The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer Page B

posts, they are busy complaining about him in the safety of their own language, they retreat into it and they can say what they like. This slightly tautens the muscles in the thickness between his shoulder-blades, a fibrosis, as he feels them behind him, leaves them behind him.
    The farm is large. He can go off anywhere. (Quite frankly, I can’t wait to get away to my old plaas . — There is a mica-glitter of malice in the polite refusal of weekend invitations. He is still in demand; he’s needed at table. What a pity, and I had such a charming woman for you.)
    Four hundred acres. But like an old horse, he ... Everything has its range. Even the most random-seeming creatures are shown by studies to have a topography of activity from which they never really depart, although they may appear to casual observation to weave and backtrack aimlessly, almost crazily, free. From the flat to the car to the office, from tables to beds, from airports to hotels, from city to country, the track like the etching something (worms? ants?) has left on this tree-trunk amounts to a closed system. No farther. Wherever he sets out for or from, or however without direction he sets out to roam, on his farm, it’s always here that he ends up. Down over the third pasture at the reeds. Peaceful, of course. They don’t come down here any more, for some reason or other; not even the piccanins. He is here alone; there is a sensation he can’t place, it’s as if, sitting down, he has taken a (non-existent, since he hasn’t been wearing one) hat off - it’s because the willows have no leaves at all now, they leave the brow and eyelids without any shield against light and space. He is alone with the letter between pocket lining and thigh, not the sort of letter — a letter from a woman - that must be taken away to be read in some special private place. But a letter that has to be read sometime. A shallow grave of stones is under his eye for a few seconds of absent lack of recognition - of course it’s not the grave, there is no grave: the pit where sheep were roasted in the summer. Every feature is made simple and prominent by the purity and dryness of winter. The hump of the bank here where, when it is higher, the river flows out of the reeds, has emerged from its plump rump of summer green, the bony hip of an Amazon torso under his shoulder. The muscles round his mouth and the cleft pad of his chin briefly compress the flesh into dimpled bloodlessness in one of those tics developed by men accustomed to conceal their irritation with subordinates. The dead reeds are never quite silent and once he has slit the envelope the unfolding rustle of the two thin sheets within is a fingering in the reeds.
    ‘I don’t know how you can say so. There isn’t plenty of time at all. You know we had to fill in the registration form last year. They’ve got my name and everything. You know that when I went with the school tour I couldn’t even get a passport to go overseas without you writing to Pretoria for permission from the Defence Force. As soon as the exams are over at the end of the year - this year - (underlined twice) they’ll call me up. Please, dad, I know you’re busy and that but I must know. Am I going to America in December or not. That’s what I must know. (Crossed out.) All I can tell you, that if anyone thinks I am going into their army to learn to ‘kill kaffirs’ like a ware ou , well I’m damn well not. Thank you very much - you say it will be an experience for me to meet all sorts of people I don’t normally, being sent to a good - I’d call it snob, by the way - school. What sort of people? I don’t see anything good (crossed out) anything to be gained by living for nine months as a cropped head with a bunch of loyal South Africans learning how to be the master race because you’ve got the guns. It would be a good experience, too, I suppose, to be sent up to the Caprivi Strip to shoot Freedom Fighters. About the August holidays.