Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

For the man who had married my father’s sister the farm ‘Vergenoegd’ was God’s bounty that was hers by inheritance, mortgage, land bank loan, and the fruitfulness he made of it, the hotel was his by the sign painted over the entrance naming him as licensee, the bottle store was his by the extension of that licence to off-sales. His sons would inherit by equally unquestioned right; the little boy who played with Tony would make flourish the tobacco, the pyrethrum — whatever the world thinks it needs and will pay for — Noel de Witt would never allow himself to grow.

When the girl cousin who was my contemporary was home from boarding-school for the weekend, we ladyshipped it about hotel and farm together as her natural assumption. Daniel was commanded to bring cokes; the hotel cook was pestered to put dough men in the oven; a farm labourer mended her bicycle, a child from the kraal brought ants’ eggs for her schoolfriend’s grass snake, a kitchen maid had to wash and iron the particular dress she decided to wear. Her mother had no other claim, no other obligation but to please her daughter.

With this cousin I shared the second half of my name; it was the name of our common grandmother, long dead. Marie showed me our grandmother’s grave, fenced in with several others of the family, on the farm. MARIE BURGER was cut into a mirror of smooth grey stone veined with glitter. On the slab were round glass domes cloudy with condensation under which plastic roses had faded.

You thought I must be named for Rosa Luxemburg, and the name I have always been known by as well as the disguised first half of my given name does seem to signify my parents’ desire if not open intention. They never told me of it. My father often quoted that other Rosa; although he had no choice but to act the Leninist role of the dominant professional revolutionary, he believed that her faith in elemental mass movement was the ideal approach in a country where the mass of people were black and the revolutionary elite disproportionately white. But my double given name contained also the claim of MARIE BURGER and her descendants to that order of life, secure in the sanctions of family, church, law — and all these contained in the ultimate sanction of colour, that was maintained without question on the domain, dorp and farm, where she lay. Peace. Land. Bread . They had these for themselves.

Even animals have the instinct to turn from suffering. The sense to run away. Perhaps it was an illness not to be able to live one’s life the way they did (if not the way you did, Conrad) with justice defined in terms of respect for property, innocence defended in their children’s privileges, love in their procreation, and care only for each other. A sickness not to be able to ignore that condition of a healthy, ordinary life: other people’s suffering.

Rosa Burger was among city people who ate in a public square at lunchtime. The stale chill of the airconditioned offices she had left evaporated in the sun and the warm sounds of pigeons. There was a statue. The hissing spigots of a fountain donated by a mining company smoothed traffic blare and voices; she had her sandwiches and fruit, bought boxed under a tight membrane of plastic from a shop on the way, others shared a lovers’ picnic unwrapped from a briefcase between them on a park bench. Children and greedy waddling birds were fed the same sort of titbits. Indian girls secretively ate daintily with their fingers from take-away cartons of curry. On the grass coloured girls jeered, gossiped and laughed, waving chicken-bones, and black men sat with their half-loaves of bread in wisps of wrapping, pulling out the white centre like cotton bolls. There were bins with advertising legends (Why be Lonely? Step Out Tonight with One of Our Lovely Hostesses) where leavings were thrust, and these were picked over, as the pigeons did what was left on gravel and grass, by various people in various kinds of need. The child who led the blind beggar felt for potato chips and half-gnawed chicken, other blacks shook empty cigarette packs, and there were white men and women, threadbare-neat pensioners and old creatures with sparse orange hair and red lips inexpertly drawn in the light of failing sight who might be obsolescent prostitutes, scratching and peering for finds which seemed to give them satisfaction. The women hid these away in tattered shopping bags; the men smoothed retrieved newspapers.

On the grass black men slept deeply, face down; they might have been dead. On benches avoided by other people, white tramps with drunkard’s blue eyes and the brief midday dapperness of hair slicked back in the municipal washroom, approached each other confidentially, came and went with the dogged, shambling dedication of their single purpose — to find money for a bottle. Sometimes one of these who were fixtures along with the pigeons was apart from the others, drunk, asleep, or in some inertia and immobility that was neither. Rosa, seeing one like this, chose a bench on the other side of the walk. But she need not have thought he might make a nuisance of himself; she ate her lunch, two little boys ran up and down twirling plastic whirligigs before him, a girl wearing the name DARLENE in gilt letters suspended on either side by a gilt chain round a freckled neck kissed a young man for the full time it took a pantechnicon, unable to turn at the traffic lights because of a parked car, to manoeuvre its length back into the street from which it had emerged; one of the children was caught and smacked on the back of the thighs by its mother; a fat man in a blue suit dropped an ice-cream cone which was pecked away by the birds; the clock that could be heard only within a radius of three blocks of the old post office struck the single wavering note of one o’clock and then the half-hour; and still the man did not move, sitting with his leg crossed over the other at the knee, arms folded, head sunk forward like that of someone who has dozed during a speech. A pigeon alighted on his shoulder and took off clumsily again.

But that moment in which the bird had paused, cocking its beak, indifferent busybody, changed the awareness of the freckled girl and her boy; of Rosa Burger; of the mother and the two little children, the man in the blue suit. They looked at each other as if each had a sudden question to ask. They all began to watch the man. The children’s mouths opened. They pressed back against their mother’s side and she moved away from the demand, shifting supermarket carriers as a claim defended, an alibi of the normality of her presence; resting there with her kids in the square, waiting for the time to catch a bus or be fetched by a husband. Now other people from benches farther off, from the grass, approached. Two hobos came over hunched towards each other, hands making intimate sign-language, and the one tried to restrain the other while he took the man on the bench by the shoulder the pigeon had landed on, and called a name. Hey Doug, come on, man, Doug . The man did not wake up but did not fall over. He stayed, solid as the statue of the landdrost, as if at the axis where one knee crossed the other he was secured to the bench as the landdrost was fixed to his plinth by bronze prongs.

The two friends backed away, whispering and challenging.

The freckled girl’s boyfriend turned to Rosa in triumph, with an answer, not a question. — You know what? — the bloke’s dead.—

— Ooooh, I’m getting out of here. — His girl was shaking her hands from the wrists, urgently.

The two little boys moved nearer and were stopped by their mother — Come away!—

No policeman was about but someone fetched a traffic officer and he had in his hand a first-aid box of the kind with a toy axe attached buses carry along for emergencies.

People pressed forward all round Rosa where she stood as if waiting to be told, to have some indication whether to go this way or that. Only the man himself took no notice. The black men who had lain on the grass like dead men got up and came to look at him.