The Conservationist (14 page)

My - possessions - are - enough - for - me.

Who dares say that?

He has not spoken. There’s no one to speak to, on the farm. He’s aware that he’s accountable to no one. There is no answer. You are not here, nor he. You are not here, nor she. The season is not suitable for picnic parties from town. The colleagues on the Board, the mining connections, the chairman who has a place of his own like this, the women who seat him beside them at dinner, the daughter who offers still the child’s good-night kiss, they are not invited. A dead man, but he doesn’t speak the same language. The coal-blue water’s chapped by the wind. The dust has raised a second horizon, edged with mauve, all round the sky. Even in this wind, the burned reeds are silent, all strings broken.

He feels the stirring of the shameful curiosity, like imagining what goes on behind a bathroom door, about what happens under a covering of earth (however shallow; you can be sure it was done carelessly) when a fire like this one comes over. Is all somehow blackened leathery, hardened in baked clay, preserved, impossible to get rid of even by ordeal by fire? Or is it consumed as if in a furnace, your whole dirty, violent, threatened and threatening (surely), gangster’s (most probably) savage life — poor black scum - cleansed, down there? Escaped from the earth in essence, in smoke?

When it rains again (if the rains are good this year; and every farmer must be an optimist, as he says with the professional pride of the amateur, in city luncheon talk) there will be smooth, olive-coloured tapers everywhere, coming out even from those trunks that may collapse and lie in the water, and the reeds will come up, too, high as a man, you won’t be able to see in there. The damage is done. But it will seem as if nothing has ever happened. It will be as if nothing ever happened down here.

... That was the end of it, and he was not again told by anything to go and fetch the antelope. They went home, there being nothing there.

What had begun as their own passion to be let out had long since become a fierce passion to keep out others. The dogs held within their ring of savagery the Indians’ store, house and family, and the blacks in the yard, surrounded together. It was the Indians’ only form of tenure; and the Africans had papers that made them temporary sojourners where they were born.

Bismillah in shirtsleeves came from the chilly shelter of the shop and walked about in the sun for a few minutes and it was not to take the air. He saw at once where part of the fence was sagging or where another bit of old roofing was needed to reinforce the corrugated iron with which it was defended. No breach went unnoticed. And the black men who under his instructions hammered the iron into place or cobbled the barbed wire did so with satisfaction. Now no one could get in. They were safe against their own kind, all the others who had nothing of right and would take anything.

No marauder from the location could come near the store-room with the boarded-up windows where primuses, cooking pots and bicycle spares were kept. No terrorizing hand blew the door of the safe, with the coat-of-arms of the English makers faded on it, that was hidden behind a pink curtain in the passage of the house. No intruder’s face frightened the gentle girls, or the beautiful children who clung to the drapings of maternal statues stationed at the kitchen stove. The tyres of the old Pontiac would never disappear overnight, nor the car radio and the batteries. And in the hovels where the blacks lived the bicycles would not be taken, nor the blankets, or Dorcas’s sewing machine bought from Bismillah on instalments she agreed to have docked off her wages.

The dogs paced out the limit of this safety.

They were useless against the possibility - always present - of a visit from some official, investigator, inspector: many titles that all amounted to the same thing: a white man with the right to serve an eviction order. The dogs must be called in, chained helpless against the arrival of such a one; he was not an intruder or marauder, he came in the name of law, there was no defence to keep him out. He must not be antagonized: the only way was roundabout. A Group Areas order might be enforceable in six months, a year, two years? An extension might be granted. There was the question of designation of group area: Proclaimed White? White by Occupation? Bismillah was not an educated man - he’d seen to it that his sons were given a better start - but within this legal terminology he was as much at home as any lawyer. And although he was not a rich man (the family was large, the Pontiac they crammed into, secondhand) he had paid out and was paying out regularly as if
he
were buying something on the instalment plan, lawyer’s fees to keep himself and his family one move ahead of the official visit. If the official came to warn that it would be six months, the lawyer must be ready to find the legal loophole that could make it a year. And when the year is up, another year. There was an old, old man in a country store like this one who simply refused to move when the evictors came, and went to prison, and fasted there to shame them in Gandhi’s way by suffering in his own person, and died, at last, recognized as a kind of saint by the white newspapers. Bismillah’s wife and old aunts welled tears when Nana Sita was recalled; but while everyone could be proud that he was a great man as only an Indian can be, most people had wife, children, and aunts etc. to think of. Not everyone was poor enough to afford greatness.

