Burger's Daughter (15 page)

Ivy brought Rosa up-to-date.—Bapendra Govind's home from the Island, you know. Since last month.—

—And how is he ? I gather he hasn't been banned again, so far. I haven't seen anything in the paper, anyway.—

—Yes, his wife wants them to apply for exit permits and go to Canada before it comes.—Ivy gestured, letting the knitting sink in her lap.—Leela says she won't go with her mother and father. But you know how clannish Muslims are.—

—What does Leela do ?—

—Oh she's been working with me for about six months now. She's an efficient little thing, is Leela! She takes down the send-outs, over the phone, she gives a hand in the kitchen. Oh anything. She goes to the market for me and buys most of my supplies.—

—You have quite an organization, Ivy.—

Ivy looked round.—Ay...we all eat. That I can say. Beulah James is in with me, too...Alfred has another seven months to go. (They've transferred him to Klerksdorp which is a nuisance for her, Pretoria Central was handier.) We're moving away from the sandwiches and rolls, concentrating more on soup and curry and so on. Hot things are very popular. And then we have salads, of course. I see quite a few of the people I used to work with... I may not be allowed to put my nose into factory premises but the whites still send out blacks to buy their lunch... Yes, it wouldn't be too bad if we knew what Dick...he has to find something to do...—

—I wouldn't mind taking Aletta's Follies on a country-wide tour.—Dick grinned; the joke of a man confined to the magisterial district around the house they sat in.

Ivy tensed back her shoulders and stretched the grand folds of her neck, a challenging goose.—I don't think I could face the Bantus-tans, thank you very much. Even if I could get in. Mantanzima, Mangope—any of that crowd—the sight of their ‘capitals' with their House of Assembly and their hotel for whites.—A heave of disgust.

—Oh come on, Ivy. If Aletta gets someone in...there are still people there...old friends. There's work to be done.—

—Where are they ? You know where; the black Vorsters have got their detention laws, too.—

—There must be a few still around, contact's been lost, yes—

—You were right not to try it, Rosa. Personally, for me to put my foot in those places... It's a denial of Nelson and Walter—of the Island. Of Bram and Lionel.—

The pause settled round the presence of Lionel's daughter. The black woman walked into it.—You having lunch with us, Rosa. I made nice roast potatoes.—But the guest had already risen, she could not stay, they went through the ritual of remonstrances and excuses, Rosa pretending to accept the childhood authority of Lily Letsile's counterpart, the Terblanches' servant taking upon herself the role of disappointed hostess. Ivy put her arms right round Rosa. —Don't stay away.—The girl called out over the mother's shoulder to the daughter.—Ring me if you want to do anything about a flat.—There was a wave of casual agreement between the two girls.

Dick's tread accompanied Rosa to her car, taking a chance, through the man-high dead khakiweed of the lane, his arms crossed over his chest bundling up the pockets and flaps of his jacket. He stood beside her window and she put the key in the ignition and then did not turn it, looking at him. He was humming softly, stumbling and repeating notes.

—Trying to remember one of the songs...Katya... Something like this: ‘Lift your spade from the field, raise your pick from the ditch, lift your shi-eld, match your step wi-th your bro-ther'—His voice was deep, strangled and shaky, his Adam's apple keeping time under coarse sunburned folds intricately seamed with bristles and blackheads.—Oh lord I haven't thought about it for donkey's years. I never had a memory for that sort of thing. A pampoen-head. When I was in solitary I used to try—even just to remember what I learnt at school, man—you know, poems and that. You read about people who can keep their minds active, saying over whole books to themselves. It's a wonderful gift. But sometimes I—big hands rested on the bevelled edge of the window—I made things, in my mind; I carved a whole diningroom table and chairs, the one for the head of the table with arms, like the one my grandfather had ...barley-sugar uprights with round knobs on top...man, it was craftsmanship... But the stoep at home, I planned it when I was inside, it was all worked out to the last inch of frame and pane of glass. And when I checked the measurements, they weren't half-an-inch out, I could go along to the hardware shop, just like that. No problem. I scratched the plans on the floor of my cell with a pin. There was trouble—they were suspicious it was an escape route I was working on. Can you beat it ? Anyone'd be stupid enough to draw that where every warder saw it? It was just after Goldreich and Wolpe got away; they were jumpy, I suppose they felt their whole security system had been made nonsense if two politicals could get out on their wits and come back in again without even being seen when arrangements went wrong,
and
repeat the whole business without a hitch the next night... Well chances like that won't come again. They're keeping politicals in maximum security these days.—

