I felt them click smoothly against each other as ping-pong balls in the paper bag, afterwards.
That was how it was, Conrad. You came round to my father’s house that evening to see what it was like to belong to a family where the father could risk going to prison for life, and have it come to pass. I don’t reproach you for the curiosity, the fascination this had for you. I was not there; I was with the Santorinis and others who had been part of my father’s life. Lily was in the mood for a wake — she needed some sort of ceremony to make the transition to ordinary days when my father would be in prison for life — and you were impressed because she wouldn’t let you go before she’d given you a glass of fresh orange juice. You remarked on it later. You were thinking it another interesting example of the ‘gracious living’ standards of my father’s house, jugs of freshly-squeezed orange always on tap. You didn’t know it was the glass I didn’t drink.
At Theo’s we had Dao, Lionel’s favourite. The bottles were the remains of a case Lionel had given Theo for his birthday (Lionel was an awaiting-trial prisoner already, then; he’d told me to order it). Everyone there was fiercely proud of Lionel. Yes, that was the mood. Marisa Kgosana, whose husband had been two years on Robben Island, turned up about ten o’clock with her usual bodyguard of huge, silent admirers, and, jerking her beautiful breasts, challenged with a throw-away gesture of hands decked as much in their own blackness as their rings and red-painted nails — Rosa, whose life anyway? Theirs or his? — My father is dead and her husband is still on Robben Island. She has been banned for years. She has many lovers and probably as a husband she has forgotten him, she isn’t the Penelope the faithful write about when they find a sympathetic press. He wouldn’t expect her to be, because his way, as my father’s was, is to go on living however you must. And if he doesn’t outlast his jailers, his and Marisa’s children will.
Theo thrust on me forms of application for a correspondence course from the external studies university. — You better get cracking with this. Lionel says the registration for prisoners this year closes next week. — And to the others around us, with the assumption of slightly haughty, careless arrogance with which he expressed the intoxication of his association with my father through the triaclass="underline" —God knows where he found that out. But he did, this last week. With the judgment coming up. And it was the first thing he said when we saw him after the sentence this afternoon. Ay, Rosa? Don’t forget my course. Anthropology, and if that can’t be arranged, the diploma in industrial psychology.—
— Do they offer such a thing?—
— If Lionel says so. Rosa’ll have those papers in right away — tomorrow morning, my girl—
Lionel was spending his first night without the privileges of an awaiting-trial prisoner. I think that was what I thought about? They had taken away his own clothes. He had begun an imprisonment that could end only with the end of his life or the end of the regime; not just the government of the day, but any other white government that might succeed it. There was bravado and sentiment in the confidence of the room full of people at Theo’s that they were behaving as Lionel Burger would expect, as he would do himself in their situation. That was how they saw themselves. Strong emotion — faith? — has different ways of being manifested among the different disciplines within which people order their behaviour. That was what you were curious — had a sense of wonder about. That was what brought you to Lionel Burger’s empty house. I can’t tell you anything more because I now see I don’t know anything more, myself.
The copper plate at the Burgers’ gateway with Lionel Burger’s name and medical degrees was kept polished through the months of his trial by the Burgers’ servant, Lily Letsile. His daughter Rosa was living at home and working as a physiotherapist at a hospital. She was the last member of the family of five (counting Baasie) to live there, but the household had never matched her doll’s house family of mother and father, boy and girl, dog and cat, and even during this period there was usually someone else staying there. Bridget Sulzer’s son from the Brodkin marriage came and occupied the garden rondavel while studying for examinations. A political scientist who had been expelled from a neighbouring black state spent six weeks at her own risk (she was an old friend of Rosa’s mother), since if the Special Branch came to do one of their regular house-cleanings she would very likely lose the research papers she had brought with her. The old man, Kowalski, his mixed Eastern European antecedents further confused by the turn of speech and demeanour taken on during the years he had lived in a Sophiatown yard, so that even the police no longer could decide whether or not he was the wrong colour in the wrong area, stayed on in a room where there had been many transients. He had turned up destitute at the surgery one day before Lionel Burger was arrested that final time, and been recognized as the champion vendor of the Party paper in the streets, during the period before, in its final avatar, it had been banned.
But by the time her father was convicted, the last of scores of people who had shared the house since she was born there were gone. Her father, allowed to consult with his lawyer on family and business affairs, decided with Theo that the house should be sold. A good job was found for Eilefas Bengu, the gardener, Lily Letsile was pensioned and went home to the Northern Transvaal to reflect upon whether or not she wanted to work again, the Labrador bitch went to Ivy Terblanche where Rosa could come and visit her, the black cat and two tabbies went to the former receptionist from the surgery, the rabbits, the guinea-pigs, the tortoise and love-birds Rosa and her brother had made houses for and slept with and communed with as children had long since died or disappeared. The furniture was sold in a house-auction she did not attend. Three hundred people came (the press reported) and not all to buy; they were curious, too. When Rosa called to pick up some small personal possessions the new owners were there, walking round the swimming-pool where her brother had drowned and replanning, with arabesques drawn in the air and dimensions paced out, the patio area where her father set up his braaivleis and her mother’s tree-ferns from Tzaneen had grown so big they lifted the paving. As she was leaving, there was an awkward, undertone conversation and the new lady of the house came running after her. — I wonder — about the plate? The doctor’s plate. — The girl apologized; she would get it removed.
She returned before dark with an unhealthy-looking fair man with long hair and a straggling moustache, wearing the fashionable garb of shirt with Balkan embroidery, jeans, and veldskoen. He had a screwdriver but found some difficulty in turning it in the grooves caked with layers of metal polish turned to stony verdigris. She did not get out of the driver’s seat. The oblong where the plate had been showed whitish in the twilight. He put the plate in the boot of her car and they drove away.
Rosa was allowed one prison visit every two months for the first year, while her father was a ‘D’ grade prisoner. She received from him, and wrote in return, one letter a month not longer than the regulation 500 words. When she exceeded this limit by a sentence, the page was cut at that point by the Chief Warder, who censored prisoners’ mail. Her father told her, at her next visit, how he had amused himself trying to construct from the context of the preceding sentence what the missing part would have added. In the July and October of that year, she did not write in order to let her half-brother from her father’s first marriage, a doctor working in Tanzania and a prohibited immigrant in South Africa, send a letter. During the second year, her father became a ‘C’ grade prisoner and was allowed several special visits. Application to take advantage of these visits by Flora Donaldson and Dick Terblanche (Ivy was in prison but her husband’s ban had lapsed and had not yet been renewed) were turned down by the Director of Prisons, as was that of an old comrade, Professor Jan Hahnloser, who thought Lionel Burger had foolishly and tragically thrown his life away for political beliefs now long become abhorrent to the professor, but found in the tragedy the necessity to assert the bonds of youthful friendship. The Director did allow a Christmas visit from the aunt and uncle — her father’s sister and brother-in-law, a farmer and his wife who had been present in court for the verdict at his trial. It was in the autumn of the second year, when she was allowed to see her father every alternate week, that one of her visits was to the prison hospital because he had the first of the virus throat infections that kept recurring.