Free Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer Page A

the digit of a claw missing raised the shutter of one lid then the other. A perle-lemoen-shell ashtray, a miniature Limoges teaset, a fossil fragment, tortoise carapace, black-tipped Sacred Ibis feathers someone had stuck in a Vat 69 glass filched from the bar—each was charged with associations she could feel without having to know its history; the rich clutter of private ends pursued was there, in place.
    Although no one could enter these quarters, Rosa could come and go as she pleased. With the hotel dog tittuping ahead on three legs she wandered the wide dirt streets behind the main road in the mornings. Scarcely anyone passed her; a white woman going shopping on foot, a bicycle zigzagging. The houses, little and crabbed, with tin roofs, dark stoeps and windows that were never open, or amply haphazard with clumsy gables like dough-shapes, gave no sign of life but the clucking of chickens and the successive frenzies of dogs who, like the one who accompanied her, were all related in the common progenitor of a yappy Pomeranian-fox terrier cross. A parallel neighbourly cross-breeding of gardens produced, the length of the streets, the same blinding luxury of cerise Bougainvillaea, golden shower creeper, red hibiscus, the same pink and cream frangipani surrounded by a sweet confetti of their own flower-droppings, the same furzy tree-ferns and green-dugged pawpaw palms : the artificial ‘tropical’ gardens of smart resort hotels, elsewhere in the world. They ravelled out in mealie and pumpkin patches where the dorp ended in khakiweed and rusty metal and the veld merged with it. When she reached these quiet, wild, sleeping limits sudden rustlings aware of her—the presence of rats or snakes, once a nest of kittens that hissed and fled from her—turned her back.
    But there were landmarks. She went as far as a broken-paved space within loops of rusty chain where she puzzled over the letters carved on a stone obelisk, although she was, as Uncle Coen told her, ‘ ’n Boere meisie’ who knew her mother tongue, Afrikaans. The inscription was in Hollands, dating from the time of the Transvaal Boer Republic, commemorating the site of the first Gereformeerde Kerk in the district. Another street ended at the church to which she was taken with the Nel family on Sundays, wearing a borrowed hat. It was a new building of the kind that marked the existence of a dorp from miles away at every turn in the landscape. Its copper-covered spike stuck into the sky like a giant, gleaming, three-sided floor-nail. The street that was in line with the most direct path across the veld to the location was where old black men or women greeted her as if she were a grown-up, black children giggled and talked about her, she could tell, as they passed with a loaf or packet on their heads. Once when a group was playing some sort of tag as they sauntered, and a packet broke, she tried to help scoop up the spilt mealie meal and realized they couldn’t speak Afrikaans or English.
    She was resting, in the chair she’d discovered for herself—the solid surface roots of a marula tree, another landmark—when the old oom 1 who often sat talking on the hotel stoep to whoever would listen, came by. He walked so slowly, appearing to use his stiff hip as a cane past which he dragged his other leg, that she recognized him from a long way. He stopped and spoke in Afrikaans.—What is a child doing out of school, this time ?—She could only giggle and say nothing, as the black children had done when she spoke to them.—My child! Go on, now! Go home! Your mother’s waiting. Your poor mother, waiting for you to come from school!—
    She got up and beat at her dress. The dog sniffed the old man’s trousers and jumped away, barking. She did not say to him: my mother’s in prison. How could he understand that ? The prison was down the road, just behind the police station where the flag flew. A little stone