Burger's Daughter (19 page)

Leaning on her elbow at the cosmetic counter opposite I saw the half-bare back of a black woman dressed in splashing colour which included as overall effect the colour of her skin. The boldest, darkest lines of blue and brown, ancient ideogrammatic symbols of fish, bird and conch were extended in the movement of two rounded shoulder-blades from the matt slope of the neck to their perfect centring on the indented line of spine, rippling as shadowless store lighting ran a scale down it. The cloth suggested robes but was in fact cut tight to the proud backside jutting negligently at the angle of the weight-bearing hip, and close to the long legs. There was a blue turban, and before the head turned, the tilt of a gold hoop bigger than a tiny ear. She could have been a splendid chorus girl but she looked like a queen of some prototype, extinct in Britain or Denmark where the office still exists. She was Marisa Kgosana. We embraced, and the professionally neutral face of the white cosmetic saleswoman, protected by her make-up from any sign of reaction as a soldier on guard is protected by his uniform from blinking an eye before public taunts, awaited the completion of the sale.

To touch in women's token embrace against the live, night cheek of Marisa, seeing huge for a second the lake-flash of her eye, the lilac-pink of her inner lip against translucent-edged teeth, to enter for a moment the invisible magnetic field of the body of a beautiful creature and receive on oneself its imprint—breath misting and quickly fading on a glass pane—this was to immerse in another mode of perception. As near as a woman can get to the transformation of the world a man seeks in the beauty of a woman. Marisa is black; near, then, as well, to the white way of using blackness as a way of perceiving a sensual redemption, as romantics do, or of perceiving fears, as racialists do. In my father's house, the one was seen as the obverse of the other, two sides of false consciousness—that much I can add to anyone's notes. But even in that house blackness was a sensuous-redemptive means of perception. Through blackness is revealed the way to the future. The descendants of Chaka, Dingane, Hintsa, Sandile, Moshesh, Cetewayo, Msilekazi and Sekukuni are the only ones who can get us there; the spirit of Makana is on Robben Island as intercessor to Lenin. Sipho Mokoena who made kites for Tony and showed children the rip in his trouser-leg made by a bullet, Gana Makabeni who was best man at the wedding and Isaac Vulindlela who gave his only son, Baasie, to the care of my father and mother; Uncle Coen Nel's barman, Daniel; the watchman who brought bets for you to place—the creased, pale-soled black feet naked at the swimming-pool as well as the black faces in the majority at the last of the underground congresses my father could attend: in the merger of white Cain, black Abel, a new brotherhood of flesh is the way to the final brotherhood. The middle-aged cosmetic saleswoman and the few customers not too self-absorbed to glance up saw a kaffir-boetie girl being kissed by a black. That's all. They knew no better. That house was closer to reaching its kind of reality through your kind of reality than I understood. You and I argued in the cottage.
Sex and death
, you said. The only reality. I should have been able to explain the element of sensuality that would have qualified the experiences of that house to be considered real by you. I felt it in Marisa's presence, after so long; the comfort of Baasie in the same bed when the dark made that house creak with threats.

Marisa was buying face-cream, testing brands on the back of a hand laid for the saleswoman's attention between them on the counter. The hand wore its insignia of rings and long brilliant nails as a general wears gold braid and campaign ribbons. Didn't I think this smelled too much like a sweet cake ?—Over-ripe fruit, to me.—

—Violets, madam—The saleswoman was earnest.

No, no, it wouldn't do; but Marisa wouldn't take the other brand being rubbed onto her plum-dark skin with a rapid to-and-fro of one white finger.—D'you know what they charge for that, Rosa ? I'd rather get wrinkles.—The saleswoman had another, a tube, French but not expensive, one need use so little, herb-scented. Marisa had the air of someone who is never undecided.—Okay. That'll do. The nail stuff, the cream, nothing else. But Rosa, if you're working in that building, I'm just around the corner! An attorney's. Someone Theo found—she laughed, sharing our admittance of the use everyone made of Theo, our dependency on him at the trials of her husband, Joseph Kgosana, or my father, as women share faith in a good doctor.—I'd only started, not even a week—then I got permission for a visit. I'm just back from the Island.—

