by Guy Butler
The Dominee thought: Which ‘we’ – the Castelyn family? the congregation? the Nationalist Party? the Afrikaner nation?
The big man was at a loss how to proceed.
‘Dominee, I have had a dream. The same dream. Three times, almost the same. No escape, Dominee.’ He raised his head, and looked at him hard, and then, as though he could not bear it, away quickly, and out of the window.
The Dominee was surprised. For one thing, he was no expert on dreams. He had been pulled up on more than one occasion by his elders for his casual treatment of them. Had not Joseph taken the dreams of Pharaoh seriously? Daniel’s dreams provided prophecies for historians to ponder until the end of time. The Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. And Pilate’s wife, she dreamt terribly the night before the Crucifixion.
Yes. But – well, whatever Groot-Piet Castelyn was, he was not likely to be a dreamer. It would have been no surprise if the Bible-saturated Klein-Piet had come to report a dream; or the half-witted Hans Lategan, even, perhaps, Maljan Delport. But for Groot-Piet to have a dream?
The Dominee’s initial disappointment gave way to a slight unease. He knew just enough about modem psychology to know that dreams could be significant indicators of the dreamer’s wishes or anxieties, and that psychiatrists could find them useful, not in foretelling the future, but in discovering the past of the patient. Powerfully disturbing dreams could be a prelude to a nervous breakdown, or sometimes even to a religious conversion. The Dominee hoped that the big man in front of him was not going to have either. He felt singularly incompetent to cope with the souls of either of the Castelyns.
‘I dreamt that I died. The coffin was too small. They had to press me hard to get me into it. That made me very angry, and I shouted, but they refused to hear me. Then I started swelling in the coffin. I exploded like a bomb and I was free – only to smell the terrible smell of myself. – Dominee, do you mind if we open the window?’
The big man got up and stood in front of the open sash.
‘Then there was a thundering and lightning such as I had never known. It washed the air nice and clean, and I was walking among the vineyards and mountains of, I think, Franschhoek, and came to one of those great whitewashed gateways to an old wine estate. The gate was closed but there was an old coloured man sitting there on a stool in the shade of an oak so big that it must have been planted before Van Riebeeck. I was very tired and lonely, and was looking for a place to introduce myself, sit down, and be given something to drink and eat. The old coloured got up politely as I approached, and said: “Good morning” and produced a key, and pointed to the gate and said, “Do you want to go in?”
‘“What’s the name of the place? Are the people at home?” I asked. He pointed with a little gesture to the gate, and there, nicely spelt out in the white-washed plaster was the name “Heaven’s Gate”. Well, I’ve been up and down “Hell’s Hoogte” many times, and I used to own a farm called “Paradise”. But that name made me feel uneasy. So, to reassure myself, I turned to the outa and said, jokingly: “I suppose your name is Peter?”
‘He smiled, and nodded.’
‘And, at once, I knew it was absolutely true. It was Saint Peter himself, key in hand. Dominee, I did not know what to say or do, I was so embarrassed. Our church is at fault, Dominee. It only prepares us to talk to God. We haven’t got the first idea how to address a saint, even if he looks just like an old coloured. Even the Roman Catholics are better prepared for the next world than we are.
‘“Do you want to go in?” Peter asked again.
‘“Can I sit here and rest a bit?”
‘“Of course. There is another place further along, on the left, down an easy slope. No trouble to get in there at all. The gates are always open. But they say the company inside is bad and the climate worse. Hot and dry.”
‘I was very uncomfortable in Peter’s presence, but I was too tired to go any further. So I sat there, Dominee.
‘Dominee, I watched the people arriving at the gate. Many walked right past as if they didn’t even notice it. And it was not all one-way traffic. Some people came from the further place. They’d tried it, not liked it, and been allowed to come back to see if they could get into Heaven.
