Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

He speaks in Afrikaans, she doesn’t seem to understand. She looks from the refrigerator to the kitchen and back. She opens the refrigerator reverently and is hidden by the door for a few long seconds, then emerges with a saucer with a shabby dollop of butter on it and a large milk jug which she hurriedly puts on the table, under the net. He wants to repeat what he has asked but she meets his look with that agitated yearn towards the kitchen again and hurries out. She returns with a tray covered by a plastic lace mat on which, since she holds out the tray low enough for him to inspect, before setting the contents upon the table, he sees a plate with sardines keeping the shape in which the tin confined them, a packet of sweet rusks, and the single tin-foil ingot of cheese remaining in a round cardboard box.

He forgot to tell anyone there are supplies to be brought in. — No — Alina — look in the car, you’ll find meat there, and tomatoes. Bread. -

His hand burrows into the back of the section of the cupboard where Jacobus puts the invoices. Any blank sheet would do, but there’s nothing, and tomorrow the urge will be gone. He usually dictates his letters, since he doesn’t write personal ones. If there’s a woman he’s pursuing he would telephone; if he knew where she was. He has not written but he dictated a note to accompany a bank draft ten days or so ago. Old Emmy and Kurt will have known what to do with it, even if it has been scorned.

It is too late for letters, anyway. There has been only one from South West Africa and the present of the bank draft served as reply to it. It was headed ‘Namibia’. That’s all, above the date. Then a selection of suitable information. He has been out into the desert with Kurt and (name illegible or no longer attached to a remembered face) some other old man from Swakopmund. They were wonderful, they knew everything about plants and animals, Kurt had tried to drive him where he wanted to go, but of course the uranium mine area was sealed off, you couldn’t get nearer than Khan Canyon. The Damaras in the area have all been — the word was in quotes — ‘removed’ and herded into a Reserve somewhere, the entire population. A figure was given; also the remark that it is much too cold to swim.

Why this sudden interest in uranium? Not because he wants to go into base metals, that’s for sure. Damaras? — talking about the Klip Kaffirs, in the stony hills around the dry river bed. We used to come upon them when we were youngsters out hunting buck, though how a buck or a man survives in a place like that is a mystery. They are there like the stones — no, were there like stones, apparently they aren’t any more. He hasn’t ever seen one, but he tells me all about them. Not a very fascinating holiday for a boy of sixteen. Old people and some sort of study of Blue books or White papers (it seems) for company. He could come along to Tokyo or Canada. One of the times. What time would that be? When the school holidays coincided with a necessary trip. A time when there would be a father and son with a lot to say to each other, sitting side by side in the plane and making plans. The farm — who else is a farm for, but a son — doesn’t interest him; the whole month of August could have been spent here. Could have planted trees together. One forgets that.

Although the fire was cold, he has come up to the house feeling and looking like an exhausted fire-fighter, and now the tension and weariness of the morning give way to hunger. He does not wait for Alina to bring the food but himself fetches the body-warm brown loaf he brought from town and cuts a rough slice in the meantime. Yes, one forgets; he really has not remembered until today, and the whole month has gone by. Too late for a letter. He is eating the bread without having quartered or buttered it, tearing the crust from the clinging, soft interior and stuffing it into his mouth; he eats slightly piggishly when he’s alone here. There is a pleasure in it, even if there are no other pleasures in the house, the beds empty and that piano silent. He really ought to do something about fixing things up a bit; why must the refrigerator be in this room? Yet it is convenient, just to get up from the table and take what you want. Alina brings in a plate of tomatoes wet from the tap and the half-pound of delicatessen ham with slivers of red cellophane sticking to the fat. While he eats he does not look up to the window through which he could see the farm’s bums, the beggared willows. He deliberately keeps his gaze the other way, towards the smaller window that gives on a peach-tree, a water-tank, and the utilitarian scrap — a car seat, the frame of an old electric stove — they won’t ever throw away.

Chill around him, shadow over his head, wax-polished underfoot — the house is that part of the farm which matters least. What’s appreciated is the value of the land. Inflation has contributed to that, but nevertheless it was not a foolish buy in the first place, and it’s well cared-for. The land itself must be worth as much, now, as land-plus-house when he bought. There are other houses, other beds (he can never bring himself to lie down in the dingy bedroom, he doesn’t mind if his boots smear ash on the sofa). She knew that, of course, though it is difficult with her kind to tell what is grand theory (what she thinks she ought to think) and what actuality. After all, she says ‘Namibia’ too, something that doesn’t exist, an idea in the minds of certain people, as the name of a country where he was born and brought up and she had probably never been. Shoulders hunched, mouth clamped, show of a burst of laughter breaking forth: — And in what way, if you please, is your concept of the place any more than an idea? To the Ovambos and Hereros and Damaras? Can you tell me that? You who ‘know’ the country? Little white baas who ran barefoot with the little black sons of servants, now fathers of servants? A name on a map. A label stuck on them. ‘South West Africa.’ ‘Mandatory territory.’ You don’t ‘own’ a country by signing a bit of paper the way you bought yourself the title deed to that farm. -

It is in opposition (the disputed territory of argument, the battle for self-definition that goes on beneath the words) that attraction lies, with a woman like that. It’s there (in the divorce-court phrase) that intimacy takes place. Not that he has ever been mixed up in one of those affairs that end in court with detectives and accusing husbands; for a man in his position a scandal is out of the question. Her husband was safely more interested in his Bushmen than the activities of his wife.

She would talk about sex, too, as part of an ideology he couldn’t share. Athough she visited that territory with him a few times. He wants the boy to have a good time while he is a youngster — that was the way he put these things to her — get it out of his system, not miss anything, so that he’ll see the whole business isn’t all that important, when he is older.

— What bunk. A simplistic view of sex. As if you can get it over and done with. If you haven’t ‘missed anything’ when you’re young, this doesn’t mean you have no more to discover in your own sexuality. It’s idiotic to ignore that sex is mixed up with emotional ideas that’ve grown round it and become part of it, from courtly love to undying passion and all that stuff, and these are not growing pains. They’re as demanding at forty as at seventeen. More. The more you mature the greater and humbler the recognition of their importance. -

— I don’t think about it. —

— No, you just do it. —

— That’s right. — With a particular smile that she took eagerly as evidence against him but that roused her to him in spite — or because? — of this.

— I remember you told me you rather liked to buy a woman now and then — to think, she’s doing this because I’ve paid her; she has to. Sexual fascism. Pure and simple. —