The Conservationist (33 page)

While his tongue plunges down her throat to choke the bitch, stuff her, in the closed-up house with the whisky bottle on the floor and the cologne in the bathroom, his gorge rises in revulsion. No no. The grain of the skin is gigantic, muddy and coarse. A moon surface. Grey-brown with layers of muck that don’t cover the blemishes. She pulls away; she pretends that’s that, she knows how to excite; they’re panting, eyeing each other, and - suddenly - he has become aware as of a feature of a landscape not noticed before, of a pair of strong male calves in woollen stockings exactly on a level with his eyes, behind her shoulders some yards off in the scrubby growth the eucalyptus have put out. Between the leaves a pair of solid calves is in squatting position, facing knees-on but a little to one side so that a black pocket-comb is plainly visible stuck between a great calf-muscle and the ribbed turnover of a sock.

If it were not for the comb - so undeniably the sort of detail that no unnerved imagination could supply - there could not possibly be anyone there. There cannot be anyone there. But there is. Someone has been there all the time. It would be possible to be entirely surrounded, cops and robbers, in this place, without knowing it. But how ridiculous. No, no. Examining the trees without moving, without indicating anything, he has seen another pair of squatting calves - or is it the first that have changed position or crept to view from another angle. She’s lying with her breasts lolling apart under the cheap cotton sweater as her legs are rolled apart under her skirt, exposed knees dark-skinned and rough as dirty elbows. Her mouth’s open and wet for anything, with a knowing smile, a bit jaunty. A heavy jutting mouth; nothing like at all. — Come. What you bring me here for, then, man. — Her manner is easy and shrewd. How could anything ever have come of it, a bloody love-nest twenty-five miles from town, you were so ‘intelligent’ you saw through the whole thing, of course it amused you, the first time you saw me looking in at the windows - Why not just leave it all as it is? — Her eyes are glittering, quite nasty, but she’s grinning, more amused than rebuffed. The burly calves are not there; that is to say, not to be seen, but there all right. Someone has been watching the whole time and is watching still, waiting to see — what? When the bitch went off into the bushes, was it to signal or conspire? Oh God no. That hair’s been straightened and that sallowness isn’t sunburn. That’s it. Perhaps. It’s a factory girl he’s been lured into the woods with; a poor factory girl doing a grade of work reserved for coloureds. A Sunday newspaper story. A dolled-up supermarket caricature of the tanned, long-waisted lucky ones who, aping pigment, provide in turn a model for one like this, who has it, to follow: a double fake. She’s a trap, then; she waits by the road and brings white men here for whatever those
Boere
call themselves, the miscegenation squad or the vice squad, to follow. She could be Portuguese; one of those little silent immigrants who can be trusted not to speak. It doesn’t calm him that she has the accent of a bilingual country, that her mistakes in English clearly come about because she is Afrikaans-speaking. It doesn’t help that so much is illogical and not feasible in fact; if she’s a trap, you bloody fool, how is it that she was with the old man with the gold-braided cap, the one she says was her grandfather, the first time she made him pick her up. It is all nonsense, horrible nonsense, it can’t happen to him, but here he is, in this place, this dirty mine plantation, his car stands there, can’t be denied, she’s lolling on a raincoat on the ground —

He’s struggled to his feet while someone’s there, right there, watching him. But he shouts first. The habit of authority speaks for him — if he’s about to be set upon, robbed, killed, castrated (they could also be a gang, here in the plantation, waiting to leap upon men in
flagrante delicto
, unmanned when most manly) he will challenge. — What d’you want? — He hears his own yell.

The man in woollen knee-stockings, shorts, with an open-necked shirt and an ugly ginger sports-jacket is ten yards off. His slow-thinking red face with cropped reddish-blond stiff hair, brighter than the dull fuzz that shows against the light along his forearms and above the tops of the socks, looks grave. He stands and they gaze at him, caught between the trees as if he were a creature framed in its natural habitat. A thug in shorts. One of their rugby-forward dicks. Or a mine detective maybe (same breed), patrolling the property - they used to employ them to keep an eye on such places, trying to catch people who were involved in illicit gold-dealing. (This mine has been closed for ten years ...) The creature clears its throat. — You better go — It speaks in ponderous policeman fashion.

The man and the woman are both fully dressed, unless you count the fact that her shoes are off - exactly the perfectly innocent shedding of town shackles allowed any picnicker. The raincoat serves to make the damp ground a place to sit on, that’s all. There is even the paper that has until recently wrapped food, crumpled into a ball and flung aside by her, just the way others like her have already fouled the place before her: witness that disgusting mess against the tree, eh.

— Yes? What do you want here! Yes? - He is shouting but can scarcely hear his own voice for the beat of his heart thudding like a pick into the swelling thickness of his chest muscles. These are the bastards who shovelled him in as you might fling a handful of earth on the corpse of a rat, just to cover the stink. — Say what you want! —

— It’s not safe here. —

Is that all? Is that the best you can do, thick-headed ox, guardian of the purity of the master race?

— What business is it of yours? Who are you? What d’you think you’re doing in this place? —

He stands his ground because those are his orders: dispose of the body, and so you dump your rubbish on somebody’s private property; that’s the easiest thing to do. About as civilized as the blacks who knife each other for you to bury.

— What do you want? —

The man suddenly squats down again, confidentially, although he hasn’t come any nearer. — They find you people here, they rob you. —

— Who? What the hell are you talking about? —

— I’m telling you. They leave you naked. You won’t have nothing. —

— We are fully clothed; we came to eat our lunch. — How shamefully, not able to stop himself in time, he has stooped to pick up and demonstrate the pathetic evidence of the crumpled ball of greasy paper.

