The Conservationist (31 page)

Jacobus is in a hurry. He’s running, so far as this can describe the gait possible in such conditions, over such terrain, stumbling and sliding, lurching, slipping. There’s the sensation that the eyes of the old devil are already fixed on him before they can be seen, before the face can be made out. When it is near enough to separate into features he becomes strongly and impressively aware that there is something familiar, something that has already happened, something he knows, in their expression.

Jacobus is panting. His nose runs with effort and a clear drip trembles at the junction of the two distended nostrils.

Jacobus is going to say, Jacobus is saying — Come. Come and look. —

‘And who was Unsondo?’ - ‘He was he who came out first at the breaking off of all things (ekudabukeni kwezinto zonke).’
—
‘Explain what you mean by ekudabukeni.’ – ‘When this earth and all things broke off from Uthlanga.’ – ‘What is Uthlanga?’ – ‘He who begat Unsondo.’ – ‘Where is he now?’ – ‘O, he exists no longer. As my grandfather no longer exists, he too no longer exists: he died. When he died, there arose others, who were called by other names. Uthlanga begat Unsondo: Unsondo begat the ancestors; the ancestors begat the great grandfathers; the great grandfathers begat the grandfathers; and the grandfathers begat our fathers; and our fathers begat us.’ — ‘Are there any who are called Uthlanga now?’ — ‘Yes.’ — ‘Are you married?’ – ‘Yes.’ — ‘And have children?’ – ‘Yêbo. U mina e ngi uthlanga.’ (Yes. It is I myself who am an uthlanga.)

No, no.

No, no. The struts of the Indians’ water-tank are broken on one side, the rain’s done it, undermined the thing, it’s about to collapse. No no. The place was bought for relaxation. We lay there shut up in the house on summer afternoons while you said you were having your hair done; I parted your legs while you were in the bath and soaped you with my own hands because, as you once so graciously admitted, I’m not without tenderness, no ordinary etc., etc. Tank’s going to fall unless they do something about it, they won’t, peace will end up face-down in the mud. Peace hurtles along on a thousand motorbikes, is worn on the sleeves of leather jackets that pocket flick-knives, and is drawn in red ink on a satchel containing books on unnatural violation of the male body, or plain buggery, that’s the real name of what you’re curious to know more about. No, no, no. What’s the point? What can be left, after ten months? If those
boere
bastards had done what they should, it would never have been there. They couldn’t even see to it that a proper hole was made. Scratch the ground and kick back a bit of earth over the thing like a cat covering its business.

But no. No, no. It was dumped there in the first place, not taken away, in the second, and is certainly not the responsibility of the owner of the property. A dead trespasser nobody claims. Why should anyone? No. no. There are a hundred-and-fifty thousand of them in those houses passing on the right, rolled out by speed behind the high fence under the smoke. The women in the bus queues at the gates are busy with a flash of implements and crude coloured yarn while they stand. They’re tough. Sheets of broken water around their feet; and the passing car flings it in their faces. They’re used to anything, they survive, swallowing dust, walking in droves through rain, and blown, in August, like newspapers to the shelter of any wall.

Recognized by the shoes and apparently what’s left of a face, with the - that’s enough! Why hear any more, it’s not going to do anybody any good. That’s enough. A hundred-and-fifty thousand of them practically on the doorstep. It was something that should have been taken into consideration from the beginning, before the deed of sale was signed. They’ll plough down palaces and thrones and towers, you said, smiling defiantly, in the ring of voice that I know means you’re quoting some poem; you waited to see if I would recognize the lines, knowing damn well we pig-iron ‘millionaires’ don’t read poetry, and that makes you feel superior, particularly if it’s one of your left-wing geniuses no one’s ever heard of. And you laugh: — Roy Campbell, South African fascist. — — No ordinary S.A. fascist, I’m sure — I’ve amused you, again. It disposes you well to me; as I walk about the room in the house that is exciting because we know that from outside it looks as if there’s nobody in it, I feel your gaze on my penis that’s thrust out a stiff yearning tongue, helpless, even though I’m moving casually enough around fetching a cigarette or pouring a drink to bring to the bed. Others have examined the thing, of course, as you are doing. Some woman once said that the tip or head looked just like a German helmet; that dates me : it must have been during the war - I was only sixteen when it began. What can be left that is recognizable after so long in the earth. The vlei never dries out. It is always wet, down there, moist anyway. There are worms in that ooze. Spaghetti with bulges of pink; not spaghetti, more like those tubes that are part of the innards of a chicken - the solid white line on the road is preventing him from overtaking a frozen chicken delivery van ahead. Rats, and water-rats. There are no jackal. They are nature’s scavengers. They keep the veld clean. De Beer has not seen a jackal for more than ten years. - Oh no.
A helmet!
It’s exactly like the middle of a banana flower. Even the purplish colour and the slight moist shine. You know how the banana flower hangs sideways from the plant? —

