The Conservationist (9 page)

He drew her tongue into his mouth as he would suck the flame of a match up into his cigar. Perhaps she deliberately used half-burned candles, knowing they would always last exactly the duration of one meal for two people - the interplay of conversation with more guests would extend the time taken, of course.

Under the net weighted with beads, Alina has today, as usual, set out tomato sauce, marmalade, honey, mustard, uncertain what category of meal it is that he eats when he comes here. The variety assembled goes further than that: it expresses the mystery of eating habits, unimaginable choices of food not open to her. There is also a jar of pickled onions he bought the other weekend from one of those roadside lorries that sell home produce and handcrafts, fireside pouffes made of off-cuts of fake leather, stuffed cotton toys. It is true, lately he quite often eats at the farm, and at odd times - he may work through lunch and then, on impulse, leave the office at three and pick up provisions whose nature is determined by whatever shop’s convenient, on the way. There are no lunch parties down at the river. Not since before he was in Japan. The willows have moulted entirely and the grass, grazed down to earth, anyway, has a layered, slippery covering of narrow brown leaves. Dead, and buried, down there - the summer. Whenever he thinks of bringing some friends out from town ... it would amount to the same old crowd, the good friend of fifteen years and her set, the daughter who was the playmate of his son. On the farm it is the time for conservation - buildings to be repaired, fire-breaks cleared, he must go round all the fences with Jacobus. The sort of jobs they’ll never think to do unless you push them to it. A place must be kept up. His energy rises in inverse proportion to winter slackness: sitting there warming themselves against the wall of the kraal, while the weekly bags of mealie meal are sure to be doled out and their poor little devils trail to the pump for water. Jacobus reports that there has been frost already: he has him up on the roof of the shed, hammering down a dog-eared sheet of galvanized iron, sniffing raucously, drawing mucus back into his running nose as he will all winter. On the fences they work together, as they do, from time to time; it is the only way to get the job done properly. Jacobus calls out some reproach, in their language, to chase away the children who are hanging around, not really noisily, just scuffling and stiffling giggles, and, of course, coughing all over the place. — Here, wait! — There seem to be more of them every time he comes out. He has got rid of the two- and one-cent pieces in his pocket and they are happy.

Yes, happy. His hand comes into contact, in the pocket, with the letter addressed in a schoolboy hand that he has not opened.

— Why you don’t ask that master what he do? Why he break that light in the back? Is long time now, then he going to say somebody else you break you pick-up —

The letter crepitates against the lining of the pocket with every movement of the right thigh. -
You
worry about what you do to the tractor, using it like a location taxi. —

— Me! — But the wire is held steady, no fool; presence of mind, that one.

- Yes, you know what I’m talking about. -

The job is finished in the silence of wire squeaking under strain round the new creosoted posts, twanging like broken guitar strings when released.

— The India he’s speak about me. — He’s been working it out.

— I don’t go to the Indians to talk about my farm. But I know what goes on. Remember that. And if you come and tell me next time the tractor’s broken —

He hasn’t got an answer to that one. But when he and Solomon and the youngster, the one who affects fancy headgear, are clearing up the roll of barbed wire and the unused posts, they are busy complaining about
him
in the safety of their own language, they retreat into it and they can say what they like. This slightly tautens the muscles in the thickness between his shoulder-blades, a fibrosis, as he feels them behind him, leaves them behind him.

The farm is large. He can go off anywhere. (Quite frankly, I can’t wait to get away to my old
plaas
. — There is a mica-glitter of malice in the polite refusal of weekend invitations. He is still in demand; he’s needed at table. What a pity, and I had such a charming woman for you.)

