The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Is there going to be a merry-go-round?” Oupa Bekker enquired, his eyes lighting up. “Why didn’t you say so before? Bekkersdal was named after my grandfather. But I didn’t even think of going to the hundred-year birthday. I never thought they would have a merry-go-round, too. They’re doing it grand, hey? The first merry-go-round I saw was when I was a child, and we had to go all the way to Zeerust. But you say they’re really going to bring the merry-go-round to Bekkersdal? The horses going round, and brass music, and silver paper stars?”

  “More than anything else, silver paper stars,” Chris Welman said.

  Oupa Bekker was genuinely excited.

  “My! My!” he said, and again, “My! My! To think that after all these years such a thing should happen to Bekkersdal. We’re all going, of course, aren’t we? Bekkersdal’s hundredth year’s birthday. What Chris Welman says is as good as a centenary, just about. And brass music and silver paper stars.”

  We all said, yes, of course we would go. The only person that seemed a bit out of it was the schoolmaster.

  And because what he said was what he had learnt at university, the schoolmaster’s words did not make sense to us, overmuch.

  “The drostdy,” young Vermaak said, “gone. It’s like the front teeth knocked out of Bekkersdal’s main street. It’s as though I’ve had my own front teeth knocked out by a caestus. It’s like I’m myself spitting out teeth.”

  “Silver paper stars,” Oupa Bekker said, who hadn’t heard what the schoolmaster was saying, and wasn’t interested, anyway.

  Who would want the southern hemisphere’s summer heavens, when there was the majestic firmament of a merry-go-round side-show fashioned of speckled silver paper?

  Dying Race

  We agreed with Gysbert van Tonder that, for ignorance, the T’hla-kewa Bushman took a lot of beating. For real ignorance, that was, of course. And then it had to be a real T’hlakewa Bushman, also. It had to be the genuine article and no nonsense. We didn’t want a Flat-Face Koranna that you could see by his toenails was half Mchopi coming along and pretending to us that he was a Bushman.

  Nor did we mean the high society kind of Bushman, we said, that had lived for a while at a mission station and had there learnt one or two civilised tricks. Like wearing a collar stud stuck through his ear lobe, we said. Or rubbing axle-grease in his hair in place of the gemsbok fat that he had been used to. Or painting lines in washing-blue round his eyes and from there to his ears, to look like spectacles, we said. No, we certainly did not mean a Bushman like that, that had learnt city ways.

  When it came to proper ignorance, we said, it had to be a raw T’hla-kewa Bushman just out of the desert: so raw that the soles of his feet were worn through, with his walking over hard ground after being used only to the sandier parts of the desert. That was what we meant by a raw Bushman, we said – one that had his feet raw. We didn’t mean the kind of Bushman that when he saw a petrol pump would go and get fuel for his lighter there.

  “It’s funny that you should talk like that,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “but I remember a Bushman in the Kalahari once mentioning to me about what he took to be a new kind of policeman in a red uniform that he had seen, at a distance of eleven miles – the Bushman having no wish to get any nearer to a policeman than that.

  “I realised afterwards that it wasn’t a policeman that the Bushman had seen there but a petrol pump painted red. But the Bushman took no notice of my explanation. ‘How I know he was a policeman,’ the Bushman said, ‘is because he never moved more than he had to.’ And so I still don’t know if he was a real ignorant T’hlakewa Bushman or if he had learnt a thing or two.”

  It was these scientists, Jurie Steyn said, coming along into the Kalahari and studying the Bushmen and their ways and listening to what they had to say, that were giving the Bushmen wrong ideas. How a self-respecting white man, and one supposed to have a certain amount of education, too, could waste his time like that passed his understanding, Jurie Steyn said.

  And he wasn’t talking even about how much of the Bushman’s time got wasted. For the Bushman needed every spare moment of time he had, Jurie Steyn reckoned, in order to be able to meditate properly on what kind of a lost heathen he was.

