“One time I saw that wild glare,” Chris Welman announced, “was when Gysbert van Tonder asked could he have At Naudé’s wireless, now, since At Naudé would probably not be permitted to keep it in the place where he was going to be taken to. The other time was when Gysbert van Tonder was pouring himself a mug of mampoer out of the jar standing near At Naudé’s bed. It was when it seemed as though Gysbert was going to empty the jar that At Naudé again got that wild look in his eye. You’ve got no idea how wild.”
“Except that he doesn’t get out of bed and that wild look,” Jurie Steyn asked, “how else is he sick? Talks queer, I suppose?”
Gysbert van Tonder and Chris Welman nodded solemnly and in unison.
“That’s where the rest of us Marico farmers are different,” Jurie Steyn said, expressing what we were all thinking. “Look how sensibly we talk here in my voorkamer. It’s through not reading newspapers and that sort of thing that keeps us healthy-minded. I suppose At Naudé thinks he’s Napoleon, too, hey?”
But Gysbert van Tonder said that that was something that he couldn’t swear to, really. And Chris Welman said, no, he couldn’t, either – not swear to, that was.
“I mean, he didn’t say straight out that he was Napoleon,” Chris Welman supplemented his statement. “He didn’t put his hat on sideways and hold one hand in his waistcoat and the other behind his back, like in that bioscope picture. But then, of course, At Naudé was lying in bed.”
Jurie Steyn raised his eyebrows in mute enquiry.
“He didn’t – ?” Jurie Steyn asked.
“No,” Gysbert van Tonder admitted, determined on being truthful. “No, he didn’t have his hat on in bed. I looked. Because I know that’s a sign that a man isn’t normal – if he wears his hat in bed, and he’s not wearing his hat in bed because it’s raining and the rainwater is leaking through the roof.”
But Oupa Bekker said you couldn’t always go by that. It wasn’t always a sure sign – the Napoleon sign or the hat sign, Oupa Bekker said. Or keeping your kitchen full of scorpions as pets.
Jurie Steyn said, well, maybe Oupa Bekker was right. He wouldn’t argue. Maybe a person who did things like that wasn’t mad. But it was mad enough for him, Jurie Steyn said.
“Or bending a curtain rod into a trumpet for blowing into to chase meerkats away,” Oupa Bekker continued imperturbably. “Sitting on your front stoep blowing. Or hearing voices. Or following the instructions in the Agricultural Department’s booklet on how to increase your mealie production.”
It was apparent that Oupa Bekker had in his time come across a pretty comprehensive assortment of Bushveld eccentricities.
“I’ve noticed,” Oupa Bekker went on, “that if a man is queer in one way, he may be quite all right in other ways. And so it’s a mistake that he’s mad because, say, for instance, he – well, what was that you said At Naudé had got?”
Gysbert van Tonder explained.
“The reason At Naudé has gone to bed,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “is because he says he keeps on seeing grey and black spots before his eyes the shape of aeroplanes –”
“What sort?” Johnny Coen interjected quickly. “Bombers or just passenger planes?”
They hadn’t gone into it so far, Gysbert van Tonder said, in their discussions with At Naudé.
“Well, he did the right thing, anyway,” Jurie Steyn said, “going to bed. Time, too, I should think. And no matter what kind of aeroplanes he sees. I mean, he can’t get dangerous, as long as he just keeps lying in bed.”
“And with his hat off,” Chris Welman made haste to concur.
“As Oupa Bekker would say,” Jurie Steyn remarked with a wink, “there’s just nothing wrong with At Naudé, except that he just sees a lot of aeroplanes all the time, in his bedroom at Okkerneutblaar, via Sinkplaas, District Groot Marico, with the curtains drawn. Next thing he’ll give Gysbert van Tonder that wireless set of his, simply because he won’t need it anymore. He’ll be able to hear all kinds of music and everything just in his room at Okkerneutblaar, and without any wireless at all. Oh, yes, you can see he’s quite sane. But I only hope they move him from there pretty soon into a room that’s got the walls all lined with pillows. Before he starts chopping people up, that is. I mean, seeing he’s so sane.”
