Burger's Daughter (16 page)

They are waiting.

They leave me alone to go my own way because they can't believe —Lionel's daughter—I am not waiting with them. Our kind repudiates ethnic partitioning of the country. They believe I talked of trying to get into the Transkei because I was under orders to find a cover job in a hospital there; I must have taken advantage of my period of ‘convalescence' and refused. But one day I won't be able to say no.

Although it's all there, in notes for publication researched diligently from libraries and the memories of exiles, the past doesn't count: the general strikes that failed when the Party was legal, the High Command that was betrayed when the Party was underground. The relic present, when they joke twice a week with the police sergeant as they become signatories to their own captivity, doesn't count. They've lived without fulfilment of personal ambition and it's not peace of mind they're looking forward to in their old age. The defeat of the Portuguese colonial armies in Angola and Moçambique; the collapse of white Rhodesia; the end of South Africa's occupation of Namibia brought about by SWAPO'S fighters or international pressure; these are what they're waiting for, as Lionel was waiting, in jail. Signs that it will soon be over, at last. The Future is coming. The only one that's ever existed for them, according to documentation. National liberation, phase one of the two-stage revolution that will begin with a black workers' and peasants' republic and complete itself with the achievement of socialism.

And not just waiting. Whatever can be done between one dutiful report to the police and the next will be done by people who, far from poring over the navel of a single identity (yes, a dig at you, Conrad), see the necessity of many. It won't be by chance Ivy has her lunch-counter in an area of heavy industry where thousands of blacks work. And of course the people who pack her cartons of curry and the salads that are so popular are all old associates or their relatives. She put the typewriter down to cover papers she had been working on but when she picked up the comb that was wetting the corner of one sheet she pulled it out to let it dry; I saw it was part of an analysis of wages. She's probably supplying the radical students' black wages commission with material. Dick will tell William Donaldson he wants a job to supplement his pension; but he's looking for what will show him to be ‘harmlessly occupied', whatever else he may be doing. It's not easy for families of old lags, like the Terblanches, like the one I'm the remnant of-watched all the time.

They are prepared to be patient with me. It's not sympathy, some pallid underwriting of the validity of self-pity, they offer. I have had a course of action to follow which involved the life of a man who happened to be my father, just as they themselves have had. The consequences for Dick have been periods of imprisonment with my father; for Ivy, imprisonment because of my father. The course of action I have duly fulfilled, with consequences for me some of which were self-evident, foreseen and accepted, just as theirs were, is part of a continuing process. It is complete only for Lionel Burger; he has done all he had to do and that, in his case, happened to imply a death in prison as part of the process. It does not occur to them that it could be complete for themselves, for me.

It is not so easy to shut oneself off from them—these people: Dick with his farmer's blue eyes under those distance-shading eyebrows, his safari suit with shorts that show his strong, vein-tattooed legs, and his jacket decked out with pockets in the style of the old colonial-military, frontier way of life, so that his appearance is innocently exactly that of one of his brother Boers who regard his beliefs as those of Antichrist, the devil himself, and of the capitalist-adventurist European conquistadors he himself sees as the devil; Ivy with her supermarket housewife's body in cheerful prints, her wild, Einstein head, and the unexpected concession to vanity in the evidence—a glossy streak of blonde fringing her upper lip—that she peroxides the moustache with which age is trying to deny her femininity. These two people represent an intimacy with my father greater than mine. They know what even one's own daughter is never told. A biographer ought to be referred to them, Lionel's—what ? Friends, associates—comrades, the biographer will settle for as catch-all, but some new term ought to come into being for what I understood, coming back into their presence. It goes beyond friendship, beyond association; beyond family relationship—of course. They will be waiting for me to find what there is for me to do. How they all cared for each other's children, when we were little! In the enveloping acceptance of Ivy's motherly arms—she feels as if I were her own child—there is expectance, even authority. To her warm breast one can come home again and do as you said I would, go to prison.

 

 

I found the ring I wore when what I had to do was be a young girl in love. In the leather collar-box from one of my grandfathers, among cards of moth-eaten darning wool and the elastic my mother used to thread through the waist of my school pants. With it were brass serpent insignia of the Medical Corps—my father's cap badges. My mother kept those? My father joined the white South African army, according to the date I've been given, when the Soviet Union was attacked, and was in charge of a hospital in the Middle East. She wasn't married to him then; did she take the badges off old uniforms later, or maybe Tony asked for them, and when the little boy was dead and she found his treasures she didn't throw them away. They could tell any raiding Special Branch policemen nothing about Lionel Burger that should not be discovered. In fact at his trial Theo Santorini included ‘a distinguished record of service to wounded soldiers of his mother country' in establishing the standing of such a man:
How easy would it have been, I put it to you, Your Lordship, for him to choose professional and civic honours; and what grave sense of wrongs committed by the white establishment must he have had, in order for such a man to turn his back on the laurels of white society and risk—no, refute outright—reputation, success and personal liberty, in the cause of the black people.
The army service seems to have lasted two years—like most people, I foreshorten the entire period of life my parents lived before I was alive, and they were strangers to whom I have no relation. Lionel once told me how when he was about fourteen and had just come to boarding-school in Johannesburg he saw torn-up passbooks in the street after a demonstration and curiosity led him to realize for the first time that the ‘natives' were people who had to carry these things while white people like himself didn't. For me, this childhood awakening of his is no farther away than his reasons for going to war. The war experience gave him the chance to be active (as the biographer's phrase goes) in an ex-servicemen's legion that brought together along with white veterans, black orderlies and ambulance men who had risked their lives but not been allowed to bear arms. The movement broke up, like my mother's attempts to get black workers and white together in trade unions, on the white men's fear of losing the privileges of segregation from their comrades. Yet when the black and white veterans were marching 40,000 strong through Cape Town it must have seemed a sign; soon over, now.