  “That’s the only way the Bushman will ever get right,” Jurie Steyn said, “through sitting down and using his brains a bit – thinking out quietly about why he’s such a bane to mankind. It’s only in that way that he’ll be able to change his ways a little and not get the human race such a bad name wherever he goes, just through his belonging to the human race.”

  But instead of that, there were these scientists actually coming along and studying the Bushman’s ways, and making notes, Jurie Steyn said. What could the Bushman think other than that his manner of life was all right, and something to be proud of, even, when white men came and asked him questions about it, telling him that they were anxious to learn about his habits?

  That gave the Bushman no end of a high opinion of himself – thinking that white travellers had come all that way into the desert just to look him up so that they could learn from him. It made the Bushman quite insufferable, Jurie Steyn contended. The Bushman stuck his chest out, and acted as though he was some sort of a professor, talking just any kind of rubbish that came into his head as though it was the most profound wisdom.

  “I’ve known,” young Vermaak the schoolmaster said, winking, “more than one university professor that was just like that.”

  “You’d think that a Bushman would be only too glad to keep quiet about his habits, seeing what most of his habits were,” Jurie Steyn continued.

  And he wasn’t talking even about a Bushman’s habits to do with laundry that he saw hanging on a clothes-line when there was nobody within sight. Or a Bushman’s habits with a sheep that had strayed from the flock and the shepherd having his back turned for a few minutes. Or his habits with watermelons that you weren’t watching. Or with a blancmange pudding when the pantry window was open.

  There was the Bushman’s established practice, Jurie Steyn said, of going down on all fours in front of an ant-hill that he had broken the top of off, and just licking up the ants as fast as he could go, and without washing them first. And his custom of popping a scorpion in his mouth and swallowing it down without chewing, not even thinking under what kind of a stone that scorpion might have been. And then patting his stomach afterwards.

  Naturally, it gave a Bushman wrong ideas about things, Jurie Steyn said, when a well-dressed white man, instead of asking him wasn’t he ashamed of himself for being so low, said that he had come to the Bushman to learn, and started making gramophone records of the things the Bushman had to say. Or a film.

  “I even heard one of those records,” Jurie Steyn added, “and you know what, I could hardly understand what the Bushman was saying, with all the extra clicks he put in, him thinking he’s so smart, talking into a gramophone. But what I say is, if a scientist wants to study something, why can’t he go and learn something high up? Like high dictation – or – or –”

  “Or ethnology?” the schoolmaster suggested. “Or anthropology?”

  “Yes, something high up like that,” Jurie Steyn agreed. “What’s he want to fool around with studying Bushmen? The scientist can take it from me that no good can come of that. Next thing, he’ll also be patting his stomach after eating something that he didn’t take the insides out of first.”

  Another thing, At Naudé said, that was causing a quite unnecessary amount of disorder in these parts, was that story that the scientists had been spreading of late about the Bushmen being a dying race. Every year their numbers were decreasing, the scientists said. Soon the Bushmen would be no more.

  Gysbert van Tonder said he was glad At Naudé had mentioned that, because he was coming to it.

  “As though the Bushmen haven’t always been cheeky enough,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “And now here’s this new piece of nonsense, about the Bushman disappearing. Well, we all know, of course, that when it’s wi
th something slung over his shoulder that doesn’t belong to him, then there’s nobody can disappear as quick as a Bushman. I mean, when you look again, he’s just vanished. And, of course, that’s what happens every time with the scientist. The scientist is sitting out in the desert on a camp-stool with the recording instrument on one side of him and a bottle on the other, and the Bushman is talking.

  “And when the scientist hears the machine going click-click-click quicker than what the Bushman is making clicks, he knows it’s time to change the record. And, naturally, when the scientist turns round again, the Bushman isn’t there anymore. And because he’s absent-minded, being a scientist, he doesn’t see that the bottle isn’t there anymore, either. And because he doesn’t notice the Bushman around, he thinks, ah, well, the Bushman must be dead. It’s only a scientist that would get hold of a muddle-headed notion like that, of course. Or what do you think?”

  We did not demur.

