Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

She looked at him.

— Grow chickens. —

— Raise chickens. -

— Well, whatever. Be a — a — She moved her head attractively, her lips, ready for the words, searching as if for a fruit being dangled at her mouth.

A brave revolutionary. Trouble, you said. You were proud, you had resisted all the temptations: oh shame , dear little puppy, dear little piccanins.

— I don’t know why I tell you these things. - After making love it was always necessary to her ego to establish the difference, the vast gap between herself and a man like him, that might seem to have bridged itself in pleasure. And at the same time she was offering flattery: no ordinary pig-iron dealer, then? — I really don’t know why I do. But don’t you find the people it’s most difficult to make confidences to are the ones who are closest to you? In fact confession is best made to complete strangers. Somebody who gets talking to you on a journey. It’s easier with someone you don’t know at all. —

The house has never been got into shape. He is closing the windows against the dust that is blowing up this afternoon (the burnt vegetation makes it worse) and everything inside is much the same as it must have been when he couldn’t look in properly from the outside the first day. Seeing the black landscape out there, his fingers curl up into his palms, he’s kneading his own flesh, he feels the nails biting and marking him, he can’t help it — how many years have those willows been put back! Even if most survive; it is difficult to tell how dead or alive they are — those that he knows, from inspection close-up, have had the innards burned out of them have, from here, brown wisps blowing about on top, strands dragged over a pate of sky, that appear too high to be harmed. Even if it had been somewhere other than a couple of times at the flat, it would have worn itself out by now. It was wearing thin already. How many more times, before that day in the Greek café where she felt sure no one would recognize them? There are no letters of course. — I won’t write. It might not be healthy for you to get letters from me. — That sort of thing; even when she was on the run as fast as she could scuttle, she still couldn’t resist pulling frightening faces at herself in the mirror.

— Nobody opens my mail, I assure you. Except my secretary, when it isn’t marked personal. —

— Ah yes, that’s the trouble — you think you are inviolate, the Special Branch wouldn’t dare take an interest in you, you’re developing the economy, you’re attracting foreign capital, you’re making friends with the Japanese, you’re helping to balance the balance of payments — She was amusing, all right, when she started with one of her dark political warnings and then took off on one of her flights of fancy into what she thought of — tongue-in-cheek — as his world. — Still, those wholly-owned subsidiaries. Tube Manipulations, what was it? — Hot-Dip-something — you have multiple identities and addresses, chairman of this and that, president of the other. — She was reflecting now, envious, how she might have made use of these identities and addresses, coming to mind too late. He followed the thought across her olive-smooth face: You don’t mind if a few letters come enclosed in envelopes addressed to the chairman? It won’t be often. You can give them to me when we see each other.

She was the one to telephone, from the café, after weeks — was it? Months? Long before then he had forgotten about trying to get her out here. When she kissed him (in the car? Could it have been when he took her to the lawyer she wanted of him? No, he saw her again after that, but not in the flat, thank you, now that she’d really succeeded in getting herself into trouble and probably was being followed about) — she kissed him, he knew she would leave the country; there was no feeling to send his nails into his palms.

In spite of the wind that makes a loose-hinged window screech so that someone seems to be shaking at the house for entry — Jacobus must be told to wire it up until he remembers to bring out a new hinge from town — he gets onto legs that no longer ache but feel weakly cool in the calves for a moment, from having his feet up, until the blood comes back, and he goes out once more. Dust has the effect on his distant hills of a pencil sketch gone over by a soft rubber. Nearer, every object flashes, scoured by the wind in the three o’clock sun — cows’ horns, new wire of a fence, the strap of his watch. Behind the house, looking up the lands towards the road, all is untouched. A field of polka rye cowers flat under the wind; it’s ridiculous to have the irrigation jets on it, the water’s all being blown away. He struggles with the valve, where water keeps dribbling although he’s turned it off. He likes to show he prefers to do things for himself when he’s there, he doesn’t believe in calling the boys all the time. The upper fields that have been ploughed are all right, of course, and — he has stopped, he has his hands on his belt, he is smiling and counting, eyes slitted against the wind — over there, over there, are twenty-three guinea fowl, some just the heads, others the leaden-blue oriental shapes in profile, something off the border of a piece of Indian cloth, stylized as the mango pattern on a paisley tie he’s got. Twenty-three. He may have counted one or two twice, or missed a couple — they know he’s there and they are moving. They seem to flow evenly, heads advancing over the clods as boats breast choppy water. But they’re actually running like hell, just try and keep up with guinea fowl. Twenty-three, about. A flock of twenty-three on my place. Not bad. That’s not bad at all. A small black sore on the landscape stays his pleasure — what’s that, far from the river? But he knows at once what it is — that’s up at a small road where one of their buses goes down to the industrial area opposite the location. The squatters who go out to work catch the bus there and it’s cold, these mornings — must be — they just light themselves a bunch of dead grass to warm their hands while they wait. It happened last year. That’s how the whole thing began, last year, not on De Beer’s side, but from the road. He will never know when the phone-call may be to tell him there’s been another fire. There’s a firebreak, all right; he saw to that early in the winter season, he had the boys up there. But what’s to stop anyone going to the other side of the break to warm himself with a nice little blaze. Nothing to be done.

Passing under the glittering-scaled gum-trees with leaves blown back showing the undersides, it seems to him as if the fire from the vlei has gone through the kraal too. But no. The ground is marked by the heat of their braziers everywhere. An enormous ash-heap beside their rooms. The blackened sacks in the apertures are only curtains. Burned mealie-cobs lying about where they’ve been eating. It’s just as usual, in winter, when there’s no rain to clean the place. Their dogs lift shaky heads and bark at him, but they never come out; it’s a bitch with puppies who’s making all the fuss, and the puppies are starved, they ought to be taken to be put away at the S.P.C.A. It’s no good talking to Jacobus, apparently. But the flock could have been fifty. If they increased too much, one could always cull a few, for the table.

From here, black desolation down there at the river is before his eyes again.

They are tramping past him on the road in their usual weekend peregrinations. He hears them at his back and they hesitate to overtake him, it’s as if he’s leading them in procession, ridiculously, for a few moments, and then they surround him at a polite distance briefly while gaining on him, two men on the one side, and one of their women on the other. The one man wears his farm gumboots and the other has a balaclava enclosing him in a knight’s visor against the dust — he can’t take off his hat as his companion does while passing, but both intone, Baas… Baas . A bit tipsy already, he can hear, it’s Saturday afternoon, the weekend’s begun, for them. A disinfectant whiff of Lifebuoy soap where they pass; from the woman a smell of female (he supposes; he does not associate it with the intimacies of white female flesh) and wood-smoke. She wears a blanket pinned as a warm skirt over a dress and her strong shiny black calves and shiny black arms with elbows like pips in the flesh are bare. Children going towards the compound have not greeted him. There’s a baby being carried among them that has light yellow-reddish hair — very ugly. He doesn’t remember seeing it before; God knows how many people move into that compound.