The Conservationist (26 page)

There’s a metal folding chair whose plastic thongs are not all broken. That’s how he came to sit down here, the first time, in the first place. He has no idea how it got there; a ring never turns up again, but something no one remembers they’ve left will never be claimed: many months ago some guest afraid he might be expected to sit on the grass must have brought his own comfort along to one of the picnics down at the river. And he himself must have forgotten to fold the chair and throw it behind the fertilizer bags the last time he used it; it is placed at an angle just to the left of a stunted and much-hacked mulberry tree that has survived (somebody must have lived here at one time). It is strange to see a chair there as if it had been appointed. It is rather like being disembodied and seeing himself sitting there.

He inhabits - by filling — the place prepared for him. The whisky and water is delicious. Although one may eat like a pig when alone, drinking becomes a more careful and conscious pleasure when it’s not fuel for social intercourse. Every few seconds the whole night undulates with sheet lightning and now and then the pitchy sky on the left. cracks like a teacup from top to bottom in a blinding scribble whose running instant (complex as a capillary vein or the topography of a river) is branded upon the dark of eyelids blinked in reaction. But there’s no thunder. The fading call of his guinea fowl in the mealies comes quite clearly and all around — or the firing seems so, because the hills on the horizon throw a retort swiftly from one to another — De Beer and his kind are amusing their kids by letting off fireworks. All occasions are family ones for them. No thunder: that tremendous storm is miles away and it’s possible, just once, on a night like this, to sit at the point where its element ends and the absolutely calm, full-moon-lit element begins. It is really two nights at once; just as midnight will bisect two years.

He is fully aware that he’s feeling what he’s drinking but it certainly isn’t enough to do more than heighten a little his perception of this miraculous night. At any of their parties he would have drunk much more by now, as much as they will be drinking, until they all sway together, clutch each other’s hands and hold on, as if they could help each other, as if some rug is about to be pulled from under their feet.

He feels what can only be a sense of superiority. Not because he is not among them any more, not this year — Someone of your (basic) intelligence, Mehring, even you had to get shot of that lot eventually- No, not because of what they may or may not be, drinking Veuve Cliquot while the coloured band plays, watching that little green rocket ejaculate weakly over the vlei while the children cling to their mother’s pink close-together thighs, for taking over anyone’s festival, any excuse to begin beer-drinking before the weekend — but because no one is watching this night the way he is. No one is seeing it but him. That’s the feeling. You produced tears when you left the country but do you know about this?

And you don’t know that he and I sat together, just the two of us, out here in front of a house that isn’t a house and a tree that at this moment doesn’t seem to be a tree but a paper shuffle in the sudden breeze, a blot shifting dark against the light. We two men sit here where you can keep the whole stretch of reeds and river before you, not so much as a bat can move down there without making a shadow in the moonlight, and we kill the rest of the bottle. From what direction he comes won’t be sure, not more than a shadow among shadows, a rustle in the night-secret movement of harmless creatures in the grass — but he said he would come: loping up, with a hop onto the old roofless stoep, where he squats comfortably enough. He must be grinning on those filthy teeth, if the moonlight behind him didn’t make the face a dark blank. — Good, Jacobus! Now we have our drink, eh? Come! — There’s no second chair, so any awkwardness about taking it wouldn’t arise. Rather the way it used to be in the old days in the desert, when the Damara boys would squat with us round the fire and tell us tall stories about their hunting.

— You like it? Very good stuff. Very good. It’s nice, eh? Warm inside the stomach? —

He has perhaps never tasted it before. But of course he has, like the
boere musiek,
they develop a taste for everything, they want to wear shoes all right, just give them a chance.

— Here. — (And at once he’s holding out his glass as if he did so every day.) — I’ll give you some more. You’re happy tonight, eh? Everyone’s happy tonight. Music, drinking, pretty fireworks in the sky ... you too, eh? How long you been here? —

No, not how long he’s worked for me; how many years on this place is what I mean. Jacobus was in residence when I bought; he had worked for the previous owner, or perhaps it was only on some neighbouring farm: boundaries mean little to them, when they say ‘here’. - How old are you? —

He laughs, of course. — Not old - he always says - not yet old. —

Probably doesn’t know. — Happy-happy. Tomorrow another New Year, eh, Jacobus. Long time, long time now. — Yes, it doesn’t stand still for any of us; his children (which are his children?) must be growing up. He has daughters I know — sons? — I ought to know. Which of them is his? They have probably gone away. He’ll never leave this place. Where would he go? — We’re going to finish the bottle, Jacobus, you and I, just this once. You think we’re strong enough to finish the bottle? —

