Burger's Daughter Read online

  Only in May did the other meaning in his remark—It’s what’ll be asked, my girl ?—become operative.

  —Of course, I imagine the last thing you’ll feel like is getting together with the whole clutch of exiles. In London and so on.—Brandt Vermeulen pulled a respectfully bored face?—The old crowd.—

  Rosa Burger smiled slowly; merely tolerantly, he decided, and he went on.—No, of course not. A holiday. That’s what I’ve assured...—And then he looked at her for a moment not to be gone back on. She said nothing but the corners of her soft mouth were compressed and her chin jutted as she took the compact steadily. —Good. And while we’re about it—maybe the papers overseas will sniff you out.—

  —I shouldn’t think so.—She did not regard herself as interesting.

  —Oh yes. In England—apartheid victim’s daughter visits Tower of London, you know the style of thing—

  She was shaking her head, chin still forward; to him reassuring, a peculiarly Afrikaner mannerism, typical as a Frenchman’s shrug.

  —It’s understood you won’t be giving any press interviews. You don’t want publicity, it’s not your style, no. That’s all right ? Now I won’t make any commitment—I’m not going to give any undertakings you aren’t quite clear about, quite happy with. Then that’s fine; I’m satisfied. I just hope others will be—He gave his playful, encouraging grin.

  —Is there anything else ?—

  Her conscientiousness made him optimistic.—No. I think things are moving. It’s sensible, on both sides...—He was quoting an argument he had put forward, somewhere.—We don’t lack confidence, we don’t have to be revengeful, isn’t that so ? You don’t have to be kept prisoner like the Russians do to their dissident families from generation to generation. If there’s anything else, I’ll tell you, I’ll be open. Oh—just one small point—your brother—you’ve got a half-brother ?—

  —Yes—

  —You won’t be seeing him ?—

  —If I get a South African passport it won’t gain me entry to Tanzania, will it.—

  —No, no, but he isn’t likely to be in Europe somewhere ?—

  —I hadn’t thought about contacting him at all.—

  —Then no problem, no problem.—He didn’t want to raise her hopes too high, but sometimes when they had been talking of other things (he kept up with vogue movements in European and American thought, once explaining Monod’s theory of chance and necessity, another time something of Piaget and structuralism—It’s fascinating—or the writings of Galbraith and B. F. Skinner) he even spoke of addresses he must give her, people she must look up, his good friends.

  It was over a year after her first visit to Brandt Vermeulen that Rosa Burger was given a passport. The document was valid for one year, and for the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, but not the Scandinavian countries, Holland or the United States. She told nobody what she had in her possession. She resigned her job with the Barry Eckhard organization without explanation. She said goodbye to no one, except just possibly Marisa. Surveillance was not sure. She said nothing to Flora and William Donaldson, and had not seen Aletta or the Terblanches for many weeks—the two Terblanche women were released from detention but both placed under banning orders. She had no relationship with a man permanent enough, at the time, to require a parting. Not even the Sunday papers discovered she was going; no one but the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of State Security and Brandt Vermeulen (she did not say goodbye to him; it was tacitly understood that he should not have any personal connection with her departure, once it was assured) knew she now had a passport.

  It was issued counter to the express advice and instruction of BOSS who could not understand how it could have been granted at all, and therefore disclaimed all further responsibility for the security risk involved. The case became one of those that create interdepartmental hostility and rivalry. Yet nothing could be done to stop her. Rosa Burger sat unrecognized in the departure lounge of the airport early on a Sunday morning. Her legs in jeans and boots showed under the opened newspaper that covered her face but did not hide her; when the boarding call came, the girl lowered the paper and listened as if it were a private summons, only for her. She tramped slowly across the tarmac, disappeared in the shadow of the plane’s wing and—there she was—appeared again in the sun. She climbed the metal stairway to the darker shadow of the door, not turning to look back. Surveillance watched her go in.

  I do not even know if you are alive. I read of a yacht that has disappeared between Durban and Mauritius. There are photographs of the girls on deck in bikinis ‘recalling the high spirits in which the home-built craft set out’ only weeks before. Bits of wreckage seen drifting, currents apart, suggest unpreparedness for what could happen: the striped balloon that marked the position of a spear-fisherman, floating from a broken cord, a plastic ice-bucket still decorated with varnished liquor labels washed up among rotting seaweed and flies. At sea, at sea; to circumnavigate is to end up no farther than you started. The world round as your navel. Your contemplation of it in the cottage doesn’t serve me any more. I am like my father—the way they say my father was. I discover I can take from people what I need. But I am aware I don’t have his justification; only the facility’s my inheritance—my dowry, if any man is interested.

  Till the last minute, I expected to be stopped. When the boarding call came I put down the morning paper: now: now as I get up the young policeman blinking at the door with his lanyard and revolver and walkie-talkie crackling will ask me to stand aside. I could have stopped early on, before I started, so to speak. The first people I tried were frightened of me; I felt they couldn’t have me gone quick enough to wipe my footmarks from the front stoep. Those who were not afraid had no power. I could have given up. It is impossible to decide in advance whether a man like him has sufficient influence. Impossible to find out whether he is in the Broederbond or not. Though perhaps I should have asked him! I’m the one person he might have answered ?

