Thereupon we all said ha, ha.
In the same moment At Naudé dropped the corner of the chintz curtain quickly and returned to his riempies chair. A little later two large but nonetheless trim-looking suitcases came in through the half-open door. The lorry-driver’s assistant came in with them. It was our turn to whistle, then – even though, unlike At Naudé, we had not yet seen Pauline. We whistled because it was the first time we had ever seen the lorry-driver’s assistant so polite to a passenger. When it came to not being polite to a passenger, we knew that the lorry-driver’s assistant was a lot worse even than the lorry-driver himself. This was easy enough to understand, of course, seeing that the lorry-driver’s assistant was trying to get promotion, and he had already learnt that the only way to get anywhere in the service was by being insulting enough to passengers.
But when Pauline Gerber came into the voorkamer we could see why the lorry-driver’s assistant didn’t care then about all the chances of promotion that he was sacrificing through carrying in a passenger’s luggage. He could make up for it later on by losing a milk-can in a donga, maybe. Or by throwing a lighted cigarette-end among a Mtosa passenger’s blankets, perhaps.
The point is that Pauline Gerber wasn’t merely pretty. She brought into Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer more than just good looks. And more than you could learn at just a finishingschool , for that matter. As Gysbert van Tonder said about it afterwards, Pauline Gerber’s coming into the voorkamer was like the middle part of a song of which he had forgotten the words but that he could play the tune of with a comb and tissue paper. And Oupa Bekker said – also afterwards – that, far from the middle, or any other part of Pauline’s entrance being forgotten, it was like something that would be ever remembered. In story and in song, Oupa Bekker added.
Anyway, there it was. The suitcases came in first, with the lorry-driver’s assistant walking a little behind the handle of one of the suitcases, going a bit gingerly on that side, as though the heated radiator of the lorry hadn’t done his palm much good. Then came Pauline Gerber, with Jurie Steyn’s wife following in the rear.
“Not there!” Jurie Steyn’s wife called out as the lorry-driver’s assistant made ready to swing the suitcases onto the post office counter, nearly knocking over the brass scale and the pen-and-ink stand.
“But I can’t put them on the floor,” the lorry-driver’s assistant mumbled, dropping the suitcases on the floor, all the same. “Wet cow-dung.”
The post office floor had recently been smeared.
The sound that Jurie Steyn’s wife made sounded a lot like a snort.
“Ho,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said, “and since when isn’t cow-dung good enough for you, mister? Something seems to have turned your head, all right. Maybe you can tell us what kind of dung is good enough for you? Come on, speak up. Elephant, maybe, or – or –”
The lorry-driver’s assistant looked embarrassed.
“Trouble is, I burnt myself on that verdomde radiator,” he announced, studying the inside of his hand. “It’s all blisters.”
Jurie Steyn’s wife sniffed elegantly.
In doing so she inhaled some of the aroma from the newly smeared floor that had blended – a trifle incongruously, perhaps – with the perfume that Pauline Gerber had bought at the Cape. That much came out in her next remark.
“Something has turned your head, all right,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said to the lorry-driver’s assistant, “something that has made you turn up your nose at my floor. The same thing that made you stand there all simpering in front of the lorry, I’m sure. And that’s how you got burnt. Now, if my floor isn’t good enough for those two suitcases, then what you could do, see, is to sit down on that bench, there, and hold the two suitcases in your lap. Or is there something else, rather, that you would like to hold in your lap? Not that she’d object very much, I should imagine.”
Later on, when we discussed the matter between ourselves, in private, we said, yes, we did notice how much of the conversation in the post office that afternoon seemed to have taken on something of a low tone. That was what women’s influence was on company, we said. The talk in the voorkamer had never got so low, really, we said, in all the time we could recall when there were only men. Or perhaps men and just one woman, Gysbert van Tonder said. And so we said, afterwards, that, yes, it was all right when it was just men, or just men and one woman. But when it was men and there were two women, we said, then the tone of the talk got lowered in a way that we just couldn’t understand. That was what we said afterwards, in private, to each other.
