The Conservationist (22 page)

On Monday Jacobus was relieved to see that he must have remembered to turn off the irrigation. The compound stank of fermented maize in various avatars — spilt beer, vomit, urine. And the few bones feasting dogs and flies were testimony to the inadequacy of a goat. Someone — who else but that woman? — had hung the horns above the sack that covered the doorway of Solomon’s room. He threw them on the ash-heap.

You should just see it. A pity you can’t see it. It was getting on for autumn that first time I came to look over the place — wasn’ t that the year the drought had already begun, anyway? You couldn’t imagine, looking at it then, it could be like this.

It is true any woman would go crazy over the multiple-headed lilies that are suddenly blooming out of these untidy streamers of leaf. Some were burned, in the fire; he remembers kicking at the exposed apexes of the bulbs, thinking they were done for. But no, with the early rain, they are out all over the veld: they don’t look like wild flowers, at all, they are something you’d pay through the nose for, from a florist’s, stems rising two-foot tall with a great bunch of five or six blooms at the top, white striped with red. He has counted seventeen over on the island that the fire made visible; the new reeds aren’t thick enough to hide it completely, yet. And where the river is narrower and the banks are clear of the reeds, red-hot pokers are flowering right out of the water. Down here at the third pasture the place looks like a water-garden on some millionaire’s estate.

You wouldn’t believe it was natural. If you could show it to Kurt and his old cronies! Genus:
Amaryllidaceae
; species:
Crinum bulbispermum.
One of the secretaries at the office has been sent out to buy the best book available on veld flowers and from it he’s identified the lilies as the Orange River Lily,
Crinum bulbispermum
, spring-blooming, favouring swampy ground. It belongs to the amaryllis family, most of whose members are distinguished by the arrangement of the flowers in an umbel subtended by two or more bracts.

— Look — a perfect mandala- Showing off, or flirting by pretending to assume he would know what she was talking about, she gestured with her foot at some bedraggled plant. But in that courtship dance that led over pasture and donga, he had seen the foot rather than the plant: chipped red shield of a big toenail that protruded from the sandal like an imperious finger.

— A what? —

- The shape of these leaves - you know - it’s that whorl you see inside a marble. A symbol of the universe. —

— What sort of word is that? —

— Now you have me. Sanskrit, I think. — Crawling through a fence while he held the barbed wires apart for her, a strand of her hair caught and remained there. A pause; part of the fine old chase. She laughed while he jerked the hairs loose and wound them round his finger to present to her. He often saw tufts of coarse blond hair from the cows’ tails left like that, on the fences.

Crinum bulbispermum
. The bulbs of many species contain alkaloids and some have medicinal value. (He keeps the book now on the sideboard in the house.) Perhaps that’s why the boys seem to have gone round clumps of the plants instead of ploughing them in, over here, and in other places where they occur on the edges of the mealic fields. Fortunately the piccanins don’t pick flowers (they’re not interested in such things) but he does remember last year seeing some woman from the compound digging up roots. Jacobus ought to be told that medicine or no medicine, these bulbs mustn’t be taken.

— What is pig-iron? No, I’m serious —

Pig-iron really doesn’t interest me that much any more, you know - but since pig-iron’s what you conveniently associated me with, since that’s my label — I’ve sold enough of it and all the other things, sold and bought, known when to buy and sell enough for several lifetimes. Oh I’ve had my fun among the big boys. Now there are possible new markets in Brazil; enormous potential. I’ve been over to have a look (a weekend in Jamaica on the way back — ever seen a black beach?), but I don’t get excited about such things. Was there ever a transformation like the one brought about by the early rain on this place? Could there be anything finer? And it all happens in its own time, nothing can force it up, corner or rig it, and when it’s ready, nothing can hold it back. Did you know that when there is drought, hippos abort? And now with the early rain the lilies and red-hot pokers were in full bloom in October, and by November the lucerne — he suddenly noticed as he came to that high ground near the eucalyptus trees, this morning - is turning blue in flower. You’d never know the vlei had burned. More birds than ever. You’d never know anything had happened there. The ploughing was early because of that good rain and half an hour ago I stood within thirty yards of a dozen Hadedas feeding among the young mealies. Several Sacred Ibis, too. The plants are up to my knees already.

