Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

The howls have throbbed themselves out and sunk away into the peace. This place absorbs everything, takes everything to itself and loses everything in itself. It’s innocent. The pulse, the rhythm now is a coming and going of flights of birds just after sunset. The oceanic swaying of layers of boughs and swathes has stopped; the force of gravity sinks everything that is of the earth to the earth, chained to a ball of molten ore that has rolled over the dark side. All the weight of his life is taken by the tree at his back. Swallows are a flick of dark flying droplets. From the far curve of the sky, finches; they spring up and down in and out of the line of their formation as they go. Darts of doves aim at some objective of their own. Like showers of sparks, birds explode into his sky, and — a change of focus — close to his eyes gnats are raised and lowered, stately, as they hover in their swarm on strings of air. He feels (see him in her crystal ball and have a good laugh if she likes) almost some kind of companionship in the atmosphere. You predicted it — right — you are so clever, your kind, you always know the phrase: — The famous indifference of nature really sends people like you, doesn’t it — it’s the romanticism of your realpolitik , the sentimentalism of cut-throat competitors —

But for all the brown-titted warmth and revolutionary humanity you exude, you fastened the seat-belt and left them all behind.

Tracing his consciousness as an ant’s progress is alive from point to point where it is clambering over the hairs of his forearm, he knows he is not the only one down at the reeds. He doesn’t think of him , one of them lying somewhere here, any more than one thinks consciously of anyone who is always in one’s presence about the house, breathing in the same rooms. Sometimes there arises the need to speak; sometimes there are long silences. He feels at this particular moment a kind of curiosity that is in itself a question: from one who has nothing to say to one to whom there is nothing to say. Falling asleep there he was not alone face-down in the grass. There are kinds of companionship unsought. With nature. Nature accepts everything. Bones, hair, teeth, fingernails and the beaks of birds — the ants carry away the last fragment of flesh, small as a fibre of meat stuck in a back tooth, nothing is wasted.

In the harbour of the summer night the city rides lit-up at anchor across the veld. The telephone answering device waits to provide his only conversation. It’s Barbara, darling. Where on earth are you hiding yourself? Seton and I want to have some people over for New Year’s Eve, just a small thing, not a great lush-up. But we can’t imagine it without you . I mean, we really do want to know if you’re going to come? I’ve phoned umpteen times.

This is Mr André Boyars’ secretary speaking. Mr Boyars would like Mr Mehring to come to Sunday brunch to meet Mr and Mrs David Lindley-Brown, of

Does this thing really work, Mehring, or am I shouting down the wind… look, Caroline and I want to make up a foursome to sail with Blakey Thompson to the Comores early in January. How does that strike you? He’s refitted his yacht and he’s got all the info, but we both feel, good chap though Blakey is, we couldn’t take him unadulterated all the way across the Indian Ocean — Caroline’s interrupting, she says it’s up the Mozambique Channel, to be precise…

I’m getting a coloured band Jan’s dug up. The girl at your office said she didn’t think you’d be back in time, but it’d be so lovely if you could just make it… it’s going to be enormous, keep thinking of more people I can’t do without — you know how I am —

Someone told me you’ve gone off skiing in Austria? — René and I want to have a civilized New Year away from the mob, and I said to him, d’you know, there’s only one person I’d be happy to have with us… truly. You’ve never been to our game lodge on the Olifants River, have you? Well, we’ll take lots of good drink and food and watch the hippos. We’ve built a sort of little tower… René’s got a cousin out from Belgium, a charming girl, I know you’ll get on famously, we’d be cosy.

Some people are intimidated by the machine and couch their messages in telegraphese, as if paying so much a word. Others are cut off just when they are getting into conversational stride — they forget or do not know the span of the recording does not take into consideration how much you may still have left to say. The machine simply stops listening.

Just as he gives no answer. He takes no part in the conversation. He sits with his head tipped back in a long chair, but not negligently. If it were not for the drink in his hand, anyone looking in on the closed-up flat where the owner is away on holiday would take the attitude to be one of a doctor or other disinterested confidant, reliably impersonal.

On Christmas Day they beat a dog and on the last night of the year their radio is turning out boere musiek, the sawing, thumping concertina-stuff that Afrikaners love. The monotonous rhythms must have come originally from the chants of tribal blacks, anyway. Listen to one of the farm boys singing the same phrase over and over to himself while he walks, or hear them singing when they’re drunk. — As they soon will be.

He takes a walk along the road past the compound and in the adjoining paddock the beasts are all lying down. It’s said that cows like music. They breathe in deep animal sighs.

No one shows a sign of life from the compound though he knows they’re all there. The L-shape of their shacks hides them and their mess and fowls and cooking-fires from the road. Some year the whole thing will have to be pulled down and decently rebuilt where it ought always to have been — up behind the house, near the public road, clear of the river frontage. There’ll be dissatisfaction because they were here when he came, they were squatting God knows how long before he bought the place and they’ll expect to have their grandchildren squatting long after he’s gone. Everyone pretends he’s not there, at the compound, but when he comes back to the house where his car, clearly as any flag run up, signifies his presence, Jacobus is hanging about obviously waiting for him, although his trouser legs are rolled and he’s carrying soap and a piece of towel as if he’s simply about to wash his feet at the yard tap. He doesn’t like an arrival in his absence or any wanderings about without his knowledge; that’s an old story. God knows what goes on when they’re left to themselves. Clever as a wagon-load of monkeys. He’s only got to see a cloud of dust to know from the shape the Mercedes’s coming, and he’s got the word out, it’s telepathic or witchcraft, they understand each other, they back each other up so well. Today Jacobus is expansive and reckless — had something to drink; well, hell, why not.

— Baas, I’m going wake you up twelve o’clock. Knock on the door. —

— Yes! then we drink whisky- He happens to be taking a bottle, sheathed in the twist of thin white paper in which they are packed by the case, out of the car.

— What, whisky…! — The laughter is turned towards a marginal presence; the nightwatchman. It beckons him like an encouraging hand. The offer — or joke — is explained in their language.

He has not thought about which party to go to until it is too late to make up one’s mind. Lightning in a soaring cave of black cloud on his right, and on the left a huge orange moon is turning yellow, as the skin of a bright balloon thins and lightens as it is blown up. An extraordinary sight; an extraordinary night. There are times when exactly the particular combination of degree of warmth, humidity, direction or absence of wind, occurring at exactly the right time of evening on precisely the right date after the vernal equinox, will bring winged ants floating out of the ground. Or (a completely different combination: high temperature in an early, dry spring) fireflies, running lines of burning thread through the reeds. They were captured in a school cap and put in an empty chocolate carton with cellophane windows, to make a lantern — a great success with a small boy. It happened only once. No one knows the formula. If the phenomenon should recur it would be too late, now. The air tonight is of the temperature and softness that will bring out women in flimsy dresses. They’ll all swim in the nude at midnight among the moths that have been attracted by the underwater pool-lights and fallen in. Those guests who have jumped clothes and all will have cloth pasted sodden against them like the water-logged wings. It is impossible to put any kind of shelter between oneself and such a night. He has moved away from the house, the neck of the whisky bottle still in his hand; he goes back to the house for a moment — the kitchen door is open, Alina is back and forth for those endless buckets of hot water they seem to draw — and he takes one of the thick cheap tumblers and a plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator.