The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “I could see the police post very well from there,” Chris Welman said. “I was standing near a Mtosa hut. When the Mtosa woman lifted a petrol tin onto her head and went down in the direction of the spruit, for water, I moved over to an iron pot that a fire had been burning underneath all afternoon. All afternoon it had smelt to me like sheep’s insides and kaboe-mealies. And when Koos Nienaber had asked me to do that small favour for him, of standing on the rant and watching if the two policemen just went on dealing out cards to each other and taking turns to drink out of a black bottle, Koos Nienaber had forgotten to give me something to take along that I could eat.”

  He could still see those two policemen quite distinctly, Chris Welman said, when he lifted the lid off the iron pot. He wasn’t in the least worried about those two policemen, then. Actually, he admitted that he was, if anything, more concerned lest that Mtosa woman should suddenly come back to the hut, with the petrol tin on her head, having forgotten something. And it had to be at that moment, just when he was lifting the lid, that smoke from the fire crackling underneath the pot got into his eyes. It was the most awful kind of stabbing smoke that you could ever imagine, Chris Welman said. What the Mtosa woman had made that fire with, he just had no idea. Cow-dung and bitterbessie he knew. That was a kind of fuel that received some countenance, still, in the less frequented areas along the Molopo. And it made a kind of smoke which, if it got into your eyes, could blind you temporarily for up to at least quarter of an hour.

  Chris Welman went on to say that he was also not unfamiliar with the effects of the smoke from the renosterbos, in view of the fact that he retained many childhood memories of a farm in the Eastern Province, where it was still quite usual to find a house with an old-fashioned abba-kitchen.

  It was obvious that Chris Welman was beginning to yield to a gentle mood of reminiscence. The next thing he would be telling us some of the clever things that he was able to say at the age of four. Several of us pulled him up short, then.

  “All right,” Chris Welman proceeded, “I think I know how you feel. Well, to get back to that rant where I was standing on – well, I don’t know what kind of fuel it was under that iron pot. What I will never forget is the moment when that smoke got into my eyes. It was a kind of smart that you couldn’t rub out with the back of your sleeve or with the tail of your shirt pulled up, even. I don’t think that even one of those white handkerchiefs that you see in the shop windows in Zeerust would have helped much. All I know is that when some of the pain started going, and I was able to see a little bit, again, I was lying under a mdubu tree, halfway down that rant. I had been running around in circles for I don’t know how long. And it might give you some sort of an idea of the state I was in, if I tell you that I discovered, then, that I had been carrying that pot lid around with me all the time. I have often wondered if the Mtosa woman ever found that lid, lying there under the mdubu. And if she did, what she thought.”

  Chris Welman sighed deeply. Partly, we felt, that that sigh had its roots in a nostalgia for the past. His next words showed, however, that it was linked with a grimmer sort of reality.

  “When I got back to the top of that rant,” Chris Welman declared simply, “the two policemen weren’t there at the post anymore. And Koos Nienaber had been fined so often before that this time the magistrate would not let him off with a fine. Koos Nienaber took it like a man, though, when the magistrate gave him six months.”

  More than one of us, sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, sighed, too, then. We also knew what it was to get smoke in your eyes, at the wrong moment. We also knew what it was to hold sudden and unexpected converse with a policeman on border patrol, the while you were nervously shifting a pair of wire-cutters from one hand to the other.

  Gysbert van Tonder brought the discussion back to the subject of the stars.

  “If the American astronomers are leaving South Africa because they can’t stand our sort of smoke,” Gysbert van Tonder declared, “well, I suppose there’s nothing we can do about it. Maybe they haven’t got smoke in America. I don’t know, of course. But I didn’t think that an astronomer, watching the stars at night through a telescope, would worry very much about smoke – or about cinders from looking out of a train window, either – getting into his eyes. I imagined that an astronomer would be above that sort of thing.”

  Young Vermaak, the schoolteacher, was able to put Gysbert van Tonder right then. In general, of course, we never had much respect for the schoolteacher, seeing that all he had was book learning and didn’t know, for instance, a simple thing like that an ystervark won’t roll himself up when he’s tame.

