Burger's Daughter (3 page)

It didn't occur to him:—I don't have a passport.—

He didn't make sympathetic, indignant noises. He pondered as if on a practical matter.—Not even to hop just over there ?—

—No.—

He looked at her in silence, confronted with her, considering her as a third person, a problem set up for both of them.

—Come to my house.—

—Yes I will, I'd like to see it. Your big jacaranda.—

—Bauhinia.—

—Bauhinia, then.—

—I mean now.—

—I have to go to Pretoria after work this afternoon.—But at least it was a serious answer, a practical matter that could be dealt with.

—There's an adjournment till Monday, isn't there ?—

—Yes, but I've got permission for a visit today.—

—It's virtually on your way back.—

The mansion and garden of the early nineteen-hundreds to which the cottage belonged had been expropriated for a freeway that was being delayed by ratepayers' objections; in the meantime the cottage was let without official tenure at an address that no longer existed.

The wavy galvanized iron roof was painted blue and so were the railings of the wooden verandah. From an abandoned tennis court brilliant with glossy weeds a mournful bird presaged rain. The bauhinia tree lifted from shrubs and ornamental palms become a green-speared jungle; the two rooms were sunk in it like a hidden pool. It was safe and cosy as a child's playhouse and sexually arousing as a lovers' hideout. It was nowhere.

She came in out of the sun and the traffic of the highway straight from the prison and he got up from some dim piece of furniture where he made no pretence not to have been lying, probably all afternoon, and kept her standing just within the doorway, rubbing himself against her. The directness of the caress was simply the acting-out, in better and more appropriate circumstances, of what was happening in the coffee-bar. Desire can be very comforting. Lying with the vulnerable brassy smell of a stranger's hair close to her breathing, she saw flies swaying a mobile beneath a paper concertina lantern, the raised flower pattern within the counted squares of a lead ceiling over-patterned with shadows cast from the garden, his watch, where his hand lay on her, showing the time—exactly one hour and twenty minutes since she had been sitting on the bench on the visitors' side of the wire grille that fragmented her father's face as the talk of other prisoners and their visitors broke the sequence of whatever he was trying to tell her.

—Lucky to find a place like this. It's what everybody always looks for.—

—Easy. Convincing the rich old girl or old guy who owns it is the only trouble. They'd have a black if it was allowed to have blacks living in, because you can control a black, he's got to listen to you. But a white who will live in a shack like this will always be young and have no money. They're afraid you'll push drugs or be politically subversive, make trouble. When I said I worked at the race-course that was okay; the kind of honest living they understand, although not socially acceptable to them, at least part of the servicing of their kind of pleasures. You keep your mouth shut about university, they don't trust students at all. Not that I blame them. Anyway, suits me. If I can finish the bloody thesis and make my hundred, hundred-and-fifty a week among those crooks and suckers at the race-course, I'll push off to Mexico.—

—Mexico now! Why Mexico!—

He got up, stretched naked, yawned so that his penis bobbed and the yawn became a cat's grin. He put the flat of his hand on some books on a brass tray with a rickety stand.—No good reason for people who must have good reasons. If I read poetry or novels I like then I want to go and live in the country the writer knows. I mean I just want to know what he knows...—

—Lend me something.—

She tried the names on the books he handed her.—Octavio Paz. Carlos Fuentes.—

He corrected the pronunciation.

—Ah, you've learnt Spanish ?—

He came over and touched a breast as one might adjust the angle of a picture.—There's a girl giving me a few lessons.—

She would not have noticed if he had no longer been about; if he had disappeared at any time during the seven months of her father's trial, she would simply have assumed he had gone off to Mexico or wherever. In fact, once when, chin on hands across the table among friends and hangers-on, at tea-break while an observer from the International Council of Jurists was commenting on some aspect of the morning's proceedings, he looked up at her under his eyebrows and raised a hand in salute, she recognized the greeting of someone who has been away and signals his return. He took a lift back with her to Johannesburg. He was one of those people who usually wait for the other to begin to talk. The Defence evidence in the afternoon had gone badly; there was nothing to say,
nothing
. She was aware, in the presence of another in the car, only of actions that usually are performed automatically, the play of the tendons on the back of her hand as she shifted the gear-stick, the sag of her elbows on the steering-wheel, and her glance between the rear-view mirror and the road ahead.—How was it ?—

—What was ?—With an edge of challenge to her preoccupation.

Her voice went light with embarrassment.—You've been—where ?—Cape Town... ?—

—You're always so polite, aren't you. Just like your father. He never gets rattled. No matter what that slimy prosecutor with his histrionics throws at him. Never loses his cool.—

She smiled at the road ahead.

—You must've been very well brought up. No slanging matches and banging doors in the Burger house. Everybody marvellously up-tight.—

—Lionel's like that. Outraged, yes. I've seen him outraged. But he doesn't lose his temper. He can be angry without losing his temper...never, I don't remember even once when we were little... It's not put on, he just is naturally sympathetic in his manner.—

—Marvellously up-tight.—

She smiled and shrugged.

—The old girl this afternoon. She was a friend ?—

—Sort of.—

—Sort of. Poor old girl. Trembling and snivelling and looking down sideways all the time so she wouldn't meet his eyes. Not just the eyes, she couldn't let herself see even the toe of his shoe. You could tell that. And saying everything they'd got out of her, dirtying herself... All in front of him. I watched Number One accused. He just looked at her, listening like anyone. He wasn't disgusted.—

—She's been detained for nearly a year.—The driver must have felt her passenger studying her.—She's broken.—

—She was a bloody disaster for your father today. What is this—Christ-like compassion ?—

—He knows what's happened to her. That's all.—

Her consciousness of the set of her profile made it impossible for him to say: And you ?

