Burger's Daughter Read online

  When we sat down to lunch the white woman lawyer was emphasizing the sociological aspects of legal cases referred to her—she is consultant to an advice bureau dealing mainly with coloured women, squatters, indigents—the prosecutions for incest, rape and desertion as an indictment of living conditions rather than individual criminal tendencies. Whom to punish, how to redress ? What she said was concisely analysed, true; her napkin-touched lips shaped and her hands with their pushed-back cuticles outlined human destruction. The smugness of her appearance was perhaps a defence against the self-defeating nature of the good work she did. In such company no one has the bad taste to point out this common characteristic of ‘working within the system’. We all listened respectfully under Flora’s eye; William with politeness that hopes it will do for admiration or whatever else is called for. The Indian lawyer exchanged a few professional anecdotes in the same context, with a slight change of emphasis—there were laws—did we know ?—laws still in force in Natal, whereby an Indian husband could have his wife imprisoned for adultery. A relic of the days when labourers imported from Gujerat were indentured to work in the sugar-cane fields, a perpetuation of the image of the South African Indian as eternally a foreigner in the country of his birth, living by mores that set his behaviour patterns apart. The general theme of conversation and the current preoccupation of Flora were the same. Mrs Eunice Harwood wanted to make black and white women aware of such rights as they had, over their children, their property and their person, for a start; Mrs Daphne Mhkonza was not only an economically-emancipated black, she was a black woman beating white businessmen with their own marked cards. In her mood of political ecumenism, Flora no doubt saw engagement in a struggle for black rights as a natural extension of the limits of the woman lawyer’s scrupulously constitutional commitment, and Mama Mkhonza’s recruitment to the system—Orde Greer would expect me to phrase it that way—as a raid upon it. The current ground of common cause was women’s liberation, the roast lamb was victualling Flora’s little caucus for a meeting that was going to take place that afternoon.

  —Where ?—If it’s true William has decreed Flora must stick to harmless liberal activities these days, he felt obliged to show some interest in them.

  She put down her knife and fork and opened her eyes at him, smiling round to draw everyone into the spectacle:—Here, my darling, here. In your house.—The coquettish wifely frankness was that of a woman who no longer has adultery to conceal and enjoys displaying an innocent flirtation. Let him be grateful it was only to be a meeting that was to be there, in his house, quite harmless, too innocuous, maybe, to provide anything much of interest to BOSS, whose man—or rather woman, on this occasion—certainly would be present as a matter of routine observation of any assertion of common purpose between whites and blacks.

  And of course I was to be drawn in, too—that was why I had been produced at lunch, although Flora knows quite well that as a named person my position at meetings is a delicate one. Someone like me may attend, so long as the purpose of the meeting is not to be construed as in any way political. One may take part in discussion, yes; but the contribution can’t be recorded in the minutes or reported in the press. Meanwhile surveillance has taken down what one has said. And if the subject touches upon political rights, for example the rights of women as our kind (the faithful and their faithful hangers-on, the Floras) see these: the oppression of black women primarily by race and only secondarily by sex discrimination... My attendance could bring me into court as a contravention; Flora offered her statement, prepared for this :—You’re William’s visitor, not mine. Mnh ? Isn’t that so ? Why shouldn’t she be ? You simply happened to turn up to see him while I was having a meeting in our livingroom.—

  It is true that her friends—of our kind—are old hands at breaking the minor hobbles of the restrictions on their lives. I should know as well as anyone how to make a nuisance of myself, using the courts as the only political platform I could get at, getting my name in the papers, starkly eloquent of the gag on my mouth I’ve inherited in the family tradition, since only my name—Lionel Burger’s daughter, last of that line—can be reported, not my ‘utterances’. That’s how they perceive her, people who read the name. I am a presence. In this country, among them. I do not speak. Except to you, out of a habit, formed in the dark in your cottage, that came late.

