Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Hunching your shoulders and looking at me, mouth pulled up at one corner, smiling, not wanting to offend, not knowing what he’s talking about. A goat?

— No, no. I’m tell you. Sshh. The witch-doctor he’s tell the people they must buy the goat. Then he’s put that goat away somewhere, somewhere, she don’t know where. Nobody must say her. Since three day she mustn’t go out, nobody must talk to her in her room there. She don’t see nothing. Then later on, she going to throw bones, everything, you know, and she must tell where is that goat. —

— And the dance? —

— Yes, sometime five or half-past. Everything’s coming ready.

The three have turned gradually to regard the visitors standing by, Jacobus casting a watchful eye over them as he does when taking a white man to inspect some particular group of cows in one of his paddocks. He certainly has a sense of attachment to the place; one could do a lot worse, although it’s business-lunch exaggeration to say (he sometimes hears himself) his old boy does better than any white manager. What this really means is that they’re more honest than any white you’re likely to get in a menial yet responsible position. He may filch a bag of mealie-meal for perks but why the hell not, who wouldn’t — but he hasn’t the craft to crook you. There is laughter when — frankly confidential — there comes the observation that you can always trust a man who can’t write not to keep a double set of books. The chief accountant appreciates that one most.

The man in the white coat (yes, now that we’ve heard the witch-doctor story it definitely looks surgical, ay, Terry) holds his arms respectfully down across his body in a V whose base is the hat he removed as soon as the car drove into the yard. He bows: — ‘Nkos’, ‘ Nkos ’. —

Jacobus makes a sweeping gesture, and says, now loudly — They want to go to the compound, they asking —

The man’s greeting is acknowledged; the women neither greet nor expect to be greeted, they do not see themselves at all in the eyes of the white man and white boy. — All right. Tell them all right. -

It’s true those feet are so toughened he trails along (just like one of them) without any apparent discomfort while Jacobus presents his usual weekly crop of problems; he’s smoking, not possible to say if he’s taking any notice of what’s going on, until Jacobus demonstrates what has gone wrong with the disc-plough. Then he jack-knifes down on his haunches and the blond, not-too-clean hair hides his face: — But look at this. It’s bust off here, something’s missing. —

Jacobus never stops his running commentary of explanation and the two of them seem to understand each other. Rising at last, even the black face shows the darkening of the blood that suffuses both heads. The veins on his black forehead above that prominent frontal bone they have give him the appearance of frowning while he admires, encourages. — You too clever, Terry. Why you don’t come this time, holiday time? What is wrong you don’t want help us? —

You laugh. Laughing to please Jacobus.

— He went away, far away, to see my old home Jacobus. —

— But he’s coming Christmas time, yes. You come help us Christmas when the school is finish. Yes! —

— I want to plant another hundred trees along here this summer. —

He has his thumbs hooked in the diagonal front pockets of the jeans and he picks his way easily through puddles made in the road by the irrigation jets. — What kind? —

Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk: the long, wavering squirts jerk round, changing direction under their own pressure; tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk.

A decision is made. The answer’s going to be unexpected, with the shadow of the fast-growing eucalyptus ahead. - Oaks. -

You don’t plant oaks for yourself but for those who come after.

But that is not our subject, apparently. The response that comes is a question. — You’re not going to Plet? —

Arms, staggering flailing arms, flowing sleeves of water; one trails suddenly over their faces, so that they smile at one another under the caress. Forced by irrigation the lucerne is green and thick, it’s as if summer were already here.

— I am not. I’m going to plant trees. Let the others catch the big fish and booze at the Christmas parties. -

What is it you want me to say now?

A-hah — you were thinking of going to the cottage at the sea, maybe, you could have had a good time this year, that’s true, soon seventeen, all those daughters of friends grown up just your age. But that means in January you’ll go into the army, that’s where you’ll be when the party’s over. What is it you want me to say? If you’re waiting for me to broach that subject, you’re mistaken — yet he doesn’t say anything, he speaks but he doesn’t say anything, he won’t bring it up himself.

At the compound sleeping women lie on the ground beside the ash-heap rolled like corpses in new blankets, right over their heads, brightly checked and fringed. There’s no child to be seen and their dogs seem to be shut away for once. — Looks more like the morning after, to me. But they probably walked all night to get here. —

He’s jogged ahead a bit; he turns — Oh the picnic place was burnt! —

— It’s all recovering now, you should’ve seen it a couple of weeks ago. —

There’s just time to go down there; it’ll take the best part of an hour to get to the airport. He’s fallen behind again. Down to the third pasture through the gate, and he closes it after them, struggling to get the hoop of wire back over the ant-eaten post with the goaded air of an action performed too many times without question. Why Namibia? The great thing was once Spain. You are not the first. It’s always been like that. Yes, it’s all been thought, what you’re thinking, a thousand times before. They went to fight in Greece, club-footed poet and the well-meaning romantic muddlers or freaks. They went off to Spain and lost the good cause and as a result today, despite the great loss to the country because a gipsy and her professor wouldn’t dream of going there any more than they’d consider enjoying themselves in what she calls the Colonels’ Greece (- But of course if you ever should have to get off your farm, the next thing’ll be a villa in Malaga, eh. Isn’t that the latest for rich South Africans —), yes the people are all better off today than they ever were. They have work and they eat. They wear shoes. A uranium deposit on that scale can raise the gross national product to a level where development — viability — becomes a reality, not a dream that depends on ‘justice’, wherever you’re expecting to find that. He pads behind on those bare feet, he’s nothing to say for himself but he’s there. They want shoes for their feet. They’ll have the Germans and French and Italians and South Africans to thank for that, whatever name you use for the place.

The swift flight of single birds laces across vision. They’re building. The urge is on them; they might almost skin blindingly into your face. Those feet are very strong and supple. He’s standing on the blackened stones that he helped carry to line the pit for the spit last year — long skinny toes grapple the stone — as if this provides an elevation for survey. Out of a black sedge or bog that is waterlogged burnt reeds, the new reeds are brilliant silk, sugar-cane green, the colour of the bits of new grass moistened with saliva he shows between his teeth.

— There’s nothing. I always wanted to see what was in the middle of the vlei. —

— Just vlei. — There’s the proof: to someone who was away at school at the time and was never told, it looks as if there never was anything. Come to think of it all the earth is a graveyard, you never know when you’re walking over heads — particularly this continent, cradle of man, prehistoric bones and the bits of shaped stone (sometimes a plough has actually turned one up) that were weapons and utensils. It’s all the same. Their ancestors. No one knows who they were, either. No way of making known: the mouth stopped with mud. Doesn’t exist unless one happens to know — always knows, down here — that it’s there, all right. Already the new growth of reeds must be eight inches high.