And of course he laughs. Everyone knows how much of their own brew they can put away. It’s a feast or a famine with them; they gorge themselves when they can and starve when they have to, that’s their strength. — Everyone’s happy. It’s a good farm, a good place to work, mmh? And the cattle are looking fine, this summer. We’re building up a nice little herd. Except for that young bull — I’m not so sure I made the right buy, with that one. I was taken for a ride. Wha’d’you think? You must know as much as the next man about cattle stock by now, you and Phineas and Solomon, you mayn’t know the jargon, but you know the feel of a chunk of good beef-flesh under your hand, I’ll bet —

Just this once.

They can talk together about cattle, there’s that much in common. The old devil’s no fool when he doesn’t want to be and it doesn’t suit him to be. He was quite sharp about the bull the other day; one would almost say needling, pretending innocence.

— That bull, that young one, it’s all right. But what it is wrong with the legs in front - the legs are little bit weak. -

Yes, yes, I can see that for myself. — But he’s young still, the legs will get stronger. -

— No, he’s coming big, here - like this - but the legs is staying little bit weak. —

Yes, yes, I know. — But when the beast is fully mature ... —

— Why the other bull, that old one, he is not weak like that when he is young? —

- Oh Nandi, he’s the one Terry named after the Hindu god he saw on the temple in Durban, oh Nandi, now you’re talking

- that’s a bull. But where d’you have the luck to find that sort of quality again -

- No, when you buy bull, you look long time, eh? Then why you don’t look at the legs they must be strong like Nandi? Nandi is coming old, but the legs is strong. —

— Yes, and why not garland the beast with frangipani as Terry wanted to ... I know what you’re getting at, if it were your bull, you’d make sure you didn’t buy one with rheumatic legs that wouldn’t be able to mount a cow properly, you’d see to it, if you had a thousand rand to buy a bull —

But we are getting along fine. We’re laughing a lot; I would always recognize him by his laugh, even if his face is hidden by darkness. - D’you remember at all what he looked like? That time, Jacobus? You must have turned him over, seen the face. surely? When you took the sunglasses and the watch, all that stuff. Would you know it if you saw him again — were shown a photograph, the way the police should have done, for identification? —

He holds his liquor well; he bears his head as a man deeply considering.

He says what he said, before, in another time. The tree splashes back and forth across the moon; we are talking unhurriedly, sometimes with closed eyes. — Nobody can know for this man. Nothing for this man. —

Well, he’s welcome. Harmless. Let him stay. What does it matter. We would give him drink if he were to be here now, poor bastard. We wouldn’t ask any questions, eh? Just this once. No harm done.

We drink the whisky and we talk and laugh. he’s having the night of his life. Despite the language difficulty. That would give you something to think about, if you ever knew.

All around, on the periphery of the night, not touching upon it, are the pathetic distant sounds of human festivity. It’s difficult to distinguish them one from the other; a kind of far-off wail from which now and then a single note, that could just as easily be laughter as pain, wavers higher. You cannot imagine what it sounds like, so long as you are part of it. He has tipped back the chair and feels the moonlight on his left cheek as if tanning in some strange sun; but perhaps that is only because of his consciousness of the darkness of the storm which the right side of his face receives. The moon is so bright he can read the dial of his watch. On an impulse, he drags down from the house a sleeping-bag and canvas and metal stretcher (folding, like the guest’s forgotten chair) and one or two other necessities. If anyone looked out — Alina’s room’s in darkness, the
boere musiek
-drugged cattle do not so much as turn their pale gleaming horns - they would see him going burdened back to the outhouse over the path he has already set for himself through the lucerne, guided along it as if he were already being drawn through his own dreams. He has brought a mosquito coil as well as a fresh box of cheroots. The night has run down very still if certainly not silent and there will be mosquitoes out here, all right, on the stoep among the fertilizer bags. These coils are supposed to be used indoors but they may help. He lights the taper several times before it takes and begins, very slowly, to touch with tiny red the coil that is a skinny cobra with an upright head erect from the centre. Now slow smoke trails from its live mouth. In the sleeping bag he feels gleefully cosy and can see everything, like a hare (there must be a few, if they haven’t eaten them all) or a jackal (De Beer says there were still a few around until about ten years ago) putting its head out of its hole. He has thought he would smoke a final cheroot lying there but his eyes close. There is a strong human presence in the sleeping bag, other than his own. He presses his nose into the thin parachute silk stuffed with down. It’s the smell of the blond hair of a schoolboy, none-too-clean hair, although it wasn’t so long then, that has rubbed against the cowl through many restless adolescent nights.

