The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  It was just that we were all respectable people, respectable farmers, and so on, Johnny Coen explained, and for that reason we all got a little upset when a policeman came round, especially when the policeman pulled out a pencil and notebook. If we weren’t such respectable people, respectable farmers and so on, Johnny Coen said, we wouldn’t mind if even a dozen mounted policemen in uniforms came marching into our voorkamers with S. A. P. on their shoulders and with their horses waiting outside.

  But it was just because we were respectable people that we got a guilty sort of a conscience when a policeman came into our house, Johnny Coen proceeded. And for that reason he wanted Constable Bothma to bear with Jurie Steyn and not to get offended at anything that Jurie Steyn said in haste.

  “Oh, no,” Constable Bothma said. “That is quite in order. I would not even have thought that there was anything insulting in it, in what Meneer Steyn said.”

  So Johnny Coen said that that was just what he meant. Any man that was not a policeman would very likely have had his pride hurt, by the way that Jurie Steyn had spoken. But he could see that it would, of course, be different with a policeman, Johnny Coen said. It wasn’t that he thought a policeman didn’t have pride –

  Johnny Coen looked pretty foolish, then. For he had been trying to stand up for Constable Bothma, but had only succeeded in making Jurie Steyn’s disparaging references to the police force sound a lot worse.

  After that it was, of course, Oupa Bekker’s turn to talk. And although Oupa Bekker’s story related to some period in the past when the functions of a police constable were exercised apparently not unsuccessfully by the local veldkornet, it seemed as though the difficulties that Con-stable Bothma was experiencing at present had some features in common with the vicissitudes that the young veldkornet in Oupa Bekker’s story went through.

  “Many a man would have been satisfied with that position,” Oupa Bekker was saying, “just because of the honour that went with it in those days. For one thing, even if you didn’t have a uniform or an office with a telephone in it to work in, like you have today, or even a mounted policeman horse with a white star on his forehead that can keep time to the music at the Johannesburg Show – even if you had to ride just one of your own horses on a patched saddle, and you had a patch in the seat of your trousers, too, you still had a printed certificate signed by the president to say you were veldkornet, and that you could hang in a gold frame on the wall of your voorkamer.”

  But the glitter of rank and the nimbus of office were as nought to that young veldkornet, Oupa Bekker said. The thing that worried the young veldkornet was that, because he was charged with the mainten-ance of law and order in his area, he was called upon, in however delicate a manner, to act as an informer on his neighbour. The thought that, through his job, he was cut off from intimate contact with his fellow men saddened him. He liked having friends, and he found he couldn’t have any, anymore – not real friends – now that he was veldkornet.

  “In the end –” Oupa Bekker said.

  But we had rather that Oupa Bekker had not continued to the end, which was at once stark and inexorable, pitiless and yet compelling. For the only true friend that the young veldkornet had in the end was Sass Koggel, a scoundrel the like of whom the Groot Marico District had had but few in its history. Only with Sass Koggel did the veldkornet find, in the end, that he could be as he really was.

  Sass Koggel and the veldkornet took each other for what they were. Neither, in his relations with the other, had to put up any sort of pretence. They were on opposite sides of the law. The veldkornet was all out to lay Sass Koggel by the heels. Sass Koggel directed all his efforts to the end that the veldkornet should get nothing on him.

  But, outside of that technicality, it would be hard to find, in the whole of the Marico, a couple of firmer friends than were those two.

  It was a long story that Oupa Bekker told, and we listened to it with fluctuating degrees of attention.

  But Constable Bothma and Gysbert van Tonder did not listen to Oupa Bekker at all. They were too engrossed in what each had to say to the other. And while talking to Gysbert van Tonder, the cattle-smuggler, it was only once necessary for the policeman, Constable Bothma, to open his notebook.

  Constable Bothma opened his notebook at the back, somewhere, and extracted a photograph which he passed over to Gysbert van Tonder. Gysbert studied the likeness for some moments. “Takes after you, does he?” Gysbert van Tonder asked.

