Tales from the Old Karoo

by Guy Butler

  Marais was the first to meet his replacement. And who should he be? Corporal Gommie Loots, an old friend from Graaff-Reinet who’d joined the Constabulary on the very same day, but had somehow managed not to join Scheepers. Unlike Henegan, though, Gommie was a friendly fellow, not given to political righteousness, under whose influence the whole atmosphere on both sides of the pontoon changed. He used to cross to the German side, in order to liaise with his opposite number on certain points of international law which needed clarification. The main matter was this: where, exactly, did the frontier run?

  Down midstream? But who could draw a line on running water? So it was decided that the northern bank was German, the southern bank Colonial, and the river itself neutral. This meant, of course, that the frontiers changed during flood time, when the river overflowed its banks. Well, floods were acts of God, so who were they to argue?

  Having reached agreement on this matter of principle, they had to tackle the next problem: under what flag and what laws did the pontoon and its passengers come after leaving one bank before arriving at the other? The two international lawyers decided that it would be manifestly unjust for either German or Roman Dutch Law to operate; and that the older laws of common sense and good-fellowship should prevail instead whenever the pontoon was in transit from north to south, and vice versa.

  Having established a constitution for the pontoon in transit, the high contracting parties had to consider the corollary: how long would it hold valid if, say, the pontoon got stuck in midstream?

  ‘As long as supplies lasted’, said the German.

  ‘As long as no one in Berlin or Cape Town found out’, said Corporal Loots.

  This was the beginning of the famous pontoon parties. They all played pontoon on the pontoon all night, anchored in midstream. It was so nice being in a neutral country. The German privates said midstream must be something like Switzerland; ‘Nein’, said the Corporal: ‘Ze Swiss don’t know how to make ziss witblitz.’.

  They then discovered that to secure neutral status, the pontoon did not need to pull right out into midstream at all: a foot of insulating water between it and either bank was quite sufficient. It also made it easier to replenish supplies of witblits and sauerkraut.

  The Graaff-Reinetters, Marais and Gommie, could survive the combined assaults of weariness and witblits better than the others. Long after the rest were snoring, they’d play klaberjass by storm lantern, with a thin slip of a moon reflected in that neutralising sliver of water rippling between the landing stage and the pontoon. When, at dawn, Gommie stepped off Switzerland into Namaqualand, he’d turn round and say, affectionately and sadly:

  ‘Petrus, my old friend, you must not forget the law: the moment you put your foot on this bank, I clap my hand on your shoulder, and I arrest you.’

  The only real crisis in the little floating international republic of good sense was caused by a young and inexperienced missionary. Claiming to be one of the Graaff-Reinet Murrays, he had just returned from a period of study in Scotland and was on his way to his first charge. Marais was glad someone was going to enlighten the benighted Ovambos; but it turned out that Murray had a far more difficult assignment: to convert the Hereros from the faulty Christianity imparted to them by the Moravians, and to bring them to the only true faith, according to Calvin and Knox. The German, who was a good Lutheran, wondered, in a speculative way, whether Africa really needed so many versions of Christianity on its religious menu.

  The young missionary was shocked at the corrupt life on the pontoon: here were fine young fellow-countrymen visibly falling to pieces under the impact of idleness, cards, and witblits. He didn’t object to the sauerkraut. After deep pondering, he decided that it was his duty to save them first, before the Hereros.

  He’d lived a healthy moral life in Scotland, and been introduced to Scots folk culture by his surviving relatives in Perth. He was not so stupid as to think that a single long-faced sermon would stop the rot. First, it would be sound pastoral theology to show that he was a man such as they were – even to the point of taking an occasional thimble-full of witblits. Once he’d gained the confidence of the company, he would propose some suitable alternative forms of entertainment.

  So, when a dog-eared pack of cards was produced, he proposed that they should dance instead. Dance?! This, coming from a dominee, was received with nervous laughter by some, and stunned silence by others.

