The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Isn’t it a bastard?” Jurie said, simply.

  At Naudé cheered up quite a lot, then. A good deal of that healthy glow – that we had noticed on him when he stepped off the lorry and that seemed to fade afterwards – came back into his face.

  “Well, when I heard that my uncle Ockert Sybrand was pretty sick,” At Naudé explained, “I of course went down to the Cape to see. I mean, seeing that he never got married, it was only right that somebody of his family should be there at the last. Or even a bit before the last.”

  Even a good bit before the last, Chris Welman agreed, nodding his head.

  “In case my dying uncle got swindled,” At Naudé went on. “Him being so old and all, and never having been married. If my uncle Ockert Sybrand died with a next of kin sitting leaning right over him, with his hand up to his ear to catch his last words, well, my uncle would know right away then that there was nobody around to swindle him.”

  But At Naudé said that when he got to that farm in the Western Cape Province with the old oak-trees bending over the road to the house and with the white curved gables and the squirrels and with the benches on the long stoep, he received a nasty surprise. He had already decided where to have one of those benches shifted so that you got more sun in the forenoon when you drank your coffee, with your feet raised, At Naudé said, when that surprise came to him.

  “For when I got to the front door, who should open it for me but my second cousin, Seraphima, with three of her younger children with dirty faces hanging onto her dress?” At Naudé said. “And Seraphima asked me what I wanted. Well, I could see from that that my uncle was sick, all right. Real sick, I mean.”

  At Naudé said that, on the way to the dwelling house, he had already gathered that Ockert Sybrand was far from well. He gathered that much from the hushed way in which the Cape Coloured farm-workers comported themselves, At Naudé said, sitting in little groups under the old oak-trees playing cards.

  “That was a sure sign to me that the master was ill,” At Naudé said. “For otherwise they would be cheerily working in the lands with spades and hoes. But now they just didn’t have the heart for it. All they could bring themselves to do was to sit in the shade and play cards for money.

  “One of the coloured farm-workers was so moved that he was even playing a little tune on a guitar, standing up against a tree. He was playing ‘Hier Kom die Alabama’. He was doing it just because the master was sick, of course. And I had the feeling, somehow, that if my uncle saw him at it, my uncle Ockert Sybrand would have got still a lot more sick.”

  Anyway, At Naudé said that, in reply to his second cousin Seraphima’s question, he asked her, in turn, what it was that she wanted. And she said that, with Ockert Sybrand dying, it was only right that, in his last hour, he should have his next of kin around him, sitting over him and listening to what he had to say about who was to get what.

  “Of course, my cousin Seraphima always had such an uneducated way of talking,” At Naudé said. “And, I thought, yes, with her whole family around to listen, there wouldn’t be much that they would miss, about who was to get what. It seemed that it was going to be a pretty awful sort of death-bed that my uncle was going to have, with such a lot of vultures around him, some with dirty faces, too.

  “So I said I was surprised that she hadn’t brought her husband, Agie, along as well, Agie being a shift boss on the mines and well out of the way, then, as I thought. About a thousand miles by rail, I thought, and the better part of a mile by that hoist thing that they have over a mine shaft.

  “‘Agie,’ my cousin Seraphima said to me, ‘is here, too.’”

  So At Naudé said that he thought that, well, that was that. And it was without much enthusiasm that he walked into his uncle Ockert Sybrand’s bedroom. And when he saw that his uncle wasn’t lying flat down but was sitting up against some pillows, he felt less perky than ever, At Naudé said.

  “I talked to my uncle a little and I offered him a cigarette, which,” At Naudé went on, “he took. And my uncle said that, seeing there were only a few left in the packet, he might as well keep the packet.

  “There was no doubt that my uncle was sick. But I felt, then, that he wasn’t so sick that he wouldn’t be able to pull himself round. From the firm way he took the cigarettes off me, I felt that he would still be wearing that awful jacket to Nagmaal.”

  But that part of his visit to his uncle’s farm over which he would draw a veil, At Naudé said, was his meeting with his second cousin Seraphima’s husband, Agie, the shift boss on a Johannesburg mine.

