Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

And not just waiting. Whatever can be done between one dutiful report to the police and the next will be done by people who, far from poring over the navel of a single identity (yes, a dig at you, Conrad), see the necessity of many. It won’t be by chance Ivy has her lunch-counter in an area of heavy industry where thousands of blacks work. And of course the people who pack her cartons of curry and the salads that are so popular are all old associates or their relatives. She put the typewriter down to cover papers she had been working on but when she picked up the comb that was wetting the corner of one sheet she pulled it out to let it dry; I saw it was part of an analysis of wages. She’s probably supplying the radical students’ black wages commission with material. Dick will tell William Donaldson he wants a job to supplement his pension; but he’s looking for what will show him to be ‘harmlessly occupied’, whatever else he may be doing. It’s not easy for families of old lags, like the Terblanches, like the one I’m the remnant of-watched all the time.

They are prepared to be patient with me. It’s not sympathy, some pallid underwriting of the validity of self-pity, they offer. I have had a course of action to follow which involved the life of a man who happened to be my father, just as they themselves have had. The consequences for Dick have been periods of imprisonment with my father; for Ivy, imprisonment because of my father. The course of action I have duly fulfilled, with consequences for me some of which were self-evident, foreseen and accepted, just as theirs were, is part of a continuing process. It is complete only for Lionel Burger; he has done all he had to do and that, in his case, happened to imply a death in prison as part of the process. It does not occur to them that it could be complete for themselves, for me.

It is not so easy to shut oneself off from them — these people: Dick with his farmer’s blue eyes under those distance-shading eyebrows, his safari suit with shorts that show his strong, vein-tattooed legs, and his jacket decked out with pockets in the style of the old colonial-military, frontier way of life, so that his appearance is innocently exactly that of one of his brother Boers who regard his beliefs as those of Antichrist, the devil himself, and of the capitalist-adventurist European conquistadors he himself sees as the devil; Ivy with her supermarket housewife’s body in cheerful prints, her wild, Einstein head, and the unexpected concession to vanity in the evidence — a glossy streak of blonde fringing her upper lip — that she peroxides the moustache with which age is trying to deny her femininity. These two people represent an intimacy with my father greater than mine. They know what even one’s own daughter is never told. A biographer ought to be referred to them, Lionel’s — what? Friends, associates — comrades, the biographer will settle for as catch-all, but some new term ought to come into being for what I understood, coming back into their presence. It goes beyond friendship, beyond association; beyond family relationship — of course. They will be waiting for me to find what there is for me to do. How they all cared for each other’s children, when we were little! In the enveloping acceptance of Ivy’s motherly arms — she feels as if I were her own child — there is expectance, even authority. To her warm breast one can come home again and do as you said I would, go to prison.

I found the ring I wore when what I had to do was be a young girl in love. In the leather collar-box from one of my grandfathers, among cards of moth-eaten darning wool and the elastic my mother used to thread through the waist of my school pants. With it were brass serpent insignia of the Medical Corps — my father’s cap badges. My mother kept those? My father joined the white South African army, according to the date I’ve been given, when the Soviet Union was attacked, and was in charge of a hospital in the Middle East. She wasn’t married to him then; did she take the badges off old uniforms later, or maybe Tony asked for them, and when the little boy was dead and she found his treasures she didn’t throw them away. They could tell any raiding Special Branch policemen nothing about Lionel Burger that should not be discovered. In fact at his trial Theo Santorini included ‘a distinguished record of service to wounded soldiers of his mother country’ in establishing the standing of such a man: How easy would it have been, I put it to you, Your Lordship, for him to choose professional and civic honours; and what grave sense of wrongs committed by the white establishment must he have had, in order for such a man to turn his back on the laurels of white society and risk — no, refute outright — reputation, success and personal liberty, in the cause of the black people. The army service seems to have lasted two years — like most people, I foreshorten the entire period of life my parents lived before I was alive, and they were strangers to whom I have no relation. Lionel once told me how when he was about fourteen and had just come to boarding-school in Johannesburg he saw torn-up passbooks in the street after a demonstration and curiosity led him to realize for the first time that the ‘natives’ were people who had to carry these things while white people like himself didn’t. For me, this childhood awakening of his is no farther away than his reasons for going to war. The war experience gave him the chance to be active (as the biographer’s phrase goes) in an ex-servicemen’s legion that brought together along with white veterans, black orderlies and ambulance men who had risked their lives but not been allowed to bear arms. The movement broke up, like my mother’s attempts to get black workers and white together in trade unions, on the white men’s fear of losing the privileges of segregation from their comrades. Yet when the black and white veterans were marching 40,000 strong through Cape Town it must have seemed a sign; soon over, now.

You didn’t want to believe that at twelve years old what happened at Sharpeville was as immediate to me as what was happening in my own body. But then I have to believe that when the Russians moved into Prague my father and mother and Dick and Ivy and all the faithful were still promising the blacks liberation through Communism, as they had always done. Bambata, Bulhoek, Bondelswart, Sharpeville; the set of horrors the faithful use in their secretly printed and circulated pamphlets. Stalin trials, Hungarian uprising, Czechoslovakian uprising — the other set that the liberals and right-wing use to show it isn’t possible for humane people to be Communist. Both will appear in any biography of my father. In 1956 when the Soviet tanks came into Budapest I was his little girl, dog-paddling to him with my black brother Baasie, the two of us reaching for him as a place where no fear, hurt or pain existed. And later, when he was in jail and I began to think back, even I, with my precocious talents for evading warders’ comprehension now in full maturity, could not have found the way to ask him — in spite of all these things: do you still believe in the future? The same Future? Just as you always did? And anyway it’s true that when at last the day of my visit came I would be aware of nothing except that he was changing in prison, he was getting the look on those faces in old photographs from the concentration camps, the motionless aspect, shouldered there between the two warders that accompanied him, of someone who lets himself be presented, identified. His gums were receding and his teeth seemed to have moved apart at the necks; I don’t know why this distressed me so much. In the cottage I used to see that changed smile that no one will know in the future because the frontispiece photograph I’ve been asked for shows him, neck thick with muscular excitement, grinning energy, speaking to a crowd not shown but whose presence is in his eyes.