Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

I do not even know if you are alive. I read of a yacht that has disappeared between Durban and Mauritius. There are photographs of the girls on deck in bikinis ‘recalling the high spirits in which the home-built craft set out’ only weeks before. Bits of wreckage seen drifting, currents apart, suggest unpreparedness for what could happen: the striped balloon that marked the position of a spear-fisherman, floating from a broken cord, a plastic ice-bucket still decorated with varnished liquor labels washed up among rotting seaweed and flies. At sea, at sea; to circumnavigate is to end up no farther than you started. The world round as your navel. Your contemplation of it in the cottage doesn’t serve me any more. I am like my father—the way they say my father was. I discover I can take from people what I need. But I am aware I don’t have his justification; only the facility’s my inheritance—my dowry, if any man is interested.

Till the last minute, I expected to be stopped. When the boarding call came I put down the morning paper: now: now as I get up the young policeman blinking at the door with his lanyard and revolver and walkie-talkie crackling will ask me to stand aside. I could have stopped early on, before I started, so to speak. The first people I tried were frightened of me; I felt they couldn’t have me gone quick enough to wipe my footmarks from the front stoep. Those who were not afraid had no power. I could have given up. It is impossible to decide in advance whether a man like him has sufficient influence. Impossible to find out whether he is in the Broederbond or not. Though perhaps I should have asked him! I’m the one person he might have answered ?

The strange thing is, my father had the same kind of illusion about Brandt Vermeulen as he has about my father. Except that my father placed it as something in the past, a lost opportunity, not something that might have come about in one or other of their respective utopias. Lionel shook his head in dry wonderment at the exegesis of apartheid with which Brandt Vermeulen enlightened Rotary Clubs and political seminars.—Man !—he won’t scruple to invoke Kierkegaard’s Either/Or against Hegel’s dialectic to demonstrate the justice of segregated lavatories...—But at the same time Lionel thought Brandt Vermeulen a casualty of his historical situation; with his intelligence, he should by rights have opted for the Future and not the volk. I might have had this in the back of my mind when I went to him. Anyway, I found he was not afraid.

Not afraid; fascinated. The state of fascination can be a function of vanity. Even the timid woman who betrayed my father was drawn into fascination by an idea of herself as spirited as she would have liked to be, she got from him. Brandt—how quickly he became ‘Brandt’ and how much it pleased him—was cautious, out of

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