Jacobus has not come.

A touch of the cold metal tag of a sleeping-bag zipper is what awakens him. It is already light. But perhaps very early. Morning comes at a different time when the curtains keep it out. A sun as pale as last night’s — last year’s — moon was orangey, is stiffening the topmost leaves of that tree. In metal silhouette against the sky the truncated limbs for which twiggy and leafy growth has provided flimsy cover are solidly revealed as maimed stumps. He knows in some layer of consciousness that there were new wails, louder, calling what he has heard at that hour on that particular night of each year as long as he can remember, Ha-ppee, Ha-ppee. Ha-ppee ... ha-ppeee ... it’s a cry, not a toast, and it does not attempt to define further the quality, state or desire expressed. Happee happee. At midnight they yell it in suburban backyards and in the streets and they produce their own kind of carrillon. Yes. They hit the telephone poles with dustbin lids and garden spades, wailing, happee, ha-ppee. They must have been doing it with their hoes up on the road where you can hear the telephone wires hum if you’re alone, they must have been clanging outside the Indians’ store. The Boers were sleeping, the Indians were sleeping. And he himself never rose out of that level of his consciousness. It’s all over. A narrow escape.

Of course - stupid not to remember! If he did come it was to the
house
. He knocked on the kitchen door perhaps, a long time, and went away. He realized it was said jokingly. Will you play hookey and come with me to
Trinitywhatsisname?
— It was a joke, of course. She took it as a joke. Christ almighty. Last year’s joke.

Everywhere he stood down the lucerne last night is bruised dark green where the sweet damp juicy leaves are crushed and wadded. Apart from a path between his two points of destination, here and the house, no purpose can be read from these scattered tramplings in a field broken out, pristine and crystalline, in a heavy dew. What on earth was he doing, stamping round and round himself, a dog making a place to lie, or a game-bird flattening a nest with its breast. Only the cows are awake and sounding their long affirmative noises: mmm-mmmM-Mh! Up at the compound not even a thread of smoke. Still in the arms of their women. Widow-birds - idiotic popular name, what could be more male, in nature, than that assumption of an exaggerated tail of plumage - trail themselves low over the mealies, which are turning fields from green to curds as their tops flower all at exactly the same height. Not a whiff of the soapy bad breath of the river. There is absolutely no one. It’s his own place. No eyes keep watch on him. Like any healthy creature still in its prime, he squats privately in the sweet wet lucerne and has produced, with ease and not without pleasure (the cheroot unlit last night smoking past his nose) a steaming turd. The faint warm smell, out here in the open, is inoffensive as cow-dung. He kicks loose some earth and lucerne and buries this evidence of himself.

So we came out possessed of what sufficed us, we thinking that we possessed all things, that we were wise, that there was nothing we did not know ... We saw that, in fact, we black men came out without a single thing; we came out naked; we left everything behind, because we came out first. But as for white men ... we saw that we came out in a hurry; but they waited for all things, that they might not leave any behind.

Riding his bicycle without any particular destination, Izak stopped to see what the Indians were doing. It was one of the sons from the shop who was climbing the struts that supported their rainwater tank. They didn’t have a windmill like those at the farm, but there was that old well in the yard where the people used a hand-pump to get water. The Indian was going to paint the struts; a tin of paint was wedged in the angle formed by a couple of bars that formed an X on the way up, and he hung easily, when he’d chosen where to begin, feet balanced wide apart on a cross-piece, left hand round an upright while with the right he drew long strokes of red-brown down the bars. He was dressed like a white boy from town on a Sunday - Izak saw them when they came heading along the main road on their motorbikes — with rubber sandals held by a thong between the toes and tight cropped shorts of the kind that have a little metal buckle and built-in belt. He was naked above the waist and as he moved so did the chain with something gilt hanging from it that he wore on his breast. A little girl from the Indians’ house stood, immediately below, gazing up and asking questions and wouldn’t go away. They argued in their language until her brother or whatever he was pretended to hold out the brush to dribble paint on her, and she ran screaming and kicking her legs in long white socks. Izak could see him press up the muscles round his shoulder-blades and get on with the job. It was tricky to stub round the angles of the iron but he was doing quite well; Izak did not know why he should suddenly stop and climb down, feeling for his footholds and not missing one, and then walk all round the whole edifice, looking up at it.