Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

When I had got my driving licence and could go to Noel’s prison visit alone, after I had seen him I drove slowly round the limits of the blind red-brick buildings caged in barbed wire with lookouts high up where guns and lights roosted. Round and round, in low gear, as many times as I dared without attracting suspicion. I could see there was no way out. If that was what I was looking for: or for some sign of where, behind those walls whose base not even a weed was allowed to approach, so forbidding and remote yet so ugly, commonplace, he was now back in a cell whose dark, recessed meshed slot might be that one or that one. The effort of following the live impression of him — only just left — into that place, down corridors I had caught sight of, through the smells of lavatory disinfectant, floor polish and sickly stewing meat whose whiff I had got, dazed me. If I looked away from the walls, towards warders’ houses, I used to see children playing in the small gardens, creaking the rusty chains of swings provided for them. It was easier to follow him to another life he might be living, on a farm with me (the farm I knew as a child, with tobacco limp as gloves in the drying shed); he wanted to be a farmer (I collected every scrap of information about him) although he had a science degree and worked for a paint manufacturer before he became a political prisoner. — Why should I choose to go to Tanzania or be rescued by Marcus and his wife in Sweden — why could not Noel de Witt and I have gone away to farm, to breed babies from me that would look like him, to grow wattle or tobacco or mealies or anything it was that he wanted to make flourish and couldn’t, not so much as a knot of tough grass able to force its way between the bricks of those walls?

I did — as you say — what was expected. I was not a fake. Once a month I sat as they had sent me to take their messages and receive his, a female presented to him with the smiling mouth, the gazing yet evasive eyes, the breasts drooping a little as she hunched forward, a flower standing for what lies in her lap. We didn’t despise prostitutes in that house — our house — we saw them as victims of necessity while certain social orders lasted.

When Noel de Witt’s sentence was served the prison authorities did what is often done with political prisoners, they opened the doors early one morning a few days before the stated date of his release, and put him out with the old airways bag of clothes and the watch that had been taken from him when he entered two years before. He knew he would be banned or perhaps house-arrested within a week, and he had, hidden away in town, an Australian passport on which he could leave the country if he were quick enough. He did not dare come to our house. From one of those Portuguese greengrocer’s shops that open when dawn supplies come from the market, he telephoned someone else, someone on the fringe, who could be trusted to do what was expected now as I had before — someone who had kept safe the Australian passport. When he arrived in England Noel sent a letter through another contact to tell my father these things and there was an enclosure for me, sweet and funny, to thank me for the letters that had cheered him, the visits that had kept him going, the goodies I’d been able to wheedle Chief Warder Potgieter into passing, the cleverly-chosen books I’d managed to get by as essential for his studies. A grateful hospital veteran’s phrases. Flowers came without a card and I was told he’d left some of the little money he had, for these to be ordered.

Those were my love letters. Those visits were my great wild times. All this I was free to understand in the tin cottage.

I grumbled one day, some commonplace — I’m sick of this job.—

You were driving me from the hospital where I worked. When we spoke to each other there was the clandestine quality of talking to oneself; the taunting and tempting of mutual culpability. You acknowledged me in you rather than looked towards me. — Even animals have the instinct to run a mile from sickness and death, it’s natural.—

The platitude I had used so meaninglessly, harmless remark belonging to the same level of communication as ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache’, broke loose in me. There was no sense of proportion for such things in that cottage; I was taken possession of by chance remarks, images, incidents; the unnumbered pages came up. I read them again and again, their script appeared in everything I seemed to be looking at, pupils of yellow egg yolk slipping separate from whites of eyes cracked against the bowl, faint quarterings of tabby ancestry vestigial on the belly of the black cat, the slow alphabetical dissolve from identity to identity, changing one letter at a time through the spelling of names in the telephone directory. Spoken against the cover of your daily noise on the violin and the bucklings of the tin roof that shifted silences, the chorus of running water in the bath that was furred with putty-coloured lime like an old kettle, the calls of the watchman’s drunks making their trajectory over the sough of night traffic, my silence hammered sullen, hysterical, repetitive without words: sick, sick of the maimed, the endangered, the fugitive, the stoic; sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain.

Yet I left the cottage where this kind of fervid private tantrum was possible.

I left the children’s tree-house we were living in, in an intimacy of self-engrossment without the reserve of adult accountability, accepting each other’s encroachments as the law of the litter, treating each other’s dirt as our own, as little Baasie and I had long ago performed the child’s black mass, tasting on a finger the gall of our own shit and the saline of our own pee. Although you and I huddled for warmth in the same bed, I never minded your making love to the girl who taught Spanish. And you know we had stopped making love together months before I left, aware that it had become incest.

It was like an illness no one mentioned, among my father’s relatives with whom we stayed when we were little. An illness that proved fatal: they came to pay their respects when they sat, my aunt and uncle, the good and kind Coen Nels, beside me to hear the life sentence pronounced.

Tony was so happy helping to cook bricks in a serious mud-pie game with the farm labourers who called him ‘little master’ (although that was Baasie’s name) and playing with half-naked black children who were left behind when he and cousin Kobus ran into the farmhouse for milk and cake. I understood quite quickly that Baasie, with whom I lived in that house, couldn’t have come here; I understood what Lily meant when she had said he wouldn’t like to. I forgot Baasie. It was easy. No one here had a friend, brother, bed-mate, sharer of mother and father like him. Those who owed love and care to each other could be identified by a simple rule of family resemblance, from the elders enfeebled by vast flesh or wasting to the infant lying creased in the newly-married couple’s pram. I saw it every Saturday, this human family defined by white skin. In the church to which my aunt drove us on Sunday morning, children clean and pretty, we sat among the white neighbours from farms round about and from the dorp, to whom the predikant said we must do as we would be done by. The waiter my uncle’s barman beat with his lion’s head belt was not there; he would be in his place down under the trees out of sight of the farmhouses, where black people sang hymns and beat old oildrums, or in the tin church in the dorp location. Harry Schutte didn’t come to church (on Saturday nights roars of song and the sound of smashing glasses came from the bar, as farmers’ rugby teams ended their afternoon’s sport) but he had worked hard for his sleep-in and he never forgot an ice-cream for a kid who might have been one of his own (after all, he and my father were born in the same district). Daniel knew the strength of the tattooed arm he was safe from so long as he didn’t take the white man’s bottle but stayed content to swallow the dregs left in his glass.