The Conservationist (12 page)

A moment’s hesitation; four into the palms of Solomon.

- Here. - Two for Jacobus.

Someone neglected a cooking fire or De Beer’s boys decided off their own bat they wanted to burn weeds or force the green through early in a patch of pasture. — Bad luck for us this winter, eh, Jacobus? —

Jacobus is showing with windmill sweeps of the arm, as they walk, how the fire was kept back from the lands. But the truth is it looks as if it reached its own limitation where it wasn’t stopped by the existing firebreaks. The wind changed; something like that. Will the willows ever be the same again? They think if the lands are saved no damage has been done. They don’t understand what the vlei is, the way the vast sponge of earth held in place by the reeds in turn holds the run-off when the rains come, the way the reeds filter, shelter . . . What about the birds? Weavers? Bishop birds? Snipe? Piebald kingfisher that he sometimes sees? The duck? The guinea fowl nest in the drier sections, as well. There will have been no nests, though, at this time of year. But what else — insects, larvae, the hidden mesh in there of low forms that net life, beginning small as amoeba, as the dying, rotting, beginning again?

Burned off black. Back down there he moves, a lone piece of vermin through that convict’s head of stubble manged with ash. Rags of black hang from the lower stumps of the willows. Perhaps it is not their substance but the remains of the feathery parts of the reeds. Up into some of the older trees fire has thrust a surgeon’s red-gloved hand, cauterizing through a vaginal gap or knot-hole; the raised pattern on the trunks of all of them has been scorched into a velour of fine white ash.

His calves are aching. It’s something to do with the way the circulation is affected: the doctor said smoke less. That’s why he started to smoke cigars in place of cigarettes; except that he now smokes both, instead. But it’s not possible to lie down here, not today, not in all this litter from the fire. No wonder they ache. Distress is a compulsion to examine minutely - this anguished restless necessity, when something can’t be undone, when there’s nothing to be done, to keep going over and over the same ground. He will enter the house today. Somewhere to put his feet up. He comes in as always, like a stranger; the living-room has its unchanging, familiar and impersonal components, as a motel room has when he travels - it does not matter that in this case the signs of a previous tenant, the old magazine, the tot left in the bottle, the remnants of the fruit-bowl, are his own. Even the scent of insecticide disguised as a substitute for fresh air is there. Alina has been spraying against something although he keeps little for moths to feed on but a couple of pairs of boots; there are the few oddments of clothing his son wouldn’t fit into any more if he were to come here now. They could be given away out of compassion as the jersey was. The house is a waste, nobody uses it. Of course the month of the school holidays when he might have been here is nearly over. Soon time for him to be hitching his way home now.

Inspecting the backs of hands as he lies on the sofa he can see the graining of the skin where black was washed in rather than off. Marks of fire: she showed him the clay pots, in her house. She puts out cigarettes by holding the stub down as if keeping the head of a drowning man under water while she talks. — Oh, compassion’s like masturbation. Doesn’t do anyone else any harm, and if it makes you feel better. . . — Maybe milord Terry’d agree with you, now, he’d find it adolescent to go down to the compound with his old clothes. One could tease him and tell him it was dangerous - for them to have possessions: a poor devil has his head split open for a few rands. You are right, you never know when you are going to do more harm than good, do you? I can bring porcelain from Japan, really beautiful stuff. But that’s what you liked - something spoiled by the fire.

Now there is news to write to South West - the fire. If there happens to be any paper in the house. For the last few minutes he has known that Alina has come in and is on the other side of the inner wall, in the kitchen; he recognizes the slight sounds that follow the pattern of movements she makes in her idea of the preparation of a meal, as one can differentiate between the quiet presence of a cat, slipping into a room along the walls to jump on to a sunny window-sill, and a mouse scuttling and rummaging among food packets or papers. Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone. First the tap is turned on full blast so that it overruns the capacity of the kettle. The kettle touches down on the steel plate of the stove. The sound of the bread tin lid buckling as it is opened. Presently she must come into this room to get at the refrigerator; yes — and she does not knock because somehow the refrigerator makes of the room an extension of the kitchen, in a way. But she places her feet (in blue bootee slippers whose soles show the number 7 as they descend and lift) carefully and does not look at the sofa, as if someone were sleeping there whom attention might waken. — Is there a writing-pad? —

