“But what are you supposed to do about white ants, anyway?” Johnny Coen asked after a while. “Cooper’s dip helps, of course. But there should be a more permanent way of getting rid of them, I’d imagine.”
It was then that we all turned to the schoolmaster, again. What did it say in that book of his about the white ant, we asked him.
Well, there was a chapter in his book on the destruction of termites, the schoolmaster said. At least, there had been a chapter. It was the last chapter in the book. But he had unfortunately left the book lying on his desk in the schoolroom over one weekend. And when he had got back on Monday morning there was a little tunnel running up his desk. And the pages dealing with how to exterminate the white ant had been eaten away.
Piet Siener
Jurie Steyn jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the square crate in the corner of the voorkamer. “That is for Piet Siener,” he announced. “Funny he hasn’t come to fetch it. Maybe he doesn’t know it has arrived.”
We realised that this was a joke of Jurie Steyn’s, of course. As though there was anything Piet Siener, living away at the back of Kalkbult, didn’t know …
I mean, that was why we called him Piet Siener. He not only knew everything that happened, but he also knew it before it happened. Some of his more fervent admirers in the Groot Marico even went so far as to say that Piet Siener also knew about things that didn’t happen at all.
So when Jurie Steyn said that maybe Piet Siener didn’t know that that square box had come for him on the Government lorry, and was waiting to be fetched – well, we understood right away that Jurie Steyn was being playful.
“Piet Siener doesn’t go about much these days,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “There’s nearly always somebody at his house, wanting to know from him about the future. They say he gets it out of the ground. That’s why you always see him walking about his farm with his eyes down, like that. It’s a great gift, knowing everything, the way he does. And he won’t take money for telling you what you want to know. All he’ll take is just a little present, perhaps.”
Then Johnny Coen told us about the last time he went to Kalkbult about something he was keen on getting enlightenment on.
“I came across Piet Siener on his lands,” Johnny Coen said. “He was walking about with his eyes cast down, just like Gysbert said. Piet Siener was walking over uneven ground to try out a new pair of shop boots that his last visitor had made him a little present of.”
But Piet Siener was actually looking more at his feet than at the ground, Johnny Coen added. It seemed that it was a pair of somewhat tight shop boots.
“And what did Piet Siener say?” At Naudé asked. “Did he tell you when Minnie Nienaber would be coming back from Johannesburg?”
Johnny Coen looked mildly surprised.
“Well, I did, as a matter of fact, mention something along those lines to Piet Siener,” he said. “I’m sure I don’t know how you guessed, though. You don’t seem too bad yourself at being a seer.”
But Gysbert van Tonder said that there was nobody in the Groot Marico north of Sephton’s Nek who wouldn’t have been able to guess, just immediately, what it was that Johnny Coen would want to go and see Piet Siener about.
“And, of course, Piet Siener guessed it, too,” Johnny Coen explained. “But in his case, naturally, he didn’t guess it so much as that he divined it. It gave me quite a turn, too, the way he was standing there on the veld with his black beard flowing in the wind and his eyes fixed on his feet divining, because all I said to him was that I had come to see him about a girl, and he asked me her name. And I said Minnie Nienaber. And he said, oh, that must be the daughter of Koos Nienaber. And I said, yes. And he asked me wasn’t she in Johannesburg, or something. He asked it just like that, with his eyes down and seeming as though his gaze would pierce right into the middle of the earth, if it wasn’t that his feet were in the way.”
And we all admitted then that Piet Siener did indeed have very great gifts. And he was so very modest about it, too, we said. It was almost because it was so easy for him to be a seer that he didn’t value it. And so we were not surprised when Johnny Coen told us that when he offered Piet Siener his watch and chain, he wouldn’t take it.