  It took a lengthy explanation, and a demonstration, to persuade his audience of fallen but stubborn puritans that the Scottish sword dance was a perfectly respectable exercise for an all-male party. They had no swords to lay criss-cross so they made do with bayonets of the German privates. But they experienced great difficulty in mastering the delicate, criss-cross steps and the on-your-toes footwork; so much so that the missionary, whose pedagogy was sound enough, decided to start with the simplest of steps, which meant advancing together, in time, in a straight line. He gripped the two least truculent acolytes round their waists, and started shouting one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four to get the rhythm.

  It was a pity that the straight line took them right off the edge of the pontoon into deep international waters.

  The easiest way to save them was to throw a rope not from the pontoon, but from the landing stage; on which, dripping but undaunted, the apostle of innocent Gaelic culture continued his lessons. The only precaution he took was to turn their backs to the water before shouting one-two-three-four. They were soon well out of Switzerland. Whether they were in Namaqualand or German South West Africa no one knew, or cared. Baptised in the neutral waters of Lake Geneva, they had new life in them.

  They were, in fact, in Namaqualand, in the Cape Colony, learning the sword dance and quenching their thirst far into the night.

  True to form, Marais and Loots recovered from sleep and witblits before the others. Looking up at the last stars through the fine umbrella of a kameeldoring the Corporal said: ‘Petrus, my friend, I’m going to fall back into a deep sleep for ten minutes. If, when I wake up again, I find you and your three Angolan refugees still in the Colony, I’ll clap my hands on your shoulders and arrest you. You can leave the missionary and the Germans to me. Let them sleep till they wake up.’

  After much diplomatic negotiation and promises of wors and tins of kraut, the one German remaining on the north bank brought the pont across to the south bank to fetch the trespassers on Colonial territory. Two very puzzled Germans and a South African missionary with terrible hangovers travelled northwards across Lake Geneva into German South West Africa, where they found Marais and his friends contentedly fishing for barbel from the landing stage.

  When, at last, the amnesty came, lifting the suspended death sentence from Petrus and his friends, the news was received with an enormous relief and joy, and just a twinge of regret.

  When he got back to his father’s house in Adendorp, Petrus found that his troubles were not quite over. The price had been lifted off his head, and the British Army had no more quarrel with him; but the old Cape Constabulary had not forgotten that they had issued him with a saddle way back in ’96.

  ‘Marais’, said the Magistrate, ‘where is your saddle?’

  He looked at the Magistrate, and then north to the mountains of Graaff-Reinet, and he said: ‘Ask Scheepers.’

  4

  The Miracle Gate

  Captain Antony Colquhoun – well, we’d better start with his surname. It was one of his inherited disadvantages. In vain he’d spell it out letter by letter, C-O-L-Q-U-H-O-U-N, then end off pronouncing it ‘Ka-hoon’ loud and clear; a short sharp syllable, ‘Ka’, followed by ‘hoon’, a lovely, long vowel sound, ‘Kahoon, as in Moon’. But the locals took the ‘qu’ seriously, and pronounced the word kalkoen, which is Afrikaans for turkey. It went well enough with his high colour. Kaptein Kalkoen. His first name, Antony, was easy enough to accept as Tony, but for the most part he was known by the nickname of Telegram, and for a very good reason.

  No one in the district
had a finer English accent than Tony. Particularly the long, generous vowels. But there was a built-in fault somewhere which made him stingy with his supply of syllables. It started in that name of his which should be pronounced with three syllables – Kolko-hoon, not with two, Ka-hoon. For instance, Tony came from Somersetshire, which for all educated people who can spell has five syllables: Some-er-set-shy-er. But he would skimp it into three: Sum-set-sheer. This leaving out of parts of words extended to parts of sentences as well. As in telegrams, he could condense a whole novel into a few staccato phrases: ‘Friend once. Good fellah. Bad company. Cards y’know. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Lost both loan and friend. Suicide. Pity.’

  He was very tall, elegant and charming: large, very blue eyes either side of a long nose, a generous mouth and then a disappointingly apologetic chin which seemed to collect an uppercut from his adam’s apple whenever he spoke; long elegant hands, and long narrow feet, like an ostrich.

