He has torn up the letter. Not angrily but not without a self-conscious indifference. Now he doesn’t know what to do with the pieces. Paper is organic; it would rot, in the reeds, if he threw them there, no one comes here, no one would understand the jig-saw of words, anyway — ‘I must know’, ‘you’re busy and that’, ‘cropped head’, ‘kill kaffirs’. — Imagine if she were to be walking unknowingly over an undiscovered grave on a farm but she made out, on a scrap of paper, the words ‘kill kaffirs’ — oh my God, the story she could concoct on that bit of evidence of casual heartlessness and brutality, etc!
What do they want, anyway, who only know it’s not what he’s got? What is it he wants — a special war to be started for him, so that he can prove himself the conscientious objector hero? The way he once longed for a bicycle with racing handlebars? The way you wanted to end up sending for me to come to you in the Greek cafe: — Trouble- you said, your eyes changing from fear to idiotic arrogance and excitement the instant you looked up and saw me. No wonder those back-veld oafs in uniform slapped your face; I felt like doing it myself, once or twice. Free spirit, bold gipsy in bed (her name was Mancebo before she married her professor, an old Romany name from Spain or France, she said; more likely just some Jewish blood somewhere); but you were not so free and bold when answering questions about your poor bloody black friends at John Vorster Square. Speak to a good lawyer, a respectable, shrewd company lawyer, and keep out of jail the conscientious objector hero with the straight white-blond hair and that brownish fuzz round the chin that he’s produced surprisingly young (he’ll be virile, in spite of himself, like his papa, chase women, whether he approves of himself or not).
What is it they think they can have? What do they think’s available? Peace, Happiness and Justice? To be achieved by pretty women and schoolboys? The millennium? By people who want good respectable company lawyers?
Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore — dead and hidden — whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it’s all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?
He has them up, arraigned, before him and they have no answer. Nothing to say. He feels inside himself the relief and overflow of having presented the unanswerable facts. To prevail is to be recharged. For a moment there’s an impulse to put the bits of paper under one of the stones in the pit; he even stubs at it with the toe of his boot, although he knows (he carried some of them there) it would take two hands to lift it. But he opens the slit envelope and carefully shakes the flakes of paper back into it, making a kind of spout of the angle of fingers from cupped palm. Not one piece escapes to lie about.
— The Dutchman can take the pick-up and break the light at the back and scratch the door. Yes. —
— What kind of man is that? Like a stray dog running in from town and running back. Where’s his child? His woman? He doesn’t seem like a rich white man. - Dorcas’s husband stood among them and followed the figure with the eyes of a town-dweller; on Saturdays and public holidays farm labourers worked but he did not.
— Oh he’s got a son. He comes here sometimes. —
— ‘Terry’. His son said he doesn’t want to be called master — he told Jacobus, didn’t he? You mustn’t call me Master Terry. He just wants us to call him by his name. — Izak gave his young laugh.
Jacobus dismissed irrelevancies, dropping his voice although he knew his words, even if audible at this distance, wouldn’t be understood. — Does it break the tractor if I take it up to the shop? —
— You should take the pick-up. Use the pick-up when you like. He wouldn’t know the difference. How could he know? He’s running in from town and running back. You’re a fool, old man. —
— I’m the one who oils and looks after the tractor, I’m the one who looks after all his machines, all his machines, everything, all his cattle, every day. Saturday, Sunday, even Christmas. —
They are raking down cattle feed from the bunker silo. A great show of industry — no one looks up except a visitor (the constant stream of Saturday and Sunday visitors, drunk and sober) who is gossiping with them. He must have imagined it, composed out of the cadences of their language what was somewhere in his mind, but did he hear the name ‘Terry’, quite distinctly, it seems to him, as he passed? Very unlikely. It was some other word that has a similar sound. The round lid of the dustbin outside the kitchen door lifts like a cymbal in his hand (the letter drops into the mess of burnt mealie-meal and potato peelings giving up a smell of fermentation) and clangs closed.
As usual, just as he is about to drive away Jacobus is seen hurrying over with an urgent request. The car engine is running. A bag of cement; this time it’s a bag of cement. No matter how thoroughly the question of the farm’s needs has been gone into, there will always be this compulsion of Jacobus to think of just one more thing, hardly more than a delaying tactic, as if he doesn’t want to be left behind here where he belongs, doesn’t want to be left to it, the farm. The responsibility; he really is responsible, old Jacobus, in his way. He has his usual worried grin, head on one side, showing those few rotten tusks; no sign of any offence. He could say to him, take the pick-up on Monday and go to the builders’ suppliers; but there’s no telling how far the interpretation of such authorization can be taken. The next thing, they’re piling in for a beer-drink or a funeral and the pick-up’s smashed somewhere, a dead loss because the driver was unlicensed and insurance won’t pay. These are the sort of easy concessions that don’t do anybody any good; all they do is threaten the organization of a place like this.
Who wouldn’t make the world over, if it were easy as that.
— The rise and fall of currencies, of stock exchange prices, of imports and exports, of the supply of labour and the cost of raw materials —
— Of pig-iron. —
— Yes, pig-iron. —
— Ah, I see you do believe in something — you are one of those whose Baal is development -
— What d‘you mean ‘Baal’? —
— Because you’re a pagan, you have to invest some concrete object — a thing — with power outside yourself —
— Coming from a lapsed-Catholic gipsy or whatever it is you are. —
She put her hand on him, just under the left pectoral muscle, half patted, half slapped, half caressed. — This is what I believe in — flesh-and-blood people, no gods up in the sky or anywhere on the ground. ‘Development’ — one great big wonderful all-purpose god of a machine, eh, Superjuggernaut that’s going to make it all all right, put everything right if we just get the finance for it. The money and the know-how machine. Isn’t that it, with you? The politics are of no concern. The ideology doesn’t matter a damn. The poor devils don’t know what’s good for them, anyway. That’s how you justify what you condone — that’s what lets you off the hook, isn’t it — the Great Impartial. Development. No dirty hands or compromised minds. Neither dirty racist nor kaffir-boetie. Neither dirty Commie nor Capitalist pig. It’s all going to be decided by computer — look, no hands! Change is something programmed, not aspired to. No struggle between human beings. That’d be too smelly and too close. Let them eat cake, by all means — if production allows for it, and dividends are not affected, in time. —