Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

How was he? How are they all? When we talk about them, the prisoners who have survived Lionel, the tone is purposely commonplace, an assertion that they can’t be shut away, they remain part of ordinary daily life no matter how thick the walls or rough the seas between banishment and home. — He’s fine. I was the one under the weather. It’s true — really the weather! There was a gale blowing in Cape Town! You can’t imagine what it was like. The first day the boat couldn’t go at all. The next day the police in my escort weren’t too keen either but I said, look, I insist, here’s my permit, I’m only allowed out of my magisterial area three days… so we got into the boat. I felt terrible — my god, have you ever been seasick? But I held out. And I could see they were much worse than me. First thing Joe said, Marisa! Look at you — there’s been something wrong and you didn’t say in letters… He got his warder to bring me strong coffee — yes, just like that: my wife must have a hot drink — you know? And that one brought it like a lamb.—

— It was a contact visit? — I fall back easily into the jargon of prison visiting. It will always come to me, the language I learnt as a child. At the caprice of the chief warder I would see my father in a small bare room (the furnishings the basic unit for interrogation, two upright chairs and a table, with which the purpose of such rooms was always present) or on the other side of the wire grille through which I could not touch my fiancé’s hand.

— He asked about you, he sends his love. — The symmetry of her lovely face smiling made the lie a gift. I hadn’t seen her and had sent no word to him through her for so long it was unlikely my name would have come up between them. Experienced people don’t waste the precious time of visits; everything to be said by both is thought out and fitted into the allotted period in advance. But there was I, asking about all the others by name, Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada, Mbeki, the black men with whom my father worked in an intimacy whose nature no one outside it, standing in the street watching arrests of people who haven’t snatched pay-rolls or pushed drugs, can understand. Marisa repeated the prisoners’ jokes, related what they were studying, whether they’d lost weight or ‘put on’ as she phrased it, digressed into gossip about the achievements or problems of their families — while checking her purchases, hesitating whether she shouldn’t add this or that item, and counting out money from the maw of a big fashionable bag with long fingers grappling at the points of the bright nails, like the legs of some exotic insect feeling out prey. — No, I don’t want a parcel — let me have a plastic carrier — one of those over there will do — yes, that’s right — As the woman behind the counter turned away to get change — When you’re in a hurry it’s best to pay cash… If a black produces a cheque book… I only use mine when I’m prepared to hang about while they excuse themselves and take it to a-1-1 their managers. — And in the same brisk, absent undertone, she made a suggestion, her eyes restless on the saleswoman, her head drawn back to her neck with impatient grace. — My child’s gone to get some school-books, I must pick her up. And someone’s waiting for me — what’s the time, anyway — I said we’d meet at twelve — too bad, can’t be helped… What are you doing today — this afternoon or this evening? — Marisa did not remember what day this was although she had a few moments before talked of Lionel (as Lionel used to say to Joe, if you can keep your weight and blood-pressure low, man, nothing can get you down). — Come out? You remember my cousin’s place, Fats?—

— You turn past Orlando High.—

— Yes, carry straight on, then when you come to the dip, third road on the right—

