Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

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