Burger's Daughter Read online

  An hour and a half. Nobody would dare stop him.

  ‘...stand before this court accused of acts calculated to overthrow the State and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in this country. But what we as Communists black and white working in harmony with others who do not share our political philosophy have set our sights on is the national liberation of the African people, and thus the abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all the peoples of this country... That alone has been our aim....beyond...there are matters the future will settle.

  ‘...For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority. When the Communist Party was declared a banned organization, and later formed itself as an underground organization to which I belonged, it continued for more than a decade to take part in the struggle for black advancement by peaceful and non-violent means....At the end of that long, long haul, when the great mass movement of the African National Congress, and other movements, were outlawed; the ears of the government stopped finally against all pleas and demands—what advancement had been granted ? What legitimate rights had been recognized, according to the “standards of Western civilization” our white governments have declared themselves dedicated to preserve and perpetuate ? Where had so much effort and patience beyond normal endurance found any sign of reasonable recognition of reasonable aspirations? ...and to this day, the black men who stand trial in this court as I do must ask themselves: why is it no black man has ever had the right of answering, before a black prosecutor, a black judge, to laws in whose drafting and promulgation his own people, the blacks, have had a say ?’

  Not the squat stern pantomime dame in a curly grey wig up on the bench: nobody dared silence him. Not the policemen who had brought him in, between them, not the plain-clothes men as familiar as tradesmen coming to the house since she was a child.

  ‘That is my answer to the question this court has asked, and my fellow citizens may be asking of me: how could I, a doctor, sworn to save lives, approve the even accidental risk to human life contained in the sabotage of selected, symbolic targets calculated not to harm people—the tactic to which the banned Congress leaders turned in the creation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation—turned to after three hundred years of repression by white guns and laws, after half a century of white indifference to blacks’ reasonably formulated, legitimate aspirations... the last resort short of certain bloodshed to which a desperate people turned as a means of drawing attention after everything else had been ignored—’

  One hour and forty-seven minutes.

  ‘My covenant is with the victims of apartheid. The situation in which I find myself changes nothing...there will always be those who cannot live with themselves at the expense of fullness of life for others. They know “world history would be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.”

  ‘...this court has found me guilty on all counts. If I have ever been certain of anything in my life, it is that I acted according to my conscience on all counts. I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.’

  They heard him out: the words of the condemned man, and the last judgment on those who had condemned him, the judge learnedly and scrupulously impartial within the white man’s laws, the secret police and the uniformed police who enforced them, the white people, his own people, who made the laws. The sentence was what her father knew was coming to him; and she, and the lawyers and everyone around them throughout the trial knew was coming. The newspapers reported a ‘gasp through the court’ when the judge pronounced sentence of imprisonment for life. She did not hear any gasp. There was a split second when everything stopped; no breath, no heartbeat, no saliva, no flow of blood except her father’s. Everything rushed away from him, drew back, eclipsed. He alone, in his short big-headed body and his neat grey best suit, gave off the heat of life. He held them all at bay, blinded, possessed. Then his eyes lowered, she distinctly noticed his eyelids drop in an almost feminine gesture of selfconscious acknowledgment.

  She looked straight ahead because she was afraid someone would speak to her or lay a hand on her.

  At the back of the court where the blacks were crushed in, standing, so that when the seated whites turned to look up, they were overhung, the shouts flung out: Amandhla!

  And the burst of response: Awethu!

  Amandhla! Awethu! Amandhla! Awethu!

  They fell upon her father: his flowers, laurels, embraces. He grinned blazingly and raised his white fist to theirs.

  Then it was over. A thin back went down to the cells between many policemen. It was finished. The groupings dropped apart, lawyers, police, clerks moving across each other. The plump, desperately calm face of her father’s counsel, prematurely aged by jowls of tension round his gentle, rosy mouth, looked for her and she struggled to get to him. He kissed her and she sank for a moment into the cushion of that cheek, smelled something he put on when he shaved. A foreigner’s British voice was saying past her ear—And here life means life.

  I know those hours afterwards. After someone has been taken away.

  After my brother drowned. After arrests. After my mother died at ten past five in the afternoon at the hospital and when we got home the sprinkler was on in the garden and the washwoman’s baby was trying to catch the spray in his hands.

  I think that while my mother was alive and my brother was a baby my parents arranged their activities so that one of them was in the clear, always, one would always have a good chance of being left behind to carry on the household if the other were arrested. Of course they also calculated on the Special Branch preferring to leave one of them apparently at large, in the hope of being led to others who were working underground. Nobody told me this, nobody discussed it at home—I just knew, as children know about things their mothers and fathers discuss in bed at night. Then when my brother and mother were gone, there was me. If my father were to be arrested, there would always be me.

  Afterwards, there are toys, there are cupboards full of clothes, there are bills and circulars from people who don’t know the addressee won’t receive them. Although there are no documents or letters because people like my father and mother cannot preserve anything that establishes names or connections, there are boxes (an old round leather box with a buckle fastening, I am told people—perhaps Lionel’s grandfather—used to put stiff collars in) containing broken things you don’t know why have been kept. The furniture in rooms is arranged in accordance with a logic of movement, of currents of life about it that are no longer there.

