Burger's Daughter (6 page)

Conrad and Rosa were often in that same livingroom together on Sundays. The yoghurt and fruit of a late breakfast was supplemented from time to time as she would push onto a plate cold leftovers from the fridge and he would fetch a can of beer and bread covered with peanut butter. Now and then it was bread he himself had made.

The cat she had brought with her skittered among the loose sheets of his thesis buried under Sunday papers.—Shall I put these somewhere safe or put the cat out ?—

They both laughed at the question implied. The room filled up with his books and papers, his Spanish grammars, his violin and musical scores, records, but in this evidence of activity he lay smoking, often sleeping. She read, repaired her clothes, and wandered in the wilderness outside from which she collected branches, pampas grass feathers, fir cones, and once gardenias that heavy rain had brought back into bloom from the barrenness of neglect.

Sometimes he was not asleep when he appeared to be.—What was your song ?—

—Song ?—Squatting on the floor cleaning up crumbs of bark and broken leaf.

—You were singing.—

—What ? Was I ?—She had filled a dented Benares brass pot with loquat branches.

—For the joy of living.—

She looked to see if he were making fun of her.—I didn't know.—

—But you never doubted it for a moment. Your family.—She did not turn to him that profile of privacy with which he was used to meeting.—Suppose not.—

—Disease, drowning, arrests, imprisonments.—He opened his eyes, almond-shaped and glazed, from ostentatious supine vulnerability. —It didn't make any difference.—

—I haven't thought about it. No. In the end, no difference.—An embarrassed, almost prim laugh.—We were not the only people alive.—She sat on the floor with her feet under her body, thighs sloping forward to the knees, her hands caught between them.

—I am the only person alive.—

She could have turned him away, glided from the territory with the kind of comment that comes easily: How modestly you dispose of the rest of us.

But he had a rudder-like instinct that resisted deflection—A happy family. Your house was a happy one. There were the Moscow trials and there was Stalin—before you and I were even born—there was the East Berlin uprising and there was Czechoslovakia, there're the prisons and asylums filled with people there like your father here. Communists are the last optimists.—

—... My brother, my mother: what's that got to do with politics—things like that happen to anybody.—

He moved crossed arms restlessly, his hands clinically palpating his pectoral muscles.—That's it. To anyone—they knock the wind out of anyone. They mean everything... In the end no one cares a stuff who's in jail or what war's on, so long as it's far away. But the Lionel Burgers of this world—personal horrors and political ones are the same to you. You live through them all. On the same level. And whatever happens—no matter what happens—

She was waiting, turned away from him, jaw touching her hunched shoulder in listening obstinacy.

He started to speak and stopped, dissatisfied. At last he settled for it with a strange expression of effort round his hair-outlined mouth; as if he stomached something of both the horrors and his own wonder.—Christ. You. Singing under your breath. Picking flowers.—

She drew her hands from between her thighs and looked at the palms, so responsible and unfamiliar a part of herself, as if they had acted without her volition. The words came from her in the same way.—Nothing more than animal survival, perhaps.—

He disappeared from time to time, once brought from Swaziland a wooden bowl and a piece of naive wood-carving. The bowl held the sleeping cat or his bread-dough left to rise, the red and black bird was set up where he could see it when he woke in the mornings. When Lionel Burger's big car was sold there was only her Volkswagen, and he assumed use of it, waiting to pick her up outside the hospital without a spoken greeting. Sometimes, not having discussed the intention, they spent evenings in cinemas or, strolling out into the wilderness round the tin cottage, kept walking for miles through the suburbs.

On such a night they walked past her father's house. As she approached it, a passer-by, her tread slowed. Her companion's pace dropped to hers. The lights were on in the upstairs rooms for him to see but only she knew that the watermarks of light behind the dark windows of the livingroom came from a window in the passage to which the inner door must have been left ajar. Only she, her ear accustomed to separating its pitch from all other sounds, could hear that across the garden, beyond the walls, the upstairs telephone was ringing in its place in her mother's room.

He was at ease in the streets as children or black men. A fist knocked on the trunk of the pavement tree they stood under, a caress for its solidity.—How old were you and I when Sharpeville happened ?—

No one answered the telephone still ringing, still ringing, not her mother, Lily clopping upstairs in shoes whose backs were bent under her spread heels, old Kowalski obliging, Lionel, herself. —Twelve. About.—

—Just twelve. D'you remember ?—

—Of course I remember.—

—I know what I've read, that's all.—

Shifting stains of leaf-shadows over their bodies and faces made the movement of air something seen instead of felt, as in place of feeling her habitation about her, she saw her own shell.

—I suppose in that house there was
outrage.
—In the dark and half-dark each was a creature camouflaged by suburban vegetation. —Your favourite expression.—

—Lionel found out they'd been shot in the back. I asked my mother and she explained...but I didn't understand what it meant, the difference if you were hit in the back or chest. Someone we knew well, Sipho Mokoena—he was there when it happened and he came straight to us, my father was called from his consulting rooms —Sipho wasn't hurt, his trouser-leg was ripped by a bullet. I'd imagined (from cowboy films ?) a bullet went right through you and there would be two holes...both the same...but when I heard my father asking him so many questions, then I understood that what mattered was you could see which side and from which level a bullet came. Lionel had ways of getting in touch with people who worked at the hospital where the wounded had been taken—the press wasn't allowed near. I woke up very late at night, it must have been three in the morning when he came back and everyone was with my mother in our diningroom, I remember the dishes still on the table, she'd made food for people. They didn't go to bed at all. The ANC leaders were there, and the lawyers, Gifford Williams and someone else—it was urgent to go out and get sworn statements from witnesses so that if there was going to be an inquiry what really happened would come out, it wouldn't just be a State cover-up... PAC people—Tsolo and his men were the ones who'd actually organized that particular protest against passes at the Sharpeville police station, but that didn't matter, what happened had gone far beyond political rivalry. When I got up again for school Lionel was already shut in with other people, he hadn't had any sleep. Lily gave me a tray of coffee to take to them, and they'd forgotten to turn off the lights in the daylight.—The sort of thing that sticks in your mind when you're a child.—Tony and I kept asking Sipho to show us where his trousers were torn. Sipho said how when the police were loading the dead into vans he had to ask them to take the brains as well—the brains of a man with a smashed head spilled and they left them in the road. My mother got agitated and took Tony out of the room. He was yelling and kicking, he didn't want to go. But I heard how Sipho said they sent a black policeman to pick up the brains with a shovel.—

