Burger's Daughter (2 page)

I
shall never know. It's all concocted. I saw—see—that profile in a hand-held mirror directed towards another mirror; I know how I survived, not unhappily, if not popular then in unspoken, acknowledged inkling that I was superior to them, I and my family, at that school; I understand the bland heroics of badly-written memoirs by the faithful—good people in spite of the sanctimony.

I suppose I was aware that ordinary people might look down from a bus and see us. Some with wonder, knowing whose relatives and friends we must be—even somebody's daughter, look, a kid in a gym—and knowing why we were there. Flora Donaldson and the others talked loudly in high voices the way another kind of woman will do in an expensive restaurant and, if in very different circumstances, for the same reason: to demonstrate self-confidence and a force of personality naturally dominant of an environment calculated to impress or intimidate. I draw that analogy now, not then; it's impossible to filter free of what I have learnt, felt, thought, the subjective presence of the schoolgirl. She's a stranger about whom some intimate facts are known to me, that's all. We were aware of ourselves and the people belonging to us on the other side of the huge, thick, studded doors in a way that the passers-by would not understand and that we asserted, gave off—Wally Atkinson who had no one inside but had been in many times himself, and came to fly the standard of his white hair among us, Ivy Terblanche and her daughter Gloria, determinedly knitting for Gloria's baby while waiting to hand over pyjamas and soap for husbands who were also father and son-in-law, Mark Liebowitz shaking his weight from one foot to the other in the kind of nervous glee with which he met crises, Bridget—Bridget Sulzer formerly Watkins formerly Brodkin born O'Brien—banging on the prison door with the heel of a multicoloured sandal from which the worn green leather peeled back, her sexy high-arched foot with thick painted toenails bare in spite of the cold. Even the two women I don't think I knew, the fashionably groomed ones who didn't belong (Aletta Gous attracted the friendship of wealthy liberal women whose husbands, at that time, let them run the risk as an indulgence) had set themselves apart from their background in the strange arousal of the persecuted. One of them had had her cook bake a special wheat-germ loaf (Aletta was always a food-faddist) and the lady argued high-handedly when the warder refused it; I remember because she gave it to Ivy—the queer occasion made such assumptions of sudden friendship possible—and Ivy broke off a bit of crust for me to taste when she gave me a lift home.

I was in place, outside the prison; both my parents had been expecting to be picked up for several weeks. Of course, when it happened, and they took my mother, the reality must have been different from the acceptance in advance; it's impossible to conquer all fear and loss by preparation. There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be. I just knew that my mother, inside, would know, when she got the things I was holding, that I had been outside; we were connected. Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about ‘the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them. Flora was a grown-up who made me feel older than she was.

I knew them nearly all, the people I stood among, and didn't need to look at them to see them as I knew them: as I did the way home, the appearance of a landmark at a certain turn. It was that door that I see: the huge double door under the stone archway with a bulb on a goose-neck looking down as a gargoyle does. The tiny hatch where the warder's eyes will appear could be a cat-door if it were lower. There are iron studs with hammer-marks faceting the white sunlight like a turned ring. I see these things over and over again as I stand. But real awareness is all focused in the lower part of my pelvis, in the leaden, dragging, wringing pain there. Can anyone describe the peculiar fierce concentration of the body's forces in the menstruation of early puberty? The bleeding began just after my father had made me go back to bed after my mother had been taken away. No pain; just wetness that I tested with my finger, turned on the light to verify: yes, blood. But outside the prison the internal landscape of my mysterious body turns me inside out, so that in that public place on that public occasion (all the arrests of the dawn swoop have been in the newspapers, a special edition is on sale, with names of those known to be detained, including that of my mother) I am within that monthly crisis of destruction, the purging, tearing, draining of my own structure. I am my womb, and a year ago I wasn't aware—physically—I had one.

As I am alternately submerged below and thrust over the threshold of pain I am aware of the moulded rubber loop by which the hot-water bottle hangs from my finger, and the eiderdown I hold against my belly is my old green taffeta one Granny Burger gave me when I was not old enough to remember her; my father thought my mother's double-bed one was too big and too beautiful to get spoilt in prison. The hot-water bottle is my own idea. My mother never used one; and so—as I prepared the device I imagined her swiftly discovering it—she would realize there must be some special reason for its having been sent. Between the black rubber washer and the base of the screw-top I have folded a slip of thin paper. When I came to write the message I found I did not know how to address her except as I did in the letters I would write when away on a holiday.
Dear Mom, Hope you are all right.
Then this innocently unsuitable tone became the perfect vehicle for the important thing I needed to convey.
Dad and I are fine and looking after everything. Lots of love from both
. She would know at once I was telling her my father had not been taken since she had gone.

 

 

My version and theirs. And if this were being written down, both would seem equally concocted when read over. And if I were really telling, instead of talking to you in my mind the way I find I do... One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to someone. Suddenly, without knowing the reason, at different stages in one's life, one is addressing this person or that all the time, even dreams are performed before an audience. I see that. It's well known that people who commit suicide, the most solitary of all acts, are addressing someone. It's just that with me it never happened before. It hasn't happened even when I thought I was in love—and we couldn't ever have been in love.

If you knew I was talking to you I wouldn't be able to talk.

But you know that about me.

 

 

After the death of her father, someone who had had no importance in their life, someone who stood quite outside it, peripheral, one of the hangers-on drawn by curiosity who had once or twice looked in on it, appeared at her side. Years before, when she was a university student and her father was not yet on trial, not yet sentenced or imprisoned, the young man had come for a Sunday swim at the house. So he said. She must have invited him; many people came on Sundays, it was a tradition. They came when she and her brother were little, they came when her mother was detained, they came when her mother was dying of multiple sclerosis, they came when her father was out on bail during his trial. Nothing the secret police could do could more than interrupt. Life went on; Lionel Burger, in his swimming trunks, cooking steak and boerewors for his comrades and friends, was proof.

