The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  But At Naudé told us that, surprisingly enough, Klaas Senekal seemed quite willing to let bygones be bygones.

  “He explained that he would get another job as a bywoner and make a fresh start,” At Naudé said. “He was just waiting a bit before looking for work again. That was what he was doing in the room of that Boardinghouse – waiting. He was waiting for a court order to be served on Petronella by a mounted policeman to return his wooden leg to him.”

  And just to think, Jurie Steyn said, that Petronella should be so pretty and all.

  Thereupon Oupa Bekker said that he had a feeling that a policeman would come into it somehow. And he was glad that the policeman was brought into it for nothing more than just to fetch back Klaas Senekal’s wooden leg. For nothing worse, that was, Oupa Bekker added, sounding mysterious.

  And so Jurie Steyn asked him what he meant by anything worse.

  “Well, I am only guessing, of course,” Oupa Bekker said. “But, if my guess is right, then I can understand why Klaas Senekal should feel that he’s lucky to have got away as he did, in time. And that would explain what he meant by saying that it was something too awful ever to talk about. All the same, I would still like to know was it sheep-dip he meant or ground glass.”

  “She is –” Jurie Steyn started. He did not finish what he wanted to say.

  Eavesdropper

  It was only natural, since Jurie Steyn was nowhere on view in his post office that afternoon, that mention should have been made of it by the assembled farmers waiting for their mail. It was also no more than reasonable that sundry possible explanations for his absence should have been put forward by the said assembled farmers. And that the theories advanced should, in the main, have been endued with sombre tints was, under the circumstances, only to be expected.

  Chris Welman’s suggestion that Jurie Steyn might have been arrested was discounted by the fact that Jurie’s hat and jacket were hanging on a nail above the counter. For, as Gysbert van Tonder pointed out, Jurie Steyn could not be locked up in the Bekkersdal gaol and those articles of apparel left behind, it being well known that, in an arrest, the law’s production of a warrant was invariably accompanied by an injunction to the prisoner to get his hat and coat.

  “Not that there’s much sense in going to gaol with a hat on,” Gysbert van Tonder mused. “Seeing that you’ve got to keep taking it off all the time. And as for a jacket – I mean, they supply you with a striped jersey to wear, instead.”

  Well, maybe Jurie Steyn hadn’t been arrested, Chris Welman conceded – at least, perhaps not this time. But he had the feeling, Chris Welman said, that we would one day again be gathered in that same voorkamer, with Jurie Steyn not present, and that then Jurie Steyn’s hat and coat would be missing from the nail in the wall above the counter.

  “The way he throws his money about,” Chris Welman went on. “It can’t be just his pay as postmaster or what he makes out of his farm. Take now, when his braces broke. Instead of mending them with a piece of string like any of us would do, Jurie Steyn goes and buys a brand new pair of braces with red and white stripes –”

  “Maybe it’s to go with that striped jersey that Gysbert van Tonder spoke about,” At Naudé interjected. “Myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jurie Steyn gets put away for quite a long while, next time the post office auditor comes round to investigate what’s going on here.

  “And maybe that has happened – I’ve just thought of it now. Maybe Jurie Steyn has got to hear of it that there actually is an inspector from the G. P. O. in the neighbourhood – an inspector that’s trying to find out how it is that the Posts and Telegraphs Department is losing such thousands and millions of pounds every year. And so Jurie Steyn has run away into the bush to hide. Well, I only hope, for his sake, that in the thick bush he doesn’t with his striped braces get taken, from behind, for a quagga.”

  Another thing a post office inspector would have a lot to say about, Oupa Bekker remarked – in addition to Jurie Steyn’s stealing, that was – was the dreadful way Jurie Steyn loafed.

  “How can he do justice to his post office work or his farming?” Oupa Bekker asked. “The way he spends hours every week, standing behind his counter talking a lot of nonsense to us – we who are sitting here on important post office business, waiting for the Government lorry over long periods.”

  Yes, we agreed with Oupa Bekker, it would be an eye-opener, we were sure, if we were to work out how much time we had regularly to devote, on those same riempies seats, to officially waiting there like that, waiting for our mail. And to think that during all that time Jurie Steyn would just stand behind the counter and laze.

