The Conservationist (16 page)

—
And if another hand should move over the thigh, from the outer side, near the knee somewhere
(her body takes up the narrative),
up and inwards at the same time, it will meet the parallel lines of the two thighs where, like two soft bolsters or rolls of warm dough, they feel the pressure of their own volume against each other.
—

They are covered with something - stockings, I suppose, I didn’t see when she seated herself, I didn’t bother to look.

—
The hand may be cool or it may feel warm. The thighs may freeze against it, tendons flexed rigid, or maybe they will lie helpless, two stupid chunks of meat, two sentient creatures wanting to be stroked.
—

The plane was a hospital ward where the patients had not entirely settled for the night yet, the attendant with her blonde chignon passed silently down the rows in surveillance and the exchange stopped until she had gone, the hand waiting quietly on the thigh. Then, despite the fact that there was still the occasional movement that showed others were still awake, and an old man strolled slowly by on his way to the lavatory, the hand took up the thread of communication as happens when interruption cannot really disturb the deep level of preoccupation at which it has been established. It was his left hand, which had been farthest away from him and closest to the other being, anyway, and he did not have to shift his position leaning against the angle of seat and window. Under the rug the hand found the edge of the very short skirt and there was a pause, quite delicate and patient, until the answer — she lifted her weight just enough to release the material so that he could glide his hand (yes, there were stockings) beneath it and push it up with his wrist as the hand rose.

An inquiry into what kind of flesh this was, to what milieu it belonged: as might have been expected, travelling well-chaperoned with a mother and sister, it was clothed in more than the usual garments for girls of the same age and more independent sophistication. A lining of some kind beneath the skirt, and beneath that, so surprising that they baffled him for a moment, at the top of the stockings those bumps of metal and rubber fasteners that lead by elastic straps somewhere up to the body. For years now women wore flimsy stockings and pants of a piece; there was something identifiably duenna’d about the suspenders and the belt they implied. His stranger’s hand, man’s hand, opened a forefinger and hooked it under the stocking-top and touched flesh.

In the cosy dark of other presences, in the intimacy like the loneliness of the crowd, the feel of flesh is experienced anew, as the taste of water is recognized anew in the desert. The finger went against the grain of fine down - yes, the flesh admits that it belongs to the Latin races, often hairy - and reached the warmth of the two legs pressed together. The skin was tacky, almost damp. It clung to his fingers with a message of excitement and pleasure. He felt how she kept her head absolutely still and knew he was forbidden to look at her face. Tucked, sucked in between the neatly parallel thighs his finger stirred only very slightly, just a murmur. He did not know its exact position in relation to the knees and the limits of the body; much higher than half-way, he guessed, because of the fullness of the thighs. The finger was in no hurry to broach the question; the thighs must be anticipating that it was coming. Even if they had never answered it before (neither she nor the sister looked more than sixteen or seventeen) they knew it had come now, whatever time this was - an hour between the hour of Europe and the hour of Africa, not registered on any watch glowing on passengers’ wrists in the quiet dark - and whatever place this was: passengers are not disturbed by flight information while they sleep. It could have been the last of Europe or was Africa, already, they were unaware of passing over. She need not be afraid of wanting what was happening because it was happening nowhere. The other three fingers fluently joined the forefinger between the thighs and then unexpectedly (it must have been, for her) lost coherence and freeing themselves all the fingers trailed back and forth over the mound of one thigh, under the stocking but without unfastening the suspender, because the hand liked its confinement beneath a web. Then the fingers curled - she must have felt the tips if not the nails drawing in - and found, of course, another ridge of material that gave easily, in fact care had to be taken not to let it snap back against the skin - a crinkly edging round the leg of panties of some tight stretchy weave. If she had been sitting more upright, this was where the crease of juncture of thigh and body would have been. But she was lying as fully stretched under her rug as the seat on its reclining ratchet would allow, and his fingers recognized the juncture only by the different texture of the skin, a sudden grainless smoothness, silky and hot.