— Now that you’ve bought that place, I can just see you in a few years time, falling into its bosom. When all this is finished for you —

Was it so great a bounty, naked clairvoyant, that you read in your body? The Hadedas looked around from time to time but went on sticking their beaks into the earth as if I weren’t there.

— Mother it and husband it and lover it —

There’s some sort of wild clover, with a yellow flower, that’s come up among that special mixture of pasture grasses I got from the agricultural research people, and I can tell you, it has a scent like fermented honey, it blows across all the time, makes you breathe deeply, makes you want to lie down and sleep ...

- You’ll wallow in it. —

That wasn’t one of our more successful get-togethers, I suppose. Something a bit pathetic about the way the two bodies separate with a little sucking noise like two halves of a juicy fruit being pulled apart from the pip. Women expect something then - a caress, an endearment - they often don’t seem to know what. You were like the others, although you were going on about my ‘historical destiny’. I don’t have anyone hanging around here, thank God, if you walk about this place on your own, I can tell you, you see things you’d never see otherwise. Birds and animals — everything accepts you. But if you have people tramping all over the place —

- All to yourself. You’ve bought what’s not for sale: the final big deal. The rains that will come in their own time, etcetera. The passing seasons. It’s so corny, Mehring. I thought you had more to you than that I’ll bet you’ll end up wanting to be buried there, won’t you? Down there under your willow trees, very simply, sleeping forever with your birds singing to you and Swart Gevaar tending your grave. O Mehring! — hiking herself up from the bed on one elbow, the way she did, so that her brown breasts swung like weights in a sling — O Mehring — her laugh -you are a hundred years too late for that end! That four hundred acres isn’t going to be handed down to your kids, and your children’s children —

— Come on — I’ve only got one —

- Well, his children’s children. That bit of paper you bought yourself from the deeds office isn’t going to be valid for as long as another generation. It’ll be worth about as much as those our grandfathers gave the blacks when they took the land from them. The blacks will tear up your bit of paper. No one’ll remember where you’re buried. —

- Asleep down there at the river, what will I care. —

— You think you’ve discovered the joy of simple tastes, I know, but it’s just that you’ve made enough money. —

- If you had my money ... it offends you to think I’ve got what I want, through it. Free soul that you are: you’ve never forgotten your Sunday school dictum that money is wicked. And your psychologizing - doesn’t Freud say money is shit? But even shit is good - if you could just see this good thick carpet of ordure the cows have laid down in their paddock. It’s dry and friable, and when Jacobus spreads it on the fields and the irrigation jets wet it, there’s the smell of the sea here, a wonderful freshness, salt and sensual. —

— You think you’ve found peace but it’s just that no one as intelligent as you are - basically - (always a reservation, from her) could go on forever seeing those awful people you mix with, and eating those awful expensive meals in those ghastly hotels, and meeting those bloody awful charity-dispensing wives of other businessmen —

The young ones aren’t so bad. There are some lovely girls among the daughters. If one were to have long blond hair oneself, almost as long as theirs (from the back you can hardly tell the difference) and go about barefoot, it might make sense. Otherwise not.

— I can hear it. ‘He’s in love with his farm,’ they’ll say. But you don’t want them to come out and play at milkmaids. Perhaps you’ll really believe it’s love. A new kind. A superior kind, without people. You’ll even think in time there’s something between you and the blacks, mmh? Those ‘simple’ blacks you don’t have to talk to. The little kids we saw pulling a toy car they’d made of wire in the image of one like yours. —

Jacobus respects me. Perhaps. Old devil. They respect the people they know they can’t fool. They know where they are with me. I’m the one who feeds them. I wanted to buy you the toy - you raved over it so much as a great work of art. Could have put it with your collection of pots. They would’ve been thrilled to get a nice big fifty-cent piece and go off and pinch another bit of wire to make another car. But no. Your face: there was some dreadful blue I’d made by such a suggestion. You know the tactics: your expression saying, well, if you can’t see why not, it’s something that can’t be explained. What are you rich people made of, anyway - pig-iron? But I’m serious. What exactly
is
pig-iron? I really ought to know. I do know it’s used in the manufacture of steel -

