Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Rosa, moving away out of the small crowd, entered the strands of pedestrians crossing the street, intersecting with the strands coming across from the other side, as a thief makes himselfindistinguishable from any other passer-by.

Iworked for a trade journal, for a man who imported cosmetics and perfume, for an investment adviser. I gave up my hospital profession when I left you and the cottage. I was living alone for the first time in my life: without a stake of responsibility in that of anyone else. For us — coming from that house — that was the real definition of loneliness: to live without social responsibility.

There had been deaths in my father’s house but the death of a tramp in the park was in a sense the first for me. I ate my lunch there nearly always when I was working for Barry Eckhard, the finance man. Up on the twenty-sixth floor the smoked glass windows made the climate of each day the same cool mean, neither summer nor winter, and the time something neither night nor day; I came down into the city to repossess a specific sense of these things. I came to be anonymous, to be like other people. Although Barry’s offices concealed their function behind the penthouse style, not only banks’ pot plants but also original indigenous sculpture and a chrome table game that, set in motion, illustrated a Newtonian principle of dynamics, he enjoyed revealing to clients who seemed all to be first-name friends that his ‘girl Friday’ was Lionel Burger’s daughter. Sometimes she was invited along with them to expensive restaurants where their simple lunches of grilled kingklip were proof that they were not vulgar tycoons.

In the little public square I went to no one recognized me and so no one saw me. I ate my sandwiches, like everybody else, there, while the man died, or was dead already when we grouped ourselves round him as we did in relation to each other: the black labourers washed up from the streets prostrate upon the bit of grass, not yet ready for the kind of token comfort of white-collar workers so recently opened to blacks by the desegregation of the benches, the coloured factory girls signalling in their teasing manner of eating the sexual self-confidence Indian girls, huddled like nuns, were denied, the couple from the Post Office whose privacy the presence of all of us hedged, I myself making the choice of this bench rather than that because a member of the resident sherry gang sometimes struck up a tedious conversation or — worse — talked to himself. I had quickly discovered it’s unbearable to sit on a park bench beside a stranger who is talking to himself aloud as you are doing silently.

The evening newspaper spread across three columns a photograph taken of the dead man on the bench by some keen amateur who happened to have had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time. The space was as much as was customarily given to a daily series of girls on beaches from Ostia to Sydney. The caption drew upon the melodramatic romantic platitude of the ‘heartlessness’ of the city. (The two little boys were in the picture, mouths open, gazing.) But there was nothing cruel and indifferent about our eating our lunches, making love or sleeping off a morning’s work while a man, simulating life with one leg easily and almost elegantly crossed over the other, died or was dying. He looked as if he were alive. He gave no sign of injury, pain or distress, he was not held between the uniformed bodies of custodians, looking out where he could not run, he was not caged in court or cell, or holding out, as a beggar has nothing to present but his stump, a paper for the official stamp that is always denied him. The whole point was that I — we — all of us were exonerated. What could we have done? It was not a matter of help that could be given or withheld. Not a matter of the kiss of life or massaging a heart. Nothing could change the isolation of that man. What could we have known that would have made it possible to understand how he left us while among us, went away without crumpling a paper carton or throwing the skeleton of a bunch of grapes into the bin; stayed with us, as a shape of arranged flesh, when he was not there. The post office clerk and his girl could not do more than kiss. He had to keep his hands off her breasts and keep a newspaper or jacket across his lap to hide the swelling of his arousal to life. But this man who crossed his legs conversationally, whose arms were folded attentively — only his head had nodded off, drooped with the heat or boredom, it could happen to anybody — he carried through the unspeakable act in our presence. He made final the unfinished take-away chicken meal, the fondling half-mating that was as far as DARLENE and her boy could go. He concluded the digestive cycles and procreative tentatives around him by completing the imperative, the ultimate necessity. We saw and heard nothing.

I didn’t go back to eat in the square and I didn’t cut out the photograph. I knew the arch of the foot that was cocked over the knee, quite a high arch, which gives a foot a nice line, and the shoes not particularly worn since brown suede seems to look right only when rather shabby. The paper said the man’s name was Ronald Ferguson, 46, an ex-miner, no fixed abode. He drank methylated spirits and slept in bus shelters. There is an element of human wastage in all societies. But — in that house — it was believed that when we had changed the world (yes, in spite of, beyond the purges, the liquidations, the forced labour and imprisonments) — the ‘elimination of private conflicts set up by the competitive nature of capitalist society’ would help people to live, even people like this one, who, although white and privileged under the law of the country, couldn’t make a place for himself. I had seen my brother dead and my mother and father; each time the event itself, so close to me, was obscured from me by sorrow and explained by accident, illness, or imprisonment. It was caused by the chlorinated water with flecks of his pink breakfast bacon in it that I saw pumped from my brother’s mouth when he was taken from the pool; by that paralysis that blotted out my mother limb by limb; by the fever that my father smelled of, dying for his beliefs in a prison hospital.

But this death was the mystery itself. The death you were talking about; in the cottage. Circumstantial causes are not the cause: we die because we live, yes, and there was no way for me to understand what I was walking away from in the park. There was no way to deal with this happening but to gather the little plastic-foam tray and cellophane from which I’d eaten my lunch and go over and put it, as every day, as everyone else must, in the waste bin hooked to a pole. The revolution we lived for in that house would change the lives of the blacks who left their hovels and compounds at four in the morning to swing picks, hold down jack-hammers and chant under the weight of girders, building shopping malls and office towers in which whites like my employer Barry Eckhard and me moved in an ‘environment’ without sweat or dust. It would change the days of the labourers who slept off their exhaustion on the grass like dead men, while the man died. The children the white couple would make in their whites’ suburb would not inherit the house bought on the municipal loan available to whites, or slot safely into jobs reserved for whites against black competition. Black children — it was promised — would not have to live off the leavings we threw into the bin. Eckhard’s clients would no longer get rich by the effort of a phone-call to authorize a sale on the stock exchange. All that might change. But the change from life to death — what had all the certainties I had from my father to do with that? When the hunger ended and the kwashiorkor was wiped out as malaria was in the colonial era, when there were no rents extorted and no privately-owned mansions and cosy white bungalows, no white students in contemplative retreat where blacks could not live; when the people owned the means of production of gold, diamonds, uranium, copper and coal, all the mineral riches that had rolled to the bottom of the sack of Africa — one would be left with that. Nothing that had served to make us sure of what we were doing and why had anything to do with what was happening one lunchtime while I was in the square. I was left with that. It had been left out. Justice, equality, the brotherhood of man, human dignity — but it will still be there , I looked away everywhere from the bench and saw it still, when — at last — I had seen it once.