  “It isn’t the smoke that gets into their eyes,” the schoolteacher explained. “It’s the smoke in the atmosphere that interferes with the observations and mathematical calculations that the astronomers have to make to get a knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies. There’s Tycho Brahe and Galileo, for one thing, and there’s Newton and the mass of the sun in tons. And there’s Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion and the circumference of the moon’s orbit. The weight of a terrestrial pound on the moon is two-and-a-half ounces and the speed of Uranus round the sun is I forget how many hundred thousand miles a day – hundred thousand miles, mind you.”

  We looked at each other, then, with feelings of awe. We were not so much impressed with the actual figures, of course, that the schoolmaster quoted. We could listen to all that and not as much as turn a hair. Like when the schoolmaster spoke about the density of the sun, reckoning the earth as 1.25, we were not at all overwhelmed. We were only surprised that it was not a lot more. Or when the schoolmaster said that the period of the sun’s rotation on its axis was twenty-five days and something – that didn’t flatten us out in the least. It could be millions of years, for all we cared; millions and millions of years – that couldn’t shake us. But what did give us pause for reflection was the thought that just in his brain – just inside his head that didn’t seem very much different from any one of our heads – the young schoolmaster should have so much knowledge.

  When the schoolmaster had gone on to speak about curved shapes and about the amount of heat and light received by the other planets being as follows, we were rendered pretty well speechless. Only Jurie Steyn was not taken out of his depth.

  “It’s like that book my wife used to study a great deal before we got married,” Jurie Steyn said. “I have told you about it before. It’s called Napoleon’s dream-book. Well, that’s a lot like what young Vermaak has been talking about now. At the back of the Napoleon dream-book it’s got ‘What the Stars Foretell’ for every day of the year. It says that on Wednesday you must wear green, and on some other day you must write a letter to a relative that you haven’t seen since I don’t know when. The dream-book doesn’t know, either, mostly. Anyway, I suppose that’s why those American stargazers are leaving Johannesburg. It’s something they saw in the stars, I expect.”

  Chris Welman said he wondered if what the American astronomers saw through their telescope said that the star of the American nation was going up, or if it was going down.

  “Perhaps Jurie Steyn’s wife can work it out from the dream-book,” Gysbert van Tonder said.

  Green-eyed Monster

  It was again something At Naudé had read in the papers that started off the conversation in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. At Naudé had read something about a man who, committing suicide, left behind somewhat detailed instructions for the ultimate disposition of his cremated ashes. We soon found that this was a subject that lent itself readily to discussion of a sprightly sort.

  “Well, if ever I commit suicide,” Chris Welman said, “I’ll have my cremated ashes sent to the president of the Land Bank. Because, if I do commit suicide – and I’ve thought of it once or twice, lately – it will be his fault. The Land Bank seems to think that just because the price of wool has gone up, every farmer in the Groot Marico must be in a good way. Not that I envy the Eastern Province and Karoo sheep farmers, of course �
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  So we all said that we of the Marico, who were cattle farmers, naturally did not begrudge the sheep farmers the big money they were making. They were welcome to their fat motor-cars and the parquet blocks on their floors. We were quite content to blacken our floors with just olieblaar, we said. We cattle farmers of the Marico simply did not believe in giving ourselves airs with long shiny pianos that took up half of the voorhuis. Although we acknowledged, of course, that our womenfolk felt quite different about such things. Not that we took much notice of our womenfolk, indeed, seeing that this was a man’s world, but all the same, well, it wasn’t that we begrudged those sheep farmers their good fortune. They were welcome to everything, we said, and more, even.

  Nevertheless, there was something about those Cape sheep farmers, taken in conjunction with certain communications of a somewhat unreasonable nature that several of us Marico farmers had been receiving from the Land Bank lately, that – very well, let us be truthful about it – that rankled.

