Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Rosa Burger was not able to attend the trial again. A week after her return she took up an appointment in the physiotherapy department of a black hospital. She followed the proceedings, like everyone else, in the newspapers. The Defence admitted that Orde Greer had written a text which appeared in a somewhat different form as a leaflet distributed by means of a harmless explosive device (‘no more revolutionary than a firework set off on New Year’s Eve’). The difference in the texts was crucial: Greer’s version (Exhibit A of the documentation seized on the occasions when his flat was raided by the police) included no exhortations to violence, whereas the text of the leaflet actually disseminated had several statements, clearly added later and by someone else, that possibly could be interpreted to be of this nature. The well-known phrase used by Greer — was it not heard in every pulpit, employed to put the righteous fear of God into every Christian community? — ‘day of reckoning’ was by no means a threat of violence or an encouragement to violence. It was, on the contrary, a reminder that everyone would have to account to his own conscience for his convictions and actions, in the end.

There was long argument between Defence and Prosecution on the definition of ‘manual’: was Clausewitz’s classic on strategy a ‘manual’ or an historical work on the waging of warfare, a special kind of military memoir? And if the latter, were not General Giap’s writings a modern counterpart? As for the Luttwak book on the do-it-yourself coup —could anybody take such a work seriously? Was it not patently the sort of radical chic with which people living in politically stable countries titillated themselves, a subject of cocktail-party expertise? — The judge asked for a definition of the term ‘radical chic’, and this provided an item for a journalist whose assignment was sidelights, preferably ironical if not bathetic, on the trial. — And taken in the context of the reading matter of a man who was demonstrably an exceptionally wide reader — a man who earned a modest salary and must have spent a good percentage of it on the 3,000-odd books, on all subjects, that were the main furnishings of his tiny flat — was the presence of the Giap and Luttwak books of any significance? The defendant would say he had been sent both books by publishers, for review during the period when he had been acting literary editor of a journal.

Finally, the Defence provided a sensational poster for the evening paper by keeping quiet, until the appropriate moment, about a discovery made: the ‘expert on explosives’ identified by the State as the man to whom Greer was talking in the incoherent taped telephone conversation had been in Stockholm on the date on which the call was faithfully recorded by the device secretly attached to Greer’s telephone. The number was that listed under the man’s name in the London telephone directory, yes, but the subscriber himself was not living in England at the time. There was no proof that the person who answered the telephone was a member of the Communist Party, in fact there was no proof of any identity that could be attached to that voice; and whoever it belonged to had replaced the receiver promptly, as one normally does when one gets a nuisance call. The defendant would not deny the evidence that he was not sober when the call was made. In fact he would submit that he had no memory of having made the call.

But it was the main count — the alleged recruitment of a young liberal doing his military service stint — that roused fly-bitten, carious-breathed antagonisms sleeping beneath the table, in the white suburbs. Quiet dinners among intelligent people turned shrill and booming as men and women gave vent to their secret judgments of each other’s political and personal morality under the guise of disagreement about the political and moral significance not so much of Orde Greer’s action as that of the young man whom he had approached. This young man had at first agreed to do what Greer asked, and was in a position to do so because he was some sort of assistant-cum-driver to a military press attaché, often accompanying his officer with the top brass on official inspection of secret installations around the country, humble enough in status to be ignored as a piece of furniture, but with ears and eyes wide open, and hands with access to files and photographs kept as classified information. After a brief period during which he produced nothing for Greer except a confidential guide to behaviour when among foreign rural blacks — a leaflet issued to South African troops during the invasion of Angola — he apparently grew afraid or decided for some other reason that he was not willing to continue his commitment to Greer. With fist closed at rest beside a wineglass, if not thumped, someone insisted that the proper course for that young man, if he was so repelled by the idea of serving in ‘that army’, if it went so strongly against his principles, was to become a conscientious objector. Not a spy. The liberal position was to oppose the present regime openly, not betray the right of the people of the country to defend themselves against foreign powers who wanted to take advantage of this situation. — A younger man laughed fiercely: When would people learn that this playing-fields morality showed a complete misunderstanding of what repression is . — You say you want to free the blacks and ourselves of this government, and at the same time you expect people to ‘play the game’, be ‘decent’—Christ! Apartheid is the dirtiest social swindle the world has ever known — and you want to fight it according to the rules of patriotism and honesty and decency evolved for societies where everyone has something worth protecting from betrayal. These virtues, these precious ‘standards’ of yours — they’re just another swindle, here, don’t you see? The blacks haven’t ever been allowed into your schools, your clubs, your army, for God’s sake, so what do the rules mean? Whose rules? You say you’re against white supremacy — then you can’t confine your conscience to moral finesse only whites can afford. That chap had every right to use his compulsory army service to take any information he could get that would contribute to destroying that army and all it stands for. What’s ‘done’, what ‘isn’t’; I just want to smash these bastards here every way we can. Do you want to get rid of them or don’t you? That’s all I ask myself. — William Donaldson interrupted the argument with a choice of Grand Marnier or Williamine while his wife Flora followed with the serving of the coffee.

Orde Greer was found guilty on the main count of the indictment and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The one occasion on which Rosa had seen him in court he was smartened up like a scruffy boy made presentable for a summons to the headmaster’s office. His beard was shaved off. His hair, still long, had been combed wet until tamed. He wore a tan corduroy suit provided by someone who didn’t want to go so far as to put him entirely out of character in navy pin-stripe. She did not think he saw her in the gallery. His gingerish, unattractive face (for a long time the eyes in their deep archways, the thin, twirly intelligent mouth, the high bifurcated forehead with the frizz of hair behind the ears would be the image with which the faces of all men would be matched) — Orde Greer’s face was quiet and privately enquiring, as if he and his accusers were going through some process of scrutiny together, as one. She had this transparency of Greer across her mind when she read that in his opportunity to address the court he had said (inevitably) he had acted according to his conscience. Then he had interrupted himself — saying no, no — that was just a phrase, what he meant was according to ‘necessity’. People were detained every day merely for expressing too freely their conviction that theirs was an unjust, hypocritical and cruel society. ‘I’ve spent many years being proud of hob-nobbing with the people who were brave enough to risk their lives in action. I spent too many years looking on, writing about it; I would rather go to prison now for acting against evil than have waited to be detained without even having done anything.’