Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Bismillah said to the girl in Gujerati — Did you remember to take the temperature? — She put her hand over her mouth and drew in her breath.

— Just listen what she said — Dawood spread his legs under the covers and lifted his pelvis and laughed, wriggling lower in the bed. She snatched up the baby as he counted on her doing, as if he were about to kick it off. — Listen, man, listen- His huge black eyes held the enjoyment of attention of father and wife; he was exactly the way he had been when he was sick as a little boy, except for the stubble that shone strongly over his youthful double chin and round his red lips and white teeth. — But that stuff makes me cough worse! — Yes, with the beard, he was a gay little boy dressed up as a bandit, that’s all. Bismillah had never trusted anyone but himself to administer medicine to his sons. He ignored the giggling young man’s silly banter in English, and pushed the spoon at his mouth. Then came the antibiotic tablets, with the girl standing by ready with water in one of the cut-crystal wedding-present tumblers. Dawood made a fuss, eyeing himself; the whole scene was in the full-length mirror of the dressing-table that stood opposite the foot of the bed, with just room enough to pass between them.

— It makes me much worse, you see? — between bouts of coughing.

— No, the chest is looser. Let me tell you. I can hear it. Much looser. You must try and spit — give him something he can spit in. It should be here next to him all the time. Here- No — just a minute- But the girl was overcome by the audacity of her own objection.

— No, what are you doing! — not that, Bajee! — Dawood was gesturing and laughing at his father, which made him cough.

— This will do. Why not? —

— No, no, that’s a precious thing to her —

Bismillah held up the bowl in challenge for it to manifest its special purpose.

— It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anything. But not to spit in — she doesn’t want it. —

— What is the harm? It can be washed —

— But not to spit in it —

Bismillah put down the useless object, then, dismissing. They were all talking at once, in their own language, except that Dawood would always interject with his Listen , that’s how the young ones were when they’d been to school in the city, they must mix English with everything to show how educated they are.

— Bring up the phlegm. You will never clear the chest —

— All right, all right — Ah no, d’you expect me to put my nose in that — And Dawood was thrashing around joyously, childishly in the bed again, fending off the small enamel basin his wife offered. — She cleans the baby in that When he has messed himself, you know? That’s the thing she put the bits of cotton wool in. No, no, man -

Bismillah stood for a while in the doorway. Dawood sank back into his pillows, teasing, complaining, showing the girl off as a pet unaccountably reluctant to do the tricks it knows perfectly well. She sat on the edge of the bed again and undid the bundle resting on her lap, wavering limb after limb. Her spread legs were ample support; alas, the boy had married one who would be enormous after a few more births. But at least she managed a foolish smile today, shut in the bedroom like this. She had not been very lively among the girls of the house for the year she had been living there, although the only complaint on her part that Bismillah had had reported to him (if the wives were dissatisfied how could they be good for his sons) was that she had not known it would be so cold here in winter. What did she think, standing looking out into the yard or across the burned veld — you could grow bananas, it would be warm and steamy and green, like the coast? If women started grumbling, hankering, there was usually no end to it. The next thing, she would be working on Dawood to let her go and stay for months at a time with her family in Durban. The infant’s tangle of minute fingers caught in the gauze over the breasts that had outgrown the girl and were juggled as she moved, and Dawood drew attention to the incident delightedly, intervening with his own hand to disengage the baby’s, half fended-off, half encouraged by the protests of the girl. The father-in-law suddenly decided she might want to nurse the baby — something of that nature. He left them.

— Get a dish from the kitchen ay? — You must try to bring up. —

Yes, that was the short stage in life when a young man discovers his hands again, just the same as the baby, all over again, for a while. The boy will be happy anywhere where he can be touching the first woman he has all to himself. Anywhere. The room is paradise. The room is enough. Why should he ever want to get up and come back to the shop?

The old man sat there on his bentwood chair.

— With all this wind and dust how can the chest clear. -

His old father said nothing; that did not mean he was not listening.

— The medicine loosens, but I told him, he must spit. —

The old man cleared his throat; he came from a generation for which such an injunction was unnecessary, it must have seemed absurd to him.

Yinifuna? Yinifuna?

Some of the blacks would hang around in the shop for half an hour, fingering everything. Others didn’t want to wait their turn to be served. Bismillah spoke the few necessary words of their language in the pidgin form that had evolved in the mines; he knew, as well, the pidgin Afrikaans and English used by blacks on the farms. A woman was asking the price of every bolt of cloth on the shelves behind William; when Bismillah had sold a man a bar of mottled soap he pointed at and measured a pound of dried beans for another, he called — What does she want? —

— She’s look this stuff. — But the black man understood the semantics of the trade and told the woman in their own tongue that now she must make up her mind to buy. She took no notice, lingering, leaning across the counter to gaze at the roll of crimped nylon removed from her reach, before drifting out of the shop with a weighing consideration for anything in her path and a remark or two that, rather than addressed to fellow customers, assumed a right to express unspoken thoughts shared with them.

Yinifuna? Yinifuna?

— Sugar — they said.

— Tea. —

— Matches. -

— Tin syrup. —

Some merely held out money and indicated. Sometimes the money was inadequate: — Fifteen cents. - Bismillah thrust the ten-cent piece back; often they would then expect time to consider if they could or would pay the price. They might grumble, or ask for a smaller quantity or another brand. — I want for ten cents. — No ten cents, only fifteen. — Demand. Response. Counter-demand. Statement. No word was given away. Communication, narrowed down to its closest immediate confines, was complete. At the same time Bismillah continued with his old father the long conversation of their lives together in the shop, its rhythm marked but never broken by the pauses of ordinary daily absences and returns and the gradual fall, over the years, of the dominance of the old man’s voice to the corresponding rise of Bismillah’s as the one lapsed into the silences of age and the other came into the loquacity of middle age. In a full shop, the privacy of this talk in Gujerati was as secure to the family as if the shop were empty. The language reached nobody else’s understanding; in addition, contexts were so unvaryingly established, grooved by time and sameness, in the minds of the old man and Bismillah, that no reference was puzzling or irrelevant.

— You can’t be there to think for them forever. Do they realize? And what will happen then. —

Yinifuna? How much you want — twenty-five cent? This one thirty-five cent, this one twenty-five —