Burger's Daughter Read online

  How fascinated he was with his message, bringing in the familiar banned vocabulary the terms of the familiar banned aims of the faithful. They lull me; certainties around me in my childhood. For him they seemed to be discoveries; where had he come lately to them ?—but he is a journalist, although it is a camera and not a typewriter he uses, and it could have been that he would make himself a familiar in any milieu, reproducing knowledgeably any jargon appropriate to it. His job exposes him to everything. He’s in the know: if he wanted to, he could talk exactly as one would expect from a racing driver at the trackside, or exactly as one would expect from a white Communist close to the ANC.

  —This and this should happen and can’t happen because of that and that. These theories don’t fit us. We are not interested. You’ve been talking this shit before I was born. He’s been listening.— Dhladhla pointed at James.—And where is he? And where am I? When I go into the café to buy bread they give the kaffir yesterday’s stale. When he goes for fruit, the kaffir gets the half-rotten stuff the white won’t buy. That is black.—

  —You ignore the capitalist system by which you’re oppressed racially ?—

  —We don’t ignore anything. We are educating the black to know he is strong and be proud of it. We are going to get rid of the capitalist and racist system but not as a ‘working class’. That’s a white nonsense, here. The white workers belong to the exploiting class and take part in the suppression of the blacks. The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman’s way of life is best for blacks.—Tandi buried her face against his arm for a moment, threw back her head so that we caught her grin, her tongue curled out pink over her teeth.—It’s not a class struggle for blacks, it’s a race struggle. The main reason why we’re still where we are is blacks haven’t united as blacks because we’re told all the time to do it is to be racist. ANC listened to that—

  Marisa laughed.—ANC brought together the widest and biggest black unity there’s ever been.—Her tolerance was the professionalism of the imprisoned leader’s proxy, aware that the younger generation must be wooed against the day when he returns. Yet she was innocently motherly, if overwhelming sexual charm can ever be subordinate to any other; he was, after all, one of her own, her rebuke was confident. She’s ready to move at the head of Dhladhla’s students like the splendid bare-breasted Liberty in Delacroix’s painting, when the time comes.

  The schoolteacher kept trying to make himself heard.—Je-sus. No, I’m telling you!—the things they think they find at Turfloop—

  Dhladhla had the air of seeing over heads, of having his back turned even to those people he was facing.—White liberals run around telling blacks it’s immoral to unite as blacks, we’re all human beings, it’s just too bad there’s white racism, we just need to get together, ‘things are changing’, we must work out together the solution... Whites don’t credit us with the intelligence to know what we want! We don’t need their solutions.—

  Orde Greer drew in his face tight round nose and mouth and closed his eyes a moment.—And white radicals ?—

  —Aagh! All these names you call yourselves—

  —Communists who believe—like you—that reform is not the object. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve taken from them the idea that racialism is entrenched in capitalism (you turn their very words around, don’t you) and you have to destroy one to get rid of the other. They believe it’s just as impossible to conceive of workers’ power in South Africa separated from national liberation, as it is to conceive of national liberation separated from the destruction of capitalism. A black man had a lot to do with working that out, a black Communist who happens to be called Moses Kotane, eh ?—He planted each phrase:—A national—democratic revolution—bringing to power—a revolutionary democratic alliance—dominated by—the proletariat and peasantry.—Except the bit about the dictatorship of the proletariat’s been abandoned by Communists in Europe, by now. In Cuba, in Africa...it’s probably still valid. Isn’t that what you want ?—

  —So what are you saying? There are a few good whites... And then? We can’t be tricked to lose ourselves in some kind of colourless... shapeless...‘humanity’. We’re concerned with group attitudes and group politics.—

  —Communists believe in what you want—no, wait—what you want for yourselves. That’s right? But they see black consciousness as racialism that sidetracks and undermines the struggle—

  Dhladhla held the girl Tandi off from him by the wrist but did not leave hold of her.—Because the problem is white racism, there can only be one valid opposition to balance it out—solid black unity.—

  —My god! Now you’re quoting Hegel, dialectical materialism in its old-hat form, since then there’ve been Marxist thinkers who’ve disproved—

  —Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves.—

  Slogans in the mouths of those who have re-cast them for themselves regain painful spontaneity for the tags and faded battle cries of causes the speaker doesn’t acknowledge.