Four hundred acres. But like an old horse, he ... Everything has its range. Even the most random-seeming creatures are shown by studies to have a topography of activity from which they never really depart, although they may appear to casual observation to weave and backtrack aimlessly, almost crazily, free. From the flat to the car to the office, from tables to beds, from airports to hotels, from city to country, the track like the etching something (worms? ants?) has left on this tree-trunk amounts to a closed system. No farther. Wherever he sets out for or from, or however without direction he sets out to roam, on his farm, it’s always here that he ends up. Down over the third pasture at the reeds. Peaceful, of course. They don’t come down here any more, for some reason or other; not even the piccanins. He is here alone; there is a sensation he can’t place, it’s as if, sitting down, he has taken a (non-existent, since he hasn’t been wearing one) hat off - it’s because the willows have no leaves at all now, they leave the brow and eyelids without any shield against light and space. He is alone with the letter between pocket lining and thigh, not the sort of letter — a letter from a woman - that must be taken away to be read in some special private place. But a letter that has to be read sometime. A shallow grave of stones is under his eye for a few seconds of absent lack of recognition - of course it’s not the grave, there is no grave: the pit where sheep were roasted in the summer. Every feature is made simple and prominent by the purity and dryness of winter. The hump of the bank here where, when it is higher, the river flows out of the reeds, has emerged from its plump rump of summer green, the bony hip of an Amazon torso under his shoulder. The muscles round his mouth and the cleft pad of his chin briefly compress the flesh into dimpled bloodlessness in one of those tics developed by men accustomed to conceal their irritation with subordinates. The dead reeds are never quite silent and once he has slit the envelope the unfolding rustle of the two thin sheets within is a fingering in the reeds.

‘I don’t know how you can say so. There isn’t plenty of time at all. You know we had to fill in the registration form last year. They’ve got my name and everything. You know that when I went with the school tour I couldn’t even get a passport to go overseas without you writing to Pretoria for permission from the Defence Force. As soon as the exams are over at the end of the year - this year - (underlined twice) they’ll call me up. Please, dad, I know you’re busy and that but I must know. Am I going to America in December or not. That’s what I must know. (Crossed out.) All I can tell you, that if anyone thinks I am going into their army to learn to ‘kill kaffirs’ like a
ware ou
, well I’m damn well not. Thank you very much - you say it will be an experience for me to meet all sorts of people I don’t normally, being sent to a good - I’d call it snob, by the way - school. What sort of people? I don’t see anything good (crossed out) anything to be gained by living for nine months as a cropped head with a bunch of loyal South Africans learning how to be the master race because you’ve got the guns. It would be a good experience, too, I suppose, to be sent up to the Caprivi Strip to shoot Freedom Fighters. About the August holidays. Thanks, but I don’t feel like Johannesburg. Mummy suggests that I come to New York to her, but she’ll have David and Erica, she won’t really be lonely, and it’s such a lot of money to ask you. And as you know I hope to be going over in December. But you know Mummy - she always thinks you’re a millionaire! Anyway, what I want to do - I thought I’d like to go to South West, to Swakopmund. Will you write to Emmy and Kurt and tell them it’s all right? I wrote and they said fine, okay, but would like to hear from you, etc. Don’t send an air ticket or the train-fare. I’ll hitch.’

Oh fine, okay, cast off the things of this world for those jeans with the hems carefully cut ragged and take your begging bowl on the road to South West Africa. No one’s going to know that the old couple who’re waiting to anoint the little lordling’s feet at the other end are living on a pension from your father.

If I had your money. Of course, his mother didn’t want him when she left him, eight years old, but she would fly him back and forth ten thousand miles twice a year to be with her new American brood, why not?

If I had your money . . . I’d pretend it doesn’t exist; on the road, not even the train-fare to my name.

I’d leave it all just as it is. And if I had children, I don’t believe in inheritance of property, unearned possessions, the perpetuation of privilege.

