Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Jacobus looked round before he left the house; nothing there that would be cause for complaint: the pair of boots cleaned and standing beside the refrigerator, the windows closed and curtains drawn. The glass bowl Alina had put in the middle of the table with three shrivelled oranges left over from last time. Nobody had touched anything. He sniffed: no smell, not that he could detect, anyway. He locked up and from the kitchen door, recognizing the head of the man beside Witbooi, hailed the tractor as it was passing the barn. Witbooi called back; their cries rose and died away across each other, nocturnal calls beginning with the cold shadow of sunset. The house behind him was dark; on each window a sun, rouged with smoke and dust, slipped down the blind glass.

The tractor propelled itself over the contours of the darkening earth like a cripple. Witbooi and the other sat a moment when it came to a halt, Witbooi leaning slightly towards Jacobus. Jacobus’s one hand was feeling at the missing fastenings at the neck of his overalls; perhaps he was cold. They saw he was not going to approach them and they swung slowly to the ground. They were tired by a day that had not been like other days. Their eyes were caught by the key of the house, lit by the dead sun, hanging from Jacobus’s long first finger.

— I’ve told him. You’re going to work here, now. I told him I’m taking you on. -

The other man had been squatting on the farm for many weeks, now. His family fed from everybody’s cooking pots; Jacobus could not increase the amount of mealie-meal distributed without accounting for it when the supply did not last the allotted period of time.

The man was frowning. — And he said yes? —

— You didn’t believe me, people always want everything to be done now. I told you, I know when it is the right time. —

— You’ll give us a room? I want that end room, if —

— You’ve been living all right, haven’t you? Your wife, your children — everybody. Just leave it a little while, I’ll get you bricks from him. I’ll get everything from him. -

The man moved his head in admiring disbelief. He suddenly came to himself: — Thank you, brother, yes, thank you. — That’s all right, brother. — Thank you, brother. — It’s all right. - The comforting exchange wove back and forth between them. The man seemed to have forgotten Witbooi, forgotten the tractor, went off with head down concentratedly in the direction of the kraal.

Witbooi said — Two here now without a pass. —

Jacobus gestured towards the bulk of the machine; it ought to be in the shed by dark. - D’you think he’s ever asked about your papers? He doesn’t care if anyone’s got papers or not, as long as you work. That’s all he knows. And if the police catch you, he can just look in your face and say he doesn’t know who you are, that’s all, you’re someone hiding with his boys on the farm. What has he got to worry about? — And he laughed: — know him. —

Before Solomon recovered sufficiently to tell his story the legend had already grown that he was attacked in the night by a spirit: there was something down there at the third pasture. When he did give an account of what had happened it was a series of circumstances common to everyone among the farm people, and a culmination familiar to their lives. His brother borrowed twenty rands from someone, promising Solomon would return the money for him. Solomon did not have it — a month’s wages — and raised it from someone else, leaving his bicycle as security. Solomon’s brother saw the bicycle and took it away, thinking it had been stolen. The creditor to whom it had been pledged went to Solomon’s brother’s place and-said that the brothers were both thieves, demanding his loan back. In the meantime, only nine rands and seventy cents had been paid to the first man; either Solomon or his brother had used the remainder for some other need. There were meetings, arguments, promises, back and forth across the veld, beyond the reeds between farm and shanty town. The men to whom money was owed sent henchmen to lure Solomon out at night and beat him up. He did not know who they were — two among thousands, over in the location and the shanty town, ready to do at someone’s bidding what they did to him; he knew why it was done.

But the children did not go to the third pasture. They stopped one another, hung back: There is something there. No one had seen it; it had frightened one of the little ones. Which one? Who? — Something there. —

They did not remember any more what there was there, down under the reeds. What Solomon had found, months ago, in the third pasture; still there.

‘So,’ said he, ‘I awoke. When I had set out, my brother, Umankamane, followed me. He threw a stone and struck an aloe. I was frightened, and ran back to him and chided him, saying, why did you frighten me when I was about to lay hold on my antelope?’

Is this all that survives?

Is that all that is left?

The reeds are cropped by fire so that they present a surface like a badly-barbered crew-cut head. The whole vlei is seared off, jagged. - You can see that promised land the cows always want to get at; it’s nothing but a flat bit of solid island in there. - Blackened, hacked: the whole thing exposed, brought down to less than eye-level, all around. And there’s nothing. Nothing to be seen in those reeds, now that everything is bared and revealed. Not a trace. No place to be recognized from any other.

He could see before he ever got to the farm what has happened. Right from the Indian store. Same thing every year but one since he has had the farm; but this time the reeds are destroyed, never before. This time it must have started over at De Beer’s place. A black map extends from below the gum plantation on De Beer’s hill (the wind spared his trees by blowing the other way) down over the veld to the river, following the vlei about half a mile as if the invader were reconnoitring a place to cross — which eventually it did by leaping from reeds to reeds and burning down towards the hidden islands, establishing itself there and then snatching hold of the reeds once more to burn over the waters to Mehring’s veld. The fire’s territory: the invasion marked out with its inlets, promontories and beach-heads. Taken overnight.

The moment of first sight, from the store, roused an anguished revulsion, an actual physical reaction, as if the python of guts in which his large weekend breakfast was warming uncoiled against some inner wall of his body. The Mercedes meandered towards the side of the road, overtaken by its own dust. He may have spoken aloud to himself — cursed, the invocation of forgotten and (for him) non-existent gods. Then he put his foot down and drove very fast, feeling the tyres chuntering over the corrugations buried in the dust, conscious of swallowing, with a gulping movement of his adam’s apple, conscious of taking in air and containing it, burstingly, held in a tense lump at the base of his throat, needing to get there — what for?

It’s all done. Smoking faintly. Quite cold. The whole farm stinks like a dirty ashtray. Worse than last year because the willows have caught it, too; but the lands are almost unharmed on his side. He walks along the new boundaries of black and finds at close quarters how inexplicably the fire has reaped a patch of tall grasses here, skirted one there, gutted itself greedily in a ditch, fanned a shrivelling heat over a clump of some tough marsh-plant without devouring it, leaked a trickle of black towards the fence. The picnic bank is in black territory; it’s littered with twisted filaments of burned leaves and shapes of willow twigs that appear to have grown furry grey mould and fall to ashes at the touch of his boot. The stones of the pit, there, bear fire-marks like crude pottery.