  —Hell, that’s beautiful, man ?—Fats held his palm up, weighing old words anew for us.

  The baby had been making its way through a grove of legs. I picked it up to save it being stepped on, and it examined me, and then put out a little soft pad of brown hand and buffed me on the nose, laughing, laughing until the gurgles became liquid and saliva strung from its amber-pink lip.

  —Isn’t that beautiful? Duma—if you see my boy giving a knockout against a white fighter, you’ll see something beautiful like that, man. I’m not kidding. You’ll see he’s just like you’re saying. Isn’t it ? Black body and black hands that did it...he doesn’t care for anybody. He feels—he looks—you’ll see (Fats appropriated Dhladhla’s term; perhaps he would take and keep it, overlay its defiance with the swagger of show-business)—Blackman.—His wave of laughter at himself swept round.

  James Nyaluza’s voice drew aside from it.—Verwoerd and Vorster did it. Fifteen years we haven’t been able to reach the kids. It’s all words for these kids, just new words... When the day comes when you have to act...what will they know?—

  Duma Dhladhla and Tandi made a couple oddly counterparted by the baby and me. The shift of people as the discussion lost impetus left us in the arena of a moment whose nature was undecided: maybe we would begin to chatter inconsequentially, the obsessive forces charged between all who had been arguing or listening suddenly veering off, leaving little amicable drifts of people, cosy in their silent sociability of shared drinks and smokes on the house, like the huddled hangers-on who now and then loped out contentedly to the lavatory in the yard, or arguing away at treasured points they had not got anyone to listen to yet, like James captured by Orde Greer. Tandi suddenly addressed the baby in my arms off-handedly, in her own language. The baby went still and obstinate. Tandi spoke again. The baby gave a bouncing jerk against me and was quite still again. I was smiling down at him in the homage adults feel they must offer children without knowing why. Tandi held out her arms and at once the baby stretched his to her and was taken from me.

  I spoke in the mild intimacy of girls of about the same age.—It is yours?—I meant I had thought the child was Margaret’s and Fats’.

  —They’re all ours.—It was a forked flicker of the tongue; something that the one to whom it was addressed was not expected to understand, had no right to understand. She looked at me for a second; and turned away laughing aggressively, in talk, in their own language, with Dhladhla. She was teasing him, teasing the baby, he half-irritated, the baby half-in-bliss-half-in-tears. Margaret came and took it away from her, while she kissed it passionately and maliciously and it clung to her.

  Somewhere near me the white journalist’s phrases jingled like a bunch of keys fingered in a pocket.—...not peace at any price, peace for each at his—

  The women were in and out of the kitchen. I made myself useful with Mar
isa who at once organized and delegated tasks among the pots of boiled fowl and meat, the potatoes and mealie-pap, the gravy that smelled of curry. Tandi’s friend cut bread. Margaret was making her salads dainty with beetroot stars and radish roses.

  Thanks madam—the runts waited to be served by me, their fellow-guest, and ate seriously under their caps. Some people left without eating but others came in from the night as a matter of Fats’ habitual sociability rather than because they had been invited. In fact I—Orde Greer and I—hadn’t been asked for a meal in the way invitations are exchanged among whites, but simply had stayed on after dark until it happened to be the time when Fats’ family usually ate. It’s in this kind of black sociability, extending to blacks the hospitality already offered to white people in the tradition of my grandmother Marie Burger by Uncle Coen and Auntie Velma, that the Sundays in that house came about. We used to squat round the swimming-pool juggling hot boerewors from finger-tips to finger-tips; these children shared a dish on the floor, their fingers carefully moulding and dipping balls of stiff mealie-pap in gravy, while the baby and his grandmother ate from her plate.

  Sitting on a plastic pouffe between James and Fats I was aware of the figure of Greer always seen from the back, planted with the hopeful and slightly ridiculous air of someone who has determinedly drunk more than anybody else, and makes a nuisance of himself on the periphery of one little group or another, taking with him his set of challenges, so that people might break off what they were saying but would either carelessly absorb his preoccupations or even interpret them wrongly in order to blend them with the direction of their own. He had mushed his food together without eating, already his abandoned plate had the repellent look of leftovers; someone stubbed a cigarette in it. Finally he was before Duma Dhladhla, unavoidable, ignoring the self-sufficiency of the trio, Dhladhla and the two girls. I heard him say very loudly, as if he and Dhladhla were alone—What would you do if you were me ?—

  Dhladhla took a snapping bite out of a chicken leg in his hand and chewed it with vivid energy, the muscles at the angles of his fine jaw moving naturally in the way of male actors affecting emotion. He looked at Greer, importuned, triumphant and bored.

