Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Is it money you want?

But those five words that came back most often presented themselves differently from the way they had been coldly thrust at him to wound, to make venal whatever his commitment is. They came back not as the response to the criminal hold-up, but as the wail of someone buying off not a threat but herself.

There’s nothing unlikely about meeting a man on holiday whom one comes to love, but such a meeting — with Baasie — is difficult to bring about. There was no avoiding it, then? In one night we succeeded in manoeuvring ourselves into the position their history books back home have had ready for us — him bitter; me guilty. What other meeting-place could there have been for us? There have been so many arrests, trials, interrogations, fleeings: failures. The Future has been a long time coming, and who’s going to recognize the messiah by the form he finally takes? Isaac Vulindlela called his son ‘suffering land’ and probably never translated the name for you, his comrade, either, and you called your daughter after that other Rosa — ah, if you’d heard us at each other… What a bastard he is! What a bitch.

But at least you know ; you still know — there is only one end to the succession of necessary failures. Only one success; the life, unlike his or mine, that makes it all the way to the only rendezvous that matters, the victory where there will be room for all.

A squabble between your children.

My Chabalier — of course I told him about the meeting, the phone-call in the middle of the night. The family history, Baasie and me. My poor darling. You of all people . But he was drunk, eh — poor devil. You really should have put down the phone. To hell with the stupid cunt, then. I don’t care who he is!…Maybe a bit crazy? You know, an exile, black, it’s hard. Je hais, done je suis. What else is there for such a one? An exile, living it up in London, sponging…just drinking themselves to death…self-pity, even in Paris there are some, hanging about out of favour with this regime or that.

All these things; and once my love said (I wish it had not been over the telephone. If I could have seen his face, the gestures — I might have found, at that point, how to explain what was happening to me, I might have found he was moving to come between it and me) — he said — There are some things you can tell only in the middle of the night…and what you mean is that next day they will have disappeared for good — probably next time…if you ever see him again it will be all right. — But there was only the voice of Bernard Chabalier. The chance was gone. Don’t be upset, my darling . Of course you lost your temper. Your father! It’s absurd. Everyone, black and white…no matter what political differences. Whatever happens. A noble life. What does it matter if some crazy chap comes along with his own frustrations in the middle of the night — that’s all it amounts to… We really shouldn’t even get excited. But it’s natural, you were outraged.

He hit upon the word I sometimes use to describe your kind of anger; but of course mine was not like that. A foreigner, he had probably picked up the word from me.

The fact is that after a few days my obsession with what had been said to me that night and what I had said or should have said, should have done (nearly twenty years, and then that borrowed, bar-room embrace!) left me. Deserted me. I solved nothing but was no longer badgered. There’s no explanation for how this comes about. Silence. In place of the obsession were the simple, practical facts of a life being planned. A little apartment had been found with a tiny balcony not big enough to put a chair out on but enough for a pigeon to have found a ledge where to lay an egg. That was sufficient to tip the decision in favour of taking the place — the pigeon already in residence on its egg. It was impossible to be lonely in the company of that pigeon, êh. There was no view because unfortunately the rooms faced one of the narrow side streets (quieter, anyway) but the building was actually on a very old forgotten square, almost like a courtyard, where there was a church with a clock that whirred before it chimed. Two chestnut trees. No grass, but a bench. A good baker nearby. A hole-in-the-corner shop run by a nice Arab couple, maman and son, where yoghurt and groceries and even cheap wine could be bought at all hours — apparently they never close. The metro to dive into at the corner — and it was one of the old ones, green copper curlicues, genuine art nouveau — two stops exactly from the lycee.

I wrote down the address and left the piece of paper where I would keep seeing it. I read it over often. I had no sense of having been in the kind of streets that led there, only a few blocks from a High School. Paris. ‘Paris is a place far away in England.’

It isn’t Baasie — Zwel-in-zima, I must get the stress right — who sent me back here. You won’t believe that. Because I’m living like anyone else, and he was the one who said who was I to think we could be different from any other whites. Like anyone else; but the idea started with Brandt Vermeulen. You and my mother and the faithful never limited yourselves to being like anyone else.

