The Conservationist (13 page)

— What, no sauna bath? No swimming-pool? —

— Communal. On the roof. You’ll have to be satisfied with the bathrooms, pink with beige john, green with black John. Take your choice. -

- Oh very chic. Which does one use for what? —

If I had your money . . .

She came to the flat, like the others; it was in the flat, like the others. Only Terry has slept behind the wall of this room (not the wall behind which the kitchen lies, where Alina is talking to somebody); over behind the piano and the wall where a pair of china duck in flight hang up high. On the bed in his school sleeping-bag, Terry - that is certain - had no woman in there, only masturbation and compassion.

The dunes of the desert lie alongside the road between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. Golden reclining nudes. Torso upon torso, hip sweeping from waist, smooth beyond smoothness, suggesting to the tactile imagining only the comparison, in relation to the hand, of the sensation of the tongue when some substance evanesces on it. The sea is on the other side of the road. There among the rocks pelicans floated at rest like bath toys and those crayfish - lumps under mayonnaise in the sort of place he goes to - were caught by feeling with bare hands under the rock shelf. No fancy gloves and goggles and snorkels that old Kurt and Emmy demand nicely for their princeling visitor. There were old-timers who were friends of Kurt then, too, who knew nature lore and told stories. Could be the same old man. There’s a quality in people like them that makes youngish men seem to have been old, in retrospect. The appellation ‘old so-and-so’ designates something other than age - benignity, perhaps? Some comfortable outgrown quality you don’t see around. Goodness? Emmy and Kurt are good simple people - which means they have been left behind, they don’t change, they are preserved by the desert back there in the past - as good for the boy as they were for himself when he was a boy. Childless women like Emmy are the ones who would have been the best mothers; old chaps like Kurt, who have no son, can do with any boy all those things the father doesn’t have time or the knack for. That little house alone, with its back garden of desert sand raked into a pattern along the paths marked with seashells, and the dog’s kennel Kurt made with the hinged roof so that, like Emmy’s house, the dog’s could be aired every morning. It’s the sort of thing that makes children happy. One would think that for a boy of sixteen, a farm to mess around on would be a paradise; you could keep a horse to ride, if you wanted. If you took an interest.

- You must come out to the farm again, sometime. —

- Oh yes. That was a beautiful place. . . —

As if he had burned it down or something. Destroyed it by his touch. But it was all part of the sexual game with her, perhaps? He must try to entice her; she must seem to be capitulating. And then she bobs her backside up in his face, so to speak, and is off. - One of these days . . . —

— Take a picnic lunch. Just for an hour. I’d love to play hookie from the damned office. —

She looks insolently, thrusting her chin and waggling her head, making fun: — I know you would. Perhaps. Next week. -

Once or twice in the flat; that was nothing, really. She was not a woman who had an instinct for what you wanted, at particular moments, when in bed. No doubt she thought she was a remarkably ‘intelligent’ lover. In the flat, just like any other.

— Oh yes ... sometimes I wish I had your farm . . . — She was the one who brought it up again.

He had not mentioned the subject. They had met at an hotel for a drink after he had not seen her for several weeks and did not know whether she would come somewhere - it would have to be his flat, he supposed - or whether they would have one more drink and part for the evening.

— Sometimes for such a small reason - any little thing - this afternoon I was rushing along the street to - I had to get somewhere in a hurry - and I saw a puppy outside one of those little houses with a polished stoep and ferns in a tin - you know. A spindly pup standing with its paws turned in and its silly tail hanging in the air. Then it sat down suddenly and watched everything going by. I wanted to have that puppy and that house and sit and play with it in the afternoons. For a few moments that’s what I wanted. And I understood that by
that
I meant what it was to be ‘good’. Can you imagine me? —

So you have moments when you want to submit to the ‘system’, keep out of ‘trouble’, be a housewife complacent in her white privilege. Just as you want to go and make love although you are ashamed of having lovers; again a man like him is quick to understand what is being said that can’t be said.

