Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Blond locks flying, careering on bare feet, there he comes, even skittering in the dust for the fun of it — that’s how he must be, in the company of others, then? Yet drumming up some young company for the occasional weekends out of school didn’t work. Brought together again — the two who used to play with one another as children — the only reaction to that lovely girl with a waist the length of a swan’s neck was a remark that she couldn’t help it but she was a typical spoilt Johannesburg girl. At sixteen (going on seventeen), has he no eyes? No dreams burrowing the bedclothes into flesh all night — good God, what that matters can be ‘spoilt’ in a girl, at sixteen, for any boy: teeth sweet and clean as fresh-peeled almonds, a tongue that’s only just stopped being used to lick ice-cream, breasts larger than expected, delightfully heavy-looking in contrast to the rest of her, at her mother’s swimming-pool. At that age — oh but what is the use of saying ‘at that age’, the gipsy is right, it goes on forever, for all one knows, need outlasting performance, in the end, a Churchill with an unlit cigar.

He’s got something in a bit of white paper in one hand. He’s eating. - Look. Have some. —

— What’d you find to buy? —

Instead of getting straight into the car, he has come round to the driver’s window, holding out the plate of his hand, very friendly. — They gave me some. Samoosas. —

Breaking bread together. He puts the neat, crisp, greasy triangle whole into his mouth in order not to dirty the steering-wheel while he drives. It’s not exactly the sort of thing to eat just after a late breakfast. — Thanks, no more. Very good, ay? —

— Are you going to do anything about it? — The jaw moves with the last mouthful of one little geometrical pastry parcel while the hand has already taken up the next: the appetites are there, all right.

— You mean they knew who you were? They asked you? Nerve enough for anything. —

— Of course not. - He has crumpled the bit of paper, transparent with grease, he wipes his fingers on it as best he can, and now he winds down his window.

— No. Stick it in the ashtray. Or on the floor. —

The window is wound up again without a word.

What does he want me to say, about what? On what subject?

— Some wangle. They’re experts. These Indians run rings round anybody when it comes to palm-greasing. They know how to survive. Well! They’ll find some Van der Merwe who won’t turn his nose up at coolie money, no matter what he says about them to his Boer pals. Anyway, I’ll just give the shop a wide berth, that’s all. —

Of course; sitting there picking (he sees out of the corner of his eye) at a dirty thumbnail, you are made moody by the simple generosity of kind people. As if they didn’t recognize perfectly well who you are. Probably saw it was my car although I drove past, and they’re no fools, they understand tact in the service of their own interest, clever as Jews — not a word, only goodies to please the child of the father!

Why do you call it ‘Namibia’?

Driving along, that is the subject on which he himself wants to ask the question, will get the urge to ask all day, meaning something different every time. He never asked her, although she was using the name already, then. He would have phrased it slightly differently, with her — Why call it Namibia? — i.e. why that and not another invention expressive of a certain attitude towards the place. Why a geographical, descriptive root to the chosen name? It’s not all desert. But she would have been too clever to fall for that, she knows when questions to which the answers are already known are asked, merely because the questioner thinks the answers are going to cause the adversary to give himself away. Then she snatches the advantage by exhibiting that unlike his kind, hers has the honesty to admit their evasions. — The Namib doesn’t conjure up jealousy in anybody. So it doesn’t suggest the country belongs any more to Ovambos than Damaras, Hereros than Basters. It’s demographically neutral. A desert. It’s nobody’s in particular. -

— And your husband’s Bushmen? They won’t press their claim? —

— Oh, the Bushmen… —

— You’re not interested in minority rights, then? —

She’s irritated to get her own sort of phrase thrown back at her. — What’s it got to do with minority rights? They’ll have the same rights as anyone else; but they’re not likely to claim the country belongs more to them than the others because it’s named for the Namib desert. It’ll be everybody’s except the whites who occupied it unlawfully. —

But ‘why do you’ is the substance of the question, here today; what has made you take up these causes with your sixth-form athlete’s arms? What does your adolescent brain think the name means?

Perhaps again the answer is there before the question.

I know what you think. I know what you say when you don’t speak, sitting there with your body in its penitent’s rags for all the sins of the fathers.

You are too green to try her trick; but I should be able to — I could — make you roll over, nothing but a wretched little puppy under attack, trickling a few drops of pee to show it’s culpable only of youth.

What’s our subject?

The pleasures of travel. All right. You’ve crossed, thirty years after me, thirty years ahead in time, the plain of Welwitchia mirabilis ; those great vegetable octopuses, living fossils beached out of evolution seven hundred years ago. One of the old chaps, Kurt’s cronies who know it all like the brown age-blots on the backs of their hands and have no claim at all, neither a share in Rio Tinto nor a hearing at UNO, takes tourists to the plain to see these ancient monstrosities of plant life. - He’s bought an old Land-Rover. - Oh really? — All the desert is the same but he knows where the very biggest Wel-witchia is to be found, the one that will be photographed and projected in colour slides and movies on walls in Munich and New York (the plant is actually a conifer — but you know that, the old ones will have told you everything they know). Specially in Munich and Berlin and Bonn and Frankfurt-am-Main the pictures will be shown; there’s your story about the German tourist you met who remarked, We Germans have very much interest for this country, young man. Our fathers have been here. Did he think you were too young to know, not knowing that you have just learnt too, from your Blue books and White papers, what he has forgotten — the how-many-thousand Hereros the fathers killed? Nineteen thousand. — You know the exact figure, of course. Everything was ready for you, up there, and you for it; it has ‘taken’, finding a host entirely innocent of any immunity.

You came to Khan Canyon and saw the peaks, thorns of rock hooked and crooked against the sky; you stood under one of the camel-thorn trees down there and looked up at the mountains where the uranium lay hidden, something the world didn’t know it wanted, thirty years ago when I was there and for millennia before.

— You can’t see anything? —

— Nothing. You aren’t even allowed on the approach road, where it turns off from the Swakopmund road. -

— A tremendously valuable installation. Probably the biggest single find in the world. Millions sunk in it. - Driving over the soft dust, avoiding the crown where the bald corrugations are, it is possible to talk of this subject as a normal exercise in security. — Swakopmund must have gone ahead? —

If that’s what interests you, the tone implies: — There’s a whole new part of the town. I don’t know how many houses, for the whites who work on the mine. —

— I should go up and have a look sometime. How d’you like our new sign? — He has slowed, at the left turn into the property itself, not only for safety but also to let his passenger see. His passenger gives his attention, smiling slightly with pursed lips as if he’s sucking on his tongue, taking his time — is he simply looking at the thing, a yellow board with black lettering, baked enamel on steel, clamped to two iron poles painted shiny black and sunk in concrete, or is he reading the message three times over, in English, Afrikaans and Zulu.