Burger's Daughter (45 page)

—Tell it, say it—

—What they always say—they found him hanged in his cell.—

—How, Rosa ? Don't you know they take away belts, everything—

—I know.—

—Hanged himself with his own prison pants.—

‘Baasie'—she doesn't say it but it's there in the references of her voice, their infant intimacy—I asked if you'd come and see me—or I'd come to you, tomorrow, but you—

—No, I'm talking to you now.—

—D'y'know what time it is ? I don't even know—I just got to the phone in the dark—

—Put on the light, Rosa. I'm talking to you.—

She uses no name because she has no name for him.—I was fast asleep. We can talk tomorrow. We'd better talk tomorrow, mmh ?—

—Put on the light.—

Try laughing.—We'd better both go back to bed.—

—I haven't been in bed.—There were gusts of noise, abruptly cut off, background to his voice; he was still somewhere among people, they kept opening and shutting a door, there.

—The party going strong ?—

—I'm not talking about parties, Rosa—

—Come tomorrow—today, I suppose it is, it's still so dark—

—You didn't put the light on, then. I told you to.—

They began to wrangle.—Look, I'm really not much use when I'm woken up like this. And there's so much I want... How old were we ? I remember your father—or someone—brought you back only once, how old were we then ?—

—I told you to put it on.—

She was begging, laughing.—Oh but I'm so tired, man! Please, until tomorrow—

—Listen. I didn't like the things you said at that place tonight.—

—
I
said ?—

—I didn't like the way you went around and how you spoke.—

The receiver took on shape and feel in her hand; blood flowing to her brain. She heard his breathing and her own, her breath breathing garlic over herself from the half-digested sausage.

—I don't know what to say. I don't understand why you should say this to me.—

—Look, I didn't like it at all.—

—I said ? About what ?—

—Lionel Burger, Lionel Burger, Burger—

—I didn't make any speeches.—

—Everyone in the world must be told what a great hero he was and how much he suffered for the blacks. Everyone must cry over him and show his life on television and write in the papers. Listen, there are dozens of our fathers sick and dying like dogs, kicked out of the locations when they can't work any more. Getting old and dying in prison. Killed in prison. It's nothing. I know plenty blacks like Burger. It's nothing, it's us, we must be used to it, it's not going to show on English television.—

—He would have been the first to say—what you're saying. He didn't think there was anything special about a white being a political prisoner.—

—Kissing and coming round you, her father died in prison, how terrible. I know a lot of fathers—black—

—He didn't think what happened to him more important.—

—Kissing and coming round you—

—You knew him! You know that! It's crazy for me to tell
you.
—

—Oh yes I knew him. You'll tell them to ask me for the television show. Tell them how your parents took the little black kid into their home, not the backyard like other whites, right into the house. Eating at the table and sleeping in the bedroom, the same bed, their little black boss. And then the little bastard was pushed off back to his mud huts and tin shanties. His father was too busy to look after him. Always on the run from the police. Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country. One of Lionel Burger's best tame blacks sent scuttling like a bloody cockroach everywhere, you can always just put your foot on them.—

Pulling the phone with her—the cord was short, for a few moments she lost the voice—she felt up the smooth cold wall for the switch: under the light of lamps sprung on the voice was no longer inside her but relayed small, as from a faint harsh public address system in the presence of the whole room.

She hunched the thing to her head, clasping with the other hand the wrist of the hand that held it.—Where did they take you when you left us ? Why won't you tell me ? It was Transkei ? Oh God. King William's Town? And I suppose you know—perhaps you didn't—Tony drowned. At home.—

—But he taught us to swim.—

—Diving. Head hit the bottom of the pool.—

—No, I didn't hear. Your little boss-kid that was one of the family couldn't make much use of the lessons, there was no private swimming-pool the places I stayed.—

—Once we'd left that kindergarten there wasn't any school you could have gone to in our area. What could your father or mine do about that. My mother didn't want your father to take you at all.—

—What was so special about me ? One black kid ? Whatever you whites touch, it's a take-over. He was my father. Even when we get free they'll want us to remember to thank Lionel Burger.—

She had begun to shiver. The toes of her bare feet clung, one foot covering the other, like those of a nervous zoo chimpanzee. —I just give you the facts. He's dead, but I can tell you for him he didn't want anything but that freedom. I don't have to defend him but I haven't any more right to judge him than you have.—

His voice danced round, rose and clashed with hers—Good, good, now you come out—

—Unless you want to think being black is your right ?—Your father died in jail too, I haven't forgotten. Leave them alone.—

—Vulindlela! Nobody talks about him. Even I don't remember much about him.—

The shivering rose like a dog's hair along its back.—I want to tell you something. When I see you and we talk. Not now.—

—Why should I see you, Rosa ? Because we even used to have a bath together ?—the Burger family didn't mind black skin so we're different for ever from anyone ? You're different so I must be different too. You aren't white and I'm not black.—

She was shouting.—How could you follow me around that room like a man from BOSS, listening to stupid small-talk ? Why are we talking in the middle of the night? Why do you telephone? What for ?—

—I'm not your Baasie, just don't go on thinking about that little kid who lived with you, don't think of that black ‘brother', that's all.—

Now she would not let him hang up; she wanted to keep the two of them nailed each to the other's voice and the hour of night when nothing fortuitous could release them—
good
,
good
, he had disposed of her whining to go back to bed and bury them both.

