Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— That bull, that young one, it’s all right. But what it is wrong with the legs in front — the legs are little bit weak. -

Yes, yes, I can see that for myself. — But he’s young still, the legs will get stronger. -

— No, he’s coming big, here — like this — but the legs is staying little bit weak. —

Yes, yes, I know. — But when the beast is fully mature… —

— Why the other bull, that old one, he is not weak like that when he is young? —

— Oh Nandi, he’s the one Terry named after the Hindu god he saw on the temple in Durban, oh Nandi, now you’re talking

— that’s a bull. But where d’you have the luck to find that sort of quality again -

— No, when you buy bull, you look long time, eh? Then why you don’t look at the legs they must be strong like Nandi? Nandi is coming old, but the legs is strong. —

— Yes, and why not garland the beast with frangipani as Terry wanted to… I know what you’re getting at, if it were your bull, you’d make sure you didn’t buy one with rheumatic legs that wouldn’t be able to mount a cow properly, you’d see to it, if you had a thousand rand to buy a bull —

But we are getting along fine. We’re laughing a lot; I would always recognize him by his laugh, even if his face is hidden by darkness. - D’you remember at all what he looked like? That time, Jacobus? You must have turned him over, seen the face. surely? When you took the sunglasses and the watch, all that stuff. Would you know it if you saw him again — were shown a photograph, the way the police should have done, for identification? —

He holds his liquor well; he bears his head as a man deeply considering.

He says what he said, before, in another time. The tree splashes back and forth across the moon; we are talking unhurriedly, sometimes with closed eyes. — Nobody can know for this man. Nothing for this man. —

Well, he’s welcome. Harmless. Let him stay. What does it matter. We would give him drink if he were to be here now, poor bastard. We wouldn’t ask any questions, eh? Just this once. No harm done.

We drink the whisky and we talk and laugh. he’s having the night of his life. Despite the language difficulty. That would give you something to think about, if you ever knew.

All around, on the periphery of the night, not touching upon it, are the pathetic distant sounds of human festivity. It’s difficult to distinguish them one from the other; a kind of far-off wail from which now and then a single note, that could just as easily be laughter as pain, wavers higher. You cannot imagine what it sounds like, so long as you are part of it. He has tipped back the chair and feels the moonlight on his left cheek as if tanning in some strange sun; but perhaps that is only because of his consciousness of the darkness of the storm which the right side of his face receives. The moon is so bright he can read the dial of his watch. On an impulse, he drags down from the house a sleeping-bag and canvas and metal stretcher (folding, like the guest’s forgotten chair) and one or two other necessities. If anyone looked out — Alina’s room’s in darkness, the boere musiek -drugged cattle do not so much as turn their pale gleaming horns — they would see him going burdened back to the outhouse over the path he has already set for himself through the lucerne, guided along it as if he were already being drawn through his own dreams. He has brought a mosquito coil as well as a fresh box of cheroots. The night has run down very still if certainly not silent and there will be mosquitoes out here, all right, on the stoep among the fertilizer bags. These coils are supposed to be used indoors but they may help. He lights the taper several times before it takes and begins, very slowly, to touch with tiny red the coil that is a skinny cobra with an upright head erect from the centre. Now slow smoke trails from its live mouth. In the sleeping bag he feels gleefully cosy and can see everything, like a hare (there must be a few, if they haven’t eaten them all) or a jackal (De Beer says there were still a few around until about ten years ago) putting its head out of its hole. He has thought he would smoke a final cheroot lying there but his eyes close. There is a strong human presence in the sleeping bag, other than his own. He presses his nose into the thin parachute silk stuffed with down. It’s the smell of the blond hair of a schoolboy, none-too-clean hair, although it wasn’t so long then, that has rubbed against the cowl through many restless adolescent nights.

Jacobus has not come.

A touch of the cold metal tag of a sleeping-bag zipper is what awakens him. It is already light. But perhaps very early. Morning comes at a different time when the curtains keep it out. A sun as pale as last night’s — last year’s — moon was orangey, is stiffening the topmost leaves of that tree. In metal silhouette against the sky the truncated limbs for which twiggy and leafy growth has provided flimsy cover are solidly revealed as maimed stumps. He knows in some layer of consciousness that there were new wails, louder, calling what he has heard at that hour on that particular night of each year as long as he can remember, Ha-ppee, Ha-ppee. Ha-ppee… ha-ppeee… it’s a cry, not a toast, and it does not attempt to define further the quality, state or desire expressed. Happee happee. At midnight they yell it in suburban backyards and in the streets and they produce their own kind of carrillon. Yes. They hit the telephone poles with dustbin lids and garden spades, wailing, happee, ha-ppee. They must have been doing it with their hoes up on the road where you can hear the telephone wires hum if you’re alone, they must have been clanging outside the Indians’ store. The Boers were sleeping, the Indians were sleeping. And he himself never rose out of that level of his consciousness. It’s all over. A narrow escape.

Of course — stupid not to remember! If he did come it was to the house . He knocked on the kitchen door perhaps, a long time, and went away. He realized it was said jokingly. Will you play hookey and come with me to Trinitywhatsisname? — It was a joke, of course. She took it as a joke. Christ almighty. Last year’s joke.

Everywhere he stood down the lucerne last night is bruised dark green where the sweet damp juicy leaves are crushed and wadded. Apart from a path between his two points of destination, here and the house, no purpose can be read from these scattered tramplings in a field broken out, pristine and crystalline, in a heavy dew. What on earth was he doing, stamping round and round himself, a dog making a place to lie, or a game-bird flattening a nest with its breast. Only the cows are awake and sounding their long affirmative noises: mmm-mmmM-Mh! Up at the compound not even a thread of smoke. Still in the arms of their women. Widow-birds — idiotic popular name, what could be more male, in nature, than that assumption of an exaggerated tail of plumage — trail themselves low over the mealies, which are turning fields from green to curds as their tops flower all at exactly the same height. Not a whiff of the soapy bad breath of the river. There is absolutely no one. It’s his own place. No eyes keep watch on him. Like any healthy creature still in its prime, he squats privately in the sweet wet lucerne and has produced, with ease and not without pleasure (the cheroot unlit last night smoking past his nose) a steaming turd. The faint warm smell, out here in the open, is inoffensive as cow-dung. He kicks loose some earth and lucerne and buries this evidence of himself.

So we came out possessed of what sufficed us, we thinking that we possessed all things, that we were wise, that there was nothing we did not know… We saw that, in fact, we black men came out without a single thing; we came out naked; we left everything behind, because we came out first. But as for white men… we saw that we came out in a hurry; but they waited for all things, that they might not leave any behind.