The Conservationist (25 page)

Without the services of the Girl Friday (his office is watched over by her in his absences abroad as a kind of disused parlour, the rolled financial journals put aside on his desk, the air-conditioner kept going and the ashtrays kept empty)
bonsellas
for the boys are not bought, ready for him, this Christmas. He has remembered just in time, and there is the Indians’ — he can stop a minute and find something that will do. Months have gone by, they must have found some solution to their troubles long ago - anyway it’s just too bad, he has no intention of driving back to town to shop.

A figure of purpose enters past rusty wire stands of wilted vegetables and blackening bananas and among the blacks who block the doorway drinking cans of sweet drinks or waiting dreamily to buy. The middle-aged Indian and his son have noticed at once, he produces a kind of alert; but perhaps that is only because he is such a large man, white, a head above every head; a sticky piccanin is staring in fascination at the level of his knee. They are affable as only shop-keeping Jews and Indians are. It’s as if they expected him. They’ve forgiven him; he made some social blunder that nobody’s going to mention. They knew he would come back some time; they can’t be dispensed with.

— I got something very nice. This is what all the boys buy. They like. You’ll see. -

The denim trousers are so stiff the garments could stand alone. They have ‘Lone Ranger’ or ‘Deputy Sheriff’, a choice of legend, embroidered between two star-shaped studs on a back pocket. But he can’t see Jacobus as a movie hero. — Now something for the older boys. —

— This’s the right thing. First quality polyester, no-iron. Nice colours, very nice colours. That’s what they like. Let me tell you. —

— How much? —

- Oh it’s cheap. It’s not expensive. -

— How much? And the pants? —

- Don’t worry, we give you a good price, you know that —

The purchase is a large one, and the plump son with the liquid eyes heavy with good-nature or laughter or last night’s sex has dropped what he was doing and father and son are energetically folding and stacking garments to make a neat parcel. The father hustles spectacularly - No, no man, that’s no good, get one of the big sheets from inside there - no, put that shirt here, look what you do to the collar! — There you are. Try that, sir. Is that okay? You sure? Just don’t carry on the string, eh, I don’t want the paper to tear and everything falls - wait - Dawood! What about one of those shirt boxes, man- — No, that’ll do fine. —

— He’ll take it to the car for you. Dawood —

- Give here, it’s perfect. —

They are beaming at him. Except the old man who sits as always, not dead yet, and looks through him and the blacks as if all are the same to him, or are not there at all. His gaze meets the old man’s and nobody sees; a chink in the eye of a blind man.

— Compliments of the season to you. If you need anything, we open right through to seven tonight. I suppose we be greeting the young gentleman over the holidays. Oh that’s a nice boy. And he like the Indian foods, you know! Tell him he must come —

Yes, yes, he’ll tell him, thank you, thank you.

They beat a dog at the compound on Christmas Day. He lies down there and hears it. He’s given them their pair of trousers or shirt each (ten per cent discount from the Indians’) and the beer and hunk of meat Jacobus was deputed to buy; probably that’s what the dog’s got at: the meat. The bellowing howls die to squeals and whimpers and then it’s started again. He cannot not hear it. They’ve got no bloody feeling for animals. Well, if the cur had had any sense; they’d murder for meat. There is no such thing as a continuous cry of pain, eh; interesting. Man or beast, there has to be a stop for breath although the pain doesn’t cease. Unless it is that pain is transmitted in waves or pulsations or whatever you call it - back to the brain from the spot where it’s being inflicted, back from the brain to the place where the sjambok’s cut or the boot’s landing. They should be stopped. They shouldn’t keep those dogs. But you can’t get through over things like that. — What dogs? Is only one small dogs, he doesn’t know to chase the birds - grinning on brown-necked teeth. You can’t get through. You are right, reading the cards on the table; charity’s a waste of time, towards man or beast, it only patches up a little bit of pain here and there. If it were as easy as that! If I stop them hitting it now that won’t stop them doing it again when I’m not here. Everything needs changing. Don’t you realize, if you were here these days they wouldn’t want to have you on their side, they’d want you to be a white bitch. It makes things clearer all round. If you had any sense in that intelligent head of yours, you’d know that’s how you had to end up. There isn’t anything else they need from you.

