Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The moonstone-coloured eyes under dabs of shadow gazed back, sought no evasion or escape. — The photocopying service still operates. We do have a key, yes. In case the office needs to use the room after Chambers are closed.—

— So all the other firms in the building that use the room have keys, too — exactly. We only need Eckhard’s for about twenty minutes! Lunch hour; nobody’ll be there to notice it’s gone before it’ll be back.—

Resistance brought them closer and closer to one another although they had not moved.

Rosa Burger’s body rather than her face expressed an open obstinacy — the arms thrust down at her sides, the hands, palms on the seat of the chair, pushed in and hidden beneath thighs neatly placed — an obstinacy that came to the Terblanche girl as a demand she didn’t understand, rather than a refusal. She trembled on the verge of hostility; they were aware of each other for a moment as females.

Rosa Burger’s prim thighs closed at the bony outline of pubis in shrunken jeans, a long sunburned neck with the cup at the collar-bones where — she sat so still, no nerves, she did not fidget — a pulse could be seen beating: Noel de Witt’s girl; also the mistress of a Swede (at least; of those that were known) who had passed through, and some silent bearded blond fellow, not someone who belonged, not he, either. A body with the assurance of embraces, as cultivated intelligence forms a mind. Men would recognize it at a glance as the other can be recognized at a word.

Clare Terblanche — the old playmate who had been thick and sturdy as a teddy-bear, little legs and arms the same simplified shape, furry with white down that brushed by, in tussles, smelling sweetly of Palmolive soap — her flesh was dumb. She lived inside there, usefully employing now tall, dependable legs that carried one haunch before the other until she found the flat. A poor circulation (showing itself in the pallor and flush of the face), breasts folded over against themselves, a soft expanse of belly to shelter children. A body that had no signals; it would grow larger and at once more self-effacing. Few men would find their way, seek her through it.

There was the table between them at the level of their calves; music and voices, fake sentiment, generalized emotion, public exposure passing for private need… and one for Billy Stewart. Billyboy I’ll bet that’s what they call you at home anyway Billy granma andgranpa Davis are proud of you keepsmiling allathome love you waiting for you my darling Koosie —

Rosa suddenly got up and cut off the voice.

— Perhaps you want to look at the flat anyway?—

Clare Terblanche did not answer. She drank from her coffee-mug in slow gulps they both heard. — All right.—

She seemed chastened, chastised.

At the door she stopped, turning back on the girl behind her. — It is just this you won’t do?—

Iam not the only survivor.

Her crepe soles made the searing squeak of fingers dragged over a balloon that Tony used to torment me with when we were little. I fetched that key at once (she must have found it ironic) from the caretaker and we went down the ringing iron steps of the fire escape. In the empty flat there was an old telephone directory, a population of fish-moth in the bath; cockroaches in the kitchen, a sanitary towel dried stiff to the shape in which it had been worn, left inside the cupboard I opened to show what storage-space was provided. Both were duly shocked at this example of the civilized habits whites were dedicated to maintaining against black degradation (these are the sort of reactions that come to me when I am back among my own kind). Anyway, both of us are nicely-brought-up girls, fastidiously middle-class in many ways — remember the high standard of comfort you remarked in my father’s house — although if the class membership of our respective families were to be correctly defined by place in production relations, she was working-class and I was not. Our kind has never been dirty or hungry although prison and exile are commonplaces of family life to us. Being white constitutes a counter-definition whose existence my father and her mother were already arguing between dancing to the gramophone at the workers’ club. I shut the cupboard with some sort of exclamation.

Wires were wrenched off at the wainscot where the telephone had been. The smell of her cigarette crept round like a suspicious animal. Freed even of inanimate witnesses, we did not know how to get away from one another — at least, she did not know how to make me feel demeaned by my refusal. On the contrary. I was aware of an unpleasant strength bearing upon her from me. She’s something sad rather than ugly, a woman without sexual pride — as a female she has no vision of herself to divert others from her physical defects. The way she stood — it irritated me. Clare Terblanche has always stood like that, as if someone plonked down a tripod, without the flow of her movement behind her or projected ahead of her! There’s an ordinary explanation: knock-kneed. Why didn’t Dick and Ivy have her treated when we were little? The dandruff, and the eczema it caused, they were of nervous origin. Why did we pretend not to notice this affliction? It was ‘unimportant’. She knew I was seeing her clumsy stance, the tormenting patches of inflamed and shedding skin, stripped of familiar context. Poor thing; and she knew I thought: poor thing. I am able to withstand other people’s silences without discomfiture. I felt pity and curiosity, slightly cruel. I might just as well have reached out and taken her roughly by the shoulder, no one was there to hear or overhear us, no voice of pulp goodwill overlaid indiscretion and glossed heresy. I can’t speak loudly; it’s not my nature, even in insolence. I said to her, Why do you go on with it?

She was not sure she understood me. Or she understood instantly; I had an impatient sense that I was part of her mental process, I was there, taking fright at what exists only once it has been spoken. She tried an interpretation as a specific reference: without me, without the photocopies at Barry Eckhard’s building — oh, she would find some other possibility. Although (half-offended, half-appealing for sympathy) for the moment she was damned if she knew what.

I began to recite a quiet liturgy. — The people will no longer tolerate. The people’s birthright. The day has come when the people demand —

She stared at me as if I were shouting.

I spoke with interest, nothing more. — When you see reports of the evidence in newspapers, doesn’t it sound ridiculous? Still the kits with invisible ink, the forged passports, the secret plans kept like dry cleaners’ slips, the mailing-lists, the same old story of people who are ‘approached’ and turn state witness after having licked some envelopes… You want to laugh, you can’t help it; it’s pathetic. You’ll print your news-sheet or you’ll send out your leaflets. It’s all decided already, from the beginning, before you’ve begun. A few pieces of paper, a few months, and you’ll be caught. You’ll be traced easily or someone you’ve trusted will get twenty rand and sell you. An enemy of the people… You’ll disappear into detention. Maybe there’ll be a case and a lawyer who tries for mitigation, shaming you by making all the old slogans mean less than they mean.—

Her face slowly thickened and concentrated before me the way the faces of patients at the hospital would register an injection releasing the sensation of some substance into the bloodstream.

— And you’ll go inside. Like them. You’ll come out. Like them — We saw Ivy and Dick and Lionel.

Tears pushed magnifying lenses up over her eyes and she had to hold them wide so that I should not see drops fall.