Burger's Daughter Read online

  I was miles from where Marisa lived, from where I could go to her cousin Fats’ place and send someone to see if I could slip into her house by way of yards. I wasn’t even sure how to get across to the township without going all the way back through town. There was a woman with a tin of live coal selling roast mealies and I got out of the car to go over and ask directions of her. She didn’t know. Orlando might have been at the other end of the world. The ribbed papery husks stripped from cobs made a thick mat all round her, under the soles of my shoes as it was under bare feet when Tony, the other Marie and I pranced with black farm kids around the thresher on Uncle Coen’s farm. I made for a gang of black children and youths now, the little ones dancing and jumping among excited dogs to touch a bike with ram’s-horn racing handles, a young chap astride it in the centre of other adolescents sharing smokes and a half-jack of something wrapped in brown-paper. I called to them but they only catcalled and laughed back in wolf-whistle falsetto. I was approaching—smiling, no, be serious for a moment, tell me—I heard the hard ring of struck metal and saw the fall of a stone that had hit my old car. I drove away while they went on laughing and yelling as if I were at once prey and a girl for teasing. I took wheel-tracks deep enough to be well used that seemed to lead over the veld to a road away on the rise in the right direction. The hump of dead grass down the middle swished against the belly of the car and now and then the oil-sump scraped hard earth. The track went on and on. I was caught on the counter-system of communications that doesn’t appear on the road-maps and provides access to ‘places’ that don’t appear on any plan of city environs. I was obstinate, sure the track would be crossed by one that led to the main road somewhere ; there was a cemetery half a kilometre across the veld with the hired buses as prominent as sudden buildings, and the mass of black people and black umbrellas like the heap of some dark crop standing on the pale open veld, that mark a Saturday funeral. I gained a cambered dirt road without signposts just as one of those donkey-carts that survive on the routes between these places that don’t exist was approaching along a track from the opposite side. Driver’s reflex made me slow down in anticipation that the cart might turn in up ahead without calculating the speed of an oncoming car. But there was something strange about the outline of donkey, cart and driver; convulsed, yet the cart was not coming nearer. As I drew close I saw a woman and child bundled under sacks, their heads jerked rocking; a driver standing up on the cart in a wildly precarious spread of legs in torn pants. Suddenly his body arched back with one upflung arm against the sky and lurched over as if he had been shot and at that instant the donkey was bowed by a paroxysm that seemed to draw its four legs and head down towards the centre of its body in a noose, then fling head and extremities wide again; and again the man violently salaamed, and again the beast curved together and flew apart.

  I didn’t see the whip. I saw agony. Agony that came from some terrible centre seized within the group of donkey, cart, driver and people behind him. They made a single object that contracted against itself in the desperation of a hideous final energy. Not seeing the whip, I saw the infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishment without the ravisher, torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it. The entire ingenuity from thumbscrew and rack to electric shock, the infinite variety and gradation of suffering, by lash, by fear, by hunger, by solitary confinement—the camps, concentration, labour, resettlement, the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island, Lionel propped wasting to his skull between two warders, the deaths by questioning, bodies fallen from the height of John Vorster Square, deaths by dehydration, babies degutted by enteritis in ‘places’ of banishment, the lights beating all night on the faces of those in cells—Conrad—I conjure you up, I drag you back from wherever you are to listen to me—you don’t know what I saw, what there is to see, you won’t see, you are becalmed on an empty ocean.

  Only when I was level with the cart, across the veld from me, did I make out the whip. The donkey didn’t cry out. Why didn’t the donkey give that bestial snort and squeal of excruciation I’ve heard donkeys give not in pain but in rut ? It didn’t cry out.

  It had been beaten and beaten. Pain was no shock, there is no way out of the shafts. That rag of a black man was old, from the stance of his legs, the scraggle of beard showing under an old hat in a shapeless cone over his face. I rolled to a stop beyond what I saw; the car simply fell away from the pressure of my foot and carried me no farther. I sat there with my head turned sharply and my shoulders hunched round my neck, huddled to my ears against the blows. And then I put my foot down and drove on wavering drunkenly about the road, pausing to gaze back while the beating still went on, the force there, cart, terrified woman and child, the donkey and man, bucked and bolted zigzag under the whip. I had only to turn the car in the empty road and drive up upon that mad frieze against the sunset putting out my eyes. When I looked over there all I could see was the writhing black shape through whose interstices poked searchlights of blinding bright dust. The thing was like an explosion. I had only to career down on that scene with my car and my white authority. I could have yelled before I even got out, yelled to stop!—and then there I would have been standing, inescapable, fury and right, might, before them, the frightened woman and child and the drunk, brutal man, with my knowledge of how to deliver them over to the police, to have him prosecuted as he deserved and should be, to take away from him the poor suffering possession he maltreated. I could formulate everything they were, as the act I had witnessed; they would have their lives summed up for them officially at last by me, the white woman—the final meaning of a day they had lived I had no knowledge of, a day of other appalling things, violence, disasters, urgencies, deprivations which suddenly would become, was nothing but what it had led up to: the man among them beating their donkey. I could have put a stop to it, the misery; at that point I witnessed. What more can one do ? That sort of old man, those people, peasants existing the only way they know how, in the ‘place’ that isn’t on the map, they would have been afraid of me. I could have put a stop to it, with them, at no risk to myself. No one would have taken up a stone. I was safe from the whip. I could have stood between them and suffering—die suffering of the donkey.

