Burger's Daughter (29 page)

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 things 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 ?

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.