Burger's Daughter Read online

  This guest was a young man named Conrad. A pale acne-scarred back to the sun, lying in the way of but never putting out a teasing hand to catch the black and white legs of children who raced round the edge of the pool. He rested his chin on his forearms, and sometimes his forehead pressed there. He was not the type looking for commitment. There had been, were some, and they were quickly recognized. Sometimes their potential was made use of. He was not even a paid spy posing as the type looking for commitment; that had become a recognizable type, too. Lionel Burger would not restrict his daughter’s normal student sociability for fear she might be made use of by one of those. But this boy was of interest to no one; let him look at them all, if the spectacle intrigued him: revolutionaries at play, a sight like the secret mating of whales. He got his boerewors, hot and scented-tasting, from the hands of Lionel Burger himself, like everyone else. Rosa was a pretty thing as she grew up; many boys would follow her, not knowing she was not for them.

  Once or twice during the trial she had noticed this Conrad in the visitors’ gallery of the court. She moved inevitably in the phalanx of familiars, the friends some of whom disappeared, arrested and arraigned in other trials, in the course of her father’s. Once when she had gone out to telephone from the Greek café nearby, she met the chap on the pavement on her way back to the court-house. He offered her an espresso and she laughed, in her way of knowing only too well the facilities of the environs of this court, always she was aside from her generation in experience of this kind—where did he think you could get an espresso around here ?

  —You can, that’s all.—He took her down a block, round a corner and into a shopping arcade. She understood he must have followed her out of court. Real espresso was brought to a little iron table by a black waiter dressed up in striped trousers, black waistcoat and cheese-cutter. She pulled a funny face behind the waiter, smiled, friendly and charming, any girl singled out by a man. —What d’you think that’s supposed to be? In Pretoria!—He pushed over to her an ashtray lettered THE SINGING BARBER.

  —What do you think he feels about your father ?—

  —My father ?—

  Her beau broke a match between his teeth and waved its V in the direction of the court-house.

  Oh, she understood: the blacks, do they know, are they grateful to whites who endanger their own lives for them. So that was the set of tracks along which this one’s mind trundled; there were others who came up to her, sweating and pitched to their greatest intensity, Miss Burger you don’t know me but I want to tell you, the government calls him a Communist but your father is God’s man, the holy spirit of our Lord is in him, that’s why he is being persecuted. And there were the occasional letters that had been coming to the house all her life; as soon as she was old enough—her mother knew when that was; how did she know ?—her mother let her see one. It said her father was a devil and a beast who wanted to rob and kill, destroying Christian civilization. She felt a strange embarrassment, and looked into her mother’s face to see if she should laugh, but her mother had another look on her face; she was aware of some trust expressed there, something that must last beyond laughter. It was a Saturday morning and when her father had come home from his early round of visits to his patients in hospital he had given Baasie and her their weekly swimming lesson; at that moment with the letter before her, ‘her father’ came to her as a hand cupped under her chin that kept her head above water while her legs and arms frogged. Baasie was afraid still. His thin, dingy body with the paler toes rigidly turned up went blacker with the cold and he clung flat against her father’s fleshy, breathing chest whose warmth, even in the water, she felt by seeing Baasie clinging there.

  In the coffee bar she was still smiling. She seemed to savour the domino of sugar she held, soaking up dark hot coffee before she dropped it in.—Oh leave the poor waiter alone.

  —No but—I’m curious.—

  She nodded in jerky, polite, off-hand dismissal, as if that were the answer to the idle question she didn’t ask: What brings you to the trial ? A girl in her situation, she had nothing much to say to a stranger, and it was difficult for anyone outside what one must suppose—respect, awkwardly—were her intense preoccupations, to begin to talk to her. An important State witness was due to be called for cross-examination before the court rose for the day; she knew she must drink up and go, he knew she would go, but they sat on for a minute in a purely physical awareness of one another. His blond-brown hand lying across the vice of his crossed thighs, with the ridiculous thick silver manacle following the contour of the wrist-bump, the nave of her armpit in a sleeveless dress, shiny with moisture as she pushed away the tiny cup—the form of communication that is going on when two young people appear to have no reason or wish to linger.

