Burger's Daughter (24 page)

Dhladhla took a snapping bite out of a chicken leg in his hand and chewed it with vivid energy, the muscles at the angles of his fine jaw moving naturally in the way of male actors affecting emotion. He looked at Greer, importuned, triumphant and bored.

—I don't think about that.—

Marisa had joined us.—So there was a raid in town today? June Makhubu's detained, and two others, they say. All Sol Hlubi's Black Studies stuff taken away. Even the report on high school children the municipal social welfare people have already accepted as evidence for their official commission...I'd like to know how that suddenly becomes subversive... They're mad... Rosa, we were both in town in the morning... ?—

She assumed I had been as unaware as she. And in this company I understood it was strange, some sort of lapse, from the norm established in me from the beginning of my life, that I should not have told her at once, when we met in the shop.

—Orde probably knows more...—Marisa rallied him.—Orde, what was this business at Providence House? Who else did they visit as well as Hlubi's outfit ?—

He was stiffly dignified with his red socks sagging over the boots, his hand feeling masturbatorily round his back and chest under the pullover.

He had taken pictures; Colonel van Staden himself led the raid, that meant they were after something big; the intrepid news photographer had doubled up the fire escape and there was one shot of van Staden's man, that lout Claasens——He's holding some chap by the scruff of the neck like a dog, you can see he's got him by a handful of jacket and shirt—man, his feet are practically lifted dangling off the ground—

—But what was happening? Resisting arrest ?—

—No—no—Claasens is searching him, with the other hand he's in his pockets—you'll see... But you won't because my bloody editor won't publish. He says to me, they'll be down on us like a load of bricks. You'll be in for it too.—You're not allowed to show the police busy in any situation like that. Prejudicial to the dignity of the law.
Their
dignity.
Christ.
—

—Did Claasens see you'd caught him ?—

—I ran like hell. One of the others spotted me but when he came after he slipped on the metal steps, down on his backside, the bugger was lucky he didn't fall four flights—

The baby on his grandmother's lap shouted back gleefully at our laughter. An exchange of stories scoring off the police, some of which the tellers had experienced themselves, other belonging to our folklore, was encouraged among Marisa, James and me.—What about when your father and mother got married, Rosa—And I had to describe again, as Lionel told as a political anecdote, a family chronicle, what was really his love affair with my mother: how the police came to raid the first tiny flat and had to unpack the household goods. While I was telling it the baby boy ran over to me and pressed upon me some red knitted garment. I thought it was something of his that he wanted me to help him put on, but he held it away, reaching up towards my head, and then rubbing at his own. What does he want ?—I signalled to Margaret and saw the grandmother's gums bared at me in pleasure. But Marisa understood. —He wants to put the hat on you, Rosa. It's for you.—I obliged; bent my head, and the child crowned me with crooked jabs. A cap with a rosette on one side, of the kind black women sell, spread out before them, while they crochet among the legs of passers-by on the city pavements as if they were in their own kitchens. The grandmother was presenting Lionel's daughter with her handiwork. I pulled it on and Marisa set it right for me.—The rose shouldn't be in the middle—She tittered delightfully, regarding me, the first knuckle of her slender hand caught between her teeth a moment. Margaret added her touch, rolling up the edge of the thing to make a brim.—No wait—that's it—Marisa pushed all my hair up under it, both of us protesting and giggling. The old woman came over and hugged me. The nine- or ten-year-old girl who had brought me tea in the afternoon hung on my arm with the lovesickness of one who claims an elder sister. Certainly Orde Greer didn't seem in much of a condition to drive; when Fats and his wife urged me to spend the night—the short pile on the baby's head was softly rough under my chin—I was drawn to the idea of staying there among them, in the pawings and touches of the children, the comforting confidence of Fats, capable in corruption, that if the police should discover I was there, he would know exactly to whom to give a bottle of brandy. The vanity of being loved by and belonging with them offered itself. But I know it can't be taken for nothing. Offered freely—yet it has its price, that I would have to settle upon for myself, even if I didn't make a fool of myself, like Greer, asking for an estimate from Dhladhla. We drove under a sky fluttering eyelids of lightning through streets that flattened away into night, low houses shut tight, battened in darkness, barred with tin and iron against thieves and penned against the police, marauders without distinction. The eye in a window was a candle far inside; or only the reflection of the Volkswagen's headlights looking back at me as we shook and swerved our way out. Sudden street-lights, far apart and irregular, make one vulnerable there, passing under them as a target. Smoking like a burned-out site, the miles of townships were all round, dark-clotted, no assertion of tall buildings against the sky, no cloudy alabaster bowl like that inverted above the white city by life that declares itself openly in neon, floodlight, and windows letting lamp-shafts into gardens. A man lay where the road, without a gutter, found a boundary in ruts and pools. Drunk or knifed. It didn't occur to either of us to call out to stop or even pass a remark. Not in that place. Not even if we had been black. Not even though we are white.