When Bismillah was satisfied that the fence was being put in order he went in through the store to the house, picking up on the way a bottle of cough syrup and a phial of pills that had stood, for the past few days, where they would be under his eye beside the till. The passage of the house was narrowed by things for which there was room nowhere else - the safe, a glass-fronted bookcase preserving the schoolbooks used by each child throughout his school life as well as a presentation copy of the Koran, Khalil Gibran, and
How to Teach Yourself Accountancy
, a folding crib propped against the wall, a tall rickety plant-stand with a vase of artificial chrysanthemums that shook over his footsteps.

The plant-stand had once stood in the room he now entered, before it had had to be given over as the new home of the latest young couple the house had to accommodate. Into this one room was fitted all the proper provision made by her parents in Durban to set up in married life the bride of his second son, Dawood: the father-in-law was surrounded by white, gilt-scrolled furniture assembled almost as close as in the pantechnicon that had brought it from the coast. The mauve nylon curtains were draped across the lowered venetian blinds; the frilled lamps with their gilt chains were lit. At eleven in the morning, there was the intimacy of night. In the enormous bed, his face rosy-brown within pillows against the satin-padded gable of the bedhead, his son lay smiling. Two front teeth like those of the grandfather rested on his lower lip, but this lip was fresh and shiny. - Listen - she says I must get up now, I’m getting lazy — He spoke English, clutching the wrist of his young wife, who was struggling to her feet in embarrassment from where she had been lounging beside him. The sleeping bundle of baby was on the bed, too. Her trousseau
choli
was tight and Dawood pulled mimicking faces at the confusion with which she tried to lift the side of the fashionable low square neck where her milk-bloated breasts bulged together under the gauze sari with the same heated, glistening look as the flesh of his face. There was a radiator warming a smell of new varnish, Vicks, and human milk. The whole tiny room with its furniture-store opulence seemed slightly feverish.

Bismillah said to the girl in Gujerati - Did you remember to take the temperature? - She put her hand over her mouth and drew in her breath.

— Just listen what she said — Dawood spread his legs under the covers and lifted his pelvis and laughed, wriggling lower in the bed. She snatched up the baby as he counted on her doing, as if he were about to kick it off. — Listen, man, listen- His huge black eyes held the enjoyment of attention of father and wife; he was exactly the way he had been when he was sick as a little boy, except for the stubble that shone strongly over his youthful double chin and round his red lips and white teeth. — But that stuff makes me cough worse! - Yes, with the beard, he was a gay little boy dressed up as a bandit, that’s all. Bismillah had never trusted anyone but himself to administer medicine to his sons. He ignored the giggling young man’s silly banter in English, and pushed the spoon at his mouth. Then came the antibiotic tablets, with the girl standing by ready with water in one of the cut-crystal wedding-present tumblers. Dawood made a fuss, eyeing himself; the whole scene was in the full-length mirror of the dressing-table that stood opposite the foot of the bed, with just room enough to pass between them.

— It makes me much worse, you see? - between bouts of coughing.

— No, the chest is looser. Let me tell you. I can hear it. Much looser. You must try and spit - give him something he can spit in. It should be here next to him all the time. Here- — No — just a minute- But the girl was overcome by the audacity of her own objection.

— No, what are you doing! - not that, Bajee! — Dawood was gesturing and laughing at his father, which made him cough.

— This will do. Why not? —

— No, no, that’s a precious thing to her —

Bismillah held up the bowl in challenge for it to manifest its special purpose.

- It doesn’t matter. It isn’t anything. But not to spit in - she doesn’t want it. —

— What is the harm? It can be washed —

— But not to spit in it —

Bismillah put down the useless object, then, dismissing. They were all talking at once, in their own language, except that Dawood would always interject with his
Listen
, that’s how the young ones were when they’d been to school in the city, they must mix English with everything to show how educated they are.

