Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

He shouted as if he and his father were alone.

His father never forgot the presence of the old man; in his place, in his chair. He spoke as a man does conscious of witness, of giving account to an invisible code.

— Never mind. You’ve got all these Dutch farmers up and down this road and they see it. You never know when someone notices and starts something — I know about these things, believe me. They don’t worry us, we don’t worry them, that’s the best way. Leave it like that…. The police van is up and down this road every day —

— So the police are going to come and say you’re a communist, we’re communist Koolies, that’s what’s going to happen, ay? — That’s the hammer and the sickle up there, you say — they’ve told you — you and they say —

His temper and his nerve flew apart under his own words. They took a hammer to the coloured photograph of himself smiling on the day he got his matric results that hung with all the wedding pictures in the sitting-room. He was smashing himself. - They know — you believe — Suddenly aware — urgent as an alarming internal spasm prefacing uncontrollable diarrhoea — that tears were about to come, he burst through the dark passage that led from shop to house and shut himself in the room he shared with brothers.

They were at school. There was no key but he pushed the corner of a bed across the door as he had done at other times. He heard his mother breathing on the far side and making small polite noises in her throat. But she would hang about, afraid actually to speak. He lay on his bed and smoked. There were no tears. He thought where he might go. To cousins in Klerksdorp. His mother’s aunt in Lichtenburg. An uncle and cousins in Standerton. Even Dawood’s wife’s people near Durban. Plenty of places. To work in the same kind of shop and hear the same talk.

His mother smelt the cigarette and went almost soundlessly, although she was a majestic size, turned away, down the narrow passage.

The telephone answering device has twice recorded an attempt to reach him through a personal service overseas call.

He could, in his turn, record an instruction for calls to be diverted to the number at the farm. But he does not. There is no one to answer at the house, unless he happens to be inside when the phone rings. And it would mean that anyone else — if there is anyone left, by now, who may not have given up trying to invite him to dinner — would be able to foreshorten the distance (business in Australia, skiing in Austria) at which absence has placed him, in their minds, over the holidays.

There’s no way of knowing whether the call would have been reverse charges. Even if you wear your jeans to rags and go barefoot the possibility of telephoning across the world without having to pay marks you unmistakably as belonging in pig-iron, I’m afraid. You are branded by it.

— I just wanted to say Happy New Year and all that-I notice on the phone you always leave out — avoid using — any form of address that establishes your relationship to me. You don’t call me anything. But that doesn’t change who you are. — Oh jolly good idea, how’re things? Has it been a cold Christmas there? Having a good time? I’ve been very quiet, taking it really easy — slept the New Year in, believe it or not, in bed at ten o’clock more or less —

And then? A silence while distance is something audible if not palpable: that faint supersonic ringing in the ears, of long distance lines, those wavering under-sea voices that are always there, forlorn sirens of other conversations thinly tangled across millions of miles. Can you hear me? Think of something to say next.

— It’s not Terry who wants to speak to you. I do. —

That’s also not impossible at this juncture, although we usually communicate through the lawyers, having long ago found that this was the best way to avoid friction that might be harmful to him. But that was when he was a child. Look at him now, a young man fully equipped by Eros himself with the beginnings of a beard. - I know why it’s you. -

— He wants to stay and I intend to keep him here. -

— I knew that was it. Why else should you phone me? —

— I have no intention of seeing him forced to go into that army for a year. He has his principles and I don’t see why you shouldn’t respect them. —

— Yes, and you are going to keep him there, under mama’s skirts, and I can do what I damn well like about it, isn’t that so? —

He’s standing beside you and watching your face to see from it how I’m reacting. - Why can’t the boy speak to me, like a man? Let me talk to him. —

He has nothing to say.

— But I have: to you. He’s a minor. I have full custody under a court order. You should be aware of that. I shall get an interdiction served on you-

— Oh yes — run to the lawyers, as usual, you can afford the best there is and I won’t stand a chance against your money —

He’s thought of something he could have said to the boy, anyway. Sticking out of the open windows of the car are the shaking heads of two young saplings, one on either side. Their roots, each in a big fist of soil carefully gloved in sacking and plastic, are on the back seat of the Mercedes. - The trees I told you I was going to plant — remember? — they’ve been delivered by truck but I don’t trust the nursery with these beauties. You know what they are? Spanish chestnut. Specially imported variety. A hundred rands each. My present to myself. God knows how they’ll do, but I’m going to have a go. Have you bought yourself roast chestnuts in the streets? That’s the best part of the bloody miserable New York winter. —

The road is so familiar that it exists permanently in his mind like those circuits created when electrical impulses in the brain connecting complex links of comprehension have been stimulated so often that a pathway of learning has been established. He knows where the speed-trap traffic cop hides himself. He reads without actually looking at it every time the hieroglyph someone’s scrawled on the Indian’s rain-water tank. He is aware before he sees her floral rabbits and donkeys displayed on the bonnet and roof of her old station-wagon, that the arty woman who sells stuffed toys will be at the bend where the freeway ends. Particular vehicles, probably encountered many times, using the route as frequently as he does, have become half-expected pointers if not landmarks. Even faces. The other day he thought someone smiled at him from a bus-stop on the road. He could drive it in his sleep; sometimes does; he awakens in the middle of the night in town and for a moment thinks he is at the farm, he wakes camping out in that room at the house and thinks he hears the telephone ringing in the flat. The fancy heads of the little trees are dipping and bobbing in the airstream created by his passage; people in passing cars give his the second glance that is drawn by anyone exposing out of context a component of private existence — those Boers who will tie anything from a woman’s dressing-table to a farm implement on top of their cars, or the location black cycling along with a primus stove on the handlebars or — once — a goat tied on his back.

How many times has he gone to and fro, ironed out the path of the first time he went to look at the place and decided it was a good buy. Scoring a groove over and over again, ineradicable. If there is a first purpose there will also one day be a last. It probably will be something like… something not more than a new grease-trap for a drain that Jacobus’s asked for, or a supply of drench for the cows. That’s the reality of the place, my dear; keeping it up. It would be crazy to suppose the call might even have been you, but not entirely inconceivable. The sort of thing you would do. Even if it had been reverse charges — that might well strengthen the chances that it would be you, after all, my money is useful to count on when one’s in trouble. You are always sailing close in to trouble — with a loudhailer for SOS in one hand. Well, you are female and that’s your charm, or part of your charm. You start off by reestablishing it: — You still keep that beautiful place I once saw, Mehring? If you knew how homesick I get for Africa! Not the people — the shitty whites, god knows — but the country. —