The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Was Pieterse – I mean, did Pieterse not look very surprised, sort of, at your being taken ill so suddenly, Oom Tobie?” Jurie Steyn asked, doing his best to keep a straight face.

  “Well, no,” Oom Tobie replied in all honesty. “When he helped me back onto the stoep from the place where we were going to put up the fence, Pieterse said he had felt for quite some days that I had this illness coming on. It wasn’t so much anything he could see about me as what he felt, he said. And he could remember the exact time, too, when he first had that feeling. It was the afternoon when the poles and the rolls of barbed wire came from Ramoutsa. He didn’t himself feel too good, either, that afternoon, he said. It was as though there was something unhealthy in the air. He’s an extraordinary fellow, Pieterse. But that’s because he’s Cape Coloured, I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s some part of him Slams, too. You know these Malays …”

  Chris Welman asked Oom Tobie what he thought his illness was, this time. “Well, I know it can’t be the horse-sickness,” Oom Tobie said, “because I had the horse-sickness last year. And when you’ve had the horse-sickness once you don’t get it again. You’re salted.”

  The new schoolteacher, Vermaak, who wasn’t long out of college, and whom Jurie Steyn’s wife seemed to think a lot of, on account of his education, then said that it was the first time he had ever heard of a human being getting horse-sickness.

  Several of us, speaking at the same time, told the schoolteacher that there were lots of things he had never heard of, and that a white man getting horse-sickness was what he now had an opportunity of getting instructed about. We told him that if he remained in the Groot Marico longer, and observed a little, he would no doubt learn things that would surprise him, yet.

  The schoolmaster said that that had already happened to him. Just from looking around, he said.

  “What I have got this time, now, is, I think, the blue-tongue,” Oom Tobie continued. “Mind you, I used to think that only sheep get the bluetongue. When there is rain after a long drought – that is the worst time for the blue-tongue. And you know the dry spell was pretty long, here in the district, before these rains started. So I think it must be blue-tongue.”

  Gysbert van Tonder asked Oom Tobie to put his tongue out, so we could see. We all pretended to take a lot of interest in Oom Tobie’s tongue, then. It was, of course, quite an ordinary-looking sort of tongue, perhaps somewhat on the thick side and with tobacco-juice stains in the cracks. Oom Tobie first protruded his tongue out straight in front of his face as far as it would go – a by no means inconsiderable distance. Then he let his tongue hang down on his chin, for a bit.

  Oom Tobie was engaged in lifting his tongue up again, in the direction of his eyebrows, so that we could see the underneath part of it, when Jurie Steyn’s wife came into the voorkamer from the kitchen. From her remarks, then, it was clear that she had not heard any of our previous conversation.

  “I am ashamed of you, Oom Tobie,” Jurie Steyn’s wife announced, speaking very severely. “Sticking out your tongue at Mr Vermaak like that.”

  The schoolmaster was sharing the riempies bench with Oom Tobie.

  Oom Tobie started to explain what it was all about. But because he forgot, in the excitement of the moment, to put his tongue back again, first, all he could utter was a sequence of somewhat peculiar noises.

  “If you disagree with Mr Vermaak on any subject,” Jurie Steyn’s wife went on, “then you can at least discuss the matter with him in a respectable sort of way. To stick out your tongue at a man, and to wobble it, is no way to carry on a discussion, Oom Tobie. I can only hope that Mr Vermaak does not think everybody in the Bushveld is so unrefined.”

  By that time Oom Tobie had found his tongue again, however, in quite a literal way. And in a few simple sentences he was able to acquaint Jurie Steyn’s wife with the facts of the situation. Oom Tobie might have made those sentences even simpler, perhaps. Only he happened, out of the corner of his eye, to catch a glimpse of Jurie Steyn behind the counter. And Oom Tobie was sick enough on account of the blue-tongue. He did not want to become still more of an invalid as a result of a misunderstanding with Jurie Steyn, who was known for his strength and ill-temper.