  He’d married Bernadine Louw shortly after the Boer War. It was all very romantic. Bernadine had been to the Huguenot Ladies’ College in Wellington before hostilities, where she had immersed herself in English Literature, fashion and manners. Her old father, like most well-to-do Cape farmers, did not encourage his son to join the Cape Rebels. Gysbert must stay on his farm. Laastekans was not the sort of place which could be run from a rebel’s saddle.

  Towards the end of the war the rebels were everywhere in the Cape Midlands. Under guerilla wizards like Gideon Scheepers and Wynand Malan they ran rings round the Tommies.

  Within a week of landing in Cape Town as a replacement, Captain Antony Colquhoun was twice ambushed, the second time towards the end of a long night march below a low long ironstone ridge. ‘Terrible. Taken prisoner. Stripped. No boots. Told to walk, south. Barefoot. Heat. Two days. Lost way. Lost mind. Woke up. White sheets. Angel leaning over me. Bernadine. Love at first sight.’

  Bernadine inherited a portion of Laastekans and the old homestead set among aloes (Aloe ferox) and thorn trees (Mimosa afra). She gave it a new romantic name, ‘Bosky Dell’.

  Her brother Gysbert built a new homestead for his bride, Susanne, who came from Vredefort in the Free State. As her father had spent much of the war as a POW on St Helena, she was a non-romantic, like her husband Gysbert. Gysbert was stocky, red-haired. He was not much of a talker, but when he did speak, he spoke in complete sentences. He retained the name Laastekans.

  From the start there was something near-tragic about that foursome. Bernadine and Susanne, in their different ways, were both extremely proud and maternal; but it was years before either was able to fall pregnant. This is more frustrating on farms than elsewhere – all those cows calving and the ewes lambing all around them, season in and season out. Bernadine retreated more and more into books, and Susanne into politics. Bernadine’s sort of literature and Susanne’s sort of politics had no common ground. The men at least had the same sort of veld and weather to talk about, and the prices of produce. And pests.

  Then Tony started drinking, heavily. He’d go into the dorp in the Cape cart with his coloured groom, Klaas, on Friday midday, and get back in the small hours, singing ‘Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all’, or ‘De ye ken John Peel’, and shouting ‘Tally ho!’ and ‘Yoicks!’ It drove Bernadine to tantrums. Or the knot in his tongue would be loosed for two whole hours on end, and he’d talk rubbish with complete fluency; all about Strindberg and Schopenhauer, not Shelley and the Lady of Shalott. It drove her to tears. In despair she appealed to her brother Gysbert.

  ‘Tony’, said Gysbert. ‘You’re drinking too much.’

  ‘My business’, said Tony.

  ‘Your wife’s my sister and that’s my business.’ Pause. ‘You are also my neighbour, my close neighbour, and neighbours must help each other’, he said, and turned round and walked off.

  This lecture from Gysbert made things worse; the afflicted man started drinking in secret, keeping a cache in the stable. The farm started to suffer. Bernadine called in the doctor. The doctor shook his head. ‘I’m afraid no one will be able to cure him. Not until he admits to himself that he’s, well, – a drunk.’

  To hear her Tony called a drunk came as a shock to Bernadine. If she found it difficult to accept, how much more difficult would it be for him? She wrote to his father in England, suggesting that his son was in deep distress and that he might recover his sense of balance if he could spend a week or two with his parent. The reply was another shock for Bernadine.

  ‘If my son is suffering from too much alcohol – as I suspect from your account – he’s inherited a family weakness. We’d be no good for each other. I advise you to get a good lawyer to protect your interests. I drank half his mother’s fortune.’

  Gysbert said it was one of the best letters he’d seen from a father-in-law, and that the advice was to be taken seriously.

  The lawyer’s visit precipitated Tony into a fortnight’s humiliated oblivion.

  Then came the Anglican padre, with the same public school background, the same speech mannerisms. Another officer-gentleman.

  Then came a Bible puncher with no background at all, and a North County accent.

  Then the desperate Bernadine procured powdered herbs from a Tembu herbalist and put them in his soup.

  In the end it took a common old farm gate to cure him: the one between Bosky Dell and Laastekans.

