The Conservationist (20 page)

Little dark birds are like snapped fingers in the air. The farm is striped - green of lucerne, blond of old dry grass where it was saved, green of new reeds - even the black of the burning is part of the pleasing composition. He should get someone out to paint it. — And what’s this? One of your country seats? — walking around the flat sizing up; even for one who despises coquetry there has to be some sort of delay before the taking off of clothes.

— A cottage we’ve had for years at Plettenberg Bay. Doesn’t look much like that any more; that whole mountainside’s built up now. -

- All your friends followed you. - Judgement or sympathetic observation? That’s your form of coquetry. But it palls, it’s just like every other novel form of arousal, it would no longer work after a time, my girl, because it’s easy to plot a graph of the reactions of your kind.

I know what you’re thinking.

Yes I know - kill the thing you love, that old saw. But d’you mean my kind does it, or both our kinds - is it a sneer or acknowledgement? Are you like me, or giving me a dig?

You are like me in some ways, or you wouldn’t have been standing there showing amused interest before a picture (
naturally
, a house at the sea as well as a farm) while I was behind you pressed up against you and moving your hair aside from your neck with my tongue.

The jets ejaculate tirelessly over the lucerne, there is a heavy bloom of droplets, of the fecundity of summer on that field. They have forgotten to turn off the irrigation but he will not look for Jacobus and he will leave the flow of water to continue for a while before stemming it himself. Even their neglect is something he can afford to allow himself; they are not about, any of them, he is free of them all. Let them smell out their goats wherever they believe them to exist. Down there, the river is perpetually-flowing. He has it all to himself, thank God. A big disc-plough has been used here: he stands in the company of the round backs of a field of sleeping beasts of earth.

He returns to the house without anyone padding along behind him (even a dog is a hindrance, always having to be called off the scent of birds) and sits, this once, like a real farmer on the stoep, although he has not bothered to unlock the place but simply has gone round and climbed the front steps. He is not watching the sunset; the stoep faces east. The house grows dark as closed, empty houses quickly do at sundown. Drumming has been going on quite a while; it started so vaguely and sporadically he’s not sure when it really began - there were those odd thumps, the sound of a carpet being beaten, it often seems - and then some sort of rhythm emerged. Ordinary Castrol drums they use, so there isn’t that thundery resonance you get from the real thing. They don’t know how to make the real thing any longer.

Unwinding, relaxing, getting quite away, is what is described by business associates who also have farms. Moving from the covert of reeds and darkening fields, losing a fugitive’s defiant heartbeat in the steady muffled drums, the dark shape on the stoep could be some creature holed up in the shelter of the doorstep of a deserted habitation. The red eye of a cigar opens and closes. No one will ever find him here, this evening, in their minds; he is placed as they dub him, as they’ve decided what he is. Up at the compound they’ll be so full of beer they didn’t even hear the car, and they know that on Sunday nights he is back in town. The gathering round the underwater-lit pool knows he’s a man with an active social life - he’s at someone else’s party, or perhaps he has a woman somewhere, he’s discreet, he doesn’t flaunt these things. Back at the school (if the plane was on time, if he is prefigured there at all) he is seen at the party in town which was mentioned to fill a silence over lunch at the airport.

Time to let go, as the saying has it. It’s agreed that’s what a place like this is for. What will she do with the egg? It will lie on a table in New York in a bowl with those old-fashioned china decoys - once put in nests to encourage hens to lay at home and not at large - she used to rummage for in antique shops.

— And this? What’s this thing? —

— That’s an old silver butter-stamp. My wife somehow missed it when she packed up, I suppose; I don’t know why I’ve kept it. She used to collect. All kinds of junk. -

— Of course. It’s what the wives of men who’re getting rich are expected to do. You don’t imagine I thought she made butter? —

— And you collect pots. — His turn for the ambiguous statement-or-accusation.

Not at all slow for a pig-iron dealer! She’s always ready to acknowledge with a laugh that she wasn’t wrong when she thought there was something else to him, something that explains his attractiveness.