  “But if it’s the blue-tongue in sheep that I’ve got,” Oom Tobie proceeded, hastily, “then it won’t show first in my tongue, so much. You see it first in the limp sort of way my wool hangs. It was the same with the horse-sickness. The first sign of it was a feeling of stiffness just behind the fetlock. It was several days before I started getting the snuffles –”

  Gysbert van Tonder interrupted Oom Tobie at that point.

  “Tell us, Oom Tobie …” Gysbert van Tonder began, and as he spoke his glance travelled in the direction of young Vermaak, the school-teacher. We guessed what was going on in Gysbert van Tonder’s mind. We felt the same way about it, too. You see, in the Marico we might perhaps laugh at Oom Tobie, and invent a nickname for him, and we didn’t mind if the Klipkop tribe of Bushmen in the Kalahari also spoke of him by that nickname. Those things we could understand. But even when we laughed at Oom Tobie, we also had a respect for him. And we didn’t like the idea that a stranger straight from university, like young Vermaak, wearing city clothes and all, should not give Oom Tobie his due. For that matter, the Klipkop Bushmen still gave Oom Tobie his due. And they did not wear city clothes. Not by a long chalk the Klipkop Bushmen didn’t.

  And what we were genuinely proud of Oom Tobie about was the fact that he had had more wild and domestic animal diseases than any man you could come across anywhere in Africa. At catch-weights and with no holds barred, we could put him, in his own line, against any sick man from Woodstock Beach to the Zambezi. And while we could laugh at him as much as we wanted, we did not like strangers to.

  Consequently, when Gysbert van Tonder turned to Oom Tobie with a determined expression on his face, we knew what Gysbert was going to say. He was going to ask Oom Tobie, salted with horse-sickness and all, really to show his paces.

  “Tell us,” Gysbert van Tonder said, getting up from his chair and folding his arms across his chest. “Tell us, Oom Tobie, about the time you had snake-sickness.”

  Thus encouraged, Oom Tobie told us, and with an elaborate amount of detail.

  “But I wouldn’t like to have to go through all that again,” he ended up.

  “All the time I was suffering from snake disease I felt so low, if you understand what I mean. With my backside right on the ground, as it were.”

  Chris Welman coughed, then.

  For Jurie Steyn’s wife was still present, and it seemed as though Oom Tobie was perhaps getting a bit coarse. To our surprise, however, Jurie Steyn himself said that it was quite in order. When you were talking about snakes, it was only natural that you should talk about them as they were, he said. It would be ungodly to pretend that a snake was different from what we all knew a snake to be.

  He spoke with a warmth that made us all feel uncomfortable.

  “For that matter,” Jurie Steyn added, with a sort of careful deliberation, “there is more than just one kind of snake right here in the Marico. There are lots of kinds.”

  I noticed that the young schoolteacher looked down, when Jurie spoke like that. I also noticed that shortly afterwards Jurie Steyn’s wife went back to the kitchen.

  We were glad when Oom Tobie started talking about his illness again. It seemed to remove quite a lot of strain.

  “Maybe it isn’t the blue-tongue,” Oom Tobie said, “because I felt it coming on even before the time that Pieterse spoke to me about it. I felt it after I had bought that barbed wire at the store at Ramoutsa. So I think maybe it’s something I ate. I ate two bananas. They gave me those two bananas as a bonsella for all the wire I bought.”

  Shortly afterwards the Government lorry came. And I still remember what At Naudé, who reads the newspapers, said when Oom Tobie, all buttoned up in his coat and scarf, and with a cushion under his arm, climbed aboard the lorry.

  “Oom To
bie looks like he’s a Member of Parliament,” At Naudé said, “fixed up for an all-night sitting.”

  Nevertheless, we were not too happy when, next time the lorry came, the driver told us what the doctor at Bekkersdal had told him was wrong with Oom Tobie. For it was a human disease, this time. And it would almost appear as though the Cape Coloured man, Pieterse, really was to some extent Slams. Moreover, we ourselves had been in somewhat close contact with Oom Tobie, and so we did not feel too comfortable about it.

