It was on these occasions that we would look at one another and wink. Sometimes Lettie would come into the room while Koenrad was saying these things about their father. But you could not tell by her face that she heard. There was just that calm and distant look in her eyes.
But we listened most attentively when Koenrad spoke about his trek into the Protectorate with Frik Engelbrecht. He said awful things about thirst and sin and fever, and we held our breath in fear that we should miss a word. It gave me a queer sort of feeling, more than once, to be sitting in that room of sickness, looking at a man with wasted cheeks, whose cracked lips were mumbling dark words. And in the midst of these frightening things he would suddenly talk about little red flowers that lay on the grass. He spoke about the foot of a hill where shadows were. And about small red flowers on the grass. He spoke as though these flowers were the most dreadful part of the story.
It was always at this stage that the argument started amongst the men sitting in the room.
Piet Snyman said it was all nonsense, the first time that Koenrad mentioned the flowers. Piet said that he had never seen any red flowers in the Protectorate, and he had been there often.
Stephanus Naudé agreed with him, and said that Koenrad was just trying to be funny with us, now, and was wasting our time. He said he didn’t get up early every morning and ride sixteen miles to hear Koenrad Wium discuss flowers. Piet Snyman sympathised with Stephanus Naudé, and said that he himself had almost as far to ride. “While Koenrad tells us about himself and Engelbrecht, or about his father’s dishonesty, we can listen to him,” Piet added.
The ouderling held up his hand.
“Broeders,” he said. “Let us not judge Koenrad Wium too harshly. Maybe he already had the fever, then, when he thought he saw the red flowers.”
Piet Snyman said that was all very well, but then why couldn’t Koenrad tell us so, straight out? “After all, we are his guests,” Piet explained. “We sit here and drink his coffee, and then he tries to be funny.”
There was much that was reasonable in what Piet Snyman said.
We said that Koenrad was not being honest with us, and that it looked as though he had inherited that dishonesty from his father. We said, further, that he wasn’t grateful for the trouble we were taking over him. He seemed to forget that it didn’t happen to just any sick person to have half the able-bodied men in the Marico watching at his bedside. Practically day and night, you could say. And sitting as near the bed as Lettie would allow us.
Gradually Koenrad began to get better.
But before that happened a kaffir brought a message to us from the man in charge of the Drogevlei post office. The man wanted to know if we would like to have our letters re-addressed to Koenrad Wium’s house at Platrand. We realised that it was a sarcastic message, and when we pointed this out to the ouderling, he went to the back of the house and kicked the kaffir for bringing it.
Koenrad’s recovery was slow. But when he regained consciousness he did not talk much. Furthermore, he seemed to have no recollection of the things he had said in his days of delirium. He seemed to remember nothing of his mumblings about his boyhood, and about Engelbrecht and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. And although the ouderling questioned him, subtly, when Lettie was in the kitchen and the bedroom door was closed, there was not much that we could learn from his replies.
“Take your father, for instance,” the ouderling said – and we looked significantly at one another – “can you remember him in the old days, when you were living in the Cape?”
“Yes,” Koenrad answered.
“And did they ever – I mean,” the ouderling corrected himself, “did your father ever go away from the house for, say, six months?”
“No,” Koenrad replied.
“Twelve months, then?”
“No,” Koenrad said.
“Did you ever see him walking about,” the ouderling asked, “with a red handkerchief fastened over the lower part of his face?” We could see, from this question, that the ouderling had more exciting ideas than we had about the sort of things that a thief does.
“No,” Koenrad said again, looking surprised.
All Koenrad’s replies were like that – unsatisfactory. Still, it wasn’t the ouderling’s fault. We knew that the ouderling had done his best. Piet Snyman’s methods, however, were not the same as the ouderling’s. His words were not so well thought out.
“You don’t seem to remember much about your father – huh?” Piet Snyman said. “But what about all those small red flowers lying around on the grass?”
The change that came over Koenrad Wium’s face at this question was astonishing. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he drew the blanket over his head and lay very still. Piet Snyman was still trying to pull the blanket off his face, again, when Lettie walked into the bedroom.
“Your brother has had a relapse,” the ouderling said to Lettie.
Lettie looked at the ouderling without speaking. She picked up the quinine bottle and knelt at Koenrad’s bedside.
Koenrad relapsed quite often after that, when Lettie was in the kitchen. He relapsed four times over questions that the ouderling asked him, and seven times over things that Piet Snyman wanted to know. It was noticeable that Koenrad’s condition did not improve very fast.
Nevertheless, his periods of delirium grew fewer, and the number of his visitors dwindled. Towards the end only the ouderling and I were left. And we began discussing, cautiously, the mystery of Frik Engelbrecht’s disappearance.
“It’s funny about those red flowers on the grass,” the ouderling said in a whisper, when Koenrad was asleep. “I wonder if he meant that there was blood on the grass?”
We also said that Lettie seemed to be acting strangely, and I said I wondered how she felt about the fact that her lover had not returned.
