Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Harry Schutte often took her along for the ride beside him when he drove off in the van that had the name of the hotel and ‘Off-Sales’ painted on it. Jumping down at the cartage contractor’s, the hardware store, the estate and insurance agent’s where his girl-friend worked, he seemed to forget Rosa, but would always bring her an ice-cream or a liquorice pipe. The girl-friend leaned on the van window and flirted with him through the child. — Shame, when’s your mommy coming back from overseas? Don’t you want to come and stay by me so long? I’ve got a nice house. Haven’t I, Harry? I’ve got two puppies…you ask Harry—

Five weeks after she and her brother had been sent away Rosa sat on Daniel’s box while he was busy serving the people who filled the verandah tables from mid-morning on a Saturday. A party of schoolgirls voluptuous in track suits jounced down the main street on their way from a sports meeting. Black women selling mealies sat with babies crawling from under the coloured towels they wore as shawls. Farmers whose hats hid their eyes waited for wives and children who trailed and darted in and out of shops, sucking sweets and clutching parcels. Black children coming up behind humble parents were in rags or running barefoot, bundled from above the knees in school uniforms that could be afforded only once in years, so that small boys were tiny within vast clothing, and big boys wore burst and almost unrecognizable versions of the same. Young white bloods revved dust under their wheels, car radios streaming snatches of music. Black youths in token imitations of this style — a bicycle with racing handles, a transistor on a shoulder-strap, or merely a certain way of lounging against the pillars of the Greek fish-and-chip shop opposite the hotel — occasionally crossed, making the cars avoid them, to pick up cigarette butts thrown away by the hotel drinkers on the stoep. Daniel skittered and sweated; the customers climbed the steps past Rosa: huge marbled legs of a young woman who shouted to him for a double rum and coke, dainty little girls with miniature handbags sent off into the hotel hand-in-hand— Ask the boy where the toilet is . The parents sat over their beers as if they did not know each other, the grandmothers spread in their chairs like rising bread; there were the fragile grandfathers to whom middle-aged daughters shouted, the sulky young girls who turned away from their families, sucking at straws with eyes narrowed in an assumption of unawareness of passing men. Farmers’ wives with cake-boxes exchanged cries of greeting over Rosa’s head. The barman’s dog ignored her in the bristling pleasure of approaching the town clerk’s Pomeranian from whose strain he was distantly sprung. All this ordered life surrounded, coated, swaddled Rosa; the order of Saturday, the order of family hierarchy, the order of black people out in the street and white people in the shade of the hotel stoep. Its flow contained her, drumming her bare heels on Daniel’s box, its voices over her head protected her. Her aunt with the confidential, comedian’s smile of a woman with a long prominent jaw was suddenly above her. — Guess what? Mommy’s coming to fetch you.—

At eye-level, a small boy passed holding in his fist one finger of his father’s huge hand.

— And daddy?—

— Not just yet, Rosa.—

Charges against her mother had been withdrawn. Her father was released on bail soon after she and her brother came home, and was on trial for twenty-eight months before the court quashed the indictment against him and sixty other accused out of the ninety-one committed for trial. In the Burger house there was a party, then, more joyous than any wedding, cathartic than any wake, triumphant than any stryddag held by the farmers of the Nels’ district in celebration of the white man’s power, the heritage of his people that Lionel Burger betrayed.

Now you are free. The knowledge that my father was not there ever, any more, that he was not simply hidden away by walls and steel grilles; this disembowelling childish dolour that left me standing in the middle of them all needing to whimper, howl, while I could say nothing, tell nobody: suddenly it was something else. Now you are free.

I was afraid of it: a kind of discovery that makes one go dead-cold and wary.

What does one do with such knowledge?

Flora Donaldson’s bossy joy in managing other people’s lives saw me taking off for another country: always in Africa, of course, because wasn’t that where my father had earned the right for us to belong? Wasn’t that our covenant, whatever happened to us there? You saw me in prison. Matter-of-factly, eventually, inevitably. For you, I could not be visualized leaving, living any other life than the one necessity — political necessity? — had made for me so far. You with your navel-fluff-picking hunt for ‘individual destiny’: didn’t you understand, everything that child, that girl did was out of what is between daughter and mother, daughter and brother, daughter and father. When I was passive, in that cottage, if you had known — I was struggling with a monstrous resentment against the claim — not of the Communist Party! — of blood, shared genes, the semen from which I had issued and the body in which I had grown. I stand outside the prison with an eiderdown and hidden messages for my mother. Tony is dead and there is no other child but me, for her. Two hundred and seventeen days with the paisley scarf in my pocket, while the witnesses came in and out the dock condemning my father. My mother is dead and there is only me, there, for him. Only me. My studies, my work, my love affairs must fit in with the twice-monthly visits to the prison, for life, as long as he lives — if he had lived. My professors, my employers, my men must accept this overruling. I have no passport because I am my father’s daughter. People who associate with me must be prepared to be suspect because I am my father’s daughter. And there is more to it, more than you know — what I wanted was to take a law degree, but there was no point; too unlikely that, my father’s daughter, I should be allowed to practise law, so I had to do something else instead, anything, something that would pass as politically innocuous, why not in the field of medicine, my father’s daughter. And now he is dead! Dead! I prowled about that abandoned garden, old Lolita’s offspring caught Hottentot Gods in the grass that had taken over the tennis court, and I knew I must have wished him to die; that to exult and to sorrow were the same thing for me.

We had in common such terrible childish secrets, in the tin house: you can fuck your mother, and wish your father dead.

There is more to it. More than you guessed or wormed out of me in your curiosity and envy, talking when the lights were out, more than I knew, or wanted to know until I came to listen to you, unable to stop, although the shape of your feet held by the sweat in your discarded socks, the doubt whether the money in the two-finger-pocket with the button missing at the waist of your jeans always went where the watchman trusted it to — these venial familiarities of the body’s exuding or the mind’s deviousness were repugnant to although loyally not criticized or revealed by me. So it was when my brother Tony pinched stamps from my father’s desk and sold them at a cent or two in excess of the post office price to the servants round about who wrote to their homes in Malawi and Moçambique, or when he gave himself away by farting with anguish whenever he lied, poor little boy. — The Saturday morning Tony drowned I saw him bringing his friends to swim and I told him not to show off and dive. He promised, but I could smell him.

Still more to it than you knew. My Swede, that Marcus whose name you didn’t bring up because you thought it would be painful for me was of no importance, whether he went away or stayed. What was there between us — as the language of emotional contract puts it? That’s easy. He wanted to make a film about my father, in Stockholm. It was going to be a collage of documentary evidence of events and fictional links, with an actor playing the part of my father. I had to look at photographs of Swedish actors and say which I thought would come closest to suggesting Lionel Burger. Because of course Marcus could never see him. Not even as he was then, in prison. We went together one weekend to a Transvaal dorp, for me to show the sort of environment in which my father grew up. We also went together to Cape Town because my father was at the medical school there as a student. That wasn’t the reason the Swede gave to the principal. He got into the School to take some footage by telling everyone he was making a film about South Africa’s wonderful heart transplants. But the real reason for going to Cape Town was not even the one we concealed, the real reason was to make love at the sea. He had that sexual passion for nature I imagine is peculiarly Northern. Something to do with too much cold and darkness, and then the short period when there is no night and they don’t sleep at all. He called it ‘dragon-fly summer’, just like one long, extraordinary, bright day in which to live a complete life-cycle.