“Piet Siener was quite cross about it, too,” Johnny Coen proceeded. “He said that what he had told me was nothing – just nothing at all. And he said he already had over two dozen watches and chains, and what he would do with any more he just didn’t know. I felt that was one of the few things that Piet Siener really didn’t know. And he said that if I had no more use for my new guitar with the picture of gold angels on it, and if I was determined to give him a little present …”
So we said that that was Piet Siener all over. He would never accept from you anything that you thought something of. If you did give him a present, then it had to be something that you were finished with.
“Like the time I went to see Piet Siener about a cure for my wife’s asthma,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “It was just after I had bought that mealie-planter with the green wheels. I did not say anything to Piet Siener about my wife’s asthma. There was no need for me to. In fact, before I could tell him what I had come about, he told me something quite different. That’s how great a seer he is. He said he could see a most awful disaster hanging over my head. No, he wouldn’t tell me what that disaster was, because if he did tell me it would turn my hair grey overnight, having that size of calamity hanging over my head. It was more than flesh and blood could stand.
“But there was still time to turn that misfortune aside from me onto someone else. So I asked him would he turn it aside onto the market master in Zeerust, and I wouldn’t care how much of a disaster it was then, I said. And Piet Siener said all right. And he said that if I had to give him a little present, well, if I had perhaps thought of throwing away my mealie-planter with the green wheels, then I mustn’t do any such thing. He would take it, he said.”
After that Jurie Steyn told us about the last time Piet Siener came to his post office, and about how there was in the post bag for Jurie Steyn a new kind of hair clipper he had ordered from Johannesburg, having seen a picture of it in the Kerkbode. “I told Piet Siener what was in the parcel,” Jurie continued. “And do you know what, before I had unwrapped it, even, Piet Siener said I mustn’t throw it away on the rubbish heap, or give it to the first Bechuana I saw.”
“Well, can you beat that?” At Naudé asked, and in his tone there was real admiration.
It was while we were still talking about how wonderful he was that Piet Siener himself came into the post office. He walked with a quick step, his black beard flapping. You could see he was excited.
Then he walked straight up to the counter and said to Jurie Steyn: “There’s something come for me in a small packing case. It was sent free on rail.”
We nudged each other when we heard that. We felt that there was just nothing you could keep from the seer.
“I got the rail note yesterday,” Piet Siener said, producing a piece of paper from his pocket. “Weight 98 lb., it says on the consignment. I’ll take it with me.”
Jurie Steyn pointed to the crate in the corner.
“I could have guessed as much,” Piet Siener said when he lifted the crate and then turned it round. “Look, it says ‘This side up, with care.’ Instead of that you’ve got it standing on its end. I could have guessed that would happen.”
“You mean you could have divined it,” At Naudé said. But we didn’t laugh. The moment seemed too solemn, somehow.
Jurie Steyn apologised and said there was no doubt something very precious inside. And we realised that Jurie spoke those words as though he meant them. It wasn’t the way he usually apologised to people in his post office, that made you feel sorry you had brought the matter up at all.
Piet Siener said that it was all right, then. But he said that what was inside that crate was something of such importance that you couldn’t be careful enough with it. He had ordered it from America, he
said. And it was the latest invention in electro-biology and some kind of rays that he hadn’t quite got the hang of yet, but that he was still studying the pamphlet. By means of that instrument you could tell if there was gold or diamonds under the ground.
“You can stand it on a tripod anywhere you like,” Piet Siener explained. “And it will tell you what minerals there are in the crust of the earth under your feet up to a depth of two miles. Think of that – two miles.”
We did think of it, after Piet Siener had gone out with the crate. And we said he couldn’t be much of a siener if he didn’t know what was two miles under the ground without having to look through an electric instrument that he had to order from America. And we thought nothing of his gift anymore.
He could throw his seer’s mantle away on the rubbish heap, now, for all we cared. Or he could make a present of it to the first down-and-out Bechuana passing along the road.