— It presented itself as an awful temptation, honestly just for a flash. I must have been very tired today. —

To understand and to take the opportunity. — You don’t look tired. - She would groan if you told her she was pretty, etc. but at the same time it was what she must hear, not in so many words. Time was measuring as it did when the half-candles were burning; -And if you had my farm? —

She tapped her foot a few moments, her thigh moving in her skirt; smiled, summing herself up in the way she prided. - Same sort of thing, I suppose. —

She looked at him.

— Grow chickens. —

- Raise chickens. -

— Well, whatever. Be a - a - She moved her head attractively, her lips, ready for the words, searching as if for a fruit being dangled at her mouth.

A brave revolutionary. Trouble, you said. You were proud, you had resisted all the temptations: oh
shame
, dear little puppy, dear little piccanins.

— I don’t know why I tell you these things. - After making love it was always necessary to her ego to establish the difference, the vast gap between herself and a man like him, that might seem to have bridged itself in pleasure. And at the same time she was offering flattery: no ordinary pig-iron dealer, then? — I really don’t know why I do. But don’t you find the people it’s most difficult to make confidences to are the ones who are closest to you? In fact confession is best made to complete strangers. Somebody who gets talking to you on a journey. It’s easier with someone you don’t know at all. —

The house has never been got into shape. He is closing the windows against the dust that is blowing up this afternoon (the burnt vegetation makes it worse) and everything inside is much the same as it must have been when he couldn’t look in properly from the outside the first day. Seeing the black landscape out there, his fingers curl up into his palms, he’s kneading his own flesh, he feels the nails biting and marking him, he can’t help it - how many years have those willows been put back! Even if most survive; it is difficult to tell how dead or alive they are - those that he knows, from inspection close-up, have had the innards burned out of them have, from here, brown wisps blowing about on top, strands dragged over a pate of sky, that appear too high to be harmed. Even if it had been somewhere other than a couple of times at the flat, it would have worn itself out by now. It was wearing thin already. How many more times, before that day in the Greek café where she felt sure no one would recognize them? There are no letters of course. — I won’t write. It might not be healthy for you to get letters from me. — That sort of thing; even when she was on the run as fast as she could scuttle, she still couldn’t resist pulling frightening faces at herself in the mirror.

— Nobody opens my mail, I assure you. Except my secretary, when it isn’t marked personal. —

- Ah yes, that’s the trouble - you think you are inviolate, the Special Branch wouldn’t dare take an interest in you, you’re developing the economy, you’re attracting foreign capital, you’re making friends with the Japanese, you’re helping to balance the balance of payments - She was amusing, all right, when she started with one of her dark political warnings and then took off on one of her flights of fancy into what she thought of - tongue-in-cheek - as his world. — Still, those wholly-owned subsidiaries. Tube Manipulations, what was it? - Hot-Dip-something - you have multiple identities and addresses, chairman of this and that, president of the other . . . — She was reflecting now, envious, how she might have made use of these identities and addresses, coming to mind too late. He followed the thought across her olive-smooth face: You don’t mind if a few letters come enclosed in envelopes addressed to the chairman? It won’t be often. You can give them to me when we see each other.

She was the one to telephone, from the café, after weeks - was it? Months? Long before then he had forgotten about trying to get her out here. When she kissed him (in the car? Could it have been when he took her to the lawyer she wanted of him? No, he saw her again after that, but not in the flat, thank you, now that she’d really succeeded in getting herself into trouble and probably was being followed about) - she kissed him, he knew she would leave the country; there was no feeling to send his nails into his palms.