  “And the advantage,” Gysbert van Tonder proceeded, “that the Bushman is taking of this tomfool story that he is dying out, is just too awful. He thinks he’s something precious, because he’s dying. Like I said to a Bushman in the Kalahari a little while ago, no, he couldn’t have any more chewing tobacco. He’d had enough for one morning, I said … So what does this Bushman answer? ‘You’ll be sorry for this one day, baas,’ he says. ‘One day when I am not here anymore. When all that will be left of me will be a gramophone record.’”

  When he did feel sick, though – really sick – Gysbert van Tonder said, was when the Bushman said it would be a happy release for him.

  “I got him in the end, though,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked, looking pleased with himself. “He was loafing on the job. So I told him to shake himself. ‘Hurry up,’ I said to him, ‘you know you haven’t got too much time.’”

  We said to Gysbert van Tonder that it was easy to see that that one couldn’t have been a very raw Bushman. The only part of him that might have been raw, we said, would be the inside of his hands – raw from trying to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together in front of a movie camera.

  There was another side to being a film actor that was different from just getting your name in front of a bioscope in electric lights, we said. And the Bushman was beginning to find that out for himself. For one thing, he also had to start thinking out silly answers to the questions the scientist asked him. Because, unless he gave a silly answer, the scientist would think he wasn’t a proper Bushman, and that would be the end of the Bushman’s film and gramophone career.

  “It makes you sick,” Gysbert van Tonder – who was apparently not feeling quite himself that afternoon – said for the second time. “Like one Bushman that a scientist asked ‘What happens when you throw a stone into the water at Lake Ngami?’ … and the Bushman said, ‘It makes brass bangles come on the water, baas.’ Now, that Bushman just about choked, trying not to laugh. He knew as good as you or me that if you chuck a stone into a dam it gives off yellow ripples, with the sun shining on them.

  “But the Bushman knew that, to have a film made of him as the last survivor of a primitive race, his answer had to be as absurd as possible. And you’ve got no idea what a fuss the scientist made of that Bushman, who was trying not to choke. The scientist said to the camera-man that they must have a close-up of the Bushman right away.”

  He felt like choking himself, too, Gysbert van Tonder said. With indignation.

  “It made my stomach turn,” he pursued in the vein of earlier on. “And so I said to them, well, if that Bushman is now becoming a film star, the next thing he’ll want is to be allowed to wear a collar and tie, and to vote. And then the scientist said that he was sorry he was a bit short of film, because he would like a close-up of me, also.”

  But just to think, Gysbert van Tonder observed finally, that the Bushman had today already grown so ignorant that he couldn’t make a fire anymore by rubbing two sticks together, but had to use matches. It might even be true, Gysbert van Tonder suggested, what the scientists said about the Bushman – that he was a member of a dying race.

  But young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, advised us not to be too hasty in our conclusions. All the scientist was doing, he said, was to try and trace back the story of man to its beginnings. How man rose from savagery. How he advanced by virtue. How he started enquiring after truth. How he attempted decoration early on in his upward march. How he followed his destiny, with science and knowledge as his guides.

  Maybe the Bushman was the wrong person for the scientist to come and ask these questions of, the schoolmaster said, but it was a fact that, belonging to a very primitive division of African humanity, the Bushman was a true prehistoric type. And maybe the first caveman would also have liked to play-act before a movie camera, pretending he didn’t know more than a stone axe.

  “And what we’ve been saying about the Bushman’s ignorance,” the schoolmaster added, half laughing, “well, we know he’s a member of a dying race. Face to face with the King of Terrors. You know what I mean – The Great Adventure, and all that. Anyway, it’s queer to think that – with all his ignorance – the Bushman will shortly know more than any of us.”

  In the Old Days

  Ah, yes, where are those days?” At Naudé said, sighful for the sweetness of long-vanished youth. It was a rhetorical question. He expected no answer.

  “How do you mean, where those days are?” Jurie Steyn demanded, a shade aggressively and in a spirit of fact-finding realism. “What days do you mean, anyway? It’s about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard anybody ask – asking what’s happened to days.