  “Let the Land Bank come and try to breed sheep here in the Marico,” Gysbert van Tonder said – in those few words summing up what we all felt – “let the Land Bank come along and try to shear a sheep after that sheep has been through a patch of wag-’n-bietjie bush …”

  “Or a clump of haak-en-steek,” Jurie Steyn said, with much feeling.

  “Or young soetdorings,” At Naudé added. “I’d like to know how many years a soetdoring takes to grow more than sheep-high. I’ve never tried to work it out. But, off-hand, I should say a lifetime. Not a sheep’s lifetime but a human being’s, I mean. Just let the Land Bank come and try it here for a little while, that’s all. And I am not even talking about blue-tongue.” (And we all said, no, of course not, we were not one of us even talking about blue-tongue.) “And then I would like to see the Land Bank go back to Pretoria. I’d like to see the Land Bank, then, that’s all. Or, rather, I wouldn’t like to see the Land Bank, then. With its ceiling coming all down, I mean. And with cracks in its plaster the size of a – the size of a –”

  At Naudé paused. He wasn’t able to think of something quite suitable to serve as a figure for conveying the size of the cracks in the Land Bank’s facade.

  Then Chris Welman started talking about how stupid a sheep was. A flock of sheep couldn’t go anywhere at all unless they had a goat to lead them. And as for a goat … We spent quite a while in detailing sundry authentic anecdotes that had to do with a more unintelligent sort of goat that we had at various times come across.

  But, all the same, we didn’t envy the sheep farmers their prosperity, Gysbert van Tonder ended up by saying. And we all agreed with Gysbert van Tonder. The last thing in the world we wanted, we said, was to grow rich through just standing by the side of a stile and counting sheep jumping over it.

  “Buying blue serge shop suits with wide, rolled lapels, and the pockets high up, and double-breasted,” Johnny Coen said, a trifle wistfully.

  “Or a trek-klavier,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “with silver stars on the band that goes over your shoulders. Who wants a thing like that – just for counting sheep, that is?”

  And so we all said again, just to make it quite clear, that we weren’t in any way jealous of the sheep farmers. Jealous? Why, the whole idea was so ridiculous that we didn’t have to discuss it, even.

  “Counting a lot of sheep jumping over a stile,” At Naudé said. “Why, that’s not work at all. If I had to do that, I’d be asleep before I knew where I was. Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two – and two crept through underneath, that’s twenty-four – twenty-five, twenty-seven – chase back that goat there – twenty-eight … and so on. I could do that lying right in bed, and I’d be asleep before I knew where I was. And that’s what I’ve found about almost every sheep farmer I’ve come across. He’s fast asleep. He’s like in a dream. And he’s more like in a dream than ever when he opens the letter from the Port Elizabeth market and he studies the size of the wool cheque he’s got. He holds onto the cheque very tight with one hand and then pinches himself with the other, to make sure it’s real. He still thinks he’s dreaming and that he’s back at that stile, there, saying, ‘Chase that goat away’.”

  All this talk had carried us rather a long way from the subject we had started off by discussing, which was about the man who had committed suicide and had left instructions about what they had to do with his cremated ashes. It was only after Oupa Bekker had started off on a rambling account of the circumstances attendant on the suicide and subsequent cremation of his friend, Hans Potgieter, in the old days, that we were recalled to some sort of realisation of what was going on around us. The truth was that we had got into something of a dreamy state ourselves, in the course of which we were each of us imagining what we would do with a wool cheque – not that we envied the wool farmers in the least, of course.

  We were able to catch up with Oupa Bekker’s story quite easily, however. In the first place, Oupa Bekker had invested his recital of past events with a good deal of circumstantial detail. And, in the second place, the young schoolmaster, Vermaak, had pulled Oupa Bekker up several times for talking about “cremated ashes”. According to the schoolmaster, it was enough to say just “ashes”. The word “cremated”, it would seem, meant no more than plain ashes. Moreover, the schoolmaster would make no concessions to the standpoint taken up by Oupa Bekker, which was to the effect that the words “cremated ashes” made his story sound much more impressive.