  Most of their meetings were as inconsequential. He came to the trial but did not always seek her out—supposing she was right that he ever had. Sometimes he was one of the loose group centred round the lawyers and her who ate sandwiches or grey pies in the Greek café during the lunch adjournment; it was assumed she brought him along, she thought someone else had. He did not telephone her at work but she met him once in the public library and they ate together in a pizzeria. She had thought he was a university lecturer or something of that kind but he told her, now that (without curiosity) she asked, that he was doing a post-graduate thesis on Italian literature, and working on Wednesdays and weekends as a bookie’s clerk at the race-course. He had begun the thesis while studying in Perugia, but given it up when he spent a year or so in France and Denmark and England. He was vague about what he had done and how he lived. In the South of France, on a yacht—Something between a servant and a pet, it sounds—

  He was not offended by her joking distaste.—Great life, for a few months. Until you get sick of the people you work for. There was no place to read in peace.—

  It was a job for which you did not need a foreigner’s work permit —he knew all the ways of life that fitted into that category. In London he squatted in a Knightsbridge mansion. He’d fixed up a condemned cottage, in Johannesburg, with the money he’d got for bringing in a British car duty-free, after having had the use of it for a year abroad, an arrangement made with a man who had bought it in his name.—Any time you need somewhere to stay... I’m often away for weeks. I’ve got friends with a farm in Swaziland. What a wonderful place, forest from the house all the way to the river, you just live in a kind of twilight of green—pecan-nut trees, you know.—A casual inspiration.—Why don’t you come there this weekend ?—

  It didn’t occur to him:—I don’t have a passport.—

  He didn’t make sympathetic, indignant noises. He pondered as if on a practical matter.—Not even to hop just over there ?—

  —No.—

  He looked at her in silence, confronted with her, considering her as a third person, a problem set up for both of them.

  —Come to my house.—

  —Yes I will, I’d like to see it. Your big jacaranda.—

  —Bauhinia.—

  —Bauhinia, then.—

  —I mean now.—

  —I have to go to Pretoria after work this afternoon.—But at least it was a serious answer, a practical matter that could be dealt with.

  —There’s an adjournment till Monday, isn’t there ?—

  —Yes, but I’ve got permission for a visit today.—

  —It’s virtually on your way back.—

  The mansion and garden of the early nineteen-hundreds to which the cottage belonged had been expropriated for a freeway that was being delayed by ratepayers’ objections; in the meantime the cottage was let without official tenure at an address that no longer existed.

  The wavy galvanized iron roof was painted blue and so were the railings of the wooden verandah. From an abandoned tennis court brilliant with glossy weeds a mournful bird presaged rain. The bauhinia tree lifted from shrubs and ornamental palms become a green-speared jungle; the two rooms were sunk in it like a hidden pool. It was safe and cosy as a c
hild’s playhouse and sexually arousing as a lovers’ hideout. It was nowhere.

  She came in out of the sun and the traffic of the highway straight from the prison and he got up from some dim piece of furniture where he made no pretence not to have been lying, probably all afternoon, and kept her standing just within the doorway, rubbing himself against her. The directness of the caress was simply the acting-out, in better and more appropriate circumstances, of what was happening in the coffee-bar. Desire can be very comforting. Lying with the vulnerable brassy smell of a stranger’s hair close to her breathing, she saw flies swaying a mobile beneath a paper concertina lantern, the raised flower pattern within the counted squares of a lead ceiling over-patterned with shadows cast from the garden, his watch, where his hand lay on her, showing the time—exactly one hour and twenty minutes since she had been sitting on the bench on the visitors’ side of the wire grille that fragmented her father’s face as the talk of other prisoners and their visitors broke the sequence of whatever he was trying to tell her.