The howls have throbbed themselves out and sunk away into the peace. This place absorbs everything, takes everything to itself and loses everything in itself. It’s innocent. The pulse, the rhythm now is a coming and going of flights of birds just after sunset. The oceanic swaying of layers of boughs and swathes has stopped; the force of gravity sinks everything that is of the earth to the earth, chained to a ball of molten ore that has rolled over the dark side. All the weight of his life is taken by the tree at his back. Swallows are a flick of dark flying droplets. From the far curve of the sky, finches; they spring up and down in and out of the line of their formation as they go. Darts of doves aim at some objective of their own. Like showers of sparks, birds explode into his sky, and - a change of focus - close to his eyes gnats are raised and lowered, stately, as they hover in their swarm on strings of air. He feels (see him in her crystal ball and have a good laugh if she likes) almost some kind of companionship in the atmosphere. You predicted it - right - you are so clever, your kind, you always know the phrase: — The famous indifference of nature really sends people like you, doesn’t it - it’s the romanticism of your
realpolitik
, the sentimentalism of cut-throat competitors —

But for all the brown-titted warmth and revolutionary humanity you exude, you fastened the seat-belt and left them all behind.

Tracing his consciousness as an ant’s progress is alive from point to point where it is clambering over the hairs of his forearm, he knows he is not the only one down at the reeds. He doesn’t think of
him
, one of them lying somewhere here, any more than one thinks consciously of anyone who is always in one’s presence about the house, breathing in the same rooms. Sometimes there arises the need to speak; sometimes there are long silences. He feels at this particular moment a kind of curiosity that is in itself a question: from one who has nothing to say to one to whom there is nothing to say. Falling asleep there he was not alone face-down in the grass. There are kinds of companionship unsought. With nature. Nature accepts everything. Bones, hair, teeth, fingernails and the beaks of birds - the ants carry away the last fragment of flesh, small as a fibre of meat stuck in a back tooth, nothing is wasted.

In the harbour of the summer night the city rides lit-up at anchor across the veld. The telephone answering device waits to provide his only conversation. It’s Barbara, darling. Where on earth are you hiding yourself? Seton and I want to have some people over for New Year’s Eve, just a small thing, not a great lush-up. But we can’t imagine it without
you
. I mean, we really do want to know if you’re going to come? I’ve phoned umpteen times.

This is Mr André Boyars’ secretary speaking. Mr Boyars would like Mr Mehring to come to Sunday brunch to meet Mr and Mrs David Lindley-Brown, of

Does this thing really work, Mehring, or am I shouting down the wind ... look, Caroline and I want to make up a foursome to sail with Blakey Thompson to the Comores early in January. How does that strike you? He’s refitted his yacht and he’s got all the info, but we both feel, good chap though Blakey is, we couldn’t take him unadulterated all the way across the Indian Ocean — Caroline’s interrupting, she says it’s up the Mozambique Channel, to be precise ...

I’m getting a coloured band Jan’s dug up. The girl at your office said she didn’t think you’d be back in time, but it’d be so lovely if you could just make it ... it’s going to be enormous, keep thinking of more people I can’t do without - you know how I am —

Someone told me you’ve gone off skiing in Austria? - René and I want to have a civilized New Year away from the mob, and I said to him, d’you know, there’s only one person I’d be happy to have with us ... truly. You’ve never been to our game lodge on the Olifants River, have you? Well, we’ll take lots of good drink and food and watch the hippos. We’ve built a sort of little tower ... René’s got a cousin out from Belgium, a charming girl, I know you’ll get on famously, we’d be cosy.

Some people are intimidated by the machine and couch their messages in telegraphese, as if paying so much a word. Others are cut off just when they are getting into conversational stride - they forget or do not know the span of the recording does not take into consideration how much you may still have left to say. The machine simply stops listening.

Just as he gives no answer. He takes no part in the conversation. He sits with his head tipped back in a long chair, but not negligently. If it were not for the drink in his hand, anyone looking in on the closed-up flat where the owner is away on holiday would take the attitude to be one of a doctor or other disinterested confidant, reliably impersonal.