  William made objections, naturally. Rosa was not going to run any risk of being picked up just because of some damn meeting. I laughed to stop them bickering about me. Mrs Eunice Whatnot, her face worked-over as if it were a portrait rather than a face, looked at what a named person was like. Mama Mkhonza majestically bridled on my behalf.—Ter-rible. Honestly! These people! Really terrible. What do they want with a young girl ? Why can’t they leave you alone just to live!—

  —Like anyone else: I had undertaken to Brandt Vermeulen. And I could see, I alone, as I did the passport in the wardrobe, Flora’s meeting as what could stop me. I had only to jeer kindly at William’s fussing, come up to Flora’s expectations and sit in quietly among the women listening to the proceedings; stand up and have my say. I have faith in BOSS; one of the faces, not so easy to pick out as the men’s usually are, but surely there, would make a note of the presence—my presence. Unknown to anyone the passport in the wardrobe nobody knew about would be listed invalid by the Department of the Interior. The police would demand its surrender forthwith. I could give it back without having used it. Maybe there wouldn’t be any charge or court appearance; simply the demand for the passport, their side of the bargain withdrawn.

  —They’ll be a mixed crowd of females. God knows. All kinds, I hope. But concerned. We’ve more or less restricted it to representatives of various organizations, with a few outstanding individuals, old Daphne Mkhonza, yes—we don’t just want a lot of do-gooders and church women, we must drop white urban values and rope in some of the toughies with guts, the flamboyant ones. I wish the shebeen queens would come; and white prostitutes—why not? I don’t delude myself we’ll reach the radical black girls in the student movements, though I’ve got a hopeful contact or two for Turfloop and the Western Cape. Never mind. Even if we can close up a bit—close the hiatus between the politically-aware young women, those smashing black girls with the holoha hairdos—don’t you love the way they look? That sort of ‘Topsy, and fuck-you’—and the ordinary black woman. Get her to regard herself as someone who can do something again, you’re too young to remember, but the women’s movement in the ANC was a force—and at the same time get these white suburban good souls (basically, they’re really concerned) to tackle human rights as women...together... I think it’s possible to tap new resources, maybe—Eunice Harwood’s terrifyingly professional, isn’t she ?—Flora had me to herself for a quick briefing away from the others; we buttered scones.

  I kept out of the way while people were arriving; William and I sat with the cold coffee cups from lunch, in the little paved courtyard Flora has made off the diningroom, hearing car doors bang and the eager pitch of welcome, the breathy laughter and African organ-note murmur of polite responses, and the enumerative intoning by which introductions could be recognized without names being audible to us. Both too comfortable—too marginal—to get up, he to demonstrate, I to see for myself, we discussed pointing from our chairs how he decided which shoots to train where on the plants he has espaliered against the walls.—Don’t you think pomegranates hanging down, that red against the white-wash... I want to have a go with a pomegranate. You’ve seen those miles of peach and pear espaliered on frames along the roads of the Po valley—considerate William at once shifted the tactless reference to the ease with which he could go about the world, making over the question into a small marital joke—Don’t see why it’s any more unnatural for a pomegranate to be trained to grow in a regular pattern, do you ? Flora keeps accusing me, but then so’s it ‘unnatural’ to prune any tree.—The arrivals seemed all to be behind doors, now; each catching the other’s eye, we giggled quietly.—Quite a mo
b.—William assumes in me an affectionate tolerance like his own, for Flora’s activities, which he himself is supposed to have circumscribed. When I put down my section of the Guardian Weekly we were sharing and went indoors he looked across from the sheets he held but said nothing. The moment in which he might have questioned where I was going was really made by me; I caught myself, an instant almost of shame, in the misreading his concern would be victim of. But I had always made free of their home; I might just as well be going upstairs for a doze on the bed in ‘my’ room or to the downstairs lavatory with the Amnesty International poster for contemplation on the back of the door.

  I skirted Flora’s assembly and sat down at the back. The meeting had just begun. After the cube of courtyard sun, dark breathing splotches furred with light transformed the big livingroom. Everyone—I began to see them properly—bunched together in the middle and back seats, the black women out of old habit of finding themselves allotted secondary status and the white ones out of anxiety not to assume first place. Flora’s gay and jostling objections started a screech of chairs, general forward-shuffle and talk; I was all right where I was—her quick attention took me in, a bird alert from the height of a telephone pole. After the addresses of the white woman lawyer and a black social welfare officer, a pretty, syrup-eyed Indian with a soft roll of midriff flesh showing in her seductive version of the dress of Eastern female subjection, spoke about uplift and sisterhood. Flora kept calling upon people—masterly at pronouncing African names—to speak from the floor. Some were trapped hares in headlights but there were others who sat forward on the hired chairs straining to attract attention. A white-haired dame with the queenly coy patience of an old charity chairwoman kept holding up a gilt ballpoint. Along my half-empty row a black woman urged between the whispers of two friends could not be got to speak.