— Bring up the phlegm. You will never clear the chest —

— All right, all right - Ah no, d’you expect me to put my nose in that — And Dawood was thrashing around joyously, childishly in the bed again, fending off the small enamel basin his wife offered. — She cleans the baby in that When he has messed himself, you know? That’s the thing she put the bits of cotton wool in. No, no, man -

Bismillah stood for a while in the doorway. Dawood sank back into his pillows, teasing, complaining, showing the girl off as a pet unaccountably reluctant to do the tricks it knows perfectly well. She sat on the edge of the bed again and undid the bundle resting on her lap, wavering limb after limb. Her spread legs were ample support; alas, the boy had married one who would be enormous after a few more births. But at least she managed a foolish smile today, shut in the bedroom like this. She had not been very lively among the girls of the house for the year she had been living there, although the only complaint on her part that Bismillah had had reported to him (if the wives were dissatisfied how could they be good for his sons) was that she had not known it would be so cold here in winter. What did she think, standing looking out into the yard or across the burned veld - you could grow bananas, it would be warm and steamy and green, like the coast? If women started grumbling, hankering, there was usually no end to it. The next thing, she would be working on Dawood to let her go and stay for months at a time with her family in Durban. The infant’s tangle of minute fingers caught in the gauze over the breasts that had outgrown the girl and were juggled as she moved, and Dawood drew attention to the incident delightedly, intervening with his own hand to disengage the baby’s, half fended-off, half encouraged by the protests of the girl. The father-in-law suddenly decided she might want to nurse the baby - something of that nature. He left them.

— Get a dish from the kitchen ay? - You must try to bring up. —

Yes, that was the short stage in life when a young man discovers his hands again, just the same as the baby, all over again, for a while. The boy will be happy anywhere where he can be touching the first woman he has all to himself. Anywhere. The room is paradise. The room is enough. Why should he ever want to get up and come back to the shop?

The old man sat there on his bentwood chair.

— With all this wind and dust how can the chest clear. -

His old father said nothing; that did not mean he was not listening.

— The medicine loosens, but I told him, he must spit. —

The old man cleared his throat; he came from a generation for which such an injunction was unnecessary, it must have seemed absurd to him.

Yinifuna? Yinifuna?

Some of the blacks would hang around in the shop for half an hour, fingering everything. Others didn’t want to wait their turn to be served. Bismillah spoke the few necessary words of their language in the pidgin form that had evolved in the mines; he knew, as well, the pidgin Afrikaans and English used by blacks on the farms. A woman was asking the price of every bolt of cloth on the shelves behind William; when Bismillah had sold a man a bar of mottled soap he pointed at and measured a pound of dried beans for another, he called - What does she want? —

— She’s look this stuff. — But the black man understood the semantics of the trade and told the woman in their own tongue that now she must make up her mind to buy. She took no notice, lingering, leaning across the counter to gaze at the roll of crimped nylon removed from her reach, before drifting out of the shop with a weighing consideration for anything in her path and a remark or two that, rather than addressed to fellow customers, assumed a right to express unspoken thoughts shared with them.

Yinifuna? Yinifuna?

— Sugar — they said.

— Tea. —

- Matches. -

— Tin syrup. —

Some merely held out money and indicated. Sometimes the money was inadequate: — Fifteen cents. - Bismillah thrust the ten-cent piece back; often they would then expect time to consider if they could or would pay the price. They might grumble, or ask for a smaller quantity or another brand. — I want for ten cents. — — No ten cents, only fifteen. — Demand. Response. Counter-demand. Statement. No word was given away. Communication, narrowed down to its closest immediate confines, was complete. At the same time Bismillah continued with his old father the long conversation of their lives together in the shop, its rhythm marked but never broken by the pauses of ordinary daily absences and returns and the gradual fall, over the years, of the dominance of the old man’s voice to the corresponding rise of Bismillah’s as the one lapsed into the silences of age and the other came into the loquacity of middle age. In a full shop, the privacy of this talk in Gujerati was as secure to the family as if the shop were empty. The language reached nobody else’s understanding; in addition, contexts were so unvaryingly established, grooved by time and sameness, in the minds of the old man and Bismillah, that no reference was puzzling or irrelevant.