  “I had several times asked one or other of the coloured farm-workers if they had seen another white baas around the place, somewhere,” At Naudé said. “But they were too concerned about their master’s illness to be able to answer me. All they said was ‘Straight flush’ or ‘Full house’ or ‘Jy moet straight deal’ to each other.”

  Nor would he like to repeat the reply he got, At Naudé said, from a couple of coloured workers who, when he approached them with his question, were, at the time, in the shade of a very old oak-tree, fighting with knives.

  “It was only towards evening,” At Naudé said, “that I was able to find an elderly coloured farm-worker who could conduct me to where my second cousin Seraphima’s husband, Agie, was. The elderly coloured farm-worker put the finger of one hand against the left side of his nose. We went down by a lot of old stone steps. But I hardly recognised my second cousin Seraphima’s husband, Agie.

  “He was standing with his legs apart and he looked almost as bad as my uncle Ockert Sybrand, then. You have got no idea how changed he was from when I had seen him last. At first I thought it must be my cousin Seraphima. Then I thought it must be the mines. But it was only when Agie spoke that I realised that it was neither.

  “‘There’s,’ Agie said, stretching his legs still further apart and waving a tin pannikin at me, ‘barrels of that stuff here.’”

  At Naudé said that he would rather not recount the more unhappy features of his visit to that Western Province farm. What made it worse, At Naudé said, was that they were having their annual wine festival at the town some little distance away. And Agie insisted on At Naudé accompanying him into town on a good number of occasions.

  “They had girls in the street, laughing,” At Naudé said. “And they had wagons with grapes and people with big paper heads. And there was a merry-go-round and a thing that went round and up and sideways that they called the Octopus.

  “And young fellows and the girls that a little while before had been laughing in the street went for rides on those things. But they didn’t seem to laugh in the same way when they got off them again. Not when they got off the Octopus, they didn’t.”

  But all this talk of At Naudé’s did not seem to be leading anywhere. We were consequently glad when Chris Welman brought him back to the point.

  “Your uncle Sybrand, now,” Chris Welman asked. “Did he get quite well again?”

  “Quite well?” At Naudé repeated. “Why, that was the whole trouble. He got so well that we just couldn’t keep him off the Octopus. It got so bad, him and that Octopus – him wanting to go for rides, all the time – that life wasn’t worth living anymore, afterwards, for me and Agie. And my uncle Ockert Sybrand was with that Octopus like he was with cigarettes. We had to pay for him, every time – me and Agie.”

  Nevertheless Jurie Steyn said that, taken all in all, he didn’t think At Naudé had done so badly. Jurie Steyn said that in a significant way. For it was after At Naudé had spoken of his meeting with Agie in the wine cellar, that we had all of us started putting two and two together about that healthy glow on At Naudé’s face.

  “Did you bring any of it with you?” Chris Welman asked.

  “Yes,” At Naudé said, somewhat lamely. “A few bottles in my suitcase.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so sooner?” Jurie Steyn asked. “Instead of wasting our time with that Octopus talk.”

  We all started feeling kith and kin of one
another, then, with At Naudé opening the suitcase.

  Rolled Gold

  It was about the first time young Vermaak had come to visit us in Jurie Steyn’s post office since his marriage to Pauline Gerber. We could see, in several ways, the difference it had already made to the schoolmaster to be married to the daughter of a wealthy Bushveld farmer like old Gerber.

  For one thing, young Vermaak was now smoking expensive cigarettes out of a cigarette case made of a yellowish metal that he passed round to us so that we could each help ourselves to a cigarette and at the same time see the big curved lines of his initials engraved on the lid.

  We knew that the schoolmaster’s initials had certainly not been by any means so important before he had married Pauline Gerber.

  “If I had a cigarette case like that,” Gysbert van Tonder said to young Vermaak, in handing it back to him, “I wouldn’t have the letters of my Christian name and my surname cut into it so big and so fat. And so deep. I mean, think of how much gold gets scooped off it, that way. It’s a wonder the Zeerust watchmaker that did the job didn’t write his own name on it as well, and his address, so that he could prune off a whole lot more gold for himself. Just lopping it off in chunks like that, I mean.”