Pauline Gerber took no notice of the insinuations made by Jurie Steyn’s wife. You could see she had been taught that it was not ladylike to show her annoyance openly. Instead, Pauline stood straight up in the middle of the voorkamer and gazed slowly about her, at the men sitting on the chairs and benches. And a look of disappointment came over her face. It was almost as though there was something about our appearance that was distressing her. But we knew it couldn’t be that, of course. We realised that we were not all as handsome as Johnny Coen, for instance – who was not there, that afternoon – but we knew that as a collection of manly-looking farmers (and not sissies) we could hold our own with any bunch of men that you could pick anywhere from between the Orange River and the Caprivi Strip. Pretty though she was, Pauline Gerber must not start giving herself airs now, we thought.
Then Jurie Steyn spoke.
“Can’t one of you fat loafers,” Jurie Steyn shouted from behind his counter, “get up and give the young lady a seat?”
We all jumped up then, of course. Well, if that was all it was, we knew our manners, all right, even though we hadn’t been to any higher ladies’ college. In a moment there were half-a-dozen chairs for Pauline Gerber to pick from. And we didn’t make an issue of it with Jurie Steyn, either, for what he had said about fat loafers.
Thereupon Pauline Gerber explained, in dark sweet tones, that what worried her was that nobody of her family was there to take her home. There must have been some sort of misunderstanding, she said. It was the first time she had spoken. Her words had an extraordinary effect on Jurie Steyn.
“I’ll drive you home in my mule-cart,” Jurie Steyn said. “My wife can look after the post office while I’m away.”
We were all much impressed with the well-bred and modest fashion in which Pauline Gerber accepted Jurie’s invitation.
Some time later, however, when Jurie Steyn called out from the front of the post office to say that the mules were inspanned, we wondered if that young ladies’ academy in the Cape really had changed Pauline Gerber so very much. It was when Pauline walked out of the front door, with her chin still in the air. And it wasn’t what she did so much as the way she did it, that made it look as though she was at heart still very much of a Marico Bushveld girl. The way she sort of half-lifted her skirts at Jurie Steyn’s wife, when she went out.
Singular Events
What actually started the discussion in Jurie Steyn’s post office that day was afterwards not very clear. For that matter, it was not too clear, either, afterwards, as to how it all ended. At Naudé did make reference, of course, to a story that he had listened in to over the wireless. But he only brought in that wireless story to illustrate something that somebody else had already said. It had to do with a ship or a boat on which there were a lot of seamen and they were drifting about for a very long time, unable to reach land, At Naudé explained. When At Naudé explained further that it was something that had happened ever so long ago, we felt that he was taking our conversation off its course, in much the same way that the seamen he spoke about had been taken off their course, drifting about and all like that on the ocean.
That kind of thing naturally set Oupa Bekker off talking about another ship that couldn’t make port. And even before Oupa Bekker spoke we knew what was coming. It was an established fact, as far as you liked to go north of the Dwarsberge, that Oupa Bekker on his grandmother’s side was directly descended from Kapitein van der Decken
, jolly skipper in the service of the Dutch East India Company’s merchant navy, whose square-rigged brig, a familiar sight off the southern Cape Peninsula, had with the passing years acquired the stage name of Flying Dutchman.
We had heard this story so often before from Oupa Bekker that Gysbert van Tonder began heading him off the moment Oupa Bekker brought up his heel to knock out his pipe against. Gysbert van Tonder was only partially successful, however. Oupa Bekker did get so far as to acquaint us once more with some of the details of his last visit to Cape Town.
“Big white sails, just like you see in pictures,” Oupa Bekker concluded. “And it gave me a lot of pleasure, you understand, to be able to be there at Camps Bay and to wave at my ancestor. And when I thought of how old he was, I didn’t feel so old anymore, somehow, myself. And on the way back to the Transvaal I told a young man in my compartment about it. The young man was a student going home for the holidays, and he had a solemn look, and he said our nation must ‘Hou koers’ and he seemed older, somehow, than me, or even than Kapitein van der Decken, who is my ancestor on my grandmother’s side.”