Even though it was his own voorkamer that he was talking in, we all felt that it was not quite right that Jurie Steyn should be so heartless about At Naudé.
So we were glad when Oupa Bekker started talking again about how a man could appear to be mad in one way and yet in all other respects be completely normal. That was after Jurie Steyn had spoken of the day that At Naudé would be taken to the Weskoppies institution, outside Pretoria. And Jurie Steyn said he wondered what At Naudé would think when they passed the aerodrome and he saw real aeroplanes.
“When he sees those aeroplanes, there, taking off for Cape Town and England,” Jurie Steyn said, “I suppose he’ll think he’s just imagining them, too. And he’ll say to the male nurse in the blue uniform that he’s got those spots in front of his eyes again that look like aeroplanes. And the male nurse will say, ‘But, Meneer Naudé, they are aeroplanes.’ And poor old At will think the male nurse is just saying that to humour him.”
Never mind At Naudé, we thought. Jurie Steyn seemed in a pretty bad way himself, thinking out all that kind of nonsense.
But by that time Oupa Bekker had started citing the parallel instance of the mental trouble that came to Joggem Struys in the old days. What looked like mental trouble to outside observers, Oupa Bekker took pains to point out.
“Joggem Struys claimed he had a snake in his inside,” Oupa Bekker said.
“What sort of snake, a mamba or a –” Johnny Coen began again.
“– or a rinkhals. I don’t know,” Oupa Bekker headed him off. “But it was a black snake that was eating out his inside, Joggem Struys said. Twisting and squirming and eating. Sometimes, from his symptoms, it seemed like it might be a bakkop. Other times, again, it sounded more like a boomslang, except that a boomslang is green, whereas the snake in Joggem Struys’s inside was black. Of course, it was snake country in which Joggem Struys lived, and we know that there are some pretty queer places that a snake can get into, when it’s real snake country, especially in the old days –”
Thereupon Chris Welman mentioned the case of a snake that had got into the cupboard of the konsistorie where the Nagmaal wine was kept, and of the fright the dominee received when he went to that cupboard at a time when it wasn’t Nagmaal. But the dominee’s agitation was only equalled by the alarm awakened in an elder when he went to that cupboard at a time when it wasn’t Nagmaal. And only afterwards it was discovered, Chris Welman said, that that snake was only a tame snake that the verger had introduced into the wine cupboard for reasons of his own.
After that, Gysbert van Tonder spoke about a quite untrained snake with a love for education that used to come and clean the blackboard for the teacher and at playtime made himself into a hoop for the children to roll around. But that snake was a bad example to the class, Gysbert van Tonder said, because of the habit he had of putting his tongue out, and forked, too, whenever he wasn’t thinking. Sticking out his tongue in class was a practice that the teacher couldn’t encourage and that the snake couldn’t break himself of, and so he wasn’t allowed to come to the school anymore, Gysbert van Tonder said.
To talk of snakes was an invitation to everybody to tell all the Bushveld lies they could think of, with the result that it was quite a while before Oupa Bekker could return to the subject of Joggem Struys and his internal complaint.
“And so it was proved from what the doctor said,” Oupa Bekker ended up, having spoken at some length, “that Joggem Struys was not really so mad, after all. The symptoms of the stomach trouble that Joggem had, the doctor said, were such that could very well be described as like a black snake eating up your inside. That was what made it easy for the doctor to work out what medicines to give him. The doctor said that Joggem Struys’s sickn
ess had a long Greek name that meant a black snake eating up your inside.”
That gave young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, his chance to show how much he knew both about medicine and Greek. Melan, he said, was the Greek for black, and ophis was the word for a snake. What the Greek word for eating was, he did not, however, know.
Nevertheless, the schoolmaster said, one could understand, in the same way, that what At Naudé was suffering from was some form of illness that made spots come in front of his eyes. That would account for that look that Gysbert van Tonder and Chris Welman, giving a measure of rein to their imaginations, perhaps, had depicted as a wild glare.
“It is only natural, too,” young Vermaak continued, “considering At Naudé’s absorption in current world affairs, that he should also make use of his imagination a little and see those floating spots as aeroplanes. As jet fighters, likely as not.”