Orde Greer got me home all right. He must be used to driving when fairly drunk. The only sound in the car was his heavy breathing and a belching of whisky fumes that buckled him every now and then; he concentrated in a way that excluded my presence. We knew that nothing would happen to us in that car, taking corners fast and wide and pausing with demonstrative caution before crossing against the red light. I can see he's someone perpetually fascinated by the idea of something that may transform him; accidental death is not his solution. And I'm here, the last of my line.

 

 

Silkworms of soft rain munching the leaves at two in the morning.

But I hadn't forgotten the red knitted hat; I have that, I put it away in a drawer—the temptation—before I went to bed that Saturday, just as the mild storm reached the white suburbs.

W
hat I say will not be understood.

Once it passes from me, it becomes apologia or accusation. I am talking about neither...but you will use my words to make your own meaning. As people pick up letters from the stack between them in word-games. You will say: she said
he
was this or that: Lionel Burger, Dhladhla, James Nyaluza, Fats, even that poor devil, Orde Greer. I am considering only ways of trying to take hold; you will say: she is Manichean. You don't understand treason; a flying fish lands on the deck from fathoms you glide over. You bend curiously, call the rest of the crew to look, and throw it back.

Whatever I was before, you confused me. In the cottage you told me that in
that house
people didn't know each other; you've proved it to me in what I have found since in places you haven't been, although you are exploring the world. But there are things you didn't know; or, to turn your criteria back on yourself, you knew only in the abstract, in the public and impersonal act of reading about them or seeking information, like a white journalist professionally objective and knowledgeable on the ‘subject' of a ‘black exploiting class'. The creed of that house discounted the Conrad kind of individualism, but in practice discovered and worked out another. This was happening at the interminable meetings and study groups that were the golf matches and club dinners of my father's kind. It was what was wrested from the purges when they denounced and expelled each other for revisionism or lack of discipline or insufficient zeal. It was something they managed to create for themselves even while Comintern agents were sent out to report on their activities and sometimes to destroy these entirely on orders that caused fresh dissension among them, despair and disaffection. It is something that will roll away into a crevice hidden between Lionel's biographer's analysis of the Theory of Internal Colonialism, the Nature of the New State as a Revolutionary Movement, and the resolution of the Problems of the Post-Rivonia Period—the crystal they secreted for themselves out of dogma. What would you do if you were me?
What is to be done ?
Lionel and his associates found out; whatever the creed means in all the countries where it is being evolved between the ‘polar orthodoxies of China and the Soviet Union' (the biographer's neat turn of phrase), they made a Communism for ‘local conditions' in this particular one. It was not declared heretic, although I see it contains a heresy of a kind, from the point of view of an outsider's interpretation. Lionel—my mother and father—people in that house, had a connection with blacks that was completely personal. In this way, their Communism was the antithesis of anti-individualism. The connection was something no other whites ever had in quite the same way. A connection without reservations on the part of blacks or whites. The political activities and attitudes of that house came from the inside outwards, and blacks in that house where there was no God felt this embrace before the Cross. At last there was nothing between this skin and that. At last nothing between the white man's word and his deed; spluttering the same water together in the swimming-pool, going to prison after the same indictment: it was a human conspiracy, above all other kinds.

