Burger's Daughter Read online

  I suppose my experience of journalists makes me stiff in their presence, even so long after Lionel’s trial. I become what they caught me as in all the newspaper photographs, the dumpy girl with the paisley scarf doffed, untidy hair springing about, defiant tendons on display in her neck, head turned full-on to the camera because she doesn’t have to hide her face like the relatives of a swindler, but eyes acknowledging nothing, because she doesn’t need sympathy or pity like the relatives of a murderer. And who are they to have decided—the law did not allow them to photograph him—in their descriptions of him in the dock, in the way he listened to evidence against him, in the expression with which he met the public gallery or greeted friends there, that they knew what he was, when I don’t know that I do.

  This one looked at me from my armchair with the beer-mug sceptred in his hand, marking that I had changed into a pair of well-fitting trousers, not as a man assumes for himself the position of one for whom a girl has made herself sexually more attractive (he wouldn’t have dared that), but as a successful intruder notes intimate behaviour that cannot be concealed from him, and from which he will build conclusions that will establish him as an insider. He looked me over—almost. Half-smiling, entirely for himself.

  He was one of those people who find it easiest to talk when they are driving and are addressing others only with a voice, body and attention directed elsewhere. In a casual tone by which I understood he had planned to bring up the subject, he wanted to know if I had read a book recently published in England by a former political prisoner in exile.

  One of us—I hadn’t read it yet.

  He offered to lend me his copy. But I thanked him—I didn’t need it. I knew that Flora, who so enjoys making ‘ordinary’ people run mild risks without being aware of it, had arranged for a business associate of William to smuggle copies from London.

  —There’s quite a lot about you of course. Your father and the family.—

  —They were in prison together the last year of my father’s life.—

  —Oh plenty about that—conversations with your father. How your father ran his own little clinic, more or less, even the warders coming with their aches and pains. They had to decide whether he could be allowed to write prescriptions, and then when he was given pads the politicals used the paper to circulate their own news-sheet ...it’s interesting. But also about the days when...the days in the house. The Sundays. That famous house.—

  He was taking a route unfamiliar to me.

  —I wonder what you’ll think of it. How it’ll strike you.—

  He wanted me to ask why; I understood there must be things in the book I could confirm or deny, things he thought would displease me. If he’s one of us it meant partisan sympathy but if he’s simply one of them, a liberal journalist observing the ‘reactions’ of Burger’s daughter, enjoying being in the know, it was nothing but the revival of an old newspaper sensation.—Are you sure where you’re going ?—

  He took it as a deliberate change of subject, snubbed himself with a little snigger.—Why shouldn’t I be ?—

  —Just that I’ve never gone to Orlando this way. You know where Marisa’s cousin lives, though ?—

  —I know.—The shortness rebuked me; he was no tourist in blacks’ areas, no Swede in need of a cicerone. He rolled hairs of his beard together between fingers and thumb while we waited to make a right turn across a line of traffic.—I never saw the inside of that house.—

  An odd thing to say. To me. And in the manner of someone who is addressing himself in the certainty of being overheard. Did he hang around like you, Conrad ? What did he want of us ? What absolution did you think you’d find in what my father did!

  The journalist and I lost touch once we were at Marisa’s cousin’s ‘place’. Marisa was not there yet; she would ‘drop in some time’—Fats was impartially welcoming as the host of a television show. There was the litter of beer, whisky and glasses; three or four black men dressed in tartan seersucker jackets and picture ties, spread thigh-to-thigh on chairs, with among them a runt or two, jeans poked at the knees, laceless running shoes, and the big, sad heads of jockeys or go-betweens for money and sport. There was an insolently handsome boy shaped in his sky-blue denim as Victorian girls were defined by tight-lacing. A middle-aged man with the black school-headmaster’s dark suit and neat tie-pin dozed between appearances of being a part of the animation. Men were talking and arguing; Orde Greer stood with a whisky at once in hand, interrupting (Listen—man, listen), cocking his head to take something in, the slight shuffle of lameness making a mendicant of him.

