Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— You should take the pick-up. Use the pick-up when you like. He wouldn’t know the difference. How could he know? He’s running in from town and running back. You’re a fool, old man. —

— I’m the one who oils and looks after the tractor, I’m the one who looks after all his machines, all his machines, everything, all his cattle, every day. Saturday, Sunday, even Christmas. —

They are raking down cattle feed from the bunker silo. A great show of industry — no one looks up except a visitor (the constant stream of Saturday and Sunday visitors, drunk and sober) who is gossiping with them. He must have imagined it, composed out of the cadences of their language what was somewhere in his mind, but did he hear the name ‘Terry’, quite distinctly, it seems to him, as he passed? Very unlikely. It was some other word that has a similar sound. The round lid of the dustbin outside the kitchen door lifts like a cymbal in his hand (the letter drops into the mess of burnt mealie-meal and potato peelings giving up a smell of fermentation) and clangs closed.

As usual, just as he is about to drive away Jacobus is seen hurrying over with an urgent request. The car engine is running. A bag of cement; this time it’s a bag of cement. No matter how thoroughly the question of the farm’s needs has been gone into, there will always be this compulsion of Jacobus to think of just one more thing, hardly more than a delaying tactic, as if he doesn’t want to be left behind here where he belongs, doesn’t want to be left to it, the farm. The responsibility; he really is responsible, old Jacobus, in his way. He has his usual worried grin, head on one side, showing those few rotten tusks; no sign of any offence. He could say to him, take the pick-up on Monday and go to the builders’ suppliers; but there’s no telling how far the interpretation of such authorization can be taken. The next thing, they’re piling in for a beer-drink or a funeral and the pick-up’s smashed somewhere, a dead loss because the driver was unlicensed and insurance won’t pay. These are the sort of easy concessions that don’t do anybody any good; all they do is threaten the organization of a place like this.

Who wouldn’t make the world over, if it were easy as that.

— The rise and fall of currencies, of stock exchange prices, of imports and exports, of the supply of labour and the cost of raw materials —

— Of pig-iron. —

— Yes, pig-iron. —

— Ah, I see you do believe in something — you are one of those whose Baal is development -

— What d‘you mean ‘Baal’? —

— Because you’re a pagan, you have to invest some concrete object — a thing — with power outside yourself —

— Coming from a lapsed-Catholic gipsy or whatever it is you are. —

She put her hand on him, just under the left pectoral muscle, half patted, half slapped, half caressed. — This is what I believe in — flesh-and-blood people, no gods up in the sky or anywhere on the ground. ‘Development’ — one great big wonderful all-purpose god of a machine, eh, Superjuggernaut that’s going to make it all all right , put everything right if we just get the finance for it. The money and the know-how machine. Isn’t that it, with you? The politics are of no concern. The ideology doesn’t matter a damn. The poor devils don’t know what’s good for them, anyway. That’s how you justify what you condone — that’s what lets you off the hook, isn’t it — the Great Impartial. Development. No dirty hands or compromised minds. Neither dirty racist nor kaffir-boetie. Neither dirty Commie nor Capitalist pig. It’s all going to be decided by computer — look, no hands! Change is something programmed, not aspired to. No struggle between human beings. That’d be too smelly and too close. Let them eat cake, by all means — if production allows for it, and dividends are not affected, in time. —

The farm, to justify its existence and that of those who work on it, must be a going concern. These are the facts.

… once at night he was told to awake and go down to the river and he would find an antelope caught in a Euphorbia tree; and to go and take it.

Thousands of pieces of paper take to the air and are plastered against the location fence when the August winds come. The assortment of covering worn by the children and old people who scavenge the rubbish dump is moulded against their bodies or bloated away from them. Sometimes the wind is strong enough to cart-wheel sheets of board and send boxes slamming over and over until they slither across the road and meet the obstacle of the fence, or are flattened like the bodies of cats or dogs under the wheels of the traffic. The newspaper, ash, bones and smashed bottles come from the location; the boxes and board and straw come from the factories and warehouses not far across the veld where many of the location people work. People waiting at the roadside for buses cover their mouths with woollen scarves against the red dust; so do the women who sit at their pitches selling oranges or yellow mealies roasting on braziers. The scavengers are patient — leisurely or feeble, it’s difficult, in passing, to judge — and their bare feet and legs and the hands with which they pick over the dirt are coated grey with ash. Two of the older children from the farm go to school in the location. They could return as they come, across the veld and through the gap cut in the fence by gangs who bring stolen goods in that way, but they lengthen the long walk home by going to have a look at what people are seeking, on the dump. They do not know what it is they would hope to find; they learn that what experienced ones seek is whatever they happen to find. They have seen an ash-covered forefinger the size of their own dipping into a sardine-tin under whose curled-back top some oil still shone. When the oil was licked up there was still the key to be unravelled from the tin. There have been odd shoes, casts of bunions and misshapen toes in sweat and dirt and worn leather; a broken hat. The old tyres are hardest to get because people make sandals out of them. From hoardings along the railway line, which also runs through the industries, providing sidings, black men with strong muscles and big grins look down, brushing their teeth, drinking canned beer or putting money in a savings bank. Industries and factories announce themselves — gas welding, artistic garden pots, luxury posture-corrective mattresses, THIS IS THE HOME OF FIAT.

The location is like the dump; the children do not know what there is to find there, either. It is not at all like the farm, where what you will find is birds’ eggs, wire, or something (a coin, a pocket comb, cigar stumps) white people have dropped or thrown away. A ring was lost; the children were told to look for a shiny stone in the grass. Once there was a tortoise, and the parents ate it and the shell is still in Jacobus’s house.

They roamed the streets of the location seeing in to houses that had furniture, like the white farmer’s house, and peach trees fenced in, with dogs like the India’s barking, and they passed other kinds of houses, long rows of rooms marked off into separate dwellings by the pink and blue paint used on the exterior, where a lot of men from the factories lived and made mounds of beer cartons on the waste ground around. Outside a hall as big as a church they saw the huge coloured pictures of white men shooting each other or riding horses but they had never paid to go inside. They went into little shops like the India’s and bought five cents’ hot chips wetted with vinegar, and hung about against the glass walls of the biggest store in the location with thousands of different coloured bottles of liquor behind its fancy steel burglar grilles. They saw men in clothes better than anything Izak had, white caps and sun-glasses, wonderful watches and rings on hands resting on coloured fur-covered steering wheels of cars. There were women wearing the straight hair of white people and hospital nurses in uniforms clean and stiff as paper. There was an abundance of the rarities carefully saved, on the farm: everybody here had boxes and carriers and bottles and plastic cans in their hands or on their heads. A child had a little three-wheeled bicycle; a shopkeeper chased a screaming girl who had taken a pineapple. They played in the streets with some children who suddenly snatched their chips off them and disappeared; a balloon was handed to them from a van with a voice like Izak’s radio, telling people to buy medicine for their blood. Looking on at boys their own age gambling they saw one pull a knife and thrust it into the back of the other’s hand. They ran. But they went back; always they went back. One had once been farther, actually into Johannesburg, lying on a manure hawker’s cart and seeing the buildings, enormous, jolting all round as if about to topple with the movement of the frightened horse and uneven axles in the traffic.