  In respectful silences for the weakness of our sex, the flesh that can come upon any of us as women, black matrons were handed slowly, backside and belly, along past knees to the table where Flora had a microphone rigged up. Others spoke from where they sat or stood, suddenly set apart by the gift of tongues, while the faces wheeled to see. The old white woman’s crusade turned out to be road safety, a campaign in which ‘our Bantu women must pull together with us’—she trembled on in the sweet, chuckly voice of a deaf upper-class Englishwoman while Flora tried to bring the discourse to an end with flourishing nods. A redhead whose expression was blurred by freckles floral as her dress asked passionately that the meeting launch a Courtesy Year to promote understanding between the races. She had her slogan ready, SMILE AND SAY THANKS. There was a soft splutter of tittering crossed by a groan of approval like some half-hearted response in church, but a young white woman jumped up with fists at her hips—Thank you for what ? Maybe the lady has plenty to thank for. But was the object of action for women to make black women ‘thankful’ for the hovels they lived in, the menial jobs their men did, the inferior education their children got ? Thankful for the humiliation dealt out to them by white women living privileged, protected lives, who had the vote and made the laws—And so on and so on. I saw her falter, lose concentration as three black girls in jeans who had only just come in got up and walked out as if they had come to the wrong place. A white woman had thrust up an arm for permission to speak—We don’t need to bring politics into the fellowship of women.—Applause from the group with whom she sat. Black matrons ignored both the white girl and black girls, busily briefing each other in the susurrations and gutturals, clicks and quiet exclamations of their own languages. They responded only to the sort of housewives’ league white ladies who stuck to health services and ‘commodity price rises in the family budget’ as practical problems that were women’s lot, like menstruation, and did not relate them to any other circumstances. The black ladies’ fear of drawing attention as ‘agitators’ and the white ladies’ determination to have ‘nothing to do’ with the politics that determined the problems they were talking about, made a warmth that would last until the teacups cooled. Dressed in their best, one after another, black women in wigs and two-piece dresses pleaded, were complaining, opportuning for the crèches, orphans, blind, crippled or aged of their ‘place’. They asked for ‘old’ cots, ‘old’ school primers, ‘old’ toys and furniture, ‘old’ braille typewriters, ‘old’ building material. They had come through the front door but the logic was still of the back door. They didn’t believe they’d get anything but what was cast-off; they didn’t, any of them, believe there was anything else to be had from white women, it was all they were good for.

  And all the time those blacks like the elderly one near me, in her doek with Thursday church badges pinned to it, a piece cut out of her left shoe to ease a bunion, a cardigan smelling of coal-smoke and a shopping bag stuffed with newspaper parcels, listened to no one; were there; offered only their existence, as acknowledgment of speakers, listeners and the meaning of the gathering. It was enough. They didn’t know why they were there, but as cross-purpose and unimaginable digressions grew louder with each half-audible, rambling or dignified or unconsciously funny discourse, clearer with each voluble inarticulacy, each clumsy, pathetic or pompous formulation of need in a life none of us white women (careful not to smile at broken English) live or would know how to live, no matter how much Flora protests the common possession of vaginas, wombs and breasts, the bearing of children and awful compulsive love of them—the silent old blacks still dressed like respectable servants on a day off, although they were sitting in Flora’s room, these were everything Flora’s meeting was not succeeding to be about. The cosmetic perfumes of the middle-class white and black ladies and the coal-smoke and vaginal odours of old poor black women—I shifted on the hard chair, a deep breath in Flora’s livingroom took this draught inside me.