  —Lucky to find a place like this. It’s what everybody always looks for.—

  —Easy. Convincing the rich old girl or old guy who owns it is the only trouble. They’d have a black if it was allowed to have blacks living in, because you can control a black, he’s got to listen to you. But a white who will live in a shack like this will always be young and have no money. They’re afraid you’ll push drugs or be politically subversive, make trouble. When I said I worked at the race-course that was okay; the kind of honest living they understand, although not socially acceptable to them, at least part of the servicing of their kind of pleasures. You keep your mouth shut about university, they don’t trust students at all. Not that I blame them. Anyway, suits me. If I can finish the bloody thesis and make my hundred, hundred-and-fifty a week among those crooks and suckers at the race-course, I’ll push off to Mexico.—

  —Mexico now! Why Mexico!—

  He got up, stretched naked, yawned so that his penis bobbed and the yawn became a cat’s grin. He put the flat of his hand on some books on a brass tray with a rickety stand.—No good reason for people who must have good reasons. If I read poetry or novels I like then I want to go and live in the country the writer knows. I mean I just want to know what he knows...—

  —Lend me something.—

  She tried the names on the books he handed her.—Octavio Paz. Carlos Fuentes.—

  He corrected the pronunciation.

  —Ah, you’ve learnt Spanish ?—

  He came over and touched a breast as one might adjust the angle of a picture.—There’s a girl giving me a few lessons.—

  She would not have noticed if he had no longer been about; if he had disappeared at any time during the seven months of her father’s trial, she would simply have assumed he had gone off to Mexico or wherever. In fact, once when, chin on hands across the table among friends and hangers-on, at tea-break while an observer from the International Council of Jurists was commenting on some aspect of the morning’s proceedings, he looked up at her under his eyebrows and raised a hand in salute, she recognized the greeting of someone who has been away and signals his return. He took a lift back with her to Johannesburg. He was one of those people who usually wait for the other to begin to talk. The Defence evidence in the afternoon had gone badly; there was nothing to say, nothing. She was aware, in the presence of another in the car, only of actions that usually are performed automatically, the play of the tendons on the back of her hand as she shifted the gear-stick, the sag of her elbows on the steering-wheel, and her glance between the rear-view mirror and the road ahead.—How was it ?—

  —What was ?—With an edge of challenge to her preoccupation.

  Her voice went light with embarrassment.—You’ve been—where ?—Cape Town... ?—

  —You’re always so polite, aren’t you. Just like your father. He never gets rattled. No matter what that slimy prosecutor with his histrionics throws at him. Never loses his cool.—

  She smiled at the road ahead.

  —You must’ve been very well brought up. No slanging matches and banging doors in the Burger house. Everybody marvellously up-tight.—

  —Lionel’s like that. Outraged, yes. I’ve seen him outraged. But he doesn’t lose his temper. He can be angry without losing his temper...never, I don’t remember even once when we were little... It’s not put on, he just is naturally sympathetic in his manner.—

  —Marvellously up-tight.—

  She smiled and shrugged.

  —The old girl this afternoon. She was a friend ?—

  —Sort of.—

  —Sort of. Poor old girl. Trembling and snivelling and looking down sideways all the time so she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Not just the eyes, she couldn’t let herself see even the toe of his shoe. You could tell that. And saying everything they’d got out of her, dirtying herself... All in front of him. I watched Number One accused. He just looked at her, listening like anyone. He wasn’t disgusted.—

  —She’s been detained for nearly a year.—The driver must have felt her passenger studying her.—She’s broken.—

  —She was a bloody disaster for your father today. What is this—Christ-like compassion ?—

  —He knows what’s happened to her. That’s all.—

  Her consciousness of the set of her profile made it impossible for him to say: And you ?

