Burger's Daughter Page 12

  Sweat 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?

  They are waiting.

  They leave me alone to go my own way because they can’t believe —Lionel’s daughter—I am not waiting with them. Our kind repudiates ethnic partitioning of the country. They believe I talked of trying to get into the Transkei because I was under orders to find a cover job in a hospital there; I must have taken advantage of my period of ‘convalescence’ and refused. But one day I won’t be able to say no.

  Although it’s all there, in notes for publication researched diligently from libraries and the memories of exiles, the past doesn’t count: the general strikes that failed when the Party was legal, the High Command that was betrayed when the Party was underground. The relic present, when they joke twice a week with the police sergeant as they become signatories to their own captivity, doesn’t count. They’ve lived without fulfilment of personal ambition and it’s not peace of mind they’re looking forward to in their old age. The defeat of the Portuguese colonial armies in Angola and Moçambique; the collapse of white Rhodesia; the end of South Africa’s occupation of Namibia brought about by SWAPO’S fighters or international pressure; these are what they’re waiting for, as Lionel was waiting, in jail. Signs that it will soon be over, at last. The Future is coming. The only one that’s ever existed for them, according to documentation. National liberation, phase one of the two-stage revolution that will begin with a black workers’ and peasants’ republic and complete itself with the achievement of socialism.

  And not just waiting. Whatever can be done between one dutiful report to the police and the next will be done by people who, far from poring over the navel of a single identity (yes, a dig at you, Conrad), see the necessity of many. It won’t be by chance Ivy has her lunch-counter in an area of heavy industry where thousands of bl
acks work. And of course the people who pack her cartons of curry and the salads that are so popular are all old associates or their relatives. She put the typewriter down to cover papers she had been working on but when she picked up the comb that was wetting the corner of one sheet she pulled it out to let it dry; I saw it was part of an analysis of wages. She’s probably supplying the radical students’ black wages commission with material. Dick will tell William Donaldson he wants a job to supplement his pension; but he’s looking for what will show him to be ‘harmlessly occupied’, whatever else he may be doing. It’s not easy for families of old lags, like the Terblanches, like the one I’m the remnant of-watched all the time.

  They are prepared to be patient with me. It’s not sympathy, some pallid underwriting of the validity of self-pity, they offer. I have had a course of action to follow which involved the life of a man who happened to be my father, just as they themselves have had. The consequences for Dick have been periods of imprisonment with my father; for Ivy, imprisonment because of my father. The course of action I have duly fulfilled, with consequences for me some of which were self-evident, foreseen and accepted, just as theirs were, is part of a continuing process. It is complete only for Lionel Burger; he has done all he had to do and that, in his case, happened to imply a death in prison as part of the process. It does not occur to them that it could be complete for themselves, for me.

  It is not so easy to shut oneself off from them—these people: Dick with his farmer’s blue eyes under those distance-shading eyebrows, his safari suit with shorts that show his strong, vein-tattooed legs, and his jacket decked out with pockets in the style of the old colonial-military, frontier way of life, so that his appearance is innocently exactly that of one of his brother Boers who regard his beliefs as those of Antichrist, the devil himself, and of the capitalist-adventurist European conquistadors he himself sees as the devil; Ivy with her supermarket housewife’s body in cheerful prints, her wild, Einstein head, and the unexpected concession to vanity in the evidence—a glossy streak of blonde fringing her upper lip—that she peroxides the moustache with which age is trying to deny her femininity. These two people represent an intimacy with my father greater than mine. They know what even one’s own daughter is never told. A biographer ought to be referred to them, Lionel’s—what ? Friends, associates—comrades, the biographer will settle for as catch-all, but some new term ought to come into being for what I understood, coming back into their presence. It goes beyond friendship, beyond association; beyond family relationship—of course. They will be waiting for me to find what there is for me to do. How they all cared for each other’s children, when we were little! In the enveloping acceptance of Ivy’s motherly arms—she feels as if I were her own child—there is expectance, even authority. To her warm breast one can come home again and do as you said I would, go to prison.