  Young Vermaak gazed at Gysbert van Tonder with a thin smile.

  If the jeweller’s graver had been set as shallow there would have been no mark at all made on the cigarette-case lid.

  “It wasn’t a Zeerust watchmaker,” young Vermaak announced. “My monogram was engraved by a Johannesburg firm.

  “I don’t know whether I should not give up teaching for a while,” he said. “I would like to improve my mind so that I can fit in better in the world of intellect and culture. I want to have breadth to my mind and outlook. I have been reading a book in which are described those cramping influences that fetter the spirit like a vinculum. A vinculum is the Latin word for a chain.”

  Gysbert van Tonder said that if that was all that was worrying the schoolmaster, then he was certainly in the right place, now, at Welgevonden, for being able to enlarge his knowledge of the world. Oom Petrus Gerber, young Vermaak’s father-in-law, Gysbert van Tonder said, was easily the most broad-minded man in this part of the Marico.

  “I mean, just take the way Oom Petrus Gerber made all his money,” Gysbert van Tonder proceeded. “Well, if that’s not broad-minded, then I don’t know. I mean, the Bechuanas as far as Malopolole know how broad-minded Oom Petrus Gerber is to this day about what brand marks there are on the cattle that he brings back to the Transvaal. That is why the Bechuanas have given him the name of Ra-Sakeng. It means ‘He-Who-Walks-Too-Near-the-Cattle-Kraal’. And if Oom Petrus can teach you a few things in that line, then maybe you will get just as broad-minded. Only, I think your father-in-law will tell you that the police pay more attention today than they did in the old days to a Bechuana’s complaint about missing cattle.

  “So you should perhaps not start getting too broad-minded, straight away. Otherwise you’ll find your wrists fastened together with a – what was that foreign word you said?”

  “Vinculum,” interjected At Naudé, who was quick at picking up languages.

  After an interval of silence, the schoolmaster, having first self-consciously cleared his throat, proceeded to deal with the matters on which we could sense he had really come to enlighten us.

  “I have booked for a number of the Grand Operas in Johannesburg,” he said. “I feel that will open up a new world of culture to me. Vision is what I’ll get, I think.”

  We could see, from the way Gysbert van Tonder opened his mouth, that Gysbert was going to ask if that was a new word for time.

  “It’s some of the true glory of European culture coming here to South Africa,” young Vermaak went on quickly, before Gysbert van Tonder could make any more disguised reference to the penalties for cattle-theft.

  “And I think I’ll be a better schoolteacher and more of a credit to the Education Department for having gone. You’ve got to wear an evening dress-suit with tails.”

  That was how you had to go to the Grand Opera in Johannesburg today, the schoolmaster added. And that was what gave Chris Welman, who had once worked on the mines, his chance to be sarcastic.

  “I suppose you’ve also got to carry the right sort of dinner-pail,” Chris Welman said, thinking of the times when he had been wont to present himself for the night-shift at No. 3 shaft (and of how his colleagues would laugh at an underground man who wasn’t de règle, but had his sandwiches wrapped in an odd piece of newspaper). “And I suppose you’ve also got to wear at the opera the right kind of bicycle clips with your evening dress-suit pants.”

  Nevertheless – no matter what we might have pretended to the contrary – the fact was that we stood in a good deal of awe of what young Vermaak had said about the culture of Europe.

  It was in recognition of this that Jurie Steyn, as though doffing his hat to the traditions of old cities, enquired of the schoolmaster, reluctantly, as to what an opera was, exactly.

  So young Vermaak got his chance to spread himself, after all.

  “An opera,” he said, “is a play, just like Vertrapte Harte or Die Dominee se Verlossing or Liefde op die Ashoop. It’s like any play they have in the hall next to the flour-mill at Bekkersdal, except that it’s all songs and music.

