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

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.—
    â€”Just twelve. D’you remember ?—
    â€”Of course I remember.—
    â€”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.
    â€”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.—
    â€”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