He speaks in Afrikaans, she doesn’t seem to understand. She looks from the refrigerator to the kitchen and back. She opens the refrigerator reverently and is hidden by the door for a few long seconds, then emerges with a saucer with a shabby dollop of butter on it and a large milk jug which she hurriedly puts on the table, under the net. He wants to repeat what he has asked but she meets his look with that agitated yearn towards the kitchen again and hurries out. She returns with a tray covered by a plastic lace mat on which, since she holds out the tray low enough for him to inspect, before setting the contents upon the table, he sees a plate with sardines keeping the shape in which the tin confined them, a packet of sweet rusks, and the single tin-foil ingot of cheese remaining in a round cardboard box.

He forgot to tell anyone there are supplies to be brought in. — No — Alina - look in the car, you’ll find meat there, and tomatoes. Bread. -

His hand burrows into the back of the section of the cupboard where Jacobus puts the invoices. Any blank sheet would do, but there’s nothing, and tomorrow the urge will be gone. He usually dictates his letters, since he doesn’t write personal ones. If there’s a woman he’s pursuing he would telephone; if he knew where she was. He has not written but he dictated a note to accompany a bank draft ten days or so ago. Old Emmy and Kurt will have known what to do with it, even if it has been scorned.

It is too late for letters, anyway. There has been only one from South West Africa and the present of the bank draft served as reply to it. It was headed ‘Namibia’. That’s all, above the date. Then a selection of suitable information. He has been out into the desert with Kurt and (name illegible or no longer attached to a remembered face) some other old man from Swakopmund. They were wonderful, they knew everything about plants and animals, Kurt had tried to drive him where he wanted to go, but of course the uranium mine area was sealed off, you couldn’t get nearer than Khan Canyon. The Damaras in the area have all been - the word was in quotes — ‘removed’ and herded into a Reserve somewhere, the entire population. A figure was given; also the remark that it is much too cold to swim.

Why this sudden interest in uranium? Not because he wants to go into base metals, that’s for sure. Damaras? - talking about the Klip Kaffirs, in the stony hills around the dry river bed. We used to come upon them when we were youngsters out hunting buck, though how a buck or a man survives in a place like that is a mystery. They are there like the stones - no, were there like stones, apparently they aren’t any more. He hasn’t ever seen one, but he tells me all about them. Not a very fascinating holiday for a boy of sixteen. Old people and some sort of study of Blue books or White papers (it seems) for company. He could come along to Tokyo or Canada. One of the times. What time would that be? When the school holidays coincided with a necessary trip. A time when there would be a father and son with a lot to say to each other, sitting side by side in the plane and making plans. The farm - who else is a farm for, but a son - doesn’t interest him; the whole month of August could have been spent here. Could have planted trees together. One forgets that.

Although the fire was cold, he has come up to the house feeling and looking like an exhausted fire-fighter, and now the tension and weariness of the morning give way to hunger. He does not wait for Alina to bring the food but himself fetches the body-warm brown loaf he brought from town and cuts a rough slice in the meantime. Yes, one forgets; he really has not remembered until today, and the whole month has gone by. Too late for a letter. He is eating the bread without having quartered or buttered it, tearing the crust from the clinging, soft interior and stuffing it into his mouth; he eats slightly piggishly when he’s alone here. There is a pleasure in it, even if there are no other pleasures in the house, the beds empty and that piano silent. He really ought to do something about fixing things up a bit; why must the refrigerator be in this room? Yet it is convenient, just to get up from the table and take what you want. Alina brings in a plate of tomatoes wet from the tap and the half-pound of delicatessen ham with slivers of red cellophane sticking to the fat. While he eats he does not look up to the window through which he could see the farm’s bums, the beggared willows. He deliberately keeps his gaze the other way, towards the smaller window that gives on a peach-tree, a water-tank, and the utilitarian scrap - a car seat, the frame of an old electric stove - they won’t ever throw away.