Nor, the schoolmaster continued, should the significance be overlooked of that jar of mampoer that Chris Welman spoke of as being in the neighbourhood of At Naudé’s bed. Within access of At Naudé’s right hand when his arm was extended, the schoolmaster assumed.
“Well, that can bring spots before a person’s eyes, all right,” young Vermaak declared.
We nodded our heads in thoughtful agreement. Yes, we said, it could.
As it turned out – when we heard of what the doctor who attended At Naudé had to say about it – Oupa Bekker and the schoolmaster would appear to have summed up At Naudé’s condition pretty correctly.
For the doctor said that after a few days of diet and medicine the spots would be gone from in front of At Naudé’s eyes, and At would be about again.
And he was, too.
It was Gysbert van Tonder and Chris Welman, again, who imparted this news to us.
“He’s all right now,” they said.
“He’s out of bed and sitting on his front stoep,” they said.
“And he’s got no more aeroplane spots in front of his eyes,” they said.
At Naudé was very contented, sitting on his stoep. And he had bent a curtain rod into a trumpet that he was blowing into for chasing meerkats away, they said. Sitting on his front stoep blowing.
Man to Man
The young mounted policeman, Bothma, explained of course, that why he had called round at Jurie Steyn’s post office, that afternoon, was just because he was on his regular rounds. He hadn’t picked that afternoon, particularly, he added. And he hadn’t come to Jurie Steyn’s post office specially, any more than he would visit any other post office or voorkamer in that part of the Groot Marico specially, he said.
It was only that he was carrying out his duties of patrolling the area, he explained, and it just so happened that in the course of routine he was patrolling over Jurie Steyn’s farm, then.
He was new to the job of being a mounted policeman, young Bothma added.
Well, we realised that much about him, of course, without his having had to say it. And because he was new to his work we made a good deal of allowance for him. But we were also pretty sure that the time would come when Mounted Constable Bothma would learn a few more things.
And he would understand then that nothing could rouse people’s suspicions more than that a policeman should come round and offer all sorts of excuses for his being there.
“I just sort of make a few notes in my notebook,” Bothma went on, “to say at what time, and so on, I call at each farmhouse that I do call on, patrolling, like I said.”
Gysbert van Tonder yawned.
You could see, from the policeman’s taking out his notebook and pencil like that, right at the beginning of his visit, and before he had sat down properly, almost, that he would yet have a long way to go and would have to traverse many a mile of made Bushveld road and bridle path, asking a multitude of questions and getting the same number of wrong answers, before his call at an isolated farmhouse would make the farmer start thinking quickly to himself.
But the way Bothma was now, the farmer wouldn’t ask him had he come through the vlakte – expecting the policeman to say, untruthfully, no, he had followed the Government Road as far as the poort. The farmer’s thoughts would not travel with lightning speed to his brandy still. Nor would the farmer wonder if those few head of Bechuana cattle were safe in the truck to the Johannesburg market.
All those things we could sense about Constable Bothma in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer that afternoon. It was also apparent to us that, before arriving at where we were, he had called on more than one Bushveld farmer en route. That would account for something of the diffidence in his manner. It was easy to guess that he had asked a few stock questions along the road – not that there was anything specific that he wanted to know, really, as he would no doubt have explained, but just because asking those questions was a part of his patrol duties – and it was only reasonable to suppose that the answers some of the Marico farmers had given him were not characterised by a noteworthy degree of artlessness.
He had doubtless discovered that while a policeman’s questions might be, in terms of standing orders, stereotypes, a farmer’s replies, generally speaking, weren’t. Especially when that farmer’s answers were being written straight into a notebook.
Nevertheless, because Bothma was, after all, a mounted policeman and in khaki uniform, with brass letters on his shoulders, we did feel a measure of constraint in his company. This circumstance of our not feeling quite at ease manifested itself in the way that most of us sat on our riempies chairs – just a little more stiffly than usual, our shoulders not quite touching the backs of the chairs. It also manifested itself in the unconventional way in which Gysbert van Tonder saw fit to sprawl in his seat, in an affectation of a mental content that would have awakened mistrustful imaginings in the breast of a policeman who had been, say, two and a half years at the game.