In spite of the wind that makes a loose-hinged window screech so that someone seems to be shaking at the house for entry - Jacobus must be told to wire it up until he remembers to bring out a new hinge from town - he gets onto legs that no longer ache but feel weakly cool in the calves for a moment, from having his feet up, until the blood comes back, and he goes out once more. Dust has the effect on his distant hills of a pencil sketch gone over by a soft rubber. Nearer, every object flashes, scoured by the wind in the three o’clock sun - cows’ horns, new wire of a fence, the strap of his watch. Behind the house, looking up the lands towards the road, all is untouched. A field of polka rye cowers flat under the wind; it’s ridiculous to have the irrigation jets on it, the water’s all being blown away. He struggles with the valve, where water keeps dribbling although he’s turned it off. He likes to show he prefers to do things for himself when he’s there, he doesn’t believe in calling the boys all the time. The upper fields that have been ploughed are all right, of course, and - he has stopped, he has his hands on his belt, he is smiling and counting, eyes slitted against the wind - over there, over there, are twenty-three guinea fowl, some just the heads, others the leaden-blue oriental shapes in profile, something off the border of a piece of Indian cloth, stylized as the mango pattern on a paisley tie he’s got. Twenty-three. He may have counted one or two twice, or missed a couple - they know he’s there and they are moving. They seem to flow evenly, heads advancing over the clods as boats breast choppy water. But they’re actually running like hell, just try and keep up with guinea fowl. Twenty-three, about. A flock of twenty-three on my place. Not bad. That’s not bad at all. A small black sore on the landscape stays his pleasure - what’s that, far from the river? But he knows at once what it is - that’s up at a small road where one of their buses goes down to the industrial area opposite the location. The squatters who go out to work catch the bus there and it’s cold, these mornings - must be - they just light themselves a bunch of dead grass to warm their hands while they wait . . . It happened last year. That’s how the whole thing began, last year, not on De Beer’s side, but from the road. He will never know when the phone-call may be to tell him there’s been another fire. There’s a firebreak, all right; he saw to that early in the winter season, he had the boys up there. But what’s to stop anyone going to the other side of the break to warm himself with a nice little blaze. Nothing to be done.

Passing under the glittering-scaled gum-trees with leaves blown back showing the undersides, it seems to him as if the fire from the vlei has gone through the kraal too. But no. The ground is marked by the heat of their braziers everywhere. An enormous ash-heap beside their rooms. The blackened sacks in the apertures are only curtains. Burned mealie-cobs lying about where they’ve been eating. It’s just as usual, in winter, when there’s no rain to clean the place. Their dogs lift shaky heads and bark at him, but they never come out; it’s a bitch with puppies who’s making all the fuss, and the puppies are starved, they ought to be taken to be put away at the S.P.C.A. It’s no good talking to Jacobus, apparently. But the flock could have been fifty. If they increased too much, one could always cull a few, for the table.

From here, black desolation down there at the river is before his eyes again.

They are tramping past him on the road in their usual weekend peregrinations. He hears them at his back and they hesitate to overtake him, it’s as if he’s leading them in procession, ridiculously, for a few moments, and then they surround him at a polite distance briefly while gaining on him, two men on the one side, and one of their women on the other. The one man wears his farm gumboots and the other has a balaclava enclosing him in a knight’s visor against the dust - he can’t take off his hat as his companion does while passing, but both intone,
Baas ... Baas
. . . A bit tipsy already, he can hear, it’s Saturday afternoon, the weekend’s begun, for them. A disinfectant whiff of Lifebuoy soap where they pass; from the woman a smell of female (he supposes; he does not associate it with the intimacies of white female flesh) and wood-smoke. She wears a blanket pinned as a warm skirt over a dress and her strong shiny black calves and shiny black arms with elbows like pips in the flesh are bare. Children going towards the compound have not greeted him. There’s a baby being carried among them that has light yellow-reddish hair - very ugly. He doesn’t remember seeing it before; God knows how many people move into that compound.

No point in going down there again. Going over losses. There are no losses - none that can be measured to put down on the income tax forms - the polka rye is undamaged, no stock has been harmed. The fact is - his feet are carrying him over the frost-bitten lucerne stubble, anyway - he just had not remembered until today that the month of August is almost over, that - no, not a child who will play marbles in the schoolboys’ winter season for the game, but the one with the long blond hair and incipient beard, has not been here.

An unnecessary presence. The fact is - he has reached the third pasture, he has opened the gate for himself and looped the wire over the post behind him - he would not have his gipsy back. He walks on and on, following the black, reading the topography of the new boundary, pacing it all out measuredly: what is it that he has? It is something they would never believe. It’s not convenient for any to believe, it’s contrary to all ideology; stop your ears, cover your eyes, then, if you don’t like it. He is striding slowly. He hears his own tread, boot following boot, exploding faint puffs of brittle burned vegetable membrane, breaking traceries that are the memory of what is already consumed by fire. His thoughts space beautifully to the tread.