  “If I’ve got to say just ‘ashes’, and not ‘cremated ashes’, it won’t be anything like what I felt on my farm by the Molopo when the post-cart brought me that jam bottle with the screw-top and the letter from my friend, Hans Potgieter, who had hanged himself after he had been two years in Johannesburg,” Oupa Bekker said. “I had been looking forward to my friend, Hans Potgieter, coming back to the Marico from Johannesburg in a new spider with green wheels and carrying a real leather portmanteau in his hand, and with a tie with stripes blowing over one shoulder, in the wind. Instead, I got just a bottle with a screw-top and a letter. From that it looked as if Hans Potgieter had not succeeded as well in the big city as he had hoped when he set out from alongside the Molopo.”

  Oupa Bekker paused, to allow his words to sink in. And they did deeper than he himself knew, maybe.

  “It was quite a cheap sort of jam jar, too,” Oupa Bekker added. “And in his letter my friend Hans Potgieter asked me to do him a last favour. It would appear that he had grown a trifle embittered during those two years of his stay in Johannesburg, and so he had asked me would I please give his crema – I mean – his ashes, to the devil. He trusted me enough, he said, to know that I would not fail him. He said I must hand over his ashes to Beelzebub himself.”

  The silence that followed was of some duration.

  “Did Hans Potgieter say in his letter,” Jurie Steyn asked – for, of course, Jurie Steyn could not let slip this opportunity of taking the young schoolteacher down a peg – “did he say ‘his cremated ashes’, or just ‘his ashes’?”

  Oupa Bekker flung a triumphant look at the schoolteacher. “ ‘His cremated ashes’,” Oupa Bekker announced.

  “Well, of course, that was an awful one for me,” Oupa Bekker went on. “There, alone by the Molopo. Perhaps you can imagine it. With nobody to talk to. And with Hans Potgieter’s ashes in a kist in my bedroom. And the funny part of it is that I was all the time expecting Hans Potgieter to come back to the Marico. Wearing a stiff white collar and white cuffs on his sleeves, like I have said. And then, writing me such a letter. Well, it seemed to me, at times, that a man who could go and commit suicide belonged to the devil, in any case. He was the property of the devil, flesh and soul and bones and everything, even before they had cremated him and put his ashes in a jam pot. He already belonged to the devil, body and spirit, the moment he put that rope round his neck with his own hands. So there was no point in his asking me to hand just his cremated ashes over to the devil, when everything about him already belonged to the devil.”
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  We understood Oupa Bekker’s difficulty, of course. He must have been in a pretty awkward predicament, that time. And we said so.

  “There were nights when I was afraid to go to bed,” Oupa Bekker continued. “I would think of the jam jar in that kist, and I would think of what Hans Potgieter had asked me to do, in his last letter, and I would wonder where I could find Beelzebub, so that I could hand over Hans Potgieter’s ashes to him. But the most awful feeling of everything was when it seemed to me that Hans Potgieter was the devil. And that where Beelzebub really was, was inside that screw-top bottle locked up in the kist in my bedroom.”

  Although the incident of Hans Potgieter’s suicide and his strange request and the funeral urn and the last letter written by someone about to take his own life – although all those things belonged to the distant past, we could see that Oupa Bekker was still strongly moved when he thought about it. We urged him to continue. Not in words, but through saying nothing … which is at times the most strident sort of speech.

  “But I worked it all out,” Oupa Bekker said, after a while. “I found the answer, alone here in the Marico. Before any of you came here. I wanted to know where I could find the devil, so that I could give the devil Hans Potgieter’s ashes. And I began to fear that Hans Potgieter was the devil, and that the devil was in that glass bottle with the screw-top. But because I was alone, I suppose it didn’t take me as long as it would otherwise to find out that Hans Potgieter hadn’t made a mistake about where to send his cremated ashes to.

  “That jar is still there, in my kist. And I expect the devil is still – as I found out then – inside me. Or a good deal of him is, anyway.”