To make him comfortable, she gave an aside half-smile, half-grimace. —Not ‘well brought up', just used to things.—

The day her father was sentenced he would have been there, the narrow face pale as a Chinese mandarin's with the drooping moustache to match, ostentatiously ill-dressed to rile a stolid gaze of heavy police youths creaking in their buckled and buttoned encasement. She didn't remember seeing him although it was true that she had slept with him once or twice. Family feeling overruled other considerations as at a wedding or funeral; an aunt—one of her father's sisters—and uncle, and cousins from her mother's side came to be with her despite the fact that they had never had anything to do with her father's politics. As at a service in church, the family took the first row in court. The aunt and female cousins wore hats; she had with her in her pocket the blue, lilac and red paisley scarf she put on only when the court rose as the judge entered, each day of the two-hundred-and-seventeen of her father's trial. All around, everywhere except the high ceiling where the fan propellers were still, there were faces. The well of the court was lined with bodies, bodies shifted and surged on the benches behind her, pushed up thigh against thigh, the walls were padded with standing policemen.

He—her father was led up from cells below the court into the well, an actor, saviour, prize-fighter, entering the realm of expectation that awaits him. He was, of course, more ordinary and mortal than the image of him as he would be on this day had anticipated; a spike of hair stood away from his carefully-brushed crown, her hand went up to her own to smooth it for him. She saw that he saw his sister first, then the cousins; smiled at her, in remark of the family assembly, then deeply, for herself. Lionel Burger and her father, he gave his address from the dock. She knew what he was going to say because the lawyers had worked with him on the material and she herself had gone to the library to check a certain quotation he wanted. She heard him speaking aloud what she had read in his handwriting in the notes written in his cell. Nobody could stop him. The voice of Lionel Burger, her father, was being heard in public for the first time for seven years and for the last time, bearing testimony once and for all. He spoke for an hour. ‘...when as a medical student tormented not by the suffering I saw around me in hospitals, but by the subjection and humiliation of human beings in daily life I had seen around me all my life—a subjection and humiliation of live people in which, by my silence and political inactivity I myself took part, with as little say or volition on the victims' side as there was in the black cadavers, always in good supply, on which I was learning the intricate wonder of the human body... When I was a student, I found at last the solution to the terrifying contradiction I had been aware of since I was a schoolboy expected to have nothing more troubling in my head than my position in the rugby team. I am talking of the contradiction that my people—the Afrikaner people—and the white people in general in our country, worship the God of Justice and practise discrimination on grounds of the colour of skin; profess the compassion of the Son of Man, and deny the humanity of the black people they live among. This contradiction that split the very foundations of my life, that was making it impossible for me to see myself as a man among men, with all that implies of consciousness and responsibility—in Marxism I found it was analysed in another way: as forces in conflict through economic laws. I saw that white Marxists worked side by side with blacks in an equality that meant taking on the meanest of tasks—tasks that incurred loss of income and social prestige and the risk of arrest and imprisonment—as well as sharing policy-making and leadership. I saw whites prepared to work under blacks. Here was a possible solution to injustice to be sought outside the awful fallibility in any self-professed morality I knew. For as a great African leader who was not a Communist has since said: “The white man's moral standards in this country can only be judged by the extent to which he has condemned the majority of its population to serfdom and inferiority.”

‘...The Marxist solution is based on the elimination of contradiction between the form of social control and the economy: my Boer ancestors who trekked to found their agrarian republics, subjecting the indigenous peoples of tribal societies by the force of the musket against the assegai, were now in their turn resisting the economic forces that made their feudalistic form of social control obsolete. The white man had built a society that tried to contain and justify the contradictions of capitalist means of production and feudalist social forms. The resulting devastation I, a privileged young white, had had before my eyes since my birth. Black men, women and children living in the miseries of insecurity, poverty and degradation on the farms where I grew up, and in the “dark Satanic mills” of the industry that bought their labour cheap and disqualified them by colour from organizing themselves or taking part in the successive governments that decreed their lot as eternal inferiors, if not slaves....A change of social control in compatibility with the change in methods of production—known in Marxist language as “revolution”—in this I saw the answer to the racialism that was destroying our country then and—believe me! believe me!—is destroying it even more surely and systematically now. I could not turn away from that tragedy. I cannot now. I took up then the pursuit of the end to racialism and injustice that I have continued and shall continue as long as I live. I say with Luther: Here I stand.
Ich kann nicht anders.'

An hour and a half. Nobody would dare stop him.

‘...stand before this court accused of acts calculated to overthrow the State and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in this country. But what we as Communists black and white working in harmony with others who do not share our political philosophy have set our sights on is the national liberation of the African people, and thus the abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all the peoples of this country... That alone has been our aim....beyond...there are matters the future will settle.

‘...For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority. When the Communist Party was declared a banned organization, and later formed itself as an underground organization to which I belonged, it continued for more than a decade to take part in the struggle for black advancement by peaceful and non-violent means....At the end of that long, long haul, when the great mass movement of the African National Congress, and other movements, were outlawed; the ears of the government stopped finally against all pleas and demands—what advancement had been granted ? What legitimate rights had been recognized, according to the “standards of Western civilization” our white governments have declared themselves dedicated to preserve and perpetuate ? Where had so much effort and patience beyond normal endurance found any sign of reasonable recognition of reasonable aspirations? ...and to this day, the black men who stand trial in this court as I do must ask themselves: why is it no black man has ever had the right of answering, before a black prosecutor, a black judge, to laws in whose drafting and promulgation his own people, the blacks, have had a say ?'