Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

And did she also like pickled pumpkin? Did she know what pickled pumpkin was? He thought not! He was playfully boastful about his sensible vegetable patch out there near the swimming-pool; people simply didn’t realize how beautiful vegetables were, he must show her his mahogany-coloured brinjals and scarlet chillies, and pumpkins like those plump fancy sofa cushions with a button in the middle. His garden, his paintings, this sort of mad venture — he blew rose petals off the jacket proofs — now he was about to lose his boots publishing a book of woodcuts and poetry that was actually erotic but wouldn’t run into trouble with the tannies 2 because the woodcuts were too abstract and the poems too esoteric for one to expect to sell any copies…

He could have gone on quite easily entertaining her with his enthusiasms and ability not to take himself seriously, she could have got up to leave at the end of an hour without having revealed any purpose in coming. Those magnificent pumpkins — Mina pickled them sweet-and-sour, he would give her a jar to take home. — Do you still live in the house — your father’s house? — he laughed, he wasn’t prying — I don’t know, are you married or anything?—

She told him she had lived in various places; now in a small flat.

— So you gave up that house…of course. I was there once when I was about fifteen years old — I don’t think you were even born—

She smiled, closing her eyes momentarily in an unconscious effort of recall or denial. — Oh yes I was.—

— Well, too young to have been much in evidence…I messed up a knee at rugby and the uncle who kept an eye on me while I was away from home at school wanted your father’s opinion before he’d take the responsibility for the usual cartilage operation. He swore by the skill of Lionel Burger — may be a red but he’s the best doctor in the country! So my father had to give in… — He made the transition to Afrikaans, for them, without noticing it — I was a bit nervous, I didn’t know what a red would be like, some sort of Antichrist, Frankenstein we kids used to see in the bioscope, but your father was marvellous, we talked rugby — of course he’d been a first team fullback in his medical school days — I decided, what did they mean about this red business!—

— I sold the house, I’ve given up my old hospital job. Over a year, now. — She was speaking in Afrikaans, too.

His beaming, sun-and-chlorine-scoured face composed itself to consider what perhaps his visitor had given up more than a house, a job. Wit and frivolity sank, like kites gracefully grounded.

— I’ve been working for one of the big investment advisers. The Barry Eckhard organization.—

— I see. — And he was looking, looking at her for what there was to be revealed.

She showed no signs of nerves or embarrassment, yet neither did she have the defensiveness he was used to meeting if someone were to be pressing him. She was mistress of her own silences; as if he were the one waiting for her to speak instead of she herself looking for an opportunity. He folded his arms, workman-like.

She spoke in the tone and cadence she had used to say her mother had not, so far as she knew, been handed down a recipe for gingerbread. — It’s not very interesting. In fact, so much less than I thought.—

His bristly blond eyelashes flicked towards the preoccupation on the table. — Ways of losing money are more amusing, unfortunately. —

— I could hardly say I’m tired of it — already. Rather that I don’t seem to have made…how shall I say…contact with it.—

He was drawn into a leading question. — It’s not what you need…?—

She let his question become a conclusion. Then she spoke not in reflection but directly to him, a quiet statement coming up on him and surrounding him.

— I want to go somewhere else.—

He took time — Another job?—

— I’d like to see Europe.—

Put like that it seemed so reasonable; he had been back and forth so often; there she was, a girl like any other, a girl in her twenties, of an intelligence, education and class that took experience of the outside world for granted, was it not perfectly reasonable that she was aware of the possibility of other people’s pleasures existing for her, too? He could not be less than serious and sympathetic. — Well why shouldn’t you! I mean why shouldn’t you want to?—

— But I never have.—

— Not as a child? — The telephone had started ringing.

— I’ve never been able to. — Rosa Burger did not appear to grant tacit permission for him to answer it.

— I thought that once or twice your father — The telephone continued to press its electrical impulses upon them, compressing the isolation of their talk towards a complicity. He got up, shedding that. — Damn it, no one will go. — Old retainers have the disadvantage of being deaf.

From some other room his voice came, lively, cajoling, laughing; when he returned all died quickly from his face.

— Sorry about that. — In a monkeyish gesture his hand darted of itself and tossed a piece of the cake into his mouth.

— My mother and father went several times to the Soviet Union, but before I was born. The last time my father was abroad was in 1950, I was two, he went to England and Czechoslovakia as well. All over — not to America, the Americans wouldn’t let him in. It was the last time he or my mother was allowed out. And when I grew up this automatically applied to me, too.—

It sounded like something merely handed down; another family recipe. — Have you never tried?—

— Once. — She smiled at him. — But not very seriously. That is, not in a way that makes any sense. I just went along and filled in a form at the passport office… But that was when my mother was alive, and my father.—

— And now? — For the first time, his voice took her on.

She seemed to reiterate, simply — I want to know somewhere else. — But following the reference to Lionel Burger and his wife, he saw that the statement was different; besides, he heard ‘know’ instead of ‘go’: I want to know somewhere else . The mother, the father; their destination, here or anywhere, did not have to be hers. He took the soothing, encouraging tone of one who can agree warmly with a move that has nothing to do with him. — Well, why not — naturally — of course.—

— D’you think you can help me?—

He did not evade her gaze; his grin deepened and the skin at the side of his left eye was tweaked by some nerve; he got up suddenly and stood as if he had forgotten what for. He wrestled with pleasantries that wouldn’t do, for her; he did not know how to get back onto the plane of soothing empathy without responsibility. She hadn’t even given him the conditional ‘could’; it was as good as stated: you can help me. More, coming from her: I’m ready to let you.

He scratched both hands up through his short hair, stretched the fingers wide and let his hands fall. Staringly smiled at her, as he kept his good temper, his charm — almost English-gentleman stuff, to faze the English liberals themselves in debate. When he spoke he addressed her with a diminutive in their language, to show — she understood? — he did not repudiate ties that had no need of consanguinity. She and her father and mother belonged with him even though they disowned the volk — nothing could change that, Lionel Burger who died an unrepentant Communist jail-bird also died an Afrikaner. Brandt Vermeulen did not need to tell her her father could have been prime minister if he had not been a traitor. It had been said many times. For the Afrikaner people, Lionel Burger was a tragedy rather than an outcast; that way, he still was theirs. They could not allow the earth of the fatherland to be profaned by his body; yet, that way, they were themselves absolved from his destruction.