  A child bore over to me a cup of milky tea chattering against its saucer.—And how have you been keeping? That’s nice!—Fats’ wife pushed another child off a dining-table chair with a reproach in her own language, not interrupting the smiling conventions.—I thought maybe you’ve gone away or something... since your father passed on... shame—She settled us side by side.—Try a biscuit, Miss Burger, my sister-in-law makes them, she’s a really wonderful baker, even wedding cakes, you know. I wish I could be clever like that.—She can never bring herself to call me Rosa. I am part of the entourage of her famous and brave relative, Marisa Kgosana; of the distinction conveyed upon her family by their kinship with Joe Kgosana, on the Island with Nelson Mandela. She caught the hand of a girl who had been stalking in and out of the adjoining bedroom, adjusting the set of the blouse knotted under her breasts and pressing the imprint of one mulberry-painted lip upon the other: —D’you know who this is ? This is Lionel Burger’s daughter—But the girl did not react to the identity. She gave her hand for a second to a white girl. She said nothing.—Miss Burger, meet my niece Tandi, haven’t you perhaps seen that Fanta advert on the big board where you turn off for Soweto ?—she’s in that—

  The girl had already turned away, superior to praise from an aunt who was impressed by whites. She joined a friend, the two braced against the wall from the base of shoes with platforms twice the thickness of the feet they supported, their heads geometrically patterned rather than coiffured with the hair parted in small squares, each drawn tightly to its centre in a tobacco-twist strand pulled to connect it to the next. A baby boy with a bare bottom skeetered into the room from the direction of the smell of food cooking and was pursued by a heavy old woman who held him laughing and kicking while, smiling on an empty mouth, she talked to the two girls. Fats’ Margaret was still telling me about her niece, in the English vocabulary of black newspapers—A well-known model and top actress—she faltered in embarrassment over the naked baby, seeing him with eyes other than her own, and scooped him up, also laughing, her pretty, sexually-contented face under her wig and her clumsy voluptuous body, beside the old woman for a moment, a conjuration of what the old woman once was, and the old woman so clearly what the young would be. Do you know who this is... The grandmother dealt with me in the style of her own time. Her English was the kind white people mimic. She was holding my wrist:—The Lord will reward your fath-a. Yes, he has his reward with Gord. Yes, listen to me, I’m promising. The African people we thanks the Lord for what your fath-a was doing for us, we know he was our fath-a.—Margaret was not embarrassed on her account. Her head tracked, smiling agreement, from the old woman to me. I might have been moved. The afternoon of the anniversary of Lionel’s death: but I was aware of those two girls, the one chewing gum with the concentration of an incantation, the other (who had been introduced) a head set like a seal’s in a single line with the neck, entirely self-regarding. No, I felt instead only an affinity with them, with their distance, although they were distanced from me, too.

  Fats’ place, Marisa said. I said. Orde Greer said. Blacks don’t talk about ‘my house’ or ‘home’ and whites have adopted the term from them. A ‘place’; somewhere to belong, but also something that establishes one’s lot and sets aside much to which one doesn’t belong. So long since I had been with blacks in their own homes that I saw it, Soweto, Orlando, this township house—a year after Lionel was dead—as someth
ing apart, apart from my daily life; something from the past. When I was a child I went in and out the black townships with my mother so often and naturally that I embarrassed Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen, chattering of this when Tony and I lived with them. How many months since I had crossed the divide that opens every time a black leaves a white and goes to his ‘place’; the physical divide of clean streets become rutted roads and city centres become veld dumped with twisted metal and a perpetual autumn of blowing paper—the vast vacant lot where Orde Greer turned off from the main road that leads from white city to white city; and the other divide, hundreds of years of possession and decision, which lay even between that house where Orde Greer was never invited, that house where the revolution was planned, and the ‘place’ of those millions who have been dispossessed and for whom others have made all the decisions. From the car I saw it again as I had once ceased to see the too familiar. These restless broken streets where definitions fail—the houses the outhouses of white suburbs, two-windows-one-door, multiplied in institutional rows; the hovels with tin lean-tos sheltering huge old American cars blowzy with gadgets; the fancy suburban burglar bars on mean windows of tiny cabins; the roaming children, wolverine dogs, hobbled donkeys, fat naked babies, vagabond chickens and drunks weaving, old men staring, authoritative women shouting, boys in rags, tarts in finery, the smell of offal cooking, the neat patches of mealies between shebeen yards stinking of beer and urine, the litter of twice-discarded possessions, first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black—is this conglomerate urban or rural ? No electricity in the houses, a telephone an almost impossible luxury: is this a suburb or a strange kind of junk yard ? The enormous backyard of the whole white city, where categories and functions lose their ordination and logic, the ox and the diesel engine, the pig rootling for human ordure and the slaughterer, are milled about together. Are the tarts really tarts, or just factory workers or servants from town performing the miracle of emerging dolled-up and scented, a parody of any white madam, from these shelters where there is no bathroom ? Are the ragged boys their brothers? Their children, conceived with lovers in a corner of a room where brothers and sisters sleep ? Which are the gangsters, which the glue-sniffers among the young men on street-corners ? Who are the elderly men in pressed trousers and ties who sit drinking beer and arguing on a row of formica chairs on the strip of dirt between a house and the street ?