  As soon as I planted myself in front of them it would have become again just that—the pain of a donkey.

  I drove on. I don’t know at what point to intercede makes sense, for me. Every week the woman who comes to clean my flat and wash my clothes brings a child whose make-believe is polishing floors and doing washing. I drove on because the horrible drunk was black, poor and brutalized. If somebody’s going to be brought to account, I am accountable for him, to him, as he is for the donkey. Yet the suffering—while I saw it it was the sum of suffering to me. I didn’t do anything. I let him beat the donkey. The man was a black. So a kind of vanity counted for more than feeling; I couldn’t bear to see myself—her—Rosa Burger—as one of those whites who can care more for animals than people. Since I’ve been free, I’m free to become one.

  I went without saying goodbye to Marisa.

  Someone threw a stone, yes. Perhaps one of the little ones with baby brothers or sisters humped on their backs, shouting voetsak! at the dogs, flung a stone not meant for me. If someone did report I’d been at a public meeting with a possible political intention, there were no consequences. Nothing and nobody stopped me from using that passport. After the donkey I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know how to live in Lionel’s country.

  Conrad. I did not tell you before. The yacht was never found. I may have been talking to a dead man: only to myself.

  Two

  To know and not to act is not to know.

  —Wang Yang-ming—

  The silk tent of morning sea tilted, pegged to keyhole harbours where boats nosed domestically like animals at
a trough; Vauban’s ancient fort squatted out to the water; two S-shaped buildings towered, were foreshortened, leaned this side and that of the wing, rose again. Lavender mountains with a snail-trail spittle of last winter’s snow swung a diagonal horizon across the fish-bowl windows. Down to earth, the plane laid itself on the runway as the seagulls (through convex glass under flak of droplets) breasted the sea beside it.

  Passengers who disperse from the last step of a plane’s stairway all hurry but their oncoming seems slowed, their legs don’t carry them, they’re seen through the horizontal waverings-away of a telescopic lens. The long last moment before anybody is recognizable : a woman tipped into her mouth the drop of melted sugar settled in the bottom of an espresso thimble and stood at the glass wall. Her eyes held the moving figures, her expression becoming an offering like a bunch of flowers held ready, but her head hawked forward in tense curiosity.

  She left the bar and hurried to the little crowd gathered at the barrier before the passport officers’ booths. Among the elegant homosexuals with bodies of twenty-year-olds and faces like statues of which only the head remains of the ancient original, the blonde with nipples staring through her shirt, the young man with a Siamese cat on a leash, the well-preserved women wearing gold chains and sharkskin pants attended by husbands and poodles, the demanding American children with wet gilt hair, the black-clad grandmothers borne up emotionally by daughters and the frilly infants held by young fathers in leather jackets, she was the one: rounded knuckles of cheekbone, brilliant blue dabs under clotted lashes, wrinkled made-up lids, tabby hair. The one with the neck rising elegantly although the bosom was big and she was low in the welcoming crowd—stocky, and when they could be seen the legs had the ex-dancer’s hard lumpy calves and fleshless ankles.

  Her gaze, pushing through the queue bunched behind the immigration booths, setting aside this one from that, passed over once and then returned, singled out. She was watching the approach of a girl sallow and composed with fatigue. The girl had curly hair—dark girl—and a look around the jaw, a set of the mouth (that was it: the woman’s expression deepened strongly) although the eyes were clear and light, not what she was looking for.

  They had seen each other. The understanding spun a thread along which they were being drawn together while the girl took her turn; almost at the immigration booth, now; now there, putting the green passport on the counter for an official hand to draw under the glass partition; bending suddenly to dig in the bulging sling-bag (a hitch ? a document missing ?—the woman craned on her toes.) The eyes-down face of someone under surveillance. A faint, sideways smile to the woman watching. (Nothing wrong; just the usual traveller’s start of anxiety that something has been remembered too late.) The girl was pushing the green passport into a pocket on the outside of the bag. She drew the zip firmly closed. She moved on, she was in: received. Coming across the few yards, through the barrier, the whole of her could be seen clear of other people, small girl with a sexy, ignored body (the mother had always somehow ignored her own beauty, found it of no account) dressed in the inevitable jeans outfit yet never in a thousand years would have passed for one of the young from yachts and hotels and villas wearing the same thing. Pretty. But not young-looking. A face seen on a child who looks like a woman.