‘Whenever old Peter opened the gate to let a trial batch in I caught a glimpse of an enormous staircase going up, and up, and up into the sky, with people on it. They seemed to be moving very slowly. And that’s another thing, Dominee. The next world is terribly old-fashioned. No progress there that I could see. If they’d kept up to date, that staircase would have been an escalator, like in the OK Bazaars in any big town. Once or twice people came down the stairs. One chap couldn’t come out fast enough, and shouted to Saint Peter as he ran along the other road: “You can keep your blerry heaven!”
‘All this was bad for my nerves, Dominee. And it was only the beginning. A familiar figure came along, from the wrong direction, limping, looking very tired. He cried out with joy when he saw me – like when South Africans who have booked in the wrong sort of luxury tour meet other South Africans in Paris or Rome – long-lost, close bosom friends all of a sudden. He sat down next to me, and put his arm round my shoulder, and cried: “Man, Pietie old boy, am I glad to see you.”
‘It was Maljan Delport, Dominee. The place he’d just visited was hell, man, absolute hell. Worse than any foreign country he had been to. Strangers rushing everywhere, and nothing ever quiet and still. And everybody talking all the time, and nobody listening to anybody. Like a cross between UNO and a cocktail party. Except some officials, who hardly moved at all. Their uniforms kept changing, but somehow you always knew they were officials. They were very polite. Their eyes were emerald green, and a sort of wisp of blue steam came off them all the time. And they kept saying: “Keep moving!”, “Move along there!” No one is allowed to sit down except very special people. There are rows of chairs along the walls of the long corridors like the London Underground. And nobody wants to look at those sitting there, because they look as though they’d love to get up and walk, but can’t. But I was so tired, and thirsty, and not a tap or a windmill in sight. At last I saw an empty seat; true, it had a sharp spike in it, and it was red hot, but I was so exhausted I did not care: if only I could sit down. But just as I reached it, an official said: “Sorry, move along! That seat is reserved, for Dominee Malherbe.”’
Groot-Piet looked at the Dominee, and the Dominee looked at Groot-Piet. The Dominee did not know whether to let the great laugh inside him burst free or not. He did not wish to treat Groot-Piet’s dream irreverently. The question was: Was Groot-Piet telling a real dream, or inventing a dream in order to tell him, the Dominee, something he couldn’t put into plain words? So he said: ‘And what did you say to Maljan?’
‘I told him I didn’t believe him, and that I was going to report the matter to you. Which I am now doing, Dominee.’
At this point there was a discreet knock at the door, and the maid entered with a tray of coffee. Dominee Malherbe was extremely grateful for this reminder that there was a normal routine still running safely outside his study. The coffee ritual broke the confessional tension. They talked of the crops and the cricket as though hell and Maljan did not exist. But the Dominee knew he’d have to return to the matter. What was he to make of this big man who had such an unexpectedly big, and devious, imagination?
‘Oom Piet’, he said, putting down his empty cup. ‘First, let me assure you that there’s nothing wicked in thinking a Dominee might go to hell like anyone else. Don’t let that worry you. And second, thank you for the warning.’ His tone of voice suggested an end to the interview.
‘But Dominee’, said the big man, ‘I haven’t finished. That was just the beginning.’
‘Oh? Very well’, said the Dominee. ‘What happened to Maljan?’
‘As soon as he’d made that silly joke about you, he disappeared. Then and there I decided hell was not for me. At least one can sit down outside Heaven’s Gate. But boring, Dominee, boring. S
pending eternity watching other people going places. So I got up, and told Saint Peter I’d like to go in. He opened up, and said I’d be given clear instructions by Mr Angel.
‘Once I was inside, I was shown into a neat little office, and given a chair to sit on, and wait. Then Mr Angel walked in, and sat opposite me. That was a big shock. His face was exactly the face of my cousin, Klein-Piet Castelyn, the Elder. Yes, Dominee, him. Except all that mean and anxious look was gone. My favourite cousin looked quite kind and gentle.’
The Dominee found that hard to believe, and all his current anxieties about the Maljan/Hans Lategan fracas leapt into life again.