  Theo had wanted to take me home with him but I said I would go back to the house first and come to the Santorinis’ later.—To eat with us.——Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.——We’ll open a bottle of Dao.—Dao was my father’s favourite wine.

  Theo could say that to me. He wasn’t merely my father’s counsel, he wasn’t even only a friend. When a hostile colleague had taunted him—lawyers named as Communists by the government are disbarred—with more than professional interest in the Burger case, he had everted his pink, clean lips—Let’s say my heart is in it.—

  I knew I would have to go through a scene with Lily, and her husband Jamison and any of her other cronies who happened to be gathered at the house. It was she who had given baby photographs to the press when Tony drowned. She had gone into mourning, black from head to toe, with only the salmon-coloured palms of her hands and the whites of her eyes for relief, when my mother died. She did for us all the things white people had taught her one ought to be expected to do. I knew she would be shocked that I did not come back borne along by the aunt and uncle and cousins who had, with the blood-loyalty that was their form of courage or kindness, sat to hear the sentence pronounced. I wanted to take Lily up to my bedroom so that we could sit on my bed and I could put my arms round her and let her have her c
ry, but she was seated formally among the up-ended chaises-longues and pool equipment on the porch outside my father’s study with Jamison and the servants from round about who were her intimates, waiting for me. I had told her many times that she must expect my father to go to prison this time for a long time. I had tried to prepare her. But she was sitting there as at one of her prayer meetings waiting for the good news, the Lord’s mercy. There was a tray with a jug of orange juice and one glass—for me—on the rusty table with the hole where the sun umbrella used to be fitted. They all got up from the screechy wrought-iron chairs whose cushions she had stored away, and when she saw me coming in, just as I had been day after day for all the time of the trial, she understood there was no good news, no Lord’s mercy, and her obstinacy fell away from her. She said with a belligerent sense of tragedy—What they did do to him ?—

  Then she wept and rolled her head and fiercely waved the others away. Her keening, trilling shrieks seemed about to begin, but some sense in her was watching me and we were making a tacit compact that she would not fall to the floor in hysterics. I stroked her head that felt like a lumpy mattress, her springy African hair divided and plaited in tiny pigtails under her doek (I had often watched her do it, as a child). She rocked me with her.—God is going to stay with him in that place. All the time, all the time. Until he come home.—Here she interceded for us, too, mediating our rejection of belief into the acceptable form, for well-off white people, of merely neglecting to go to church. I don’t know what I said; we had our form, too, for correcting without offending—You think of him, Lily. You’ll think of him often and he won’t be alone.—Something like that.

  Arms round each other, just the two of us, we went slowly to the big kitchen where she had cooked so many meals for my father, his family. The alarum clock that she took to her room every night stood on the windowsill above the sink, tacking down the seconds of the end of the first day—life means life. At last, she said eggs were finished, and no bread for breakfast tomorrow. So I went out again that day and drove to the Portuguese greengrocer down the road. The west-facing hill where the shops were held the heat of the afternoon sun that made garish the scratches and smears on the car windscreen. Barefoot white children already in their short cotton pyjamas were buying milk and cigarettes and a bonus of chewing-gum or ice-cream cone to take up to the flats above. I was among young women my own age, some with children on the hip or by the hand, their backs and breast-slopes stained deep pink-brown from an afternoon in their swimming-pools; among black men in overalls, silently drinking bottles of coke or orangeade where they stood; among authoritative middle-aged white women bearing the casques of freshly-tinted hair as they selected strawberries and lettuce and lemons according to the plan for a dinner-party. Henriques knew we bought brown eggs, extra-large. My mother must have started the preference; anyway, Lily always insisted on it. Henriques had a smile for everyone in turn; as if, having escaped a poor Madeiran’s service in the Portuguese colonial army, he had no right ever to be tired or irritable. He would not dare to flirt with educated South African girls like me, but he expressed a shy preference or longing by the gift of a peach or perfect apple whose price he would wave away.—To-day‘sunlucky (his English made the liaison). Brown s’come tomorrow, I don’ know if you wan’ wait.—

  Outside the bottle store next door the derelict black women who were always there, not professionals but ready to trade the alleyway use of their unsteady bodies in fair exchange for drink, pleaded with muzzy black building workers. The men went in and out the section of the store where blacks were served, bringing cartons of beer and half-jacks of brandy whose brown paper wrapping was peeled back just sufficiently to unscrew the cap before the bottle passed from mouth to mouth. The quarrelling drunk women shared even a cigarette in this way, parenthetic to their wrangling. One swayed and staggered, her blouse like a grey burst sausage and a blanket hitched round her waist in place of a skirt. In my path, she clutched me :—Sorry missus, sorry.—But the eggs weren’t broken.

  I felt them click smoothly against each other as ping-pong balls in the paper bag, afterwards.