  We said that we were certain the authorities wouldn’t put up with some of the things taking place in the post office if they knew. In our own time, even, there had been some pretty disgraceful carryings-on in the post office, we said.

  “But one thing,” Johnny Coen observed, “Jurie Steyn isn’t standing behind the counter now, lazing.”

  And so Gysbert van Tonder said that it was the first time in his recollection that Jurie Steyn wasn’t.

  “And wouldn’t it be funny if Jurie Steyn was hiding, not in the bush, but behind the counter there?” Gysbert van Tonder continued. “That would be a joke, wouldn’t it? I mean, if all the time he has been listening to what we have been saying about him, ha, ha.”

  We laughed very heartily at that idea, and it had of course to happen that while we were still laughing our loudest Jurie Steyn suddenly did pop up from behind the counter, striped braces and all.

  We learnt afterwards that he had been squatting on the floor, there, searching through some files, when a couple of us came in. Then, when he heard his name mentioned, he decided to crouch behind the counter, to hear more of what we had to say about him.

  Chris Welman, in discussing it afterwards, said that how Jurie Steyn spoke then was the most awful single-handed dressing-down he had ever listened to since he was in the Kalahari with a Hollander and their Bushman guides decamped one night, taking with them a bottle of gin that the Hollander used as medicine. The Hollander spoke of the Bushmen in much the same terms that Jurie Steyn saw fit to employ then, Chris Welman said.

  Only, for the Bushmen it was less painful than it was for us, seeing that when the Hollander spoke the Bushmen didn’t have to sit around on riempies chairs and listen. When he heard Jurie Steyn talk, Chris Welman said, he actually wished that he was one of those Bushmen – sitting hundreds of miles out in the desert drinking gin.

  Anyway, the first of us that was able to make a reasonably coherent remark, after all that, was Oupa Bekker. And Oupa Bekker said it was well known that an eavesdropper never heard any good about himself. There was an Afrikaans proverb about it, too, even, Oupa Bekker said. It was such an old proverb that it was hardly Afrikaans, either, but more like High Dutch. (Chris Welman told us, too, afterwards, that when Oupa Bekker said those words he again thought of what had happened in the Kalahari, and then he remembered that what the Hollander spoke was also mostly High Dutch, about the Bushmen.)

  The proverb about eavesdroppers rhymed, Oupa Bekker went on, and one of the words in the rhyme was so low that no respectable people used it in Afrikaans anymore but only in High Dutch.

  A perturbed expression came over Jurie Steyn’s face. It was not difficult to imagine that he must have worn very much that same sort of look earlier in the afternoon, when he heard from behind the counter what our real opinion of him was. It was to be hoped that, through habit, Jurie Steyn’s features were not going to remain set in that mould.

  “If you think that, on top of everything else you’ve been saying about me,” Jurie Steyn burst out, “if you think that on top of everything else I’m also an eavesdropper –”

  But Oupa Bekker said, no, it was different in Jurie Steyn’s case.

  “If you think I’m nothing more than a High Dutch word –” Jurie Steyn started again.

  No, Oupa Bekker said to Jurie Steyn, reassuringly, we didn’t think th
at of him. After all, it wasn’t as though he had gone and hidden himself behind the counter on purpose.

  “Although,” Oupa Bekker added, shaking his head half-sorrowfully, “you could have come out from there quicker. Before we had said some of the things that we would rather have left unsaid, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” Gysbert van Tonder muttered, but not loud enough for Jurie Steyn to hear.

  So Jurie Steyn said that if we expected him to apologise for having listened to our disparaging statements about him, well, that would give him a laugh. He only hoped that next time he would overhear us saying even worse things about him, like that he should be sentenced by a judge of the Supreme Court to get lashes, or that he should get hanged, even. And he wouldn’t apologise for it, either, no matter how low the things were that he overheard us saying about him, Jurie Steyn said.

