Burger's Daughter Read Free

young man named Conrad. A pale acne-scarred back to the sun, lying in the way of but never putting out a teasing hand to catch the black and white legs of children who raced round the edge of the pool. He rested his chin on his forearms, and sometimes his forehead pressed there. He was not the type looking for commitment. There had been, were some, and they were quickly recognized. Sometimes their potential was made use of. He was not even a paid spy posing as the type looking for commitment; that had become a recognizable type, too. Lionel Burger would not restrict his daughter’s normal student sociability for fear she might be made use of by one of those. But this boy was of interest to no one; let him look at them all, if the spectacle intrigued him: revolutionaries at play, a sight like the secret mating of whales. He got his boerewors, hot and scented-tasting, from the hands of Lionel Burger himself, like everyone else. Rosa was a pretty thing as she grew up; many boys would follow her, not knowing she was not for them.
    Once or twice during the trial she had noticed this Conrad in the visitors’ gallery of the court. She moved inevitably in the phalanx of familiars, the friends some of whom disappeared, arrested and arraigned in other trials, in the course of her father’s. Once when she had gone out to telephone from the Greek café nearby, she met the chap on the pavement on her way back to the court-house. He offered her an espresso and she laughed, in her way of knowing only too well the facilities of the environs of this court, always she was aside from her generation in experience of this kind—where did he think you could get an espresso around here ?
    â€”You can, that’s all.—He took her down a block, round a corner and into a shopping arcade. She understood he must have followed her out of court. Real espresso was brought to a little iron table by a black waiter dressed up in striped trousers, black waistcoat and cheese-cutter. She pulled a funny face behind the waiter, smiled, friendly and charming, any girl singled out by a man. —What d’you think that’s supposed to be? In Pretoria!—He pushed over to her an ashtray lettered THE SINGING BARBER.
    â€”What do you think he feels about your father ?—
    â€”My father ?—
    Her beau broke a match between his teeth and waved its V in the direction of the court-house.
    Oh, she understood: the blacks, do they know, are they grateful to whites who endanger their own lives for them. So that was the set of tracks along which this one’s mind trundled; there were others who came up to her, sweating and pitched to their greatest intensity, Miss Burger you don’t know me but I want to tell you, the government calls him a Communist but your father is God’s man, the holy spirit of our Lord is in him, that’s why he is being persecuted. And there were the occasional letters that had been coming to the house all her life; as soon as she was old enough—her mother knew when that was; how did she know ?—her mother let her see one. It said her father was a devil and a beast who wanted to rob and kill, destroying Christian civilization. She felt a strange embarrassment, and looked into her mother’s face to see if she should laugh, but her mother had another look on her face; she was aware of some trust expressed there, something that must last beyond laughter. It was a Saturday morning and when her father had come home from his early round of visits to his patients in hospital he had given Baasie and her their weekly swimming lesson; at that moment with the letter before her, ‘her father’ came to her as a hand cupped under her chin that kept her head above water while her legs and arms frogged. Baasie was afraid still. His thin, dingy body with the paler toes rigidly turned up went blacker with the cold and he clung flat against her father’s fleshy, breathing chest whose warmth,