Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Oh Ivy man! After all, it was someone her father was married to the first time! Have a heart!—

The Terblanche daughter who had stood pregnant outside the prison had left the country long ago with her husband. It was the younger one who came in raking down dun wet hair. — What’re you getting het up about now?—

— Nothing, nothing. Things that happened before you girls were ever thought of, nothing.—

With the ease of being a contemporary of the guest, the girl wandered before the glass louvres Dick had fitted, flicking her comb at the avocado pips growing in jam-jars on the sill, her head interrupting the sunlight. — Where’re you staying now, Rosa?—

— A little flat, not bad.—

— Sharing?—

— No. It’s my own.—

— What d’you pay?—

— Clare my girlie, look what you’re doing.—

She twisted her head clumsily, sent another shower of drops over her father’s bare knees in shorts, laughed — Don’tfuss — and mopped him with the end of her long denim skirt. — I mean I’ve been looking for a place for someone — a girl with a kid, she’s coming up from Port Elizabeth — but the rents are terrible.—

— Well, mine’s just one room. I don’t know whether that would do, with a child. But I know there’s an empty flat in the building — or was, anyway, last week.—

Clare poured herself tea, paused critically at the array on the tray, poured the tea back into the pot and filled a cup with milk. — What happened to that garden cottage?—

— It disappeared with the freeway.—

— Not even a biscuit — I’ve had no breakfast you know. You two have filled yourselves up with scrambled eggs. Why do old people and babies get up so early?—

Ivy took the wet comb from where it had been dropped beside her papers. — Well go into the kitchen and fetch yourself something. There’re baked apples. But don’t cut the date loaf Regina’s made — if it’s cut while it’s hot it gets sad. She’s vegetarian these days, is Clare, and she thinks it gives her the right to priority with everything that isn’t meat.—

The girl ignored her mother, amiably sulky. — You’re still at the hospital.—

— No, that’s over, too.—

Dick had gone into the kitchen and come back with a thick slice of date loaf. — Here, man, eat. — Before Ivy could speak, his patient-sounding Afrikaner voice assured — With Regina’s permission. — A quick, comedian’s twitch of the nose for Rosa alone.

The skin bridging Clare’s heavy eyebrows was inflamed by dandruff. Between bites, she was preoccupied with details of a toilet to which she turned probably infrequently: pushing back the cuticles of her nails with smoke-blued teeth, looking at the strands of hair that came away in her fingers when she tested the length of the ends against her shoulders, noticing intently — as if the presence of the other, Rosa, brought her attention down to these things — her pink feet (thick as her father’s hands) like strangers in curling brown sandals.

— You’re not looking for a job, I suppose. With us.—

— Us? — Rosa took in Ivy and Dick. Ivy’s match waved denial, extinguishing its tiny flame invisible in the sun. — She’s working with Aletta.—

— Aletta — oh that’s wonderful. How’s she these days?—

— A red-head, for the moment.—

— Ma, I must say I think she looks great.—

— But if I did it, you and Dick—

He gazed at Ivy the way familiars seldom consider one another. — You’d look like a bloody Van Gogh sunflower.—

Laughter drew them all together, so that Ivy said what might have been remarked only after she had gone. — And this business of Eckhard — how long’s that going to carry on? — A second’s glance not at but in the direction of Dick, as if an invisible thread had been tugged, was followed by quick, smooth deflection — I mean, aren’t you bored yet, Rosa?—

The chance given her to speak, if she could. A swift temptation to talk. To ask—

— It’s a job.—

Rosa had her old childhood self-possession of being able to evade opportunities as well as advances, stubborn little girl in the woman. And she would not make it easier for anyone by changing the subject; other people were both held off, and held to it.

But an atmosphere of convalescence was still allowed her. Ivy strewed commonplaces over the moment. — Oh it could be quite interesting. Yes, useful, give you a practical insight, the way economic power manipulates in this country…one can always learn something…for a while, I mean — She looked around generously.

— A job like any other. — Rosa’s stillness opposed the other girl’s roaming self-awareness, Ivy’s ample concern, Dick’s restless inklings. He kept nodding, as if patting a hand or shoulder.

Clare spoke without malice. — I suppose it must be something to be decently paid for once.—

— The usual typist’s salary. Nothing out of the ordinary. But nothing’s expected — of you, either. It’s the faceless kind of job 90 per cent of people do. You only really understand when you do it… there’s nothing to show at the end of the day. Telephone calls and paper looping out of the teleprinter, vast sums of money you never see, changing hands — you never touch the hands. — Her father’s smile.

Clare rubbed at the inflamed patch between her eyebrows. — Well come down to our place. We’re weighing and lugging sacks about — that stuff we sell smells like baby-sick, Aletta says. No, really, Mum, it’s okay at first, you think it’s pleasant, but with each load, after a few weeks, it’s cloying! Can’t get the smell out of your hair and clothes. Tactile and whiffy enough for you, I can tell you. But nourishing, nourishing. — The affectation of a mimicking, didactic air, the eyebrows she had inherited from her father, tousled — You just have to see Aletta with some of these women who come along. She snatches their babies from them, yelling the place down, prods their pot-bellies — you know Aletta — look at this! look at this! — The girl demonstrated on her own slack body, stretched on the frayed grass matting; wobbled with laughter — And then out with the slides showing what awful things happen to bones when they lack vitamin C and skin when there’s not enough vitamin B…they get hell for the bits of fur and beads and god knows what they tie round their kids’ necks — you know how she is about tribalism. Oh but she’s fantastic, eh. They take it from her. They just giggle — Her latest thing, she’s going to show them films. This weekend she’s seeing that chap who makes short documentaries.—

— A film? — Ivy counted stitches along her knitting.

— Her nutrition education film. I told you. The fellow who borrowed the Mayakovsky. The Bedbug. —

— Clare! Get it back from him for me? So that’s where it is! I bought that book thirty years ago in Charing Cross Road. I managed to keep it when the police took away everything in sight that was printed. And then some lad of yours walks off with it…—

Dick was led to recollect, for his guest. — Colette started a theatre group, you know. Must have been about 1933. She was in charge of the cultural programme, class consciousness through art and that.—

— Invented her own programme for herself, more likely. I don’t remember anyone else being asked much about it. Her way of getting out of teaching in the night school. You couldn’t get her to work for anything she couldn’t take the credit for initiating. Not her! But Clare — I mean it, you tell that young whoever-he-is from me—

— We went in a truck to black townships up and down the Reef, Krugersdorp and Boksburg… She made up the plays and I think the songs too. We acted Bloody Sunday and I was Father Gapon. And what was the one about the Gaikas and the British Imperial troops, Ivy? Blacks from our night school were the Gaikas. We used to have the Red Flag flying on the bonnet of Isaac Lourie’s old produce truck.—