Chill around him, shadow over his head, wax-polished underfoot - the house is that part of the farm which matters least. What’s appreciated is the value of the land. Inflation has contributed to that, but nevertheless it was not a foolish buy in the first place, and it’s well cared-for. The land itself must be worth as much, now, as land-plus-house when he bought. There are other houses, other beds (he can never bring himself to lie down in the dingy bedroom, he doesn’t mind if his boots smear ash on the sofa). She knew that, of course, though it is difficult with her kind to tell what is grand theory (what she thinks she ought to think) and what actuality. After all,
she
says ‘Namibia’ too, something that doesn’t exist, an idea in the minds of certain people, as the name of a country where he was born and brought up and she had probably never been. Shoulders hunched, mouth clamped, show of a burst of laughter breaking forth: — And in what way, if you please, is your concept of the place any more than an idea? To the Ovambos and Hereros and Damaras? Can you tell me that? You who ‘know’ the country? Little white baas who ran barefoot with the little black sons of servants, now fathers of servants? A name on a map. A label stuck on them. ‘South West Africa.’ ‘Mandatory territory.’ You don’t ‘own’ a country by signing a bit of paper the way you bought yourself the title deed to that farm. -

It is in opposition (the disputed territory of argument, the battle for self-definition that goes on beneath the words) that attraction lies, with a woman like that. It’s there (in the divorce-court phrase) that intimacy takes place. Not that he has ever been mixed up in one of those affairs that end in court with detectives and accusing husbands; for a man in his position a scandal is out of the question. Her husband was safely more interested in his Bushmen than the activities of his wife.

She would talk about sex, too, as part of an ideology he couldn’t share. Athough she visited that territory with him a few times. He wants the boy to have a good time while he is a youngster - that was the way he put these things to her - get it out of his system, not miss anything, so that he’ll see the whole business isn’t all that important, when he is older.

— What bunk. A simplistic view of sex. As if you can get it over and done with. If you haven’t ‘missed anything’ when you’re young, this doesn’t mean you have no more to discover in your own sexuality. It’s idiotic to ignore that sex is mixed up with emotional ideas that’ve grown round it and become part of it, from courtly love to undying passion and all that stuff, and these are not growing pains. They’re as demanding at forty as at seventeen. More. The more you mature the greater and humbler the recognition of their importance. -

— I don’t think about it. —

— No, you just do it. —

— That’s right. — With a particular smile that she took eagerly as evidence against him but that roused her to him in spite - or because? - of this.

— I remember you told me you rather liked to buy a woman now and then - to think, she’s doing this because I’ve paid her; she has to. Sexual fascism. Pure and simple. —

Why not this house? There was not time; she has friends to stay and they would wonder at her lengthy absence. She laughs at the suggestion of the hairdresser. — Do I look as if I spend hours getting myself back-combed and tinted? - He had given himself away and she never left him unaware of such proof, to her, of what he was: the sort of women he was used to had nothing better to do than spend hours in beauty salons. And what was the corollary of that? - he could have trotted it out pat for her . . . ‘while blacks did all their work’. If such women wanted to make love, their alibi was in character.

Since she was such a free spirit, then: — Why do you have to account to your friends for where you go? —

— I have bonds with my friends that are more important than anything else. -

Of course. She didn’t even allow herself to mention the friends’ names. Some instruction to keep your mouth shut, keep your contacts isolated from one another, if I don’t come back from my mission by twenty-one-O-five hours, alert everyone that I’ve been picked up, destroy documents . . . all that incompetent cloak-and-dagger romanticism she elevated to a moral code. Didn’t it provide her, within its limits, with an alibi as good as that of any woman who goes to the hairdresser? Very convenient. After all, not telling anyone where you were going so that they couldn’t reveal your whereabouts even under interrogation made it safe as houses for her to come to his flat those times, even if she had to be home before dark or whenever the countdown with her friends was.

— A duplex, isn’t that what the estate agents call them? — Coming downstairs, she looks under her eyelids at her stomach; it is
her
moment of giving herself away. She watches herself. She flaunts early grey hairs but she fears, too - a slack belly. It is true that she is not flat, when you lie on her you do not feel, anymore, that ass’s jawbone thrust forward down there. When you look down on her, there is no smooth concave pinned on either side by a hipbone, that charming reminder of a nakedness beyond nakedness, a nakedness so complete it goes beyond flesh right to the bone, that some young girls show in a bikini, with cover over only the little padded beak that brings the female body to a point. She did not have a particularly beautiful body even then, five years ago, before she need really have begun to worry about what will happen to it, what happens to them all, around the waist.