Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Rosa Burger went on through the commercial centre of the town in rush-hour traffic of four in the afternoon, glancing at a piece of paper which did not direct her past the Supreme Court or the old synagogue converted for use as a court to which she knew her way. Driving at the pace of one who must make out signs ahead, she found the suburb and street. One of the old suburbs; Straat Loop Dood, a cul-de-sac tunnelled to the barrier of a steep koppie under enormous jacarandas which were not in flower at that season. The houses were those of Boers become burgers seventy or eighty years ago; single-storey farmhouses with dark stoeps where the old people who built them will have sat until they died. The house was like all the others; a pair of horns above the front door, a woody orange tree bearing tiny senile fruit, a wooden balustrade to the red-polished stoep, an oil-drum of Elephant Ear and another from which a flowering cactus clawed up the wall and clung overhead on tentacles like flies’ feet. A wasp had plastered a nest against the door. The façade was a statement related to those with which Brandt Vermeulen liked good-humouredly to surprise, to confound disdain in symposia — no, I do not live in accordance with my newspaper image of the worldly man-about-town Afrikaner divorce, in a penthouse with a sauna and squash in the basement, apeing the parvenu luxury of Johannesburg. He had the confidence to assert (what he would have termed) an indigenous sensibility; appreciation of the privacy, peace and appropriately simple ‘environmental solution’ preserved in that lovely street, with, of course, another surprise in store — when he opened the humble front door himself, a little tousled, expecting Rosa Burger by telephone appointment but informal by nature, a smiling sun-roused face, he led the way into a huge room that descended on two levels to a glass wall slid back on another garden, a real garden this time. The inside of the house had been knocked apart; it was hollowed out for the space taken up by modern good living. He was barefoot and in white canvas jeans and a checked shirt that smelled of fresh ironing, his hair was wet because — he waved towards the walled garden — he had just had a quick swim. Such a boiling afternoon — would she perhaps like to cool off, his pool was about the size of a bird-bath, no Olympic lengths offered, but there were several bikinis forgotten by various female guests, she was welcome…? He chattered in English and appeared to have no curiosity at all about her visit. Should they sit outside under the vine, or in? White wooden chaises-longues on wheels were splattered with purple droppings from the Cape thrushes who were feeding their young on the dangling bunches of grapes. — Ah, the mess…but the grapes only look pretty, they’re those sour little Catawba things, and don’t you love the calls of the thrushes? So gentle and inquisitive. And have you seen the size of the babies they’re feeding — great fat lumps with spotted breasts, still, but as big as the poor mamma. They just fly in and sit there with their beaks open, look — she sort of posts grapes down them as if they were letter boxes — The birds skimmed between him and his guest where they stood. — But it’s hot. Cooler inside; come, let’s sit here.—

The grouping of furniture casually divided the indoor space into comfortable intimacy. Rosa Burger, who had never been in any habitation of this man’s before, was settled in the sling of one of the suede and chrome chairs beside a low glass table where he had been working — under a bowl of yellow roses pushed aside, typescript and proofs of book jacket designs lay among newspapers with columns ringed in red. The flat monk’s sandals she was wearing let in the long white pelt of a carpet with the feel of soft grass.

Her crinkly Indian cotton dress looked wrung-out round her, limp; to him a statement that the visit was not something for which she had prepared herself in any way. There was no indication of what impression she wanted to make, this girl; but that was, in fact, the impression he had formed the few times, since she was an adolescent, he had encountered her and even from photographs in the papers: she was either so vulnerably open that her presence in the world made an impossible claim, or so inviolable that her openness was an arrogant assumption — which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t understand the shame of the need to please, as royalty never carries money. The coolie-pink (he had an affection for these old descriptive terms, so innocently, artlessly insulting) — the purplish pink of the dress made her skin an attractive contrast, almost painterly: greeny-bronze lights slipping over her sallow collar bones and the quiet-breathing dip at the drawstring neckline where the breasts began. The dress was merely uninteresting, not unconventional in the striking way he liked loose clothes on the tall bodies of the Afrikaans state theatre actresses and art school lecturers who were the women he kept around him. It was in spite of her clothes that potent physical appeal remained; unpainted, softly-quilted full lips at rest after a strong polite smile, the water-drop clarity of the eyes and glossy accent of eyebrows in the smokiness of her face. Vitality was suggested by the dark curly head, not tilted in coquetry when she spoke or listened, calmly upright above the chairs when he left her to fetch refreshments.

On one of the walls of this house an oil of heroic proportions: the visitor’s eye matched to it a number of others in the room. All were composed radially from figures which seemed flung down in the centre of the canvas from a height, spread like a suicide on a pavement, or backed against a wall, seen from the sights of the firing-squad. Brandt Vermeulen was evidently a patron of the painter. There was also a Kandinsky drawing and a Georgia O’Keeffe lithograph she did not recognize until her host explained his tastes and preferences, much later, because she was rather ignorant of movements in art; a Picasso satyr that was unmistakable even to her, and a group of small, intensely atmospheric Cape and Karoo landscapes that must be Pierneefs. A print from one of the African herbalists’ shops, showing the Royal Zulu line from Shaka to the contemporary King Goodwill Zwelithini grouped in cameo portraits round a beehive hut, and framed in pink-striped plastic exactly as it would be in some servant’s backyard room, represented quaintly the local naive tradition, in line (she was later to learn from her host) with Rousseau or Grandma Moses. Standing on an antique Cape yellow-wood kist beside the visitor’s chair was a presence, once alone, she became aware of, a life-size plastic female torso, divided down the middle into a blue and a red side, with its vaginal labia placed horizontally across the outside of its pubis, like the lips of a mouth. The tip of a clitoris poked a tongue. The nipples were perspex, suggesting at once the hardness of tumescence and the ice of frigidity.

Brandt Vermeulen carried in orange juice. She was asked to move the roses and he put down the tray among fallen petals. There was a warm loaf-shaped cake — You have to try at least half a slice, my Mina’s gingerbread is an experience, and she gets offended — It was delicious, the real thing, he took pleasure in their mutual experience of the pure natural juice and the tender spiciness, helping himself to more cake and gesturing his guest to do so. — It’s an old family recipe from my grandmother Mina learnt when she was a piccanin helping out in the kitchen — so she says, but my mother says she got it from her mother herself, and taught Mina — maybe your mother had it handed down, too?—

There might be some distant family connection between Brandt Vermeulen and Rosa Burger. It was not on record in Bureau of State Security files. Her mother had been vague about it. Brandt Vermeulen’s mother and Rosa’s mother could have been third or fourth cousins on the maternal side; he had no need to acknowledge the possibility, nor would Rosa have much ground to claim kinship in the collateral of Afrikanerdom where, if you went back three hundred years, every Cloete and Smit and van Heerden would turn out to have blood-ties with everyone else. — No, she had never tasted such good gingerbread before.