“Perhaps she has already got her eye on some other man,” the ouderling said, and he pushed out his chest and stroked his beard. “Perhaps what she wants now is an older man, with more understanding. A man who has been married before.”
The ouderling was a widower.
I thought he was talking very foolishly. For it was easy to see – from the look of patient dignity that passed over her face whenever she glanced at me – that Lettie preferred the kind of man that I was.
Then, one day, when Koenrad Wium was well enough to be able to move about the room, two men came for him. One wore a policeman’s uniform. The other was in plain clothes, and walked with a brisk step. And Lettie opened the door for them and led them into the bedroom, very calmly, as though she had been expecting them.
Starlight on the Veld
It was a cold night (Oom Schalk Lourens said), the stars shone with that frosty sort of light that you see on the wet grass some mornings, when you forget that it is winter, and you get up early, by mistake. The wind was like a girl sobbing out her story of betrayal to the stars.
Jan Ockerse and I had been to Derdepoort by donkey-cart. We came back in the evening. And Jan Ockerse told me of a road round the foot of a koppie that would be a short cut back to Drogevlei. Thus it was that we were sitting on the veld, close to the fire, waiting for the morning. We would then be able to ask a kaffir to tell us a short cut back to the foot of that koppie.
“But I know that it was the right road,” Jan Ockerse insisted, flinging another armful of wood on the fire.
“Then it must have been the wrong koppie,” I answered, “or the wrong donkey-cart. Unless you also want me to believe that I am at this moment sitting at home, in my voorkamer.”
The light from the flames danced frostily on the spokes of a cartwheel, and I was glad to think that Jan Ockerse must be feeling as cold as I was.
“It is a funny sort of night,” Jan Ockerse said, “and I am very miserable and hungry.”
I was glad of that, too. I had begun to fear that he was enjoying himself.
“Do you know how high up the stars are?” Jan asked me next.
“No, not f
rom here,” I said, “but I worked it all out once, when I had a pencil. That was on the Highveld, though. But from where we are now, in the Lowveld, the stars are further away. You can see that they look smaller, too.”
“Yes, I expect so,” Jan Ockerse answered, “but a school-teacher told me a different thing in the bar at Zeerust. He said that the stargazers work out how far away a star is by the number of years that it takes them to find it in their telescopes. This school-teacher dipped his finger in the brandy and drew a lot of pictures and things on the bar counter, to show me how it was done. But one part of his drawings always dried up on the counter before he had finished doing the other part with his finger. He said that was the worst of that dry sort of brandy. Yet he didn’t finish his explanations, because the barmaid came and wiped it all off with a rag. Then the school-teacher told me to come with him and he would use the blackboard in the other classroom. But the barmaid wouldn’t allow us to take our glasses into the private bar, and the school-teacher fell down just about then, too.”
“He seems to be one of that new kind of school-teacher,” I said, “the kind that teaches the children that the earth turns round the sun. I am surprised they didn’t sack him.”
“Yes,” Jan Ockerse answered, “they did.”
I was glad to hear that also.
It seemed that there was a waterhole near where we were outspanned. For a couple of jackals started howling mournfully. Jan Ockerse jumped up and piled more wood on the fire.
“I don’t like those wild animal noises,” he said.
“They are only jackals, Jan,” I said.
“I know,” he answered, “but I was thinking of our donkeys. I don’t want our donkeys to get frightened.”
Suddenly a deep growl came to us from out of the dark bush. And it didn’t sound a particularly mournful growl, either. Jan Ockerse worked very fast then with the wood.
“Perhaps it will be even better if we make two fires, and lie down between them,” Jan Ockerse said, “our donkeys will feel less frightened if they see that you and I are safe. You know how a donkey’s mind works.”
The light of the fire shone dimly on the skeletons of the tall trees that the white ants had eaten, and we soon had two fires going. By the time that the second deep roar from the bush reached us, I had made an even bigger fire than Jan Ockerse, for the sake of the donkeys.
Afterwards it got quiet again. There was only the stirring of the wind in the thorn branches, and the rustling movement of things that you hear in the Bushveld at night.
Jan Ockerse lay on his back and put his hands under his head, and once more looked up at the stars.
“I have heard that these stars are worlds, just like ours,” he said, “and that they have got people living on them, even.”
“I don’t think they would be good for growing mealies on, though,” I answered, “they look too high up. Like the rante of the Sneeuberge, in the Cape. But I suppose they would make quite a good horse and cattle country. That’s the trouble with these low-lying districts, like the Marico and the Waterberg: there is too much horse-sickness and tsetse-fly here.”
“And butterflies,” Jan Ockerse said sleepily, “with gold wings.”
I also fell asleep shortly afterwards. And when I woke up again the fires were almost dead. I got up and fetched more wood. It took me quite a while to wake Jan Ockerse, though. Because the veldskoens I was wearing were the wrong kind, and had soft toes. Eventually he sat up and rubbed his eyes; and he said, of course, that he had been lying awake all night. What made him so certain that he had not been asleep, he said, was that he was imagining all the time that he was chasing bluebottles amongst the stars.