How splendidly she made the trip. In one sentence she and I were alone; even if the elderly blonde, who had put on glasses dangling from a gilt chain to write the sales slip, understood which island, neither she nor the other customers trailing the aisles in perfume and light stood in intelligence of the level of the gaze at which Marisa held me. Hardly a change of tone needed between us. For Marisa it seems easy. She doesn't have to find a solemn face, acknowledge the distance between the prison and the cosmetic counter. She doesn't close away, go to cover, dead still, as I do. She doesn't have to recourse to putting things delicately or explaining herself for fear of being misunderstood or misjudged. Defiance and confidence don't mourn; her beauty and the way she assumes it are stronger than any declaration.

How was he ? How are they all ? When we talk about them, the prisoners who have survived Lionel, the tone is purposely commonplace, an assertion that they can't be shut away, they remain part of ordinary daily life no matter how thick the walls or rough the seas between banishment and home.—He's fine. I was the one under the weather. It's true—really the weather! There was a gale blowing in Cape Town! You can't imagine what it was like. The first day the boat couldn't go at all. The next day the police in my escort weren't too keen either but I said, look, I insist, here's my permit, I'm only allowed out of my magisterial area three days... so we got into the boat. I felt terrible—my god, have you ever been seasick ? But I held out. And I could see they were much worse than me. First thing Joe said, Marisa! Look at you—there's been something wrong and you didn't say in letters... He got his warder to bring me strong coffee—yes, just like that: my wife must have a hot drink—you know ? And that one brought it like a lamb.—

—It was a contact visit ?—I fall back easily into the jargon of prison visiting. It will always come to me, the language I learnt as a child. At the caprice of the chief warder I would see my father in a small bare room (the furnishings the basic unit for interrogation, two upright chairs and a table, with which the purpose of such rooms was always present) or on the other side of the wire grille through which I could not touch my fiancé's hand.

—He asked about you, he sends his love.—The symmetry of her lovely face smiling made the lie a gift. I hadn't seen her and had sent no word to him through her for so long it was unlikely my name would have come up between them. Experienced people don't waste the precious time of visits; everything to be said by both is thought out and fitted into the allotted period in advance. But there was I, asking about all the others by name, Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada, Mbeki, the black men with whom my father worked in an intimacy whose nature no one outside it, standing in the street watching arrests of people who haven't snatched pay-rolls or pushed drugs, can understand. Marisa repeated the prisoners' jokes, related what they were studying, whether they'd lost weight or ‘put on' as she phrased it, digressed into gossip about the achievements or problems of their families—while checking her purchases, hesitating whether she shouldn't add this or that item, and counting out money from the maw of a big fashionable bag with long fingers grappling at the points of the bright nails, like the legs of some exotic insect feeling out prey.—No, I don't want a parcel—let me have a plastic carrier—one of those over there will do—yes, that's right—As the woman behind the counter turned away to get change:—When you're in a hurry it's best to pay cash... If a black produces a cheque book... I only use mine when I'm prepared to hang about while they excuse themselves and take it to a-1-1 their managers.—And in the same brisk, absent undertone, she made a suggestion, her eyes restless on the saleswoman, her head drawn back to her neck with impatient grace.—My child's gone to get some school-books, I must pick her up. And someone's waiting for me—what's the time, anyway—I said we'd meet at twelve—too bad, can't be helped... What are you doing today—this afternoon or this evening ?—Marisa did not remember what day this was although she had a few moments before talked of Lionel (as Lionel used to say to Joe, if you can keep your weight and blood-pressure low, man, nothing can get you down).—Come out? You remember my cousin's place, Fats ?—

