Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

I hoped to be stopped. ‘Détente’ (mispronounced and misappropriated) made my passport possible. Brandt Vermeulen wanted to believe in ‘the new dynamic’ as he preferred to call it; I sat in his lovely old house, one of the exhibits; if he could get a passport for Burger’s daughter to travel like anyone else — if Burger’s daughter was willing to travel like anyone else — who could say the regime was not showing signs of moving in the direction of change?

When the 24th April came (I know you dislike my habit of naming private events with public dates, but public events so often are decisive ones in my life) I thought I would be stopped. There would be an end of it. Half the white wall fell in on itself; the Portuguese were done for. Dick had not been projecting himself too far into the Future when he talked to me through the car window many months before. But by this time Brandt was deeply committed to his kind of freedom. He had told me how much importance he placed on the human scale of policy action (the succinct phrases are his); that meant that when one has found the Kierkegaardian idea for which one must live or die, one must support its policy passionately in theory and at the same time take on the job of personal, practical, daily responsibility for its interpretation and furtherance. He gave me an informal luncheon-type address on the honourable evolution of Dialogue, begining with Plato, the dialogue with self, and culminating in ‘the Vorster initiative’, the dialogue of peoples and nations. With me he was self-engaged in that responsibility on the human scale; for him, his afternoons with Rosa were ‘Dialogue’ in practice.

Others, less fastidious-minded than he, pursue the human scale in the rooms supplied with only the basic furnishings of interrogation, winning over enemies brought out of solitary confinement to stand on their feet until they drop, kicked, beaten, doused and terrorized into submission. When I stood watching the wasp delicately plastering its nest for the seconds before the front door was opened to me, I was entering each time a place that didn’t exist for my father and that he would never have put me in, never, although he sent me to prisons; that he would never have set foot in himself, although I had inherited from him and from my mother the necessity of deviousness wily enough to get myself there — a place where a meeting was possible between those for whom skin is an absolute value and those for whom it is not a value at all; a place whose shameful existence recognizes a possibility of there being anything to say between migrant miners, factory workers, homeless servants, landless peasants, and the class and colour that lives on them. Peace. Land. Bread. But Brandt knows only the long words — ethnic advancement, separate freedoms, multilateral development, plural democracy. To show the world how South Africa ‘beleaguered by hostile states on her own borders’, imprisons and detains only those who actively threaten her safety from within, it was more necessary than ever for her to prove her good faith in continuing daytant through the right concessionary gestures at home. It was necessary for Brandt to stand firm, with his friends in high places, over the bargain of Burger’s daughter. She had accepted that she would contact no one who counted, abroad; she would not even go to Holland or Scandinavia, where anti-apartheid and Freedom Fighter support groups were most active, and her Communist background effectively debarred her from the United States, where black American lobbies would have sought her support for economic boycotts.

Nothing stopped me. Until the very last week I still thought I would stop myself. It’s difficult to believe that being too detached to see myself interesting to newspapers could have turned into a guarantee not to be interviewed by the hostile foreign press. It’s only too easy to be cold to the prospect of meetings in London with my father’s old associates in exile, who would receive me expectant as the old Terblanches and their daughter are; it hardly seemed to constitute an undertaking. And all I had to say about my brother, my father’s other son, was to observe that a South African passport isn’t recognized in Tanzania. The remark put him as far from me as if he too drowned as a child, or like Baasie, my little kaffertjie, disappeared into some room, some black township, some prison, maybe, where I can’t catch up.

After I had taken the passport, after I’d gone — I don’t know what they said: the faithful. They would surely never have believed it of me. Perhaps they got out of believing it by substituting the explanation that I had gone on instructions, after all, instructions so daring and secret not even anyone among themselves would know. So my inactivity for so long would present them with a purpose they had always hoped for, for my sake. And by what means I had managed to get papers — that was simply a tribute to the lengths a revolutionary must go. I think about what they must be thinking. Listen to me — Conrad, whatever I may have said to you about them, however they may have seemed to me since I have been free of them, they are the ones who matter.

Adonkey. The real reason why I went is something only you would believe. In fact, only if you believe will it become believable, to me. I recognize it as part of the way my life has been coded, since you forced me to read such things in the cottage; but the code is my own, not yours, not theirs. A donkey. A donkey. A matter for the SPCA. Lionel loved animals almost sentimentally, he set the leg of a seagull with sellotape when we were camping at Quagga Mouth when we were children; my mother thought too many people in our country who cared for animals had no care for people — she herself had none over, for beasts. A meths drinker dead on a park bench. A matter for the Social Welfare Department. These are the things that move me now — when I say ‘move’ I don’t mean tears or anger. I mean a sudden shift, a tumultuous upheaval, an uncontrollable displacement, concepts whose surface has been insignificant heaving over, up-ended, raised as huge boulders smelling of the earth that still clings to them. A shift that comes to me physically, as intestines violently stir and contract when some irritant throws a switch in the digestive tract. Earth, guts — I don’t know what metaphors to use to describe the process by which I’m making my own metaphors for suffering.

I had the passport on the shelf in the wardrobe. In the leather collar-box with the medical corps brass serpents and my father’s watch — I have given away everything of his that might continue to be of use to others, even his medical library, but the only person I’d have liked to have had the watch was Baasie, and I don’t know where to find him. The passport was there the day I went to Flora Donaldson for lunch. I thought of it while Flora stood carving the leg of lamb, her voice pitched to penetrate the several conversations at table. — Well-done, pinkish? — would anyone prefer quince jelly to mint sauce — There was childish satisfaction in imagining how she would react (point of knife in air with a bit of meat dangling, face excruciatingly mobile between amazement, curiosity, and indecision whether to be delighted or shocked) if she were to know. She would probably have decided celebration was the correct reaction: everybody! we have news — William was the one who had been offended by the suggestion, when she was busy managing my life for me just after Lionel died, that I would ever consider leaving the country. He isn’t really one of our kind but he understands what it means to be one, whereas good old Flora is an amateur in her perceptions as well as her acts. A talented and brave one, sometimes; the faithful have to be alert for adventurism among themselves, but it can be made use of when it is found in the temperament of others — it was Flora who had Nelson Mandela successfully hidden in her wine cellar when he went in and out of the country illegally before the Rivonia Trial. What her husband William sees in me when I am sitting (a daughter of the house, Flora likes to think of me: Lionel Burger’s daughter) on his right at table, is a professional, like my father.