Burger's Daughter

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.—

— Yes, fantasies, obsessions. They’re mine. They’re the form in which the question of my own existence is being put to me. From them come the marvels (in that gesture he had from some bar- or bible-thumping ancestor he put the flat of his hand, hard, on Borges’ poems she had been reading), the real reasons why you won’t kill and perhaps why you can go on living. Saint-Simon and Fourier and Marx and Lenin and Luxemburg whose namesake you are — you can’t get that from them.—

When he began to talk (he who had no conversation among other people) she would lose mental grip of what she was occupied with, keeping still and quiet as if to attract something that might approach her. Her hands told the beads of repetitive gesture. Her feet and calves went numb beneath her weight but she did not get up from her place on the floor, the continuance of a sensation holding a train of lucidity.

— Of course I wanted to kill myself. I believed I ought to kill myself for fucking my mother. That’s clear and easy to you and me. No difference, when it comes to guilt, between what you’ve done and what you’ve imagined. But I had no idea…I didn’t know the connection existed.—

— You poor little devil.—

— No no no. Rosa, I’m telling the truth about what matters. This was just one of the ways I happened to come to reaching the realities: sex and death. Everything else is ducking away.—

She raked the four fingers of her left hand through the stiff, dirty pile of the old carpet, again and again.

— You saw someone dead when you were little.—

— No. Oh a dog or cat. Birds we killed at school, with a catapult. Or at least they did — others. I gave up.—

She smiled. — Why—

— They didn’t sing any more.—

— So you chose the ‘joy of living’.—

— In my way. Being told it was cruel certainly hadn’t stopped me.—

Somewhere down in the wilderness outside the cottage the roadmakers had an equipment dump, with mounds of small stones, upturned wheelbarrows treacled with tar, poles and trestles and lanterns for barricades. There was a hut made of sheets of lead ceiling and loose bricks from the demolished mansion. The watchman’s brazier, pierced with triangular red eyes at night, smoked through half-bald pepper trees and velour-leafed loquats during the day; outlaw cats waited to streak upon the crusts of burned mealie-meal from the big black pot without a handle that belched on the coals. The sounds of a camp established the direction of the place; there were always hangers-on gathered around him. Rosa came upon the curious stance of the back of a drunk man peeing against a tree; or the cat, sensing the presence of some menace from its own kind, suddenly pinned in thin air an uncompleted gambol.

The watchman gave Conrad money to place bets at the race-course. The man came regularly to the cottage in the late afternoons; he took off his yellow oilskin hat and asked for the master. If Conrad were not there but might be back soon, Rosa invited him to come in but such a suggestion was incomprehensible to him, he understood it only as the established procedure for approaching a white man’s house; sat on the broken step that was all that remained of five that had once led to the verandah, and waited until the white man came.

Conrad squatted down with him there. He read out the names of horses and the odds quoted and the watchman interrupted with throat-noises of assent or sometimes let silences of indecision hold, after Conrad had paused, expecting assent. Conrad pushed the man’s paper money into the pocket of his jeans, from which he would use it as ready cash; apparently he took its equivalent from his earnings at the race-course when actually placing the bets at the tote. The watchman giggled with falsetto joy as he was paid out a win. He would take the young white man by the wrist, the shoulder, good fortune made flesh. He would ask, as of right, for a beer. Conrad laughed. — He should be standing me.—

She brought the beer cans. — You’re the fount from which all blessings flow.—

Once the black man was emboldened by happiness to talk to her. — Your brother is very clever. I like such a clever one like him.—

— What happens when that watchman loses his money?—

— It’s gone. That’s all.—

— He can’t afford the risk.—

— He can’t afford the kick he gets out of winning, either.—

When they went among Conrad’s friends she talked easily and he was almost as withdrawn as he was when they encountered the Burger faction. One of his friends was building a sailing ship in a backyard. Rosa laughed with pleasure at the incongruous sight, rearing up between a dog kennel, a garage, and the servant’s room where the bed raised on bricks could be seen through the open door. Conrad studied diagrams and charts relating to the ship’s construction and the seas on the route proposed. Apparently the idea was that he would navigate from island to island across the Indian Ocean to Australia. The friend looked up at her, casually generous. — Come along.—

— Oh I’d love to. You could drop me off at Dar es Salaam to see my brother.—

It was a game, pretending she had a passport, referring to the son of her father’s first marriage, whom she had never seen, as her sibling; her polite fantasy to make herself acceptable among these people absorbed in planing wild-smelling wood and sewing bunk covers. Like a temptation, she returned to its conventions while she and Conrad were cutting each other’s hair in the bathroom of the cottage. He had read aloud a poem Baudelaire wrote about Mauritius, translating for her.

— André and his girl have it all out of a manual. I think I’d be scared to go all that way to sea with only one person aboard who knows anything about sailing.—

— So what? You’re not scared to stay at home and go to prison.—

She held his head steady to gauge the evenness of the hair-level over the ears. He let her snip towards his lobes.

She took his place on the lid of the lavatory seat. He put round her shoulders the towel furred with his hair, the pale colour and rough as the nap of sacking. — Close your eyes.—

She felt the cold little metal beak along her forehead. — Not too much. Don’t scalp me.—

— Don’t worry. You look okay. You’ll survive.—

She spoke with a change of key. — Why should I go to prison?—

— Well you will, won’t you. Sooner or later.—

Her eyes were closed against the falling hair. — If Lionel and my mother…if the concepts of our life, our relationships, we children accepted from them were those of Marx and Lenin, they’d already become natural and personal by the time they reached me. D’you see? It was all on the same level at which you — I—children learn to eat with a knife and fork, go to church if their parents do, use the forms of address by which the parents’ attitudes — respect, disapproval, envy, whatever — towards people are expressed. I was the same as every other kid.—