Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist

The shopkeeper cut off his attention abruptly; already his hand with the little red-eyed ring had put on his glasses and taken up the suppliers’ invoices he was checking. His lips moved sternly over words: 12 only gents’ plastic watch straps. The shop was empty after Jacobus’s clumsy shape sauntered out of the light of the door and the old man and the young watched their son and father keeping vigil, as it was necessary to do over everything and everyone with whom they had dealings.

The Indians had a house snugly contiguous with the store, with beans trained up the walls and marigolds behind the barbed-wire fence. Except for the façade of the store the ten-foot fence enclosed their whole property, right around the partly-bricked-in yard, taking in the tin hovels supported by the yard wall down where their blacks lived. The fence was shored up here and there with sheets of corrugated iron and even an old bedstead — the blacks had built it for their employers, to keep blacks out. The two great dogs — cross-breeds of the white men’s favourite watch-dogs, Alsatian and Dobermann Pinscher — who were chained to runners along the fence had worn a shallow ditch inside the length of it, bounding, racing and snarling at everything that passed within their hearing and vision. They barked now at an approach, but when Jacobus came up to the high gate, stopped, claws splayed tensely in the dust, sniffed. He stood a moment or two, his fingers hooked through the diamond mesh, exchanging greetings with a woman who was pumping water from the well. The dogs stood by with swinging tails while the woman let him in and she and he strolled over to the tin houses. He and the people there greeted each other with ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘mother’, ‘uncle’, a grammar of intimacy that went with their language; one of the women was doing the Indians’ washing, a visitor was eating half a loaf and drinking a bottle of Coke, an old man as well as several other women were home. The doors of the houses were open and gave directly onto the dirt, the broken chairs, empty bottles and cooking pots proclaiming the outside as much a living area as the inside. Perhaps in response to a message run by a child, one of the men who worked in the store appeared, too. He and Jacobus had not seen each other when Jacobus was in the store. His hands were dusty with some whitish grit: he had been at the back, weighing mealie-meal into paper bags.

— They were here? —

— The same day. —

Jacobus was comfortable on an up-ended box. He was offered, but did not take, a pinch of snuff from the old man’s tin. — What’s he so worried about? Do you ever hear that an India kills people. —

— Frightened about the shop. You know they’re not supposed to stay here, this place is for white people. The Indians can’t have a shop here. They pay. - He put out his black hand, pollened with white, and rubbed the thumb along the close-held fingers. He smiled at the thought that this was something Jacobus didn’t know.

The old man said — Yes, plenty of money, these people. They pay and then everyone is quiet Nice and quiet. They leave them alone. No trouble. No trouble and they won’t come, they won’t ask anything if it’s Indians or a white man in the shop. -

Jacobus smoked the half cigarette he had taken from his pocket; exclaimed amusedly, a comment to himself on the exchange he had had in the shop, and then was distracted by the visitor’s new bicycle that was lying beside him: how much did a bicycle like that cost, nowadays? It was a third as much again as Jacobus had paid for the same make some years ago, before he had begun to use the tractor for transport. They talked of money; it led, inevitably, to talk of work. Someone’s relative working on a farm round about had been told to go — that was how dismissal happened and no one questioned the bluntness any more than the purpose of mentioning the matter to Jacobus.

— We don’t need anybody. —

But they knew Jacobus was the boss of the show, he ran that farm while the white man lived in town. - All right, tell him to come. But not Sunday. Before Sunday or after Sunday. I don’t know — perhaps I can… It’s nearly winter, there’s not so much work, you know. Perhaps I can say… I can tell him I need another boy for the cows —

A woman who had not spoken turned out to be the man’s wife: Hallo, sister, hallo, brother. — She’s staying here, but she can’t stay — someone said. One of her children carried the baby of the family like a hump on its back. The baby’s hair was reddish, the usual symptom of nutritional deficiency when infants become too old to be satisfied by the breast and are given mealie porridge instead. It was crying and the child joggled it until its yelling head rolled. Children followed Jacobus through the gate and climbed on to the tractor but he chased them off and they watched him drive away at the majestic pace of the iron caterpillar, laughing, pummelling each other, falling about in the dust.

I pray for corn, that many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise, and glorify you.

Mehring read in the paper how hippos were aborting their foetuses in dried-up pools. It was the fourth (fifth?) year of drought. Of course, it didn’t affect him; the river, if reduced in volume, was perpetual, fed by an underground source. The farm didn’t depend on surface water. He didn’t depend on the farm. He would have to buy a considerable amount of supplementary feed for the cattle, but that could all go down as a tax loss.

He has just flown to Japan for a week; his frequent travels are of the kind where luggage consists of a couple of new shirts and whole files of papers to be studied on the plane. There seldom is time — chance — for any pleasure. A dinner with the Japanese or Germans or Canadians and their wives is part of the business schedule. They all have boats or summer places about which, as a change from base metals, it is protocol to talk over food and drink. — I’m not in the yacht-owning class, I’m afraid (it was charming of him to say). I have my bit of veld and my few cows. And that’s all I want. —

In Africa! A farm in Africa! How he must love Africa. And were there any wild animals there?

A week’s absence in Japan finds everything just as it was. Past the location entrance, the lurching buses and second-class taxis are a menace, and the location people wait for them in the litter of beer cartons and orange peel, women sitting on their bundles, the men dolled up and full of drink. The children are spending the day picking over the dirt on the stretch of open veld opposite that is used as rubbish dump. Because it’s Sunday, the Indians are on the verandah of their house, even the women in their pink and yellow trousers and tunics. Poor bloody chained dogs still racing up and down; the blacks from the farm trudging or zig-zagging on bicycles along the dirt road. The man in the tatters of dungarees who skips aside and stands at something between a bow and attention, lifting a purple knitted cap in greeting, doesn’t know him: just had a few too many.

They are banging away at their drums somewhere over the river. The usual beer-drinks. But his own, up at the kraal, are pretty quiet. The thudding and distant shouts are no more than a smudge on the perfect silence that stretches to his horizon, which is first of all, while he walks, the rise of the next farm beyond the river, and then, when he lies down at the willows, the maze of broken reeds. The willows dangle at him from the sky. A wan yellowed leaf taken between thumb and forefinger is pliable, like thin kid-skin. He rolls onto his belly and, remembering a point he ought to have made clear in Tokyo, making a mental note to make a note of it (there is a tape-recorder in his briefcase but the briefcase is in the car) his presence on the grass becomes momentarily a demonstration, as if those people on the other side of the world were smilingly seeing it for themselves: I have my bit of veld and my cows… Perhaps he has dozed; he suddenly — out of blackness, blankness — is aware of breathing intimately into the earth. Wisps and shreds of grass or leaf stir there. It is the air from his nostrils that moves them. To his half-open eye the hairs that border it and the filaments of dead grass are one.