Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The two rooms where no guests were allowed in were exactly as a child would have expected, would have arranged them herself: crowded, overgrown with possessions whose origin was as individual as the standardization of hotel furnishings was anonymous, a shrine of coloured photographs of weddings and babies, souvenirs and natural curiosities. There were no books, no flowers: it was not at all like home — her father’s house — but stood in relation to the hotel as the child’s cupboard full of treasures does to its parents’ domain. The light came through windows safe with burglar-bars, cosy with the domestic lianas of net curtains and wandering philodendron. She lay on a thick carpet the colour of the red you see when you shut your eyes against sunlight and looked at women’s magazines and the Farmer’s Weekly. A parakeet with the digit of a claw missing raised the shutter of one lid then the other. A perle-lemoen-shell ashtray, a miniature Limoges teaset, a fossil fragment, tortoise carapace, black-tipped Sacred Ibis feathers someone had stuck in a Vat 69 glass filched from the bar — each was charged with associations she could feel without having to know its history; the rich clutter of private ends pursued was there, in place.

Although no one could enter these quarters, Rosa could come and go as she pleased. With the hotel dog tittuping ahead on three legs she wandered the wide dirt streets behind the main road in the mornings. Scarcely anyone passed her; a white woman going shopping on foot, a bicycle zigzagging. The houses, little and crabbed, with tin roofs, dark stoeps and windows that were never open, or amply haphazard with clumsy gables like dough-shapes, gave no sign of life but the clucking of chickens and the successive frenzies of dogs who, like the one who accompanied her, were all related in the common progenitor of a yappy Pomeranian-fox terrier cross. A parallel neighbourly cross-breeding of gardens produced, the length of the streets, the same blinding luxury of cerise Bougainvillaea, golden shower creeper, red hibiscus, the same pink and cream frangipani surrounded by a sweet confetti of their own flower-droppings, the same furzy tree-ferns and green-dugged pawpaw palms: the artificial ‘tropical’ gardens of smart resort hotels, elsewhere in the world. They ravelled out in mealie and pumpkin patches where the dorp ended in khakiweed and rusty metal and the veld merged with it. When she reached these quiet, wild, sleeping limits sudden rustlings aware of her — the presence of rats or snakes, once a nest of kittens that hissed and fled from her — turned her back.

But there were landmarks. She went as far as a broken-paved space within loops of rusty chain where she puzzled over the letters carved on a stone obelisk, although she was, as Uncle Coen told her, ‘ ’n Boere meisie’ who knew her mother tongue, Afrikaans. The inscription was in Hollands, dating from the time of the Transvaal Boer Republic, commemorating the site of the first Gereformeerde Kerk in the district. Another street ended at the church to which she was taken with the Nel family on Sundays, wearing a borrowed hat. It was a new building of the kind that marked the existence of a dorp from miles away at every turn in the landscape. Its copper-covered spike stuck into the sky like a giant, gleaming, three-sided floor-nail. The street that was in line with the most direct path across the veld to the location was where old black men or women greeted her as if she were a grown-up, black children giggled and talked about her, she could tell, as they passed with a loaf or packet on their heads. Once when a group was playing some sort of tag as they sauntered, and a packet broke, she tried to help scoop up the spilt mealie meal and realized they couldn’t speak Afrikaans or English.

She was resting, in the chair she’d discovered for herself — the solid surface roots of a marula tree, another landmark — when the old oom 1who often sat talking on the hotel stoep to whoever would listen, came by. He walked so slowly, appearing to use his stiff hip as a cane past which he dragged his other leg, that she recognized him from a long way. He stopped and spoke in Afrikaans. — What is a child doing out of school, this time? — She could only giggle and say nothing, as the black children had done when she spoke to them. — My child! Go on, now! Go home! Your mother’s waiting. Your poor mother, waiting for you to come from school!—

She got up and beat at her dress. The dog sniffed the old man’s trousers and jumped away, barking. She did not say to him: my mother’s in prison. How could he understand that? The prison was down the road, just behind the police station where the flag flew. A little stone building, and in the yard at the back where the police van stood, tin sheds with barred windows. The prisoners were barefoot black men in loose shorts whom anyone could see cutting the grass with lengths of sharpened iron outside the municipal offices.

Daniel the bar waiter who served on the stoep sat on an up-ended beer crate on the pavement when there was nobody drinking. He wore a red monkey-jacket with black grosgrain lapels that smelled strongly of sweat as he moved his arms, a bow-tie, a red-and-black forage cap, and peeling black patent shoes whose shine cracked over the strange protrusions on his feet — like Selena and Elsie, he walked to work across the dusty veld from the location every day. Rosa hopped about on the pavement, coming and going before him while they talked. She described Johannesburg, which he had never seen. — When you going back, me I’m coming there too. I’m going work for your house. Your daddy. — She told him no, Lily Letsile worked for her mother and father. He told her he had five children and would send one of the boys to work in her garden. — How old?—

— Oh he’s coming big. I think is nearly thirteen years now.—

— He’ll have to go to school, not work in the garden. Children don’t work. But he’s too big to go to school with Baasie and my school’s only for girls.—

Daniel laughed and laughed, as if she were very funny.

Suddenly she told him — My mother and father are in jail.—

Daniel lowered and waggled his head, gave out grunting yelps, and screwed up one eye to pin reproach on her. — Don’t say like that about your parents. Always your parents look after you nice, send you nice school, make everything for you. Don’t say those thing.—

The white barman had black sideburns, a bright skin, and wore a belt with a lion’s head buckle. Once he took it off and chased Tony and the cousin out of the bar when they were making a nuisance of themselves, but it was only in play. Daniel told Rosa that Baas Schutte used his belt if he found any of the waiters stealing drink; this was the sort of gossip that passed away hours, on the pavement.

— Did you see? — She did not quite believe anyone would hit a grown-up, although she knew some people smacked their children.

— There in the yard! He was holding and that boy he couldn’t run away! He’s too strong, Baas Schutte! — Daniel was laughing again.

— Which waiter? — She knew them all; they brought her her food, padding heavily in and out the swing doors from the diningroom to the kitchen with its blast of smells and noise, they gambled with bottle tops or flung themselves down to smoke in the sun outside the kitchen.

— Jack? Was it Jack? — She had heard Auntie Velma having an argument with Jack about dried-up mustard in the little metal pots that stood on the tables.

— Jack? Jack he’s not waiter for bar! How Baas Schutte can trouble for Jack? That one he’s gone away. He won’t work here no more in town. He’s go away there to his home. He’s too frightened for Baas Schutte! — Daniel clapped his hands on his tin tray.