Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Sweat of wet wool heating up in sun through glass and scent of apples baking with cinnamon.

Those nights talking in the cottage: you wanted to know. The man who was gathering material wanted to know; he supplied facts but it was from me he expected to know.

Noel de Witt’s the one with the ‘strong Frelimo connections’—that I know. His Portuguese rebel mother. Although Ivy, who went to prison for two years rather than tell in court what she knew about my father, doesn’t talk before me of present activities, and Dick, unable not to hint because of whose daughter I am, gave no name. Noel would be the one who reported secret plans for a Portuguese army revolt. The nice new young wife Flora commended would have told no one, even in London, where he was when he went away, because even London is full of informers, and the lines back to South Africa have to be protected. Gloria Terblanche and her husband are in Tanzania, he has a cover job teaching, perhaps sometimes they pass in the street the man who is my brother (although Tony is dead and you I don’t see any more) — the son of the woman who went to the Sixth Congress with my father and when he died wrote to me from the South of France.

There are reports from time to time, there are rumours that may be more than rumours. I used to have to try to find some way of telling them to my father when he was alive — but I was well experienced in getting what I needed to past the big ears of warders. Sometimes the sign that it will soon be over is read from an event without, and sometimes it is from within the country. The Terblanches, going from shabby suburb to prison, and back from prison to shabby suburb, growing old and heavy (she) selling cartons of curry, and deaf and scaly-skinned (he) on a pension or charity job from friends — they wait for that day when rumour will gather reality, when its effect will be what they predict, as their neighbours (whom they resemble strangely, outwardly) wait to retire to the coast and go fishing. For the Terblanches even holidays ceased to exist years ago. Their outing is the twice-weekly trip to report at the local police station on the way to or from work, as other people have to attend a clinic for control of some chronic infection. If they get really old and sick I suppose somebody like Flora — someone fascinated by them, shamed by not living as they have lived — will keep them alive on hand-outs of money she is embarrassed to possess. And Dick and Ivy will take it since neither they nor she have petit bourgeois finickiness about such things: they because it’s not for themselves but for what lives in them, Flora because she does not believe what she possesses has come to her by right. People like Dick and Ivy and Aletta don’t understand provision in the way the clients of the man I worked for do—‘provision’ is a word that comes up continually in the market place of Barry Eckhard’s telephone: provision against a fall in the price of gold, provision against inflationary trends, provision for expansion, provision against depression, a predicate stored for sons and sons of sons, daughters and daughters of daughters — stocks, bonds, dividends, debentures. In the pulpits and newspapers of my boss’s clients the godless materialism of what they call the Communist creed is outlawed; but the Terblanches have laid up no treasures moth or rust will corrupt. For them there is no less than the future in store— the future. With what impossible hubris are they living out their lives without the pleasures and precautions of other white people? What have they to show for it — Ivy become a petty shopkeeper, and the blacks still not allowed in the open unions she and my mother worked for, Dick tinkering in his backyard on a Sunday in a white suburb, and the blacks still carrying passes twenty-five years after he first campaigned with them against pass laws and went to jail. After all the Dingaan’s Day demonstrations (1929, J. B. Marks declared ‘Africa belongs to us’, a white man shouted ‘You lie’ and shot Mofutsanyana dead on the platform, 700 blacks arrested; 1930, young Nkosi stabbed to death, Gana Makabeni took his place as C.P. organizer in Durban, 200 black militants banished); all the passive resistance campaigns of the Fifties, the pass-burnings of the Sixties; after all the police assaults, arrests; after Sharpeville; after the trials, detentions, the house arrests, the deaths by torture in prison, the sentences lived through and the sentences being endured while life endures. After the shame of the red banner ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa’, flown in 1922, had been erased later in the 1920s by the acceptance of Lenin’s thesis on the national and colonial questions, after the purges when Lionel Burger (who had married a dancer abroad without obtaining his Central Committee’s consent) voted for the expulsion of his mentor Bunting, after the Party in South Africa turned right and then left again, after it refused to support the war that South Africa was fighting against racialism in Europe while herself practising racialism at home, after the Soviet Union was attacked and this policy of opposition to the war effort was reversed, after the Popular Front when the C.P. was permitted to work with reformist organizations; after the issue of political versus industrial action (those in favour of political action quoting Lenin’s denunciation of the ‘infantile disorder of anti-parliamentarianism’, those against arguing that in South Africa four-fifths of the working class were black and had no vote anyway); after the banning of the Party, the underground reorganization after 1966, the banishments, the exiles, the life sentences — I didn’t learn it at my mother’s knee but as you told me, it was the everyday mythology of that house — I breathed it as children must fill their lungs indiscriminately out of mountain air or city smog, wherever they happen to be pitched into the world, and I would like once and for all to match the facts with what I ought to know.

That future, that house — although my father’s house was larger than Dick and Ivy’s home-improved bungalow, that house also made provision for no less than the Future. My father left that house with the name-plate of his honourable profession polished on the gate, and went to spend the rest of his life in prison, secure in that future. He’s dead, Ivy and Dick are ageing and poor and alive — the only difference. Dick with those ugly patches on his poor hands said to me like a senile declaration of passion; we are still here to see it. He thought I was overcome at the thought of my father. But I was filled with the need to get away as from something obscene — and afraid to wound him — them — by showing it. It was like the last few weeks when I was working at the hospital; you remember?

They are waiting.

They leave me alone to go my own way because they can’t believe — Lionel’s daughter — I am not waiting with them. Our kind repudiates ethnic partitioning of the country. They believe I talked of trying to get into the Transkei because I was under orders to find a cover job in a hospital there; I must have taken advantage of my period of ‘convalescence’ and refused. But one day I won’t be able to say no.

Although it’s all there, in notes for publication researched diligently from libraries and the memories of exiles, the past doesn’t count: the general strikes that failed when the Party was legal, the High Command that was betrayed when the Party was underground. The relic present, when they joke twice a week with the police sergeant as they become signatories to their own captivity, doesn’t count. They’ve lived without fulfilment of personal ambition and it’s not peace of mind they’re looking forward to in their old age. The defeat of the Portuguese colonial armies in Angola and Moçambique; the collapse of white Rhodesia; the end of South Africa’s occupation of Namibia brought about by SWAPO’S fighters or international pressure; these are what they’re waiting for, as Lionel was waiting, in jail. Signs that it will soon be over, at last. The Future is coming. The only one that’s ever existed for them, according to documentation. National liberation, phase one of the two-stage revolution that will begin with a black workers’ and peasants’ republic and complete itself with the achievement of socialism.