  Flora touched my hand in passing as we were led into the room where tea was laid out but resisted the temptation to introduce me to anyone and did not even address me by name. There were a few among the black women who knew me, or whom I knew as people who had worked with my mother, in the days of the co-operative. They didn’t recognize me, Mrs Cathy Burger’s schoolgirl, as a white woman. Among the white women, I saw recognition of my face only in the look of the girl who had leapt up to attack the white members of the meeting—a freelance journalist, Flora mentioned. She did a lot of scribbling on a note-pad. Perhaps she was the one, the one who would have marked my presence for BOSS o s; an attractive girl with an irreverent expression, in a black leather jacket and ivory and elephant-hair bracelets—if her ‘provocative’ speech had been meant to encourage others to reveal subversive tendencies it had not succeeded in that gathering. She was eating scones and drinking tea like the rest; as other people receiving their retainer had enjoyed their boerewors among my father’s associates and friends at the swimming-pool. When people began to leave there was the usual problem about who, among the few blacks with cars, could give a lift to whom. There were muddles; some people had left without the complement of passengers they’d brought. William was called from upstairs and went off with a car-load to Soweto. I asked Flora if I could give anyone a lift. Her eyes moved quickly.—But where ?—I suppose I moved a hand or shoulders.—Perhaps if you could take a couple of women just to the entrance to the townships, or maybe even only to a convenient station—if you are driving that way, anyway... —She put her arm on mine, seduced, and spoke in my ear like a lover—But Rosa—not inside, don’t go being persuaded to run anyone home to her house, for Christ sake, please, d’you hear me—

  Yet where could she have thought I would be going that was ‘on the way’ out towards any black townships, now that I had a passport in my wardrobe ? Prescient about what she did not know, she was preoccupied with concern at the temptation presented. She looked suddenly alone among her knot of smiling, hand-shaking women; she watched me go with a vividness of attention secret to me.

  During those days, that whole time, many months, since I had suddenly begun to go to Pretoria but not to the prison, I did thi
ngs without a connection made by intention or decision. When three women had fitted themselves and their trappings out of the way so that the two doors of my old car could close, I was going to drop them off somewhere because I was on my way to Marisa. I had avoided her without Brandt Vermeulen needing to mention the precaution. Flora was right. My direction existed. I had not spoken —had not ‘uttered’—at the meeting but I felt—can’t explain—released from responsibility for myself, my actions, the way I imagine a gambler must feel when he exchanges the last contents of his wallet, down to the lining of his pockets, for a pile of chips and pushes them over the baize. What will be lost is only money; what would be lost was only a passport. It was all external, had nothing to do with, did not match any category of what has really happened to me in my life. Marisa was the one I should have been going to say goodbye to, if I had not been going to be stopped. I try to sort this out in some order, now, of present and future; of logic; it didn’t have or need any. You’ll understand, you’ll approve: one knows best what one’s doing when one doesn’t know what it is.

  Of course Flora was right. An old mama who had confidently lied about where she really lived, climbing into the seat beside me with agreement that her destination was the same as the others’, announced when they got out that a bus stop was no good to her at all, she had needed to get to Faraday Station; and even that was no good, she was afraid of tsotsis on the Saturday trains. Composedly sure I would drive her home to her house now that she was in my car, it was natural to her that I did.

  She didn’t live in an official township at all but in one of those undefined areas between black men’s hostels and the mine-dumps on the outskirts of the city. Small industries have taken over the property of worked-out gold mines, the hollows are mass graves for wrecked cars and machine parts, the old pepper trees are shade for shebeens, and prostitutes lie down for customers in the sand of the dumps. There were still hawkers’ mules tethered in grazed circumferences of tin-littered veld; a tiny corrugated-iron church with broken windows, and a peach-tree half hacked-away for firewood; in abandoned cottages that had once belonged to white miners, and in the yards built up with shelters made of materials gathered from the bull-dozed mine compounds and the brick shells of concession stores, people were living in what had been condemned and abandoned by the white city. This was the ‘place’; she assured me it would do to stop anywhere on the switchback I was driving between dongas and boulders of the tracks that bound bricks, tin and smoke. God would bless me: with this she went off with her stolid side-to-side gait through bicycles and listing taxis hooting at her. Perhaps she didn’t really live there—she looked much too respectable for this sort of den existing on the sale of sex and drink to factory workers and railway-yard labourers. It’s impossible to say; for Flora’s white women to imagine where on earth they come from, these neat black ladies they meet in Flora’s house. Probably the old mother thought she’d take advantage of the provision of a car and driver and go and visit an out-of-the-way friend—why not ?