Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Baasie never came back to live in the Burger house.

Her brother Tony boasted to the little boys of the neighbourhood how he could dive and was drowned in the swimming-pool.

Rosa Burger was unable to make out, driving over the freeway in her car, where the corrugated-iron cottage had been bulldozed. Old loquat trees suggesting those that had grown near the roadmakers’ camp were incorporated into the landscaping of the shoulders of the freeway, but the bauhinia was not where she would have thought it might still stand.

To be free is to become almost a stranger to oneself: the nearest I’ll ever get to seeing what they saw outside the prison. If I could have seen that, I could have seen that other father, the stranger to myself. I seem always to have known of his existence.

I suppose you found another place to live. (Mexico perhaps.) We didn’t bump into each other around town (you never knew about the man in the park). But you were the one who had said — Why d’you talk about him as ‘Lionel’?—

— Do I?—

— Sometimes even in the same sentence—‘my father’, and the next moment you switch to ‘Lionel’.—

It was something curious, to you who were nosy about what you called the mores of a house of ‘committed’ people. In me, significant — of what? It’s true that to me he was also something other than my father. Not just a public persona; many people have that to put on and take off. Not something belonging to the hackneyed formulation of the tracts and manifestos that explain him, for others. His was different. His may have been what he really was. After he was dead — after I left the cottage where I accused him — that persona became something held secret from me. How can I explain that the death of the man — the man in the park was part of the mystery. As he had died, or the fact of his death existed in my presence without my having been aware of it, so I lived in my father’s presence without knowing its meaning.

There were things whose existence was not admitted, in that house. Just as your mother’s love affairs and the way your father made his money were not, in yours. My parents’ was a different kind of collusion. It surprises me to see, looking at photographs, my mother was actually good-looking. And not only when she was young — in Russia, on some Students for Peace junket, everyone on a railway station holding bouquets big as bundles of washing — but even at that famous nineteenth birthday party of mine that was raided by the police a few months before her illness began. There is supposed to be a particular bountiful attractiveness about a woman who is unaware of her good looks, but if, as with my mother, she literally does not inhabit them , lives in purposes that are not served in any particular way by the distinction of a narrow face with deep eye-sockets, a long, straight, slender prow of nose, a skin so fine that even the earlobes are delicately ornamental under early-greying hair, these beauties fall into disuse through something more than neglect. There’s a photograph that catches her looking up from a table full of papers, dirty tea-cups, ashtrays, among her plain or brassy women garment workers; magnified by reading glasses, her intricately-marked irises are extraordinary, and the lashes are as thick on the lower eyelids as on the upper. Beautiful eyes. But I see only the interrogatory watchfulness that looked out, looked up at my footsteps displacing the gravel outside my ‘fiancé’s’ jail; the quick flicker of early-warning or go-ahead that went out to my father when she and he were in discussion with the many people who used that house. The lipstick she, in the habit of women of her generation, put on her lips, outlined not the shape of the lips so much as the determined complexity that composed them — a mouth that has learnt to give nothing away when speaking; whose smile comes from the confidence not of attraction but of conviction. I suppose children always think of their mothers as being capable; a rationalization of dependence and trust. She always knew what to do, and did it. The crowds of people who came to her funeral loved her for her kindness; the rationale of her always deciding what action to take, and acting. When Tony lay in the swimming-pool that Saturday morning she jumped in (one of her shoes as she kicked them off hit me) and when she came up out of the water she had him. Lily was holding me and screaming, as if the water would take me, too. My mother hooked her fingers in Tony’s mouth and hiked him up with a great effort, she was gasping and coughing, and held him upside-down. The water came out with bits of his breakfast in it, bits of pink bacon I saw. She squatted over him and breathed from her mouth to his, holding his nose shut and releasing the pressure of her hands on his chest. She did this for a long time.

But he was dead.

My father — as a doctor — put her to sleep. The next day he took me to her in their bed; I felt afraid to enter the room. She took me into the bed with her and she was crying, not the way Tony and I did, making a noise, but silently, the tears running sideways into her hair. Lily told me they would ‘fill up that terrible hole’—the swimming-pool. Lily said she would never go on that side of the house again, never!

One Sunday soon after, my father remarked that he hadn’t timed my crawl once since the school term had begun.

— What about a demonstration this morning? Lovely hot day—

I didn’t read the comic supplement spread before me on the floor. My mother ignored the pawing of the cat, wanting to get onto her lap.

— Put on your costume. Off you go. — When I came back he took his car-key out of his pocket and going over to my mother, opened her hand, put the key in it, and folded the hand, holding the fist he had made of it within his own. — You said you’d take the car and fill up for me.—

That swimming-pool was enjoyed by many people. It became the tradition, in summer, for us to keep open house round it at Sunday lunch — Lionel Burger’s braaivleis. My mother swam; she kept a supply of blow-up armlets and it was a rule of the house, dutifully followed by new guests, new contacts, who did not know that the Burgers had had a son, that all children in the pool area had to wear them. Some of the black friends had never been in a pool before; the municipal swimming baths weren’t open to them. My father gave their children swimming lessons; they clung to him, like Baasie and me. In that house, we children had few exclusive rights with our parents. Taking into account the important difference that I was a female child and so the sexual implications would have been different, I wonder if the sight of my mother with another man — all right, under another man — would have cracked the shell of containing reality for me, made me recoil entirely into that of internal events, as it did for you? ‘I wonder’ in the sense that I doubt it; she was Baasie’s mother, as well as Tony’s and mine, and mother to others from time to time, so perhaps I should not have thought of her and my father, Lionel, as each other’s possession. We belonged to other people. I must have accepted that, too, very young, in that house. I became Noel de Witt’s girl, if need be.

And other people belonged to us. If my mother had no lover — and although I see I know nothing, nothing about her, I am sure of this — there were other relationships, not sexual, about which there has been speculation. Even in court, The woman who couldn’t meet my father’s face, looking so gently, patiently at her — who couldn’t let herself see ‘even the toe of his shoe’: poor sniveller, wretched or despicable, she began as one of my mother’s collection of the dispossessed, like Baasie or the old man who lived with us. Unlike them, she was not what the papers call a victim of apartheid; she was an old-maid schoolteacher who belonged to a church group that looked for uplifting works to do in the black townships. She must have met my mother through the co-operative’s office, in connection with some feeding scheme or other. One of those eager souls who see no contradiction in their protest that they are not at all ‘political’ but would like to do something effective — something less self-defeating than charity, for what (euphemism being their natural means of expression) they call ‘race relations’. Through my mother, she began to teach at the school Baasie and Tony and I had been to, the little school that did not officially exist, where we white, African, coloured and Indian children of my parents’ ‘family’ of associates learned together. So far as she was concerned, my mother had given her exactly what she sought; her gratitude became the kind of worshipping dependency my mother was often burdened with, and we gained another hanger-on in that house. This one was grateful to be in the background: she helped out in my father’s surgery when his receptionist was on leave; she would bring home-grown sweet peppers, carrots and radishes from her little garden, for him, who adored to eat raw, bright vegetables; when my mother was ill she wanted to nurse her, although there were others preferred for their skill and the abundant life and vigour dying people need as reassurance.