Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

If it were not for the comb — so undeniably the sort of detail that no unnerved imagination could supply — there could not possibly be anyone there. There cannot be anyone there. But there is. Someone has been there all the time. It would be possible to be entirely surrounded, cops and robbers, in this place, without knowing it. But how ridiculous. No, no. Examining the trees without moving, without indicating anything, he has seen another pair of squatting calves — or is it the first that have changed position or crept to view from another angle. She’s lying with her breasts lolling apart under the cheap cotton sweater as her legs are rolled apart under her skirt, exposed knees dark-skinned and rough as dirty elbows. Her mouth’s open and wet for anything, with a knowing smile, a bit jaunty. A heavy jutting mouth; nothing like at all. — Come. What you bring me here for, then, man. — Her manner is easy and shrewd. How could anything ever have come of it, a bloody love-nest twenty-five miles from town, you were so ‘intelligent’ you saw through the whole thing, of course it amused you, the first time you saw me looking in at the windows — Why not just leave it all as it is? — Her eyes are glittering, quite nasty, but she’s grinning, more amused than rebuffed. The burly calves are not there; that is to say, not to be seen, but there all right. Someone has been watching the whole time and is watching still, waiting to see — what? When the bitch went off into the bushes, was it to signal or conspire? Oh God no. That hair’s been straightened and that sallowness isn’t sunburn. That’s it. Perhaps. It’s a factory girl he’s been lured into the woods with; a poor factory girl doing a grade of work reserved for coloureds. A Sunday newspaper story. A dolled-up supermarket caricature of the tanned, long-waisted lucky ones who, aping pigment, provide in turn a model for one like this, who has it, to follow: a double fake. She’s a trap, then; she waits by the road and brings white men here for whatever those Boere call themselves, the miscegenation squad or the vice squad, to follow. She could be Portuguese; one of those little silent immigrants who can be trusted not to speak. It doesn’t calm him that she has the accent of a bilingual country, that her mistakes in English clearly come about because she is Afrikaans-speaking. It doesn’t help that so much is illogical and not feasible in fact; if she’s a trap, you bloody fool, how is it that she was with the old man with the gold-braided cap, the one she says was her grandfather, the first time she made him pick her up. It is all nonsense, horrible nonsense, it can’t happen to him, but here he is, in this place, this dirty mine plantation, his car stands there, can’t be denied, she’s lolling on a raincoat on the ground —

He’s struggled to his feet while someone’s there, right there, watching him. But he shouts first. The habit of authority speaks for him — if he’s about to be set upon, robbed, killed, castrated (they could also be a gang, here in the plantation, waiting to leap upon men in flagrante delicto , unmanned when most manly) he will challenge. — What d’you want? — He hears his own yell.

The man in woollen knee-stockings, shorts, with an open-necked shirt and an ugly ginger sports-jacket is ten yards off. His slow-thinking red face with cropped reddish-blond stiff hair, brighter than the dull fuzz that shows against the light along his forearms and above the tops of the socks, looks grave. He stands and they gaze at him, caught between the trees as if he were a creature framed in its natural habitat. A thug in shorts. One of their rugby-forward dicks. Or a mine detective maybe (same breed), patrolling the property — they used to employ them to keep an eye on such places, trying to catch people who were involved in illicit gold-dealing. (This mine has been closed for ten years…) The creature clears its throat. — You better go — It speaks in ponderous policeman fashion.

The man and the woman are both fully dressed, unless you count the fact that her shoes are off — exactly the perfectly innocent shedding of town shackles allowed any picnicker. The raincoat serves to make the damp ground a place to sit on, that’s all. There is even the paper that has until recently wrapped food, crumpled into a ball and flung aside by her, just the way others like her have already fouled the place before her: witness that disgusting mess against the tree, eh.

— Yes? What do you want here! Yes? — He is shouting but can scarcely hear his own voice for the beat of his heart thudding like a pick into the swelling thickness of his chest muscles. These are the bastards who shovelled him in as you might fling a handful of earth on the corpse of a rat, just to cover the stink. — Say what you want! —

— It’s not safe here. —

Is that all? Is that the best you can do, thick-headed ox, guardian of the purity of the master race?

— What business is it of yours? Who are you? What d’you think you’re doing in this place? —

He stands his ground because those are his orders: dispose of the body, and so you dump your rubbish on somebody’s private property; that’s the easiest thing to do. About as civilized as the blacks who knife each other for you to bury.

— What do you want? —

The man suddenly squats down again, confidentially, although he hasn’t come any nearer. — They find you people here, they rob you. —

— Who? What the hell are you talking about? —

— I’m telling you. They leave you naked. You won’t have nothing. —

— We are fully clothed; we came to eat our lunch. — How shamefully, not able to stop himself in time, he has stooped to pick up and demonstrate the pathetic evidence of the crumpled ball of greasy paper.

— They sell it in the location. You won’t see it again. Your watch, your money. - He speaks very low, almost wheedling, his head down and his eyebrows raised because he’s peering up. He dares to shuffle a little closer. That’s some kind of signal! Stupid not to keep a gun in the car! The others will burst out from behind the trees where they have been watching and listening: not even a strong man, not yet fifty, kept fit by sauna baths, massage, and exercise on his 400 acre farm, will stand a chance. And at last it will be in the papers, it will all come out, distorted, decayed, but just recognizable, a face with a — enough. — Trouble — you said: the prominent industrialist associated with the economic advancement of the country at the highest level who helped his leftist mistress to flee abroad. He tried to interfere with me (that’s the phrase that’s used) when as a young prospective immigrant girl I sat beside him in an aircraft. He propositioned me in a coffee bar, trying to persuade me to sit in the dark with him at a cowboy film. If I had had my father’s money I would have known better what to do with it than to pick up a prostitute and take her behind the trees. We phoned again and again, but no wonder, he was caught with a black girl, that’s what he was doing. She hasn’t even got up, the bitch. She lies there looking on, she doesn’t even bother to draw her legs together. She has friends who matter more to her than anything in the world, because they pay her, yes, she has her kind of loyalty and it’s bought. He’s going to leave her to them. He’s going, in a matter of seconds — mustn’t give himself away by so much as glancing towards the car — he’s going to make a dash for it, a leap, sell the place to the first offer, jump in, the key’s there in the ignition, and drive off reversing wildly first through the trees, the open door on the passenger’s side swinging and crashing, breaking branches and tearing leaves. He’s going to run, run and leave them to rape her or rob her. She’ll be all right. They survive everything. Coloured or poor-white, whichever she is, their brothers or fathers take their virginity good and early. They can have it, the whole four hundred acres. She’ll jump up and scream after him, sobbing and yelling, and they’ll come at him at the same time, that one will tackle him round the legs, grabbing him as he passes, holding fast from the ground like a fist out of hell, and bring him down to them… no no no. No no, what nonsense, what is there to fear — shudder after shudder, as if he were going to vomit the picnic lunch, it’s all coming up, coming out. That’s a white tart and there was no intent, anyway, report these gangsters or police thugs terrorizing people on mine property, he’s on a Board with the chairman of the Group this ground still belongs to… No, no, no. RUN.