Burger's Daughter (10 page)

I did—as you say—what was expected. I was not a fake. Once a month I sat as they had sent me to take their messages and receive his, a female presented to him with the smiling mouth, the gazing yet evasive eyes, the breasts drooping a little as she hunched forward, a flower standing for what lies in her lap. We didn't despise prostitutes in that house—our house—we saw them as victims of necessity while certain social orders lasted.

When Noel de Witt's sentence was served the prison authorities did what is often done with political prisoners, they opened the doors early one morning a few days before the stated date of his release, and put him out with the old airways bag of clothes and the watch that had been taken from him when he entered two years before. He knew he would be banned or perhaps house-arrested within a week, and he had, hidden away in town, an Australian passport on which he could leave the country if he were quick enough. He did not dare come to our house. From one of those Portuguese greengrocer's shops that open when dawn supplies come from the market, he telephoned someone else, someone on the fringe, who could be trusted to do what was expected now as I had before—someone who had kept safe the Australian passport. When he arrived in England Noel sent a letter through another contact to tell my father these things and there was an enclosure for me, sweet and funny, to thank me for the letters that had cheered him, the visits that had kept him going, the goodies I'd been able to wheedle Chief Warder Potgieter into passing, the cleverly-chosen books I'd managed to get by as essential for his studies. A grateful hospital veteran's phrases. Flowers came without a card and I was told he'd left some of the little money he had, for these to be ordered.

Those were my love letters. Those visits were my great wild times. All this I was free to understand in the tin cottage.

I grumbled one day, some commonplace—I'm sick of this job.—

You were driving me from the hospital where I worked. When we spoke to each other there was the clandestine quality of talking to oneself; the taunting and tempting of mutual culpability. You acknowledged me in you rather than looked towards me.—Even animals have the instinct to run a mile from sickness and death, it's natural.—

The platitude I had used so meaninglessly, harmless remark belonging to the same level of communication as ‘I've got a bit of a headache', broke loose in me. There was no sense of proportion for such things in that cottage; I was taken possession of by chance remarks, images, incidents; the unnumbered pages came up. I read them again and again, their script appeared in everything I seemed to be looking at, pupils of yellow egg yolk slipping separate from whites of eyes cracked against the bowl, faint quarterings of tabby ancestry vestigial on the belly of the black cat, the slow alphabetical dissolve from identity to identity, changing one letter at a time through the spelling of names in the telephone directory. Spoken against the cover of your daily noise on the violin and the bucklings of the tin roof that shifted silences, the chorus of running water in the bath that was furred with putty-coloured lime like an old kettle, the calls of the watchman's drunks making their trajectory over the sough of night traffic, my silence hammered sullen, hysterical, repetitive without words: sick, sick of the maimed, the endangered, the fugitive, the stoic; sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain.

Yet I left the cottage where this kind of fervid private tantrum was possible.

I left the children's tree-house we were living in, in an intimacy of self-engrossment without the reserve of adult accountability, accepting each other's encroachments as the law of the litter, treating each other's dirt as our own, as little Baasie and I had long ago performed the child's black mass, tasting on a finger the gall of our own shit and the saline of our own pee. Although you and I huddled for warmth in the same bed, I never minded your making love to the girl who taught Spanish. And you know we had stopped making love together months before I left, aware that it had become incest.

I
t was like an illness no one mentioned, among my father's relatives with whom we stayed when we were little. An illness that proved fatal: they came to pay their respects when they sat, my aunt and uncle, the good and kind Coen Nels, beside me to hear the life sentence pronounced.

Tony was so happy helping to cook bricks in a serious mud-pie game with the farm labourers who called him ‘little master' (although that was Baasie's name) and playing with half-naked black children who were left behind when he and cousin Kobus ran into the farmhouse for milk and cake. I understood quite quickly that Baasie, with whom I lived in that house, couldn't have come here; I understood what Lily meant when she had said he wouldn't like to. I forgot Baasie. It was easy. No one here had a friend, brother, bed-mate, sharer of mother and father like him. Those who owed love and care to each other could be identified by a simple rule of family resemblance, from the elders enfeebled by vast flesh or wasting to the infant lying creased in the newly-married couple's pram. I saw it every Saturday, this human family defined by white skin. In the church to which my aunt drove us on Sunday morning, children clean and pretty, we sat among the white neighbours from farms round about and from the dorp, to whom the predikant said we must do as we would be done by. The waiter my uncle's barman beat with his lion's head belt was not there; he would be in his place down under the trees out of sight of the farmhouses, where black people sang hymns and beat old oildrums, or in the tin church in the dorp location. Harry Schutte didn't come to church (on Saturday nights roars of song and the sound of smashing glasses came from the bar, as farmers' rugby teams ended their afternoon's sport) but he had worked hard for his sleep-in and he never forgot an ice-cream for a kid who might have been one of his own (after all, he and my father were born in the same district). Daniel knew the strength of the tattooed arm he was safe from so long as he didn't take the white man's bottle but stayed content to swallow the dregs left in his glass.

For the man who had married my father's sister the farm ‘Vergenoegd' was God's bounty that was hers by inheritance, mortgage, land bank loan, and the fruitfulness he made of it, the hotel was his by the sign painted over the entrance naming him as licensee, the bottle store was his by the extension of that licence to off-sales. His sons would inherit by equally unquestioned right; the little boy who played with Tony would make flourish the tobacco, the pyrethrum—whatever the world thinks it needs and will pay for—Noel de Witt would never allow himself to grow.

When the girl cousin who was my contemporary was home from boarding-school for the weekend, we ladyshipped it about hotel and farm together as her natural assumption. Daniel was commanded to bring cokes; the hotel cook was pestered to put dough men in the oven; a farm labourer mended her bicycle, a child from the kraal brought ants' eggs for her schoolfriend's grass snake, a kitchen maid had to wash and iron the particular dress she decided to wear. Her mother had no other claim, no other obligation but to please her daughter.

