Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

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?

He has them up, arraigned, before him and they have no answer. Nothing to say. He feels inside himself the relief and overflow of having presented the unanswerable facts. To prevail is to be recharged. For a moment there’s an impulse to put the bits of paper under one of the stones in the pit; he even stubs at it with the toe of his boot, although he knows (he carried some of them there) it would take two hands to lift it. But he opens the slit envelope and carefully shakes the flakes of paper back into it, making a kind of spout of the angle of fingers from cupped palm. Not one piece escapes to lie about.

— The Dutchman can take the pick-up and break the light at the back and scratch the door. Yes. —

— What kind of man is that? Like a stray dog running in from town and running back. Where’s his child? His woman? He doesn’t seem like a rich white man. - Dorcas’s husband stood among them and followed the figure with the eyes of a town-dweller; on Saturdays and public holidays farm labourers worked but he did not.

— Oh he’s got a son. He comes here sometimes. —

— ‘Terry’. His son said he doesn’t want to be called master — he told Jacobus, didn’t he? You mustn’t call me Master Terry. He just wants us to call him by his name. — Izak gave his young laugh.

Jacobus dismissed irrelevancies, dropping his voice although he knew his words, even if audible at this distance, wouldn’t be understood. — Does it break the tractor if I take it up to the shop? —