Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

It is not known when she began making herself useful in other ways. The dates at which the prosecution, for whom she appeared under indemnity as State Witness, suggested she was already acting as a courier predate the illness and death of my mother; but nothing was proved — she wept and insisted she had gone to Scotland for the visit to her elder sister she had been saving for over many years. She produced the inevitable post office book as proof of this monthly scrimping and self-denial, and one needed only to look at her to believe in it.

Maybe my mother knew she could count on the genteel, schoolgirl code of such a person never to enquire about the contents or addressee of, let alone open, letters she was asked to deliver abroad. It was little enough to ask of someone so eager to be needed? This quick realization within my mother would be signalled by that sudden seizing glance, sideways, without turning the head, showing the whites of those eyes shaded not only by their dreamy sockets but also the darkening skin round them, as my mother grew older. I know it well, I’ll always know it, that look my mother was unconscious of and that would have amazed — disquieted her: it was a glance that slipped the leash.

When I was the woman of my father’s house, after my mother’s death, this particular hanger-on scarcely ever came there. Perhaps she knew I had no feelings for her; if anything a young girl’s unthinkingly cruel irritation at her self-effacing lack of definition. We didn’t notice her absence, as we certainly should have that of Bridget Sulzer, Ivy and Dick Terblanche, Aletta Gous, Marisa Kgosana, Mark Liebowitz, Sipho Mokoena — any of those longtime associates of my mother and father who were still at large, neither in jail, in exile, nor opted out, or even the new frequenters who from time to time were attracted into that house. You were one; Conrad, you never told me whether or not Lionel, in his unique way, making you feel you would be liked, honoured, understood whether you responded or not, tried to recruit you. I wonder if perhaps he did, and you were ashamed that you withdrew from that marvellous ambience? That you never joined Baasie and me in the warmth of that stocky breast? You who had known only a father who prided himself on being self-made on sharp deals in scrap metal and disowned you as a long-haired loafer unworthy of inheriting money and the hard-working tradition in which it was earned. Lionel Burger probably saw in you the closed circuit of self; for him, such a life must be in need of a conduit towards meaning, which posited: outside self. That’s where the tension that makes it possible to live lay, for him; between self and others; between the present and creation of something called the future. Perhaps he tried to give you the chance. When you saw that wretched creature in the witness box, she could have been you.

It seems that all the time I thought she’d dropped us, or rather that we had thankfully got rid of her, Lionel was in touch with her. She did the simple things such people are fairly safe for. She kept illegal funds in her bank account. She rented a house where one of the faithful successfully lived underground for several months. It may have been out of some sentiment towards my mother’s memory; it may have been because she fell in love, late and hopelessly, with Lionel Burger, who will have made her feel liked, honoured, understood, whether she agreed or not to do what he asked of her, and who will also have — because all women confirm this — made her feel she was a woman. She is the example, in particular, that white liberals give when they point out how Communists, even my father, used innocent people; one could admire the courage, the daring, the lack of regard for self with which a man like Burger acted according to his convictions about social injustice (which, of course, one shares), even if one certainly didn’t share his Communistic beliefs and the form of action these took, but the way in which he involved others was surely ruthless? She had never been a member of the Party, or any radical organization. She told the court she ‘tried to live according to Christ’, and added the rider ‘very unsuccessfully’. At that point, as at many during her cross-examination, she wept. Her swollen nose and the torn hangnails that disfigured her hands were distasteful. Those who felt she had been exploited by Lionel Burger expressed their pity and kept unexpressed their disgust at the sight; only he, who had given her her chance, looked and listened without either, ready to meet without reproach the bloodshot eyes that could not look at him whom she had betrayed.

After Lionel Burger’s death a number of people approached his daughter with a view to writing about him. As the only surviving member of his family, she would have been the principal source of information for any biographer. One she refused after the first meeting. Another’s letters she did not answer. The one to whom she agreed to make material available did not find her very communicative. She had little to offer in the way of documentation; she said the family kept few letters or papers, and what there was had been taken away in police raids in the course of the years. She mentioned she had part of her parents’ library but turned aside from suggestions that perhaps this in itself might be interesting to a biographer.

He wanted to go over with her the facts about her father’s life — and that implied, from a certain date, her mother’s life, too — that he had already collated from written sources, including court records, and the history of the Communist Party in South Africa which he had had to research abroad because most works concerning it were banned within the country. She answered questions in a way he found unexpected — was unprepared for. It was not what she said but the physical aspect of their confrontation. They sat at a table in the sun at the house of a friend of hers through whom he had managed to make contact with her. She kept her arms from elbow to hand resting slack on the table-top most of the time. She spoke without looking at him but at the end of what she had to say turned clear pale grey eyes steadily on him. What was expected of him? He felt inadequate. She at once gave too little and posed something he did not understand.

Lionel Burger had been born in 1905 on the farm ‘Vergenoegd’ to a wealthy family in the Springbok Flats district of the Northern Transvaal, but had gone to school in Pretoria and Johannesburg.

Well — she didn’t know if they should be called wealthy — they owned land that they’d lived on for several generations.

He began his medical studies at Cape Town, and completed them at Edinburgh University in the late 1920s. He married Colette Swan, a South African girl studying ballet in London, while still a student, and returned to South Africa with her in 1930. They had one son, now also a doctor, and practising in Tanzania. They were divorced — when?

The daughter of the second marriage didn’t know. The date of her own parents’ marriage was 19th August 1946, the week of the black miners’ great strike on the Witwatersrand. Her mother, Cathy Jansen, was twenty-six and the general secretary of a canning or textile union — anyway, one of the three or four existing mixed unions of coloured and white people at the time. The marriage was supposed to have taken place on 14th August but the best man, J. B. Marks, chairman of the African Mineworkers’ Union, was arrested on the second day of the strike and this seems to have upset the wedding plans for a few days. Another trade unionist, Gana Makabeni, stood in for Marks. By then, both bride and bridegroom had also been arrested, as a result of a raid on the Communist Party offices in Johannesburg on 16th August. Although her name appeared on the charge sheet as Cathy Jansen, she had become Lionel Burger’s second wife while he and she were out on bail, before the preparatory examination opened.