Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

I spoke in the mild intimacy of girls of about the same age. — It is yours? — I meant I had thought the child was Margaret’s and Fats’.

— They’re all ours. — It was a forked flicker of the tongue; something that the one to whom it was addressed was not expected to understand, had no right to understand. She looked at me for a second; and turned away laughing aggressively, in talk, in their own language, with Dhladhla. She was teasing him, teasing the baby, he half-irritated, the baby half-in-bliss-half-in-tears. Margaret came and took it away from her, while she kissed it passionately and maliciously and it clung to her.

Somewhere near me the white journalist’s phrases jingled like a bunch of keys fingered in a pocket. — …not peace at any price, peace for each at his—

The women were in and out of the kitchen. I made myself useful with Marisa who at once organized and delegated tasks among the pots of boiled fowl and meat, the potatoes and mealie-pap, the gravy that smelled of curry. Tandi’s friend cut bread. Margaret was making her salads dainty with beetroot stars and radish roses.

Thanks madam —the runts waited to be served by me, their fellow-guest, and ate seriously under their caps. Some people left without eating but others came in from the night as a matter of Fats’ habitual sociability rather than because they had been invited. In fact I — Orde Greer and I — hadn’t been asked for a meal in the way invitations are exchanged among whites, but simply had stayed on after dark until it happened to be the time when Fats’ family usually ate. It’s in this kind of black sociability, extending to blacks the hospitality already offered to white people in the tradition of my grandmother Marie Burger by Uncle Coen and Auntie Velma, that the Sundays in that house came about. We used to squat round the swimming-pool juggling hot boerewors from finger-tips to finger-tips; these children shared a dish on the floor, their fingers carefully moulding and dipping balls of stiff mealie-pap in gravy, while the baby and his grandmother ate from her plate.

Sitting on a plastic pouffe between James and Fats I was aware of the figure of Greer always seen from the back, planted with the hopeful and slightly ridiculous air of someone who has determinedly drunk more than anybody else, and makes a nuisance of himself on the periphery of one little group or another, taking with him his set of challenges, so that people might break off what they were saying but would either carelessly absorb his preoccupations or even interpret them wrongly in order to blend them with the direction of their own. He had mushed his food together without eating, already his abandoned plate had the repellent look of leftovers; someone stubbed a cigarette in it. Finally he was before Duma Dhladhla, unavoidable, ignoring the self-sufficiency of the trio, Dhladhla and the two girls. I heard him say very loudly, as if he and Dhladhla were alone — What would you do if you were me?—

Dhladhla took a snapping bite out of a chicken leg in his hand and chewed it with vivid energy, the muscles at the angles of his fine jaw moving naturally in the way of male actors affecting emotion. He looked at Greer, importuned, triumphant and bored.

— I don’t think about that.—

Marisa had joined us. — So there was a raid in town today? June Makhubu’s detained, and two others, they say. All Sol Hlubi’s Black Studies stuff taken away. Even the report on high school children the municipal social welfare people have already accepted as evidence for their official commission…I’d like to know how that suddenly becomes subversive… They’re mad… Rosa, we were both in town in the morning…?—

She assumed I had been as unaware as she. And in this company I understood it was strange, some sort of lapse, from the norm established in me from the beginning of my life, that I should not have told her at once, when we met in the shop.

— Orde probably knows more… — Marisa rallied him. — Orde, what was this business at Providence House? Who else did they visit as well as Hlubi’s outfit?—

He was stiffly dignified with his red socks sagging over the boots, his hand feeling masturbatorily round his back and chest under the pullover.

He had taken pictures; Colonel van Staden himself led the raid, that meant they were after something big; the intrepid news photographer had doubled up the fire escape and there was one shot of van Staden’s man, that lout Claasens — He’s holding some chap by the scruff of the neck like a dog, you can see he’s got him by a handful of jacket and shirt — man, his feet are practically lifted dangling off the ground—

— But what was happening? Resisting arrest?—

— No — no — Claasens is searching him, with the other hand he’s in his pockets — you’ll see… But you won’t because my bloody editor won’t publish. He says to me, they’ll be down on us like a load of bricks. You’ll be in for it too. — You’re not allowed to show the police busy in any situation like that. Prejudicial to the dignity of the law. Their dignity. Christ. —

— Did Claasens see you’d caught him?—

— I ran like hell. One of the others spotted me but when he came after he slipped on the metal steps, down on his backside, the bugger was lucky he didn’t fall four flights—

The baby on his grandmother’s lap shouted back gleefully at our laughter. An exchange of stories scoring off the police, some of which the tellers had experienced themselves, other belonging to our folklore, was encouraged among Marisa, James and me. — What about when your father and mother got married, Rosa — And I had to describe again, as Lionel told as a political anecdote, a family chronicle, what was really his love affair with my mother: how the police came to raid the first tiny flat and had to unpack the household goods. While I was telling it the baby boy ran over to me and pressed upon me some red knitted garment. I thought it was something of his that he wanted me to help him put on, but he held it away, reaching up towards my head, and then rubbing at his own. What does he want? — I signalled to Margaret and saw the grandmother’s gums bared at me in pleasure. But Marisa understood. — He wants to put the hat on you, Rosa. It’s for you. — I obliged; bent my head, and the child crowned me with crooked jabs. A cap with a rosette on one side, of the kind black women sell, spread out before them, while they crochet among the legs of passers-by on the city pavements as if they were in their own kitchens. The grandmother was presenting Lionel’s daughter with her handiwork. I pulled it on and Marisa set it right for me. — The rose shouldn’t be in the middle — She tittered delightfully, regarding me, the first knuckle of her slender hand caught between her teeth a moment. Margaret added her touch, rolling up the edge of the thing to make a brim. — No wait — that’s it — Marisa pushed all my hair up under it, both of us protesting and giggling. The old woman came over and hugged me. The nine- or ten-year-old girl who had brought me tea in the afternoon hung on my arm with the lovesickness of one who claims an elder sister. Certainly Orde Greer didn’t seem in much of a condition to drive; when Fats and his wife urged me to spend the night — the short pile on the baby’s head was softly rough under my chin — I was drawn to the idea of staying there among them, in the pawings and touches of the children, the comforting confidence of Fats, capable in corruption, that if the police should discover I was there, he would know exactly to whom to give a bottle of brandy. The vanity of being loved by and belonging with them offered itself. But I know it can’t be taken for nothing. Offered freely — yet it has its price, that I would have to settle upon for myself, even if I didn’t make a fool of myself, like Greer, asking for an estimate from Dhladhla. We drove under a sky fluttering eyelids of lightning through streets that flattened away into night, low houses shut tight, battened in darkness, barred with tin and iron against thieves and penned against the police, marauders without distinction. The eye in a window was a candle far inside; or only the reflection of the Volkswagen’s headlights looking back at me as we shook and swerved our way out. Sudden street-lights, far apart and irregular, make one vulnerable there, passing under them as a target. Smoking like a burned-out site, the miles of townships were all round, dark-clotted, no assertion of tall buildings against the sky, no cloudy alabaster bowl like that inverted above the white city by life that declares itself openly in neon, floodlight, and windows letting lamp-shafts into gardens. A man lay where the road, without a gutter, found a boundary in ruts and pools. Drunk or knifed. It didn’t occur to either of us to call out to stop or even pass a remark. Not in that place. Not even if we had been black. Not even though we are white.