This guest was a young man named Conrad. A pale acne-scarred back to the sun, lying in the way of but never putting out a teasing hand to catch the black and white legs of children who raced round the edge of the pool. He rested his chin on his forearms, and sometimes his forehead pressed there. He was not the type looking for commitment. There had been, were some, and they were quickly recognized. Sometimes their potential was made use of. He was not even a paid spy posing as the type looking for commitment; that had become a recognizable type, too. Lionel Burger would not restrict his daughter's normal student sociability for fear she might be made use of by one of those. But this boy was of interest to no one; let him look at them all, if the spectacle intrigued him: revolutionaries at play, a sight like the secret mating of whales. He got his boerewors, hot and scented-tasting, from the hands of Lionel Burger himself, like everyone else. Rosa was a pretty thing as she grew up; many boys would follow her, not knowing she was not for them.

Once or twice during the trial she had noticed this Conrad in the visitors' gallery of the court. She moved inevitably in the phalanx of familiars, the friends some of whom disappeared, arrested and arraigned in other trials, in the course of her father's. Once when she had gone out to telephone from the Greek café nearby, she met the chap on the pavement on her way back to the court-house. He offered her an espresso and she laughed, in her way of knowing only too well the facilities of the environs of this court, always she was aside from her generation in experience of this kind—where did he think you could get an espresso around here ?

—You can, that's all.—He took her down a block, round a corner and into a shopping arcade. She understood he must have followed her out of court. Real espresso was brought to a little iron table by a black waiter dressed up in striped trousers, black waistcoat and cheese-cutter. She pulled a funny face behind the waiter, smiled, friendly and charming, any girl singled out by a man. —What d'you think that's supposed to be? In Pretoria!—He pushed over to her an ashtray lettered THE SINGING BARBER.

—What do you think he feels about your father ?—

—My father ?—

Her beau broke a match between his teeth and waved its V in the direction of the court-house.

Oh, she understood: the blacks, do they know, are they grateful to whites who endanger their own lives for them. So that was the set of tracks along which this one's mind trundled; there were others who came up to her, sweating and pitched to their greatest intensity, Miss Burger you don't know me but I want to tell you, the government calls him a Communist but your father is God's man, the holy spirit of our Lord is in him, that's why he is being persecuted. And there were the occasional letters that had been coming to the house all her life; as soon as she was old enough—her mother knew when that was; how did she know ?—her mother let her see one. It said her father was a devil and a beast who wanted to rob and kill, destroying Christian civilization. She felt a strange embarrassment, and looked into her mother's face to see if she should laugh, but her mother had another look on her face; she was aware of some trust expressed there, something that must last beyond laughter. It was a Saturday morning and when her father had come home from his early round of visits to his patients in hospital he had given Baasie and her their weekly swimming lesson; at that moment with the letter before her, ‘her father' came to her as a hand cupped under her chin that kept her head above water while her legs and arms frogged. Baasie was afraid still. His thin, dingy body with the paler toes rigidly turned up went blacker with the cold and he clung flat against her father's fleshy, breathing chest whose warmth, even in the water, she felt by seeing Baasie clinging there.

In the coffee bar she was still smiling. She seemed to savour the domino of sugar she held, soaking up dark hot coffee before she dropped it in.—Oh leave the poor waiter alone.

—No but—I'm curious.—

She nodded in jerky, polite, off-hand dismissal, as if that were the answer to the idle question she didn't ask: What brings you to the trial ? A girl in her situation, she had nothing much to say to a stranger, and it was difficult for anyone outside what one must suppose—respect, awkwardly—were her intense preoccupations, to begin to talk to her. An important State witness was due to be called for cross-examination before the court rose for the day; she knew she must drink up and go, he knew she would go, but they sat on for a minute in a purely physical awareness of one another. His blond-brown hand lying across the vice of his crossed thighs, with the ridiculous thick silver manacle following the contour of the wrist-bump, the nave of her armpit in a sleeveless dress, shiny with moisture as she pushed away the tiny cup—the form of communication that is going on when two young people appear to have no reason or wish to linger.

Most of their meetings were as inconsequential. He came to the trial but did not always seek her out—supposing she was right that he ever had. Sometimes he was one of the loose group centred round the lawyers and her who ate sandwiches or grey pies in the Greek café during the lunch adjournment; it was assumed she brought him along, she thought someone else had. He did not telephone her at work but she met him once in the public library and they ate together in a pizzeria. She had thought he was a university lecturer or something of that kind but he told her, now that (without curiosity) she asked, that he was doing a post-graduate thesis on Italian literature, and working on Wednesdays and weekends as a bookie's clerk at the race-course. He had begun the thesis while studying in Perugia, but given it up when he spent a year or so in France and Denmark and England. He was vague about what he had done and how he lived. In the South of France, on a yacht—Something between a servant and a pet, it sounds—

He was not offended by her joking distaste.—Great life, for a few months. Until you get sick of the people you work for. There was no place to read in peace.—

It was a job for which you did not need a foreigner's work permit —he knew all the ways of life that fitted into that category. In London he squatted in a Knightsbridge mansion. He'd fixed up a condemned cottage, in Johannesburg, with the money he'd got for bringing in a British car duty-free, after having had the use of it for a year abroad, an arrangement made with a man who had bought it in his name.—Any time you need somewhere to stay... I'm often away for weeks. I've got friends with a farm in Swaziland. What a wonderful place, forest from the house all the way to the river, you just live in a kind of twilight of green—pecan-nut trees, you know.—A casual inspiration.—Why don't you come there this weekend ?—