In Africa! A farm in Africa! How he must love Africa. And were there any wild animals there?
A week’s absence in Japan finds everything just as it was. Past the location entrance, the lurching buses and second-class taxis are a menace, and the location people wait for them in the litter of beer cartons and orange peel, women sitting on their bundles, the men dolled up and full of drink. The children are spending the day picking over the dirt on the stretch of open veld opposite that is used as rubbish dump. Because it’s Sunday, the Indians are on the verandah of their house, even the women in their pink and yellow trousers and tunics. Poor bloody chained dogs still racing up and down; the blacks from the farm trudging or zig-zagging on bicycles along the dirt road. The man in the tatters of dungarees who skips aside and stands at something between a bow and attention, lifting a purple knitted cap in greeting, doesn’t know him: just had a few too many.
They are banging away at their drums somewhere over the river. The usual beer-drinks. But his own, up at the kraal, are pretty quiet. The thudding and distant shouts are no more than a smudge on the perfect silence that stretches to his horizon, which is first of all, while he walks, the rise of the next farm beyond the river, and then, when he lies down at the willows, the maze of broken reeds. The willows dangle at him from the sky. A wan yellowed leaf taken between thumb and forefinger is pliable, like thin kid-skin. He rolls onto his belly and, remembering a point he ought to have made clear in Tokyo, making a mental note to make a note of it (there is a tape-recorder in his briefcase but the briefcase is in the car) his presence on the grass becomes momentarily a demonstration, as if those people on the other side of the world were smilingly seeing it for themselves: I have my bit of veld and my cows… Perhaps he has dozed; he suddenly — out of blackness, blankness — is aware of breathing intimately into the earth. Wisps and shreds of grass or leaf stir there. It is the air from his nostrils that moves them. To his half-open eye the hairs that border it and the filaments of dead grass are one.
There is sand on his lip.
For a moment he does not know where he is — or rather who he is; but this situation in which he finds himself, staring into the eye of the earth with earth at his mouth, is strongly familiar to him. It seems to be something already inhabited in imagination.
At this point his whole body gives one of those violent jerks, every muscle gathering together every limb in paroxysm, one of those leaps of terror that land the poor bundle of body, safe, in harmless wakefulness. The abyss is no deeper than a doorstep; the landing, home.
He must have dropped off face-down and his head has sagged off his forearm; a dribble of saliva has made the earth stick to his lip. He’s had complaints that he’s inclined to sleep open-mouthed and make noises.
He rolls onto his side, where he has the impression the reeds facing him hide him as drawn curtains keep out day. The sense of familiarity, of some kind of unwelcome knowledge or knowing, is slow to ebb. As it does, it leaves space in his mind; or uncovers, like the retreat of a high tide, carrying away silt.
He lies for what seems a long time. This place — his farm — really is what everyone says of it, he himself as well (and he can hear, as if rehearsing, the jokes about tax deductions, the serious remarks that reveal how surprisingly much he knows of husbandry). A high-veld autumn, a silvery-gold peace, the sun lying soft on hard ground, the rock pigeons beginning to fly earlier, now, the river he can hear feeling its dark tongue round the watercress and weeds, there inside the reeds. As if he hasn’t been away. As if nothing had ever happened; as if there never has been — is not — someone dead, down there. Just as everyone believes — he himself has long ago come to believe — that the farm was acquired as a good investment. Yet when he brought her here that day, the first time he saw the place, and they were walking over the very piece of ground on which he is stretched now, allowing that distant first time to return to him, he was possessed only by the brilliant idea of the farmhouse as a place to bring a woman.
— I’m in pig-iron. — Confident enough to clown a little: these were the preliminaries, the exchange-of-unvital-information stage.
— No ordinary pig-iron dealer — she said. But it was not flattery, not her — ironic, sarcastic even, condescending, weighing him up.
That ugly little plaas house — he hadn’t even been inside it yet, but he could visualize the flowered linoleum on the floor and the dead flies against the bedroom windows — it was only twenty-five miles or so from town and she had a car. Much safer than a flat, and a hotel room was probably out of the question, with a woman like her. (Though one never knew; the ones who fancied themselves brainy were often the least fastidious when roused.) All the time they were walking about this place (he is sitting up, in a slight buzz of dizziness — has lit a cigarette and is inhaling deeply), while his tongue was busy talking, his body responding, taking her hand and momentary weight across dongas, his real attention was on the lucky existence of a house. Only twenty-five miles from town and she the sort of woman who drives about in her little car all over the show. No one would ever know where she was going. The hairdresser’s; the dressmaker’s, a girlfriend. The house would have the minimal luxuries essential to its purpose, and none of the unnecessary domestic essentials. It would not be in the least like home, anybody’s home, and she would love it. Whisky and Danish beer, good cheese and fresh bread bought on the way; cologne and huge towels in the bathroom. Yes, his mind raced ahead planning while they walked and talked, tried to cross the river, pored, close enough to smell each other’s warmth, over the boundary map the estate agent had given him, waded through khaki-weed whose barbed seeds changed their trousers into a bristly hide. He talked of clearing weeds, fencing, ploughing, draining, irrigating. She pulled the seed needles off herself with the concentrated pleasure of a dog de-fleaing: — Why not just buy it and leave it as it is? —
How could she know how close she came to the light in which he was actually considering acquisition of the place? Undoubtedly a thousand times better than any flat in town, from the point of view of discretion, and the farm servants no problem at all since, as he had no wife, they would assume she was that person, the missus. My God, what a state of heat, over that bitch, what excitation of secret plans he had indulged himself with. Had he ever bought the bath towels and the cologne? — that he does not remember. But he paid 100 rands an acre; high at the time, must be worth more than double by now.
He has got up, stiffly, and picked up the Sunday paper which he had been reading before he fell asleep. Having your back scrubbed by a professional Japanese is no substitute for exercise. The paper is folded into the sort of wad you make to swat something with, and is a nuisance to carry. But he never leaves so much as a cigarette butt lying about to deface the farm; it’s they — up at the compound — who discard plastic bags and put tins beside tree-stumps. He’s forever cleaning up after them. There the children are now, shouting in their thin voices as they come over the veld carrying those endless paraffin tins of water from the pump. Some of them are so small they appear to be paraffin tins with legs. But the parents don’t care. Just back from Japan, he feels himself to look a lonely man, walking along beside the reeds. So many of them are dried out and trampled down by cattle that you can walk quite a way farther in among them than was possible a few weeks ago. The weaver-bird nests (like balls of dusty hair-combings women leave behind them) are knocked off and deserted and the vlei is dry; the river has retreated to a passage he can’t see. Dried-up water plants web and scum the hard mud. He bats his way through the margin of overlaid reeds, using the newspaper. Hippos aborting their foetuses in dried-up pools, places like this. It’s extraordinary how nature isn’t squeamish about what to do in desperation. The shallowest covering of earth is enough. The part of the river bed he is standing on seems to be somewhere about the place that Jacobus took him. Cows break up and tamp down the surface, some small creatures (rats?) make their holes, reeds fall; it looks no different from anywhere else. No way of telling. The biggest willows were away over to the left, from where that thing lay… What a tremendous fuss she would have made over it, a woman like her! For instance once, just after he’d closed the deal for the land, he mentioned to her some incident concerning one of the farm boys he’d taken on.