  “If you ask where’s my roll of barbed wire that I ordered from Bekkersdal and that the lorry-driver says must have been offloaded by mistake at Welgevonden, and that Koos Nienaber at Welgevonden tells me he knows nothing about – well, that would be a sensible question to ask. Especially as Koos Nienaber was planting poles for a new cattle fence when he assured me that he hadn’t even seen my roll of barbed wire. And he got quite nasty about it, too, afterwards, swearing and all. And saying it wasn’t neighbourly for me to come and stand there in an unbelieving sort of way.

  “Spoiling a friendship of long standing, Koos Nienaber said, just for the sake of a rusty old roll of barbed wire. And with so many kinks in it that it would snap the moment you put the pliers to it, Koos Nienaber said.

  “Well, that would be sensible, now – to ask where’s my barbed wire. Or to ask where is … well, something that you can say, oh, it’s lost, or oh, it strayed down the Government Road and you’ve got a pretty good idea in whose kraal you’ll find it, with a changed brand mark on it. But to ask where are some days: maybe they are in a crate hung under somebody else’s wagon on the way to market.”

  Jurie Steyn guffawed. That was a good one he had just said, he felt.

  “A couple of Large White days,” Jurie Steyn went on, expanding the metaphor, “or Berkshires, and they getting dizzy in the crate from watching the spokes of the wheels turning.”

  It seemed that Jurie Steyn was a bit dizzy in his mind himself, At Naudé responded, for him to talk like that. But he would pass it over, At Naudé said. He could only see now how deeply the loss of his roll of barbed wire had affected Jurie Steyn, At Naudé said.

  “All I meant,” At Naudé proceeded, “was about how the past is gone. The good old times, and all that. When I was young the world didn’t only look different, but it also smelt different. People were nobler when I was young, and more human. The women were more beautiful than what you get them today. The men were braver; stronger and thicker. The lies they told were bigger.

  “I had an uncle that was called Jors Groot-Lieg, just because of all the bare-faced untruths that he could tell. And he was proud of his nickname. And he did his best to live up to his reputation for being the most awful liar in the district. But where would my uncle, Jors Groot-Lieg, be today? His family would be ashamed of his weakness. And they would as likely as not get the elder, when he came round, to pray for him. And my uncl
e would be all abashed and humble. And he would say, yes, he did perhaps exaggerate a little about the length of the python that had swallowed him when he was camping by the Molopo. The length and the width, he would say.

  “And, with the elder looking on pleased, my uncle would also admit that the python didn’t swallow the whole of him down, with just his veldskoens sticking out, like he said the first time. He remembered now that he hadn’t been pulled down into the snake’s inside to much below his knees, he would admit, because he could recall how he lay back and crossed his legs, the time the snake rested a little from swallowing.

  “And so it is with everything, today. The world was bigger long ago; and wider and fatter; more blown out in the face, too. Look at the ambitions we used to have when we were young. Like being an engine-driver. Not only because of the speed of the engine and the hot coals and the roar, and the fire it shoots out going uphill in the night. But you also used to think that if you were an engine-driver you would be able to drive very fast round the Hex River bends and give all the grown-ups in the train a fright.”

  At Naudé paused to heave another sigh, filled with the wistful melancholy that clothes the past in Tyrian-dyed habiliments.

  “And only the other day I asked a little boy what he was going to be when he grew up,” At Naudé added. “And he said ‘Prime Minister.’”

  He felt sorry, then, that he had asked, At Naudé said. For when that little boy spoke there was something about him that made At Naudé feel that he would make it. Something distasteful, At Naudé seemed to imply.

  “Well, it’s funny, but when I was young,” Chris Welman remarked, “it was my ambition to be the best mouth-organ player in the whole of the Marico. And I can still remember how excited I was the birthday when I got my first proper German mouth-organ that had a picture on the cardboard box of a man on the stage with a very curled moustache – curled up like that so it wouldn’t get entangled with some of the top notes of the mouth-organ he was blowing into, I suppose. And the theatre in the picture on the box of the mouth-organ was crowded – women with jewels and men in uniforms. And one man in a uniform had a moustache that was almost as curled as the mouth-organ player’s.