- You’ve got a son? He lives with you? —

— I’ve always had sole custody. He’s away at school. Almost a man. As tall as I am. He said to me last holidays, ‘Why did you marry?’ And I said to him, what’s the reason we go after them - she was pretty. She had a smashing figure. -

It was the hour for a cigarette and confidences, after lovemaking. Suddenly she was up on one elbow, the olive-brown face with smeared eye-paint was looking down on him with an admiring disgust, an expression he had seen once before under different circumstances, on the face of a woman he had taken to watch a wrestling match. — About his mother? —

- He’s not a child. —

— You used exactly those words? As if you were talking of buying a woman in a bar or off the street. —

— Shall I tell you something, Antonia? You don’t know it, but there’s a special pleasure in having a woman you’ve paid. Now and then. I can’t explain it. It’s very clear-cut. For that one night, or that one afternoon or day, whatever it is. You’ve bought and paid for everything. -

— There will be absolutely no unfulfilled emotional obligations on either side, hanging on afterwards. —

— No, no, you see deep meanings in everything. Sorry to disappoint you. Just the feeling that you’re not only taking this woman, you’ve also paid for her. - His forefinger was stirring with gentle regularity in the black fur in the cup of her armpit, while they talked, as he would scratch a cat just under the ear.

- My god, you want to convince me you can buy anything. Mehring and his wholly-owned subsidiaries. — She began to caress him somewhere, too, to assert that she was not the passive partner in whose role people like him would cast her.

— No, just that there are some good things to be bought. —

A plover has landed within a few yards of his feet, tipping from beak to tail for balance. Its exquisitely neat black and white markings take his eye into visual discipline. The winter landscape of the high-veld is supposed traditionally to be harsh but here it is harsh only to the touch - the bristles of broken grass tussocks, the prickly dead khaki-weed, the snagging knife-edge of dead reeds - everything his gaze has been resting on except the ink of the letter and the shapes of the grave-stones, over there, is soft and tonal. The range of distant hills is laid, pale and gentle, along his horizon. The willows, when he sees them as a destination, from the house or up on the road, are caught like smoke over the reeds. The fact is that all this softness is the result of smoke; particles of smoke that hang in the still winter air; smoke from that location that lies between the farm and city. It’s a cataract over the fierce eye of the sun; it’s even possible, some days, to look straight at the sun as if you are staring at the prism deep in the under-water radiance of a star sapphire.

He has torn up the letter. Not angrily but not without a self-conscious indifference. Now he doesn’t know what to do with the pieces. Paper is organic; it would rot, in the reeds, if he threw them there, no one comes here, no one would understand the jig-saw of words, anyway - ‘I must know’, ‘you’re busy and that’, ‘cropped head’, ‘kill kaffirs’. — Imagine if she were to be walking unknowingly over an undiscovered grave on a farm but she made out, on a scrap of paper, the words ‘kill kaffirs’ — oh my God, the story she could concoct on
that
bit of evidence of casual heartlessness and brutality, etc!

What do they want, anyway, who only know it’s not what he’s got? What is it
he
wants - a special war to be started for him, so that he can prove himself the conscientious objector hero? The way he once longed for a bicycle with racing handlebars? The way
you
wanted to end up sending for me to come to you in the Greek cafe: -Trouble- you said, your eyes changing from fear to idiotic arrogance and excitement the instant you looked up and saw me. No wonder those back-veld oafs in uniform slapped your face; I felt like doing it myself, once or twice. Free spirit, bold gipsy in bed (her name was Mancebo before she married her professor, an old Romany name from Spain or France, she said; more likely just some Jewish blood somewhere); but you were not so free and bold when answering questions about your poor bloody black friends at John Vorster Square. Speak to a good lawyer, a respectable, shrewd company lawyer, and keep out of jail the conscientious objector hero with the straight white-blond hair and that brownish fuzz round the chin that he’s produced surprisingly young (he’ll be virile, in spite of himself, like his papa, chase women, whether he approves of himself or not).

What is it they think they can have? What do they think’s available? Peace, Happiness and Justice? To be achieved by pretty women and schoolboys? The millennium? By people who want good respectable company lawyers?

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore - dead and hidden - whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it’s all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?