— They sell it in the location. You won’t see it again. Your watch, your money. - He speaks very low, almost wheedling, his head down and his eyebrows raised because he’s peering up. He dares to shuffle a little closer.
That’s some kind of signal!
Stupid not to keep a gun in the car! The others will burst out from behind the trees where they have been watching and listening: not even a strong man, not yet fifty, kept fit by sauna baths, massage, and exercise on his 400 acre farm, will stand a chance. And at last it will be in the papers, it will all come out, distorted, decayed, but just recognizable, a face with a - enough. —
Trouble
— you said: the prominent industrialist associated with the economic advancement of the country at the highest level who helped his leftist mistress to flee abroad. He tried to interfere with me (that’s the phrase that’s used) when as a young prospective immigrant girl I sat beside him in an aircraft. He propositioned me in a coffee bar, trying to persuade me to sit in the dark with him at a cowboy film. If I had had my father’s money I would have known better what to do with it than to pick up a prostitute and take her behind the trees. We phoned again and again, but no wonder, he was caught with a black girl, that’s what he was doing. She hasn’t even got up, the bitch. She lies there looking on, she doesn’t even bother to draw her legs together. She has friends who matter more to her than anything in the world, because they pay her, yes, she has her kind of loyalty and it’s bought. He’s going to leave her to them. He’s going, in a matter of seconds - mustn’t give himself away by so much as glancing towards the car - he’s going to make a dash for it, a leap, sell the place to the first offer, jump in, the key’s there in the ignition, and drive off reversing wildly first through the trees, the open door on the passenger’s side swinging and crashing, breaking branches and tearing leaves. He’s going to run, run and leave them to rape her or rob her. She’ll be all right. They survive everything. Coloured or poor-white, whichever she is, their brothers or fathers take their virginity good and early. They can have it, the whole four hundred acres. She’ll jump up and scream after him, sobbing and yelling, and they’ll come at him at the same time, that one will tackle him round the legs, grabbing him as he passes, holding fast from the ground like a fist out of hell, and bring him down to them ... no no no. No no, what nonsense, what is there to fear - shudder after shudder, as if he were going to vomit the picnic lunch, it’s all coming up, coming out. That’s a white tart and there was no intent, anyway, report these gangsters or police thugs terrorizing people on mine property, he’s on a Board with the chairman of the Group this ground still belongs to ... No, no, no. RUN.

— Come. Come and look, they’re all saying. What is it? Who is it? It’s Mehring. It’s Mehring, down there.

Witbooi offered to make a coffin. They used a tarpaulin in the meantime, weighted with stones from that place where the whites once cooked meat. Izak helped saw the planks at the workshop near the house; Alina brought tea and porridge and stayed to talk, but not loudly, because of what it was the two men were hammering together. Jacobus had phoned the farmer in town at his office and asked for money for the wood. It was granted without questioning or difficulty, yes, all right, get it from the Indian and tell him he’ll be paid. Jacobus knew, through Alina’s daughter’s husband (Christmas Club) that the India had wood stored from some building he had been doing. But the farmer didn’t want to hear about it. He was leaving that day for one of those countries white people go to, the whole world is theirs. He gave some instructions over the phone; Jacobus must look after everything nicely.

Jacobus and Alina and one of the other women went to the Indian store together, with the pick-up, to fetch the wood. The women cried and said there was no money for a wrapping-cloth and wouldn’t the India give them some material, anything, any piece of old cloth? He felt sorry for the poor devils, human after all, who must have lost a member of their family, and got one of his sons to cut a length from a roll of Japanese cotton that wasn’t a good seller. They said God would bless him.

The funeral took place on high firm ground on a fine Thursday afternoon. Solomon and his brother had dug the grave. The coffin that now held properly what it should was put on the hay wagon hitched to the tractor and driven by Jacobus slowly enough for all to follow on foot. Plovers flew up peeping, shrilling, darting and diving ahead, raising their usual excitable alarm in a serenity of sky and land that took no note of them. The tractor rolled on. At the appointed spot, those people who had not followed were gathered; old Thomas the nightwatchman did not sleep that afternoon, and the children stood by. The women and old men from the location who weeded the lands were there. So was Phineas’s wife, but her followers were not with her. Thursday is the day when the women members of the sect of Zion meet in groups on the veld round about the location, and one of these appeared, led by a man in a long white coat with blue sashes criss-crossing it, carrying a tasselled staff, and accompanied by a man with a drum. He struck the drum softly once or twice: the sound of a sigh in space, the great sun-lit afternoon that surrounded the gathering. There was a moment of absolute silence when everyone was still, perhaps there was no need of speech, no one knew what to say, and then the one with the staff began to declaim and harangue, sometimes lifting a foot in the air as if to climb some invisible step, waving his staff. The women of his group, round white hats starched and ironed into the shape of four-petalled flower-bells, sang a hymn. He prayed aloud again and once more they sang, and Thomas’s voice joined them in thin but perfect harmony. The eyes of the children moved with the spade. Phineas’s wife’s face was at peace, there was no burden of spirits on her shoulders as she watched Witbooi, Izak, Solomon and Jacobus sink the decent wooden box, and her husband shovel the heavy spatter of soil, soft and thick. Without consulting Jacobus, Witbooi had privately provided a pile of medium-sized stones to surround the mound as he would mark out a flower-bed in a white man’s garden.

The one whom the farm received had no name. He had no family but their women wept a little for him. There was no child of his present but their children were there to live after him. They had put him away to rest, at last; he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them.

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