Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— It’s flourishing — the rains are almost too good this year. You should have come out more than once. —

— I know. You didn’t ever take me again — oh you would have — but we never seemed to get the right chance, did we…? -

Through the sirens calling and the deep seas drowning the cable that sways between us, you know how to put a hand on me.

No ordinary pig-iron dealer so far as you’re concerned. The flesh is present at either end of the line; in fact, that’s a live wire clutched to the ear in the right hand, a sparking wire at whose touch each nipple breaks out of its little worn brown parcel of slack skin. Lovely goose-flesh.

— I’m planting European chestnuts for the blacks to use as firewood after they’ve taken over —

Oh that makes you laugh — I know! That’s what you really like about me, about us; we wrestle with each other on each other’s ground, neither gives an inch and when we fall it’s locked together, like lovers.

Whatever you think of me as an employer of black labour you are confident you can entrust yourself to me. Always have been.

— Trouble. I don’t want to say too much over the phone —

— Ask away. Ask me for something. That’s what I’m here for. How else will you explain to them you know me? Out with it. -

— I wouldn’t do it, but there are people who matter more to me than anything in the world —

— Stop beating about the bush. —

— I wouldn’t suddenly phone you again out of the blue if it were not -

Of course you would not. Of course you would not phone.

Jacobus admires the trees although they are nothing to see, this small, because he is told they are special trees. He asks a great many questions about them; he thinks this is the way to please, he knows how to handle the farmer. It is also a way of showing that he is in charge of the digging of holes that is being done by Solomon, Phineas and himself.

— Ah, is coming fruits, that’s nice. And now is plenty, plenty rain, is going grow quick. —

— Not fruit, nuts. You know what that is? —

It is difficult to find an accurate comparison for chestnuts. None of them is likely ever to have seen an almond or walnut tree, although these grow in people’s gardens in town. Groundnuts — those they know, a common crop not here but in the middle- and low-veld; but groundnuts grow attached to the plant’s roots.

— Yes I know nuts. — Sweat clouds Jacobus’s matt-black neck (blacker than the rest of him, as a white man’s neck turns redder from long exposure to the sun) like condensation on a bottle of dark ale, and he is talking abruptly, all the time, each utterance chopped short by the blows of the pick he’s wielding.

— Peanuts, you know peanuts. Well, something like that only these are very big, they’re big as small new potatoes, and they grow in bunches on the tree. -

— Big like potatoes! —

— New potatoes, little ones. -

— And I’m sure is taste very nice. -

— Oh yes. You can cook them and eat them like mashed potatoes, too. —

Jacobus translates this bit of information and repeats it to Solomon and Phineas as they swing and rise, swing and rise with their picks, but they do not respond.

— I think I can taste that nuts next year. —

That wily character knows he is exaggerating, he may not speak the language but he understands the conventions of polite conversation all right.

— Oh it will be many years before these have any nuts. You and I will be old men, Jacobus. —

— No! How can we be old? You are still young. —

— No, no. These will be big trees, very big, when you are very old and walk with a stick. —

— Well, is all right. Is all right, when Terry can get them. when he can get marry and bring them nice for his wife, his little children? —

The farmer stands over them while they dig. It’s necessary because there must be no skimping: the holes must be deep, the earth must be properly trenched to a good depth. He cuts the thick twine round the neck of the packing on each tree and carefully folds back the plastic skin and the sacking beneath it. The clump of roots and earth (this earth has come all the way from Europe) has dried out a bit despite all precautions. Some frail capillary roots look like wisps of fibre from an old mattress. He tests them between finger and thumb; both limp and brittle. But he will not allow himself to investigate the bigger roots, visible though embedded in the European earth; the trees must take their chance. Handling them will only make things worse. Two hundred rands down the drain.

Jacobus is quick; no hesitation escapes him. His spade (they are beginning to shape the holes now) pauses. — But is coming all right when we plant. Plenty rain this month. —

The first hole is ready and they move on to make the next. It was difficult to decide where to place the trees. They ought to be near the farmhouse, really — a farmhouse as one thinks of one. Two great round chestnuts dark over the stoep on a Transvaal farm. It would be something extraordinary. But on the other hand indigenous trees would be better in such a definitive position, Yellowwood, Eugenia or something — as a general rule one should plant indigenous trees wherever possible, not even ordinary exotics like eucalyptus and poplar; he has the companion volume to the wild-flower book, a book of indigenous tree species. Anyway there really isn’t a farmhouse yet; that place could perhaps be fixed up one day but it hasn’t the right character, doesn’t look as if it were ever intended to be a real farmhouse. The curve where the road from the entrance to the property turns up towards the complex of farm buildings seems right; a sort of dignified approach to where, one day, a farmhouse and its garden would be differentiated from the farm proper, preside over it. ‘Turn right when you come to the big chestnut trees.’

He stands with his hands on his hips, for balance, looking down into the hole. Whatever else they may or may not be able to do, they know how to dig. There is laterite on some parts of the farm, but not here, and the spades have cut down clean and deep. The cross-section of close-packed soil laid bare has its layers of colours and textures stored away. Broken in upon, the earth gives up the strong musty dampness of a deserted house or a violated tomb. At one layer roots frayed by the spades stick out like broken wires. He leans down to tug at one — the young trees must not have to compete for nourishment with the root system of some other growth. But the roots don’t yield, and he can’t see where they can come from. There’s a vertigo that goes with pits; not that this one could take him in and conceal him entirely; it’s not more than four feet deep, even crouching, his head would stick out like an unwary rabbit’s. But there are some for whom it would be large enough; those tribes who bury in the foetal position.

They have dug one good hole and it remains to make sure they don’t think they’ve done enough hard work for the day and slack off on the next. The rhythmical grunts with which their picks are flying up, over there, and hooking into the ground with a thud, doesn’t mean they won’t try to get away with going down only three feet.

They’ve stopped. Jacobus is making a show of heaving at something; it’s a rock they’ve struck. On the desk at the office in town there is a grey-brown stone that bears marks of having been shaped, a kind of petrified whittling, that he once picked up when they were ploughing. The secretaries all ask about it. Like Jacobus, they feel obliged to show interest in what interests him. He is able to explain exactly. — You know what that is? That’s a hand-axe. It was used like this — here, open your palm. You know how old that is? That’s a stone age implement, from my farm. — But this is nothing but a boulder that has come to light.