Free Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

and their hotel. Three initials and a name over the doorway to the bar and the main entrance from the hotel stoep stood for Uncle Coen. He drove back and forth from his tobacco sheds and cattle to town in a big yellow American car with rubber spats trailing to protect the chassis from mud. Auntie Velma ran the hotel office and drove very fast, in a combi with curtains tied at the waist, from hotel to farmhouse, to the railway station to pick up frozen fish for the second course on the menu, to scattered schools each Friday to fetch children, and to church on Sundays. Tony had his bricks and a cousin not yet of school-going age; Rosa gradually came to make the choice, when car or combi was going back to the farm, of staying at the hotel.
    More and more, she based herself in the two rooms marked STRICTLY PRIVATE—STRENG PRIVAAT at the end of the hotel stoep. These rooms had no numbers. There was, instead, outside one, a wooden clock-face with large hands, a wire-and-feather cuckoo, and a poker-work verse: Dear Friend—If you came and we were out/Please before you turn about/Write your name! What time you came! Do call again! COEN AND VELMA NEL. A jotter hung from a string but the pencil was missing. This device was immediately recognizable to any child as something from childhood’s own system of signification. Beyond any talisman is a private world unrelated to and therefore untouched by what is lost or gained, disappears or is substituted for, in events of which the child is at mercy. She knew a badge, a password, when she met with one. She never left the Nels’ quarters without reaching up and turning the wooden hands to the time she went out the door. (She and Baasie had been given watches for Christmas. She remembered to take hers off before getting into the bath; he had not.)
    She would disappear under the dummy cuckoo clock while running down the corridor in the middle of a game with the children of hotel guests. These children would be gone, themselves, in the morning. But no one could sleep in those two rooms STRENG PRIVAAT for one night as they did in the other rooms of the hotel, moving off early for the Kruger Park or the next stop in a commercial traveller’s lowveld round, the beds quickly stripped by the maids Selena and Elsie under lights left burning by the decamped, the early morning coffee tray and the night’s empty beer bottles standing in the corridor. Numbered rooms were all alike. All the lavatory paper was pink; each narrow bedside rug was speckled mustard-brown; between twin beds a radio was affixed to the wall and above each headboard was a coloured print showing a street scene with similar trees, taxis, people sitting drinking at little tables, and girls with high heels and poodles. Rosa read very well but the shop signs in these pictures were in a foreign language; the word she could recognize was ‘Paris’—a place far away in England, she was able to tell Selena and Elsie as she followed them round from room to room, talking above the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the radio they kept turned up while they worked.
    The two rooms where no guests were allowed in were exactly as a child would have expected, would have arranged them herself: crowded, overgrown with possessions whose origin was as individual as the standardization of hotel furnishings was anonymous, a shrine of coloured photographs of weddings and babies, souvenirs and natural curiosities. There were no books, no flowers: it was not at all like home—her father’s house—but stood in relation to the hotel as the child’s cupboard full of treasures does to its parents’ domain. The light came through windows safe with burglar-bars, cosy with the domestic lianas of net curtains and wandering philodendron. She lay on a thick carpet the colour of the red you see when you shut your eyes against sunlight and looked at women’s magazines and the Farmer’s Weekly. A parakeet with