her list. — And there were deaths.—

In the middle of the night, he began to speak.

— But isn’t it true — you had your formula for dealing with that, too.—

She lay and listened to the seething and sweeping of the bauhinia tree against the tin roof.

— Isn’t it? A prescribed way to deal with the frail and wayward flesh that gets sick and wasted and drowns. Some people scream and beat their breasts, others try to follow into the next world, table-tapping and so on. Among you, the cause is what can’t die. Your mother didn’t live to carry it on, others did. The little boy, your brother didn’t grow up to carry it on, others will. It’s immortality. If you can accept it. Christian resignation’s only one example. A cause more important than an individual is another. The same con, the future in place of the present. Lives you can’t live, instead of your own. You didn’t cry when your father was sentenced. I saw. People said how brave. Some people say, a cold fish. But it’s conditioning, brain-washing: more like a trained seal, maybe.—

— What do you do when something terrible happens? — Before he answered she spoke again, from the outline of her profile seen as the valleys and peaks of a night horizon beside him. — What would you do — nothing like that’s ever happened to you.—

— Want to pull the world down round my ears, that’s what.—

— Pretty useless.—

— I don’t give a fuck about what’s ‘useful’. The will is my own. The emotion’s my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there’s no ‘we’, only ‘I’.—

They whispered in the dark, children telling secrets. He got up and closed the window on the swaying, battering windy blackness. He kept a cassette player on the floor beside the bed, and he felt for the keys and pressed one on the tinkly, choppy surprise of Scott Joplin’s music. The gay, simple progressions climbed and strutted about the room. Her feet fidgeted under the bedclothes, slowly took on rhythm like a cat’s paws kneading. He threw back the covers and they watched the silhouettes of their waving feet, wagging like tongues, talking like hands. Soon they got up and began to dance in the dark, their shapes flying and entangling, a jigging and thumping and whirling, a giggling, gasping as mysterious as the movement of rats on the rafters, or the swarming of bees, taking shelter under the tin roof.

The one in the church-going hat who came to hear sentence pronounced on Lionel Burger was the relative to whom the children were sent the single time when both parents were arrested together. She was a sister of Burger and she and her husband had a farm and ran the local hotel in the dorp of the same district.

Rosa had been armed very young by her parents against the shock of such contingencies by the assumption that imprisonment was part of the responsibilities of grown-up life, like visiting patients (her father) or going to work each day in town (once her mother was banned from working as a trade unionist, she ran the buying office of a co-operative for blacks and coloureds). At eight years old Rosa could tell people the name by which the trial, in which her father and mother were two of the accused, was known, the Treason Trial, and explain that they had been refused bail which meant they couldn’t come home. Tony perhaps did not realize where they were; Auntie Velma encouraged the idea that he was ‘on holiday’ on the farm — an attitude the parents would not have thought ‘correct’ and that their daughter, resenting any deviation from her parents’ form of trust as a criticism and betrayal of them, tried to counter. But the five-year-old boy was being allowed to help make bricks: if he had lived to be a man perhaps he would never have outgrown — given up? — this happy seclusion of what he himself was seeing, touching, feeling, from anything outside it.

Baasie was left behind. Rosa had flown into a temper over this — the way to tears through a display of anger — but she was told by Lily Letsile that Baasie wouldn’t like to be out in the veld.

— He would.—

— No, he’s scared, he’s scared for the cows, the sheeps, the snakes—

A lying singsong. Lily and Auntie Velma both used it; whereas Rosa believed her parents never lied. Baasie, the black boy almost Rosa’s age who lived with the Burger family, went to the private school run illegally by one of the Burgers’ associates that Rosa herself had attended until she was too old and had to go to the school for white girls. He was not afraid of anything except sleeping alone, Alsatian dogs, and learning how to swim. He and Rosa had often shared a bed when they were as little as Tony, they scuttled wildly together from that particular breed of dog and fought for the anchorage of wet hair on Lionel Burger’s warm breast in the cold swimming-pool. Baasie was sent to a grandmother; he did not seem to have another mother (he had Rosa’s mother, anyway) and his father, an African National Congress organizer from the Transkei, moved about too much to be able to take care of him.

The Nel relatives lived between their farm and their hotel. Three initials and a name over the doorway to the bar and the main entrance from the hotel stoep stood for Uncle Coen. He drove back and forth from his tobacco sheds and cattle to town in a big yellow American car with rubber spats trailing to protect the chassis from mud. Auntie Velma ran the hotel office and drove very fast, in a combi with curtains tied at the waist, from hotel to farmhouse, to the railway station to pick up frozen fish for the second course on the menu, to scattered schools each Friday to fetch children, and to church on Sundays. Tony had his bricks and a cousin not yet of school-going age; Rosa gradually came to make the choice, when car or combi was going back to the farm, of staying at the hotel.

More and more, she based herself in the two rooms marked STRICTLY PRIVATE — STRENG PRIVAAT at the end of the hotel stoep. These rooms had no numbers. There was, instead, outside one, a wooden clock-face with large hands, a wire-and-feather cuckoo, and a poker-work verse: Dear Friend — If you came and we were out/Please before you turn about/Write your name! What time you came! Do call again! COEN AND VELMA NEL. A jotter hung from a string but the pencil was missing. This device was immediately recognizable to any child as something from childhood’s own system of signification. Beyond any talisman is a private world unrelated to and therefore untouched by what is lost or gained, disappears or is substituted for, in events of which the child is at mercy. She knew a badge, a password, when she met with one. She never left the Nels’ quarters without reaching up and turning the wooden hands to the time she went out the door. (She and Baasie had been given watches for Christmas. She remembered to take hers off before getting into the bath; he had not.)

She would disappear under the dummy cuckoo clock while running down the corridor in the middle of a game with the children of hotel guests. These children would be gone, themselves, in the morning. But no one could sleep in those two rooms STRENG PRIVAAT for one night as they did in the other rooms of the hotel, moving off early for the Kruger Park or the next stop in a commercial traveller’s lowveld round, the beds quickly stripped by the maids Selena and Elsie under lights left burning by the decamped, the early morning coffee tray and the night’s empty beer bottles standing in the corridor. Numbered rooms were all alike. All the lavatory paper was pink; each narrow bedside rug was speckled mustard-brown; between twin beds a radio was affixed to the wall and above each headboard was a coloured print showing a street scene with similar trees, taxis, people sitting drinking at little tables, and girls with high heels and poodles. Rosa read very well but the shop signs in these pictures were in a foreign language; the word she could recognize was ‘Paris’—a place far away in England, she was able to tell Selena and Elsie as she followed them round from room to room, talking above the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the radio they kept turned up while they worked.