Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Afterwards, there are toys, there are cupboards full of clothes, there are bills and circulars from people who don’t know the addressee won’t receive them. Although there are no documents or letters because people like my father and mother cannot preserve anything that establishes names or connections, there are boxes (an old round leather box with a buckle fastening, I am told people — perhaps Lionel’s grandfather — used to put stiff collars in) containing broken things you don’t know why have been kept. The furniture in rooms is arranged in accordance with a logic of movement, of currents of life about it that are no longer there.

Theo had wanted to take me home with him but I said I would go back to the house first and come to the Santorinis’ later. — To eat with us. — Yes, I’ll have dinner with you. — We’ll open a bottle of Dao. — Dao was my father’s favourite wine.

Theo could say that to me. He wasn’t merely my father’s counsel, he wasn’t even only a friend. When a hostile colleague had taunted him — lawyers named as Communists by the government are disbarred — with more than professional interest in the Burger case, he had everted his pink, clean lips — Let’s say my heart is in it.—

I knew I would have to go through a scene with Lily, and her husband Jamison and any of her other cronies who happened to be gathered at the house. It was she who had given baby photographs to the press when Tony drowned. She had gone into mourning, black from head to toe, with only the salmon-coloured palms of her hands and the whites of her eyes for relief, when my mother died. She did for us all the things white people had taught her one ought to be expected to do. I knew she would be shocked that I did not come back borne along by the aunt and uncle and cousins who had, with the blood-loyalty that was their form of courage or kindness, sat to hear the sentence pronounced. I wanted to take Lily up to my bedroom so that we could sit on my bed and I could put my arms round her and let her have her cry, but she was seated formally among the up-ended chaises-longues and pool equipment on the porch outside my father’s study with Jamison and the servants from round about who were her intimates, waiting for me. I had told her many times that she must expect my father to go to prison this time for a long time. I had tried to prepare her. But she was sitting there as at one of her prayer meetings waiting for the good news, the Lord’s mercy. There was a tray with a jug of orange juice and one glass — for me — on the rusty table with the hole where the sun umbrella used to be fitted. They all got up from the screechy wrought-iron chairs whose cushions she had stored away, and when she saw me coming in, just as I had been day after day for all the time of the trial, she understood there was no good news, no Lord’s mercy, and her obstinacy fell away from her. She said with a belligerent sense of tragedy — What they did do to him?—

Then she wept and rolled her head and fiercely waved the others away. Her keening, trilling shrieks seemed about to begin, but some sense in her was watching me and we were making a tacit compact that she would not fall to the floor in hysterics. I stroked her head that felt like a lumpy mattress, her springy African hair divided and plaited in tiny pigtails under her doek (I had often watched her do it, as a child). She rocked me with her. — God is going to stay with him in that place. All the time, all the time. Until he come home. — Here she interceded for us, too, mediating our rejection of belief into the acceptable form, for well-off white people, of merely neglecting to go to church. I don’t know what I said; we had our form, too, for correcting without offending — You think of him, Lily. You’ll think of him often and he won’t be alone. — Something like that.

Arms round each other, just the two of us, we went slowly to the big kitchen where she had cooked so many meals for my father, his family. The alarum clock that she took to her room every night stood on the windowsill above the sink, tacking down the seconds of the end of the first day— life means life . At last, she said eggs were finished, and no bread for breakfast tomorrow. So I went out again that day and drove to the Portuguese greengrocer down the road. The west-facing hill where the shops were held the heat of the afternoon sun that made garish the scratches and smears on the car windscreen. Barefoot white children already in their short cotton pyjamas were buying milk and cigarettes and a bonus of chewing-gum or ice-cream cone to take up to the flats above. I was among young women my own age, some with children on the hip or by the hand, their backs and breast-slopes stained deep pink-brown from an afternoon in their swimming-pools; among black men in overalls, silently drinking bottles of coke or orangeade where they stood; among authoritative middle-aged white women bearing the casques of freshly-tinted hair as they selected strawberries and lettuce and lemons according to the plan for a dinner-party. Henriques knew we bought brown eggs, extra-large. My mother must have started the preference; anyway, Lily always insisted on it. Henriques had a smile for everyone in turn; as if, having escaped a poor Madeiran’s service in the Portuguese colonial army, he had no right ever to be tired or irritable. He would not dare to flirt with educated South African girls like me, but he expressed a shy preference or longing by the gift of a peach or perfect apple whose price he would wave away. — To-day‘sunlucky (his English made the liaison). Brown s’come tomorrow, I don’ know if you wan’ wait.—

Outside the bottle store next door the derelict black women who were always there, not professionals but ready to trade the alleyway use of their unsteady bodies in fair exchange for drink, pleaded with muzzy black building workers. The men went in and out the section of the store where blacks were served, bringing cartons of beer and half-jacks of brandy whose brown paper wrapping was peeled back just sufficiently to unscrew the cap before the bottle passed from mouth to mouth. The quarrelling drunk women shared even a cigarette in this way, parenthetic to their wrangling. One swayed and staggered, her blouse like a grey burst sausage and a blanket hitched round her waist in place of a skirt. In my path, she clutched me — Sorry missus, sorry. — But the eggs weren’t broken.

I felt them click smoothly against each other as ping-pong balls in the paper bag, afterwards.

That was how it was, Conrad. You came round to my father’s house that evening to see what it was like to belong to a family where the father could risk going to prison for life, and have it come to pass. I don’t reproach you for the curiosity, the fascination this had for you. I was not there; I was with the Santorinis and others who had been part of my father’s life. Lily was in the mood for a wake — she needed some sort of ceremony to make the transition to ordinary days when my father would be in prison for life — and you were impressed because she wouldn’t let you go before she’d given you a glass of fresh orange juice. You remarked on it later. You were thinking it another interesting example of the ‘gracious living’ standards of my father’s house, jugs of freshly-squeezed orange always on tap. You didn’t know it was the glass I didn’t drink.

At Theo’s we had Dao, Lionel’s favourite. The bottles were the remains of a case Lionel had given Theo for his birthday (Lionel was an awaiting-trial prisoner already, then; he’d told me to order it). Everyone there was fiercely proud of Lionel. Yes, that was the mood. Marisa Kgosana, whose husband had been two years on Robben Island, turned up about ten o’clock with her usual bodyguard of huge, silent admirers, and, jerking her beautiful breasts, challenged with a throw-away gesture of hands decked as much in their own blackness as their rings and red-painted nails — Rosa, whose life anyway? Theirs or his? — My father is dead and her husband is still on Robben Island. She has been banned for years. She has many lovers and probably as a husband she has forgotten him, she isn’t the Penelope the faithful write about when they find a sympathetic press. He wouldn’t expect her to be, because his way, as my father’s was, is to go on living however you must. And if he doesn’t outlast his jailers, his and Marisa’s children will.