It was then that Chris Welman made a remark that went a good way towards relieving the tension. Afterwards, in talking it over, we had to say that we could not but admire the manner in which Chris Welman had worked out the right words to use. Not that there was anything clever in the way that Chris Welman spoke, of course.
No, we all felt that the statement Chris Welman made then was something that was easily within the capacity of any one of us to have made, if we had just sat back a little, and thought, and had then made use of the common sense that comes to anybody that has lived on a farm long enough.
“The man you should really ask questions of,” Chris Welman said to Constable Bothma, “is Gysbert van Tonder. That’s him there. Sitting with his legs taking up half the floor and his hands behind his head, with his elbows stretched out. Just from the way he’s sitting, you can see he’s the biggest cattle-smuggler in the whole of the Dwarsberg area.”
Well, that gave us a good laugh, of course. We all knew that Gysbert van Tonder smuggled more cattle across the Konventie border than any other man in the Marico. What was more, we knew that Gysbert van Tonder’s father had been regularly bringing in cattle over the line from Ramoutsa before there had ever been a proper barbed-wire fence there, even. And we also knew that, in the long years of the future, when we were all dead and gone, Gysbert van Tonder’s sons would still be doing the same thing.
What was more, nothing would ever stop them, either. And not even if every policeman from Cape Town to the Limpopo knew about it. For the Bechuanas from whom he traded cattle felt friendly towards Gysbert van Tonder. And that was a sentiment they did not have for a border policeman, unreasonable though such an attitude of mind might perhaps seem. Moreover, this was an outlook on life that, to a not inconsiderable degree, Gysbert van Tonder shared with the Bechuanas.
Consequently, in having spoken the way he did, Chris Welman had cleared the air for all of us – for Gysbert van Tonder included. As a result, Gysbert van Tonder could for one thing sit more comfortably in his chair, relaxing as he sat. There was no longer any necessity for him to adopt a carefree pose which must have put quite a lot of strain on his neck and leg m
uscles, not even to talk of how hard it must have been for his spine to keep up that effortful bearing that was intended to suggest indifference.
Anyway, Gysbert van Tonder joined in the laughter that greeted Chris Welman’s words. Constable Bothma laughed also. It was clear from that that about the first thing the sergeant at the Bekkersdal headquarters must have told young Bothma was about how he had to keep an eye on Gysbert van Tonder.
It was good to feel that there was so much tension lifted from us then, after Chris Welman had spoken, and we had all laughed, and we understood that we need not pretend to each other anymore.
“Of course, we know you haven’t come here to spy on us,” Jurie Steyn said to Constable Bothma, after a pause. “I mean, you’ve told us all that yourself. The little odds and ends of things that you put in your notebook – well, it’s your job, isn’t it? If you didn’t write those little things in your notebook you’d get the sack, as likely as not. And if you didn’t come and patrol my voorkamer, too, like you’re doing now, you’d as likely as not also get the sack. And if you wrote anything in your notebook that isn’t so, why, for that, of course, you would just get the sack, too.”
From the way Jurie Steyn spoke, it would appear that, looked at from any angle, whatever Constable Bothma did, the one thing staring him in the face was dismissal from the police force.
“And there aren’t so many things a policeman – I mean, an ex-policeman – can find to do when once he’s got the sack,” Jurie Steyn continued. “Because when you go and look for a job, afterwards, almost the first thing the boss will ask you is why you got the sack from the police. And no matter what your answer is, it always seems as though there is more behind it than what you say. Seeing that you are an ex-policeman applying for work the boss can never be sure about how much of what you are telling him is lies.”
Johnny Coen took a hand in the conversation, then, and he said to the policeman that seeing that he and the policeman were both young, he could feel for the policeman. And he didn’t want Constable Bothma to misunderstand what Jurie Steyn had just been saying, Johnny Coen went on. It was known that Jurie Steyn was like that, Johnny Coen said, but everybody knew that Jurie Steyn meant nothing by it.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 38