Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The little Rôse left behind the summer dresses Gaby Grosbois had made her because English autumns were known, in the South of France, to be like winter elsewhere, and she would be returning to stay with Madame Bagnelli next summer. Oh and long before; —You will come for Christmas, or Pâques — at those times Bernard — it can be a bit difficult for you in Paris. Any time, this is always your home. The mimosa is already out, Christmas week, here — The warm cheek-kisses, the hug smelling of delicious soup vegetables and wood-varnish. And the nightingales? — Of course! In May, you come in May and they’ll be here.—

The London street was not tunnelled through dirty rain and fog they had told about. The trees were a heavy quiet green. Rugs of sunlight were laid by the long windows across Flora Donaldson’s Spanish matting. A ground-floor flat with a shared strip of garden sloping down towards it from the plane trees. Black birds (magpies? Christmas-card birds of the Northern Hemisphere) called sweet exclamations from a soft domestic wilderness of uncut grass and daisies.

More like a house! She was excited, on the telephone. A kind of wooden clock-face with a movable cow-tail to indicate how many pints the milkman should leave outside the door. A wall of books and a freezer full of food; one could withstand a siege. But the French did not know what England was like — England was the sun, and birds and lovers hidden in the grass. She was indoors hardly at all. She walked in the parks and took the boat to Greenwich. She knew no one and talked to everyone. Bernard Chabalier had to postpone his arrival for another two weeks because one of his fellow professors developed oreillons and the lycee was short-staffed. (What on earth…? He did not know the name of the illness in English but described the symptoms — mumps, that’s what it was, mumps.) He not only telephoned every day except Sundays at home but also wrote long letters; the delay merely gave her longer to enjoy the anticipation of their being together, alone, among all these gentle pleasures. She was taking an audio-visual French course at a student centre — it cost little and was excellent. She had been to the French Consulate and was awaiting information about the validity of her BSc. physiotherapy degree in France. He had spoken confidentially to the Anti-Apartheid Committee chairman in Paris about arranging permanent residence and a work permit for her, probably using some such terms as ‘an unnamed member of a white family of prominent victims of apartheid’. Even between Paris and London, on the telephone or in letters, he was not more explicit than simply to let her know he had ‘talked to friends’, as if — another lover might pick up tics from his mistress in a desire to identify with the way of life that formed her before he knew her — he had taken on the customs of a country he never knew.

Whereas apart from the precaution of registering at the student centre under a surname not her own — but that was for private rather than political reasons — Rosa Burger was relaxedly communicative and did not find herself in any conversations whose subject required discretion: exchanges with young mothers about the ingenuity of children making houses of sticks and leaves; discussions with barge-men about the fish who had come back to the Thames: arguments with fellow students about the meaning of this scene or that in a Japanese film everyone was seeing. Her quick responses did not extend to allowing herself to be picked up in bars — she had the invincible smiling trick of being able to turn aside such attempts that is possible only for a woman already in love. But she did go to a party with a young Indian couple who were learning French along with her. The girl came from India but the man spoke English with the accent Rosa recognized as he did hers. At the party there were other South African Indians; she had told the young couple her real name but asked them to respect her privacy for the time being — the other guests did not know her as anything more than a student from home. She met them again at the young couple’s flat. These casual encounters had the curious and unprevised effect of making her think, or daydream, about looking up the people it had been easy for her to undertake to avoid, because she could not have imagined herself wanting to do otherwise. Now she saw herself talking to them, accompanied by Bernard Chabalier. The next time one of the faithful in exile telephoned the flat on the chance that Flora might be there, Rosa no longer answered as an anonymous tenant; accepted the enthusiastic assumption that she would come round; sat on a Saturday afternoon in Swiss Cottage, a political refugee talking over old times. It was assumed that like them, she would be carrying on the struggle in one way or another; someone said she had mentioned France as her base. She went to another gathering; this time it turned out to be in honour of a Frelimo delegation in London to seek aid from the British government. Some of Samora Machel’s men had been to school or university in South Africa. In the common Southern African revolutionary cause between the blacks of Moçambique, Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa, the Frelimo government was part of black South Africans’ own self-realization, proof of themselves. Black Moçambiquan migratory labourers still worked alongside South African blacks in the gold mines and as servants in hotels and houses all over South Africa. The exiles from both countries had sat in refugee camps together, trained as guerrillas together in distant parts of the world, taken sides in each other’s internal power-struggles, splits and realignments; they spoke one another’s languages, and the white man’s English that had culturally industrialized the whole tip of their continent even where the language of the colonial power was Portuguese. It was not easy to say which among the black men in the loudly crowded room was from Moçambique and which from South Africa. Among those in the uniform of leadership, at least: the well-cut suits or Mao jackets were favoured indiscriminately by the same kind of authoritative, path-clearing face, whether ANC or Frelimo, moving from group to group. A speech was made about Frelimo and the beginning of the end of colonialist-imperialism in Southern Africa. A speech was made about the African National Congress and the fight against racism and world fascism, linking Vorster with Pinochet. ‘A few words’ were spontaneously said — and developed into an elegy with the eloquence of one (of the faithful) who had drunk just enough to gauge his moment — about the great men who had not lived to see oppression in Southern Africa breached — Xuma, Luthuli, Mondlane, Fischer, and of course Lionel Burger, who was particularly in the thoughts of many people tonight because ‘someone closest to him’ and his wife Cathy Jansen, another fine comrade — was present among them. Lionel Burger’s role in the struggle; the callousness and cowardliness of the Vorster government, keeping an ageing, dying man in jail, in contrast with the courage of that man undefeated to his last breath who refused to allow any appeals for compassionate concessions on his own behalf, who asked nothing of Vorster less than justice for the people. The white racist government had stolen his body but his spirit was everywhere — in Moçambique; in this room, tonight. An elderly white Englishwoman came up and kissed the girl. She was taken off to be introduced to the Frelimo contingent. A middle-aged ANC man reminisced about campaigns of the 1960s, working with Burger. She smiled and thanked, like a bride at a reception or an actress backstage. Bernard Chabalier was privately present to her, keeping her surely in another order of reality.

A Guardian journalist asked whether there was any chance of an interview? An independent television producer wanted to arrange to talk to her about including Lionel Burger as a subject in a television series with the provisional title, ‘Standing on The Shoulders of History’. Was there access to photographs, letters, as well as (so fortunately) the testimony of many exiles right here in England who could talk about him? She mentioned a source in Sweden. The man solicitously drew her over to the table where hot sausages were being fished from a vast pot. There were some young black men eating clannishly, their knot turning backs upon the room. He broke in among them, chatting about his project, introducing the one or two he knew, murmuring the polite English burble that disguised a lack of names for the rest. They made the laconic response of people intruded upon. She was looking at one who, while he stood with tall shoulders hunched towards his plate, chewing, stared at her as if she threatened him in some way. He had given her a thin, hot dry hand for a second, then it was stabbing at tough sausage-skin with a fork. She took her plate of food; the group that now included the television man and herself was again invaded by others, she became part of a new drift-away and nucleus. But she took no part in the conversation contained within this one. She ate slowly, and drank in regular swallows from her glass of wine. Presently she put aside plate and glass as if at a summons; the person talking beside her thought she had been waved to by someone outside all angles of vision but her own. She went back to the clique of young black men. Gritting words along with mouthfuls, he was talking, low, in Xhosa, to his neighbour, but the touch she had had from him earlier interpreted itself and she interrupted — Baasie. — The answer to a question.