The Conservationist (27 page)

Izak spoke, in Afrikaans — It’s high, ay. — The Indian was the young one, not one of the schoolboys but the youngest grown one, about the same age as himself. Jacobus and even Solomon did not know exactly when they were born, but Izak knew he was born on the 21st April, 1956; he had it written down on a piece of paper.

The Indian turned dark glasses upon him. That shiny curly hair they have dangled over the metal rims and he was showing teeth, his face screwed up against the sun. — It’s all full of rust. Going to fall soon if a person doesn’t paint it. —

Izak laughed. — Too old. —

— I should’ve started with the platform. That’s the trouble. I’m a fool, man. —

Izak was on his bike, but not in the saddle; it was tipped to one side and he was sitting on the central bar, supporting himself and the machine by a leg thrust out on either side. — You can still do it. Climb up the other side, man. —

— I know. —

They both gazed at the structure a moment.

- Are you going to paint the tank? —

- You don’t paint these. It’s asbestos — some special stuff you don’t —

— Yes, I know asbestos, man. Like for the roof. —

The Indian began to climb again and this time gained the platform. Once up, he stretched his legs behind him, face-down on the ledge like an athlete doing push-ups, and carefully fished with an arm over the side to pull up the paint tin.

— You going to do the platform? —

He didn’t answer but shook his head very slowly.

Well what was he going to do up there then? Izak could see by the way the head was shaken the Indian had decided on something. But just at that moment Izak’s attention was distracted by one of the farm children who came along the road with a tiny tin of syrup balanced on her head. She wanted him to give her a lift back, pleaded and nagged. — I’m tired, Boetie. -

— How are you tired, Sesi, look at that little thing, it’s not heavy. —

— But my foot’s sore. —

— What foot? What sore foot? You just want to go on the bicycle, I know. —

When he looked up again a band of brown was begun round the top of the tank. It was not a very large tank, shaped like a barrel, and by standing on his toes - the red rubber soles of his sandals showed - the Indian could reach up the brush to the rim. He was going to paint the tank after all? No. When he had eased himself all round it and finished the top band, he squatted and with some difficulty, because squatting took up more room than standing on the platform, made the same band, the width of the paint brush, round the bottom. Now he was starting to write - no, draw something on the belly of the tank, where it faced Izak and the road. Izak began to pass remarks and show off, gently, not going too far, laughing.

— What are you doing? What’s that you’re making there? It’s a face! What is this? Ag come on, man —

The Indian only shook his head again slowly; he knew what he was doing.

— What thing is it? —

When the sign was gone over a second time to thicken the outlines, he drew himself aside from it and turned the dark glasses once again: — Don’t you see? —

The outline of an egg, standing upright, was divided inside by four lines, or rather one vertical line that half-way down subdivided, branching off a shorter line to either side at an angle. The Indian hung there a moment beside his work, swinging one foot. Then he came down in only two movements, the second a clear leap, easy as a cat from a roof, and began wiping his hands on a bit of rag. He did not look up at what he had painted.

Izak knew that egg. He saw it on the motorbikes. Even on shirts. It was smart. People wore it like you wear Jesus’s cross. It was, he saw now, what was shiny hanging at the end of the chain on the Indian’s bare chest. But he did not know what it really meant, as he knew the cross and also the six-pointed star that the people of the Church of Zion had on their flag. — It looks nice there. —

The Indian still did not look up at it. He had not seen how his handiwork looked from the ground, as Izak did.

— I’d like to buy me one. You must get one for me in your shop, ay. —

The Indian laughed and shook his head again without looking up at him, either.

— Oh, please, man, I like to have one (he patted his breast, where it would lie). How much you selling for? Why you don’t get it for me —

- We don’t keep it in the shop. -

They didn’t talk together any more after that, because the Indian didn’t talk. Izak hung on for a while zigzagging the front wheel of his bicycle in the dust and watching him return to the job of painting the struts.