Seeing that, in spite of our efforts to stop him, Oupa Bekker had actually got so far, Chris Welman, winking at us, decided to humour him.
“And what did that young student say about the Dutch East Indies ship, Oupa,” Chris Welman asked, “the ship that you stood on the sand and waved at?”
“Oh, you could see that that student knew a thing or two, all right,” Oupa Bekker said. “The student was very fine about it. He said that the Flying Dutchman was a myth. Mities, he said it was – just like that. And so I said to him that that was just how I felt about it, too. It was a word I hadn’t heard before, I told him. But that was exactly the feeling I had, standing there at Camps Bay and waving, first with my hand and then with my hat, also. I felt it was just mities. And I don’t care who knows it, I said to the student.”
Oupa Bekker went on to say that when that student alighted at his destination, which was at a siding somewhere in the Karoo, then the student looked a good few years older, even, than when he had got into the train at Stellenbosch. Older and more solemn, Oupa Bekker remarked. And he glanced over his shoulder, too, once, cautiously, as though suspicious that Oupa Bekker might decide to get off there, also.
It was Jurie Steyn who reminded us of what we had really been discussing. He reminded us in that prim and precise tone of voice that he had started adopting ever since the post office authorities had erected a strip of brass wire-netting over half the length of his counter, thereby bringing Jurie Steyn into line with the post office at Bekkersdal. And now that, for half his length, Jurie Steyn was in line with the Bekkersdal post office counter, Jurie Steyn frequently spoke in the way that the Bekkersdal postmaster spoke when he pulled down his little green curtain behind the wire-netting and told the people waiting in the queue that that section was closed until nine o’clock next morning. Of course, Jurie Steyn didn’t make use of that strip of wire-netting. For one thing, he didn’t have a little green curtain behind it that he could pull down. And, for another thing, even if he did have a curtain, you could always put your head round that part of the counter where there was no wire-netting, and see Jurie Steyn standing there.
“Anyway, what I want to know,” Jurie Steyn declared, in his new voice of higher officialdom, “is how we have come to be talking about Oupa Bekker’s old ghost ship. As far as I can recall –”
“It’s not a ghost ship,” Oupa Bekker asserted. “If you think you know better than that student –”
“Ghost ship,” Jurie Steyn continued. “And what’s more –”
“Student of divinity, too” – Oupa Bekker chanced his arm – “and Kapitein van der Decken was my grandmother’s great –”
“Now I remember what we were talking about,” Jurie Steyn announced triumphantly. “We were talking about the meat shortage in the cities and about all the different kinds of meat that’s being cut into strips and hung out on a line to dry for biltong. Baboons, I remember we said. And donkeys. They say there are lots of people in the cities can’t tell the difference, when it’s biltong. If it’s some kind of taste that they haven’t had before, then they think, oh, it must be ostrich. They never think it might be donkey. Isn’t that what you were telling us, At?”
But At Naudé said, no, he hadn’t been discussing that side of the question at all. That was what Chris Welman had been saying, At Naudé explained. He himself had been talking, he said, about that story he had heard over the wireless about those sailors ever so long ago that were adrift for months and months in a boat miles and miles away from land. That was all he said, At Naudé made clear, at the same time expressing the hope that Jurie Steyn wasn’t going to get him wrong, now.
This time Oupa Bekker did lean forward, and in such a manner that, whether he wanted to or not, Jurie Steyn had to listen to him.
“Can you tell the difference by the taste, Jurie – now, just by the taste, mind,” Oupa Bekker asked, “between, say, blesbok biltong and donkey biltong? Because, if you can, it means you have tasted donkey biltong. Perhaps you will now tell us when, and where, you ate donkey biltong. You know what I mean, strips of donkey hung out on a line to dry, when there’s a hot sun, with naeltjies and red pepper.”