  In his voice there was only sincerity.

  Feat of Memory

  “Where’s that rubber stamp, now?” Jurie Steyn said, letting his eye travel the length of his post office counter. “I’m sure I had it here a few minutes ago. Right in my hand I had it.”

  “What’s that thing you’ve still got in your hand, there, Jurie?” Chris Welman asked.

  So Jurie Steyn said, well, if that didn’t beat everything.

  “If I didn’t see it happening myself, right with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it possible that a man could be so forgetful,” Jurie Steyn said. “It’s trouble does that to a person, of course, making him absent-minded like that – trouble and a high kind of official responsibility.”

  There were a few things that we would have all liked to have said about that, of course. We would have liked to have made mention of some of the quite unusual sorts of mistakes that happened in the post office, sometimes, with letters and parcels. And it would have given us pleasure, too, to have said that, everything considered, it was not surprising that errors of a kind we could mention crept into certain aspects of the post office’s functionings.

  If there were other post office servants with Jurie Steyn’s high sense of official responsibility, we would have liked to have said. Instead, we let it pass. There were certain things, we knew, that Jurie Steyn did not like to be rubbed up the wrong way about.

  The only one of us to make any comment at all was Gysbert van Tonder. And Gysbert contented himself with a mild statement to the effect that, with the way things were today, when you rolled up the sleeve of your right arm in order to sit down and pen a letter, you were taking your life into your own hands.

  “Anyway, it said over the wireless the other night,” At Naudé remarked somewhat hurriedly – in order to forestall unpleasantness, maybe – “that some of the greatest men in history have also had some of the worst memories. And it wasn’t only learned men, like professors (that we all know have got very bad memories) that were like that. But also men without any kind of learning at all – men like great politicians, for instance, it said over the wireless.”

  And also, of the men in history with poor memories that hadn’t had much learning, At Naudé continued, were some of the world’s great educators. Some of the world’s greatest writers of text-books for high school use, the wireless said.

  So Jurie Steyn said, well, of course, he had never put forward any claims himself to having an outstanding memory. In fact, even with his job as postmaster he made mistakes, sometimes, through forgetting things, that he was sure would afford us a great deal of amusement one day when he had time to go into it all. Like he would sometimes forget for weeks on end to send a registered package on. It was really awfully funny, Jurie Steyn said.

  Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder made mention of a number of great politicians that he had known in his time who suffered from extraordinary lapses of memory. There was one politician in particular, Gysbert van Tonder said, who, when he came round to the Marico before an election, knew every farmer by his first name and knew the ages of each of the farmer’s children and knew where each child came in class at the end of the term.

  And yet, because of that high kind of official responsibility that Jurie Steyn had mentioned, the politician’s memory just went completely, immediately after he had been elected.

  “And when I went to see him in Pretoria, he hardly knew who I was, even,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “But for that I could perhaps not blame him so much, seeing that I hardly knew who he
was, either, with that dark suit he was wearing, like a manel, and with a high, stick-up collar. And when I put my hand in my pocket and he saw that what I pulled out was only my tobacco pouch, a disappointed look came over his face that remained there right through all the time I had that interview with him.

  “But how I saw that his memory had got really bad was when I mentioned a small favour that he had promised to do me. He had made me that promise sitting in my own voorkamer, even, drinking coffee. And yet when I spoke to him in Pretoria he had no recollection of ever having been in my voorkamer. And as for the coffee, he said he had drunk so much bad coffee in the Marico that he would actually be glad to forget that part.”

  Talking about that kind of thing (Oupa Bekker remarked at this stage), well, the man with the most extraordinary powers of memory that he had ever come across in the whole of the Lowveld was Sarel Meintjies – “Rooi” Sarel, they called him, from the colour of his hair. And there was nothing “Rooi” Sarel ever forgot, Oupa Bekker said. But just nothing.

