Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The kind of education the children’ve rebelled against is evident enough; they can’t spell and they can’t formulate their elation and anguish. But they know why they’re dying. You were right. They turn away and screw up their eyes, squeal ‘Eie-na!’ when they’re given an injection, but they kept on walking towards the police and the guns. You know how it is they understand what it is they want. You know how to put it. Rights, no concessions. Their country, not ghettos allotted within it, or tribal ‘homelands’ parcelled out. The wealth created with their fathers’ and mothers’ labour and transformed into the white man’s dividends. Power over their own lives instead of a destiny invented, decreed and enforced by white governments. — Well, who among those who didn’t like your vocabulary, your methods, has put it as honestly? Who are they to make you responsible for Stalin and deny you Christ?

Something sublime in you — I couldn’t say it to anyone else. Not in your biography. You would have met in your own person with what happened to blacks at Bambata, at Bulhoek, at Bondelswart, at Sharpeville. But this time they are together as they never have been, ever, not in the defeat of the ‘Kaffir’ wars, not at Bambata’s place, at Bulhoek, at the Bondelswarts’ place, Sharpeville. It’s something peculiarly their own? You used me as prison visitor, courier, whatever I was good for, you went to prison for your life and ended it there, but would you have seen yourself watching Tony and me, hand-in-hand, approaching guns? You will never tell me. You will never know. It’s not given to us (don’t worry, the reference is to the brain’s foresight, not to a niggardly God; I haven’t turned religious, I haven’t turned anything, I am what I always was) to know what makes us afraid or not afraid. You must have been afraid sometimes; or you couldn’t have had your sweet lucidity. But you were a bit like the black children — you had the elation.

I ran away. Baasie was repulsive to me; I let repugnance in: the dodge-em course between diverticulitis, breast cancer, constipation, impotence, bones and obesity. I was scared. You would laugh. You knew about such things all along; when people are dead one imputes omnipotence to them. I was scared. Maybe you will believe me. No one else would. If I were to try out telling, which I won’t. And the consequent effect is not the traditional one that I don’t ‘defend’ myself against anyone thinking ill of me; quite the contrary, I’m getting credit where it’s not due. When I came up behind him in the street, Dick said, I knew it was you, girl. Your daughter was expected. The man in France was the one I could talk to; and when it came to the point, this was the one subject I couldn’t open with him. Not that he lacks the ability to imagine — what? This place, all of us here. He reads a lot about us. Our aleatory destiny, he calls it. He could project. He had plenty of imagination — a writer of a kind, as a matter of fact, as well as professor (but he laughs at the academic pretensions of that title). Once while I was drying myself after a shower he suddenly came out with an idea for a science fiction book that would make money. Suppose it were to happen that through chemicals used to kill pests, increase crops etc. we were to lose the coating of natural oils on the skin that makes us waterproof, as the oil on duck’s feathers does — we begin to absorb water — we become waterlogged and rot… On another level, it could even be seen as an allegory of capitalist exploitation of the people through abuse of natural resources… — I would never have thought of that.

J. B. Marks, your first choice as best man, died in Moscow while you were in prison. I managed to tell you. Now again I have the impression of passing on bits of news as I did through the wire grille. I won’t see Ivy; she was gone, on orders, before the Greer trial. If she had stayed she would have been on trial, once more; she was named in absentia as a co-conspirator in the indictment. The prosecutor said she was the one who recruited Orde; Theo appeared and pleaded that his client’s outraged sense of injustice, coupled with the experience of a political journalist in this country that attempts at constitutional change are constantly defeated, led him to the hands of people who understood this outrage.

And so, at last, you. It’s to you…

All the while the air is thick with summer, threaded with life, birds, dragonflies, butterflies, swaying lantern-shapes of travelling midges. After heavy rains the concrete buildings have a morning bloom in the sun that makes them look organic to me. The freeway passes John Vorster Square at the level of the fifth storey and in the windows of the rooms with the basic units of furniture from which people have jumped, I see as I drive there are hen-and-chicken plants in pots on the sills. Your lucidity missed nothing, in the cell or round the swimming-pool, eh. A sublime lucidity. I have some inkling of it. Don’t think I’m gloomy — down in the dumps. Happiness is not moral or productive, is it. I know it’s possible to be happy while (I suppose that was so) damaging someone by it. From that it follows naturally it’s possible to feel very much alive when terrible things — dread and pain and threatening courage — are also in the air.

I’ve been to see the Nels. They were glad I came. I had always been welcome any time. There’s a Holiday Inn where the commercial travellers mostly go, now. But the off-sales trade is unaffected. The Vroue Federasie has its annual meeting in a private room at the Holiday Inn, Auntie Velma told me (distracted for a moment from her trouble), even though it’s licensed premises. And the chief of the nearby Homeland comes to lunch in the restaurant with the white mining consultants who are looking into the possibility that there’s tin and chrome in his ‘country’.

The Coen Nels are bewildered. I hadn’t realized it could be such an overwhelming state of mind. More than anything else — bewildered. They were so proud of her, in a quasi-government position, speaking a foreign language; the brains of your side of the family, but put to the service of her country, boosting our agricultural produce. So proud of Marie, her sophisticated life — all this time imagining Paris as the Champs-Elysées pictured in the cheap prints sold to backveld hotels.

At the farm I asked to be put in one of the rondavels instead of the main house. They didn’t argue on grounds of offended hospitality; when people are in trouble they somehow become more understanding of unexplained needs or whims, don’t they. Walking at night after these dousing rains, the farm house, the sheds sheer away from me into a ground-mist you can lick off your lips. Wine still isn’t served at the table but Uncle Coen made us drink brandy. I moved unevenly through drenched grass, I bumped into the water-tank, I thought only my legs were affected but I suppose my head was. I put my ear to the side of the stone barn wall where bees nest in the cavity, and heard them on the boil, in there. Layer upon layer of night concealed them. I walked round, not through, the shadows of walls and sheds, and on the bonnets of the parked cars light from somewhere peeled away sheets of dark and shone. Like fluttering eyelashes all about me: warmth, damp and insects. I broke the stars in puddles. It’s so easy to feel close to the soil, isn’t it; no wonder all kinds of dubious popular claims are made on that base. The strong searchlights the neighbouring farmers have put up high above their homesteads, now, show through black trees. Headlights move on the new road; the farmlands are merging with the dorp. But it’s too far away to hear a yell for help. If they came out now from behind the big old syringa trees with the nooses of wire left from kids’ games in the branches, and the hanging length of angle iron that will be struck at six in the morning to signal the start of the day’s work, if they loped out silently and put a Russian or Cuban machine-gun at my back, or maybe just took up (it’s time?) a scythe or even a hoe — that would be it: a solution. Not bad. But it won’t happen to me, don’t worry. I went to bed in the rondavel and slept the way I had when I was a child, thick pink Waverley blankets kicked away, lumpy pillow punched under my neck. Anyone may have come in the door and looked down on me; I wouldn’t have stirred.