— Well of course. In me you see expressed the guilty yearning for the artifacts of the culture we’ve destroyed. The same thing as young Americans wearing redskin fringed jackets and head-bands. -

But those with whom you make common cause of bare feet want to wear shoes. They’ll have on the rubber boots I supply, I’ll bet, while they’re cutting the poor bloody throat of their goat. There’s no one to blame — not really, no matter the irritation in the heat of the moment - neither Emmy and Kurt for letting him associate with hippy students nor the mother to whose nest he’s threatening to return (perhaps?). No, no, he’s on his own. He’ll flounder along, pad along on those skinny feet till he’s had enough. Curious. Curious to know. You will know everything I know, you little idiot. You can have everything I’ve had. That’s all there is. Only sixteen, in that same Swakopmund, during the war, I managed it all for myself. I found myself a woman of thirty-five and a great favourite of Emmy’s believe it or not. Emmychen was a friend of her mother, and she had come to stay with the mother because her husband was fighting in Egypt. She was beautiful the way they used to get themselves up then, with hair in a curly ruff on the shoulders, and a very red-painted big mouth. She took no notice of me and then sometimes when she was eating with us would turn to me at table — What are you day-dreaming about? What’s he thinking, that one, Tante Emmy? Does he tell you? - I started to answer back even though she was a married woman; I learned how to talk to women, to sense she liked it although I was still only a kid. We made Emmy and Kurt laugh - they thought I was so clever. She used to linger on at the house until it was dark and as there was petrol rationing Kurt couldn’t drive her, so I was told to walk her home for safety - there were plenty of black men around - your Ovambos. I used to take my bicycle along for the ride back, pushing it between us as we walked. She asked me about school and whether I didn’t want to run away and join the army? She said she wanted to see if she still remembered how to ride and she mounted, giggling and wobbling; I had to steady the steering and she kept losing balance and landing heavily against me. I suddenly understood - there is no explaining how you recognize it - she was feeling something when she lurched against my chest. She was no longer a married lady, a grown-up friend of Emmy who teased me at the table - she was what I was looking for. She was what I wanted when I was in bed at night. I held her tightly on the bicycle - good God, it was I who was suffocating, I remember it because it was the first time and it happens many times, you never know when it will happen. The more she laughed and protested the more she seemed to swell up against me, she was tumescence itself, externalized for the first time. There is no need to be curious; it happens of itself and can’t be stopped. She liked the business of the bicycle, but I don’t think she thought she ought to go so far as to go to bed with a boy of sixteen. I had a hell of a time with her, I can tell you. She agreed to let me come to her mother’s house one night when her mother would be out. But she wouldn’t take off her slacks. I remember distinctly she took off her blouse. Then she said the reason was the house wasn’t a safe place and she would get the key of another house, an empty beach-house. It was one of those old wooden places from the German time, with a fancy turret and a name —
Haus Wüsten Ruh
, I think it was, something like that — you’ve seen them, there must be a few left. Perhaps it’s still there. The sand from the desert and the sea-sand had piled up all round it. The key wouldn’t turn in the lock and we couldn’t get in; we looked through the windows in the dark but there was no way in. She wouldn’t let me force a window. Christ almighty ! She wouldn’t lie down in the sand, I suppose at thirty-five that was beneath the lady’s dignity. We went back again another night with a can of Kurt’s Three-in-One oil and got the lock to yield, and we climbed under the German feather quilt on a bed and - all of sixteen years old — I was confident as a man of thirty. But the silly bitch kept saying I was too young, she mustn’t, she really shouldn’t, and it was only about the third or fourth time we went to that house that she let me in, at last I got her to let me in, I got in, after peering through the dark closed windows like that, shut out, imagining what it would be like inside, with her, in that house.

The wind has gone down with the sun. There are even crickets; the first time this season.

Banging away.

Lulling, every now and then, into silence.

G-dump. Long pause. G-dump. Hesitation. G-dump. G-DUM-DUM-DUM G-DUM-DUM-DUM Gi-Gi-Dum Gi-Gi-DUM Gi-Gi-DUM Gi-Gi-DUM Gi-Gi-DUM Gi-Gi-DUM.