It’s not an image that will go down well with whoever the lucky man is now in London left-wing circles; none of them’s likely to be familiar with the flower of the banana palm. What could be recognizable? What’s left of a face with a — no, no. Let’s not hear the story. The vlei will have done its work. Whichever end of the cycle is taken as a starting point, decay or germination, moisture is the right condition. Things rot or grow; rot and grow through becoming some organism other than the one they once were. Rats turn to jelly, a black jelly like coagulated blood, that is the consistency conveyed by the point of a stick. And here’s just where it disappeared without a trace before the astonished eyes of horrified witnesses. The van carrying frozen chickens has pulled up at the red traffic light exactly at what must be the place (the temporary fortification of planks and barriers where a proper concrete support and balustrade is in the process of being constructed at the side of the road, marks the spot). Waiting for the light there is time to follow over and over, painted on the back of the van, the lines of a huge chicken, wearing a top hat and monocle, with a cartoon bubble anthropomorphically attributing to it the suicidal boast ONLY HIGH SOCIETY BIRDS LIKE ME ARE GOOD ENOUGH TO BE ARISTOCRAT FRESH FROZEN CHICKENS

— No one will remember where you’re buried. — Ah, it’s not as easy, not as final as that. Couldn’t recognize the place when it was burned and then when the reeds and the grass grew so high again, just as if nothing had ever happened. Couldn’t recognize — ‘find’ isn’t the word, no one ever searched, it was forgotten, even they never mentioned him again, not even Jacobus. A stink to high heaven. Everything was sweet and fresh and beautiful, my God, lying there. The grasses nearly met overhead and moved under the weight of a body, gently feeling at it. The sun went behind a cloud and a cool palm of shadow rested a moment on cheeks warm from sleep; easy, always, to drop off down there after a late night or a long journey moving through emptiness, casting a rigid flying shadow over seas and forest and deserts without touch: never coming as close as the single silver-blond stalk that sinks and rises in the breeze to the ear or nose of the sleeper. — O Mehring, how you romanticize, how you’ve fallen for that place. — A stink to high heaven. It was not final; the only thing that is final is that he’s always there. It was never possible to be alone down there. Never lonely. Never feel lonely. It may sound crazy — No, put it another way. A funny thing -You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers. Poor bastard, whoever those bastards were they didn’t give him time to speak. God knows what he hasn’t said. What he could have told; might have said. They have difficulty in expressing themselves. Only the face and the nose - that’s enough! Whether the old devil really said ‘nose’ or whether the picture of the thing is growing with not being able not to think about it, whether the detail has been added — enough. A stink to high heaven: the burned willows have grown again and the reeds have become thickets of birds, the mealies have stored sweetness of lymph, human milk and semen, all the farm has flowered and burgeoned from him, sucking his strength like nectar from a grass straw —

An awful moment looking at a green light and not knowing what it means
.

Jeers of horns are prodding at him. Blank.

