Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Clare Terblanche decided the flat wouldn’t do. Perhaps now that she has told me the special circumstances of her relationship with the prospective tenant she does not want her to live in the building where I might bump into the two of them together, and she would know that I was seeing them in the light of the confidence she had forced on me and already regretted.

Just as we were leaving the place she became absent or even agitated for a moment — I thought she’d forgotten something, left a cigarette not stubbed. Kneeling swiftly she tore sheets out of the telephone directory and then strode over to the cupboard. Picking up the sanitary towel between paper, she lifted it out without touching it with her hands and bundled up a crude parcel. Then she did not know where to put it; no bin in an empty flat. Outside on the fire escape some tenant had abandoned cartons. She lifted the top two and buried her burden, ramming the cartons back, and then stalked ahead of me as if she had successfully disposed of a body.

Only the dove could find you, that’s the idea. No claims from the world reach the ark. While you are fleeing, brave young people welcomed by the local newspaper in each foreign port, you scrub the decks in absolution and eat the bread of an innocence you can’t assume. Lionel would have explained why. If I do, you will say it’s because I’m his daughter, mouthing that spinning-wheels and the bran-and-whole-wheat you used to bake in the cottage cannot restore some imaginary paradise of pre-capitalist production. People won’t let Lionel die; or his assumption — of knowledge, responsibility shouldered staggeringly to the point of arrogance — won’t die with him and let them alone. But the faithful don’t commemorate the date of his death, they don’t have to; sentiment is for those who don’t know what to do next. Flora sends me Spanish irises on William’s account at a florist. The man who’s writing the biography phones to ask whether I would prefer to change our today’s appointment for another day?

There were two letters behind the locked tin flap bearing my number in the block of mailboxes grey as prison cells in the foyer. The one was from Sweden. I read a whole paragraph before I understood from whom; it was hand-written and any others I had received from him had always been typed. Strange not to know the handwriting of someone with whom you have made love, no matter why or how long ago. He had hoped to be able to tell me that the film about Lionel was at last to be distributed in England, but negotiations had fallen through. He would have to wait until ‘something happened in South Africa to rouse interest again’. It was easier to sell material dealing with Moçambique and Angola, at present. He had heard with much pleasure about the wing in the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow being named after my father. He had written a short piece on this and hoped it would be published soon. Because his film has not realized his hopes that it would make a name for him, that time when Lionel was alive in prison does not seem to him, as it is for Lionel and me, long ago. It is linked to what is as yet unachieved, the Swede’s success.

The other letter was not really a letter but a card, closely-written across the inner side of the leaves. I didn’t know one could buy cards for the anniversary of deaths — deckle-edged, gilded, posied, that’s certainly the sort of thing you’re safe from, cut adrift: the ordering of appropriate responses for all occasions, what you used to call ‘consumer love’, Conrad. I read the signature first; someone had signed for both: ‘Uncle Coen and Auntie Velma’ but the correspondent was clearly Auntie Velma alone. She was firmly confident as ever in her concept of feelings towards me, the last of her brother’s family. I am always welcome at the farm if I want a quiet rest. She does not ask from what activity, she does not want to know in case it is, as her brother’s always was, something she fears and disapproves to the point of inconceivability. It’s better that way. She offers neither expectations nor reproach. ‘The farm is always there.’ She believes that: for ever. The future — it’s the same as now. It will be occupied by her children, that’s all. Maybe there’ll be some improvements; change is automation in the milking sheds, and television, promised soon. My cousin, fellow namesake of Ouma Marie Burger, is seeing the world at present. She has a job with the citrus export board and has been sent to the Paris office — isn’t that nice? She had to learn French and picked it up very quickly — she has the ‘Burger brains, of course’. What Auntie Velma has in mind there is quite simply my father. The Nels have never had any difficulty in reconciling pride in belonging to a remarkable family with the certainty that the member who made it so followed wicked and horrifying ideals. Even Uncle Coen is pleased to be known as Lionel Burger’s brother-in-law. Whatever my father was to them, it still stalks their consciousness.

Another thing in the Swede’s letter: he wanted a beaded belt like the one he had bought here, did I remember the shop? The shop is a good-works affair, marketing the objects tribal blacks make for their own use and adornment, rather than tourist handicrafts. Like most non-profit enterprises, it is not efficiently run and I didn’t have much hope that whoever was in charge would be able to remember let alone be willing to bother to obtain a belt of a particular workmanship — the letter was precise, said Baca, but I didn’t think it could be that, more likely from Transkei or Zululand. Sheila Itholeng was there as usual on a Saturday morning to clean the flat and do my washing: the room comes to life. She cooks mealie meal and I fry eggs and bacon and we have breakfast together like a family. Neither of us has a husband but she has a child. I have bought little Mpho crayons and plasticine but around our legs under the table she was playing at polishing the floor with a bit of rag, her small bottom higher than her head, her pinkish heels turned out just the way her mother’s do.

Although Barry Eckhard doesn’t make his employees work on Saturdays, I went to town. In the traffic I suddenly began to try to consider this day as something specific as that belt beaded by hand I was going to look for, the duplication of a day in which, this time a year ago, Lionel was still alive, although by midday it was to be the day when he died. He and my mother once went to Lenin’s tomb, I’m told. They filed past, muffled up out of all recognition against a cold that doesn’t exist here, as an endless queue is still doing. Every November will file past my father’s death, the same day over and over again, with summer storm skies and street jacarandas merging hecticly in electric purple; seasons can only repeat themselves, they have no future. On the park bench there was also a lying-in-state.

A cordon of police flanked the entire façade of the building where the African crafts shop is. Alsatian dogs strapped to their handlers kept passers-by back but they waited stolidly, blacks holding delivery bicycles, Saturday-shopping families with children, couples with lovers’ arms dangling from shoulders or round the waist of one another’s jeans, wanting their spectacle, whether it were to be a black pop group that transforms the rhythms of the street, a suicide teetering on a parapet, a bomb hoax. I knew at once what it would be: men and women, ordinary-looking — amazing! — like themselves, led out under arrest and followed by more policemen, jaws steadying loads of papers and typewriters. The building housed organizations whose premises are often raided. I didn’t wait to see which it was this time — the association of black studies or the militant churchmen, all suspected of ‘furthering’ the aims my father and his associates took so many years to formulate. There was silence from the crowd standing by like tethered horses. A woman with a black woman’s bundle on her head and the long-nosed, keen bitter face that often comes with admixture of white blood, drunk or a little crazy, addressed everybody from a round hole of a mouth.