Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Â 
    Â 
    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.
    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 ?—
    â€”Song ?—Squatting on the floor cleaning up crumbs of bark and broken leaf.
    â€”You were singing.—
    â€”What ? Was I ?—She had filled a dented Benares brass pot with loquat branches.
    â€”For the joy of living.—
    She looked to see if he were making fun of her.—I didn’t know.—
    â€”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.—
    â€”Disease, drowning, arrests, imprisonments.—He opened his eyes, almond-shaped and glazed, from ostentatious supine vulnerability. —It didn’t make any difference.—
    â€”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.
    â€”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.—
    â€”... 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