Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us. — Impulses of cruelty came exhilarating along her blood-vessels without warming the cold of feet and hands; while he talked she was jigging, hunched over, rocking her body, wild to shout, pounce him down the moment he hesitated.

— I don’t know who you are. You hear me, Rosa? You didn’t even know my name. I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing.—

— What is it you want? — the insult thrilled her as she delivered herself of it — You want something. If it’s money, I’m telling you there isn’t any. Go and ask one of your white English liberals who’ll pay but won’t fight. Nobody phones in the middle of the night to make a fuss about what they were called as a little child. You’ve had too much to drink, Zwelin-zima. — But she put the stress on the wrong syllable and he laughed.

As if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them— You were keen to see me, eh, Rosa. What do you want?—

— You could have said it right away, you know. Why didn’t you just stare me out when I came up to you? Make it clear I’d picked the wrong person. Make a bloody fool of me.—

— What could I say? I wasn’t the one who looked for you.—

— Just shake your head. That would’ve been enough. When I said the name I used. I would have believed you.—

— Ah, come on.—

— I would have believed you. I haven’t seen you since you were nine years old, you might have been dead for all I know. The way you look in my mind is the way my brother does — never gets any older.—

— I’m sorry about your kid brother.—

— Might have been killed in the bush with the Freedom Fighters. Maybe I thought that.—

— Yeh, you think that. I don’t have to live in your head.—

— Goodbye, then.—

— Yeh, Rosa, all right, you think that.—

Neither spoke and neither put down the receiver for a few moments. Then she let go the fingers that had stiffened to their own clutch and the thing was back in place. The burning lights witnessed her.

She stood in the middle of the room.

Knocking a fist at the doorway as she passed, she ran to the bathroom and fell to her knees at the lavatory bowl, vomiting. The wine, the bits of sausage — she laid her head, gasping between spasms, on the porcelain rim, slime dripping from her mouth with the tears of effort running from her nose.

Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least. Because Rosa Burger had once cried for joy she came out of the bathroom and stalked about the flat, turning on all the lights as she went, sobbing and clenching her jaw, ugly, soiled, stuffing her fist in her mouth. She slept until the middle of the next day: it was another perfect noon. This spell of weather continued for some short time yet. So for Rosa Burger England will always be like that; tiers of shade all down the sunny street, the shy white feet of people who have taken off shoes and socks to feel the grass, the sun wriggling across the paths of pleasure boats on the ancient river; where people sit on benches drinking outside pubs, the girls preening their flashing hair through their fingers.

Children and children’s children. The catchphrase of every reactionary politician and every revolutionary, and every revolutionary come to power as a politician. Everything is done in the name of future generations.

I’m told even people who have no religious beliefs sometimes have the experience of being strongly aware of the dead person. An absence fills again — that sums up how they describe it. It has never happened to me, with you; perhaps one needs to be in the close surroundings where one expects to find that person anyway — and our house was sold long ago. I didn’t ask them for your ashes, contrary to the apocryphal story the faithful put around and I don’t deny, that these were refused me. After all, you were also a doctor, and to sweep together a handful of potash…futile relic of the human body you regarded as such a superb example of functionalism. Apocrypha, on the other hand, has its uses. It’s unlikely they would have given me the ashes if I had asked.

I cannot explain to anyone why that telephone call in the middle of the night made everything that was possible, impossible. Not to anyone. I cannot understand why what he had to say and his manner — even before the phone-call, even in the room where we met — incensed me so. I’ve heard all the black clichés before. I am aware that, like the ones the faithful use, they are an attempt to habituate ordinary communication to overwhelming meanings in human existence. They rap out the mechanical chunter of a telex; the message has to be picked up and read. They become enormous lies incarcerating enormous truths, still extant, somewhere. I’ve experienced before the same hostility: being treated as if I were not there — the girl and the young man once at Fats’ place, for example; and then I didn’t feel mean and vile and find weapons ready to hand. Like liberal reaction to understand and forgive all, this vengeful excitation is foreign to me. The habit of sorting into objectively correct and false assumptions the position taken — the sane habit of our kind saves me from the ridiculousness and vanity of personal affront. ‘A war in South Africa will doubtless bring about enormous human suffering. It may also, in its initial stages, see a line-up in which the main antagonists fall broadly into racial camps, and this would add a further tragic dimension to the conflict. Indeed if a reasonable prospect existed of a powerful enough group among the Whites joining in the foreseeable future with those who stand for majority rule, the case for revolt would be less compelling .’ Your biographer quoted that to me for confirmation of a faithful reflection of the point of view. Then why be so — disintegrated, yes; I dissolved in what I heard from him, the acid. Why so humiliated because I had — automatically, not thinking — bobbed up to him with the convention of affection, of casual meetings exchanged with the cheeks of the Grosbois, Bobby, Georges and Manolis, Didier — a rubbing of noses brought back from a trip to see Eskimos. What did that matter?

What was said has been rearranged a hundred times: all the other things I could have said, substituted for what I did say, or at least what I remember having said. How could I have come out with the things I did? Where were they hiding? I don’t suppose you could tell me. Or perhaps if I had grown up at a different time, and could have had an open political education, these things would have been dealt with. I could have been helped. Katya was surely ineducable, in that sense. Our Katya — she exaggerates for effect; I would gladly be censured, by you or the others, for being able to say what I did. ‘Unless you want to think being black is the right.’ Repelled by him. Hating him so much! Wanting to be loved ! — how I disfigured myself. How filthy and ugly, in the bathroom mirror. Debauched. To make defence of you the occasion for trotting out the holier-than-thou accusation — the final craven defence of the kind of people for whom there is going to be no future. If we’d still been children, I might have been throwing stones at him in a tantrum.

I took my statements (I thought of them that way; I had to answer for them, to myself) one by one, I carried them round with me and saw them by daylight, turned over in my hand while I was sitting at my class, or talking softly on the telephone to Paris. How do I know what it is he is doing in London? Maybe he goes illegally in and out of South Africa as his father did, on missions I should know he can’t own to. ‘This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us.’ To taunt him by reminding him that he is thousands of miles away from the bush where I thought he might have died fighting ; I! To couple his kind of defection with mine, when back home he’s a kaffir carrying a pass and even I could live the life of a white lady. With the help of Brandt, I don’t suppose it’s too late for that.