I have lost connection. It's only the memory of childhood warmth for me. Marisa says we must ‘stick together'. The Terblanches offer me the chance to steal the key of the photocopying room. What is to be done? Lionel and my mother did not stand before Duma Dhladhla and have him say: I don't think about that.

They had the connection because they believed it possible.

R
osa Burger did not go back until more than a year after his death to the town where her father had been tried, imprisoned, and died. These occasions for her to visit the town gave rise to no others; he has no grave. But when that summer had already been bisected by the change of the year from old to new in the final digit of the Barry Eckhard organization's desk-calendars, she drove three times to the town and three different addresses there, during February-March. After a period of some weeks, she again began to pay a number of visits (on the 13th and 30th April and on the 7th and 24th May); but these were all to the same address. She was known to have driven to town on these dates and to these destinations by the surveillance to whom all her movements had been and were known, from the day a fourteen-year-old girl, the arteries of her groin painfully charged with menstrual blood, stood with a hot-water bottle and an eiderdown outside the prison. Whether certain purposes those movements concealed—the slip of paper with the child's message to her mother hidden round the screw-top of the hot-water bottle—were always discoverable to surveillance cannot be sure, although for reasons of counter-strategy it is accepted that people like Lionel Burger don't hesitate to make their children adept at feints and lies from the time they're set on their feet. The new occasion for her visits to the town was soon placed: in a category indicated by what the disparate identities of the people she visited had in common. All were people whose allegiance made her father their enemy. All were Afrikaners, whose history, blood and language made him their brother.

Burger's daughter wanted something, then. Something not available to her own kind. She was officially ‘named' her kind, high up on the list, not only alphabetically. Although she was not banned, her naming as a Communist was restrictive of associations and movements she would most desire. Perhaps it was a favour she wanted for someone connected with her; but since the affair with the hippy against whom nothing could be found, and the dirty weekends with the Scandinavian journalist (the Department of the Interior had been instructed that he should never be granted another visa, the post office had been instructed to open all letters addressed to him) she seemed to be keeping to herself, except for the old contacts long taken for granted between such people, old lines surveillance can always find its way swiftly along, woken at the epicentre by the tremble of a victim newly trapped. Perhaps she wanted some relaxation of her restrictions; was tired of being a typist and had taken up again the idea of going to work with those two British doctors in the Transkei. Whatever it was, she wanted it badly enough to seek out prominent Nationalists on whom she must carefully have calculated a lien that might lever against the stone slab of fear and resistance her approach would cause to drop into position before them.

It was only when, in April and May, she began to return to one of the three addresses that the exact nature of what she was after began to be narrowed down. The address upon which she had settled her intention, either because she had been rebuffed at the others, or because she had eliminated all but the most useful, was that of Brandt Vermeulen. Brandt Vermeulen is one of the ‘New Afrikaners' from an old distinguished Afrikaner family. In each country families become distinguished for different reasons. Where there is no Almanach de Gotha, the building of railroads and sinking of oil wells becomes a pedigree, where no one can trace himself back to Argenteuil or the Crusades, colonial wars substitute for a college of heraldry. Brandt Vermeulen's great-great-grandfather was murdered by Dingaan with Piet Retief's party, his maternal grandfather was a Boer War general, there was a poet uncle whose seventieth birthday has been commemorated by the issue of a stamp, and another uncle interned during the Second World War, along with Mr Vorster, for pro-Nazi sympathies, there is even a cousin who was decorated posthumously for bravery in battle against Rommel at Alamein. Cornelius Vermeulen, a Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, was a Minister in the first National Party government after the triumph of the Afrikaner in 1948, when his son Brandt was eight years old, and held office in the successive Strydom, Verwoerd and Vorster governments before retiring to one of the family farms in the Bethal district of the Transvaal.