  The strange thing is, my father had the same kind of illusion about Brandt Vermeulen as he has about my father. Except that my father placed it as something in the past, a lost opportunity, not something that might have come about in one or other of their respective utopias. Lionel shook his head in dry wonderment at the exegesis of apartheid with which Brandt Vermeulen enlightened Rotary Clubs and political seminars.—Man !—he won’t scruple to invoke Kierkegaard’s Either/Or against Hegel’s dialectic to demonstrate the justice of segregated lavatories...—But at the same time Lionel thought Brandt Vermeulen a casualty of his historical situation; with his intelligence, he should by rights have opted for the Future and not the volk. I might have had this in the back of my mind when I went to him. Anyway, I found he was not afraid.

  Not afraid; fascinated. The state of fascination can be a function of vanity. Even the timid woman who betrayed my father was drawn into fascination by an idea of herself as spirited as she would have liked to be, she got from him. Brandt—how quickly he became ‘Brandt’ and how much it pleased him—was cautious, out of shrewdness, out of care to avoid bungle by haste and lack of strategy, but this was always outweighed by the fascination—not with me, the female thing not at all, but with what he was doing. There I was, final proof of his eclecticism, sitting—at last—in his house beside the torso with the transverse vagina, Burger’s daughter named for Rosa Luxemburg and Ouma Marie Burger. I saw, as I continued to present myself there before him, a passport for me would set him free of his last doubts. I offered myself to provide his chance to prove that the volk, become a powerful state in spite of my father and his kind, had no need to fear that in my father which hasn’t died, and which Brandt chose to see in me; to prove that an individualist like Brandt Vermeulen could continue to be committed to the volk without sacrificing ‘broad sympathies’ and ‘wide understanding’ ; that ‘pettiness and narrow, punitive restraint’ had gone down to the basement of the state museum along with Whites Only park bench signs that used to give the cou
ntry such a bad press abroad.

  I hoped to be stopped. ‘Détente’ (mispronounced and misappropriated) made my passport possible. Brandt Vermeulen wanted to believe in ‘the new dynamic’ as he preferred to call it; I sat in his lovely old house, one of the exhibits; if he could get a passport for Burger’s daughter to travel like anyone else—if Burger’s daughter was willing to travel like anyone else—who could say the regime was not showing signs of moving in the direction of change ?

  When the 24th April came (I know you dislike my habit of naming private events with public dates, but public events so often are decisive ones in my life) I thought I would be stopped. There would be an end of it. Half the white wall fell in on itself; the Portuguese were done for. Dick had not been projecting himself too far into the Future when he talked to me through the car window many months before. But by this time Brandt was deeply committed to his kind of freedom. He had told me how much importance he placed on the human scale of policy action (the succinct phrases are his); that meant that when one has found the Kierkegaardian idea for which one must live or die, one must support its policy passionately in theory and at the same time take on the job of personal, practical, daily responsibility for its interpretation and furtherance. He gave me an informal luncheon-type address on the honourable evolution of Dialogue, begining with Plato, the dialogue with self, and culminating in ‘the Vorster initiative’, the dialogue of peoples and nations. With me he was self-engaged in that responsibility on the human scale; for him, his afternoons with Rosa were ‘Dialogue’ in practice.

  Others, less fastidious-minded than he, pursue the human scale in the rooms supplied with only the basic furnishings of interrogation, winning over enemies brought out of solitary confinement to stand on their feet until they drop, kicked, beaten, doused and terrorized into submission. When I stood watching the wasp delicately plastering its nest for the seconds before the front door was opened to me, I was entering each time a place that didn’t exist for my father and that he would never have put me in, never, although he sent me to prisons; that he would never have set foot in himself, although I had inherited from him and from my mother the necessity of deviousness wily enough to get myself there—a place where a meeting was possible between those for whom skin is an absolute value and those for whom it is not a value at all; a place whose shameful existence recognizes a possibility of there being anything to say between migrant miners, factory workers, homeless servants, landless peasants, and the class and colour that lives on them. Peace. Land. Bread. But Brandt knows only the long words—ethnic advancement, separate freedoms, multilateral development, plural democracy. To show the world how South Africa ‘beleaguered by hostile states on her own borders’, imprisons and detains only those who actively threaten her safety from within, it was more necessary than ever for her to prove her good faith in continuing daytant through the right concessionary gestures at home. It was necessary for Brandt to stand firm, with his friends in high places, over the bargain of Burger’s daughter. She had accepted that she would contact no one who counted, abroad; she would not even go to Holland or Scandinavia, where anti-apartheid and Freedom Fighter support groups were most active, and her Communist background effectively debarred her from the United States, where black American lobbies would have sought her support for economic boycotts.