A shudder of tremor comes up the back of his neck to his jaw and he jerks to engage the gear. Unnerving; but it happens to everyone now and then. The single syllable chatters away crazily at his clenched jaw. No no. No no. Back to town. He has not waited to hear more. Let them do what they like with it, whether or not the word was ‘nose’. Everything at the intersection which he is now crossing like any other competent driver who’s had a dozen cars in his lifetime and to whom the wheel in his hands is second nature, asserts the commonplace and ordinary reassurance of what are the realities of life. The things he takes so for granted that, his mind on business or other preoccupations, he doesn’t normally even look at. There they are, the blacks on foot yelling at each other conversationally, the chicken van, a family car pulled up so that papa can buy candy floss for the children, an overloaded location taxi crawling, a bus sending up diesel fumes, three Lambrettas identically mounted by youngsters with girls clinging pillion with the appearance of those beetles who mate while in motion, flying along, one clamped upon the other’s back. Nothing has happened. Good god, tomorrow he will settle a dispute with the Industrial Council, and he has decided to turn down another directorship, this time of the new platinum mines - he has more directorships than anyone could wish for, apart from being chairman of two boards. As much money as he needs and knows what to do with, what’s more. The road back is commonplace and familiar enough to bring anyone down to earth. The white working man knows he couldn’t live as well anywhere else in the world, and the blacks want shoes on their feet — where else in Africa will you see so many well-shod blacks as on this road? There is a bus-stop for them (beer cartons strewn) and here, ten yards on, a bus-stop for whites employed round about: just as counting sheep puts you to sleep so ticking off a familiar progression of objects can be used to restore concentration. A prefabricated shelter at the whites’ bus-stop and from the background of a well-known cigarette advertisement someone stands forward and — again — he has that peculiar inescapable sense that eyes are fixed on him as target or goal. No. A girl’s face; a young woman is standing there, and the eyes claim him and, nearer (he has slowed automatically, out of distraction rather than curiosity) he can see clearly that although she is not actually smiling the corners of her rather big mouth are curled in a suppressed greeting. No no. He’s not quick enough to accelerate; she’s raised a hand, not too high, a gesture that detains - ‘Just a moment’ - rather than imperiously signals ‘Stop’. No. The Mercedes rolls to a halt, it has lost its puissance; she seems to be approaching at the same pace. — Oh can you p’raps lift me again? Thanks so much. — He does not take in the face at all. He sees only that the road and traffic, in miniature but clear, are reflected across her eyeballs as in one of those convex mirrors at amusement halls.

What could be a more routine incident? A car has stopped and picked up someone who wants to go in the same direction, into town. In less than a minute the action is concluded and the car is moving on with two people in it instead of one.

The driver says - You know me, then? —

— Oh yes. You lifted me and my grandad. You don’t remember. —

He listens but what is really holding his attention strangely for a few moments is the wide, flat-topped pyramid of a mine-dump to which he has deliberately turned his gaze as another normal landmark. There: has it not even a certain beauty? There are beautiful, ordinary things left. People say they are unsightly, these dumps, but in some lights ... This is a firm dump, that the rain has not softened in substance and outline, but that the wonderfully clean sunny air, sluiced by rain, gives at once the clarity of a monument against the glass-blue sky and yet presents curiously as a (remembered) tactile temptation - that whole enormous, regularly-crenellated mountain seems covered with exactly the soft buffed yellow and texture of a much-washed chamois leather. That’s it. It is
that
— the imagined sensation of that lovely surface under his hand (the tiny snags of minute hairs when a forearm or backside cheek is brushed against lips) - that produces, unbidden by any thought that normally prompts such an unconscious reaction (God knows, his mind is far enough from these things, this morning) the familiar phenomenon in his body. It’s not what the doctor calls a ‘cold erection’ though: pleasureless, something prompted purely by a morbidity in the flesh, what they say happens when a man’s hanged. It’s more like warmth coming back to a body numbed by cold or shock. Subliminally comforting.

- He never shuts up a minute. Jabber, jabber. I could have died. He’s always like that. Being old, you know. —

— He seemed a nice old man. —

She says, and from the voice he gathers she is smiling, not ill-naturedly — He’s all right. He keeps himself going and that. Lively. —

— You never said a word, I remember. —

— I did say thank you I’m sure. —

— Yes, that’s all right, you said thank you. —

— My, I was glad to see you coming along now. How many times I’ve been soaked these last weeks on the way from work. —

— You recognized the car. —

— I knew it was you. I’ve seen you before. Passing. Often, before that time. —