This time the question was differently phrased, that’s all, but it must have been understood all the same: there was no rejoinder of change of position. The thighs, he could feel where the heel of his palm rested a moment on them, continued to clasp excitedly against nothing. His finger, just the one forefinger again (an appreciative monologue) roamed amid the curly hair in no hurry, delicately burrowed beneath this soft second rug as it was already concealed by the first and - suddenly — found itself tongued by a grateful dog. That was exactly what it felt like - delightful, fluttering, as innocent as the licking of a puppy; although it was he who was stroking movement along this wet and silky lining of her body, he had the impression it was his finger that was being caressed, not the finger that was doing the caressing. Now and then, quite naturally, he encountered the soundless O of the little mouth that made no refusal. As the night wore on - oh God knows how long it went on - the finger was able to enter, many times. At first he himself was magnificently tense, not only his sex but his whole body and legs, arms, neck, huge in the seat, swollen into unusual awareness of the bounds of himself, but later there were even moments when he must have been so fatigued he dozed, his finger inside her. He woke with amazement: in the tunnel of seat-backs, the dim curving walls, the very faint creaking that was all there was to indicate that the sensation of motionlessness was in fact the nest of extreme speed - just as the extreme intimacy, his hand, finger still inside the body beside him, laved with it, was the extreme of detachment.

The gradual coming into the light of a morning somewhere did not bring an end. He could not leave her and she could not let him go. The only thing he could not get her to do was touch him; her rather plump and quite womanly hand went limp and stiff-wristed when he tried to carry it over to himself; she would not. Soon it was light, anyway, the lights went up brutally on the sleepers as prisoners are forced awake, and he took his weary hand back in good time before the trays of synthetic fruit juice arrived. The hand smelled of the body it had just left. The girl waited for him to take a plastic cup of juice and then took hers, with the same soundless thank you to the hostess. They did not speak; she emptied the cup thirstily (yes, my girl, lust dries the mouth), put the soft rug aside and went up the aisle. When she returned, she had to stand a moment before taking her seat because someone was blocking the aisle, and he looked up and met her gaze, her pale, thick-skinned face with heavy eyebrows arched, hopeless, acceptingly. A stranger’s face as the face of a woman with whom one has lived so long one doesn’t see it anymore, becomes once again closed, a stranger’s.

She carefully put back the rug over herself.

He had pushed up the eyelid of blind in his oval porthole. The reluctantly-a wakened plane drifted to half-sleep again. Orange searchlights of rising sun pierced from window across to window in the prostrate humming silence. It all began again, uncanny in the daylight. Down there below reddish eddyings of the upper air and the glint of wing flashing monotonously at him, sand was an infinite progression of petrified sound-waves. It flowed on and on, echoing itself since there was no organic renewal by which life could be measured. On and on, shimmering, fading, paling, deepening nothing. His gaze was carried on it while he continued to stroke, fondle, dabble, on and on, all the way, caressing her all the way. The desert became forests, savannah, mine-dumps. At Johannesburg when he handed down a pink coat and a package of something that looked like a plant laced up in plastic, he spoke: — You are on holiday? — She answered that she and her mother and sister were coming to live with her uncle. Her English was strongly accented but quite intelligible. He said — Oh you’ll like it there, in Durban. At the sea. - Her mother, moving with the other daughter along the queue in the aisle, nodded a faint and humble acknowledgement of the help he had given with hand-luggage.

