Burger's Daughter (5 page)

 

 

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. Bridget 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.

She returned before dark with an unhealthy-looking fair man with long hair and a straggling moustache, wearing the fashionable garb of shirt with Balkan embroidery, jeans, and veldskoen. He had a screwdriver but found some difficulty in turning it in the grooves caked with layers of metal polish turned to stony verdigris. She did not get out of the driver's seat. The oblong where the plate had been showed whitish in the twilight. He put the plate in the boot of her car and they drove away.

Rosa was allowed one prison visit every two months for the first year, while her father was a ‘D' grade prisoner. She received from him, and wrote in return, one letter a month not longer than the regulation 500 words. When she exceeded this limit by a sentence, the page was cut at that point by the Chief Warder, who censored prisoners' mail. Her father told her, at her next visit, how he had amused himself trying to construct from the context of the preceding sentence what the missing part would have added. In the July and October of that year, she did not write in order to let her half-brother from her father's first marriage, a doctor working in Tanzania and a prohibited immigrant in South Africa, send a letter. During the second year, her father became a ‘C' grade prisoner and was allowed several special visits. Application to take advantage of these visits by Flora Donaldson and Dick Terblanche (Ivy was in prison but her husband's ban had lapsed and had not yet been renewed) were turned down by the Director of Prisons, as was that of an old comrade, Professor Jan Hahnloser, who thought Lionel Burger had foolishly and tragically thrown his life away for political beliefs now long become abhorrent to the professor, but found in the tragedy the necessity to assert the bonds of youthful friendship. The Director did allow a Christmas visit from the aunt and uncle—her father's sister and brother-in-law, a farmer and his wife who had been present in court for the verdict at his trial. It was in the autumn of the second year, when she was allowed to see her father every alternate week, that one of her visits was to the prison hospital because he had the first of the virus throat infections that kept recurring.

She shared a flat for a time with Mark Liebowitz's sister Rhoda, just divorced. Then her flat-mate, the organizing secretary of a mixed trade union of coloureds and whites, began a love affair with a coloured trade unionist and went to Cape Town to be where the man lived even though she couldn't live with him. Rosa disliked the smells of other people's frying that never left the corridors and the noise of other people's radios that gabbled in under the flat door; now she was able to move. She lived with Flora Donaldson and her husband—he was away in Europe on business half the year. It was a house—open house—like their own—her father's—had been; big rooms, with flowers from the garden, friendly talkative servants about, books, pictures, guests, a swimming-pool. She tried a flat again; a small flat, on her own. What she really wanted was a garden cottage. Once she thought she had just what was in mind and then the owners realized who she was and sidled out of the agreement. As they were not open about their reasons she could not tell them the police seemed to be leaving her alone since her father had been serving his sentence. She had not been raided once, in the various places she had lived.

She still had her job at the hospital; she worked mostly in geriatric wards, and with children. Her half-brother wrote from northern Tanzania that if only he had her in his hospital...there was no money, no time, no personnel to provide physiotherapy for anyone. She could have gone to work with a doctor friend among rural Africans in the Transkei who needed her kind of skills just as badly—it would have been possible to fly up twice a month for the prison visits—but the Administrator of the territory knew who she was and would not give her permission to live in a black ‘homeland'. As it happened, her father's tendency to throat infections appeared to become chronic and she had to be there—at the prison to insist on medical reports from the Commandant; negotiating through Theo for a private specialist to see her father; importuning various officials—available to her father even if she could not see him. She played squash twice a week for the exercise. She went to the theatre when there was anything worthwhile. At parties her bared flesh was as sunburned as anyone's who had long summer holidays at the sea; she did go away from town for a week once or twice, and apparently with a Swedish journalist with whom (it was understood not even her close friends would ever expect information from Rosa herself) she was having a love affair. She took from her father's ex-receptionist one of the kittens produced by the old black cat and set it up with a sand-box in the bathroom of the flat. It was noted that the Swede wore a gold ring, in the custom of married men from Europe. Family friends and associates of her father's generation wished she would get married, to some South African, locally; but no one would have presumed to express this kindly concern to her—of course it was understood she could never leave, leave the country as so many did, now that her father was in prison and she was the only one left to him.

In November, in the second month of the third year of his life sentence, Lionel Burger developed nephritis as a result of yet another throat infection and died in prison.