  Nothing stopped me. Until the very last week I still thought I would stop myself. It’s difficult to believe that being too detached to see myself interesting to newspapers could have turned into a guarantee not to be interviewed by the hostile foreign press. It’s only too easy to be cold to the prospect of meetings in London with my father’s old associates in exile, who would receive me expectant as the old Terblanches and their daughter are; it hardly seemed to constitute an undertaking. And all I had to say about my brother, my father’s other son, was to observe that a South African passport isn’t recognized in Tanzania. The remark put him as far from me as if he too drowned as a child, or like Baasie, my little kaffertjie, disappeared into some room, some black township, some prison, maybe, where I can’t catch up.

  After I had taken the passport, after I’d gone—I don’t know what they said: the faithful. They would surely never have believed it of me. Perhaps they got out of believing it by substituting the explanation that I had gone on instructions, after all, instructions so daring and secret not even anyone among themselves would know. So my inactivity for so long would present them with a purpose they had always hoped for, for my sake. And by what means I had managed to get papers—that was simply a tribute to the lengths a revolutionary must go. I think about what they must be thinking. Listen to me—Conrad, whatever I may have said to you about them, however they may have seemed to me since I have been free of them, they are the ones who matter.

  A donkey. The real reason why I went is something only you would believe. In fact, only if you believe will it become believable, to me. I recognize it as part of the way my life has been coded, since you forced me to read such things in the cottage; but the code is my own, not yours, not theirs. A donkey. A donkey. A matter for the SPCA. Lionel loved animals almost sentimentally, he set the leg of a seagull with sellotape when we were camping at Quagga Mouth when we were children; my mother thought too many people in our country who cared for animals had no care for people—she herself had none over, for beasts. A meths drinker dead on a park bench. A matter for the Social Welfare Department. These are the things that move me now—when I say ‘move’ I don’t mean tears or anger. I mean a sudden shift, a tumultuous upheaval, an uncontrollable displacement, concepts whose surface has been insignificant heaving over, up-ended, raised as huge boulders smelling of the earth that still clings to them. A shift that comes to me physically, as intestines violently stir and contract when some irritant throws a switch in the digestive tract. Earth, guts—I don’t know what metaphors to use to describe the process by which I’m making my own metaphors for suffering.

  I had the passport on the shelf in the wardrobe. In the leather collar-box with the medical corps brass serpents and my father’s watch—I have given away everything of his that might continue to be of use to others, even his medical library, but the only person I’d have liked to have had the watch was Baasie, and I don’t know where to find him. The passport was there the day I went to Flora Donaldson for lunch. I thought of it while Flora stood carving the leg of lamb, her voice pitched to penetrate the several conversations at table.—Well-done, pinkish ?—would anyone prefer quince jelly to mint sauce—There was childish satisfaction in imagining how she would react (point of knife in air with a bit of meat dangling, face excruciatingly mobile between amazement, curiosity, and indecision whether to be delighted or shocked) if she were to know. She would probably have decided celebration was the correct reaction : everybody! we have news—William was the one who had been offended by the suggestion, when she was busy managing my life for me just after Lionel died, that I would ever consider leaving the country. He isn’t really one of our kind but he understands what it means to be one, whereas good old Flora is an amateur in her perceptions as well as her acts. A talented and brave one, sometimes; the faithful have to be alert for adventurism among themselves, but it can be made use of when it is found in the temperament of others —it was Flora who had Nelson Mandela successfully hidden in her wine cellar when he went in and out of the country illegally before the Rivonia Trial. What her husband William sees in me when I am sitting (a daughter of the house, Flora likes to think of me: Lionel Burger’s daughter) on his right at table, is a professional, like my father.

  Flora didn’t say it was going to be a lunch party. She’d implied wistfully she and William and I had not had a quiet talk and a meal together, just us, for too long. There were three other people; a handsome, semitic-looking Indian lawyer from Durban (for me ?—he was allotted to my right at table), a white woman lawyer so perfectly groomed she appeared to be under glaze; and Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, a vast expanse of navy blue crimplene, patent shoes, gilt cos
tume jewellery, like an Afrikaans cabinet minister’s wife at the opening of Parliament. Flora still manages to have these 1960s mixed lunch parties although it must be difficult to find blacks, now, who will come to them.

  Mrs Mkhonza is often ‘featured’ in the women’s pages of white newspapers as an example of what black people can achieve despite their disadvantages. She is one of the rare black petty capitalists—what Marisa’s cousin Fats would call a tycoon, who somehow manages to circumvent some of the laws that prevent blacks from trading on a scale that makes white tycoons. She has petrol service station concessions all over the Transvaal black areas, general stores and—Marisa adds to the story of success and enterprise—is a rent racketeer, obtaining leasehold over township housing by bribing officials, and then profitably letting out rooms in her slum yards to people for whom influx control makes it hopeless to expect to find somewhere to live legitimately. Marisa herself sometimes uses Mama Mkhonza, when it is urgent to find ‘somewhere to stay’ for one whose presence in Soweto is not open; Mrs Daphne Mkhonza may be an exploiter of blacks, following the example of the whites who admire her self-improvement initiative, but she’s also a black woman: she’s accepted, like the black policemen.