Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

The farmer bats at something clinging at his face. No mosquitoes now; bulrush gossamer. — He was dead when Solomon found him? —

— Dead, dead, finish. - The herdsman walks over delicately towards the object and bending, turns his face back at his employer and says confidentially, rather as if he had been listening — And now already is beginning to be little bit… He wrinkles his nose, exposing the dirty horse-teeth.

The farmer breathes quite normally, he does not take in the deep breaths of dry clear air that he did up on the lucerne field, but he does not reduce his intake either. There is nothing, really nothing; whereas, up there, that sweetish whiff.

— You’d better not touch him. You’re sure nobody here knows him? It’s got nothing to do with any of you here? — He looks very deeply at his herdsman, lowering his head and hooding his eyebrows over his eyes.

Jacobus puts a hand dramatically on his own breast, where a stained vest shows through the unbuttoned overalls. He swings his head slowly from side to side. — Nobody can know this man. Nothing for this man. This is people from there — there — He points that same accusing finger away in the direction of the farm’s southern boundary.

The skin of the palm of a hand is too insensitive to detect the gossamer but still it clings. The farmer projects his lower lip and blows sharply, upwards over his face. And now he notices a single fly, one of the lingering, persistent kind, hovering just above the neat brown ear down there. The fly is on the side to which the head is fractionally turned, although it is full-face in the mud, the side on which the mouth must be close to being exposed. The fly hovers and lands, hovers and lands, unmolested.

— Just leave it as it is. The police must come. —

— Ye-e-es Master — the herdsman says, long-drawn-out in sympathy for the responsibility which is no longer his. - Ye-e-es… is much better. —

There is a moment’s pause. The fly looks as if it ought to be buzzing but cannot be heard. There is the customary silence down here among the reeds, broken by the rifle-crack (so it sounds, in contrast) of a dry stalk snapped by the movement of some unseen bird. The seething of the wind through the green reeds in summer is seasonal.

They turn and thrash back the way they have come, leaving the man. Behind them he is lying alone on his face.

The farmer takes the car to get up to the farmhouse and Jacobus accompanies him, sitting carefully with feet planked flat on the carpeted floor and curled hands together on neat knees — he has the house-keys, anyway, so that he can always get in to telephone if necessary. The house is closed up because no one lives there or uses it during the week. They enter through the kitchen door and the farmer goes straight to the telephone in the living-room and turns the little crank beside the receiver. The party line is busy and while he waits he frees from the thin tacky mud on his soles the slivers of dry reed that are stuck in it. He prises one sole against the other and the mud wrinkles and blobs, like droppings, to the shiny linoleum patterned with orange and brown roses. The table is laid ready with hardware for a meal, under a net weighted at the hem with coloured beads; an authoritative refrigerator, placed across the angle of a corner, hums to itself. The ring that he is waiting for makes him start. The line is free now and the exchange connects him with the police station.

He always talks the white man’s other language to officials; he is speaking in Afrikaans. — Listen, Mehring here, from Vleiplaats, the Katbosrand Road. You must send someone. There’s a dead man been found on my farm. Down in the vlei. Looks as if he’s been dumped there. —

There is a blowing noise, abrupt, at the other end, air is expelled in good-natured exasperation. The voice addresses him as if he were an old friend: — Man… on Sunday… where’m I going to get someone? The van’s out on patrol at the location. I’m alone here, myself. It’s a Bantu, ay? —

— Yes. The body’s lying in the reeds. —

— Your boys have a fight or what? —

— It’s a stranger. None of my boys knows who it is. -

The voice laughs. — Yes, they’re scared, they’ll always say they don’t know. Was it a knife-fight I suppose? —

— I tell you I’ve no idea. I don’t want to mess about with the body. You must send someone. —

— Hell, I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. I’m only myself, here. The van’s in the location… I’ll send tomorrow morning. —

— But this body was found yesterday, it’s been lying there twenty-four hours already. —

— What can I do, sir? Man, I’m alone here! —

— Why can’t you get hold of some other police station? Let them send someone. —

— Can’t do that. This’s my district. —

— Well what am I to do about a dead body on my property? The man may have been murdered. It’s obvious he’s been knocked on the head or something, and dumped. You can see from his shoes he didn’t walk a step in that vlei. —

— There’s injuries on the head or where? —

— I’ve told you, that’s your affair. I don’t want my boys handling someone who’s been murdered. I don’t want any trouble afterwards about this business. You must get a man here today, Sergeant. —

— First thing in the morning. There won’t be any trouble for you, don’t worry. You’re there by the vlei, just near the location, ay? It comes from there, all right, they’re a terrible lot of kaffirs, we’re used to that lot… —

The farmer replaces the receiver and says in English, Christ almighty ; and snorts a laugh, softly, so that Jacobus shall not hear.

The herdsman is waiting in the kitchen. — They’ll come early tomorrow. I’ve told them everything. Just keep people away. And dogs. See that no dogs go down there. - The herdsman doesn’t react at all although he has no doubt thought the farmer didn’t know that the dogs which were supposed to be banished from the compound have quietly reappeared again, not the same individual animals, perhaps, but as a genus.

— Excuse, my master — he indicates that he wants to pass before him into the living-room and tramps, tip-toeing almost, across to a piece of furniture that must have once featured as the pride of a dining-room ‘suite’ but is now used as bar (a locked cupboard to which Jacobus has not got a key) and also repository (unlocked drawers) for farm documents, and pulling out one of the stiff drawers by its fancy gilt handle, feels surely under the feed bills tossed there. He has found what he apparently had hidden for safekeeping: he brings in the bowl of his palms a huge, black-dialled watch with a broad metal strap, and a pair of sunglasses with a cracked right lens. He waits, indicating by the pause that his employer must put out his hand to receive, and formally gives over the property. - From him? — And the herdsman nods heavily.

— All right, Jacobus. —

— All right, master. —

— Send Alina up about one to make me some lunch, eh — he calls after him.

So they have touched the thing, lifted the face. Of course the dark glasses might have been in a pocket. No money. Not surprising; these Friday murders are for money, what else. Jacobus took the objects (the Japanese-made steel watch is the kind of stolen goods black men offer surreptitiously for sale on street corners) into safekeeping to show that the people here’ve got nothing to do with the whole business.

Going to the drawer Jacobus has just shut, he finds a foolscap window-envelope, already franked, that has carried some circular. The watch with its flexible steel-mesh strap wrapped close fits in easily, but the glasses prevent the flap from closing. He doubles a rubber band over his fingers and stretches it to secure envelope and contents. He writes on it, Watch and Glasses, property of dead man. He adds, For the Police, and places the envelope prominently on the table, on top of the net, then moves it to the kitchen, putting it on the draining-board of the sink where it cannot fail to be in the line of vision as one walks into the house.