Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— I shouldn’t think so. — She did not regard herself as interesting.

— Oh yes. In England — apartheid victim’s daughter visits Tower of London, you know the style of thing—

She was shaking her head, chin still forward; to him reassuring, a peculiarly Afrikaner mannerism, typical as a Frenchman’s shrug.

— It’s understood you won’t be giving any press interviews. You don’t want publicity, it’s not your style, no. That’s all right? Now I won’t make any commitment — I’m not going to give any undertakings you aren’t quite clear about, quite happy with. Then that’s fine; I’m satisfied. I just hope others will be — He gave his playful, encouraging grin.

— Is there anything else?—

Her conscientiousness made him optimistic. — No. I think things are moving. It’s sensible, on both sides… — He was quoting an argument he had put forward, somewhere. — We don’t lack confidence, we don’t have to be revengeful, isn’t that so? You don’t have to be kept prisoner like the Russians do to their dissident families from generation to generation. If there’s anything else, I’ll tell you, I’ll be open. Oh — just one small point — your brother — you’ve got a half-brother?—

— Yes—

— You won’t be seeing him?—

— If I get a South African passport it won’t gain me entry to Tanzania, will it.—

— No, no, but he isn’t likely to be in Europe somewhere?—

— I hadn’t thought about contacting him at all.—

— Then no problem, no problem. — He didn’t want to raise her hopes too high, but sometimes when they had been talking of other things (he kept up with vogue movements in European and American thought, once explaining Monod’s theory of chance and necessity, another time something of Piaget and structuralism — It’s fascinating — or the writings of Galbraith and B. F. Skinner) he even spoke of addresses he must give her, people she must look up, his good friends.

It was over a year after her first visit to Brandt Vermeulen that Rosa Burger was given a passport. The document was valid for one year, and for the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, but not the Scandinavian countries, Holland or the United States. She told nobody what she had in her possession. She resigned her job with the Barry Eckhard organization without explanation. She said goodbye to no one, except just possibly Marisa. Surveillance was not sure. She said nothing to Flora and William Donaldson, and had not seen Aletta or the Terblanches for many weeks — the two Terblanche women were released from detention but both placed under banning orders. She had no relationship with a man permanent enough, at the time, to require a parting. Not even the Sunday papers discovered she was going; no one but the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of State Security and Brandt Vermeulen (she did not say goodbye to him; it was tacitly understood that he should not have any personal connection with her departure, once it was assured) knew she now had a passport.

It was issued counter to the express advice and instruction of BOSS who could not understand how it could have been granted at all, and therefore disclaimed all further responsibility for the security risk involved. The case became one of those that create interdepartmental hostility and rivalry. Yet nothing could be done to stop her. Rosa Burger sat unrecognized in the departure lounge of the airport early on a Sunday morning. Her legs in jeans and boots showed under the opened newspaper that covered her face but did not hide her; when the boarding call came, the girl lowered the paper and listened as if it were a private summons, only for her. She tramped slowly across the tarmac, disappeared in the shadow of the plane’s wing and — there she was — appeared again in the sun. She climbed the metal stairway to the darker shadow of the door, not turning to look back. Surveillance watched her go in.

Ido not even know if you are alive. I read of a yacht that has disappeared between Durban and Mauritius. There are photographs of the girls on deck in bikinis ‘recalling the high spirits in which the home-built craft set out’ only weeks before. Bits of wreckage seen drifting, currents apart, suggest unpreparedness for what could happen: the striped balloon that marked the position of a spear-fisherman, floating from a broken cord, a plastic ice-bucket still decorated with varnished liquor labels washed up among rotting seaweed and flies. At sea, at sea; to circumnavigate is to end up no farther than you started. The world round as your navel. Your contemplation of it in the cottage doesn’t serve me any more. I am like my father — the way they say my father was. I discover I can take from people what I need. But I am aware I don’t have his justification; only the facility’s my inheritance — my dowry, if any man is interested.

Till the last minute, I expected to be stopped. When the boarding call came I put down the morning paper: now: now as I get up the young policeman blinking at the door with his lanyard and revolver and walkie-talkie crackling will ask me to stand aside. I could have stopped early on, before I started, so to speak. The first people I tried were frightened of me; I felt they couldn’t have me gone quick enough to wipe my footmarks from the front stoep. Those who were not afraid had no power. I could have given up. It is impossible to decide in advance whether a man like him has sufficient influence. Impossible to find out whether he is in the Broederbond or not. Though perhaps I should have asked him! I’m the one person he might have answered?

The strange thing is, my father had the same kind of illusion about Brandt Vermeulen as he has about my father. Except that my father placed it as something in the past, a lost opportunity, not something that might have come about in one or other of their respective utopias. Lionel shook his head in dry wonderment at the exegesis of apartheid with which Brandt Vermeulen enlightened Rotary Clubs and political seminars. — Man! — he won’t scruple to invoke Kierkegaard’s Either/Or against Hegel’s dialectic to demonstrate the justice of segregated lavatories… — But at the same time Lionel thought Brandt Vermeulen a casualty of his historical situation; with his intelligence, he should by rights have opted for the Future and not the volk. I might have had this in the back of my mind when I went to him. Anyway, I found he was not afraid.

Not afraid; fascinated. The state of fascination can be a function of vanity. Even the timid woman who betrayed my father was drawn into fascination by an idea of herself as spirited as she would have liked to be, she got from him. Brandt — how quickly he became ‘Brandt’ and how much it pleased him — was cautious, out of shrewdness, out of care to avoid bungle by haste and lack of strategy, but this was always outweighed by the fascination — not with me, the female thing not at all, but with what he was doing. There I was, final proof of his eclecticism, sitting — at last — in his house beside the torso with the transverse vagina, Burger’s daughter named for Rosa Luxemburg and Ouma Marie Burger. I saw, as I continued to present myself there before him, a passport for me would set him free of his last doubts. I offered myself to provide his chance to prove that the volk, become a powerful state in spite of my father and his kind, had no need to fear that in my father which hasn’t died, and which Brandt chose to see in me; to prove that an individualist like Brandt Vermeulen could continue to be committed to the volk without sacrificing ‘broad sympathies’ and ‘wide understanding’; that ‘pettiness and narrow, punitive restraint’ had gone down to the basement of the state museum along with Whites Only park bench signs that used to give the country such a bad press abroad.