Burger's Daughter Read Online Free

commenting on some aspect of the morning’s proceedings, he looked up at her under his eyebrows and raised a hand in salute, she recognized the greeting of someone who has been away and signals his return. He took a lift back with her to Johannesburg. He was one of those people who usually wait for the other to begin to talk. The Defence evidence in the afternoon had gone badly; there was nothing to say, nothing . She was aware, in the presence of another in the car, only of actions that usually are performed automatically, the play of the tendons on the back of her hand as she shifted the gear-stick, the sag of her elbows on the steering-wheel, and her glance between the rear-view mirror and the road ahead.—How was it ?—
    â€”What was ?—With an edge of challenge to her preoccupation.
    Her voice went light with embarrassment.—You’ve been—where ?—Cape Town... ?—
    â€”You’re always so polite, aren’t you. Just like your father. He never gets rattled. No matter what that slimy prosecutor with his histrionics throws at him. Never loses his cool.—
    She smiled at the road ahead.
    â€”You must’ve been very well brought up. No slanging matches and banging doors in the Burger house. Everybody marvellously up-tight.—
    â€”Lionel’s like that. Outraged, yes. I’ve seen him outraged. But he doesn’t lose his temper. He can be angry without losing his temper...never, I don’t remember even once when we were little... It’s not put on, he just is naturally sympathetic in his manner.—
    â€”Marvellously up-tight.—
    She smiled and shrugged.
    â€”The old girl this afternoon. She was a friend ?—
    â€”Sort of.—
    â€”Sort of. Poor old girl. Trembling and snivelling and looking down sideways all the time so she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Not just the eyes, she couldn’t let herself see even the toe of his shoe. You could tell that. And saying everything they’d got out of her, dirtying herself... All in front of him. I watched Number One accused. He just looked at her, listening like anyone. He wasn’t disgusted.—
    â€”She’s been detained for nearly a year.—The driver must have felt her passenger studying her.—She’s broken.—
    â€”She was a bloody disaster for your father today. What is this—Christ-like compassion ?—
    â€”He knows what’s happened to her. That’s all.—
    Her consciousness of the set of her profile made it impossible for him to say: And you ?
    To make him comfortable, she gave an aside half-smile, half-grimace. —Not ‘well brought up’, just used to things.—
    The day her father was sentenced he would have been there, the narrow face pale as a Chinese mandarin’s with the drooping moustache to match, ostentatiously ill-dressed to rile a stolid gaze of heavy police youths creaking in their buckled and buttoned encasement. She didn’t remember seeing him although it was true that she had slept with him once or twice. Family feeling overruled other considerations as at a wedding or funeral; an aunt—one of her father’s sisters—and uncle, and cousins from her mother’s side came to be with her despite the fact that they had never had anything to do with her father’s politics. As at a service in church, the family took the first row in court. The aunt and female cousins wore hats; she had with her in her pocket the blue, lilac and red paisley scarf she put on only when the court rose as the judge entered, each day of the two-hundred-and-seventeen of her father’s trial. All around, everywhere except the high ceiling where the fan propellers were still, there were faces. The well of the court was lined with bodies, bodies shifted and surged on the benches behind her, pushed up thigh against thigh, the walls were padded with standing policemen.
    He—her father was led up from cells below the