Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

A piece of skin or gristle that wouldn’t go down. He swallowed noticeably. The tendons connecting mouth to jaw pulled on the left side as he tried with cheek muscles to dislodge something caught between two teeth. The movement became distorted; into a smile, resuscitated, dug up, an old garment that still fits.

— Yeh, Rosa.—

She came on awkwardly (he put away his plate).

She resorted to that foreigners’ greeting, brought from every café, bar and street-corner encounter, strained up to brush him on this cheek and that. He wiped his mouth as if her mouth had been there. — Yeh, Rosa. I saw you when you came in.—

The conversation seemed to follow some formula, like a standard letter copied from a manual that deals with birthday greetings, births and deaths.

— Are you living here, then — have you been away for a long time?—

— A couple of years, on and off.—

— And before that?—

He frowned to dismiss the importance of any chronology; or to establish a constant in its vagueness. — Germany, Sweden. I was around.—

— Studying something? What’s Sweden like? I’ve had an invitation to go there, but I’ve never done anything about it. They seem to be very helpful people.—

He gave a sad, sour laugh. — They’re okay.—

— Were you working, or—

— Supposed to be studying economics. But the language. Man, you’ve got to spend two years learning that language before you can take a university course. You can’t understand what’s going on at lectures.—

— I should think not! It must be terribly difficult.—

— Oh you just give in, give up.—

— And Germany?—

— It’s all right. I mean, from Afrikaans — it’s not so hard to pick up a bit of German.—

— Are you still busy with a course, here, or have you graduated? — He seemed uncertain whether to answer or not; not to have an answer. — Well, here, once you live in this place (a laugh, for the first time, his whole face trembled) — I haven’t really got back to it properly. I have to pass some exams and so on, first.—

— Yes…I wonder if I’d be allowed to work, here. If my qualifications would be recognized.—

— But you’ve been to a university, isn’t it? — Like many blacks from their home country — his and hers — for whom English and Afrikaans are lingue franche , not mother tongues, he used the Afrikaans phrase translated literally, instead of the English equivalent.

— Yes, but not all degrees are international. In fact very few. I took some sort of medical one. Not what I really wanted to do… but… — The reasons were implicit, for him.

— Oh I’d thought you were a doctor, like your father? — The television man was back, and a young couple attendant, waiting to be introduced to Rosa, listening with polite movements of the eyes from one face to another in order to miss nothing. — Incredible the way he just went on with his job, inside the jail, is that true? The warders used to come to him with their aches and pains, they preferred him to the prison doctors? They weren’t afraid he’d poison them or something? — He laughed with Rosa; turned to the couple. — Fantastic man, fantastic. I’m inspired about doing him in the series. This is his daughter, Rosa Burger — Polly Kelly, Vernon Stern. They run the universities’ AAA, that’s nothing to do with the RAC — Action Anti-Apartheid—

There was no need to introduce anyone else; the couple signalled greetings all round, they had met the company before. Rosa found an urgent way through the talk. — When will we see each other. — Before there was an answer — Come to me. Or I’ll come to you. We can meet somewhere — you say. I don’t know London. Are you very busy?—

— I’m not busy.—

She borrowed a pen from somebody who fished it out of a breast-pocket without breaking the train of a conversation about migratory labour with Kelly and Stern. She wrote the address of the flat and the telephone number, and put the scrap of paper into his hand. He was glancing at it when someone else spoke to her and her attention was counter-claimed. He was here and there in the room all evening, not far from her, and once or twice she smiled, thought he might have felt her eyes on him, but he and she were not brought together in the crowd. He had always been slight; the type that will grow up tall and thin. A little boy with narrow, almost oriental eyes and the tiny ears of his race — her brother’s ears were twice the size when they did the anatomical comparisons children make in secret out of sexual curiosity and scientific wonder. There was an unevenness in his gaze across the room, now; standing close up, she had noticed that the right eye bulged a little, flickered in and out of focus. A scar cut across his frown; an old scar with pinhead lumps where stitches had been — but he hadn’t had it, that far back. The university couple followed her from group to group; she found herself the centre of women who wanted to know how women’s lib could have an explicit function in the South African situation (she should have referred them to Flora), and passed, by way of various people who claimed her, back to her Indian friends, where her father’s association with their leaders, Dadoo, Naicker, Kathrada, was being explained to the Guardian journalist. Very late, she was talking alone to one of the Frelimo men whose passion for his country was a revelation, seen from the remove of the Europeans who had accepted her as one of themselves, who understood nationalism only in terms of chauvinism or disgusted apathy. A sensual longing pleasantly overcame her, the wave of relaxation after a yawn; for Bernard; to show off this revelation of a man to Bernard Chabalier. — When your delegation goes to France, I’d like you to meet someone there.—

He was enthusiastic. — Anyone who’s interested in Moçambique, I am interested… You understand? Anyone who will help us. We need support from the French Leftists. And we get it, yes. But what we need more is money from the French government. — The pretty white girl said she couldn’t promise that…but the three of them could eat together, drink some wine. Their dates of arrival in Paris, so far as they could predict from present intentions, accommodatingly overlapped. She promised she would confirm this after her usual telephone call from Paris next day.

The telephone ringing buried in the flesh.

Bernard.

Staggered — vertigo of sleep — hitting joyfully against objects in the dark, to the livingroom.

The voice from home said: Rosa.

— Yes—

— Yeh, Rosa.—

— It’s you, Baasie?—

— No. — A long, swaying pause.

— But it is.—

— I’m not ‘Baasie’, I’m Zwelinzima Vulindlela.—

— I’m sorry — it just came out this evening…it was ridiculous.—

— You know what my name means, Rosa?—

— Vulindlela? Your father’s name…oh, I don’t know whether my surname means anything either—‘citizen’, solid citizen — Starting to humour the other one; at such an hour — too much to drink, perhaps.

— Zwel-in-zima. That’s my name. ‘Suffering land’. The name my father gave me. You know my father. Yes.—

— Yes—

— Is it? Is it? You knew him before they killed him.—

— Yes. Since we were kids. You know I did.—

— How did they kill him? — You see, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t talk about that.—

— I don’t…because why should I say what they said.—

— Tell it, say it—

— What they always say — they found him hanged in his cell.—

— How, Rosa? Don’t you know they take away belts, everything—

— I know.—

— Hanged himself with his own prison pants.—