She was following a current between them on another level. —After next July, Dick.—

He was shyly flattered at what he took to be curiosity about an experience that was approaching him alone.—It's Ivy's worried. I'm not. I'll find something. What d'you think about Flora ? Any point? They say her husband wants her to keep clear. She goes for liberal committees and so forth, now. He's warned her off anything else. I don't know whether he'd want to give me a job.—

—There's a kind of obstinacy, always, in Flora.—Rosa was looking at him, suggesting, questioning.—William doesn't get past it, he only circumvents it, whatever he persuades her to do.—

—She's proud of the connection with us. There've been people like that. I know the kind. And even now. She's been useful. Ivy says it's the English middle-class idea of personal loyalty, nothing more. Well, okay. Whatever...—

—She'll be pleased if you ask.—

—Anything just to show I'm harmlessly occupied for the next year or two.—He looked away, out over the blackened weed with leonine patience, a restless inward gaze of one in whom will or belief is strength. Then he placed his forearms on the window and carried his face forward, chin held, there, near her.—Not long now, Rosa. Angola will go, and Moçambique; they won't last another year. Someone's just been in touch. There's going to be a revolt in the Portuguese army, they're going to refuse to fight. Gloria's husband's in Dar es Salaam and this—other one—came back from Moçambique—it's true, this time. Someone with strong Frelimo family connections, he's close to Dos Santos and Machel. It's coming at last. Some of us will still be around when it happens. Too late for Lionel, but you're here, Rosa.—

The girl could not speak; he saw it. Her face drew together, the wide mouth dented white into the flesh at its corners, she held a breath painfully and pressed the accelerator, turning the ignition so that the old car engine was startled. Dick Terblanche put a big hand, cuffed quickly and away again over the hair at the curve of her skull to her neck, afraid he had made her weep. And then he jumped back and began to direct the reversing of the car like a parking ground attendant, making feints with his arms, nodding and urging. Rosa saw in the rear mirror his old man's legs slightly bent with effort at the back of the knees, the safari jacket lifted over the behind.

S
weat of wet wool heating up in sun through glass and scent of apples baking with cinnamon.

Those nights talking in the cottage: you wanted to know. The man who was gathering material wanted to know; he supplied facts but it was from me he expected to know.

Noel de Witt's the one with the ‘strong Frelimo connections'—that I know. His Portuguese rebel mother. Although Ivy, who went to prison for two years rather than tell in court what she knew about my father, doesn't talk before me of present activities, and Dick, unable not to hint because of whose daughter I am, gave no name. Noel would be the one who reported secret plans for a Portuguese army revolt. The nice new young wife Flora commended would have told no one, even in London, where he was when he went away, because even London is full of informers, and the lines back to South Africa have to be protected. Gloria Terblanche and her husband are in Tanzania, he has a cover job teaching, perhaps sometimes they pass in the street the man who is my brother (although Tony is dead and you I don't see any more)—the son of the woman who went to the Sixth Congress with my father and when he died wrote to me from the South of France.