I had met a woman in her nightdress wandering in the street. She was like anyone else: Katya, Gaby, Donna; poor thing, a hamster turning her female treadmill. I remember every detail of that street, could walk it with my eyes shut. My sense of sorority was clear. Nothing can be avoided. Ronald Ferguson, 46, ex-miner, died on the park bench while I was busy minding my own business. No one can defect.

I don’t know the ideology:

It’s about suffering.

How to end suffering.

And it ends in suffering. Yes, it’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes. Like anyone else, I do what I can. I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital. They put one foot before the other.

Rosa Burger’s return to her native country within the period for which her passport was valid coincided with two events rivalling each other in prominence in the newspapers. Orde Greer was on trial for treason. He was accused on three counts: of having written one of the (discarded) versions of the text of a leaflet, alleged to be inciting, distributed in Cape Town by means of a pamphlet-bomb exploded in a street; of harbouring certain manuals pertaining to urban guerrilla warfare, including Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État and the writings of General Giap; and — the chief indictment — having attempted to recruit a young man of a well-known liberal family, doing his compulsory military service, to supply information and photographic material relating to South Africa’s defence installations and equipment. The trial was well under way. The State had almost concluded its evidence when Rosa Burger attended a session. The trial was held in Johannesburg because Greer was not considered a sufficiently prominent personality for there to be any risk of whites crowding the court, and with the growing political separatism between white and black radicals it was thought that the mobs of blacks who rally where political trials of their own kind are in progress would be unlikely to gather. In fact hundreds of blacks congregated outside the courts each day; the trial was transferred to a remote maize-farming town in the Eastern Transvaal before the Defence was heard.

At the stage at which Rosa was present the court was still sitting in Johannesburg. Someone made room for her on the very end of a bench in the last row of the visitors’ gallery; she had in her coat-pocket a scarf handy, but found since her father was on trial the talmudic convention by which women were expected to cover their heads in the presence of a judge had lapsed. Orde Greer was being cross-examined on the State evidence of the recording of a long-distance telephone call monitored by a device he was not aware had been installed, in his flat, by the post office on the instructions of the Security Branch, BOSS. The court heard the whirr of the tape then Orde Greer’s voice, not sober, at one point maudlin, asking what had he done? What had he failed to do? The call was identified with documentary evidence that the person to whom it was addressed, and who had replaced the receiver at once on (presumably) recognizing the voice and hearing the first few sentences, was a former South African Communist, an expert on explosives as a result of his experiences as a Desert Rat during the war and now believed to be directing urban terrorism in South Africa. The Prosecution put it to Greer that first having been recruited some time in 1974, he had been dropped by the Communist Party because of unreliability. He had a drinking problem, didn’t he? His masters’ lack of confidence in him was vindicated beyond all doubt by this preposterous telephone call asking for further instructions in the underground work they had entrusted him with… Acting on a sense of ‘disappointed destiny’ he had been ‘devilishly inspired’—had he not? — to prove himself to his masters, to reinstate himself in their good books. He had even conquered his drinking, for a time. He consulted a doctor about his drinking problem, visiting Dr A. J. Robertse, a Durban psychiatrist, on 25th February 1975, while on an assignment to that town in the course of his work as a journalist. He had told Dr Robertse that he was under stress due to marital problems. But he had no ‘marital’ problems; he was not, had never been married, his problems were with his masters, the Communists in London, who no longer trusted him because of his drinking. He had determined to show himself worthy of them, and it was therefore he himself, acting on his own initiative but strictly within the aims and objects of the Communist Party, who had tried to obtain military information by persuading a young National Serviceman that if he were indeed a liberal vociferously opposed to the policy of apartheid, he ought to be willing to steal documents, make sketches, take photographs that could lead to the destruction of the army by whose strength the policy was maintained — in short, that this young man’s duty was not to defend his country but to become a traitor to it.