— You’ll break a leg — It was the voice of Dawood, the most recently-married brother, speaking Gujerati. The painter glanced down a second behind his dark glasses: the farm boy had tired of waiting for conversation and gone away; the little sister had the married brother by the hand, as if she had dragged him there.

— What’s that for? — Dawood was tussling with the child, laughing.

- It’s the peace sign. -

— I
know
, stupid –

Two days later, stirring one of the cups of milky tea that was brought to him regularly from the house, the father spoke from a silence between them. — Jalal, why do you have to put that (still holding the teaspoon, he flapped the hand from the wrist) up there. —

He answered in English without a smile. — For fun. —

— But two feet high, everybody sees it from a mile away. —

— What d’you expect me to put up? The South African flag? The moon of Islam? —

— You wear it hanging round your neck — all right —

— What’s wrong with it. What’s the difference round my neck or on the water tank. —

— Yes, it’s all right for the white boys, they’ve got no other troubles. The hippies. White students at the university. And it looks red — the colour of the paint, I mean —

The young man’s face closed in on the other in cruel amazement, grinning and spitting —
Red! Red!
You believe everything you read in their papers, everything they tell you on the radio. You swallow it all down. Day after day. If they tell you it’s communists, then it’s communists. Red! And let me tell you something, that paint’s your paint, it’s brown bloody paint from the store-room. Red! If they tell you
Koolie
, then it’s
Koolie
, hey, why not — you believe what they say is true, don’t you. —

He shouted as if he and his father were alone.

His father never forgot the presence of the old man; in his place, in his chair. He spoke as a man does conscious of witness, of giving account to an invisible code.

— Never mind. You’ve got all these Dutch farmers up and down this road and they see it. You never know when someone notices and starts something — I know about these things, believe me. They don’t worry us, we don’t worry them, that’s the best way. Leave it like that.... The police van is up and down this road every day —

- So the police are going to come and say you’re a communist, we’re communist Koolies, that’s what’s going to happen, ay? - That’s the hammer and the sickle up there,
you
say - they’ve told you -
you
and
they
say —

His temper and his nerve flew apart under his own words. They took a hammer to the coloured photograph of himself smiling on the day he got his matric results that hung with all the wedding pictures in the sitting-room. He was smashing himself. -
They
know —
you
believe - Suddenly aware — urgent as an alarming internal spasm prefacing uncontrollable diarrhoea — that tears were about to come, he burst through the dark passage that led from shop to house and shut himself in the room he shared with brothers.

They were at school. There was no key but he pushed the corner of a bed across the door as he had done at other times. He heard his mother breathing on the far side and making small polite noises in her throat. But she would hang about, afraid actually to speak. He lay on his bed and smoked. There were no tears. He thought where he might go. To cousins in Klerksdorp. His mother’s aunt in Lichtenburg. An uncle and cousins in Standerton. Even Dawood’s wife’s people near Durban. Plenty of places. To work in the same kind of shop and hear the same talk.

His mother smelt the cigarette and went almost soundlessly, although she was a majestic size, turned away, down the narrow passage.

The telephone answering device has twice recorded an attempt to reach him through a personal service overseas call.

He could, in his turn, record an instruction for calls to be diverted to the number at the farm. But he does not. There is no one to answer at the house, unless he happens to be inside when the phone rings. And it would mean that anyone else - if there is anyone left, by now, who may not have given up trying to invite him to dinner - would be able to foreshorten the distance (business in Australia, skiing in Austria) at which absence has placed him, in their minds, over the holidays.

There’s no way of knowing whether the call would have been reverse charges. Even if you wear your jeans to rags and go barefoot the possibility of telephoning across the world without having to pay marks you unmistakably as belonging in pig-iron, I’m afraid. You are branded by it.

— I just wanted to say Happy New Year and all that-I notice on the phone you always leave out — avoid using — any form of address that establishes your relationship to me. You don’t call me anything. But that doesn’t change who you are. — Oh jolly good idea, how’re things? Has it been a cold Christmas there? Having a good time? I’ve been very quiet, taking it really easy - slept the New Year in, believe it or not, in bed at ten o’clock more or less —

And then? A silence while distance is something audible if not palpable: that faint supersonic ringing in the ears, of long distance lines, those wavering under-sea voices that are always there, forlorn sirens of other conversations thinly tangled across millions of miles. Can you hear me? Think of something to say next.

