Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Idon’t know where you live; maybe in the same city as I am, wherever I go, without either of us being aware of the presence of the other, each running along in a dark burrow that never intersects. You have hired a colour TV in a building round the corner; or you’ve sailed away from such things, on the ark I saw being built. You never got beyond fascination with the people around Lionel Burger’s swimming-pool; you never jumped in and trusted yourself to him, like Baasie and me, or drowned, like Tony. I was fascinated by your friends the boat-builders (you correct me: a yacht is not a boat). They were simple people, not like you; they didn’t understand what they were doing when they planed the sweet pine of the bunks for you to sleep in and ran up the curtains that will be keeping out the glare of the sub-tropical sea. But you know that when you take passage with them it’s to flee. Because my boss Barry Eckhard and your successful scrap-dealer father proposed to you their fate, the bourgeois fate, alternate to Lionel’s: to eat without hunger, mate without desire.

Clare Terblanche sought out Rosa Burger with whom she had played as a child. The shadow wobbling over the blistered glass of the door had no identity; but as Rosa opened her door, compliance came to her face: the matter of the vacant flat she had promised to enquire about.

The other girl swung the worn, tasselled cloth bag that weighed on her hip like a pack-horse’s pannier, and took a chair heavily. Her gaze went round the pieces of furniture from the Burger house that stood as if stored in the room. She breathed through open lips, and licked them. — A job to find this place.—

— But you’ve got my phone number at work? I’m sure I gave it to Ivy.—

— Could I have a drink of water?—

— I’ll make tea. Or would you rather have coffee?—

— Coffee, if it’s the same to you. Could I get myself some water in the meantime?—

Rosa Burger had the dazed sprightliness of someone who has been alone all day, before interruption. She might even have been pleased the other had come. — But of course! — She was gone into a tiny kitchen. There was the crackling of ice being forced out of its mould, the gurgle and splutter of a tap. The visitor sat as if she were not alone in the room.

When Rosa came back her hair lay differently; she had put a hand through it, perhaps, taking a look at herself in the distorting convex of a shiny surface. She smiled; the other was made aware that sometimes Rosa was beautiful. A knowledge parenthetic between them, briefly embarrassing Rosa.

The water was served with the small attentions of ice and a slice of lemon; the two girls talked trivialities — the neighbourhood, the warmth of the winter day — while Clare drank it off.

— I don’t want to telephone you at work.—

The statement was turned aside.

— Oh it’s all right, they know I haven’t a phone here. I should’ve let you know about the flat, I’m sorry. I looked at it — but it’s a back one, on the ground floor, awfully dark, I don’t really think… And then when I heard nothing from you — why didn’t you pop into the office and see me in all my splendour—

— I don’t want to come there.—

Clare handed back the glass. Rosa hesitated a moment, expecting it to be put down on the table.

— Oh. — With the empty glass she accepted that it was not about the vacant flat they were talking. The kettle shrieked like a toy train.

— It’s okay. Go on.—

She called from the kitchen, hospitable — Won’t be a minute.—

Clare Terblanche was not in the chair but standing about in the room. At the balcony door she rattled the handle but the door merely heaved in its frame.

— The catch is at the top.—

Rosa came and stood beside her for a moment looking out with her at the hillside of roofs and trees dropping away below the building; between blackish evergreens a cumulus of jacarandas, yellowed before their leaves fall, like some blossoming reversal of seasons in the warm winter day. But she was not seeing what the tall girl had in her mind’s eye.

— Should we go outside.—

Rosa’s lips gave a puff of dismissal. — If you want. — With polite routine consideration she leant over and turned on the portable radio that lay on a pile of newspapers and records. Clare Terblanche’s curious expression of finding fault settled at the record player, with its two speakers on the floor. Rosa unplugged the cord; closed the doors to the kitchen and bathroom; sat down — well! — before the coffee. The radio aerial was telescoped into the retracted position and reception was blurred by static interference.

— In that building — where you work now. It’s where a lot of advocates have their chambers, isn’t it?—

— The whole of the seventh and eighth floors. They’ve got a communal law library and a canteen — or rather a dining hall.—

The announcer’s voice was reciting with the promiscuous intimacy of his medium a list of birthday, anniversary and lovers’ greetings for military trainees on border duty… and for Robert Rousseau-hullo there Bob-Dawn and Flippy, Mom and Dad, thinking of you always…

— Is it true most other people in the building use a photocopying and duplicating room belonging to them?—

Although Clare Terblanche did not see the offices where now and then a pigeon rang against the smoky topaz glass like a shot from the streets far below, breaking its neck, Rosa saw what Clare did, now. Hennie Joubert, your sweetheart Elsabe… An expression of recognition, of expectation without surprise, a nostalgia, almost, slightly crinkled the delicately darkened skin round Rosa’s eyes. — I don’t know about most. Quite a few. Barry Eckhard’s firm has an arrangement— …missing you lots darling…also Patricia, Uncle Tertius and Auntie Penny in Sasolburg…

So the other — Clare — knew; or confirmed a hope — Eckhard’s has an arrangement. — At the inner starting-point of each eyebrow a few hairs, like Dick’s her father’s stood up — hackles that gave intensity to her face. She rubbed between them with the voluptuousness of assuagement; the peeling eczema danced into life and a patch of red gauze appeared on the white healthy skin of either cheek. — I don’t suppose you use it yourself.—

…love you very much see you soon… Rosa Burger was off hand and informative. It was not easy to hear her; the other girl concentrated on her lips. — Usually there’s a clerk who does. If I need photocopying done, I give it to him.—

— And I believe the room’s down on the second floor.—

— It is. — …thinking of you god bless thumbs up…

— Is it kept locked?—

— It’s open while Chambers are. Same hours as most offices. But Clare, it’s no good — With just such a smile, unanswerable, demanding, her father had invaded people’s lives, getting them to do things.

Clare Terblanche was confronted with it as a refusal. — Of course I know. You’re watched. (There was music now, the muezzin cry of a pop singer.) If you were to start being seen down there we wouldn’t last a week. I don’t mean you. But if you could just get the key for an hour. Just the key. Only long enough for us to have a duplicate made. Who’d ever know? Someone will come in between midnight when the cleaners have left, and the early hours of the morning. The person’ll bring our own rolls of paper so that can’t be traced; it won’t be the paper that’s normally used there.—

— It’s no good. — A complicated sequence of drumming had taken over from the singer.

— The Eckhard office does have a key? What happens when the courts are in recess, when the advocates are on holiday?—