  “When the warder tells the condemned man that that noise of falling bricks is the hangman’s footsteps on the stairs, the warder sings it. And when the condemned man gets a sack pulled over his head before being hanged – like in the play Frikkie se Laaste Ongeluk – then the condemned man comes to the front of the stage and sings his last words.

  “But what it sounds like, coming through a black sack, and all, I wouldn’t know. I’ve just learnt about opera from reading books about it. That is why I would like to see how it is actually done on the stage.”

  Gysbert van Tonder looked pleased with himself, suddenly. It seemed as though he had not been too far wrong, in having warned the schoolmaster of the dangers that lay in being too broad-minded.

  “You don’t only get those vinculum things on your feet, from having your ideas go too wide,” Gysbert van Tonder assured young Vermaak, solemnly. “There’s that sack over your head, also. It’s how one thing just sort of leads to another.”

  The schoolmaster flared up, then. He said he hadn’t come to Jurie Steyn’s post office to be insulted. And here was Gysbert van Tonder talking about him as though he were already a cattle-smuggler and a cattle-thief – and worse. A lot worse, the schoolmaster added – thinking, no doubt, of that sack.

  Thereupon At Naudé advised young Vermaak to ignore Gysbert van Tonder. He needn’t talk, was the way At Naudé phrased it. In any case, At Naudé said, we were all eager to learn more about opera, and if people in operas got vinculums put on them, also, well, he was sure it was for more high-minded things than just cattle-smuggling and stock-theft.

  But the schoolmaster said that, strangely enough, from what he had read in his book, there was one opera that was just like that, more or less.

  The cattle part, he said, came in in the scene that was called “Exterior of the Bull-fighting Arena”. And he said that when that opera was first produced in Paris or Munich or Rome or Sweden, or somewhere –

  (he forgot where, exactly, now, but it was some foreign place … Moscow, likely) – then when the curtain went up on the “Exterior of the Bull-fighting Arena” scene, the audience all applauded when they heard a bellowing, because they expected that a real live bull would come prancing onto the stage right up to the footlights.

  But the audience were very disappointed when they found that it was just the Basso-Profondo at the back of the stage practising some notes, arpeggios, the schoolmaster called them.

  “And it’s queer,” young Vermaak went on, “but there actually is a scene in that opera, too, that is called ‘Mountain Retreat of the Smugglers’. Only, there is a beautiful girl in that Mountain Retreat, and she is concerned only with the pleasure and th
e passion of the passing moment.”

  Well, that was something like, Chris Welman said.

  Several of us sat up very straight on our riempies chairs, then, to hear more. That was something quite new to us. It looked as though those Europeans had something, after all.

  “She makes them aware of her charms,” young Vermaak went on.

  Yes, quite, we thought.

  It was certainly something that had never come the way of a Bushveld farmer on a cloudy night when he had cut some strands of barbed wire to let a herd of cattle into the Transvaal.

  We doubted whether anything like that had ever happened even to Oom Petrus Gerber himself, although everybody knew how lucky he was in such matters. In matters relating to cattle-smuggling, that was.

  “This opera is full of colour and movement,” the schoolmaster went on.

  And we thought, yes, we could believe that. We could also understand young Vermaak having booked seats, then, even though it was all just music and singing.

  “Then a gentle peasant girl arrives with a message for the officer who is now a smuggler,” the schoolmaster proceeded.

  Well, we didn’t really care what he was – whether he was an officer or anything else – before he became a smuggler. Nor were we much interested to hear about that devout peasant girl, either. It was that other one that the schoolmaster couldn’t tell us enough about.

  “It’s a very moving song that the smuggler who was once an officer sings,” young Vermaak continued. “I am looking forward to hearing it. He sings it by a hole in the wall. It’s through reading the message that that simple-minded girl brings him.”

  The schoolmaster spoke a good deal more about opera, after that. But somehow, it never sounded quite the same again as when he first started.

  Even what he said about the lovely Rhine-maiden with the lily in her hair didn’t come up to the level of that other one.

  All the same, as the schoolmaster went on speaking, our attitude towards him began to change, in a singular way, with the result that we started feeling more human about him, and it seemed that there was something in what he called European culture, after all.