Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Bloody white bastard. Bloody police bastard. — Two young black men wearing T-shirts with the legends PRINCETON UNIVERSITY and KUNG-FU laughed at her. An older man called deeply, ‘Tula, mama’ and, a stray not knowing the source of the noise of the tin can tied to it, she grumbled back Voetsak, voetsak, wena .

I didn’t linger. The police demand identification and search everyone they find in a raided building; why should the Special Branch believe Burger’s daughter’s presence in the vicinity was to be explained by intention to buy a beaded belt at the request of a former lover? Let others protest their innocence, the water on their hands, like Pilate’s. As craziness gave the crone licence to shout at the police, the life sentence gave Lionel licence to say it from the dock: I would be guilty if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country. If I’m guilty of that innocence the police will not be the ones with the right to apprehend me.

Some of the big stores have boutiques where they sell African crafts. This follows a demand, the wave of nostalgia for the ethnic in parts of the world where ethnics are put to no sinister purpose. It’s currently fashionable merchandise that’s on display, rather than anything understood as national culture; Buy South African refers to manufactured goods and not to the carved bowls and ostrich-shell necklaces hanging somewhere between small leather-goods and cosmetic counters. The store I tried didn’t have beaded belts but I thought the wristbands, athletically, orthopaedically masculine, with bright plastic thongs woven through holes in the tough leather, worn by migratory mineworkers who made them, could be worn effectively by a Scandinavian Africa specialist, and I bought one, god knows why. The huge perfumed street floor of the shop tented the pleasure of people spending money, that peculiar atmosphere of desire and anxious satisfaction evident in the faces, hardly high enough to chin showcases, of children gathered at troughs of cheap array, and women matching colours under the advice of bosom friends, and couples conspiring over price; the spectacle, of objects they can never own as well as those which bait from them the money they have, people yearn for in the countries of the Future my father visited with both his wives. Any one of the coloured artisans and their families or the white student lovers watching arrests a few blocks away was free to enter and see legitimate aspirations that carry no risk of punishment — fully automatic washing machines, electronic watches, cowboy boots, recordings of popular music by heroes who take their groups’ names from the vocabulary of revolution. The act of acquisition. You have to acquire a yacht to escape it. A woman beside me as I waited to pay opposed her little boy: But you don’t want that? What’ll you do with it? It’s not a toy! He held tightly a patent fluff-removing brush and would not meet anyone’s eyes.

Leaning on her elbow at the cosmetic counter opposite I saw the half-bare back of a black woman dressed in splashing colour which included as overall effect the colour of her skin. The boldest, darkest lines of blue and brown, ancient ideogrammatic symbols of fish, bird and conch were extended in the movement of two rounded shoulder-blades from the matt slope of the neck to their perfect centring on the indented line of spine, rippling as shadowless store lighting ran a scale down it. The cloth suggested robes but was in fact cut tight to the proud backside jutting negligently at the angle of the weight-bearing hip, and close to the long legs. There was a blue turban, and before the head turned, the tilt of a gold hoop bigger than a tiny ear. She could have been a splendid chorus girl but she looked like a queen of some prototype, extinct in Britain or Denmark where the office still exists. She was Marisa Kgosana. We embraced, and the professionally neutral face of the white cosmetic saleswoman, protected by her make-up from any sign of reaction as a soldier on guard is protected by his uniform from blinking an eye before public taunts, awaited the completion of the sale.

To touch in women’s token embrace against the live, night cheek of Marisa, seeing huge for a second the lake-flash of her eye, the lilac-pink of her inner lip against translucent-edged teeth, to enter for a moment the invisible magnetic field of the body of a beautiful creature and receive on oneself its imprint — breath misting and quickly fading on a glass pane — this was to immerse in another mode of perception. As near as a woman can get to the transformation of the world a man seeks in the beauty of a woman. Marisa is black; near, then, as well, to the white way of using blackness as a way of perceiving a sensual redemption, as romantics do, or of perceiving fears, as racialists do. In my father’s house, the one was seen as the obverse of the other, two sides of false consciousness — that much I can add to anyone’s notes. But even in that house blackness was a sensuous-redemptive means of perception. Through blackness is revealed the way to the future. The descendants of Chaka, Dingane, Hintsa, Sandile, Moshesh, Cetewayo, Msilekazi and Sekukuni are the only ones who can get us there; the spirit of Makana is on Robben Island as intercessor to Lenin. Sipho Mokoena who made kites for Tony and showed children the rip in his trouser-leg made by a bullet, Gana Makabeni who was best man at the wedding and Isaac Vulindlela who gave his only son, Baasie, to the care of my father and mother; Uncle Coen Nel’s barman, Daniel; the watchman who brought bets for you to place — the creased, pale-soled black feet naked at the swimming-pool as well as the black faces in the majority at the last of the underground congresses my father could attend: in the merger of white Cain, black Abel, a new brotherhood of flesh is the way to the final brotherhood. The middle-aged cosmetic saleswoman and the few customers not too self-absorbed to glance up saw a kaffir-boetie girl being kissed by a black. That’s all. They knew no better. That house was closer to reaching its kind of reality through your kind of reality than I understood. You and I argued in the cottage. Sex and death , you said. The only reality. I should have been able to explain the element of sensuality that would have qualified the experiences of that house to be considered real by you. I felt it in Marisa’s presence, after so long; the comfort of Baasie in the same bed when the dark made that house creak with threats.

Marisa was buying face-cream, testing brands on the back of a hand laid for the saleswoman’s attention between them on the counter. The hand wore its insignia of rings and long brilliant nails as a general wears gold braid and campaign ribbons. Didn’t I think this smelled too much like a sweet cake? — Over-ripe fruit, to me.—

— Violets, madam — The saleswoman was earnest.

No, no, it wouldn’t do; but Marisa wouldn’t take the other brand being rubbed onto her plum-dark skin with a rapid to-and-fro of one white finger. — D’you know what they charge for that, Rosa? I’d rather get wrinkles. — The saleswoman had another, a tube, French but not expensive, one need use so little, herb-scented. Marisa had the air of someone who is never undecided. — Okay. That’ll do. The nail stuff, the cream, nothing else. But Rosa, if you’re working in that building, I’m just around the corner! An attorney’s. Someone Theo found — she laughed, sharing our admittance of the use everyone made of Theo, our dependency on him at the trials of her husband, Joseph Kgosana, or my father, as women share faith in a good doctor. — I’d only started, not even a week — then I got permission for a visit. I’m just back from the Island.—

How splendidly she made the trip. In one sentence she and I were alone; even if the elderly blonde, who had put on glasses dangling from a gilt chain to write the sales slip, understood which island, neither she nor the other customers trailing the aisles in perfume and light stood in intelligence of the level of the gaze at which Marisa held me. Hardly a change of tone needed between us. For Marisa it seems easy. She doesn’t have to find a solemn face, acknowledge the distance between the prison and the cosmetic counter. She doesn’t close away, go to cover, dead still, as I do. She doesn’t have to recourse to putting things delicately or explaining herself for fear of being misunderstood or misjudged. Defiance and confidence don’t mourn; her beauty and the way she assumes it are stronger than any declaration.