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.
My — possessions — are — enough — for — me.
Who dares say that?
He has not spoken. There’s no one to speak to, on the farm. He’s aware that he’s accountable to no one. There is no answer. You are not here, nor he. You are not here, nor she. The season is not suitable for picnic parties from town. The colleagues on the Board, the mining connections, the chairman who has a place of his own like this, the women who seat him beside them at dinner, the daughter who offers still the child’s good-night kiss, they are not invited. A dead man, but he doesn’t speak the same language. The coal-blue water’s chapped by the wind. The dust has raised a second horizon, edged with mauve, all round the sky. Even in this wind, the burned reeds are silent, all strings broken.
He feels the stirring of the shameful curiosity, like imagining what goes on behind a bathroom door, about what happens under a covering of earth (however shallow; you can be sure it was done carelessly) when a fire like this one comes over. Is all somehow blackened leathery, hardened in baked clay, preserved, impossible to get rid of even by ordeal by fire? Or is it consumed as if in a furnace, your whole dirty, violent, threatened and threatening (surely), gangster’s (most probably) savage life — poor black scum — cleansed, down there? Escaped from the earth in essence, in smoke?