Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

That long-suffering professor of yours whom I never met — You regard him as an honest man, then? —

Lying in my bed, you answered the question as if it were another: — I respect him. —

Just as I said — Jacobus respects me.

— Why do you laugh? I do. He’s devoted to his work and he doesn’t live off anybody’s back. Not directly. I suppose if one looks into where the money for those research grants comes from —

A bore in the end, just as much as any of those women whom you despised as being nothing more than a body. It would have become a bore. Ingesting, digesting and exercising moral problems clearly as a see-through gheko.

Fuckers, not lovers.

Once you were waiting for a phone-call from a lover late at night. It didn’t come. You slept, and were awakened at three in the morning, the phone already in your hand, by a voice abusing you with filthy words. One of those anonymous ‘nuisance calls’ one is supposed to report to the police. You told me it was the worst thing that had ever happened to you; but that was before you got yourself interrogated at John Vorster Square.

Lovers write letters and say things that the others feel obliged to trot out only in bed. One piece of flesh of all flesh remains opaque with mystery for them; it must be returned to again and again. And even when it has become too familiar, it is invested with something of what it once was. There is the obsession with which that yellow weaver thrusts worms and grubs and whatever it can find, down the gullets of those ugly fledglings — and there are thousands upon thousands of weavers, this year, and hundreds of the young must fall from the nests or be destroyed in other ways — you find them in the veld, ant-eaten already, the night after any heavy rain. Nourishment. Lovers take presents from each other they would not choose for themselves (what will his mother do with that agate egg when he gives it to her for Christmas? — every knick-knack shop in Madison Avenue is full of such things). They want something of each other; doesn’t matter what it is — a horse to ride? A bridge that could so easily have been built, just a matter of getting the boys to mix a bit of cement and carry over some posts and logs on the tractor? A dog kennel with an ingenious roof that lifts like a lid? — They find out. There is always a subject between them, my dear gipsy, always, always, they know what it is even if they are being shown round a farm that doesn’t interest them much, even if they don’t speak much, sitting side by side in a car. Look at that funnel of web some spider’s spread leading to its hole, and the beetle that’s struggling there, caught. If you come back to the same spot this afternoon, if it were possible ever to find it again, on this farm, you might see the beetle there still, maybe still alive, bound with filaments of shroud the spider will wind it in; sometimes it will be there for days until the spider drags it down into the hole — everything takes its own time out here, whatever you do. Listen to the frogs. The great rough rachet at which the throat of the first one of the evening engages at the same time every day. You are bored? I’m not. The frogs cease suddenly, later, just as they begin. This place is a quiet sleeper. Is he facing without eyes up through a sky of earth or is he lying here as they found him, turned away. There are languages and cultural difficulties. It isn’t possible to follow, from where he is one can’t imagine someone speaking as they speak: yes, master, the skelms from the location got me, just like the policeman said. Those blacks hit me on the head, they stuck a knife in my heart, they threw me away — No moon. You could lie out, down here. A quiet sleeper. Turn to her and without making contact with any part of her receive from her open lips, warm breath. Breathe her in as the kiss of life given a dying man.

He’s spent the night in the house quite a few times this summer. There are no sheets but a cushion from the sofa does as a pillow and there is the kaross he once bought in Botswana when there was first talk of a consortium to prospect for nickel deposits, and he flew up for a day. It’s nicely made, well-matched skins of Black-black jackal; but one buys these things when one goes about the world and then doesn’t know what the hell to do with them, or whom to give them to. It didn’t look right in the flat. The mosquitoes are bad in that bedroom. Spraying stinks but doesn’t help much. Yet shaving in the dark little bathroom an hour or more earlier than he would be if he were in town, he is feeling as fresh as if he has had a particularly good night’s sleep. Through the eye-level window that opens upwards like a fanlight he watches the arrival of women and old men who have been taken on by Jacobus to come from the location to weed. Thirty cents a day, Jacobus says he can get them for; but if you see how they’re taking it easy, how they’re strolling up and having a good old gas with Alina, and sitting about against the workshop wall — probably not worth more. He is shaving by feel, not looking into the small foxed mirror at all — good God, what’s going on? Now they’re leisurely unwrapping their babies and their bundles, apparently they bring their bread or mealie-pap along, and now young Izak arrives with a can of milk. So it’s a picnic, before the day’s work begins. Everybody’s squatting on the grass in the yard and being sociable. Some of these old girls are quite characters; one crone with nothing but a big safety pin to hold her rag of a blouse together over her huge old tits, now that she’s shed her blankets, catches him out watching through the window and calls a loud and jaunty greeting, one word in Afrikaans and one in their language: Môre, ‘Nkos’. The borehole water is soft; one gets an exceptionally good shave. Those women are giving Jacobus hell over something but it’s all banter; barefoot, his hands hooked in the braces of new bibbed overalls that stand away from his waist like Chaplin’s trousers, he’s arguing theatrically, but there’s laughter, they shout him down, behind their din there is the hurrying tripping skelter of cattle being driven out of the paddock by Solomon and Phineas — a sound queerly equivalent to that of thousands of feet coming up out of the railway stations, away from the buses, far off in the city. Jacobus pretends to threaten a woman with a fist. So that’s how work gets going on the place. Everyone takes his time, nobody’s developing ulcers out here, you’ve got to grant them that.

At the stove Alina is stirring something that already smells burnt. She looks half asleep and moves reluctantly; spoilt — she’s not used to being required in the house in the mornings. Anyway, he doesn’t want breakfast. He flings up the screeching steel fly-screens on the windows in that airless, lifeless bedroom — the moment he’s gone she’ll close everything again — and emerges through the kitchen door, an apparition (sees himself as) in that light grey summer suit with the back vent, Roman coin cuff-links and red silk tie. The guise or disguise of the city; he was here straight from the office yesterday — the old pair of corduroy jeans he keeps to get into at the farm is lying with the heap of the kaross. As he walks through scattering cats (they’ve been attracted from the roof by dregs of mealie-pap dirtily thrown about the yard) to his car, he comes face to face with the weeding contingent, who have been down to the barn to collect their implements and are now on their way to the fields. He is surrounded by the passage of a ragged army advancing on him with hoes, the grinning, knowing faces of the old women, the younger ones not meeting his eyes, their babies’ heads lolling above their backsides as they pass, the old men in scarecrow coats blindly not seeming to know what they are making for. It is only a few moments: they have him in their midst, so that he cannot go forward. It would be absurd to back away — they are all round him.