Potchefstroom Willow
“The trouble,” At Naudé said, “about getting the latest war news over the wireless, is that Klaas Smit and his Boeremusiek orchestra start up right away after it, playing ‘Die Nooi van Potchefstroom’. Now, it isn’t that I don’t like that song –”
So we said that it wasn’t as though we didn’t like it, either. Gysbert van Tonder began to hum the tune. Johnny Coen joined in, singing the words softly – “Vertel my neef, vertel my oom, Is hierdie die pad na Potchefstroom?” In a little while we were all singing. Not very loudly, of course. For Jurie Steyn was conscious of the fact that his post office was a public place, and he frowned on any sort of out of the way behaviour in it. We still remembered the manner in which Jurie Steyn spoke to Chris Welman the time Chris was mending a pair of his wife’s veldskoens in the post office, using the corner of the counter as a last.
“I can’t object to your sitting in my post office, waiting for the Government lorry,” Jurie Steyn said, “as long as you’re white. You’re entitled to sit here. You’re also entitled to drink the coffee that my wife is soft-hearted enough to bring round to you on a tray. I’m sure I don’t know why she does it. I was in the post office in Johannesburg, once, and I didn’t see anybody coming around there, with cups of coffee on a tray. If you wanted coffee in the Johannesburg post office you would have to go round to the kitchen door for it, I suppose. And I feel that’s what my wife should do, also. But she doesn’t. All right – she’s soft-hearted. But I won’t let any man come and mend boots on my post office counter and right next to the official brass scales, too, I won’t. If I allow that, the next thing a man will do is he’ll come in here and sit down on my rusbank and read a book. We all know my voorkamer is a public place, but I will not let anybody take liberties in it.”
For that reason we did not raise our voices very much when we sang “Die Nooi van Potchefstroom”. But it was a catchy song, and Jurie Steyn joined in a little, too, afterwards. Not that he let himself go in any way, of course. He sang in a reserved and dignified fashion, that made you feel he would yet go far. You felt that even the Postmaster-General in Pretoria, on the occasion of a member of the public coming to him to complain about a registered letter that had got lost, say – well, even the Postmaster-General would not have been able to sit back in his chair and sing “Die Nooi van Potchefstroom” in as elevated a manner as what Jurie Steyn was doing at that very moment.
Before the singing had quite died down, Oupa Bekker was saying that he knew Potchefstroom when he was still a child. It was in the very old days, Oupa Bekker said, and the far side foundations of the church on Kerkplein had not sunk nearly as deep as they had done today. He said he remembered the first time that there was a split in the Church. It was between the Doppers and the Hervormdes, he said. And it was quite a serious split. And because he was young, then, he thought it had to do with the way the brickwork on the wall nearest the street had to be constantly plastered up, from top to bottom, the more the foundations sank.
“I remember showing my father that piece of church wall,” Oupa Bekker continued, “and I asked my father if the Doppers had done it. And my father said, well, he had never thought about it like that, until then. But all the same, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was so. Not that anybody would ever see the Doppers kneeling down there on the sidewalk, loosening the bricks with a crowbar, my father added. The Doppers were too cunning for that. Whatever they did was under the cover of darkness.”
At Naudé started talking again about the news of the war in Korea, that he had heard over the wireless. But because so much had been spoken in between, he had to explain right from the beginning again.
“It’s the way the war news gets crowded by Klaas Smit and his orchestra,” At Naudé said. “You’re listening to what the announcer is making clear about what part of that country General MacArthur is fighting in now – and it’s hard to follow all that, because it seems to me that sometimes General MacArthur himself is not too clear as to what part of the country he is in – and then, suddenly, while you’re still listening, up strikes Klaas Smit’s orchestra with ‘Die Nooi van Potchefstroom’. It makes it all very difficult, you know. They don’t give that General MacArthur a chance at all. ‘Die Nooi van Potchefstroom’ seems to be crowding him even worse than the Communists are doing – and that seems to be bad enough, the Lord knows.”
This time we did not start singing again. We had, after all, taken the song to the end, and even if it wasn’t for Jurie Steyn’s feelings we ourselves knew enough about the right way of conducting ourselves in a post office. You can’t go and sing the same song in a post office twice, just as though it’s the quarterly meeting of the Mealie Control Board. We were glad, therefore, when Oupa Bekker started talking once more.
