Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The young husband asked how big the room was, and whether, since the shed was open, there was no other closed storage room.

‘Oh, like I said, just the usual boy’s room, not very small, no. But you can easy brick in the shed if you want, I can send you good boys for building, it won’t cost a lot. And there’s those houses for pigs, at one time Kleynhans was keeping pigs. Clean them up — no problem. But man, I’m sure if you been doing a bit of farming in England you good with your hands, ay? You used to repairs and that? Of course. And here it doesn’t cost much to get someone in to help. . You know’ (he cocked his head coyly) ‘you and your wife, you don’t sound like the English from England usually speak. .? You sound more like the English here.’

The wife looked at the husband and this time she was the one to answer at once, for him. ‘Well, no. Because, you see — we’re really Australian. Australians speak English quite a lot like South Africans.’

The husband added, ‘We’ve been living in England, that’s all.’

‘Well, I thought so. I thought, well, if they English, it’s from some part where I never heard the people speak!’ Naas felt, in a blush of confidence, he was getting on well with this couple. ‘Australian, that’s good. A good country. A lot like ours. Only without our problems, ay.’ (Naas allowed himself to pause and shake his head, exclaim, although it was a rule never to talk politics with clients.) ‘There’s a lot of exchange between sheep farmers in Australia and here in South Africa. Last year I think it was, my brother-in-law had some Australian farmers come to see him at his place in the Karoo — that’s our best sheep country. He even ordered a ram from them. Six thousand Australian dollars! A lot of money, ay? Oh but what an animal. You should see — bee-yeu-tiful.’

In the house, neither husband nor wife remarked that the porcelain lid of the lavatory cistern was broken, and Naas generously drew their attention to it himself. ‘I’ll get you a new one cheap. Jewish chappies I know who run plumbing supplies, they’ll always do me a favour. Anything you want in that line, you just tell me.’

In the garden, finally (Naas never let clients linger in a garden before entering a house on a property that had been empty a long time — a neglected garden puts people off), he sensed a heightened interest alerting the young couple. They walked round the walls of the house, shading their eyes to look at the view from all sides, while Naas tried to prop up a fallen arch of the wire pergola left from the days when Mrs Kleynhans was still alive. To tell the truth the view wasn’t much. Apart from the koppie behind the house, just bare veld with black, burned patches, now, before the rains. Old Kleynhans liked to live isolated on this dreary bit of land, the last years he hadn’t even let out the hundred acres of his plot to the Portuguese vegetable farmers, as he used to. As for the garden — nothing left, the blacks had broken the fruit trees for firewood, a plaster Snow White had fallen into the dry fishpond. It was difficult to find some feature of interest or beauty to comment on as he stood beside the couple after their round of the house, looking across the veld. He pointed. ‘Those things over there, way over there. That’s the cooling towers of the power station.’ They followed his arm politely.

Of course, he should have suspected something. Unlikely that you could at last get rid of the Kleynhans place so easily. When they were back in town in Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk and Juffrou Jansens had brought the necessary documents into his office, it turned out that they wanted to rent the place for six months, with the option of purchase. They didn’t want to buy outright. He knew it must be because they didn’t have the money, but they wouldn’t admit that. The husband brushed aside suggestions that a bond could be arranged on a very small deposit, Naas Klopper was an expert in these matters.

‘You see, my wife is expecting a child, we want to be in the country for a while. But we’re not sure if we’re going to settle. .’

Naas became warmly fatherly. ‘But if you starting a family, that’s the time to settle! You can run chickens there, man, start up the pigs again. Or hire out the land for someone else to work. In six months’ time, who knows what’s going to happen to land prices? Now it’s rock bottom, man. I’ll get you a ninety-per-cent bond.’

The girl looked impatient; it must have been embarrassment.

‘She — my wife — she’s had several miscarriages. A lot depends on that. . if this time there’s a child, we can make up our minds whether we want to farm here or not. If something goes wrong again. . she might want to go back.’

‘To Australia.’ The girl spoke without looking at the men.

The Kleynhans place had been on Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk’s books for nearly three years. And it seemed true what the husband said, they had money. They paid six months’ rent in advance. So there was nothing to lose, so far as Mathilda Beukes, née Kleynhans, who had inherited the place, was concerned. Naas took their cheque. They didn’t even want the place cleaned up before they moved in; energetic youngsters, they’d do it themselves. He gave them one last piece of advice, along with the keys. ‘Don’t keep on Kleynhans’s old boy, he’ll come to you with a long story, but I’ve told him before, he’ll have to get off the place when someone moves in. He’s no good.’

The couple agreed at once. In fact, the husband made their first and only request. ‘Would you see to it, then, that he leaves by the end of the week? We want him to be gone before we arrive.’

‘No-o-o problem. And listen, if you want a boy, I can get you one. My garden boy knows he can’t send me skelms .’ The young wife had been stroking, again and again, with one finger, the silver-furred petal of a protea in an arrangement of dried Cape flowers Naas had had on his desk almost as long as the Kleynhans place had been on his books. ‘You love flowers, ay? I can see it! Here — take these with you. Please; have it. Mrs Klopper makes the arrangements herself.’

A baboon; unlikely.

Although the medical profession tacitly disapproves of gratuitous publicity among its members (as if an orthopaedic surgeon of the eminence of Dolf van Gelder needs to attract patients!) and Dr van Gelder refused an interview with a fat Sunday paper, the paper put together its story anyway. The journalist went to the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Medical School, and snipped out of a long disquisition recorded there on tape a popular account, translated into mass-circulation vocabulary, of the differences in the skeletal conformation and articulation in man, ape and baboon. The old girls yellowing along with the cuttings in the newspaper group’s research library dug up one of those charts that show the evolutionary phases of anthropoid to hominid, with man an identikit compilation of his past and present. As there was no photograph of whatever the doctors had seen, the paper made do with the chart, blacking out the human genitalia, but leaving the anthropoids’. It was, after all, a family paper. WILL YOU KNOW HIM WHEN YOU MEET HIM? Families read that the ape-like creature which was ‘terrorising the Northern Suburbs was not, in the expert opinion of the Professor of Anthropology, likely to be a baboon, whatever conclusions his respected colleague, orthopaedic surgeon and osteologist Dr Dolf van Gelder, had drawn from the bone conformation indicated by its stance or gait.

The Johannesburg zoo stated once again that no member of the ape family was missing, including any specimen of the genus anthropopithecus , which is most likely to be mistaken for man. There are regular checks of all inmates and of security precautions. The SPCA warned the public that whether a baboon or not, a member of the ape family is a danger to cats and dogs, and people should keep their pets indoors at night.