Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

We take nature more easily, the sun’s always here. Except in prison; even in Africa, prisons are dark. Lionel said how the sun never came into his cell, only the coloured reflection of some sunsets, that would make a parallelogram coated with delicate pearly light, broken by the interruption of the bars, on the wall opposite his window.

The Swede had buttocks tanned as his back and legs — all of a unity, as if his body had no secrets. He was beautiful. And whether or not I am, he felt the same about me and could coax from me — that is the only way to describe the pride and appreciation, the simplicity of his patience and skill — three orgasms, one after the other, each pleasuring spreading to the limits of the spent one like the water touching to its own tidemarks on the sand. This had never happened to me before. And he wrote to me, when Lionel died. He said he would try to show a rough cut of the unfinished film if the Scandinavian anti-apartheid group held a memorial meeting. He had offered to try through his wife’s connections to get a passport for me, abroad, if ever I could leave. Perhaps, from his safety, from his welfare state where left-wing groups were like mothers’ unions or Rotary Clubs, and left-wing views did not imply any endangering action, being the lover of Lionel Burger’s daughter for a month or two was the nearest he would ever get to the barricades. I don’t mind. What else was I?

I told you how my ‘engagement’ to Noel de Witt was a device to enable him to be kept in touch with when he was in prison. You said with that insistent prurience with which people are curious about that with which they want nothing to do, You mean the underground Communist movement. They used you to keep in touch with him?

Yes of course, it was the obvious, an excellent idea, everyone decided.

— In that house?—

Yes of course, our house; it was natural, no one could suspect otherwise. Noel was one of my father’s known associates, he practically lived with us anyway, nothing extraordinary in his supposed to be going to marry Lionel Burger’s daughter. And his fiancée had the same privileges as a prisoner’s wife has — visits, letters and so on. Without me he would have had no one; he was half-Portuguese, his mother prohibited entry to South Africa because she was a Frelimo sympathizer who had been arrested by the Portuguese at one time, his father disappeared somewhere in Australia. Who would there have been to bring him books and writing paper? My mother and father knew what these things mean when you’re inside — the sight of a face that signals the outside still exists, a face whose associations assume that others are carrying on with what has to be done. And even the ingenuity, the blandly-outwitting joke played on the Director of Prisons, who cannot refuse permission for an ‘engaged’ girl to see her boy, the warders who feel a sneaking empathy even with a Commie when he gazes at his girl across the barrier in the visiting room — that gave confidence. That was one of the satisfactions you didn’t have on the list of our pleasures in that house — outsmarting the police. Noel entered gaily into the spirit of the thing. When he noticed the ring that had appeared on my finger for the first visit, he kept asking me whether I was quite sure I liked it? Quite, quite sure? — with all the basking persuasiveness of one who has chosen, he knows, exactly what his darling would want. The ring I wore my mother got from Aletta Gous, remembering that Aletta would rummage for just the right thing — a mean little round diamond thrust up on a mound of filigree steel-coloured metal, indispensable piece of equipment for the dorp betrothal. I don’t think it was a fake; somewhere in the nineteen-thirties Aletta had been a young girl in a country town and had nearly married the young man who ran his father’s garage and was an usher in the church of a Dutch Reformed sect called the Pinksters. When she outcast herself by running away to the city and taking part in street-corner meetings of the Communist Party, perhaps she flaunted her jaunty contempt for the broken bourgeois convention by keeping its flimsy shackle.

Mine is the face and body when Noel de Witt sees a woman once a month. If anybody in our house — that house, as you made it appear to me — understood this, nobody took it into account. My mother was alive then. If she saw, realized — and at least she might have considered the possibility — she didn’t choose to see. Alone in the tin cottage with you, when I had nothing more to tell you, when I had shut up, when I didn’t interrupt you, when you couldn’t get anything out of me, when I wasn’t listening, I accused her. I slashed branches in the suburban garden turned rubbish dump where I was marooned with you. Weeds broke rank where I tramped over twists of newspaper smeared with human shit, bottles and rags cast among the scented shrubs where tennis balls used to be lost. I accused him —Lionel Burger, knowing as he did, without question, I would do what had to be done.

Every month I was told what must be communicated in the guise of my loving prison letter. At night, sitting up in bed in my old room in that house, smoking cigarettes at that time, not yet eighteen, I rewrote each 500 words again and again. I didn’t know, ever, whether I had succeeded in writing with the effect of a pretence (for him to read as such) what I really felt about Noel so tenderly and passionately. The dates when my duty visits to him were marked on the calendar behind my bedroom door were approached by the ticking off of days in my handbag diary in which (well trained) I never wrote anything that could provide a clue to my life. On the night before the day itself finally arrived I washed my hair; before leaving for the prison I trickled perfume between my breasts and cupped some to rub on my belly and thighs. I chose a dress that showed my legs, or trousers and a shirt that emphasized my femaleness with their sexual ambiguity. Scent me out, sniff my flesh. Find me, receive me. And all this with an unthinking drive of need and instinct that could be called innocent and that you call ‘real’. I took a flower with me. Usually the warders would not accept it for him (now and then the sentimentality of one of them for ‘sweethearts’, or the vicarious sexual stir another got from pandering, would move him to pass the gift). I kept the flower in my lap or twisted the stem in my hand, where Noel could enjoy the sight of the bloom and know it was for him.

Reading in the car while she waited for me outside the prison, my mother would look up, as she heard me return, with her shrewd, anxious, complicit, welcoming expression that awaited me as a little girl when I was released from my first days of school. Had I done well? Here was my support, my reward, and the guarantor to whom I was contracted for my performance. At home, my father, his hands on my shoulders where I sat at table (his way with me, since I had been very small, to caress me like this as he came home from his patients and stood behind my chair a moment) interrogated about what Noel had managed to convey under the lovey-dovey. Was it true that Jack Schultz had been moved to another section of the prison? Had the politicals been on hunger strike for two days the previous week? I always remembered exactly what had been said in the prison visiting-room dialogue between Noel and me, although — as it was to be with my father later — several other prisoners were in their stalls talking to their visitors at the same time, and sentences in many voices crossed back and forth chaotically over his and mine. I remembered word for word, his exact turn of phrase, his cadence — so that, decoding his meanings, glancing from one to another for confirmation of interpretation, my father, mother and I could rely on each nuance being the prisoner’s own. It could also be relied upon that I had found the way to convey to him the messages I was entrusted with.