On Christmas Day they beat a dog and on the last night of the year their radio is turning out
boere musiek,
the sawing, thumping concertina-stuff that Afrikaners love. The monotonous rhythms must have come originally from the chants of tribal blacks, anyway. Listen to one of the farm boys singing the same phrase over and over to himself while he walks, or hear them singing when they’re drunk. — As they soon will be.

He takes a walk along the road past the compound and in the adjoining paddock the beasts are all lying down. It’s said that cows like music. They breathe in deep animal sighs.

No one shows a sign of life from the compound though he knows they’re all there. The L-shape of their shacks hides them and their mess and fowls and cooking-fires from the road. Some year the whole thing will have to be pulled down and decently rebuilt where it ought always to have been - up behind the house, near the public road, clear of the river frontage. There’ll be dissatisfaction because they were here when he came, they were squatting God knows how long before he bought the place and they’ll expect to have their grandchildren squatting long after he’s gone. Everyone pretends he’s not there, at the compound, but when he comes back to the house where his car, clearly as any flag run up, signifies his presence, Jacobus is hanging about obviously waiting for him, although his trouser legs are rolled and he’s carrying soap and a piece of towel as if he’s simply about to wash his feet at the yard tap. He doesn’t like an arrival in his absence or any wanderings about without his knowledge; that’s an old story. God knows what goes on when they’re left to themselves. Clever as a wagon-load of monkeys. He’s only got to see a cloud of dust to know from the shape the Mercedes’s coming, and he’s got the word out, it’s telepathic or witchcraft, they understand each other, they back each other up so well. Today Jacobus is expansive and reckless - had something to drink; well, hell, why not.

— Baas, I’m going wake you up twelve o’clock. Knock on the door. —

— Yes! then we drink whisky- He happens to be taking a bottle, sheathed in the twist of thin white paper in which they are packed by the case, out of the car.

— What, whisky ...! — The laughter is turned towards a marginal presence; the nightwatchman. It beckons him like an encouraging hand. The offer — or joke — is explained in their language.

He has not thought about which party to go to until it is too late to make up one’s mind. Lightning in a soaring cave of black cloud on his right, and on the left a huge orange moon is turning yellow, as the skin of a bright balloon thins and lightens as it is blown up. An extraordinary sight; an extraordinary night. There are times when exactly the particular combination of degree of warmth, humidity, direction or absence of wind, occurring at exactly the right time of evening on precisely the right date after the vernal equinox, will bring winged ants floating out of the ground. Or (a completely different combination: high temperature in an early, dry spring) fireflies, running lines of burning thread through the reeds. They were captured in a school cap and put in an empty chocolate carton with cellophane windows, to make a lantern - a great success with a small boy. It happened only once. No one knows the formula. If the phenomenon should recur it would be too late, now. The air tonight is of the temperature and softness that will bring out women in flimsy dresses. They’ll all swim in the nude at midnight among the moths that have been attracted by the underwater pool-lights and fallen in. Those guests who have jumped clothes and all will have cloth pasted sodden against them like the water-logged wings. It is impossible to put any kind of shelter between oneself and such a night. He has moved away from the house, the neck of the whisky bottle still in his hand; he goes back to the house for a moment — the kitchen door is open, Alina is back and forth for those endless buckets of hot water they seem to draw - and he takes one of the thick cheap tumblers and a plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator.

With the glass resting capped over the water bottle in one hand, and the whisky swinging from the other he makes his track across a great field of lucerne. Behind him the moonlit pile is now cleaved diagonally by a narrow darkness where the pressure of his feet and the volume of his two legs at calf-height have furrowed through the tender plants. The sheet lightning dances and softly capers before him; it seems to touch about his body, to run over him. He does not know where he is making for but he too, on a night like this, will know exactly, when he reaches it — where all the qualities of such a night may be present to him in perfection. He has taken lately to sitting in the evenings on the roofless stoep of a stone outhouse where bags of fertilizer are conveniently stored, since it is in the middle of the lands. No one has ever lived there - who can say, people will squat anywhere - no one has used it to live in since he brought the place and he has not yet decided what use might be made of it. With a new roof, it would be a better house than any of them has at the compound, but that’s out of the question because he has discovered, coming there in the evenings, it has the best view of any spot on the whole farm. A guest cottage? - if one wanted such a thing.