I really don’t care a bloody damn about pig-iron. I leave most of that to my partners these days. You were always so transparent. After a little while I could see your bright little female brain working as one can see the innards in the bodies of those pale ghekos that ran on the ceilings in Central Africa. Who knows when it might be useful to spout a few technical terms relevant to the base metal industry? Perhaps in London now, six thousand miles away, thank God, from this mealie-field where the Hadedas, having flown up shouting, have circled and settled once again, you are adding your knowledgeable background comment to a discussion of the labour crisis in the country you left so heroically. Now let’s look at one of the biggest employers of exploited black labour, the steel and engineering industry. SEIFSA — ? — oh ask the professor’s wife, she’s the expert on the inner workings of South African capitalist exploitation; she infiltrated the bed of a prominent industrialist - the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa has not only maintained but in most cases accelerated the substantial improvement reflected in its half-yearly figures. Pig-iron production showed the biggest increase, and production of non-ferrous alloys the biggest decrease. In September the pig-iron industry produced 435,600 tons, compared with 340,000 tons in August. This brought the production of pig-iron for the period January to September to 3,296,200 tons, an increase of 12·7 per cent over the 2,924,400 tons produced in the same period last year. Now there are hundreds of thousands of blacks in the steel industry, more than 80 per cent of the labour force is black, and from a little research I once did I happen to know that in the pig-iron industry alone ... She’s as well-informed as she’s good looking; and tough, too - a brave smile from the doorway of the plane before she turned tail and disappeared.

That long-suffering professor of yours whom I never met — You regard him as an honest man, then? —

Lying in my bed, you answered the question as if it were another: — I respect him. —

Just as I said — Jacobus respects me.

— Why do you laugh? I do. He’s devoted to his work and he doesn’t live off anybody’s back. Not directly. I suppose if one looks into where the money for those research grants comes from —

A bore in the end, just as much as any of those women whom you despised as being nothing more than a body. It would have become a bore. Ingesting, digesting and exercising moral problems clearly as a see-through gheko.

Fuckers, not lovers.

Once you were waiting for a phone-call from a lover late at night. It didn’t come. You slept, and were awakened at three in the morning, the phone already in your hand, by a voice abusing you with filthy words. One of those anonymous ‘nuisance calls’ one is supposed to report to the police. You told me it was the worst thing that had ever happened to you; but that was before you got yourself interrogated at John Vorster Square.

Lovers write letters and say things that the others feel obliged to trot out only in bed. One piece of flesh of all flesh remains opaque with mystery for them; it must be returned to again and again. And even when it has become too familiar, it is invested with something of what it once was. There is the obsession with which that yellow weaver thrusts worms and grubs and whatever it can find, down the gullets of those ugly fledglings - and there are thousands upon thousands of weavers, this year, and hundreds of the young must fall from the nests or be destroyed in other ways - you find them in the veld, ant-eaten already, the night after any heavy rain. Nourishment. Lovers take presents from each other they would not choose for themselves (what will his mother do with that agate egg when he gives it to her for Christmas? - every knick-knack shop in Madison Avenue is full of such things). They want something of each other; doesn’t matter what it is - a horse to ride? A bridge that could so easily have been built, just a matter of getting the boys to mix a bit of cement and carry over some posts and logs on the tractor? A dog kennel with an ingenious roof that lifts like a lid? - They find out. There is always a subject between them, my dear gipsy, always, always, they know what it is even if they are being shown round a farm that doesn’t interest them much, even if they don’t speak much, sitting side by side in a car. Look at that funnel of web some spider’s spread leading to its hole, and the beetle that’s struggling there, caught. If you come back to the same spot this afternoon, if it were possible ever to find it again, on this farm, you might see the beetle there still, maybe still alive, bound with filaments of shroud the spider will wind it in; sometimes it will be there for days until the spider drags it down into the hole — everything takes its own time out here, whatever you do. Listen to the frogs. The great rough rachet at which the throat of the first one of the evening engages at the same time every day. You are bored? I’m not. The frogs cease suddenly, later, just as they begin. This place is a quiet sleeper. Is he facing without eyes up through a sky of earth or is he lying here as they found him, turned away. There are languages and cultural difficulties. It isn’t possible to follow, from where he is one can’t imagine someone speaking as they speak: yes, master, the skelms from the location got me, just like the policeman said. Those blacks hit me on the head, they stuck a knife in my heart, they threw me away — No moon. You could lie out, down here. A quiet sleeper. Turn to her and without making contact with any part of her receive from her open lips, warm breath. Breathe her in as the kiss of life given a dying man.