— The India he’s speak about me. — He’s been working it out.
— I don’t go to the Indians to talk about my farm. But I know what goes on. Remember that. And if you come and tell me next time the tractor’s broken —
He hasn’t got an answer to that one. But when he and Solomon and the youngster, the one who affects fancy headgear, are clearing up the roll of barbed wire and the unused 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. Thanks, but I don’t feel like Johannesburg. Mummy suggests that I come to New York to her, but she’ll have David and Erica, she won’t really be lonely, and it’s such a lot of money to ask you. And as you know I hope to be going over in December. But you know Mummy — she always thinks you’re a millionaire! Anyway, what I want to do — I thought I’d like to go to South West, to Swakopmund. Will you write to Emmy and Kurt and tell them it’s all right? I wrote and they said fine, okay, but would like to hear from you, etc. Don’t send an air ticket or the train-fare. I’ll hitch.’
Oh fine, okay, cast off the things of this world for those jeans with the hems carefully cut ragged and take your begging bowl on the road to South West Africa. No one’s going to know that the old couple who’re waiting to anoint the little lordling’s feet at the other end are living on a pension from your father.
If I had your money. Of course, his mother didn’t want him when she left him, eight years old, but she would fly him back and forth ten thousand miles twice a year to be with her new American brood, why not?
If I had your money. I’d pretend it doesn’t exist; on the road, not even the train-fare to my name.
I’d leave it all just as it is. And if I had children, I don’t believe in inheritance of property, unearned possessions, the perpetuation of privilege.
— You’ve got a son? He lives with you? —
— I’ve always had sole custody. He’s away at school. Almost a man. As tall as I am. He said to me last holidays, ‘Why did you marry?’ And I said to him, what’s the reason we go after them — she was pretty. She had a smashing figure. -
It was the hour for a cigarette and confidences, after lovemaking. Suddenly she was up on one elbow, the olive-brown face with smeared eye-paint was looking down on him with an admiring disgust, an expression he had seen once before under different circumstances, on the face of a woman he had taken to watch a wrestling match. — About his mother? —
— He’s not a child. —
— You used exactly those words? As if you were talking of buying a woman in a bar or off the street. —
— Shall I tell you something, Antonia? You don’t know it, but there’s a special pleasure in having a woman you’ve paid. Now and then. I can’t explain it. It’s very clear-cut. For that one night, or that one afternoon or day, whatever it is. You’ve bought and paid for everything. -
— There will be absolutely no unfulfilled emotional obligations on either side, hanging on afterwards. —
— No, no, you see deep meanings in everything. Sorry to disappoint you. Just the feeling that you’re not only taking this woman, you’ve also paid for her. - His forefinger was stirring with gentle regularity in the black fur in the cup of her armpit, while they talked, as he would scratch a cat just under the ear.
— My god, you want to convince me you can buy anything. Mehring and his wholly-owned subsidiaries. — She began to caress him somewhere, too, to assert that she was not the passive partner in whose role people like him would cast her.
— No, just that there are some good things to be bought. —
A plover has landed within a few yards of his feet, tipping from beak to tail for balance. Its exquisitely neat black and white markings take his eye into visual discipline. The winter landscape of the high-veld is supposed traditionally to be harsh but here it is harsh only to the touch — the bristles of broken grass tussocks, the prickly dead khaki-weed, the snagging knife-edge of dead reeds — everything his gaze has been resting on except the ink of the letter and the shapes of the grave-stones, over there, is soft and tonal. The range of distant hills is laid, pale and gentle, along his horizon. The willows, when he sees them as a destination, from the house or up on the road, are caught like smoke over the reeds. The fact is that all this softness is the result of smoke; particles of smoke that hang in the still winter air; smoke from that location that lies between the farm and city. It’s a cataract over the fierce eye of the sun; it’s even possible, some days, to look straight at the sun as if you are staring at the prism deep in the under-water radiance of a star sapphire.