The prison authorities did not consent to a private funeral arranged by relatives. His life sentence was served but the State claimed his body. A thousand black and white people had come to the funeral of Cathy Burger, his wife and Rosa's mother, some years before. At a memorial gathering in honour of Lionel Burger held one lunch-hour in a small trades hall few of the faces recognized then were to be seen again—the black and Indian and coloured and white leaders gone to prison or exile, or restricted by bans from attending meetings of any nature. Two or three men and women who had been hidden away by house arrest for many years appeared on the platform like actors making a come-back with the style and rhetoric of their time. Some young people present asked who they were ? There were babies in arms, and restless children. A tiny Indian boy was given an apple to quiet him. If there were Special Branch men present, they were unobtrusive despite the small number of people, and difficult to spot under the cultivated shabbiness of young white intellectuals and impassively distanced air of black clerks and delivery-men they might have assumed. When the valedictions had been delivered and people were rising from their broken wooden seats, the same tiny boy, seen to have been placed standing on his by his mother, lifted a clenched toy fist and yelled in the triumph with which a child performs a nursery rhyme with exactly the intonation in which he has been rehearsed,
Amandhla ! Amandhla ! Amandhla !
Faltering response gathered from the sparse crowd trooping out:
Awethu !
Seeing he had done well, he scrambled down among people's feet to retrieve his half-eaten apple. A man who hung around the magistrates' courts to take cut-price wedding pictures and worked part-time for the Special Branch was waiting in the street to photograph everyone leaving the hall.

But people closed around Rosa Burger at the exit; some, with delicacy or embarrassment, pressed her hand and said they would come and see her—nearly three years is a long time and many had lost touch. She looked different, not only in the way in which those to whom terrible events come have faces that are hard to look upon. Her hair was cut very short, curly as the head of a Mediterranean or Cape Town urchin, making the tendons of her neck appear longer and more strained than a young woman's should. There was her father's smile for everybody. But a number of people found they did not know where to reach her, now; she was no longer in her flat: another name was up on the door. Others explained—yes, they'd heard she had found a cottage in somebody's garden, she had moved away, there was no telephone yet. It takes a little time to establish a new point of reference, even cartographically, among a circle of friends. One could always try to reach her at the hospital. Some did, and she came to Sunday lunch. She said the cottage was somewhere in the old part of town near the zoo—a very temporary arrangement; she had not made up her mind what she would do, now. The Terblanches asked if she wouldn't apply again for permission to go to the Transkei.—Why not Tanzania—to brother David!
Why not
? Maybe they're in the mood to relent and give you a passport, now.—Flora Donaldson's husband, who was usually silent in the company of her friends because he was not a political associate, suddenly turned on his wife, reversing the position in which
he
was expected to make the blunders.—Don't be absurd, Flora.—His whole body and face seemed dislocated by insult to Rosa Burger as he moved unnecessarily about the room.—Oh William, what do you know about the issues involved.——In my ignorance, it seems, a lot more than you do.—

The girl said nothing, tolerantly uninterested in a marital spat at table. But that afternoon she asked William Donaldson whether he would give her a chance to beat him at a game of tennis—it had been a joke, when she stayed with the Donaldsons, that although he played assiduously at some businessmen's sports club to keep fit, he never won a set with anyone but her.

After her father's death, unless the old circle got in touch with Rosa they saw even less of her. The Swede had disappeared; either she must have broken off the affair or he had gone back to Sweden ? When anyone did encounter her she often had in tow some young man who looked like a student radical, or fancied himself as a painter or writer—to people of her father's generation he appeared Bohemian, to her contemporaries not much more than a moody dropout and younger than she was. He could perhaps have been a relation, her father's was a big Transvaal family. She could have been keeping an eye on him in town, or offering him a bed for a while. When together they met friends of the Burgers she seemed pleased and animated to chat, and forgot him in his presence; his name was Conrad Something-or-other.

N
ow you are free.

I don't know that you said it to me or whether I thought it in your presence. It came to me when I was with you; it came from being with you.

I went to the cottage because it was the place of a stranger who said: any time... The others, my father's good friends and comrades, would have been too pressingly understanding and demandingly affectionate. They didn't want me to feel alone, I didn't want to be alone in the flat, but these were not the same thing. You had said long before that if I ever needed a place, I could use that cottage. The suggestion had nothing to do with the death of Lionel. You didn't repeat it after he died. You yourself took what you needed. You used my car. You asked me for money and I didn't ask what the need was. You slept while I was at work and if you were out at night I cooked and ate by myself; the bauhinia tree was in flower and bees it attracted were in the roof, like a noise in the head.

Now you are free.

 

 

Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him. Those nights he spent in the livingroom; Rosa, going to work in the morning, stepped round the two of them rumpled among the old cushions and kaross on the floor like children overcome by sleep in the middle of a game.