Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist

If she were here now her body would be beginning to be foreshortened, that’s what happens to women in a few years, the space between hips-and-belly and breasts gets less and less, as if age presses down upon them from the top of their heads. It is happening to the beautiful woman — the friend of fifteen years who asks him to dinner too often. Coming to a fence that cuts across the field to the reeds, he stops a moment; a week’s absence in Japan isn’t a bad way to have begun cooling that old friendship. A week can become weeks, a month. I’ve been away a lot… It happens that people drift apart. Everyone drops someone from time to time. He stands watching a black and white stork, over the fence. The daughter — the little girl no longer a little girl — is an impossibility. She will have the space between hips and breasts, even dressed it is obvious she has no belly, absolutely flat. That stork should have left for Europe long ago; it jerks along with hunched wings and eyes on the ground, as if it has lost something valuable. The ring, last year; never turned up; he realizes that although that ring, even if not in his mind, is usually in the reflex with which the tip of his boot flips over stones when he walks about the farm, today he has forgotten it. The stork is taking no notice of his presence. The drought changes the pattern of migration, perhaps? The birds hang on, where there’s water, to the last dried-up pool where the hippos abort their half-formed young. There were atrocities in Cambodia, no maize crop at all, the second year running, in the Transkei, the paper also said — the Sunday paper that is a nuisance to him to be carrying. He has turned up along the fence, plodding towards the road and eucalyptus trees, as inattentive to the earth as the stork is attentive. It is fatal to fall asleep in the afternoon. Sometimes he wakes up with the words of an old dance number — he can’t even sing in tune, that’s how much he knows of music — going round in his head like a trapped bluebottle fly. Sometimes there’s the presence of an extreme irritation over something trivial that has floated up from some obscure corner of experience. Sometimes, as now, he seems to be addressing someone. It is only a step away from the aberration of talking to oneself. Atrocities in Cambodia. Not a good idea to take the Metallgesellschaft Germans to the Kruger Park because of the possibility of stinking hippo foetuses. Across the empty irrigation ditch and on to the road, he meets the pot-bellied black brats with tins on their heads, standing aside for him on their way to fetch more water. This is what they’re doing all day, every day. And do you think I don’t know? You think I don’t know? He even slaps at his thigh with the folded newspaper; if anyone on the road or the newly-ploughed field, where the mealie stalks are piled into tepees, is looking at him, it may be interpreted as the brisk gesture of a man enjoying exercise. But the children ignore him as he ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can we go on getting away scot free? When the aristocrats were caught up in the Terror, did they recognize: it’s come to us. Did the Jews of Germany think: it’s our turn. Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our turn to starve and suffer. Why not? And did you think my respectable company lawyer, defending the just cause of your jolly parties with blacks, your posters discovering injustice as if you’d invented it — did you think he could save you from that?

Earth in his mouth.

There is grit between his teeth; as he swallows and the heavy upper and lower molars meet they grind some microscopic boulders. Earth in his mouth. Although he did wipe his lips. He gathers saliva with his tongue and drops a string of spit into the dust.

Half-grown, half-wild cats in the roof-gutter above the kitchen door; there’s plenty of milk, but they probably don’t ever bother to feed them. — No, there is a scummy dish beside the step. Psspsspss . He will wash out his mouth in the bathroom. The screen door squeaks open and bangs, swinging again of its own momentum and banging a second time behind him. The kitchen smells of burned porridge and soured milk and the plates of the electric stove, although switched off, give heat like a flushed face; they cook here, of course, although they are not supposed to. In the rest of the house the floors are thick with diligently-applied polish that no one walks on.

A place to bring a woman.

The shower is dousing warm soda water over his face and turns colder and more forceful as it runs, blinding and deafening him. Once in the bathroom, it seemed a far better idea than just rinsing his mouth. The chromium snake and rose, which may be secured in a bracket on the wall above the bath or held in the hand, are in brilliant contrast to the chipped tiles decorated with peeling Bambi transfers which were the previous owners’ level of bathroom luxury. A thousand needles of water are breaking down the immobility of his face. He holds his breath and then gasps, and the water prickles delightfully into his mouth, pinging his tongue. He hears bells ringing; water beating on your head always gives the sensation of ringing. But no; something is ringing, outside his head. The telephone. It has taken several years for his aural sense to learn to respond only to the particular combination of rings on the party line — three short and one long — that is his. He goes! naked down the passage, his spoor beading wet on the impermeable layer of wax polish.

Whenever he hears the voice of one of the locals on the phone (it is not that he knows any of them well enough to distinguish one from the other, but he recognizes the strong Afrikaans accent they all have if they speak English, and the authentic mother-tongue intonation if they speak Afrikaans) his own response takes on the firm pleasantness of the defensive, because they usually phone to complain. A straying cow has got into their lucerne or the boys have disregarded the rotation of days on which the river may be used for irrigation. But today the rather hesitant telephone voice that announces itself as De Beer (the old De Beer himself) has the slightly wheedling tone these Boers use when they want something. Afrikaans, with all its homely turns of phrase and its diminutives comfortingly formed by rounding off a word with a suffix instead of preceding it with an adjective such as ‘tiny’ or ‘little’, is better suited to this tone than English, but these people seem to ignore his ability to speak Afrikaans. Their insistence on talking to him in English demarcates the limit of his acceptance, out here, outside the city from which he comes and goes. At the same time, there have been moments when they seek to claim him: — Mehring? — A smiling, prodding, inculpatory look, as a Jew takes note of the curve of a nose, perceptible only at a certain angle in an otherwise innocent face. — Then you’re an Afrikaner, nê? — breaking into the mother tongue. They are answered in the same tongue. - It’s a German name, perhaps. From South West. A long way back. —

— Look, Mr Mehring — old De Beer is very concerned not to trouble him — Are you people at home? —

The ‘you people’ is the usage of delicacy; the farmers know there isn’t a wife around, but they also know there are sometimes carloads of visitors, and in any case, they cannot conceive of a man without a family of some sort. If he hasn’t got one, they will invent one for him, by compassionate assumption.

— Man, it’s all right then if we come over to your house? Just to have a little chat or so. It won’t be long. Perhaps you’ll be able to help us out. —

There has been a whole preamble of small talk about the weather, the drought, the usual thing before getting to the point. Because he is naked, Mehring feels like hopping with impatience. It is born of the nervous apprehension his body feels that someone may walk in: his mind is aware that no one lives in the house, there is no one to enter. Yet while he listens, smiles exasperatedly into the telephone in his right hand, his other hand plays with himself the way a small boy seeks reassurance by touching his genitals — his fingers comb the damp springy hair, draw down the foreskin that has been pushed back during the shower, weigh the uneven balls, absently tender to the one that is smaller and lighter than the other.