Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

There is sand on his lip.

For a moment he does not know where he is — or rather who he is; but this situation in which he finds himself, staring into the eye of the earth with earth at his mouth, is strongly familiar to him. It seems to be something already inhabited in imagination.

At this point his whole body gives one of those violent jerks, every muscle gathering together every limb in paroxysm, one of those leaps of terror that land the poor bundle of body, safe, in harmless wakefulness. The abyss is no deeper than a doorstep; the landing, home.

He must have dropped off face-down and his head has sagged off his forearm; a dribble of saliva has made the earth stick to his lip. He’s had complaints that he’s inclined to sleep open-mouthed and make noises.

He rolls onto his side, where he has the impression the reeds facing him hide him as drawn curtains keep out day. The sense of familiarity, of some kind of unwelcome knowledge or knowing, is slow to ebb. As it does, it leaves space in his mind; or uncovers, like the retreat of a high tide, carrying away silt.

He lies for what seems a long time. This place — his farm — really is what everyone says of it, he himself as well (and he can hear, as if rehearsing, the jokes about tax deductions, the serious remarks that reveal how surprisingly much he knows of husbandry). A high-veld autumn, a silvery-gold peace, the sun lying soft on hard ground, the rock pigeons beginning to fly earlier, now, the river he can hear feeling its dark tongue round the watercress and weeds, there inside the reeds. As if he hasn’t been away. As if nothing had ever happened; as if there never has been — is not — someone dead, down there. Just as everyone believes — he himself has long ago come to believe — that the farm was acquired as a good investment. Yet when he brought her here that day, the first time he saw the place, and they were walking over the very piece of ground on which he is stretched now, allowing that distant first time to return to him, he was possessed only by the brilliant idea of the farmhouse as a place to bring a woman.

— I’m in pig-iron. — Confident enough to clown a little: these were the preliminaries, the exchange-of-unvital-information stage.

— No ordinary pig-iron dealer — she said. But it was not flattery, not her — ironic, sarcastic even, condescending, weighing him up.

That ugly little plaas house — he hadn’t even been inside it yet, but he could visualize the flowered linoleum on the floor and the dead flies against the bedroom windows — it was only twenty-five miles or so from town and she had a car. Much safer than a flat, and a hotel room was probably out of the question, with a woman like her. (Though one never knew; the ones who fancied themselves brainy were often the least fastidious when roused.) All the time they were walking about this place (he is sitting up, in a slight buzz of dizziness — has lit a cigarette and is inhaling deeply), while his tongue was busy talking, his body responding, taking her hand and momentary weight across dongas, his real attention was on the lucky existence of a house. Only twenty-five miles from town and she the sort of woman who drives about in her little car all over the show. No one would ever know where she was going. The hairdresser’s; the dressmaker’s, a girlfriend. The house would have the minimal luxuries essential to its purpose, and none of the unnecessary domestic essentials. It would not be in the least like home, anybody’s home, and she would love it. Whisky and Danish beer, good cheese and fresh bread bought on the way; cologne and huge towels in the bathroom. Yes, his mind raced ahead planning while they walked and talked, tried to cross the river, pored, close enough to smell each other’s warmth, over the boundary map the estate agent had given him, waded through khaki-weed whose barbed seeds changed their trousers into a bristly hide. He talked of clearing weeds, fencing, ploughing, draining, irrigating. She pulled the seed needles off herself with the concentrated pleasure of a dog de-fleaing: — Why not just buy it and leave it as it is? —

How could she know how close she came to the light in which he was actually considering acquisition of the place? Undoubtedly a thousand times better than any flat in town, from the point of view of discretion, and the farm servants no problem at all since, as he had no wife, they would assume she was that person, the missus. My God, what a state of heat, over that bitch, what excitation of secret plans he had indulged himself with. Had he ever bought the bath towels and the cologne? — that he does not remember. But he paid 100 rands an acre; high at the time, must be worth more than double by now.

He has got up, stiffly, and picked up the Sunday paper which he had been reading before he fell asleep. Having your back scrubbed by a professional Japanese is no substitute for exercise. The paper is folded into the sort of wad you make to swat something with, and is a nuisance to carry. But he never leaves so much as a cigarette butt lying about to deface the farm; it’s they — up at the compound — who discard plastic bags and put tins beside tree-stumps. He’s forever cleaning up after them. There the children are now, shouting in their thin voices as they come over the veld carrying those endless paraffin tins of water from the pump. Some of them are so small they appear to be paraffin tins with legs. But the parents don’t care. Just back from Japan, he feels himself to look a lonely man, walking along beside the reeds. So many of them are dried out and trampled down by cattle that you can walk quite a way farther in among them than was possible a few weeks ago. The weaver-bird nests (like balls of dusty hair-combings women leave behind them) are knocked off and deserted and the vlei is dry; the river has retreated to a passage he can’t see. Dried-up water plants web and scum the hard mud. He bats his way through the margin of overlaid reeds, using the newspaper. Hippos aborting their foetuses in dried-up pools, places like this. It’s extraordinary how nature isn’t squeamish about what to do in desperation. The shallowest covering of earth is enough. The part of the river bed he is standing on seems to be somewhere about the place that Jacobus took him. Cows break up and tamp down the surface, some small creatures (rats?) make their holes, reeds fall; it looks no different from anywhere else. No way of telling. The biggest willows were away over to the left, from where that thing lay… What a tremendous fuss she would have made over it, a woman like her! For instance once, just after he’d closed the deal for the land, he mentioned to her some incident concerning one of the farm boys he’d taken on.

— What was it you call him? —

— Witbooi. —

Her face. - How old is he? —

— How would I know? Don’t suppose he knows, either. —

She would refer to ‘that herdsman of yours, Swart Gevaar’.

Her face was — is? — the smooth pale sallow colour he supposes you call olive-skinned, although olives are green, brown or black. The sort of monotoned skin that has no shades nor gradation of texture; fascinating. From the nose-wings to the ears, the chin to the hairline. Her hair began very clearly, too — he likes that. No encroachment on the oval, neither at the temples nor in the form of wispy growth in front of the ears. Straight hair, dark dull brown in colour, coarse and shiny. In her thirties, she ostentatiously does — did? — not pull out one

Witbooi = White boy Swart Gevaar = Black danger or two single white hairs that, visible from the fount of the crown all the way down, seem transparent, like nylon fishing line. — Trouble — she said, leaning across the café table so that not only the dark tanned V but also the paler flesh at the top of her breasts showed in the unbuttoned neck of one of those shirts she wore. He’d seen her eyes, staring at nothing while she waited for him, before she caught sight of him: staring at fear. But as she gabbled her story she began to show off, as such people always did. When she forgot the fear, by pretending to him she wasn’t afraid, she was enjoying herself. It should have been quite obvious to her that what had happened would happen: she filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised. No ordinary pig-iron dealer: it suited her, telephoning him mysteriously to meet her in some Greek café, to make that a kind of flattery, now, to use the implications to make some claim on him. He was to speak to a good lawyer — a respectable, shrewd company lawyer, the kind he would know; it was no good being represented in court by one of her own set. While she talked he could picture her saying to them: I know someone, one of those tycoons who know how to do things. One of those tycoons they despised. The naïveté of them all, her kind! The high-minded stupidity. Written all over her ‘intelligent’ face.