—Some blacks shot in the back. It's something that changed the look of everything for you, in there (indicating the house) the way firelight passes over a room in the dark. Am I supposed to believe that?—

—But at twelve, you must have been aware—

—Political events couldn't ever have existed for me at that age. What shooting could compare with discovering for myself that my mother had another man ? If your father had succeeded in a conspiracy to rouse the whole population of blacks to revolution, I wouldn't have known what hit me.—

—What'd you do ?—

—What does Oedipus do about two rivals ? I lay on her in daydreams at school, and when she was serving dinner I stared at her dress where her legs divided—
how awful
? (she could hear in his voice the mimicry of the shocked face he imagined he could see on her in the dark)—I was mad about her; now I could be, with someone other than my father there already. I was in love; you don't think about anything else then.—

Two black men with a woman, arms akimbo between them, went by chattering explosively, servants at home in their white masters' orbit of neighbourly domesticity. They did not notice or did not recognize Rosa.—Your mother—who lives in Knysna ?—

—My mother. The same. She's not old now but the other thing—you know, in between. Old at the roots; when her hair grows out half-an-inch white she dyes it again. Never more than half-an-inch old. She's got a better figure than you, in trousers. Lives with my sister, that thoroughly domesticated character who has produced five children. No men around except my sister's little fat stud. They run a pottery school, the two women. She's always bending over the kiln, or something in the oven or grandchildren who need their noses wiped. The same one: I suppose she is.—

The telephone had stopped ringing in the house. Rosa knew by some faint lack of distraction in her ears. Somebody living there now had picked it up.

—Got a match ?—She did not smoke.

He paused a second, took out his lighter with thumb scuffing to ignite it. As if guided, he passed the small illumination across the plaque of dimensions that did not cover exactly the whitish square on the brick gateway: the baked enamel profile of a fierce dog, warning emblem of the installation of a burglar alarm system.

—What happened then—

—Nothing happened—not as things were always happening in that house.—They turned away from it, under the pavement trees. —Some of us knew, and some didn't, I suppose. I think our girl did and that gave her a hold over my mother, the white missus was afraid of someone... I think I saw that in the way my mother treated her, always flattering her a bit. That's how you learn about power, from things like that. Poor ma. I didn't think of her body any more because I became fascinated by the electrical points in the house.—

The street-lights lost and found them at regular intervals, the street gave way to another.—I knew from one of those kid's kits I got one Christmas or birthday—no, I suppose I was doing physics at school by then—how quickly two-twenty volts pass through your body. Just a second's contact. You don't have to grasp or thrust. It's not like sticking a knife, or definite as pulling a trigger. Just a touch. I used to stand looking at that brown bakelite thing for minutes at a time: all you have to do is switch on and stick your fingers in the holes. A terrible fear and temptation.—

Their voices rose and fell alone in the cottage. A few steps out into the wilderness and the surge of cicadas mastered, obliterated them as the darkness did their bodies between street-lights; at certain times of day the rise of traffic from the freeways by which they were almost surrounded swirled, isolating words like the cries of birds where the tide engulfs a promontory.

—Didn't you ever imagine killing something, just because it was small and weak ? You know how you're obsessed with the possibility of death when you're adolescent. A rabbit that was afraid of you ? Somebody's baby you admired in a pram ? What it would be like—so easy—to hurt it as a punishment for its helplessness? Rosa ? Haven't you even noticed the look of a kid's face sometimes, when it gazes at the infant lying there. A little head you could imagine crushing, while never being able to hurt anything ? When you were a kid ? What did you make of those feelings ?—

Once she appealed, half-angry.—Conrad, you won't believe it. It's like saying to someone you never masturbated. I don't know that I ever had them.—

—The day somebody said look, that's Rosa Burger...from the first time...I have the impression you've grown up entirely through other people. What they told you was appropriate to feel and do. How did you begin to know yourself ? You go through the motions... what's expected of you. What you've come to rely on.—

She had taken on a way of sitting up very straight, at once resistant and yet alert to the point of strain. She did not need to look at him.

—I don't know how else to put it. Rationality, extraversion...but I want to steer clear of terms because that's what I'm getting at: just words; life isn't there. The tension that makes it possible to live is created somewhere else, some other way.—

Sometimes she parried, insulting in her return to the manner of one who could not be reached by someone like him.

—In the
I Ching.
—

—That crap.—The girl he slept with carried the book as her breviary.

—According to Jung, then.—A book beside the bed.

—But there's something there for you, never mind! One day when he was a kid Jung imagined God sitting up in the clouds and shitting on the world below. His father was a pastor... You commit the great blasphemy against all doctrine, and you begin to live...—

—
What
tension are you talking about ? Why tension ?—

—The tension between creation and destruction in yourself.—Rosa, lips together, breathing fast, the look of someone struggling with anger, dismay or contempt.—Wandering between your fantasies and obsessions.—