  To make him comfortable, she gave an aside half-smile, half-grimace. —Not ‘well brought up’, just used to things.—

  The day her father was sentenced he would have been there, the narrow face pale as a Chinese mandarin’s with the drooping moustache to match, ostentatiously ill-dressed to rile a stolid gaze of heavy police youths creaking in their buckled and buttoned encasement. She didn’t remember seeing him although it was true that she had slept with him once or twice. Family feeling overruled other considerations as at a wedding or funeral; an aunt—one of her father’s sisters—and uncle, and cousins from her mother’s side came to be with her despite the fact that they had never had anything to do with her father’s politics. As at a service in church, the family took the first row in court. The aunt and female cousins wore hats; she had with her in her pocket the blue, lilac and red paisley scarf she put on only when the court rose as the judge entered, each day of the two-hundred-and-seventeen of her father’s trial. All around, everywhere except the high ceiling where the fan propellers were still, there were faces. The well of the court was lined with bodies, bodies shifted and surged on the benches behind her, pushed up thigh against thigh, the walls were padded with standing policemen.

  He—her father was led up from cells below the court into the well, an actor, saviour, prize-fighter, entering the realm of expectation that awaits him. He was, of course, more ordinary and mortal than the image of him as he would be on this day had anticipated; a spike of hair stood away from his carefully-brushed crown, her hand went up to her own to smooth it for him. She saw that he saw his sister first, then the cousins; smiled at her, in remark of the family assembly, then deeply, for herself. Lionel Burger and her father, he gave his address from the dock. She knew what he was going to say because the lawyers had worked with him on the material and she herself had gone to the library to check a certain quotation he wanted. She heard him speaking aloud what she had read in his handwriting in the notes written in his cell. Nobody could stop him. The voice of Lionel Burger, her father, was being heard in public for the first time for seven years and for the last time, bearing testimony once and for all. He spoke for an hour. ‘...when as a medical student tormented not by the suffering I saw around me in hospitals, but by the subjection and humiliation of human beings in daily life I had seen around me all my life—a subjection and humiliation of live people in which, by my silence and political inactivity I myself took part, with as little say or volition on the victims’ side as there was in the black cadavers, always in good supply, on which I was learning the intricate wonder of the human body... When I was a student, I found a
t last the solution to the terrifying contradiction I had been aware of since I was a schoolboy expected to have nothing more troubling in my head than my position in the rugby team. I am talking of the contradiction that my people—the Afrikaner people—and the white people in general in our country, worship the God of Justice and practise discrimination on grounds of the colour of skin; profess the compassion of the Son of Man, and deny the humanity of the black people they live among. This contradiction that split the very foundations of my life, that was making it impossible for me to see myself as a man among men, with all that implies of consciousness and responsibility—in Marxism I found it was analysed in another way: as forces in conflict through economic laws. I saw that white Marxists worked side by side with blacks in an equality that meant taking on the meanest of tasks—tasks that incurred loss of income and social prestige and the risk of arrest and imprisonment—as well as sharing policy-making and leadership. I saw whites prepared to work under blacks. Here was a possible solution to injustice to be sought outside the awful fallibility in any self-professed morality I knew. For as a great African leader who was not a Communist has since said: “The white man’s moral standards in this country can only be judged by the extent to which he has condemned the majority of its population to serfdom and inferiority.”

  ‘...The Marxist solution is based on the elimination of contradiction between the form of social control and the economy: my Boer ancestors who trekked to found their agrarian republics, subjecting the indigenous peoples of tribal societies by the force of the musket against the assegai, were now in their turn resisting the economic forces that made their feudalistic form of social control obsolete. The white man had built a society that tried to contain and justify the contradictions of capitalist means of production and feudalist social forms. The resulting devastation I, a privileged young white, had had before my eyes since my birth. Black men, women and children living in the miseries of insecurity, poverty and degradation on the farms where I grew up, and in the “dark Satanic mills” of the industry that bought their labour cheap and disqualified them by colour from organizing themselves or taking part in the successive governments that decreed their lot as eternal inferiors, if not slaves....A change of social control in compatibility with the change in methods of production—known in Marxist language as “revolution”—in this I saw the answer to the racialism that was destroying our country then and—believe me! believe me!—is destroying it even more surely and systematically now. I could not turn away from that tragedy. I cannot now. I took up then the pursuit of the end to racialism and injustice that I have continued and shall continue as long as I live. I say with Luther: Here I stand. Ich kann nicht anders.’