— There’s a shop that sells coal, on the corner…?—

— That’s right, Vusili’s store—

Between us, while the murmured exchange went back and forth like any other insincere enthusiasm between friends who bump into one another, was the unspoken question-and-answer that our kind follow by gaps in what is said and hesitations or immediacy of response. Marisa is banned and under house arrest. I am Named. The law forbids us to meet or speak, let alone embrace; we take what chances come, of meetings like this, in passing, on neutral and anonymous ground. You taunted me with being inhibited; but you never had anything you valued enough, that was threatened enough for you to hide. Secrecy is a discipline it’s hard for old hands to unlearn. People under house arrest cannot receive friends at home or go out at night or weekends; if Marisa could come to town on a Saturday she must have been using a ‘spare’ day of the exemption granted her for the visit to the Island. She was taking a chance — another — on getting away with going out to someone’s house at night. She was unsure whether or not I was banned from gatherings in addition to being named. In fact I was under no ban although I have been refused a passport since before I was named — the very first year I applied. And that application was a secret, too; this time my own, not assumed in common with the others of that house, unspoken between my father and mother and me. She and Lionel did not ever know I tried for a passport when I was eighteen in preparation to follow Noel de Witt to Europe when he came out of jail. He had never known, either; but — de Witt’s fiancee and Lionel Burger’s daughter — the Minister refused me. In any case, whites are not allowed to go into black townships without a permit, and the presence of the only living member of the Burger family would not be let pass if discovered; if Marisa ignored that she was running a risk, so, if I followed the directions we were exchanging harmlessly, at risk, should I be ignoring my own.

She squeezed my hand and moved away at the same time, our hands remaining linked until they dropped apart, as blacks will do parting on street corners, calling over their shoulders as they finally go separate ways. But she forgot me instantly. In the swaying, forward movement of her crested head as she disappeared and reappeared through the shoppers there was only consciousness of the admiration she exacted, with her extravagant dress, the Ruritanian pan-Africa of triumphant splendour and royal beauty that is subject to no known boundaries of old custom or new warring political ideologies in black countries, and to no laws that make blacks’ lives mean and degrading in this one. If the white people in the shop saw only errand boys and tea-girls and street sweepers instead of black people, now they saw Marisa. The saleswoman spoke to me with the smile of one white woman to another, both admiring a foreign visitor. — Where’s she from? One of those French islands?—

Seychelles or Mauritius; it was what she understood by the Island. I told her — From Soweto. — Fancy! — she was ready to learn something, her new-moon eyebrows above the golden frame of her glasses.

You were particularly curious about Baasie. You taxed me with him — That’s how you are: here’s something that will be important for you for the rest of your life, whether you know it or not. You say you don’t ‘think’ about that kid. Whether you ‘think’ about it or don’t… When you were five years old you were afraid of the dark together. You crept into one bed.—

I didn’t answer, I kept my head turned from you because I was thinking that that was what I did with you, that was what I was. I was remembering a special, spreading warmth when Baasie had wet the bed in our sleep. In the morning the sheets were cold and smelly, I told tales to my mother — Look what Baasie’s done in his bed! — but in the night I didn’t know whether this warmth that took us back into the enveloping fluids of a host body came from him or me. You wanted to know what had happened to him. Again and again, in the cottage, you would try to trap me into answering indirectly, unwittingly, although I had told you I didn’t know. I didn’t tell you what I did know. His father, Isaac Vulindlela, was working with Lionel until the day Lionel was arrested for the last time. He was one of those who left the country and returned under false papers. He managed it successfully twice, helped by his Tswana wife’s family on the border of Botswana, who (like Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen?) didn’t want to know what he was doing. The third time, when my father was already in prison, I was the one who delivered the new passbook to the dorp ten or twenty miles from the border. It was one of the weekends when I disappeared — to show a Scandinavian journalist the scenes of Lionel’s boyhood; or to sleep with my Swedish lover entered in a motel register as his wife. The third purpose of the trip was not known to the Swede; I suppose it would give him still greater cachet if he were to learn about it, even now. A better present than a beaded belt or a black migrant mineworker’s wristband. My Swede and I were travelling not in my car but the visitor’s hired one, as the normal precaution of anonymity he is no doubt used to in his love affairs in the course of assignments that take him from country to country; I told him the spare tyre was soft and I had better see to it as he couldn’t speak Afrikaans and at a dorp garage English wouldn’t be much use. He stayed in bed, in a room hardly different from those where I followed Selena and Elsie as they cleaned up after the commercial travellers, stroking through the cross of blond hair on his chest and writing an article for Dagens Nyheter about the complicity of international industrialists with the apartheid economy.