  I used to know, or think I knew. Baasie looked like one of these children because they were black, like him. He came from streets like these and he has disappeared into them. He is a man, somewhere like this.

  The little house into which we were crowded, family, relatives, friends and furniture—familiarity placed it for me without thinking, the bigger type of standard two-roomed township house, three rooms and a kitchen, for which people have to be able to afford (Fats I remembered was a boxing promoter) a bribe to an official. The diningroom ‘suite’, the plastic pouffes, hi-fi equipment, flowered carpet, bar counter, and stools covered in teddybear fur were the units of taste established by any furniture superama in the white city. The crowding of one tiny habitation with a job-lot whose desirability is based on a consumer-class idea of luxury without the possibility of middle-class space and privacy; the lavish whisky on the table and the pot-holed, unmade street outside the window; the sense all around of the drab imposed orderliness of a military camp that is not challenged by the home-improvement peach trees and licks of pastel paint but only by the swarming persistence of children and drunks dirtying it, tsotsis, urchins and gangsters terrorizing it—this commonplace of any black township became to me what it is: a ‘place’; a position whose contradictions those who impose them don’t see, and from which will come a resolution they haven’t provided for. The propositions of the faithful that seem so vital to biographical research—I understood them in a way theory doesn’t explain, in a way I was deaf to earlier in the afternoon when I was being questioned by my father’s biographer. The debate that divided my parents and their associates in a passion whose reality you regard as abstraction far removed from reality; it was based on the fact that they did see. They had always seen. And they believe—Dick and Ivy—they know the resolution and how it will be. Clare still believes; if Lionel lived, if he were to have come out of prison to answer—

  But I can’t bring Lionel into being for myself, I can’t hear responses I ought, on the evidence of biographical data, to be able to predict. After a year, there are new.components, now that I have taken apart the whole. I’ll never be able to ask my mother, reading her book in the car and hearing my footsteps on the prison gravel, my father opening his arms to Baasie and me in the water, the things I defy them to answer me.

  Around me was talk about the selection of black athletes to go abroad with white teams. The argument among the men jumped like a fire-cracker. It landed at my feet; Fats, losing his domination of raised voices, demanded response—My boy has a chance to meet the big boys in West Germany and America—why must I say no ?—

  But he didn’t want to know, he wanted only to show his confidence in worldliness, which quality in him gained the envious support of the schoolmaster, the hangers-on and one or two others, and was despised by his attackers. A handsome man, on the fine line between muscular over-development and fat, on the point of being flirtatious with women and patronizing with men; in shirt-sleeves he had the pectorals softening into breasts that mark an ex-boxer. He rested a promoter’s arm round my shoulders a moment, haranguing.—Boxing’s not a team sport, man. It’s not a question of selecting for show a black who hasn’t had the chance to train like the blokes from white clubs. This business of blacks not having proper facilities like the whites doesn’t come into it. I’m not talking about soccer and golf and so on—that’s different. A boxer’s got his manager, his trainer, his sparring partners—everything. The best.—

  —And if he ever gets a fight with a white South African he has to fight as a stranger in his own country, a foreigner, he’s a ‘Zulu’ or a ‘Msutu’, not a South African like the white.—

  Orde Greer had his supporters—When’s your great Tap-Tap Makatini going to get a title fight here in S.A. ? Yes. Can you tell me that, man ?—