  I found the ring I wore when what I had to do was be a young girl in love. In the leather collar-box from one of my grandfathers, among cards of moth-eaten darning wool and the elastic my mother used to thread through the waist of my school pants. With it were brass serpent insignia of the Medical Corps—my father’s cap badges. My mother kept those? My father joined the white South African army, according to the date I’ve been given, when the Soviet Union was attacked, and was in charge of a hospital in the Middle East. She wasn’t married to him then; did she take the badges off old uniforms later, or maybe Tony asked for them, and when the little boy was dead and she found his treasures she didn’t throw them away. They could tell any raiding Special Branch policemen nothing about Lionel Burger that should not be discovered. In fact at his trial Theo Santorini included ‘a distinguished record of service to wounded soldiers of his mother country’ in establishing the standing of such a man: How easy would it have been, I put it to you, Your Lordship, for him to choose professional and civic honours; and what grave sense of wrongs committed by the white establishment must he have had, in order for such a man to turn his back on the laurels of white society and risk—no, refute outright—reputation, success and personal liberty, in the cause of the black people. The army service seems to have lasted two years—like most people, I foreshorten the entire period of life my parents lived before I was alive, and they were strangers to whom I have no relation. Lionel once told me how when he was about fourteen and had just come to boarding-school in Johannesburg he saw torn-up passbooks in the street after a demonstration and curiosity led him to realize for the first time that the ‘natives’ were people who had to carry these things while white people like himself didn’t. For me, this childhood awakening of his is no farther away than his reasons for going to war. The war experience gave him the chance to be active (as the biographer’s phrase goes) in an ex-servicemen’s legion that brought together along with white veterans, black orderlies and ambulance men who had risked their lives but not been allowed to bear arms. The movement broke up, like my mother’s attempts to get black workers and white together in trade unions, on the white men’s fear of losing the privileges of segregation from their comrades. Yet when the black and white veterans were marching 40,000 strong through Cape Town it must have seemed a sign; soon over, now.

  You didn’t want to believe that at twelve years old what happened at Sharpeville was as immediate to me as what was happening in my own body. But then I have to believe that when the Russians moved into Prague my father and mother and Dick and Ivy and all the faithful were still promising the blacks liberation through Communism, as they had always done. Bambata, Bulhoek, Bondelswart, Sharpeville; the set of horrors the faithful use in their secretly printed and circulated pamphlets. Stalin trials, Hungarian uprising, Czechoslovakian uprising—the other set that the liberals and right-wing use to show it isn’t possible for humane people to be Communist. Both will appear in any biography of my father. In 1956 when the Soviet tanks came into Budapest I was his little girl, dog-paddling to him with my black brother Baasie, the two of us reaching for him as a place where no fear, hurt or pain existed. And later, when he was in jail and I began to think back, even I, with my precocious talents for evading warders’ comprehension now in full maturity, could not have found the way to ask him—in spite of all these things: do you still believe in the future ? The same Future ? Just as you always did ? And anyway it’s true that when at last the day of my visit came I would be aware of nothing except that he was changing in prison, he was getting the look on those faces in old photographs from the concentration camps, the motionless aspect, shouldered there between the two warders that accompanied him, of someone who lets himself be presented, identified. His gums were receding and his teeth seemed to have moved apart at the necks; I don’t know why this distressed me so much. In the cottage I used to see that changed smile that no one will know in the future because the frontispiece photograph I’ve been asked for shows him, neck thick with muscular excitement, grinning energy, speaking to a crowd not shown but whose presence is in his eyes.

  I don’t know where you live; maybe in the same city as I am, wherever I go, without either of us being aware of the presence of the other, each running along in a dark burrow that never intersects. You have hired a colour TV in a building round the corner; or you’ve sailed away from such things, on the ark I saw being built. You never got beyond fascination with the people around Lionel Burger’s swimming-pool; you never jumped in and trusted yourself to him, like Baasie and me, or drowned, like Tony. I was fascinated by your friends the boat-builders (you correct me: a yacht is not a boat). They were simple people, not like you; they didn’t understand what they were doing when they planed the sweet pine of the bunks for you to sleep in and ran up the curtains that will be keeping out the glare of the sub-tropical sea. But you know that when you take passage with them it’s to flee. Because my boss Barry Eckhard and your successful scrap-dealer father proposed to you their fate, the bourgeois fate, alternate to Lionel’s: to eat without hunger, mate without desire.

  Clare Terblanche sought out Rosa Burger with whom
she had played as a child. The shadow wobbling over the blistered glass of the door had no identity; but as Rosa opened her door, compliance came to her face: the matter of the vacant flat she had promised to enquire about.

  The other girl swung the worn, tasselled cloth bag that weighed on her hip like a pack-horse’s pannier, and took a chair heavily. Her gaze went round the pieces of furniture from the Burger house that stood as if stored in the room. She breathed through open lips, and licked them.—A job to find this place.—

  —But you’ve got my phone number at work? I’m sure I gave it to Ivy.—

  —Could I have a drink of water ?—

  —I’ll make tea. Or would you rather have coffee ?—

  —Coffee, if it’s the same to you. Could I get myself some water in the meantime ?—

  Rosa Burger had the dazed sprightliness of someone who has been alone all day, before interruption. She might even have been pleased the other had come.—But of course!—She was gone into a tiny kitchen. There was the crackling of ice being forced out of its mould, the gurgle and splutter of a tap. The visitor sat as if she were not alone in the room.

  When Rosa came back her hair lay differently; she had put a hand through it, perhaps, taking a look at herself in the distorting convex of a shiny surface. She smiled; the other was made aware that sometimes Rosa was beautiful. A knowledge parenthetic between them, briefly embarrassing Rosa.

  The water was served with the small attentions of ice and a slice of lemon; the two girls talked trivialities—the neighbourhood, the warmth of the winter day—while Clare drank it off.