Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

But the prosecution failed to establish that causal link between the Central Executive of the Communist Party and the strike. Neither could it prove, as evidence of an element of unlawful violence constituting the crime of sedition, the use of knobbed sticks with which (Rosa Burger did remember being told, years after) the black miners danced defiance in the compound yards, or the lashing-shovels with which they defended themselves against the clubs and rifles of the police.

Her father’s biographer was eager to expatiate upon his theory, somewhat second-hand, that this trial was a watershed in the relations between liberation movements and the State, and the liberation movements and each other. The documents unearthed and seized during the raids on organization offices and people’s homes, then examined as evidence in the trial, provided the secret police with names not only of Communists but of their supporters and any organization or individual who had been associated with them, even during the period when public indignation against Fascism in Europe and among groups of white people at home brought anticommunists onto common platforms with Communists. As a result of the trial, it was possible for the government to pass the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 and bring about the dissolution of the Party as a legal one. As a result of the information gleaned at the trial, persecution through bannings, spying and harassment of the black political movements brought about an identity of cause that finally erased ideological differences between the African National Congress, the Indian Congress and the Communist Party, and culminated in the Congress Alliance of these movements in the early 1960s; the High Command which directed their underground operations; the new series of sensational political trials in which those taking supreme responsibility were discovered, betrayed, imprisoned, and with which a whole political era, in which and for which Lionel Burger lived, came to an end.

All this, hindsight told the biographer, began when the indictment against her father and his associates in the miners’ strike case was quashed, May 1948. It was the month when the first Afrikaner nationalist government took office; that would round off a chapter with a perfect touch of foreboding.

It was the month and year that Rosemarie Burger, hearing him out, was born.

Apart from Flora Donaldson, her father’s old associates did not pursue her during this time when she kept away from them. Flora had no doubt; the girl needed to live a new life. With managerial kindness and the tact of a well-off woman who fellow-travels beside suffering as a sports enthusiast in a car keeps pace alongside a marathon runner, she championed this course with the gift of a red velvet skirt and a pair of pinchbeck earrings from her own jewel-box. — I’ll pierce your ears myself; my grandmother used to do it, I’m an expert. — She returned, for Rosa’s own good, to the attractions of Tanzania. She had friends living there, they found the whole place inspiring, it would be a tremendous release to work in a black socialist country. And even London — she no longer thought the idea inconceivable, apparently — all the marvellous people in London! The exiles, Noel de Witt and his young wife, Pauline’s daughters, Bridget Sulzer, Rashid’s sons — everyone doing interesting, fulfilling work and preparing themselves positively for the day when they’d be able to come back. The Donaldsons had a flat in Holland Park, the key was there for the asking. Flora talked about these things with an air of decisions already halfway taken, when she invited Rosa to dinner and provided as table partners an eclectic assortment of visiting British and Scandinavian left-wing journalists (the latter brought regards from the Swede who briefly had been her lover) and liberal white American congressmen or black sociologists come to visit Soweto from their base in expensive white hotels where only foreign blacks could stay.

The others — her father’s closest associates, who ought to have known her best, standing among them outside the prison when she was a child, left her to come to them. Those that there were: who were not in prison or gone into exile. Many were under restrictions which forbade their meeting one another, including her. But this was an ordinary circumstance for them all; there were ways and means. They studied the pattern of police surveillance as surveillance studied them; hiatus will occur, out of habit, in vigilance become routine.

The faithful were there. They did not have to give her any sign. They had always been there. Mark and Rhoda Liebowitz’s mother, Leah Gordon, and Ivy Terblanche, danced with her father to the gramophone in the Jewish Workers’ Club in the Thirties. Aletta Gous went with Rosa’s mother when she was young and Lionel Burger married to someone else, to one of those vast assemblies of their time with names like Youth for Peace, and they were photographed together holding flowers on a Russian railway station. The biographer had borrowed the photograph for reproduction in his book. Gifford Williams, the lawyer with the briefcase for whom the fourteen-year-old had seen the prison portal open, acted for her father for years before he himself was banned, and it was he who had briefed Theo Santorini in the Burger trial.

They were not many. They had been to prison and come out again, lived through two, three, five years of their sentences — just before Lionel Burger died in prison, Ivy Terblanche completed her two years for refusing to testify against him. They lived through years-long bans on their movements and association with other people and often were banned again the week restrictions expired. Except for Dick Terblanche, who was a sheet-metal worker, they had had to find substitutes for work they were debarred from doing. Gifford sold office equipment in place of practising law, Leah Gordon, forbidden to teach, was an orthodontist’s receptionist, Ivy Terblanche ran her own little take-away lunch business in the factory area where she had once been a shop steward. Aletta Gous, banned from entry into premises where printing or publishing was done, had lost her job as a proof-reader of Afrikaans textbooks and was working, when last Rosa was in touch with her, with some organization that tried to make popular among blacks a cheap, high protein food.

Lionel’s daughter came in through the backyard gate from a lane as she had always done. When she was a child, in homely ease, now because it was not overlooked by neighbouring houses as the front entrance from the street was. As a named person she was forbidden by law to visit Ivy and Dick Terblanche, both restricted people under bans, but their daughter Clare was neither named nor banned and she happened to live with her parents and could receive her friends — some sort of an alibi. Dick Terblanche, cleaning the carburettor of Ivy’s same old car, lifted a red, yellow-eyebrowed face in whose expression Rosa was long out of mind; but at once came to kiss her. Holding his dirty hands away had the effect of outlining a space round her. Whoever watched the Terblanche house was least likely to be alert on a Sunday morning; the only witness to be seen was a neighbour’s child with a kicking rabbit in its arms, watching the car repair. It turned its attention undiscriminatingly to the embrace and then to Ivy, carolling out from the house. Rosa went quickly indoors. A thin old black woman ironing in the converted porch covering the length of the house behind whose louvres the Terblanches followed most of their pursuits, rested the iron end-up. — How’s Lily?—

— Fine. She writes sometimes. One of her granddaughters has taken up nursing. Lily’s taking care of the little boy she had. He’s called Tony, after my brother, you remember?—