  —I don’t think about that.—

  Marisa had joined us.—So there was a raid in town today? June Makhubu’s detained, and two others, they say. All Sol Hlubi’s Black Studies stuff taken away. Even the report on high school children the municipal social welfare people have already accepted as evidence for their official commission...I’d like to know how that suddenly becomes subversive... They’re mad... Rosa, we were both in town in the morning... ?—

  She assumed I had been as unaware as she. And in this company I understood it was strange, some sort of lapse, from the norm established in me from the beginning of my life, that I should not have told her at once, when we met in the shop.

  —Orde probably knows more...—Marisa rallied him.—Orde, what was this business at Providence House? Who else did they visit as well as Hlubi’s outfit ?—

  He was stiffly dignified with his red socks sagging over the boots, his hand feeling masturbatorily round his back and chest under the pullover.

  He had taken pictures; Colonel van Staden himself led the raid, that meant they were after something big; the intrepid news photographer had doubled up the fire escape and there was one shot of van Staden’s man, that lout Claasens——He’s holding some chap by the scruff of the neck like a dog, you can see he’s got him by a handful of jacket and shirt—man, his feet are practically lifted dangling off the ground—

  —But what was happening? Resisting arrest ?—

  —No—no—Claasens is searching him, with the other hand he’s in his pockets—you’ll see... But you won’t because my bloody editor won’t publish. He says to me, they’ll be down on us like a load of bricks. You’ll be in for it too.—You’re not allowed to show the police busy in any situation like that. Prejudicial to the dignity of the law. Their dignity. Christ.—

  —Did Claasens see you’d caught him ?—

  —I ran like hell. One of the others spotted me but when he came after he slipped on the metal steps, down on his backside, the bugger was lucky he didn’t fall four flights—

  The baby on his grandmother’s lap shouted back gleefully at our laughter. An exchange of stories scoring off the police, some of which the tellers had experienced themselves, other belonging to our folklore, was encouraged among Marisa, James and me.—What about when your father and mother got married, Rosa—And I had to describe again, as Lionel told as a political anecdote, a family chronicle, what was really his love affair with my mother: how the police came to raid the first tiny flat and had to unpack the household goods. While I was telling it the baby boy ran over to me and pressed upon me some red knitted garment. I thought it was something of his that he wanted me to help him put on, but he held it away, reaching up towards my head, and then rubbing at his own. What does he want ?—I signalled to Margaret and saw the grandmother’s gums bared at me in pleasure. But Marisa understood. —He wants to put the hat on you, Rosa. It’s for you.—I obliged; bent my head, and the child crowned me with crooked jabs. A cap with a rosette on one side, of the kind black women sell, spread out before them, while they crochet among the legs of passers-by on the city pavements as if they were in their own kitchens. The grandmother was presenting Lionel’s daughter with her handiwork. I pulled it on and Marisa set it right for me.—The rose shouldn’t be in the middle—She tittered delightfully, regarding me, the first knuckle of her slender hand caught between her teeth a moment. Margaret added her touch, rolling up the edge of the thing to make a brim.—No wait—that’s it—Marisa pushed all my hair up under it, both of us protesting and giggling. The old woman came over and hugged me. The nine- or ten-year-old girl who had brought me tea in the afternoon hung on my arm with the lovesickness of one who claims an elder sister. Certainly Orde Greer didn’t seem in much of a condition to drive; when Fats and his wife urged me to spend the night—the short pile on the baby’s head was softly rough under my chin—I was drawn to the idea of staying there among them, in the pawings and touches of the children, the comforting confidence of Fats, capable in corruption, that if the police should discover I was there, he would know exactly to whom to give a bottle of brandy. The vanity of being loved by and belonging with them offered itself. But I know it can’t be taken for nothing. Offered freely—yet it has its price, that I would have to settle upon for myself, even if I didn’t make a fool of myself, like Greer, asking for an estimate from Dhladhla. We drove under a sky fluttering eyelids of lightning through streets that flattened away into night, low houses shut tight, battened in darkness, barred with tin and iron against thieves and penned against the police, marauders without distinction. The eye in a window was a candle far inside; or only the reflection of the Volkswagen’s headlights looking back at me as we shook and swerved our way out. Sudden street-lights, far apart and irregular, make one vulnerable there, passing under them as a target. Smoking like a burned-out site, the miles of townships were all round, dark-clotted, no assertion of tall buildings against the sky, no cloudy alabaster bowl like that inverted above the white city by life that declares itself openly in neon, floodlight, and windows letting lamp-shafts into gardens. A man lay where the road, without a gutter, found a boundary in ruts and pools. Drunk or knifed. It didn’t occur to either of us to call out to stop or even pass a remark. Not in that place. Not even if we had been black. Not even though we are white.

