Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

You are like me in some ways, or you wouldn’t have been standing there showing amused interest before a picture ( naturally , a house at the sea as well as a farm) while I was behind you pressed up against you and moving your hair aside from your neck with my tongue.

The jets ejaculate tirelessly over the lucerne, there is a heavy bloom of droplets, of the fecundity of summer on that field. They have forgotten to turn off the irrigation but he will not look for Jacobus and he will leave the flow of water to continue for a while before stemming it himself. Even their neglect is something he can afford to allow himself; they are not about, any of them, he is free of them all. Let them smell out their goats wherever they believe them to exist. Down there, the river is perpetually-flowing. He has it all to himself, thank God. A big disc-plough has been used here: he stands in the company of the round backs of a field of sleeping beasts of earth.

He returns to the house without anyone padding along behind him (even a dog is a hindrance, always having to be called off the scent of birds) and sits, this once, like a real farmer on the stoep, although he has not bothered to unlock the place but simply has gone round and climbed the front steps. He is not watching the sunset; the stoep faces east. The house grows dark as closed, empty houses quickly do at sundown. Drumming has been going on quite a while; it started so vaguely and sporadically he’s not sure when it really began — there were those odd thumps, the sound of a carpet being beaten, it often seems — and then some sort of rhythm emerged. Ordinary Castrol drums they use, so there isn’t that thundery resonance you get from the real thing. They don’t know how to make the real thing any longer.

Unwinding, relaxing, getting quite away, is what is described by business associates who also have farms. Moving from the covert of reeds and darkening fields, losing a fugitive’s defiant heartbeat in the steady muffled drums, the dark shape on the stoep could be some creature holed up in the shelter of the doorstep of a deserted habitation. The red eye of a cigar opens and closes. No one will ever find him here, this evening, in their minds; he is placed as they dub him, as they’ve decided what he is. Up at the compound they’ll be so full of beer they didn’t even hear the car, and they know that on Sunday nights he is back in town. The gathering round the underwater-lit pool knows he’s a man with an active social life — he’s at someone else’s party, or perhaps he has a woman somewhere, he’s discreet, he doesn’t flaunt these things. Back at the school (if the plane was on time, if he is prefigured there at all) he is seen at the party in town which was mentioned to fill a silence over lunch at the airport.

Time to let go, as the saying has it. It’s agreed that’s what a place like this is for. What will she do with the egg? It will lie on a table in New York in a bowl with those old-fashioned china decoys — once put in nests to encourage hens to lay at home and not at large — she used to rummage for in antique shops.

— And this? What’s this thing? —

— That’s an old silver butter-stamp. My wife somehow missed it when she packed up, I suppose; I don’t know why I’ve kept it. She used to collect. All kinds of junk. -

— Of course. It’s what the wives of men who’re getting rich are expected to do. You don’t imagine I thought she made butter? —

— And you collect pots. — His turn for the ambiguous statement-or-accusation.

Not at all slow for a pig-iron dealer! She’s always ready to acknowledge with a laugh that she wasn’t wrong when she thought there was something else to him, something that explains his attractiveness.

— Well of course. In me you see expressed the guilty yearning for the artifacts of the culture we’ve destroyed. The same thing as young Americans wearing redskin fringed jackets and head-bands. -

But those with whom you make common cause of bare feet want to wear shoes. They’ll have on the rubber boots I supply, I’ll bet, while they’re cutting the poor bloody throat of their goat. There’s no one to blame — not really, no matter the irritation in the heat of the moment — neither Emmy and Kurt for letting him associate with hippy students nor the mother to whose nest he’s threatening to return (perhaps?). No, no, he’s on his own. He’ll flounder along, pad along on those skinny feet till he’s had enough. Curious. Curious to know. You will know everything I know, you little idiot. You can have everything I’ve had. That’s all there is. Only sixteen, in that same Swakopmund, during the war, I managed it all for myself. I found myself a woman of thirty-five and a great favourite of Emmy’s believe it or not. Emmychen was a friend of her mother, and she had come to stay with the mother because her husband was fighting in Egypt. She was beautiful the way they used to get themselves up then, with hair in a curly ruff on the shoulders, and a very red-painted big mouth. She took no notice of me and then sometimes when she was eating with us would turn to me at table — What are you day-dreaming about? What’s he thinking, that one, Tante Emmy? Does he tell you? — I started to answer back even though she was a married woman; I learned how to talk to women, to sense she liked it although I was still only a kid. We made Emmy and Kurt laugh — they thought I was so clever. She used to linger on at the house until it was dark and as there was petrol rationing Kurt couldn’t drive her, so I was told to walk her home for safety — there were plenty of black men around — your Ovambos. I used to take my bicycle along for the ride back, pushing it between us as we walked. She asked me about school and whether I didn’t want to run away and join the army? She said she wanted to see if she still remembered how to ride and she mounted, giggling and wobbling; I had to steady the steering and she kept losing balance and landing heavily against me. I suddenly understood — there is no explaining how you recognize it — she was feeling something when she lurched against my chest. She was no longer a married lady, a grown-up friend of Emmy who teased me at the table — she was what I was looking for. She was what I wanted when I was in bed at night. I held her tightly on the bicycle — good God, it was I who was suffocating, I remember it because it was the first time and it happens many times, you never know when it will happen. The more she laughed and protested the more she seemed to swell up against me, she was tumescence itself, externalized for the first time. There is no need to be curious; it happens of itself and can’t be stopped. She liked the business of the bicycle, but I don’t think she thought she ought to go so far as to go to bed with a boy of sixteen. I had a hell of a time with her, I can tell you. She agreed to let me come to her mother’s house one night when her mother would be out. But she wouldn’t take off her slacks. I remember distinctly she took off her blouse. Then she said the reason was the house wasn’t a safe place and she would get the key of another house, an empty beach-house. It was one of those old wooden places from the German time, with a fancy turret and a name — Haus Wüsten Ruh , I think it was, something like that — you’ve seen them, there must be a few left. Perhaps it’s still there. The sand from the desert and the sea-sand had piled up all round it. The key wouldn’t turn in the lock and we couldn’t get in; we looked through the windows in the dark but there was no way in. She wouldn’t let me force a window. Christ almighty! She wouldn’t lie down in the sand, I suppose at thirty-five that was beneath the lady’s dignity. We went back again another night with a can of Kurt’s Three-in-One oil and got the lock to yield, and we climbed under the German feather quilt on a bed and — all of sixteen years old — I was confident as a man of thirty. But the silly bitch kept saying I was too young, she mustn’t, she really shouldn’t, and it was only about the third or fourth time we went to that house that she let me in, at last I got her to let me in, I got in, after peering through the dark closed windows like that, shut out, imagining what it would be like inside, with her, in that house.