‘Mr Angel Klein-Piet said his task was “to instruct those aspirants to residence in heaven in routine entrance procedures”. The gate on which he did duty (there are countless gates into heaven) was custom-built for people with well-developed consciences, and was particularly popular with Calvinists. It was narrower than most. You had to press through, sideways.
‘“Now here”, said Klein-Piet, smiling gently like a kindergarten teacher, “is a nice long piece of chalk. There –” (and he pointed outside) – “is the staircase into the presence of God. You must write the biggest sin on your mind on the first step. You can only get on to each of the following steps by getting the next topmost sin off your mind.’’
‘I took this foot-long piece of chalk. Then he said: “May I remind you that sins are of two kinds?”
‘So I said: “Sins against God and sins against my neighbour?”
“Some people”, he said, “find it easier to think of sins as the bad things they have done, and also as the good things they have failed to do. But perhaps you are right. Start, maar, with the old Ten Commandments. Moses knew the rudiments.”
‘I looked into myself, Dominee, and I wondered if any staircase in the world would have enough steps for my sins. It would be a long business, that I could see. But I shook hands with Klein-Piet and said: “It’s so nice to bump into family, unexpectedly, in strange places, and to find them in such influential positions.”
“I suppose so”, he said, still smiling. “The stairs are long and tiring, but the view improves the higher you climb.” And he waved a hand, saying, “Good luck, neef.”
‘Dominee, I don’t like being “neefed” at the best of times, and I nearly gave him a piece of my mind; but I swallowed, and said to myself, “Perhaps it is a sin not to like being called neef by my own neef’.
‘Dominee, to write a sin on a stair means getting on to your knees. On one’s knees, do you understand? Our church gives us no knee practice at all. We never kneel to any man or even to God himself. It’s agony, I can tell you.’ (And he rubbed his knees intermittently from then on.) ‘And when you are a plain simple farmer, all that writing! And all that spelling! No mistakes allowed in Heaven. Anyway, I started with the sins against my neighbours …’
Dominee Malherbe had set aside an hour for the interview. It seemed that the catalogue of neighbourly sins would never end, particularly as Groot-Piet got carried away by details of his misdemeanours, almost as though he gained pleasure in recovering them, particularly the sins of his youth – fruit stealing and girls. He also interrupted his catalogue to tell the Dominee how paralysing it is to your chalk-hand to hear a heavenly voice over your shoulder, crying, ‘Groot-Piet Castelyn, is that the way to spell adultery?’ Or, ‘Don’t you know yet how many zeds there are in embezzlement?’
The boring experience was not entirely new to the Dominee. The brief excitement of little individual sins can do nothing to alleviate the boredom of sin triumphant, of sin like a millionaire, of multinational sin, of sin like an organised political party, of sins added, multiplied and computerised. Perhaps the Roman Catholic system of confession had something to be said for it: it got rid of sins regularly, week by week; it didn’t store them up like an overdraft which eventually drives the conscience into suicidal bankruptcy. Any system would be better than this marathon rehearsal by the colossal Piet, of a lifetime of iniquities.
‘I had come to the end of the sins of commission’, said Piet, ‘and was thinking of my sins of omission, particularly in religious matters. I was sitting on one of the steps, enjoying the enormous views. My greatest sin of omission, from childhood up, had been my failure to listen to our dominees, ten in all, one after the other, until I came to you, Dominee. Sunday after Sunday I would be shown the right way. And then for six days I’d go back to my own wrong ways again. Not only had I taken so little notice of my dominees, I had been very critical of them, and particularly of you, Dominee. Some of your sermons I thought utter ubbish; I have doubted your political allegiance; I have even thought you lingered too long among the bridesmaids at wedding receptions.’
The Dominee had never experienced such candour before, and did not quite know how to respond. So he said, kindly, foolishly, but with a slight blush, “None of us is perfect”.
‘I know, I know, Dominee. You see, I have come not only to get this dream off my mind, but to express my sympathy with you. As one sinner to another.’