- It’s not Terry who wants to speak to you. I do. —

That’s also not impossible at this juncture, although we usually communicate through the lawyers, having long ago found that this was the best way to avoid friction that might be harmful to him. But that was when he was a child. Look at him now, a young man fully equipped by Eros himself with the beginnings of a beard. - I know why it’s you. -

- He wants to stay and I intend to keep him here. -

— I knew that was it. Why else should you phone me ? —

— I have no intention of seeing him forced to go into that army for a year. He has his principles and I don’t see why you shouldn’t respect them. —

- Yes, and you are going to keep him there, under mama’s skirts, and I can do what I damn well like about it, isn’t that so? —

He’s standing beside you and watching your face to see from it how I’m reacting. - Why can’t the boy speak to me, like a man? Let me talk to him. —

He has nothing to say.

— But I have: to you. He’s a minor. I have full custody under a court order. You should be aware of that. I shall get an interdiction served on you-

- Oh yes - run to the lawyers, as usual, you can afford the best there is and I won’t stand a chance against your money —

He’s thought of something he could have said to the boy, anyway. Sticking out of the open windows of the car are the shaking heads of two young saplings, one on either side. Their roots, each in a big fist of soil carefully gloved in sacking and plastic, are on the back seat of the Mercedes. - The trees I told you I was going to plant - remember? - they’ve been delivered by truck but I don’t trust the nursery with these beauties. You know what they are? Spanish chestnut. Specially imported variety. A hundred rands each. My present to myself. God knows how they’ll do, but I’m going to have a go. Have you bought yourself roast chestnuts in the streets? That’s the best part of the bloody miserable New York winter. —

The road is so familiar that it exists permanently in his mind like those circuits created when electrical impulses in the brain connecting complex links of comprehension have been stimulated so often that a pathway of learning has been established. He knows where the speed-trap traffic cop hides himself. He reads without actually looking at it every time the hieroglyph someone’s scrawled on the Indian’s rain-water tank. He is aware before he sees her floral rabbits and donkeys displayed on the bonnet and roof of her old station-wagon, that the arty woman who sells stuffed toys will be at the bend where the freeway ends. Particular vehicles, probably encountered many times, using the route as frequently as he does, have become half-expected pointers if not landmarks. Even faces. The other day he thought someone smiled at him from a bus-stop on the road. He could drive it in his sleep; sometimes does; he awakens in the middle of the night in town and for a moment thinks he is at the farm, he wakes camping out in that room at the house and thinks he hears the telephone ringing in the flat. The fancy heads of the little trees are dipping and bobbing in the airstream created by his passage; people in passing cars give his the second glance that is drawn by anyone exposing out of context a component of private existence - those Boers who will tie anything from a woman’s dressing-table to a farm implement on top of their cars, or the location black cycling along with a primus stove on the handlebars or - once - a goat tied on his back.

How many times has he gone to and fro, ironed out the path of the first time he went to look at the place and decided it was a good buy. Scoring a groove over and over again, ineradicable. If there is a first purpose there will also one day be a last. It probably will be something like... something not more than a new grease-trap for a drain that Jacobus’s asked for, or a supply of drench for the cows. That’s the reality of the place, my dear; keeping it up. It would be crazy to suppose the call might even have been you, but not entirely inconceivable. The sort of thing you would do. Even if it had been reverse charges - that might well strengthen the chances that it would be you, after all, my money is useful to count on when one’s in trouble. You are always sailing close in to trouble - with a loudhailer for SOS in one hand. Well, you are female and that’s your charm, or part of your charm. You start off by reestablishing it : - You still keep that beautiful place I once saw, Mehring? If you knew how homesick I get for Africa! Not the people - the shitty whites, god knows - but the country. —