The fullness of the night is stepping up all round him, the fullness of the night’s possession over his land. Their old Castrol drums exhale and inhale it regularly, G-DUM G-DUM, the crickets sing it. There isn’t anything I haven’t had. To want for nothing; to sit here and want for nothing. You stare at your dirty toes and know only what you don’t want. Poor devil, give you a year or two. It may not be pig-iron. You’ll be in - something.

If I had your money. A night bought and secured. The price of an air ticket has put him on a plane, and the fee of a good lawyer has you safely six thousand miles from this house. He might telephone, why not, after all this time, at this distance, if he knew where she was. He had the impulse once, from Montreal. No danger of tapping-devices there to alarm you: -
Trouble
, you said, loving it. All you do love. The international exchange found the nomad in the London directory, but someone else answered and said you were away, would the professor do instead? The hotel clerk supplied a slip with the time and cost of the call as a record for expenses - that sort of impulse costs nothing, you’re right, it’s thrown in, like the sauna baths.

What more could you ask? Four hundred acres of arable land. Perpetually-flowing water, a perfectly sound dwelling-house that only needs a bit of fixing up —

You stood with your sallow, sunburned hands with the silver rings on your thighs in tight trousers, you weren’t much interested in the house. You didn’t even notice the joke of the estate agent’s lingo. — How long’s it going to last? How long before they need more land to house the blacks that work for your subsidiary companies? —

— I haven’t any interests in this area, you might care to know. -

- Ah, you think of everything. But what does it matter - other people’s companies, then. The location’ll have to be extended, you’ll need to let your land go —

— I’ve thought of that, yes. At a very good price. I’ll buy something somewhere else, farther out. —

— Your peace will have to go for the sake of growth and expansion, ay? But isn’t that what you believe in? Development? Isn’t that the deal? — Walking round the house together, you not so much as looking at it with the eye of a woman; your kind curls up and beds down anywhere, but has no home-making, Emmychen instincts, only theories about the disruption of family life by the system of migratory labour in mines etc., oh God. You run on: — You’ll opt yourself out of existence, Mehring. —

Yes, that’s the deal, the hopeful reasoning of the impotence of your kind, of those who are powerless to establish their millennium. The only way to shut you up is to establish the other, the only millennium, of the body, invade you wiih the easy paradise that truly knows no distinction of colour, creed and what-not - she’s still talking, somewhere, but for me her mouth is stopped.

— You’ll deal once too often, Mehring. —

Oh for God’s sake. Leave me alone. Touch me.

The unexpected warmth of the spring evening, a premonition of summer (is it possible the irrigation creates a local humidity, just in this valley of his farm) reaches up his shirtsleeves and down from the neck of his half-buttoned shirt to the navel. He has been sitting so still he has the fanciful feeling that so long as he does not move the farm is as it is when he’s not there. He’s at one with it as an ancestor at one with his own earth. He is there and not there.

- What’s the final and ultimate price of pig-iron? —

The Amatongo, they who are beneath. Some natives say, so called, because they have been buried beneath the earth. But we cannot avoid believing that we have an intimation of an old faith in a Hades or Tartarus, which has become lost and is no longer understood.

There was not enough meat on a goat; most who came got only beer.

Solomon had dreamt of a young bull with a white face and a copper ring in its pink nose. He was not troubled by dreams, but it had come up. Phineas with whom he was ploughing this spring was plagued by dreams - those of his wife; she had begun to see, both asleep and awake, the form of some wild animal. She described two lights, the eyes of the animal, now on the ash-heap and in the fowl run, now in the eucalyptus trees; but nobody else could make out anything. She said when she went about alone the eyes accompanied her.

She was a woman people laughed at privately; used to drink a lot, coming home singing to herself and even trotting a few dance steps, across the veld from the shanty town behind De Beers’ farm, and when the farmer first bought this place she would go up to his car and ask him for work in the house, pointing a finger down her open mouth, shaking her head hard, and saying in the pidgin white people understand,
Ikona puza
. All the time, Alina had the job of course. But the woman knew about plants. If she didn’t always do her share of work in the compound, she was very useful at collecting wild spinach and other leaves people liked, also roots for purgatives. She had no living children even though for the last birth