—There's just one thing I'm going to tell you. We won't meet, you're right. Vulindlela. About him and me. So long as you know I've told you. I was the one who was sent to take a fake pass to him so he could get back in from Botswana that last time. I delivered it somewhere. Then they caught him, that was when they caught him.—

—What is that ? So what is that for me ? Blacks must suffer now. We can't be caught although we are caught, we can't be killed although we die in jail, we are used to it, it's nothing to do with you. Whites are locking up blacks every day. You want to make the big confession ?—why do you think you should be different from all the other whites who've been shitting on us ever since they came ? He was able to go back home and get caught because you took the pass there. You want me to know in case I blame you for nothing. You think because you're telling me it makes it all right—for you. It wasn't your fault—you want me to tell you, then it's all right. For you. Because I'm the only one who can say so. But he's dead, and what about all the others—who cares whose ‘fault'—they die because it's the whites killing them, black blood is the stuff to get rid of white shit.—

—This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us.—Impulses of cruelty came exhilarating along her blood-vessels without warming the cold of feet and hands; while he talked she was jigging, hunched over, rocking her body, wild to shout, pounce him down the moment he hesitated.

—I don't know who you are. You hear me, Rosa ? You didn't even know my name. I don't have to tell you what I'm doing.—

—What is it you want ?—the insult thrilled her as she delivered herself of it—You want something. If it's money, I'm telling you there isn't any. Go and ask one of your white English liberals who'll pay but won't fight. Nobody phones in the middle of the night to make a fuss about what they were called as a little child. You've had too much to drink, Zwelin-zima.—But she put the stress on the wrong syllable and he laughed.

As if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them— You were keen to see me, eh, Rosa. What do you want ?—

—You could have said it right away, you know. Why didn't you just stare me out when I came up to you? Make it clear I'd picked the wrong person. Make a bloody fool of me.—

—What could I say ? I wasn't the one who looked for you.—

—Just shake your head. That would've been enough. When I said the name I used. I would have believed you.—

—Ah, come on.—

—I would have believed you. I haven't seen you since you were nine years old, you might have been dead for all I know. The way you look in my mind is the way my brother does—never gets any older.—

—I'm sorry about your kid brother.—

—Might have been killed in the bush with the Freedom Fighters. Maybe I thought that.—

—Yeh, you think that. I don't have to live in your head.—

—Goodbye, then.—

—Yeh, Rosa, all right, you think that.—

Neither spoke and neither put down the receiver for a few moments. Then she let go the fingers that had stiffened to their own clutch and the thing was back in place. The burning lights witnessed her.

She stood in the middle of the room.

Knocking a fist at the doorway as she passed, she ran to the bathroom and fell to her knees at the lavatory bowl, vomiting. The wine, the bits of sausage—she laid her head, gasping between spasms, on the porcelain rim, slime dripping from her mouth with the tears of effort running from her nose.

L
ove doesn't cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least. Because Rosa Burger had once cried for joy she came out of the bathroom and stalked about the flat, turning on all the lights as she went, sobbing and clenching her jaw, ugly, soiled, stuffing her fist in her mouth. She slept until the middle of the next day: it was another perfect noon. This spell of weather continued for some short time yet. So for Rosa Burger England will always be like that; tiers of shade all down the sunny street, the shy white feet of people who have taken off shoes and socks to feel the grass, the sun wriggling across the paths of pleasure boats on the ancient river; where people sit on benches drinking outside pubs, the girls preening their flashing hair through their fingers.

C
hildren and children's children. The catchphrase of every reactionary politician and every revolutionary, and every revolutionary come to power as a politician. Everything is done in the name of future generations.

I'm told even people who have no religious beliefs sometimes have the experience of being strongly aware of the dead person. An absence fills again—that sums up how they describe it. It has never happened to me, with you; perhaps one needs to be in the close surroundings where one expects to find that person anyway—and our house was sold long ago. I didn't ask them for your ashes, contrary to the apocryphal story the faithful put around and I don't deny, that these were refused me. After all, you were also a doctor, and to sweep together a handful of potash...futile relic of the human body you regarded as such a superb example of functionalism. Apocrypha, on the other hand, has its uses. It's unlikely they would have given me the ashes if I had asked.

I cannot explain to anyone why that telephone call in the middle of the night made everything that was possible, impossible. Not to anyone. I cannot understand why what
he
had to say and his manner—even before the phone-call, even in the room where we met—incensed me so. I've heard all the black clichés before. I am aware that, like the ones the faithful use, they are an attempt to habituate ordinary communication to overwhelming meanings in human existence. They rap out the mechanical chunter of a telex; the message has to be picked up and read. They become enormous lies incarcerating enormous truths, still extant, somewhere. I've experienced before the same hostility: being treated as if I were not there—the girl and the young man once at Fats' place, for example; and then I didn't feel mean and vile and find weapons ready to hand. Like liberal reaction to understand and forgive all, this vengeful excitation is foreign to me. The habit of sorting into objectively correct and false assumptions the position taken—the sane habit of our kind saves me from the ridiculousness and vanity of personal affront.
‘A war in South Africa will doubtless bring about enormous human suffering. It may also, in its initial stages, see a line-up in which the main antagonists fall broadly into racial camps, and this would add a further tragic dimension to the conflict. Indeed if a reasonable prospect existed of a powerful enough group among the Whites joining in the foreseeable future with those who stand for majority rule, the case for revolt would be less compelling
.' Your biographer quoted that to me for confirmation of a faithful reflection of the point of view. Then why be so—disintegrated, yes; I dissolved in what I heard from him, the acid. Why so humiliated because I had—automatically, not thinking—bobbed up to him with the convention of affection, of casual meetings exchanged with the cheeks of the Grosbois, Bobby, Georges and Manolis, Didier—a rubbing of noses brought back from a trip to see Eskimos. What did that matter ?