  It looked as though Oom Tobie had landed a winner, all right, and it was not impossible that the bonsella bananas had played a part in it.

  All the same, it’s queer how frightened everybody gets when you hear the word smallpox.

  II

  Onlookers at the New Year’s eve dance of the Mamba Klub of the Dwarsberg Boerevereniging’s Boeresport. 31 December 1965

  News Story

  “The way the world is today,” At Naudé said, shaking his head, “I don’t know what is going to happen.”

  From that it was clear that At Naudé had been hearing news over the wireless again that made him fear for the future of the country. We did not exactly sit up, then. We in the Dwarsberge knew that it was the wireless that made At Naudé that way. And he could tremble as much as he liked for the country’s future or his own. There was never any change, either, in the kind of news he would bring us. Every time it was about stonethrowings in Johannesburg locations and about how many new kinds of bombs the Russians had got, and about how many people had gone to gaol for telling the Russians about still other kinds of bombs they could make. Although it did not look as though the Russians needed to be educated much in that line.

  And we could never really understand why At Naudé listened at all. We hardly ever listened to him, for that matter. We would rather hear from Gysbert van Tonder if it was true that the ouderling at Pilanesberg really forgot himself in the way that Jurie Steyn’s wife had heard about from a kraal Mtosa at the kitchen door. The Mtosa had come by to buy halfpenny stamps to stick on his forehead for the yearly Ndlolo dance. Now, there was news for you. About the ouderling, I mean. And even to hear that the Ndlolo dance was being held soon again was at least something. And if it should turn out that what was being said about the Pilanesberg ouderling was not true, well, then, the same thing applied to a lot of what At Naudé heard over the wireless also.

  “I don’t know what is going to happen,” At Naudé repeated, “the way the world is today. I just heard over the wireless –”

  “That’s how the news we got in the old days was better,” Oupa Bekker said. “I mean in the real old days, when there was no wireless, and there was not the telegraph, either. The news you got then you could do something with. And you didn’t have to go to the post office and get it from the newspaper. The post office is the curse of the Transvaal …”

  Jurie Steyn said that Oupa Bekker was quite right, there. He himself would never have taken on the job of postmaster at Drogevlei if he had as much as guessed that there were four separate forms that he would have to fill in, each of them different, just for a simple five-shilling money order. It was so much brainier and neater, Jurie Steyn said, for people who wanted to send five shillings somewhere, if they would just wrap up a couple of half-crowns in a thick wad of brown paper and then post them in the ordinary way, like a letter. That was what the new red pillar-box in front of his door was for, Jurie Steyn explained. The authorities had gone to the expense of that red pillar-box in order to help the public. And yet you still found people coming in for postal orders and money orders. The other day a man even came in and asked could he telegraph some money, somewhere.

  “I gave that man a piece of brown paper and showed him the pillarbox,” Jurie Steyn said. “It seemed, until then, that he did not know what kind of progress we had been making here. I therefore asked him if I could show him some more ways in regard to how advanced the Groot Marico was getting. But he said, no, the indications I had already given him were plenty.”

  Jurie Steyn said that he thought it was handsome of the man to have spoken up for the Marico like that, seeing that he was quite a newcomer to these parts.

  Because we never knew how long Jurie Steyn would be when once he got on the subject of his work, we were glad when Johnny Coen asked Oupa Bekker to explain some more to us about how they got news in the old days. We were all pleased, that is, except At Naudé, who had again tried to get in a remark but had got no further than to say that if we knew something we would all shiver in our veldskoens.

  “How did we get news?” Oupa Bekker said, replying to another question of Johnny Coen’s. “Well, you would be standing in the lands, say, and then one of the Bechuanas would point to a small cloud of dust in the poort, and you would walk across to the big tree by the dam, where the road bends, and the traveller would come past there, with two vos horses in front of his Cape-cart, and he would get off from the cart and shake hands and say he was Du Plessis. And you would say you were Bekker, and he would say, afterwards, that he couldn’t stay the night on your farm, because he had to get to Tsalala’s Kop. Well, there was news. You could talk about it for days. For weeks even. You have got no idea how often my wife and I discussed it. And we knew everything that there was to know about the man. We knew his name was Du Plessis.”