  But by that time Oupa Bekker was well under way with a story of the old days that related to an occasion when he, too, was inadvertently an audience to a duologue, his own personal appearance, mind and character serving as subject matter for the spoken piece in question. The shallow nature of the duologue could, Oupa Bekker said, best be gathered from a girl’s fatuous giggles and a man’s guffaws with which it was, at intervals, punctuated.

  It was in the old Cape Western Province, Oupa Bekker said, and there were farmhouses with thick walls and long stoeps and curved gables. And there was a girl, Lettie, that he was in love with. And there were oak-trees and ceilings with yellow-wood beams. And there was a young fellow, Gert Viljee, that Oupa Bekker despised just on sight for his giving himself such airs because of how he could play football.

  And one night there was a dance at a farmhouse that had a large, old-fashioned wagon-house at the back. And it was moonlight.

  “I hadn’t in so many words asked Lettie to come and meet me there, by the side of the wagon-house,” Oupa Bekker said, “but when two people are in love, you don’t need many words. I just clasped her hand in the voorhuis, where the dancing was. Then I winked, subtly, and jerked my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the wagon-house, a number of times. Then I slipped out of the door and went round to the back to wait for her.”

  He had to wait quite a while, Oupa Bekker said. It looked as though Lettie was taking her time. But then, afterwards, he did hear footsteps. And so, in order to give her a surprise, he went and hid behind the oak-tree whose leaves cast shadows on the whitewashed wall of the wagon-house – the shadow of the oak-leaves making it look like it was a creeper, Oupa Bekker said.

  The approaching footsteps sounded a bit heavy for a girl, which made Oupa Bekker wonder if Lettie had perhaps been drinking a little. But the next moment he saw that it was the footballer, Gert Viljee. It was an embarrassing moment for Oupa Bekker. He would have looked silly if he had come out of hiding, then.

  “And the next thing, Lettie turned up there,” Oupa Bekker said. “And then I wondered for the second time if she had not been drinking, having in that way come to mistake Gert Viljee for me. I wondered that because of how she went right up to him and let him hold her in his arms. And then I heard my name mentioned, with Lettie saying what a job she had to get rid of me all evening. ‘But afterwards he held my hand and made some silly signs – to say he was going home, I think,’ Lettie said. ‘And about time, too.’”

  They made many remarks about him that they appeared to think funny – remarks that he would not repeat now, Oupa Bekker said, for it had happened long ago, and he did not wish to show up Lettie and Gert Viljee for how empty-headed they were.

  “But then Gert Viljee suddenly said there were things about me that I didn’t get proper credit for,” Oupa Bekker went on. “And Lettie said, yes, she for one did not agree with what people said about my singing. And Gert Viljee said he thought it was very wrong of people to say that I danced like a muscovy duck. No matter how I danced, people had no right to criticise me like that, he said.

  “Well, I started getting quite a good opinion of myself again, to hear how they were standing up for me. I was particularly pleased, too, to hear Lettie say that she had only a few days before spoken severely to her father for saying that I looked like a miltsiek kwê-bird.

  “But the next moment I understood why they were saying all those complimentary things about me. For, when I looked at the wall, I saw that the shadow of the oak-tree’s trunk had by now reached to the edge of it, and next to it there was a good deal of my own shadow sticking out. So I realised that Lettie and Gert Viljee knew I was there.

  “‘And it’s also not right that they should always tap their foreheads like that when they talk about him,’ I heard Gert Viljee say.”

  The silence that ensued was of some duration.

  “Well, anyway, I am pleased that there was no part of my shadow showing from behind the counter,” Jurie Steyn said, eventually. “I wouldn’t like to hear what you would have had to say about me if you knew I was there – if you had started standing up for me, I mean.”

  Failing Sight

  We did not think that the picture in the newspaper that At Naudé passed round to us was particularly funny. After all, it wasn’t the first time we had known of a Bapedi chief that had got over his troubles with a motor-car that way.

  And, as Chris Welman pointed out, so many things had already been said about motor-cars, and about the things that happened to motor-cars, that that sort of picture didn’t raise a laugh anymore.

  “Even at the Gaborone end of the Dwarsberge, where the sand starts,” Chris Welman proceeded, a perceptible disdain in his voice at the thought of there actually being so unsophisticated a region, “even there they don’t think it’s funny, today, when a man takes a car to the garage and they find after two days that why it won’t go is because it hasn’t got petrol.”

