Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Linking brazier to brazier, darkness to darkness and smoke to smoke, the calls of winter evenings are not addressed to him. On his way home his headlights hold out of the dark — fountain jets balancing objects aloft — the shrouded shapes of the queue waiting for a bus outside the location. The blur of frost: a cold bloom formed on the outside of a glass. A sheet of plastic he’s annoyed to see left lying at the windmill tap turns out, when he strides over in the warm sun of ten in the morning, to be a valance of icicles fallen from where they formed overnight on the water tank.

But already at the centre of the wind that blows from ten until sunset, there is a hot breath, some days. It happens literally from one to the next. He was out here, say Wednesday or Thursday, looking at the extent of the damage that reveals itself in decay as the weeks go by: the vlei is the quilled back of a porcupine, striped black and white where the reeds have paled and died off beneath their burned tops. He thought he saw a yellow weaver fly up and down a couple of times. And only two days later (the vlei looks the same), a single green nest: newly woven, or perhaps an old one repaired. That weaver was reconnoitring; they’re back.

And now today he sees what he didn’t before — probably because it wasn’t there yet — on the damp verges there is sufficient new grass to make a nest. It’s very thin and pale-bright, almost transparent. It looks bluish, perhaps only in contrast to the grave of black from which it has grown. He begins to find all the signs that were not revealed to him before (is it possible they really have appeared so quickly, were not there two days ago: last week?); things come to life under his eyes as the syntax of a foreign language suddenly begins to yield meaning. Along the strands of willow, nibs of glossy brown; catch them in his nail and they break back, green. Some spread small green leaves as hard-backed beetles will unfold thin gauzy wings from beneath a carapace. On the irrigation canals there is a scum of bubbly livid, in places velvety. Break it with a stick — the stagnant broth has swirls of emerald and bottle-green slime like the markings petrified in a semi-precious stone.

The tongue-tips of new reeds are forcing through sodden burned clumps.

It could have been worse.

— Oh yes. —

— It could have been worse, I suppose —

Words to that effect. But were they referring to the same things when they talked together? There was time to drive him out at least to have a look at the place again, because one of the secretaries had been instructed to book a seat on a plane instead of the usual school train.

— Thirteen thousand Ovambos on strike, that time, and the police didn’t dare touch them because of United Nations. That’s something. But the settlement was a sell-out. Nobody knows what’s going on in Ovamboland. We had a chance to talk to some Ovambos in the fisheries at Walvis —

He doesn’t look at his father while he speaks, it is a profile that presents itself beside the driver’s seat. The soft little downy beard is coming on; the eyelashes are arrogant and curved as a girl’s and the expression in the eyes cannot be seen.

— What in God’s name d’you find to do in Walvis! One street and a couple of beer stuben . At least in my day. —

He went there with some university student who picked him up. One of those who stick their noses into everything. No good blaming Kurt and Emmy; there was nothing they could do to stop it. But he does not seem to want to pursue the subject; he seems to keep resisting the urge to talk about what preoccupies him: what? The blacks in ‘Namibia’? The prospect of army service next year?

— Not my idea of a place for a good time! —

The incredibly long and slender creature so newly emerged into maleness; does it realize its capacity, diaphragm drawn in slimly tentative in the seat, back slightly bent, as if sheltering itself, from the broad shoulders and muscular breast towards the long legs. The hard blade-shaped thighs are exactly the width of the narrow breadth between hip-bones where the belt rests. There’s no belly at all, all grossness burned up, at this age, into the powers of muscle and sex. The whole encased in skimpy covering that looks as if it is peeling from the extremities of wrists and ankles; the jeans are so frayed that the tatters curl, now. Out of the androgynous square feet of the little boy have pushed these tense, hammer-toed, prehensile things that belong on some dangling Christ. — You’ll find the going rough on your bare soles. Everything’s burned. -

— It’s okay. I’m used to this. —

— How’s old Emmy these days. Her English better than ever? Still aber every second word? —

He has turned, this brings him full-on, smiling, in love, the sun-burned skin round the eyes actually pinkening with response. It would be possible to put out a hand and even touch him, now, it would not raise the alarm within. The ribs of long fingers with an oxidized snake ring (the kind seen so often set out on the London pavement in the vicinity of the statue of Eros; he would never have thought to bring back a present of one — there you are) are spread to indicate the impossibility of describing the perfection of this old German lady who will always look, to both father and son, like an inquiring, sceptical schoolgirl with eyes as amber-freckled as her face.

They talk about Emmy for a few hundred yards; he is dawdling the Mercedes in order to fall behind the dust raised by some vehicle ahead that it hides. — I should go up and see them sometime. It’s years since I was in South West. Time, time… I’ve only been back ten days. Brazil, Jamaica —

He never asks any questions about his father’s work. I might as well be running the Mafia. — What was it she found me guilty of, again? Collusion, ‘industry-wide collusion’, a lovely term, why should a good-looking bitch like you know all the dirty words? And what’s it mean, anyway? —

— So what d’you suggest we call it? Your pig-iron ore — the mine gets its blacks from the mines’ combined recruiting organization, mmh? That cuts out competition for labour and competitive wages for the labourers. -

And while you talk like this you take my hand and put it on your breast, your hard (brown gipsy) nipple is a dog’s nose at my palm. Always promising what you can’t give, your kind. You waved to them from the newspaper picture, leaving leaving them to it.

The dust is no more than a pollen in the air and the Mercedes could regain speed without catching up with whatever’s ahead but they are level with the Indians’ at this moment and his passenger says he’ll run in to buy cigarettes. It’s not a defiance because smoking is not an issue, although he’s only sixteen and it might well be, with another parent. The request is made casually, as of right, not concession, and without the gratitude or the least pleasure that such a concession might be expected to win. An obstinate indifference: the implication that there’s munificence only over what he doesn’t want, doesn’t care much about one way or the other. The measure of generosity taken by the recipient, not the donor. You’ll decide. I’m not to judge. Kaffir pots or genuine porcelain from the Far East.

— I’ll pull up a little way along. It’s embarrassing, they’ve got some idea in their heads I might let them put their shop in my name! The last time I was in there for a whole five cents’ worth of something, the one who’s in charge of the show, not the old man, of course, the other one, got hold of me. —

Immediately those dogs are bouncing themselves at the fence where the car comes to rest, hooking their claws through the mesh and snatching at thin air with jaws that snap like shears. Apart from the racket, it’s not pleasant to be only just out of reach of such a passion to get at him. He engages the gear and slides on a few yards past the blacks’ outbuildings that mark the limit of the Indians’ property. It won’t be possible to use the place any longer for odd necessities he sometimes forgets in his haste to be shot of town; a nuisance.