—You turn past Orlando High.—

—Yes, carry straight on, then when you come to the dip, third road on the right—

—There's a shop that sells coal, on the corner... ?—

—That's right, Vusili's store—

Between us, while the murmured exchange went back and forth like any other insincere enthusiasm between friends who bump into one another, was the unspoken question-and-answer that our kind follow by gaps in what is said and hesitations or immediacy of response. Marisa is banned and under house arrest. I am Named. The law forbids us to meet or speak, let alone embrace; we take what chances come, of meetings like this, in passing, on neutral and anonymous ground. You taunted me with being inhibited; but you never had anything you valued enough, that was threatened enough for you to hide. Secrecy is a discipline it's hard for old hands to unlearn. People under house arrest cannot receive friends at home or go out at night or weekends; if Marisa could come to town on a Saturday she must have been using a ‘spare' day of the exemption granted her for the visit to the Island. She was taking a chance—another—on getting away with going out to someone's house at night. She was unsure whether or not I was banned from gatherings in addition to being named. In fact I was under no ban although I have been refused a passport since before I was named—the very first year I applied. And that application was a secret, too; this time my own, not assumed in common with the others of that house, unspoken between my father and mother and me. She and Lionel did not ever know I tried for a passport when I was eighteen in preparation to follow Noel de Witt to Europe when he came out of jail. He had never known, either; but—de Witt's fiancee and Lionel Burger's daughter—the Minister refused me. In any case, whites are not allowed to go into black townships without a permit, and the presence of the only living member of the Burger family would not be let pass if discovered; if Marisa ignored that she was running a risk, so, if I followed the directions we were exchanging harmlessly, at risk, should I be ignoring my own.

She squeezed my hand and moved away at the same time, our hands remaining linked until they dropped apart, as blacks will do parting on street corners, calling over their shoulders as they finally go separate ways. But she forgot me instantly. In the swaying, forward movement of her crested head as she disappeared and reappeared through the shoppers there was only consciousness of the admiration she exacted, with her extravagant dress, the Ruritanian pan-Africa of triumphant splendour and royal beauty that is subject to no known boundaries of old custom or new warring political ideologies in black countries, and to no laws that make blacks' lives mean and degrading in this one. If the white people in the shop saw only errand boys and tea-girls and street sweepers instead of black people, now they saw Marisa. The saleswoman spoke to me with the smile of one white woman to another, both admiring a foreign visitor.—Where's she from ? One of those French islands ?—

Seychelles or Mauritius; it was what she understood by the Island. I told her:—From Soweto.——Fancy!—she was ready to learn something, her new-moon eyebrows above the golden frame of her glasses.

You were particularly curious about Baasie. You taxed me with him :—That's how you are: here's something that will be important for you for the rest of your life, whether you know it or not. You say you don't ‘think' about that kid. Whether you ‘think' about it or don't... When you were five years old you were afraid of the dark together. You crept into one bed.—

I didn't answer, I kept my head turned from you because I was thinking that that was what I did with you, that was what I was. I was remembering a special, spreading warmth when Baasie had wet the bed in our sleep. In the morning the sheets were cold and smelly, I told tales to my mother—Look what Baasie's done in his bed!—but in the night I didn't know whether this warmth that took us back into the enveloping fluids of a host body came from him or me. You wanted to know what had happened to him. Again and again, in the cottage, you would try to trap me into answering indirectly, unwittingly, although I had told you I didn't know. I didn't tell you what I did know. His father, Isaac Vulindlela, was working with Lionel until the day Lionel was arrested for the last time. He was one of those who left the country and returned under false papers. He managed it successfully twice, helped by his Tswana wife's family on the border of Botswana, who (like Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen ?) didn't want to know what he was doing. The third time, when my father was already in prison, I was the one who delivered the new passbook to the dorp ten or twenty miles from the border. It was one of the weekends when I disappeared—to show a Scandinavian journalist the scenes of Lionel's boyhood; or to sleep with my Swedish lover entered in a motel register as his wife. The third purpose of the trip was not known to the Swede; I suppose it would give him still greater cachet if he were to learn about it, even now. A better present than a beaded belt or a black migrant mineworker's wristband. My Swede and I were travelling not in my car but the visitor's hired one, as the normal precaution of anonymity he is no doubt used to in his love affairs in the course of assignments that take him from country to country; I told him the spare tyre was soft and I had better see to it as he couldn't speak Afrikaans and at a dorp garage English wouldn't be much use. He stayed in bed, in a room hardly different from those where I followed Selena and Elsie as they cleaned up after the commercial travellers, stroking through the cross of blond hair on his chest and writing an article for
Dagens Nyheter
about the complicity of international industrialists with the apartheid economy.