  “Except perhaps one thing, only,” Oupa Bekker continued, reflectively. “Or, at least, that was how it seemed to some of us afterwards. But if people were talking, say, like the way we’re talking in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, now, ‘Rooi’ Sarel would remember years afterwards, even, exactly what each one said. And dates – and figures – why, you’ve got no idea. If you asked him, for instance, when was the big anthrax outbreak, he could tell you exactly to the year and month.

  “And he could tell you in numbers what losses each farmer in the Dwarsberg area suffered, and how much each one got paid out by the Government in compensation. And he could also inform you precisely how long Japie Krige got for it, afterwards, when the Government found out just how wrong the figures were that Japie Krige had filled in in his compensation form.

  “Or if you asked him how many years ago it was that the post-cart got overturned at the Molopo drift, and the driver was sacked for it, because the authorities thought he had capsized the post-cart on purpose and not just because of an illness that he was taking peach brandy for – why, then, ‘Rooi’ Sarel would be able to acquaint you with it to the day, and almost to the exact hour, even. And it wasn’t just because it was ‘Rooi’ Sarel himself that was the driver of that post-cart that it was possible for him to remember so well. If it was somebody else that had been the driver of the post-cart and that was sacked for upsetting it, ‘Rooi’ Sarel would have had all the facts at his fingertips just the same.

  “Or if you took ‘Rooi’ Sarel once along a road, for instance, he would never afterwards forget that road. And if you turned right off from the road and went through the veld, even, and no matter how far, it was something that made you feel you wanted to laugh your head off at it, almost, afterwards, when you found out how faithfully ‘Rooi’ Sarel could recall every inch of the way you took.”

  When Oupa Bekker paused to refill his pipe, Johnny Coen expressed the opinion that it must be of considerable advantage to a man to be blessed with gifts of an order such as Oupa Bekker credited “Rooi” Sarel with. He himself did not have a particularly retentive mind, Johnny Coen confessed, and what served to make it even worse, actually, he found, was that in recalling past circumstances and events he would as likely as not remember a lot of things also that never happened. To have that kind of a mind was, in a way, more of a handicap to a man than to have that other kind of a mind, where you simply forgot whole stretches of incidents.

  More than once, Johnny Coen said, he had through this mental peculiarity of his been placed in an embarrassing situation – like seeming to remember that a girl in a blue dress and a white hat and shoes had smiled at him once when there was a Nagmaal. And then that girl’s young man had come and made it clear to him, later on, about how his memory had deceived him. One reason why he agreed so readily that he had been mistaken, Johnny Coen added, was because the girl in the blue dress’s young man was a weight-lifter, and had medals for it.

  “It is on that account,” Johnny Coen said, “that I have so much respect for that man, ‘Rooi’ Sarel, that Oupa Bekker has told us about. I am sure that ‘Rooi’ Sarel would never have made an ignorant mistake like what I made. He would have recalled right away that the weight-lifter’s girl had not even looked at him. And a man like ‘Rooi’ Sarel, with those great gifts of his for remembering things – well, I feel he must have been very proud to have been able to make use of his gifts to help other people. I mean, not only the Marico District, but the whole country – all the nation, that is – would be benefited through having in its midst somebody with such fine powers of memory as ‘Rooi’ Sarel’s, put to their proper use. Even if ‘Rooi’ Sarel did not get rewarded for it in the way he should have been, perhaps.”

  Oupa Bekker, having got his pipe to draw satisfactorily again – satisfactorily for himself, that was: it being a matter of lesser importance that the young schoolmaster, seated next to Oupa Bekker, had started coughing – said that he would not argue with Johnny Coen.

  For it was indeed a truth that “Rooi” Sarel had been able to place his unusual talents at the disposal of the nation. And it was also true that in terms of hard cash he had not been over-generously rewarded. And yet there were those among the farmers of the Groot Marico who felt that “Rooi” Sarel’s abilities could have been more commendably employed.