“This song, now,” Oupa Bekker was saying, “well, as you know, I remember the early days of Potchefstroom. The very early days, that is. But I would never have imagined that some day a poet would come along and make up a song about the place. Potchefstroom was the first capital of the Transvaal, of course. Long before Pretoria was thought of, even. And there’s an old willow tree in Potchefstroom that must have measured I don’t know how many feet around the trunk where it goes into the ground. It measured that much only a little while ago, I mean. I am talking about the last time I was in Potchefstroom. But I never imagined anybody would ever write a poem about the town. It seemed such a hard name to make verses about. But I suppose it’s a lot different today. People are so much more clever, I expect.”
Johnny Coen, who had worked on the railways at Ottoshoop and knew a good deal about culture, assured Oupa Bekker that that was indeed the case. For a poet that wanted to write poetry today, Johnny Coen said, there was no word that would put him off. In fact, the harder the word, the better the poet would like it. Not that he knew anything about poetry himself, Johnny Coen acknowledged, but he had been round the world a bit, and he kept his eyes open, and he had seen a thing or two.
“If you saw the way they concreted up the buffers for the shunting engine on the goods line,” Johnny Coen said, “then you would know what I am talking about. It was five-eighths steel reinforcements right through. After that, for a poet to make up a poem with the name of Potchefstroom in it, why, man, if you saw how they built up that extra platform in all box sections, you’ll understand how it is that people have got the brains today to deal with problems that were a bit beyond them, no doubt, in Oupa Bekker’s time.”
Oupa Bekker nodded his head several times. He would have gone on nodding it a good deal longer, maybe, if it wasn’t that Jurie Steyn’s wife came in just about then with the coffee. Consequently, Oupa Bekker had to sit up properly and stir the sugar round in his cup.
“I heard that song you were singing, just now,” Jurie Steyn’s wife remarked to all of us. “I thought it was – well, I liked it. I didn’t catch the words, quite.”
Nobody answered. We knew that it was school holidays, of course. And we knew that young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, had gone to his parents in Potchefstroom for the holidays. Because we kne
w that Potchefstroom was young Vermaak’s home town, we kept silent. There was no telling what Jurie Steyn’s reactions would be.
Oupa Bekker went on talking, however.
“All the same, I would like to know how many feet around the trunk of that willow tree it is today,” Oupa Bekker said. “And they won’t chop it down either. That willow tree is right on the edge of the graveyard. You can almost say that it’s inside the graveyard. And so they won’t chop it down. But what beats me is to think that somebody could actually write a song about Potchefstroom. I would never have thought it possible.”
Oupa Bekker’s sigh seemed to come from far away.
From somewhere a good deal further away than the rusbank he was sitting on. We understood then why that Potchefstroom willow tree meant so much to him.
And the result was that when Gysbert van Tonder started up the chorus of that song again we all found ourselves joining in – no matter what Jurie Steyn might say about it. “En in my droom,” we sang, “is die vaalhaar nooi by die wilgerboom.”
Sea-colonels All
The passenger on the motor-lorry from Bekkersdal that afternoon was Japie Maasdyk, Oom ‘Rooi’ Maasdyk’s son. We knew that Japie would be coming back to his parents’ farm in the Dwarsberge on leave. We were somewhat disappointed that he came back dressed in a sports jacket and grey flannel trousers.
“We were looking forward to your return,” Jurie Steyn said, “all rigged out in the blue sea-army suit that we thought you would be wearing at that college for sea-soldiers.”
Japie said that if Jurie meant his naval uniform, well, it was in his luggage all neatly folded up.
“You know,” At Naudé said, “I’ve been reading in the papers that they are going to call the different ranks in the South African Navy by a lot of new names. Has it reached to you boys in the training ship yet, Japie? I believe they are going to call the man that is in charge of your ship a sea-colonel, or something. Have you heard of it at all?”
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 9