  At Naudé said, then, that he did not think much of that sort of news. People must have been a bit simpel in the head, in those old times that Oupa Bekker was talking about, if they thought anything about that sort of news. Why, if you compared it with what the radio announcer said, only yesterday …

  Jurie Steyn’s wife came in from the kitchen at that moment. There was a light of excitement in her eyes. And when she spoke it was to none of us in particular.

  “It has just occurred to me,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said, “that is, if it’s true what they are saying about the Pilanesberg ouderling, of course. Well, it has just struck me that, when he forgot himself in the way they say – provided that he did forget himself like that, mind you – well, perhaps the ouderling didn’t know that anybody was looking.”

  That was a possibility that had not so far occurred to us, and we discussed it at some length. In between our talk At Naudé was blurting out something about the rays from a still newer kind of bomb that would kill you right in the middle of the veld and through fifty feet of concrete. So we said, of course, that the best thing to do would be to keep a pretty safe distance away from concrete, with those sort of rays about, if concrete was as dangerous as all that.

  We were in no mood for foolishness. Oupa Bekker took this as an encouragement for him to go on.

  “Or another day,” Oupa Bekker continued, “you would again be standing in your lands, say, or sitting, even, if there was a long day of ploughing ahead, and you did not want to tire yourself out unnecessarily. You would be sitting on a stone in the shade of a tree, say, and you would think to yourself how lazy those Bechuanas look, going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, with the plough and the oxen, and you would get quite sleepy, say, thinking to yourself how lazy those Bechuanas are. If it wasn’t for the oxen to keep them going, they wouldn’t do any work at all, you might perhaps think.

  “And then, without your in the least expecting it, you would again have news. And the news would find a stone for himself and come along and sit down right next to you. It would be the new veldkornet, say. And why nobody saw any dust in the poort, that time, was because the veldkornet didn’t come along the road. And you would make a joke with him and say: ‘I suppose that’s why they call you a veldkornet, because you don’t travel along the road, but you come by the veldlanges.’ And the veldkornet would laugh and ask you a few questions, and he would tell you that they had good rains at Derdepoort … Well, there was something that I could tell my wife over and over again, for weeks. It was news. For weeks I had that to think about. The visit of the veldkornet. In the old days it was real news.”

  We could see, from the way At Naudé was f
idgeting in his chair, that he guessed we were just egging the old man on to talk in order to scoff at all the important European news that At Naudé regularly retailed to us, and that we were getting tired of.

  After a while At Naudé could no longer contain himself.

  “This second-childhood drivel that Oupa Bekker is talking,” At Naudé announced, not looking at anybody in particular, but saying it to all of us, in the way Jurie Steyn’s wife had spoken when she came out of the kitchen. “Well, I would actually sooner listen to scandal about the Pilanesberg ouderling. There is at least some sort of meaning to it. I am not being unfriendly to Oupa Bekker, of course. I know it’s just that he’s old. But it’s also quite clear to me that he doesn’t know what news is, at all.”

  Jurie Steyn said that it was at least as sensible as a man lying on the veld under fifty feet of concrete because of some rays. If a man were to lie under fifty feet of concrete he wouldn’t be able to breathe, leave alone anything else.

  In the meantime, Johnny Coen had been asking Oupa Bekker to tell us some more.

  “On another day, say,” Oupa Bekker went on, “you would not be in your lands at all, but you would be sitting on your front stoep, drinking coffee, say. And the Cape-cart with the two vos horses in front would be coming down the road again, but in the opposite direction, going towards the poort, this time. And you would not see much of Du Plessis’s face, because his hat would be pulled over his eyes. And the veldkornet would be sitting on the Cape-cart next to him, say.”

  Oupa Bekker paused. He paused for quite a while, too, holding a lighted match cupped over his pipe as though he was out on the veld where there was wind, and puffing vigorously.