  The corners of the mouth dented but the lips remained tightly closed, the strangely light eyes were fixed on the woman with an expression of self-amazement, as if the girl doubted her own existence at that moment, in that place.

  They had never seen one another before. The woman’s worn lilac-coloured espadrilles splayed sturdily in welcome. She held her arms in a wide tackle and her mouth was parted, smiling, smiling.

  The aircraft Rosa Burger boarded was bound for France. The destination on her ticket was Paris but after two nights in a small hotel where she did not unpack she flew back in the direction she had come from, south, to Nice. There she was met on a beautiful May morning by a Madame Bagnelli, who when she was very young had gone to the Sixth Congress in Moscow, had been or tried to be a dancer, was once married to Lionel Burger. She had a son by him living in Tanzania whom she had not seen since he was a student; she took his daughter home to her house in a medieval village, preserved to make money out of tourists, where—the people who had known her in South Africa heard—she had been living for years.

  She talked all the way above the noise of the old Citroen into which she settled herself like a sitting hen. There was an impression of speed beyond the car’s capacity, because of her style of driving and the jig of windows that opened like flaps. She had had a terrible feeling it was the wrong day—she should have been at the airport yesterday—she had rummaged everywhere to check with the letter —put away too carefully—that was why she was so excited, relieved when she saw—

  —You’d given me the phone number.—

  —Oh I was afraid if you arrived and I wasn’t there—you’d just have gone off again—I was so worried—

  Changing from lane to lane of traffic along a sea-front, bursts of conversation in another tongue, scenes from unimaginable lives in the space of a car window and the pause at a red light, palm-trees, whiffs of nougat against carbon monoxide, pink oleanders, fish shining in a shop open to the street, pennants fluttering round a car mart, old men in pomponned caps bending over balls, shop-signs silently mouthed—Oh that—fort, château, same thing, all their castles were fortifications. That’s Antibes. We’ll go one day—the Picasso museum’s inside. Good god, what’s he think he’s doing, quel con, my god, ça va pas la tête, êh ? These kids on scooters, they attack like wasps. It’s twelve o’clock, that’s why this town is hell, everyone rushing home for lunch...don’t worry, we’ll make it, I just must stop for bread—are you hungry ? I hope you’ve got a good appetite, mmh ?—Would you rather have lettuce or cress ? You must say. Start off the way we’re going to go on, you know—I’m not going to treat you like a visitor.—

  She came out of the baker’s and pushed a baton of bread through the window. At the greengrocer next door she turned to smile at her passenger. In the wisp of tissue-paper that belted it, the bread crackled under the pressure of Rosa Burger’s hand; she sniffed the loaf like a flower; the woman’s smile broadened and mimed—go on, take a bite. Children in pinafores were being dragged past by brusque young women or old ones in slippers who blocked the pavement while they gossiped. On balconies, men ate lunch in their vests. The tables outside a bar were tiny islands round which people greeted each other with a kiss on either cheek. Rosa Burger sat in the car like an effigy borne in procession. Out of the town, past plant nurseries and cement works, the light on the new leaves of vines hunched like cripples, grey-headed olives surviving among villas, the sea appearing and disappearing from bend to bend:—They told me over the phone, a direct plane tonight so of course I thought my god I‘ve—then I told myself, stop fussing... I’m so glad you’ve come before the pear and apple’s quite over—look—up there, d’you know whose house that is ? Renoir lived there—

  A frail foam pricked through by green on trees hollowed like wine glasses; where ? where ? The girl gazed at a day without landmarks. No sooner was something pointed out than it was behind; to the driver all was so familiar she saw what was no longer visible. The car began to buck up a steep gravelly way between the park secrecy of European riverine forest, roadside tapestry flowers ashy with dust. Like the sea, a castle turned this way and that.—Poor things, more tin cans than fish in our river these days, but they keep trying. You actually do see some with a tiddler or two...—A child’s pop-up picture book castle at the pinnacle of grey and yellow-rose houses and walls, rising from the apartment blocks that filled the valley like vast white ocean liners berthed from the distant sea. Awnings bellied; leaning people were dreamily letting the car pass across their eyes an image like that in the convex mirror set up at the blind intersection. Shutters were closed; unknown people hidden undiscoverable behind there. A woman on a vélo with a child dangling legs through the parcel-carrier was
drawn level with, greeted, wobbling and puttering, overtaken.—She does for me, you’ll meet her on Tuesday, what hell with that child when it was little, peed on my bed and when it started to crawl! It was into everything, biscuits crumbled on my papers and books—how do you feel? About children ? I am a grandmother I suppose, but for me it’s so long since I handled... How old are you, Rosa ? I was thinking last night, how old can she be, that girl—twenty-three ? No ? Nearer twenty-five ? Seven—my god.—