“And I would have caught up with them, too,” he added, “only a queer sort of thing happened to me, while I was jumping from one star to another. It was almost as though somebody was kicking me.”
Jan Ockerse looked at me in a suspicious kind of way.
So I told him that it was easy to see that he had been dreaming.
When the fires were piled high with wood, Jan Ockerse again said that it was a funny night, and once more started talking about the stars.
“What do you think sailors do at sea, Schalk,” he said, “if they don’t know the way and there aren’t any other ships around from whom they can ask?”
“They have got it all written down on a piece of paper with a lot of red and blue on it,” I answered, “and there are black lines that show you the way from Cape Town to St. Helena. And figures to tell you how many miles down the ship will go if it sinks. I went to St. Helena during the Boer War. You can live in a ship just like an ox-wagon. Only, a ship isn’t so comfortable, of course. And it is further between outspans.”
“I heard, somewhere, that sailors find their way by the stars,” Jan Ockerse said, “I wonder what people want to tell me things like that for.”
He lay silent for a while, looking up at the stars and thinking.
“I remember one night when I stood on Annie Steyn’s stoep and spoke to her about the stars,” Jan Ockerse said, later. “I was going to trek with the cattle to the Limpopo because of the drought. I told Annie that I would be away until the rains came, and I told her that every night, when I was gone, she had to look at a certain star and think of me. I showed her which star. Those three stars there, that are close together in a straight line. She had to remember me by the middle one, I said. But Annie explained that Willem Mostert, who had trekked to the Limpopo about a week before, had already picked that middle star for her to remember him by. So I said, all right, the top star would do.
But Annie said that one already belonged to Stoffel Brink. In the end I agreed that she could remember me by the bottom star, and Annie was still saying that she would look at the lower one of those three stars every night and think of me, when her father, who seemed to have been listening behind the door, came on to the stoep and said: ‘What about cloudy nights?’ in what he supposed was a clever sort of way.”
“What happened then?” I asked Jan Ockerse.
“Annie was very annoyed,” he replied, “she told her father that he was always spoiling things. She told him that he wasn’t a bit funny, really, especially as I was the third young man to whom he had said the same thing. She said that no matter how foolish a young man might be, her father had no right to make jokes like that in front of him. It was good to hear the way that Annie stood up for me. Anyway, what followed was a long story. I came across Willem Mostert and Stoffel Brink by the Limpopo. And we remained together there for several months. And it must have been an unusual sight for a stranger to see three young men sitting round the camp-fire, every night, looking up at the stars. We got friendly, after a while, and when the rains came the three of us trekked back to the Marico. And I found, then, that Annie’s father had been right. About the cloudy nights, I mean. For I understood that it was on just such a sort of night that Annie had run off to Johannesburg with a bywoner who was going to look for work on the mines.”
Jan Ockerse sighed and returned to his thinking.
But with all the time that we had spent in talking and sleeping, most of the night had slipped away. We kept only one fire going now, and Jan Ockerse and I took turns in putting on the wood. It gets very cold just before dawn, and we were both shivering.
“Anyway,” Jan Ockerse said after a while, “now you know why I am interested in stars. I was a young man when this happened. And I have told very few people about it. About seventeen people, I should say. The others wouldn’t listen. But always, on a clear night, when I see those three bright stars in a row, I look for a long time at that lowest star, and there seems to be something very friendly about the way it shines. It seems to be my star, and its light is different from the light of the other stars … and you know, Schalk, Annie Steyn had such red lips. And such long, soft hair, Schalk. And there was that smile of hers.”
Afterwards the stars grew pale and we started rounding up the donkeys and got ready to go. And I wondered wh
at Annie Steyn would have thought of it, if she had known that during all those years there was this man, looking up at the stars on nights when the sky was clear, and dreaming about her lips and her hair and her smile. But as soon as I reflected about it, I knew what the answer was, also. Of course, Annie Steyn would think nothing of Jan Ockerse. Nothing at all.
And, no doubt, Annie Steyn was right.
But it was strange to think that we had passed a whole night in talking about the stars. And I did not know, until then, that it was all on account of a love story of long ago.
We climbed on to the cart and set off to look for the way home.
“I know that school-teacher in the Zeerust bar was all wrong,” Jan Ockerse said, finally, “when he tried to explain how far away the stars are. The lower one of those three stars – ah, it has just faded – is very near to me. Yes, it is very near.”
Marico Moon
I buttoned up my jacket because of the night wind that came whistling through the thorn-trees (Oom Schalk Lourens said); my fingers on the reins were stiff with the cold.
There were four of us in the mule-cart, driving along the Government Road on our way back from the dance at Withaak. I sat in front with Dirk Prinsloo, a young school-teacher. In the back were Petrus Lemmer and his sister’s step-daughter, Annie.
Petrus Lemmer was an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church. He told us that he was very strongly opposed to parties, because people got drunk at parties, and all sorts of improper things happened. He had only gone to the dance at Withaak, he said, because of Annie. He explained that he had to be present to make quite sure that nothing unseemly took place at a dance that his sister’s step-daughter went to.
The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories Page 14