With this cousin I shared the second half of my name; it was the name of our common grandmother, long dead. Marie showed me our grandmother's grave, fenced in with several others of the family, on the farm. MARIE BURGER was cut into a mirror of smooth grey stone veined with glitter. On the slab were round glass domes cloudy with condensation under which plastic roses had faded.

You thought I must be named for Rosa Luxemburg, and the name I have always been known by as well as the disguised first half of my given name does seem to signify my parents' desire if not open intention. They never told me of it. My father often quoted that other Rosa; although he had no choice but to act the Leninist role of the dominant professional revolutionary, he believed that her faith in elemental mass movement was the ideal approach in a country where the mass of people were black and the revolutionary elite disproportionately white. But my double given name contained also the claim of MARIE BURGER and her descendants to that order of life, secure in the sanctions of family, church, law—and all these contained in the ultimate sanction of colour, that was maintained without question on the domain, dorp and farm, where she lay.
Peace. Land. Bread
. They had these for themselves.

Even animals have the instinct to turn from suffering. The sense to run away. Perhaps it was an illness not to be able to live one's life the way they did (if not the way you did, Conrad) with justice defined in terms of respect for property, innocence defended in their children's privileges, love in their procreation, and care only for each other. A sickness not to be able to ignore that condition of a healthy, ordinary life: other people's suffering.

R
osa Burger was among city people who ate in a public square at lunchtime. The stale chill of the airconditioned offices she had left evaporated in the sun and the warm sounds of pigeons. There was a statue. The hissing spigots of a fountain donated by a mining company smoothed traffic blare and voices; she had her sandwiches and fruit, bought boxed under a tight membrane of plastic from a shop on the way, others shared a lovers' picnic unwrapped from a briefcase between them on a park bench. Children and greedy waddling birds were fed the same sort of titbits. Indian girls secretively ate daintily with their fingers from take-away cartons of curry. On the grass coloured girls jeered, gossiped and laughed, waving chicken-bones, and black men sat with their half-loaves of bread in wisps of wrapping, pulling out the white centre like cotton bolls. There were bins with advertising legends (Why be Lonely? Step Out Tonight with One of Our Lovely Hostesses) where leavings were thrust, and these were picked over, as the pigeons did what was left on gravel and grass, by various people in various kinds of need. The child who led the blind beggar felt for potato chips and half-gnawed chicken, other blacks shook empty cigarette packs, and there were white men and women, threadbare-neat pensioners and old creatures with sparse orange hair and red lips inexpertly drawn in the light of failing sight who might be obsolescent prostitutes, scratching and peering for finds which seemed to give them satisfaction. The women hid these away in tattered shopping bags; the men smoothed retrieved newspapers.

On the grass black men slept deeply, face down; they might have been dead. On benches avoided by other people, white tramps with drunkard's blue eyes and the brief midday dapperness of hair slicked back in the municipal washroom, approached each other confidentially, came and went with the dogged, shambling dedication of their single purpose—to find money for a bottle. Sometimes one of these who were fixtures along with the pigeons was apart from the others, drunk, asleep, or in some inertia and immobility that was neither. Rosa, seeing one like this, chose a bench on the other side of the walk. But she need not have thought he might make a nuisance of himself; she ate her lunch, two little boys ran up and down twirling plastic whirligigs before him, a girl wearing the name DARLENE in gilt letters suspended on either side by a gilt chain round a freckled neck kissed a young man for the full time it took a pantechnicon, unable to turn at the traffic lights because of a parked car, to manoeuvre its length back into the street from which it had emerged; one of the children was caught and smacked on the back of the thighs by its mother; a fat man in a blue suit dropped an ice-cream cone which was pecked away by the birds; the clock that could be heard only within a radius of three blocks of the old post office struck the single wavering note of one o'clock and then the half-hour; and still the man did not move, sitting with his leg crossed over the other at the knee, arms folded, head sunk forward like that of someone who has dozed during a speech. A pigeon alighted on his shoulder and took off clumsily again.

But that moment in which the bird had paused, cocking its beak, indifferent busybody, changed the awareness of the freckled girl and her boy; of Rosa Burger; of the mother and the two little children, the man in the blue suit. They looked at each other as if each had a sudden question to ask. They all began to watch the man. The children's mouths opened. They pressed back against their mother's side and she moved away from the demand, shifting supermarket carriers as a claim defended, an alibi of the normality of her presence ; resting there with her kids in the square, waiting for the time to catch a bus or be fetched by a husband. Now other people from benches farther off, from the grass, approached. Two hobos came over hunched towards each other, hands making intimate sign-language, and the one tried to restrain the other while he took the man on the bench by the shoulder the pigeon had landed on, and called a name.
Hey Doug, come on, man, Doug
. The man did not wake up but did not fall over. He stayed, solid as the statue of the landdrost, as if at the axis where one knee crossed the other he was secured to the bench as the landdrost was fixed to his plinth by bronze prongs.

The two friends backed away, whispering and challenging.

The freckled girl's boyfriend turned to Rosa in triumph, with an answer, not a question.—You know what ?—the bloke's dead.—

—Ooooh, I'm getting out of here.—His girl was shaking her hands from the wrists, urgently.

The two little boys moved nearer and were stopped by their mother—Come away!—

No policeman was about but someone fetched a traffic officer and he had in his hand a first-aid box of the kind with a toy axe attached buses carry along for emergencies.

People pressed forward all round Rosa where she stood as if waiting to be told, to have some indication whether to go this way or that. Only the man himself took no notice. The black men who had lain on the grass like dead men got up and came to look at him.