Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Now you are free.

Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him. Those nights he spent in the livingroom; Rosa, going to work in the morning, stepped round the two of them rumpled among the old cushions and kaross on the floor like children overcome by sleep in the middle of a game.

Conrad and Rosa were often in that same livingroom together on Sundays. The yoghurt and fruit of a late breakfast was supplemented from time to time as she would push onto a plate cold leftovers from the fridge and he would fetch a can of beer and bread covered with peanut butter. Now and then it was bread he himself had made.

The cat she had brought with her skittered among the loose sheets of his thesis buried under Sunday papers. — Shall I put these somewhere safe or put the cat out?—

They both laughed at the question implied. The room filled up with his books and papers, his Spanish grammars, his violin and musical scores, records, but in this evidence of activity he lay smoking, often sleeping. She read, repaired her clothes, and wandered in the wilderness outside from which she collected branches, pampas grass feathers, fir cones, and once gardenias that heavy rain had brought back into bloom from the barrenness of neglect.

Sometimes he was not asleep when he appeared to be. — What was your song?—

— Song? — Squatting on the floor cleaning up crumbs of bark and broken leaf.

— You were singing.—

— What? Was I? — She had filled a dented Benares brass pot with loquat branches.

— For the joy of living.—

She looked to see if he were making fun of her. — I didn’t know.—

— But you never doubted it for a moment. Your family. — She did not turn to him that profile of privacy with which he was used to meeting. — Suppose not.—

— Disease, drowning, arrests, imprisonments. — He opened his eyes, almond-shaped and glazed, from ostentatious supine vulnerability. — It didn’t make any difference.—

— I haven’t thought about it. No. In the end, no difference. — An embarrassed, almost prim laugh. — We were not the only people alive. — She sat on the floor with her feet under her body, thighs sloping forward to the knees, her hands caught between them.

— I am the only person alive.—

She could have turned him away, glided from the territory with the kind of comment that comes easily: How modestly you dispose of the rest of us.

But he had a rudder-like instinct that resisted deflection — A happy family. Your house was a happy one. There were the Moscow trials and there was Stalin — before you and I were even born — there was the East Berlin uprising and there was Czechoslovakia, there’re the prisons and asylums filled with people there like your father here. Communists are the last optimists.—

— … My brother, my mother: what’s that got to do with politics — things like that happen to anybody.—

He moved crossed arms restlessly, his hands clinically palpating his pectoral muscles. — That’s it. To anyone — they knock the wind out of anyone. They mean everything… In the end no one cares a stuff who’s in jail or what war’s on, so long as it’s far away. But the Lionel Burgers of this world — personal horrors and political ones are the same to you. You live through them all. On the same level. And whatever happens — no matter what happens—

She was waiting, turned away from him, jaw touching her hunched shoulder in listening obstinacy.

He started to speak and stopped, dissatisfied. At last he settled for it with a strange expression of effort round his hair-outlined mouth; as if he stomached something of both the horrors and his own wonder. — Christ. You. Singing under your breath. Picking flowers.—

She drew her hands from between her thighs and looked at the palms, so responsible and unfamiliar a part of herself, as if they had acted without her volition. The words came from her in the same way. — Nothing more than animal survival, perhaps.—

He disappeared from time to time, once brought from Swaziland a wooden bowl and a piece of naive wood-carving. The bowl held the sleeping cat or his bread-dough left to rise, the red and black bird was set up where he could see it when he woke in the mornings. When Lionel Burger’s big car was sold there was only her Volkswagen, and he assumed use of it, waiting to pick her up outside the hospital without a spoken greeting. Sometimes, not having discussed the intention, they spent evenings in cinemas or, strolling out into the wilderness round the tin cottage, kept walking for miles through the suburbs.

On such a night they walked past her father’s house. As she approached it, a passer-by, her tread slowed. Her companion’s pace dropped to hers. The lights were on in the upstairs rooms for him to see but only she knew that the watermarks of light behind the dark windows of the livingroom came from a window in the passage to which the inner door must have been left ajar. Only she, her ear accustomed to separating its pitch from all other sounds, could hear that across the garden, beyond the walls, the upstairs telephone was ringing in its place in her mother’s room.

He was at ease in the streets as children or black men. A fist knocked on the trunk of the pavement tree they stood under, a caress for its solidity. — How old were you and I when Sharpeville happened?—

No one answered the telephone still ringing, still ringing, not her mother, Lily clopping upstairs in shoes whose backs were bent under her spread heels, old Kowalski obliging, Lionel, herself. — Twelve. About.—

— Just twelve. D’you remember?—

— Of course I remember.—

— I know what I’ve read, that’s all.—

Shifting stains of leaf-shadows over their bodies and faces made the movement of air something seen instead of felt, as in place of feeling her habitation about her, she saw her own shell.

— I suppose in that house there was outrage. — In the dark and half-dark each was a creature camouflaged by suburban vegetation. — Your favourite expression.—

— Lionel found out they’d been shot in the back. I asked my mother and she explained…but I didn’t understand what it meant, the difference if you were hit in the back or chest. Someone we knew well, Sipho Mokoena — he was there when it happened and he came straight to us, my father was called from his consulting rooms — Sipho wasn’t hurt, his trouser-leg was ripped by a bullet. I’d imagined (from cowboy films?) a bullet went right through you and there would be two holes…both the same…but when I heard my father asking him so many questions, then I understood that what mattered was you could see which side and from which level a bullet came. Lionel had ways of getting in touch with people who worked at the hospital where the wounded had been taken — the press wasn’t allowed near. I woke up very late at night, it must have been three in the morning when he came back and everyone was with my mother in our diningroom, I remember the dishes still on the table, she’d made food for people. They didn’t go to bed at all. The ANC leaders were there, and the lawyers, Gifford Williams and someone else — it was urgent to go out and get sworn statements from witnesses so that if there was going to be an inquiry what really happened would come out, it wouldn’t just be a State cover-up… PAC people — Tsolo and his men were the ones who’d actually organized that particular protest against passes at the Sharpeville police station, but that didn’t matter, what happened had gone far beyond political rivalry. When I got up again for school Lionel was already shut in with other people, he hadn’t had any sleep. Lily gave me a tray of coffee to take to them, and they’d forgotten to turn off the lights in the daylight. — The sort of thing that sticks in your mind when you’re a child. — Tony and I kept asking Sipho to show us where his trousers were torn. Sipho said how when the police were loading the dead into vans he had to ask them to take the brains as well — the brains of a man with a smashed head spilled and they left them in the road. My mother got agitated and took Tony out of the room. He was yelling and kicking, he didn’t want to go. But I heard how Sipho said they sent a black policeman to pick up the brains with a shovel.—