  “As I have said,” Oupa Bekker continued, “it was ‘Rooi’ Sarel driving the post-cart when it capsized at the Molopo drift. And you can imagine how he must have looked when he crawled out of the water. And because all the other farmers around there had their hands full with their own troubles – since it was then right in the middle of the anthrax outbreak, and even though the Government was talking about paying the farmers compensation, it was uncertain as to how much it was going to be – nobody was able to give much thought to the misfortune that ‘Rooi’ Sarel was in – climbing out of the drift with the sack, and with his clothes wringing wet.

  “In the end it was Japie Krige, with quite a few misfortunes of his own, at the time, that took ‘Rooi’ Sarel in, feeding and clothing him and giving him enough money to get to Pretoria and to keep him there until he found work again.

  “And then, afterwards, as you know, there was that scandal about the compensations. It got to the ears of the authorities that some of the farmers had received money for losses they had never suffered. And that was when the police started offering rewards to people who could say – who could prove, that is, you know – who could –”

  “Who could give evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of party/parties aforementioned in sub-section 2 (a),” young Vermaak the schoolmaster said, having stopped coughing by then.

  “That was where ‘Rooi’ Sarel’s great powers of memory stood him in such good stead,” Oupa Bekker continued, “even though he had not stayed on Japie Krige’s farm very long, and even though the reward offered by the police was not really very large.

  “But there were some farmers in these parts who said that, with his remarkable memory and all, there was one thing that ‘Rooi’ Sarel forgot. It was a pity they said, that with so many things that he was able to remember, he should have forgotten where his loyalty lay.”

  Easy Circumstances

  “Poverty is no crime,” Chris Welman declared. He declared it loudly, a shade aggressively, at the same time pushing the toe of his broken veldskoen under his chair – a good way under. “Nor is it a matter for shame, either,” he added, “to be poor.”

  “No, I don’t care who knows that I am not particularly rich, myself,” At Naudé remarked, withdrawing from general view a trouser turn-up that had been mended with string. “Of course, it’s not like I’ve been brought up poor. When my father trekked into these parts, coming up from the Cape, he was well-to-do. I won’t say diamonds, and a sitting-up chair with blue curtains that you got carried around in, and such like, as they used to have in the old days in the Cape. No doubt my grandfather, in his time, would have been carried around in a sitt
ing-up chair.

  “But my father, when he came up from the Cape – why, we were just people in quite easy circumstances, that’s all. Perhaps in the Transvaal – with the class of farmer living in the Transvaal then, I mean – we would have been thought to have been rich, even.”

  So Chris Welman said, yes, in the same way when his grandfather came up from the Cape his grandfather was reckoned to be a man of no little affluence – especially so, perhaps, in comparison with what was the financial standing of the general run of Transvaler then resident in the Transvaal. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised if his grandfather had actually been carried up from the Cape into the Transvaal Bushveld, sitting in one of those sitting-up chairs with blue curtains.

  “Yes, I can quite believe it,” Gysbert van Tonder interjected in a sarcastic voice. “And it’s easy to see that that’s what your Nagmaal suit is patched with, too – with still a piece of that same blue curtain … Well, I’m not exactly penniless today, and I don’t care who knows it. Also, I was brought up poor, and I’m not ashamed of that either.”

  So Jurie Steyn said, well, there were different ways of making money. And he wasn’t sure that it would meet with everybody’s approval, the way some people made their money. At the same time he couldn’t but think that it was a strange thing how some people would talk about their forebears that trekked up into the Transvaal from the Cape, and about how well-to-do their forebears were, compared with the Transvalers there that lived just in reed and mud-daub houses.

  After all, where did the Transvalers that lived just in reed and mud-daub houses come from, if they didn’t come from the Cape? He was sure he didn’t know, Jurie Steyn said.