You didn't want to believe that at twelve years old what happened at Sharpeville was as immediate to me as what was happening in my own body. But then I have to believe that when the Russians moved into Prague my father and mother and Dick and Ivy and all the faithful were still promising the blacks liberation through Communism, as they had always done. Bambata, Bulhoek, Bondelswart, Sharpeville; the set of horrors the faithful use in their secretly printed and circulated pamphlets. Stalin trials, Hungarian uprising, Czechoslovakian uprising—the other set that the liberals and right-wing use to show it isn't possible for humane people to be Communist. Both will appear in any biography of my father. In 1956 when the Soviet tanks came into Budapest I was his little girl, dog-paddling to him with my black brother Baasie, the two of us reaching for him as a place where no fear, hurt or pain existed. And later, when he was in jail and I began to think back, even I, with my precocious talents for evading warders' comprehension now in full maturity, could not have found the way to ask him—in spite of all these things: do you still believe in the future ? The same Future ? Just as you always did ? And anyway it's true that when at last the day of my visit came I would be aware of nothing except that he was changing in prison, he was getting the look on those faces in old photographs from the concentration camps, the motionless aspect, shouldered there between the two warders that accompanied him, of someone who lets himself be presented, identified. His gums were receding and his teeth seemed to have moved apart at the necks; I don't know why this distressed me so much. In the cottage I used to see that changed smile that no one will know in the future because the frontispiece photograph I've been asked for shows him, neck thick with muscular excitement, grinning energy, speaking to a crowd not shown but whose presence is in his eyes.

I
don't know where you live; maybe in the same city as I am, wherever I go, without either of us being aware of the presence of the other, each running along in a dark burrow that never intersects. You have hired a colour TV in a building round the corner; or you've sailed away from such things, on the ark I saw being built. You never got beyond fascination with the people around Lionel Burger's swimming-pool; you never jumped in and trusted yourself to him, like Baasie and me, or drowned, like Tony. I was fascinated by your friends the boat-builders (you correct me: a yacht is not a boat). They were simple people, not like you; they didn't understand what they were doing when they planed the sweet pine of the bunks for you to sleep in and ran up the curtains that will be keeping out the glare of the sub-tropical sea. But you know that when you take passage with them it's to flee. Because my boss Barry Eckhard and your successful scrap-dealer father proposed to you their fate, the bourgeois fate, alternate to Lionel's: to eat without hunger, mate without desire.

C
lare Terblanche sought out Rosa Burger with whom she had played as a child. The shadow wobbling over the blistered glass of the door had no identity; but as Rosa opened her door, compliance came to her face: the matter of the vacant flat she had promised to enquire about.

The other girl swung the worn, tasselled cloth bag that weighed on her hip like a pack-horse's pannier, and took a chair heavily. Her gaze went round the pieces of furniture from the Burger house that stood as if stored in the room. She breathed through open lips, and licked them.—A job to find this place.—

—But you've got my phone number at work? I'm sure I gave it to Ivy.—

—Could I have a drink of water ?—

—I'll make tea. Or would you rather have coffee ?—

—Coffee, if it's the same to you. Could I get myself some water in the meantime ?—

Rosa Burger had the dazed sprightliness of someone who has been alone all day, before interruption. She might even have been pleased the other had come.—But of course!—She was gone into a tiny kitchen. There was the crackling of ice being forced out of its mould, the gurgle and splutter of a tap. The visitor sat as if she were not alone in the room.

When Rosa came back her hair lay differently; she had put a hand through it, perhaps, taking a look at herself in the distorting convex of a shiny surface. She smiled; the other was made aware that sometimes Rosa was beautiful. A knowledge parenthetic between them, briefly embarrassing Rosa.

The water was served with the small attentions of ice and a slice of lemon; the two girls talked trivialities—the neighbourhood, the warmth of the winter day—while Clare drank it off.

—I don't want to telephone you at work.—

The statement was turned aside.

—Oh it's all right, they know I haven't a phone here. I should've let you know about the flat, I'm sorry. I looked at it—but it's a back one, on the ground floor, awfully dark, I don't really think... And then when I heard nothing from you—why didn't you pop into the office and see me in all my splendour—

—I don't want to come there.—

Clare handed back the glass. Rosa hesitated a moment, expecting it to be put down on the table.

—Oh.—With the empty glass she accepted that it was not about the vacant flat they were talking. The kettle shrieked like a toy train.

—It's okay. Go on.—

She called from the kitchen, hospitable—Won't be a minute.—

Clare Terblanche was not in the chair but standing about in the room. At the balcony door she rattled the handle but the door merely heaved in its frame.

—The catch is at the top.—

Rosa came and stood beside her for a moment looking out with her at the hillside of roofs and trees dropping away below the building; between blackish evergreens a cumulus of jacarandas, yellowed before their leaves fall, like some blossoming reversal of seasons in the warm winter day. But she was not seeing what the tall girl had in her mind's eye.

—Should we go outside.—

Rosa's lips gave a puff of dismissal.—If you want.—With polite routine consideration she leant over and turned on the portable radio that lay on a pile of newspapers and records. Clare Terblanche's curious expression of finding fault settled at the record player, with its two speakers on the floor. Rosa unplugged the cord; closed the doors to the kitchen and bathroom; sat down—well!—before the coffee. The radio aerial was telescoped into the retracted position and reception was blurred by static interference.

—In that building—where you work now. It's where a lot of advocates have their chambers, isn't it ?—

—The whole of the seventh and eighth floors. They've got a communal law library and a canteen—or rather a dining hall.—