Well, that was a fair enough question. All the same, we felt that Oupa Bekker need not have been so nasty about it – particularly in his going to the extent of explaining to Jurie Steyn what biltong was, as though Jurie Steyn didn’t know. Well, we felt that Jurie would have been quite within his rights if he had said that Oupa Bekker looked pretty much like a long, unappetising strip of biltong himself, and without coriander spice in it.
But Jurie Steyn didn’t say that. It was almost as though Jurie had sensed that Oupa Bekker wanted him to say that. Jurie was cunning, that way. Accordingly, “Have you eaten donkey biltong, Oupa?” was all that Jurie Steyn would reply, then.
Oupa Bekker paused, with his pipe in the air, looking thoughtful.
“I can’t say for sure,” he admitted at length. “I mean, when people hand you a strip of donkey biltong, they don’t tell you it’s donkey biltong, do they? Or that it’s baboon biltong, either, for that matter – do they, now?”
We agreed that Oupa Bekker was right, there, of course. Not one of us could recall having had a statement of that description made to him just off-hand, sort of.
“And so there it is,” Oupa Bekker announced. “I may have – I just wouldn’t know. But it’s silly when people try and explain to you that they can tell by the taste what sort of biltong is what. You can try and guess, of course, but as likely as not you’ll be wrong.”
All the same, Oupa Bekker went on, looking doubtful, he couldn’t understand how all this kind of talk had come about in the first place. It seemed a bit mixed-up to him, Oupa Bekker added.
“The sailors adrift on that ship,” he said. “And donkey biltong. And Van der Decken being my ancestor on my grandmother’s side –”
We could see that an idea had suddenly occurred to him.
“Oh, yes,” Oupa Bekker said, “I remember now. It was the biltong we had at Chief Ndlambe’s kraal, when Gert Pretorius and I were the first white men to trek into these parts. And although Chief Ndlambe asked us to guess what kind of biltong it was, Gert and I just couldn’t. And afterwards Gert Pretorius and I discussed the peculiar way Chief Ndlambe had laughed when we said it was a kind of taste we hadn’t really come across before, we didn’t think … Well, I know now what it is that made me think of my grandmother. Because of the strange stories we heard from the Mtosas later on about Chief Ndlambe’s grandmother. About the bitter kinds of disputes she had been having with her grandson, lately, and of how she had suddenly disappeared, one day, from the tribal councils. Yes, that part of it I can see quite clearly. But what have those sailors got to do with it – drifting around for months and months on that ship At Naudé has been telling us about?”
Why, it was exactly the same thing, At Naudé said.<
br />
Those sailors, At Naudé said, had to eat.
Young Man in Love
Gysbert van Tonder told us, in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, that afternoon, that Johnny Coen would be along later. He had seen Johnny Coen, Gysbert said, by the mealie-lands, and Johnny Coen was busy scraping some of the worst turf soil off his veldskoens with a pocket knife that had only the short blade left. Johnny Coen was also making use of various wisps of yellow grass, performing wiping movements along the side of his face. Well, we all knew that if, in the middle of the ploughing season, a man took all that trouble with his personal appearance, it must be that he was thinking of going visiting.
“Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s coming here,” At Naudé observed. “I mean, if he was busy to make himself up so smart, well, it might perhaps mean that he was working up the courage to go and see her. You know what I mean – Johnny Coen taking all the trouble to get the turf soil off his veldskoens and to get the turf soil off his face.
“If he was coming just here to see us, well, he wouldn’t care how much black turf there was on his face. All he would be concerned about was that he didn’t leave a lot of thick mud where he walked, here, in the post office, where Jurie Steyn’s wife would complain about it.”
Oupa Bekker shook his head.
“We know that Johnny Coen hasn’t been around to the post office here, since he heard that Pauline Gerber was coming back from finishingschool ,” Oupa Bekker said. “And I think we can understand why. We know the kind of talk that there was about Johnny Coen and Pauline Gerber before Pauline suddenly decided to go to that ladies’ school in the Cape, after all. If you remember, we said that Johnny Coen couldn’t have been much of a young man if Pauline Gerber thought that going to a ladies’ academy would be more exciting. Of course, we never said any of those things in Johnny Coen’s presence …”
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 17