Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— Let’s go. I’m going to the house. - It didn’t matter to him whether they accompanied him or not.

While they walked past the stall where the bull was ruminating and the shed where the spike-tooth cultivator and other combinations of steel teeth and blades lay half-disassembled (Jacobus stepped aside to push some vulnerable part nearer its fellow components) someone said — Why didn’t those people say anything about it when he was staying there with them? —

This time the man answered for himself. — They didn’t tell me. I don’t know. —

— I only say, I remember what Alina’s daughter’s man said to me. Perhaps it’s too late. We can find out, eh, we can ask. On the telephone. -

He went into the open garage and took the kitchen door key from his hiding-place up with the bundles of onions that he was drying from the rafters. The house stank of cat’s pee. They trooped into the living-room behind him, walking softly, with slightly bent knees. The elderly Rhodesian, Witbooi, took off his hat. They stood while Jacobus’s finger went down numbers written on the margin of a calendar with a picture of a white woman without clothes. He turned the crank of the telephone, picked up the receiver, all the time keeping the forefinger of his other hand on the number, and then, after a hesitant beginning, repeated the first digit and spelled out all four to the operator. He did not look at them while waiting for the call to be connected. The Sunday paper was lying on the floor of the room. There were empty bottles beside the chairs. The ashtrays were full.

Speaking English, which not all of them could do, not only his words were different now. He stuttered, he kept lifting one foot and putting it down again, he was crouched round the hand in which he held the receiver. - Please. please I want speak William. William. The boy, there. Ye-es. Ye-es. William. No, no, I’m his brother want speak with him. -

Another silence. The youngster, Izak, picked up a beer bottle, tipped it, put it down. Now Jacobus began to talk again, fast, loud, in the language they all spoke, and they all listened. They could tell from what he was saying what the man at the other end had said: it was true that sometimes the abattoir took people without papers to work in town. Jacobus was bellowing down the machine and the other voice was bellowing back. — You mean he can go there with Dorcas’s husband any day? But what do you mean then? Not now? But why did you say — oh yes, all right, if you’re not sure. He comes home when — six o‘clock? Seven o’clock. All right. All right, boetie —

Jacobus put the phone back firmly and carefully, rang off by turning the crank, presented the accomplishment of the piece of business to them. - He’ll find out when that one comes home. -

Izak had lifted the lid of the piano; smiling at them to look at him, his hand was above the keys as if he were about to capture a butterfly.

Jacobus gave a jerk of the head to indicate the lid must be closed. As they all went out he paused, in this room, and collected from the ashtrays a half-smoked cigarette and the butts of several cigars. The butts were all smoked down to precisely the same length — like the ones the children knew they must deliver to him whenever they found them in the grass.

Rusty scales of long-dried blood gilded the gum-boots. Izak, who was sent over to buy beer at the shanty town behind De Beer’s farm, recognized the blood-coated boots before he separated the faces of the men in the drinking-place, a one-roomed house with a roof held down by rocks and pumpkins. Izak had a milk-can with a lid secured by a chain, for the beer; it jingled its early-morning sound as the two men cycled back together in the half-dark.

— That husband of Dorcas came past with Izak. - Jacobus’s wife brought him a mug of tea.

Jacobus coaxed the last of the pap round his flowered plate, with his fingertips, and made it into a final mouthful. - You can see in the dark. -

She put sugar in the tea.

— Where’d Izak find him? —

— How do I know. Eight o‘clock, nine o’clock — when they work in town they come when they like. They go where they like. - She and Alina spent a lot of time together complaining about their children and their children’s husbands and wives.

Jacobus passed the paddock where the calves were lying down for the night. One or two staggered to their feet and he murmured something soothing. From here he could see the light of the braziers at the compound, reddening the walls of the breeze-block.

— So you went off to go and get him from the India’s? — He treated young Izak with the tolerant amusement of an older man for a youth.

— He was there where I went to fetch beer for Thomas. — Izak was wearing his cap, smiling.

— That place! — Why do you people send Izak there? —

— You go yourself sometimes. -

— I go. He’s a child. That place is worse than the location, for him. They’ll take your money. If they don’t do it themselves, with a knife, they’ll get those dirty women to steal it out of your trousers. -

Izak looked softly from side to side, enjoying attention.

The fowls were quarrelling for places to roost on stumps of a tree hung with loops of iron and bits of wire; someone made as if to beat at them and the dark shape of the tree blew up.

— They’ll take something else out of his trousers —

— That’s nice, Izak? Ay? He likes that —

Jacobus said to the quiet face of the man without work — Well, what does he say? —

But the man in the blood-gilded gum-boots whom they all thought of simply as Dorcas’s husband, since she was the daughter of one of them, of Alina — answered directly, in his place. — Even if he had a pass it’s no good, man. There’s no work now. That time when I talked to you. but not now. It was the time at Christmas, before they stopped the farmers sending so many cattle. It was when too many cattle were coming at once. They were dying at the station. You remember? The slaughter-house was full up, we couldn’t do anything. The farmers were sending more and more. because of no rain.

The man who was looking for work shook his head slowly before them all. The black and white checked cap defined young Izak’s head clearly, but this head was still dusty from the morning’s work, it had a mothy dimness, half-effacing itself into the perimeter of the firelight. The fowls settled again; the children coughed in their sleep; a woman brought round the last of the beer.

— You keep away from there, Izak. No one should send you, soon you’ll begin going on your own and I tell you, that’s the beginning of trouble for you. You’ll give me trouble and that will be the end of it, for you. -

Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. Jacobus was speaking and he must be heard through.

— That’s where they came from, not from the location; the people who left that — down there at the river. -

Nobody spoke but the quality of their presence had changed; quite suddenly, drawn away at the touch of these words, clenched as the tendrils of a sea-anemone move with dumb-show recoil deep under water.

— I’m telling you. -

Izak looked from one to the other, for a clue, quite forgetting. For the moment the withdrawal seemed another reproof directed at himself — what had he done now? — Then the touch reached him, too. He remembered.

Jacobus took a gulp of beer, releasing them from the necessity to bring among them something no one spoke of. But just as they were beginning to talk about other things, he broke in again — I don’t ask anyone there. I won’t say this one or that one. Who or who. But all the same — He rapped four fingers at the bony plate of his breast, behind which this knowledge, for all of them, was thrust away.