He had washed his hands; used his electric razor; her hair was combed. The same clerk always came along with the driver to fetch him from the airport; he saw waiting at the barrier the respectfully alert, cocky young face, the sideburns and striped shirt advertised as correct wear for budding executives. An immigration official recognized him and waved him through ahead of the other sheep. The plant was being taken out of its wrapping at customs - of course, you can’t bring in live plants from other countries. There was the usual making of conversation with the clerk in the car. — Good trip, this time, sir? Everything all right? —

- My knees need a week to straighten out, that’s all. I had to travel tourist. Cramped as all hell. —

Her fluid on his hand as one says a man has blood on his hands. She screamed, or got up and told her mother. What an insane risk. A prosecution for ‘interfering’ with a young girl; yes,
crimen injuria
. That was the name; the girl had no name. A TAP mohair rug. Who would have thought it. Not without tenderness, but who is ever to know that is part of the scandal - perhaps even of rape and murder? - sometimes the only tenderness possible. A man in his position would never be free of tittering disgrace. Never. Silence in the boardroom, change of conversation at the dinner-table when his name came up, and the young daughter of the house not told the reason, because she had known him as a family friend since she was a child along with his son. An insane risk. Nothing will ever be disclosed. It was so easy, and god knows who the stranger was and where, in these streets or those, this town or that, she may anytime be quite near, with the mother and sister and whole clan those people have, guarding young girls.

Linking brazier to brazier, darkness to darkness and smoke to smoke, the calls of winter evenings are not addressed to him. On his way home his headlights hold out of the dark — fountain jets balancing objects aloft - the shrouded shapes of the queue waiting for a bus outside the location. The blur of frost: a cold bloom formed on the outside of a glass. A sheet of plastic he’s annoyed to see left lying at the windmill tap turns out, when he strides over in the warm sun of ten in the morning, to be a valance of icicles fallen from where they formed overnight on the water tank.

But already at the centre of the wind that blows from ten until sunset, there is a hot breath, some days. It happens literally from one to the next. He was out here, say Wednesday or Thursday, looking at the extent of the damage that reveals itself in decay as the weeks go by: the vlei is the quilled back of a porcupine, striped black and white where the reeds have paled and died off beneath their burned tops. He thought he saw a yellow weaver fly up and down a couple of times. And only two days later (the vlei looks the same), a single green nest: newly woven, or perhaps an old one repaired. That weaver was reconnoitring; they’re back.

And now today he sees what he didn’t before - probably because it wasn’t there yet - on the damp verges there is sufficient new grass to make a nest. It’s very thin and pale-bright, almost transparent. It looks bluish, perhaps only in contrast to the grave of black from which it has grown. He begins to find all the signs that were not revealed to him before (is it possible they really have appeared so quickly, were not there two days ago: last week?); things come to life under his eyes as the syntax of a foreign language suddenly begins to yield meaning. Along the strands of willow, nibs of glossy brown; catch them in his nail and they break back, green. Some spread small green leaves as hard-backed beetles will unfold thin gauzy wings from beneath a carapace. On the irrigation canals there is a scum of bubbly livid, in places velvety. Break it with a stick - the stagnant broth has swirls of emerald and bottle-green slime like the markings petrified in a semi-precious stone.

The tongue-tips of new reeds are forcing through sodden burned clumps.

It could have been worse.

— Oh yes. —

— It could have been worse, I suppose —

Words to that effect. But were they referring to the same things when they talked together? There was time to drive him out at least to have a look at the place again, because one of the secretaries had been instructed to book a seat on a plane instead of the usual school train.

— Thirteen thousand Ovambos on strike, that time, and the police didn’t dare touch them because of United Nations. That’s something. But the settlement was a sell-out. Nobody knows what’s going on in Ovamboland. We had a chance to talk to some Ovambos in the fisheries at Walvis —

He doesn’t look at his father while he speaks, it is a profile that presents itself beside the driver’s seat. The soft little downy beard is coming on; the eyelashes are arrogant and curved as a girl’s and the expression in the eyes cannot be seen.

— What in God’s name d’you find to do in Walvis! One street and a couple of beer
stuben
. At least in my day. —

He went there with some university student who picked him up. One of those who stick their noses into everything. No good blaming Kurt and Emmy; there was nothing they could do to stop it. But he does not seem to want to pursue the subject; he seems to keep resisting the urge to talk about what preoccupies him: what? The blacks in ‘Namibia’? The prospect of army service next year?

— Not my idea of a place for a good time! —