Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

A man wearing veldskoen ankle-boots, rolled-down red socks, shorts and in spite of the summer heat a dusty black, fisherman’s sweater — if I hadn’t recognized him at once as the one who was handicapped he might have been some athlete jogging round the neighbourhood in training.

— I believe I’m supposed to pick you up. For Fats’ place — And because the biographer was there behind me, I answered as if such an arrangement had been made. — I’ll only be another few minutes. Come in. — Marisa’s name was not mentioned before a third person; already this established an area where Orde Greer and I knew one another better than by sight. My father’s biographer was looking round at him with the frustration, concealed under an affectation of good manners, of one who finds he cannot place someone whose significance he is sure he ought to know. He shuffled notes together and made as if to leave; I apologized firmly for terminating the session, but he was the one who was all apologies. He left; I didn’t mention to Orde Greer who he was or what he was doing, either.

I didn’t know whether Greer was one of us or not; perhaps he was. His bona fides was that Marisa had sent him. I offered him a drink if he would give me time to tidy up a bit before we went.

— That’s okay. I’m early…what’s going?—

Sitting in my chair (the old green leather one, the colour of holly leaves, that was in my father’s study and that we children used to like to slide on because the friction of bare thighs produced static electricity) he had the air of taking a place he had a right to, would assume with a slightly nervous aggression before challenge. His outfit now suggested ease in the company for which he was bound.

But newspapermen have to be like that — they are used to assuming entry, I know. Afraid of me, and yet familiar at the same time; I had plenty of experience of it during the trial. There was only beer; he paused in mark of regret for the bottle of whisky he had hoped to settle down with — Beer it is. — Thick hair that tangled with a beard and gave him a consciously noble head, from the front, left him vulnerable when he bent to retrieve the metal loop fallen from the can, showing the hair already rubbed away into the scalp like a baby’s tonsured by the pillow on which it lies helpless.

I suppose my experience of journalists makes me stiff in their presence, even so long after Lionel’s trial. I become what they caught me as in all the newspaper photographs, the dumpy girl with the paisley scarf doffed, untidy hair springing about, defiant tendons on display in her neck, head turned full-on to the camera because she doesn’t have to hide her face like the relatives of a swindler, but eyes acknowledging nothing, because she doesn’t need sympathy or pity like the relatives of a murderer. And who are they to have decided — the law did not allow them to photograph him —in their descriptions of him in the dock, in the way he listened to evidence against him, in the expression with which he met the public gallery or greeted friends there, that they knew what he was, when I don’t know that I do.

This one looked at me from my armchair with the beer-mug sceptred in his hand, marking that I had changed into a pair of well-fitting trousers, not as a man assumes for himself the position of one for whom a girl has made herself sexually more attractive (he wouldn’t have dared that), but as a successful intruder notes intimate behaviour that cannot be concealed from him, and from which he will build conclusions that will establish him as an insider. He looked me over — almost. Half-smiling, entirely for himself.

He was one of those people who find it easiest to talk when they are driving and are addressing others only with a voice, body and attention directed elsewhere. In a casual tone by which I understood he had planned to bring up the subject, he wanted to know if I had read a book recently published in England by a former political prisoner in exile.

One of us — I hadn’t read it yet.

He offered to lend me his copy. But I thanked him — I didn’t need it. I knew that Flora, who so enjoys making ‘ordinary’ people run mild risks without being aware of it, had arranged for a business associate of William to smuggle copies from London.

— There’s quite a lot about you of course. Your father and the family.—

— They were in prison together the last year of my father’s life.—

— Oh plenty about that — conversations with your father. How your father ran his own little clinic, more or less, even the warders coming with their aches and pains. They had to decide whether he could be allowed to write prescriptions, and then when he was given pads the politicals used the paper to circulate their own news-sheet…it’s interesting. But also about the days when…the days in the house. The Sundays. That famous house.—

He was taking a route unfamiliar to me.

— I wonder what you’ll think of it. How it’ll strike you.—

He wanted me to ask why; I understood there must be things in the book I could confirm or deny, things he thought would displease me. If he’s one of us it meant partisan sympathy but if he’s simply one of them, a liberal journalist observing the ‘reactions’ of Burger’s daughter, enjoying being in the know, it was nothing but the revival of an old newspaper sensation. — Are you sure where you’re going?—

He took it as a deliberate change of subject, snubbed himself with a little snigger. — Why shouldn’t I be?—

— Just that I’ve never gone to Orlando this way. You know where Marisa’s cousin lives, though?—

— I know. — The shortness rebuked me; he was no tourist in blacks’ areas, no Swede in need of a cicerone. He rolled hairs of his beard together between fingers and thumb while we waited to make a right turn across a line of traffic. — I never saw the inside of that house.—

An odd thing to say. To me. And in the manner of someone who is addressing himself in the certainty of being overheard. Did he hang around like you, Conrad? What did he want of us? What absolution did you think you’d find in what my father did!

The journalist and I lost touch once we were at Marisa’s cousin’s ‘place’. Marisa was not there yet; she would ‘drop in some time’—Fats was impartially welcoming as the host of a television show. There was the litter of beer, whisky and glasses; three or four black men dressed in tartan seersucker jackets and picture ties, spread thigh-to-thigh on chairs, with among them a runt or two, jeans poked at the knees, laceless running shoes, and the big, sad heads of jockeys or go-betweens for money and sport. There was an insolently handsome boy shaped in his sky-blue denim as Victorian girls were defined by tight-lacing. A middle-aged man with the black school-headmaster’s dark suit and neat tie-pin dozed between appearances of being a part of the animation. Men were talking and arguing; Orde Greer stood with a whisky at once in hand, interrupting (Listen — man, listen), cocking his head to take something in, the slight shuffle of lameness making a mendicant of him.

A child bore over to me a cup of milky tea chattering against its saucer. — And how have you been keeping? That’s nice! — Fats’ wife pushed another child off a dining-table chair with a reproach in her own language, not interrupting the smiling conventions. — I thought maybe you’ve gone away or something… since your father passed on… shame — She settled us side by side. — Try a biscuit, Miss Burger, my sister-in-law makes them, she’s a really wonderful baker, even wedding cakes, you know. I wish I could be clever like that. — She can never bring herself to call me Rosa. I am part of the entourage of her famous and brave relative, Marisa Kgosana; of the distinction conveyed upon her family by their kinship with Joe Kgosana, on the Island with Nelson Mandela. She caught the hand of a girl who had been stalking in and out of the adjoining bedroom, adjusting the set of the blouse knotted under her breasts and pressing the imprint of one mulberry-painted lip upon the other: —D’you know who this is? This is Lionel Burger’s daughter — But the girl did not react to the identity. She gave her hand for a second to a white girl. She said nothing. — Miss Burger, meet my niece Tandi, haven’t you perhaps seen that Fanta advert on the big board where you turn off for Soweto? — she’s in that—