  Fats answered from the assurance of sources it was implied he wasn’t prepared to reveal.—That’s coming, that’s coming. That’s coming soon. You’ll see. We’re negotiating—

  The young man in denims was rocking back and forth on his heels, the muscles of his backside pursed taut.—Your boy can negotiate to go to Germany and America and hell. He’s still a ‘boy’ that’s been let out like a monkey on a string.—

  The heat was drawn to him and the man who pushed a face forward, shiny with beer-sweat.—Where’s it going to get you ? All you heroes, man, who don’t play sport and want to tell us what to do. Agh!—

  —You’ll do what the white man tells you.—

  —Listen. Listen a minute, man—if my boy wins a big fight overseas—

  —So what ? You’ll make a lot of money and he can show his medal with his pass when he gets back.—

  —then there’s no white champ in his weight here who can refuse him a fight and still think he holds the title. Isn’t that so ? Isn’t that true ? Isn’t that a real breakthrough ?—

  —You’ll do what the white man wants. Breakthrough to get them accepted back in world sport again. That’s it. And when your ‘negotiations’ for a black to win an overall title here come off, you’ll be satisfied. And if next year or the year after white soccer clubs play blacks, and take in black members, the soccer players will shout there’s no more racism in sport. But everywhere else in this country the black will still be a black. Whatever else he does he’ll still get black jobs, black education, black houses.—

  —What do you want, then ? I’m talking about sport.—

  —Blacks will be in sport only if there is one sports body—one controlling council for everyone, every sport. When that happens then you people talk to whites. Not before. If
you must talk—if you think playing games with the whites is what we blacks want.—

  Orde Greer’s patriarch’s head was unsteady with excitement, his mouth remained open for a chance to interject.—Is it a question of tactics against racialism in sport or sport as a tactic against racialism—

  The collar-bones of the young man in the denim shirt open to the waist moved under black skin with decisive energy.—Tactics! Money money money—He clicked long fingers under our noses to offer the smell.

  —We’ breaking it down, Bra.—Fats claimed the intimacy of the exclusive (in the basic sense of the word) form of ‘brother’ taken over by young militants from tsotsi jargon.—What’s the good, passing up the openings, saying no all the time—I don’t go with that.—He seemed admiring of the vehemence with which he was challenged, inviolably tolerant and masterful.—No, no, no, keep on shouting, boycotting, making the speeches—our guys overseas, SANROC and that crowd, the politicals in exile, and you guys here—that’s okay with me. Don’t think I haven’t got a lot of time for you, my brother... But meantime we’ the ones giving black sportsmen a go getting up to international standard, we’re showing the world what we can do, isn’t it ? And what about the whites then ? It’s how you look at it. You only live once, hell—

  The young man spoke about Fats as if he were no longer in front of him.—These people will always let themselves be used by the whites. They are our biggest problem; we have to re-educate—

  Fats was laughing for our benefit.—I finished Orlando High before you were at your mother’s breast. I was ANC Youth League with Lembede at fifteen—

  —Always the same story, Mandela, Sisulu, Kgosana on Robben Island—same as Christians telling you Christ died for them.—

  Marisa was suddenly there, with her husband’s name. She could not have heard the context in which it had been invoked; the perfume and dash of her presence, her gay low voice, surrounded by the wash of her hangers-on as they trooped in, broke up the composition of the room. She held Fats’ and Margaret’s little boy on her hip a moment; hugging and whispering to him, carried along in the orbit of Margaret and the grandmother; took the smart girls at the wall by the waist in easy schoolgirlish greeting; discovered me. —Rosa...oh good! Orde, look, I want to talk to you about something you may be able to do for me. No, Fats—her adorned hands touched from one to the other distributing the unconscious grace of great beauty—just a cold drink. Anything.—In their own language: —It’s Tandi’s friend—Duma Dhladhla ? That’s right ? You’re at Turfloop ?—She drew from the young man in denim a punctuation of cool nods and at last a proud curling smile that had not yet been seen, resisting her beauty with his own, as contestants of equal strength entwine forearms and try to force a fist to the table.—You promised to send me your newsletters.—She was as tall as he, he could not look down at her.—The last two happened to be banned.——Oh I know that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get a copy.—