Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Orde Greer got me home all right. He must be used to driving when fairly drunk. The only sound in the car was his heavy breathing and a belching of whisky fumes that buckled him every now and then; he concentrated in a way that excluded my presence. We knew that nothing would happen to us in that car, taking corners fast and wide and pausing with demonstrative caution before crossing against the red light. I can see he’s someone perpetually fascinated by the idea of something that may transform him; accidental death is not his solution. And I’m here, the last of my line.

Silkworms of soft rain munching the leaves at two in the morning.

But I hadn’t forgotten the red knitted hat; I have that, I put it away in a drawer — the temptation — before I went to bed that Saturday, just as the mild storm reached the white suburbs.

What I say will not be understood.

Once it passes from me, it becomes apologia or accusation. I am talking about neither…but you will use my words to make your own meaning. As people pick up letters from the stack between them in word-games. You will say: she said he was this or that: Lionel Burger, Dhladhla, James Nyaluza, Fats, even that poor devil, Orde Greer. I am considering only ways of trying to take hold; you will say: she is Manichean. You don’t understand treason; a flying fish lands on the deck from fathoms you glide over. You bend curiously, call the rest of the crew to look, and throw it back.

Whatever I was before, you confused me. In the cottage you told me that in that house people didn’t know each other; you’ve proved it to me in what I have found since in places you haven’t been, although you are exploring the world. But there are things you didn’t know; or, to turn your criteria back on yourself, you knew only in the abstract, in the public and impersonal act of reading about them or seeking information, like a white journalist professionally objective and knowledgeable on the ‘subject’ of a ‘black exploiting class’. The creed of that house discounted the Conrad kind of individualism, but in practice discovered and worked out another. This was happening at the interminable meetings and study groups that were the golf matches and club dinners of my father’s kind. It was what was wrested from the purges when they denounced and expelled each other for revisionism or lack of discipline or insufficient zeal. It was something they managed to create for themselves even while Comintern agents were sent out to report on their activities and sometimes to destroy these entirely on orders that caused fresh dissension among them, despair and disaffection. It is something that will roll away into a crevice hidden between Lionel’s biographer’s analysis of the Theory of Internal Colonialism, the Nature of the New State as a Revolutionary Movement, and the resolution of the Problems of the Post-Rivonia Period — the crystal they secreted for themselves out of dogma. What would you do if you were me? What is to be done? Lionel and his associates found out; whatever the creed means in all the countries where it is being evolved between the ‘polar orthodoxies of China and the Soviet Union’ (the biographer’s neat turn of phrase), they made a Communism for ‘local conditions’ in this particular one. It was not declared heretic, although I see it contains a heresy of a kind, from the point of view of an outsider’s interpretation. Lionel — my mother and father — people in that house, had a connection with blacks that was completely personal. In this way, their Communism was the antithesis of anti-individualism. The connection was something no other whites ever had in quite the same way. A connection without reservations on the part of blacks or whites. The political activities and attitudes of that house came from the inside outwards, and blacks in that house where there was no God felt this embrace before the Cross. At last there was nothing between this skin and that. At last nothing between the white man’s word and his deed; spluttering the same water together in the swimming-pool, going to prison after the same indictment: it was a human conspiracy, above all other kinds.

I have lost connection. It’s only the memory of childhood warmth for me. Marisa says we must ‘stick together’. The Terblanches offer me the chance to steal the key of the photocopying room. What is to be done? Lionel and my mother did not stand before Duma Dhladhla and have him say: I don’t think about that.

They had the connection because they believed it possible.

Rosa Burger did not go back until more than a year after his death to the town where her father had been tried, imprisoned, and died. These occasions for her to visit the town gave rise to no others; he has no grave. But when that summer had already been bisected by the change of the year from old to new in the final digit of the Barry Eckhard organization’s desk-calendars, she drove three times to the town and three different addresses there, during February-March. After a period of some weeks, she again began to pay a number of visits (on the 13th and 30th April and on the 7th and 24th May); but these were all to the same address. She was known to have driven to town on these dates and to these destinations by the surveillance to whom all her movements had been and were known, from the day a fourteen-year-old girl, the arteries of her groin painfully charged with menstrual blood, stood with a hot-water bottle and an eiderdown outside the prison. Whether certain purposes those movements concealed — the slip of paper with the child’s message to her mother hidden round the screw-top of the hot-water bottle — were always discoverable to surveillance cannot be sure, although for reasons of counter-strategy it is accepted that people like Lionel Burger don’t hesitate to make their children adept at feints and lies from the time they’re set on their feet. The new occasion for her visits to the town was soon placed: in a category indicated by what the disparate identities of the people she visited had in common. All were people whose allegiance made her father their enemy. All were Afrikaners, whose history, blood and language made him their brother.

Burger’s daughter wanted something, then. Something not available to her own kind. She was officially ‘named’ her kind, high up on the list, not only alphabetically. Although she was not banned, her naming as a Communist was restrictive of associations and movements she would most desire. Perhaps it was a favour she wanted for someone connected with her; but since the affair with the hippy against whom nothing could be found, and the dirty weekends with the Scandinavian journalist (the Department of the Interior had been instructed that he should never be granted another visa, the post office had been instructed to open all letters addressed to him) she seemed to be keeping to herself, except for the old contacts long taken for granted between such people, old lines surveillance can always find its way swiftly along, woken at the epicentre by the tremble of a victim newly trapped. Perhaps she wanted some relaxation of her restrictions; was tired of being a typist and had taken up again the idea of going to work with those two British doctors in the Transkei. Whatever it was, she wanted it badly enough to seek out prominent Nationalists on whom she must carefully have calculated a lien that might lever against the stone slab of fear and resistance her approach would cause to drop into position before them.

It was only when, in April and May, she began to return to one of the three addresses that the exact nature of what she was after began to be narrowed down. The address upon which she had settled her intention, either because she had been rebuffed at the others, or because she had eliminated all but the most useful, was that of Brandt Vermeulen. Brandt Vermeulen is one of the ‘New Afrikaners’ from an old distinguished Afrikaner family. In each country families become distinguished for different reasons. Where there is no Almanach de Gotha, the building of railroads and sinking of oil wells becomes a pedigree, where no one can trace himself back to Argenteuil or the Crusades, colonial wars substitute for a college of heraldry. Brandt Vermeulen’s great-great-grandfather was murdered by Dingaan with Piet Retief’s party, his maternal grandfather was a Boer War general, there was a poet uncle whose seventieth birthday has been commemorated by the issue of a stamp, and another uncle interned during the Second World War, along with Mr Vorster, for pro-Nazi sympathies, there is even a cousin who was decorated posthumously for bravery in battle against Rommel at Alamein. Cornelius Vermeulen, a Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, was a Minister in the first National Party government after the triumph of the Afrikaner in 1948, when his son Brandt was eight years old, and held office in the successive Strydom, Verwoerd and Vorster governments before retiring to one of the family farms in the Bethal district of the Transvaal.