  Orde Greer got me home all right. He must be used to driving when fairly drunk. The only sound in the car was his heavy breathing and a belching of whisky fumes that buckled him every now and then; he concentrated in a way that excluded my presence. We knew that nothing would happen to us in that car, taking corners fast and wide and pausing with demonstrative caution before crossing against the red light. I can see he’s someone perpetually fascinated by the idea of something that may transform him; accidental death is not his so
lution. And I’m here, the last of my line.

  Silkworms of soft rain munching the leaves at two in the morning.

  But I hadn’t forgotten the red knitted hat; I have that, I put it away in a drawer—the temptation—before I went to bed that Saturday, just as the mild storm reached the white suburbs.

  What I say will not be understood.

  Once it passes from me, it becomes apologia or accusation. I am talking about neither...but you will use my words to make your own meaning. As people pick up letters from the stack between them in word-games. You will say: she said he was this or that: Lionel Burger, Dhladhla, James Nyaluza, Fats, even that poor devil, Orde Greer. I am considering only ways of trying to take hold; you will say: she is Manichean. You don’t understand treason; a flying fish lands on the deck from fathoms you glide over. You bend curiously, call the rest of the crew to look, and throw it back.

  Whatever I was before, you confused me. In the cottage you told me that in that house people didn’t know each other; you’ve proved it to me in what I have found since in places you haven’t been, although you are exploring the world. But there are things you didn’t know; or, to turn your criteria back on yourself, you knew only in the abstract, in the public and impersonal act of reading about them or seeking information, like a white journalist professionally objective and knowledgeable on the ‘subject’ of a ‘black exploiting class’. The creed of that house discounted the Conrad kind of individualism, but in practice discovered and worked out another. This was happening at the interminable meetings and study groups that were the golf matches and club dinners of my father’s kind. It was what was wrested from the purges when they denounced and expelled each other for revisionism or lack of discipline or insufficient zeal. It was something they managed to create for themselves even while Comintern agents were sent out to report on their activities and sometimes to destroy these entirely on orders that caused fresh dissension among them, despair and disaffection. It is something that will roll away into a crevice hidden between Lionel’s biographer’s analysis of the Theory of Internal Colonialism, the Nature of the New State as a Revolutionary Movement, and the resolution of the Problems of the Post-Rivonia Period—the crystal they secreted for themselves out of dogma. What would you do if you were me? What is to be done ? Lionel and his associates found out; whatever the creed means in all the countries where it is being evolved between the ‘polar orthodoxies of China and the Soviet Union’ (the biographer’s neat turn of phrase), they made a Communism for ‘local conditions’ in this particular one. It was not declared heretic, although I see it contains a heresy of a kind, from the point of view of an outsider’s interpretation. Lionel—my mother and father—people in that house, had a connection with blacks that was completely personal. In this way, their Communism was the antithesis of anti-individualism. The connection was something no other whites ever had in quite the same way. A connection without reservations on the part of blacks or whites. The political activities and attitudes of that house came from the inside outwards, and blacks in that house where there was no God felt this embrace before the Cross. At last there was nothing between this skin and that. At last nothing between the white man’s word and his deed; spluttering the same water together in the swimming-pool, going to prison after the same indictment: it was a human conspiracy, above all other kinds.