The Dominee was not prepared for this declaration of their brotherhood in sin. He found himself hoping that Groot-Piet was having a nervous breakdown rather than a religious conversion. ‘It’s terrible’, the big man was saying. ‘I would like to help you, but I don’t know how.’
‘Take your time’, said the Dominee, playing for time himself. Had Piet heard of the Maljan/Hans problem? If he could help there, that would make the whole interview worthwhile.
‘I was high up on the steps – as high as the church steeple –’ (and he pointed to the great iron weathercock which his great-grandfather, the wagonmaker, had hammered out on his anvil when the church was being built in 1860) ‘sitting there, resting. I was thinking of all the times I had sat in judgement on my neighbours and friends, not only on committees, but in my mind, and guessing how many more steps that would fill up. I got on to my knees, sighed, and gripped my chalk to get busy again.
‘Then I saw someone coming down the steps. Everything about him looked tragic – like a man who has recently gone bankrupt, lost his seat in parliament, and is now returning home for the funeral of his eldest son, who has been killed senselessly, driving drunk and too fast.’
Piet got up, crossed to the Dominee, and put out both his hands in a helplessly appealing gesture.
‘It was you, Dominee.’
Surprised, the Dominee rose; swung round, and moved to the window. Groot-Piet’s voice continued: ‘I cried “Good morning, Dominee,” but you said, “I can’t stop. It’s getting late. I’ve run out of chalk.”’
There was a pause of the kind that is not measurable by clocks. Then the shoulders in front of Groot-Piet started shaking, whether from stifled laughter or choked-back sobs, or both, he could not say.
Hoping it was for both, the big man tiptoed out of the room.
On the doorstep he met his cousin, Klein-Piet, with the simple Hans Lategan in tow, and fiery Miem.
Who would be a Dominee?
7
The Death and Resurrection of Henry Rock Pigeon
Henry came from a very ancient line of the Dove family, known as the Rock Pigeons. Like most aristocrats, they had started off as country dwellers, and they still build their flimsy nests of twigs and roots for preference on precarious ledges of sandstone cliffs or columns of dolerite anywhere in the Great Karoo or Highveld. They have marvellous heads for heights – better than their traditional enemies, the various members of the cunning cat and dog families.
Henry’s branch of the family was driven into town by hunger; what some highbrows call economic pressure and others the need to find a niche in the eco-system. Others say it was a succession of droughts in the early thirties. One Transvaal clan found niches on the tops of Johannesburg skyscrapers. Another took to a disused mine shaft, and bred their young above a dark pit that ended in a two thousand foot deep well of water. They have a good head for depths as well as heights, the Transvaal branch.
Man was naturally hideous, but did have shame enough to hide himself under clothes. He was, of course, clever; clever enough to have reduced lesser branches of the pigeon family, the Pouters and Homers, to serfdom. Rock Pigeons may have come down in the world, but they never allowed themselves to be fancied by Man, or taught to fly intolerable distances in competition with their own kind. They kept a watchful and respectful distance. Somewhat snobbish, they looked down on their own poor relations, the small turtle and ring doves, and drove them away without apology if they presumed to come near the bird bath at the same time for their sundowner.
In spite of his splendid surname, William Hawkridge was merely a master in the Coleville secondary school. He was also the owner of the old double storey house, called ‘The Heights’, on the corner of Dundas and Church Streets. At least, he’d be owner one day, ‘through the Federal Building Society’. When people asked him who he worked for, he’d never say the Cape Provincial Government, he’d say the Federal Building Society. He’d also had a rural background. His father had been driven off the land into town by debt and drought. He had a secret sympathy with the Rock Pigeons, although their nests kept blocking his gutters.
The plumber, from the top of the extension ladder, shouted: ‘You should shoot ’em. Borrow a pellet gun. They make a lovely pie.’
Lucky, the family cat, stopped rubbing his black back against William’s shin and started sharpening his claws in the jacaranda stem. The sudden conversion of all Rock Pigeons into lovely pies wouldn’t suit him at all.
