Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Walking home after school from the location, the dirt road gathered itself ahead or behind, rolling up its surface into a great charge of dust coming at them; there was a moment when they saw a car and a face or faces at the fuming centre, and then they were whipped into turmoil, it lashed round them a furry tongue of fiery soft dust spitting stinging chips of stone. When they could breathe and see again, the fury was already gathering up the road on the other side, smoking against the sun and blocking the other horizon. Sometimes it was Mehring whom they found in that split second when they saw into the core of the storm.

Two men came out of the dark, unafraid of the cowardly dogs. The cooking fires were dead and Izak saw two uprights casting hoods of shadow across the kraal yard in the winter moonlight. They were pressed forward, driven within the circle of yelping and snarling. They asked for Solomon.

Solomon was somewhere within the room stored with sleeping bodies whose strong smell was brought out by the warmth of a tin of live coals. He had a woman in his iron bedstead and rose on one elbow beside the head tied in a cloth; he wore, against the cold, the shirt that he worked in and it took enough glow from the fire to show his face. He said nothing, as a man will do when he is neither alarmed nor puzzled. But he made no move, either to get up or lie down again, and Izak turned away. He stepped round those who slept on the floor.

He did not speak to the waiting men and was not surprised that they did not speak to him; he was young, no one consulted him yet. Solomon came out of the room with trousers and shoes on; they said — Your brother says you must come. —

— Tonight? —

— You must come now. —

— I’ll come tomorrow. -

— He says tell you to come tonight. —

His movements had stirred children in the room behind him and they began to cough in their sleep.

— I am in bed. We are all sleeping. —

But they were not; they were standing there.

He argued with them for a while.

— No, not tomorrow. Tonight. He’s in trouble, you must come, man. There are people making trouble for him. Tonight. -

Solomon went back into the room and returned wearing his pullover. When he walked away with the others Izak could still distinguish him by the light stripes at the neck and waistband.

He was not there to drive the cows to pasture with Phineas and Witbooi in the morning. Jacobus thought he must have slept at his brother’s in the shanty town past De Beer’s farm and would be late. Jacobus was neither concerned nor annoyed: Solomon was not a drunkard and if his brother had been caught without a pass he would have to find out in which police station he was being held and go there to bail him out. It could take a day.

At twelve o’clock Jacobus went to investigate a blockage in the irrigation pipes and himself discovered Solomon lying naked except for a vest, in the veld. His hands and feet were cold and scaly as a reptile. He had lost a lot of blood from a wound in the head; the spilt blood was frozen, a thin pink ice diluted with frost on the dead grass, where his body had kept off what warmth there was in the morning sun blown glassy by the wind. He was deeply unconscious and did not rouse to cries, voices, or the journey to the location hospital, wrapped in blankets from his bed, in the back of the pick-up. Jacobus and Solomon’s woman and Izak went to the shanty town from the hospital but Solomon’s brother was not there and had not been seen for three days. They had started their inquiries at the most likely source for news, the drinking-place, and then been sent on the route of rumour from one person to another. Izak could not describe the men because he had not seen their faces. He repeated again and again, for each group or individual, exactly what had been said. Some asked, as if it were Izak’s fault, But why did he go with those people? And others pressed, But did he know those men? Izak could only say again exactly what had happened. As the account and the response it brought became ritualized, Jacobus began to add, at the point where Izak’s silence began, a remark. — If he had called me, it would have been different. -

They looked at Izak; only a boy.

Solomon’s woman wept; he hadn’t spoken to her when he came back to fetch the pullover. She was not his wife, he did not tell her things. Back at the farm, Izak showed where he had stood and where the men had appeared, and people testified whether they had heard anything or not. The fowls picked where the men had stood and the dogs who had whined and barked but not prevented their approach lay twitching their bony haunches in daytime sleep. The children lingered around in the place where something had happened as people who have missed a train continue to stand about. The water was still not coming through the irrigation pipes; but about half-past three it began to run again — Jacobus and the other men got up from the pot of hardened mealie porridge where they had shared some sort of late meal, and went off to set the jets going. The women and children could hear the men’s voices, still in discussion, as they went slowly up the fields.

Later Jacobus took the house key from the nail among the hanging onions and telephoned to town. But the office was closed, and there was no reply from the flat. The next afternoon, he tried again.

— I see why it is no water. Is getting too much cold down there by the river. Is coming ice in the pipe; again this morning. Yesterday the same, and again this morning. -

— What do you mean ‘again’? Did it flow at all, yesterday? —

— When it’s coming little bit warm, in the afternoon, yes —

The voice has no time for this. — Oh all right, I suppose I can get some packing for the pipe — which pipe is it? — directly from the pump-house or where? — never mind — I’ll see on Sunday. I just hope it doesn’t burst before then. Jacobus, don’t use any irrigation in the meantime, that’s the safest, just leave it, eh? But let the pipe empty while the sun’s on it, be sure there’s no water there, then disconnect it. Do you understand? Don’t irrigate. —

— Yes, yes, much better. And Solomon is very sick in the hospital. -

— Oh my God, what now. And what’s wrong with Solomon? —

— In the night he’s go over there to the other farm, the Dutchman’s farm, to look for his brother. Somebody come fetch him late in the night; I think more than eleven. Now in the morning he’s not here for the cows and later on I myself I see Solomon’s all the time in the veld, there, down there, where — you know.? —

— The third pasture, you mean? —

—. Yes. Someone’s take his clothes, everything, cut his head, he’s blood there in the veld. He doesn’t hear me when I’m take him in the pick-up — I fetch the pick-up and carry him to the location. -

There is no reaction to the mention of the pick-up, although when Jacobus says the word he leaves a fractional pause before he continues; a white man will never refuse you if he has proof that someone is ill or dying; the pause is just to remind him of what he said about using the tractor.

— And what happened at the hospital, Jacobus? Is he all right? —

— He was sleeping, sleeping. They say he’s very bad but perhaps he can come all right. —

— Well, that’s terrible, Jacobus. He’s lucky he didn’t die, in this weather, out all night. —

— But I think he’s all the time sleeping, don’t know nothing, yes. —

— Heavy frost, eh? What are the radishes like? Gone black? —

— They still coming nice. and I find another boy, then, from another place, he can hold Solomon’s job for him. Good boy, he know cows well. —

Again a pause. And the response falls into the place that has been made ready for it, just as, at the telephone exchange that connects the two voices, certain metal levers have had to drop into their slots in order to establish the communication. — All right. I suppose so. If it’s necessary. I’ll try and come tomorrow, If not, Sunday. Don’t forget — no irrigation, ay, Jacobus. —