Burger's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

come to the Santorinis’ later.—To eat with us.——Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.——We’ll open a bottle of Dao.—Dao was my father’s favourite wine.
    Theo could say that to me. He wasn’t merely my father’s counsel, he wasn’t even only a friend. When a hostile colleague had taunted him—lawyers named as Communists by the government are disbarred—with more than professional interest in the Burger case, he had everted his pink, clean lips—Let’s say my heart is in it.—
    I knew I would have to go through a scene with Lily, and her husband Jamison and any of her other cronies who happened to be gathered at the house. It was she who had given baby photographs to the press when Tony drowned. She had gone into mourning, black from head to toe, with only the salmon-coloured palms of her hands and the whites of her eyes for relief, when my mother died. She did for us all the things white people had taught her one ought to be expected to do. I knew she would be shocked that I did not come back borne along by the aunt and uncle and cousins who had, with the blood-loyalty that was their form of courage or kindness, sat to hear the sentence pronounced. I wanted to take Lily up to my bedroom so that we could sit on my bed and I could put my arms round her and let her have her cry, but she was seated formally among the up-ended chaises-longues and pool equipment on the porch outside my father’s study with Jamison and the servants from round about who were her intimates, waiting for me. I had told her many times that she must expect my father to go to prison this time for a long time. I had tried to prepare her. But she was sitting there as at one of her prayer meetings waiting for the good news, the Lord’s mercy. There was a tray with a jug of orange juice and one glass—for me—on the rusty table with the hole where the sun umbrella used to be fitted. They all got up from the screechy wrought-iron chairs whose cushions she had stored away, and when she saw me coming in, just as I had been day after day for all the time of the trial, she understood there was no good news, no Lord’s mercy, and her obstinacy fell away from her. She said with a belligerent sense of tragedy—What they did do to him ?—
    Then she wept and rolled her head and fiercely waved the others away. Her keening, trilling shrieks seemed about to begin, but some sense in her was watching me and we were making a tacit compact that she would not fall to the floor in hysterics. I stroked her head that felt like a lumpy mattress, her springy African hair divided and plaited in tiny pigtails under her doek (I had often watched her do it, as a child). She rocked me with her.—God is going to stay with him in that place. All the time, all the time. Until he come home.—Here she interceded for us, too, mediating our rejection of belief into the acceptable form, for well-off white people, of merely neglecting to go to church. I don’t know what I said; we had our form, too, for correcting without offending—You think of him, Lily. You’ll think of him often and he won’t be alone.—Something like that.
    Arms round each other, just the two of us, we went slowly to the big kitchen where she had cooked so many meals for my father, his family. The alarum clock that she took to her room every night stood on the windowsill above the sink, tacking down the seconds of the end of the first day— life means life . At last, she said eggs were finished, and no bread for breakfast tomorrow. So I went out again that day and drove to the Portuguese greengrocer down the road. The west-facing hill where the shops were held the heat of the afternoon sun that made garish the scratches and smears on the car windscreen. Barefoot white children already in their short cotton pyjamas were buying milk and cigarettes and a bonus of chewing-gum or ice-cream cone to