  That was how it was, Conrad. You came round to my father’s house that evening to see what it was like to belong to a family where the father could risk going to prison for life, and have it come to pass. I don’t reproach you for the curiosity, the fascination this had for you. I was not there; I was with the Santorinis and others who had been part of my father’s life. Lily was in the mood for a wake—she needed some sort of ceremony to make the transition to ordinary days when my father would be in prison for life—and you were impressed because she wouldn’t let you go before she’d given you a glass of fresh orange juice. You remarked on it later. You were thinking it another interesting example of the ‘gracious living’ standards of my father’s house, jugs of freshly-squeezed orange always on tap. You didn’t know it was the glass I didn’t drink.

  At Theo’s we had Dao, Lionel’s favourite. The bottles were the remains of a case Lionel had given Theo for his birthday (Lionel was an awaiting-trial prisoner already, then; he’d told me to order it). Everyone there was fiercely proud of Lionel. Yes, that was the mood. Marisa Kgosana, whose husband had been two years on Robben Island, turned up about ten o’clock with her usual bodyguard of huge, silent admirers, and, jerking her beautiful breasts, challenged with a throw-away gesture of hands decked as much in their own blackness as their rings and red-painted nails—Rosa, whose life anyway ? Theirs or his ?—My father is dead and her husband is still on Robben Island. She has been banned for years. She has many lovers and probably as a husband she has forgotten him, she isn’t the Penelope the faithful write about when they find a sympathetic press. He wouldn’t expect her to be, because his way, as my father’s was, is to go on living however you must. And if he doesn’t outlast his jailers, his and Marisa’s children will.

  Theo thrust on me forms of application for a correspondence course from the external studies university.—You better get cracking with this. Lionel says the registration for prisoners this year closes next week.—And to the others around us, with the assumption of slightly haughty, careless arrogance with which he expressed the intoxication of his association with my father through the trial: —God knows where he found that out. But he did, this last week. With the judgment coming up. And it was the first thing he said when we saw him after the sentence this afternoon. Ay, Rosa? Don’t forget my course. Anthropology, and if that can’t be arranged, the diploma in industrial psychology.—

  —Do they offer such a thing ?—

  —If Lionel says so. Rosa’ll have those papers in right away—tomorrow morning, my girl—

  Lionel was spending his first night without the privileges of an awaiting-trial prisoner. I think that was what I thought about? They had taken away his own clothes. He had begun an imprisonment that could end only with the end of his life or the end of the regime; not just the government of the day, but any other white government that might succeed it. There was bravado and sentiment in the confidence of the room full of people at Theo’s that they were behaving as Lionel Burger would expect, as he would do himself in their situation. That was how they saw themselves. Strong emotion—faith ?—has different ways of being manifested among the different disciplines within which people order their behaviour. That was what you were curious—had a sense of wonder about. That was what brought you to Lionel Burger’s empty house. I can’t tell you anything more because I now see I don’t know anything more, myself.

  The copper plate at the Burgers’ gateway with Lionel Burger’s name and medical degrees was kept polished through the months of his trial by the Burgers’ servant, Lily Letsile. His daughter Rosa was living at home and working as a physiotherapist at a hospital. She was the last member of the family of five (counting Baasie) to live there, but the household had never matched her doll’s house family of mother and father, boy and girl, dog and cat, and even during this period there was usually someone else staying there. Bridge
t Sulzer’s son from the Brodkin marriage came and occupied the garden rondavel while studying for examinations. A political scientist who had been expelled from a neighbouring black state spent six weeks at her own risk (she was an old friend of Rosa’s mother), since if the Special Branch came to do one of their regular house-cleanings she would very likely lose the research papers she had brought with her. The old man, Kowalski, his mixed Eastern European antecedents further confused by the turn of speech and demeanour taken on during the years he had lived in a Sophiatown yard, so that even the police no longer could decide whether or not he was the wrong colour in the wrong area, stayed on in a room where there had been many transients. He had turned up destitute at the surgery one day before Lionel Burger was arrested that final time, and been recognized as the champion vendor of the Party paper in the streets, during the period before, in its final avatar, it had been banned.

  But by the time her father was convicted, the last of scores of people who had shared the house since she was born there were gone. Her father, allowed to consult with his lawyer on family and business affairs, decided with Theo that the house should be sold. A good job was found for Eilefas Bengu, the gardener, Lily Letsile was pensioned and went home to the Northern Transvaal to reflect upon whether or not she wanted to work again, the Labrador bitch went to Ivy Terblanche where Rosa could come and visit her, the black cat and two tabbies went to the former receptionist from the surgery, the rabbits, the guinea-pigs, the tortoise and love-birds Rosa and her brother had made houses for and slept with and communed with as children had long since died or disappeared. The furniture was sold in a house-auction she did not attend. Three hundred people came (the press reported) and not all to buy; they were curious, too. When Rosa called to pick up some small personal possessions the new owners were there, walking round the swimming-pool where her brother had drowned and replanning, with arabesques drawn in the air and dimensions paced out, the patio area where her father set up his braaivleis and her mother’s tree-ferns from Tzaneen had grown so big they lifted the paving. As she was leaving, there was an awkward, undertone conversation and the new lady of the house came running after her.—I wonder—about the plate ? The doctor’s plate.—The girl apologized; she would get it removed.