  “Or through the engine having got stolen out of it by some mine-boys passing through there on their way back to Rhodesia,” Gysbert van Tonder supplemented, “the garage taking two days to find out that the engine wasn’t there at all.”

  Generally speaking, yes, we were inclined to agree with Chris Welman. Jokes about a motor-car were pretty stale. There didn’t seem to be much point in At Naudé having gone to the trouble of cutting that photograph out of the newspaper and passing it round to us in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. For we all knew that sort of thing. But At Naudé insisted that we had missed the true purpose of his having brought that newspaper cutting along. Had we studied the picture carefully, he asked.

  “But that’s what we’ve been saying,” Jurie Steyn, whose turn it was with the photograph, observed. “We’ve known of a Bapedi chief doing exactly the same thing before. And it’s not so very funny, I don’t think. After a person had had a lot of trouble with a motor-car I can quite imagine that he would come to believe that that was the easiest way out – removing the engine, because it’s just so much unnecessary weight, and inspanning a good team of long-horned oxen to pull the motor-car, instead. There’s nothing unusual about it, anymore. Another thing, I’ll go so far as to say it’s sensible.”

  While there might have been nothing very unusual about the photo-graph, it was certainly not customary for Jurie Steyn to acknowledge that a Bapedi chief could do anything sensible. It was the schoolmaster’s turn to examine the clipping.

  “It’s not so much that it’s an old joke, although it is that, too, of course,” young Vermaak said, “but it’s also an old photograph. Take that jacket, now, that that white man has got on sitting in the car next to the Bapedi chief. It’s years since they stopped making jackets with that narrow kind of lapel. And look how straight up the white man is sitting. It looks as though he’s very proud to be in a motor-car. Or to be having his photo taken. Or to be sitting next to a Bapedi chief.

  “And the car – why, I’ve never seen so old-fashioned a model. And that headlight sticking out behind the ox’s ear – it’s the kind of lamp we used to light to go to the stable with when I was a boy. The only part of the picture that looks up-to-date is the trek-c
hain fastened onto the car’s bumper. And as for the white man’s moustache – well, there’s an old model-T for you, if you like.”

  The schoolmaster said that, as far as he was concerned, it actually was a funny photograph. And it wasn’t the circumstance of the motor-car being drawn by a span of oxen that made him laugh, either. The real scream was that moustache.

  Studying the old photograph in his turn, Oupa Bekker said that maybe it was an old joke. But he had nothing against an old joke, himself. Indeed, some of the old jokes were the best, Oupa Bekker said. For one thing, they lasted longest.

  “Only, Rabusang doesn’t look like that, anymore,” Oupa Bekker added, shaking his head.

  “But Rabusang never did look like that,” At Naudé said, laughing. “It’s not Rabusang but some other Bapedi chief. All it has got printed under the photograph is ‘Bapedi chief cheerful about petrol shortage.’ It doesn’t say which Bapedi chief.”

  At Naudé went on to say that it was a bit of a showing-up for Oupa Bekker, his making a mistake like that. For it was well known that Oupa Bekker, while admitting that his hearing might not perhaps be what it once was, always claimed that his eyesight was as good as ever.

  “But I’ve just said that he doesn’t look like Rabusang,” Oupa Bekker explained, getting petulant. “How do you expect me to say it any clearer than what I’ve just said it? I’ve just said that Rabusang doesn’t look like that – not unless he’s changed a good deal with the years. This Bapedi chief doesn’t look like Rabusang any more than that white man there with the silly moustache looks like Rabusang. In any case, the light’s not too good.”

  Oupa Bekker didn’t say whether it was the light that he himself was sitting in at that moment, or the light in which the two occupants of the motor-car had sat years ago when the photograph was taken.

  “In any case,” Oupa Bekker proceeded, quickly, apparently anxious that his failing powers of vision should not be made the subject of a lengthy and detailed disquisition, “I also once travelled quite a distance in a motor-car that a Bapedi chief had taken the engine out of and that was being pulled by a long span of oxen.