There are reports from time to time, there are rumours that may be more than rumours. I used to have to try to find some way of telling them to my father when he was alive—but I was well experienced in getting what I needed to past the big ears of warders. Sometimes the sign that it will soon be over is read from an event without, and sometimes it is from within the country. The Terblanches, going from shabby suburb to prison, and back from prison to shabby suburb, growing old and heavy (she) selling cartons of curry, and deaf and scaly-skinned (he) on a pension or charity job from friends—they wait for that day when rumour will gather reality, when its effect will be what they predict, as their neighbours (whom they resemble strangely, outwardly) wait to retire to the coast and go fishing. For the Terblanches even holidays ceased to exist years ago. Their outing is the twice-weekly trip to report at the local police station on the way to or from work, as other people have to attend a clinic for control of some chronic infection. If they get really old and sick I suppose somebody like Flora—someone fascinated by them, shamed by not living as they have lived—will keep them alive on hand-outs of money she is embarrassed to possess. And Dick and Ivy will take it since neither they nor she have petit bourgeois finickiness about such things: they because it's not for themselves but for what lives in them, Flora because she does not believe what she possesses has come to her by right. People like Dick and Ivy and Aletta don't understand provision in the way the clients of the man I worked for do—‘provision' is a word that comes up continually in the market place of Barry Eckhard's telephone: provision against a fall in the price of gold, provision against inflationary trends, provision for expansion, provision against depression, a predicate stored for sons and sons of sons, daughters and daughters of daughters—stocks, bonds, dividends, debentures. In the pulpits and newspapers of my boss's clients the godless materialism of what they call the Communist creed is outlawed; but the Terblanches have laid up no treasures moth or rust will corrupt. For them there is no less than the future in store—
the
future. With what impossible hubris are they living out their lives without the pleasures and precautions of other white people? What have they to show for it—Ivy become a petty shopkeeper, and the blacks still not allowed in the open unions she and my mother worked for, Dick tinkering in his backyard on a Sunday in a white suburb, and the blacks still carrying passes twenty-five years after he first campaigned with them against pass laws and went to jail. After all the Dingaan's Day demonstrations (1929, J. B. Marks declared ‘Africa belongs to us', a white man shouted ‘You lie' and shot Mofutsanyana dead on the platform, 700 blacks arrested; 1930, young Nkosi stabbed to death, Gana Makabeni took his place as C.P. organizer in Durban, 200 black militants banished); all the passive resistance campaigns of the Fifties, the pass-burnings of the Sixties; after all the police assaults, arrests; after Sharpeville; after the trials, detentions, the house arrests, the deaths by torture in prison, the sentences lived through and the sentences being endured while life endures. After the shame of the red banner ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa', flown in 1922, had been erased later in the 1920s by the acceptance of Lenin's thesis on the national and colonial questions, after the purges when Lionel Burger (who had married a dancer abroad without obtaining his Central Committee's consent) voted for the expulsion of his mentor Bunting, after the Party in South Africa turned right and then left again, after it refused to support the war that South Africa was fighting against racialism in Europe while herself practising racialism at home, after the Soviet Union was attacked and this policy of opposition to the war effort was reversed, after the Popular Front when the C.P. was permitted to work with reformist organizations; after the issue of political versus industrial action (those in favour of political action quoting Lenin's denunciation of the ‘infantile disorder of anti-parliamentarianism', those against arguing that in South Africa four-fifths of the working class were black and had no vote anyway); after the banning of the Party, the underground reorganization after 1966, the banishments, the exiles, the life sentences—I didn't learn it at my mother's knee but as you told me, it was the everyday mythology of that house—I breathed it as children must fill their lungs indiscriminately out of mountain air or city smog, wherever they happen to be pitched into the world, and I would like once and for all to match the facts with what I ought to know.

That future, that house—although my father's house was larger than Dick and Ivy's home-improved bungalow,
that house
also made provision for no less than the Future. My father left that house with the name-plate of his honourable profession polished on the gate, and went to spend the rest of his life in prison, secure in that future. He's dead, Ivy and Dick are ageing and poor and alive—the only difference. Dick with those ugly patches on his poor hands said to me like a senile declaration of passion; we are still here to see it. He thought I was overcome at the thought of my father. But I was filled with the need to get away as from something obscene—and afraid to wound him—them—by showing it. It was like the last few weeks when I was working at the hospital; you remember?