  He was now so bad that he’d arrive at the old Vic Hotel at opening time and stay there, without breaking for food, despatching his marvellous stories by telegram in his lah-de-dah accent. ‘Brush of fox. Spinney. Hedgerow. Ditch. Strange horse. Mouthful of mud. Breeches burst. No joke. Ladies. Red riding habits, y’know.’ Few would listen now. He had become a terrible bore and a horrible warning.

  He felt excluded, hurt. Some chaps were discussing breeding dogs specially to hunt jackals, like foxes in England. He interrupted them.

  ‘Debate in British Press. Two camps. Poor fox faction versus bugger the fox brigade. Myself? Some sympathy with fox. Hounds, you know. Running for his life. Overtaken. Teeth in gullet and groin.’ And one hand went to his throat, and the other to his crotch.

  This sort of display rather spoilt the comfortable brotherhood of beer, and the barman would try to persuade him to leave. On two occasions he’d become truculent. There’d been fights. He’d come home bruised and bloody.

  Klaas, the groom, went to Baas Gysbert, whom he had known since childhood on the old farm. He took off his hat, and wrung it out in his hands as though it were full of rain – which was an excessive gesture for a man who had come to report that he’d seen a big black-backed jackal in Gysbert’s veld, near his boundary gate, where there were six old, unnamed and forgotten graves.

  Klaas had a more than average hatred of jackals. In his folklore, the jackal is a haunter of graves, and a raiser of ghosts – possibly because he is known for trying to dig up the recently dead. That’s why the stones one packs on a grave must be nice and big. As the cart jogged into town, Klaas would tell Tony very circumstantial stories in which jackals and ghosts appeared together. Tony found them interesting – an interest which grew as his condition worsened. The cry of a jackal at twilight or at first light would make the skin on the back of his neck pucker. He did not know if he liked the feeling or not. Strange recollections of foxes flickered behind his eyes.

  Captain Antony Colquhoun left the Vic at closing time. He left the company proudly, as though he did not notice the looks of boredom, pity and contempt in their eyes. He climbed into the driver’s seat and set the horses in motion with a swanky flick of the whip; but once beyond the last street lamp, he handed the reins over to Klaas, and crumpled quickly into something that looked like a wet woolsack on the floor of the cart.

  When he surfaced into consciousness – or drifted from oblivion into dream? – he was aware that something unusual was happening, or rather that something which ought to be happening, wasn’t. The cart was standing absolutely stationary. For a long time. In the infinite space and q
uiet of night. This unnatural stillness was broken by a strange cry, as if of a terrified man in a dream. Was it a dream? or was it the dreadful horries again, the shakes and shivers of D.T.?

  When he did force his eyes open he found the dream to be true: the cart was stationary in the vast night, and he was alone, still incapably drunk, on the floor. Klaas had disappeared. Maybe he was opening the gate. If so, he was taking a long time.

  He yelled: ‘Klaas!’

  The echoes answered, but with something like ‘ … aas’. He hoped he’d heard wrongly: perhaps it was Klaas responding with ‘Baas!’ So he tried again.

  This time it was quite clear that the echo said ‘aas’; and he knew enough Afrikaans to know that ‘aas’ means carrion: which was what he felt like, but did not need to be reminded of it.

  A nearby nightjar put a whole belt of cartridges into that little machine gun he carries in his throat, and started firing them non-stop into his back. He struggled up off the floor, yelling ‘shut up’ with no effect. He tried to get the cart moving. The effort brought on a bout of vertigo followed by nausea which no amount of retching could relieve. His whole conscious world was reduced to the pain and the tearing sound of his own retching. The hills echoed with it. And the taste of bile. The bay horse stamped his foot in disgust, the roan pissed in contempt. To this chorus of rejection he lost consciousness, subsiding once more on to the floor.

  He woke again, slowly, surprised once more that the cart was not moving. Where the hell was Klaas? He cried ‘Klaas’ – and the whole sequence repeated itself, almost like a gramophone record, except that an owl took over from the nightjar.

  Towards dawn he found sufficient strength and co-ordination for a third attempt to take the reins, and to mutter a signal to the horses. They responded, but the cart didn’t: it seemed to be held back by some unearthly power. Try as they would, it would not budge. Was this to be his hell, lashing impotent horses in endless space and eternal night?