Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

At the garage on a Sunday morning there was only one attendant; a plump young black whose overalls had no buttons and were clasped together where absolutely necessary by a big safety-pin at the fly. Striped socks and a peaked cap advertising one of the companies my Swede was arraigning from the twin bed under a print of the Arc de Triomphe in spring: the young black man was mending a punctured tube, sitting on oil-stained tarmac with his legs spreadeagled round a tin bath of water. The sleek seal of black rubber bobbed at his hands. For whoever might be passing, I came over, any white missus. — Are you Abraham? — It was the year of the Smile button; he wore a big one he had perhaps picked up forgotten by some car full of children piling out to get cokes from the automatic vendor. But he didn’t smile. — Yes, I’m Abraham. — We spoke in Afrikaans and in the usual tones, mine kindly but authoritative, his hesitant and unsure whether he was to expect demand, rebuke or a request he would be reluctant to stir for. — Your mother does my washing. She’s sent you a letter. — Hey? Wat het die missus gesê?—He had heard all right but he wanted to make sure the words were exactly what he had been told to expect. I repeated them and he lip-read as if my voice might deceive but my mouth could be trusted. He wiped a wet hand down the overalls and with that movement my own right hand took the thick envelope out of the straw bag I carried to hold the paraphernalia of a car trip. The envelope passed to him and under the folds of the too-large and filthy overalls, the garb of an anonymously imposed and carelessly assumed identity beneath which, like his hidden body, he kept another, his own. He got up and tramped ahead of me to unhook the hose of the bowser and fill up the car. I gave the usual ten cents in addition to the cost of the petrol and he gave the usual flourish of a dirty rag over the windscreen.

That’s how it’s done. The cloak-and-dagger stuff. You always wanted to know about such things. But how was I to know, am I to know that you were not there for me to come to out of a calculation of my need? If Lionel Burger didn’t recruit you, it could have been that the other side did. You could have been allotted to me and me to you by the men of the Special Branch who have watched me grow up, as the saying goes for any of those adults whom the Nels had us children give the title of honorary ‘Oom’.

Whatever else I stood stripped of, teeth chattering in dreadful triumph, in the nights of the cottage, I kept what is second nature become first. I could not shed the instinct for survival that kept my mouth shut to you on such subjects. Unlike the unknown Abraham, you didn’t have the background to lip-read me. And in the dorp that Sunday I went back to the hotel and carried a beer, glass down over the bottle smoking cold at the neck, to my Swede. I didn’t tell him, either. He cajoled me back to bed and typewritten pages floated away to the floor all round us. The hotel’s Selena or Elsie knocked on the door and went away again; hotel servants understand never to ask questions. That’s how it’s done. He made love to me with the dragon Hoover breathing in the corridor outside and he does not know that the essence on his tongue in the bitter wax of my ear chamber, the brines of mouth or vagina were not my secret. For me to be free is never to be free of the survival cunning of concealment. I did not tell you what I know, however much I wanted to. Isaac Vulindlela was caught with one of those passbooks. That’s how it’s done. My father’s biographer, respectfully coaxing me onto the stepping-stones of the official vocabulary — words, nothing but dead words, abstractions: that’s not where reality is, you flung at me — national democratic revolution, ideological integration, revolutionary imperative, minority domination, liberation alliance, unity of the people, infiltration, incursion, viable agency for change, reformist option, armed tactics, mass political mobilization of the people in a combination of legal, semi-legal and clandestine methods — those footholds have come back to my vocabulary lately through parrying him. I don’t know where Baasie is but his father was found dead in a cell after eight months in detention. The police said he hanged himself with his trousers. I managed to convey the news to my father, in prison. Don’t ask me how. He didn’t know, I couldn’t tell him the passbook was one of those I had been able to hand over so easily no one would believe that is how it is done. I find it very hard to tell the difference between the truth and the facts: to know what the facts are? If Abraham at the garage had been a trap the circumstances of my failed mission would have read as ridiculously as any I exposed before poor Clare Terblanche. What was the reality of that weekend in the Western Transvaal dorp? An act in the third category of methods (legal, semi-legal and clandestine) to co-ordinate political struggle and armed activity in creating an all-round climate of collapse in which a direct political solution becomes possible? The material transcendence of a man’s span by the recording, for posterity, on film, of landscapes and types of environment that formed his consciousness? The ecstatic energy consumed in the hotel bed between eleven o’clock in the morning when the Dutch Reformed church bells were tolling and midday when the xylophone notes of the lunch gong were sounded, an hour without any consequences whatever except a stain on the bottom sheet — stiff commemorative plaque that a Selena or Elsie would remark, without having her life altered in any manner, before it disappeared in the wash?

Perhaps the way the people in the department store saw me is right. Although it was an article of faith in that house that it is necessary to go beyond the oversimplified race equation — the reformist view of the struggle as between colours, not classes — my mother and father succeeded only in making me a kaffir-boetie. Baasie’s little sibling. Marisa came over me as a sudden good mood. A tenderness softened and livened all round me as I drove home from the city: the Indian vendors with their roses wired like candelabras, and dyed arum lilies; when a red light held me up, the business-like black kid darting, spitting his shrill whistle between the lanes of cars to sell the early edition of the afternoon paper; the huge woman with a full shopping-bag on her head, a tripping child towed at her skirt and that African obi made up of the inevitable baby-on-back and swathed blanket thick round her middle, who launched herself, paused — smiled back at me — and scuttled across my path when she should have been waiting at the crossing. The comfort of black. The persistence, resurgence, daily continuity that is the mass of them. If one is not afraid, how can one not be attracted? It is one thing or the other. Marisa and Joe Kgosana have all this to draw on. Lionel and Ivy and Dick, my mother and Aletta; behind our kind, who are confined to the magisterial areas of the white suburbs, are people who sent obscene letters calling my father a monster.

Isuppose I intended to go into the township to stay in Marisa’s orbit a while longer, as people take a second drink to prolong the pleasant effect of the first before it wears off. I don’t know; I hadn’t decided. The man who is going to write about Lionel was with me in the flat early that afternoon when someone else arrived. Even surprise is something I can’t help concealing. I didn’t introduce him to the biographer. Orde Greer is a press photographer who knew me by sight, as you did, and whom I knew as I knew you before we had coffee in Pretoria that day, all during the time of Lionel’s trial, one of a cast of faces in which I read who I was. In the past few years I’ve once or twice seen him at a party, fondling an unwilling girl in the indiscriminate way of a man who will not remember next day. He was at the memorial service for Lionel. His name’s familiar, as a by-line in the paper; his person was identified for me by a polio limp as mine was for him by my relationship to my father. He greets me in the street and I nod back.