The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Koos said that Minnie has been,” Jurie Steyn said, “has been – well, just a minute – oh, yes, here it is – I got old Koos Nienaber to write it down for me – she’s been psycho – psycho-analysed. Here it is, written down and all – ‘sielsontleding’.”

  I won’t deny that we were all much impressed. It was something that we had never heard of before. Jurie Steyn saw the effect his statement had made on us.

  “Yes,” he repeated, sure of himself – and more sure of the word, too, now –”yes, in the gold-mining city of Johannesburg, Minnie Nienaber got psycho-analysed.”

  After a few moments of silence, Gysbert van Tonder made himself heard. Gysbert often spoke out of his turn, that way.

  “Well, it’s not the first time a thing like that happened to a girl living in Johannesburg on her own,” Gysbert said. “One thing, the door of her parents’ home will always remain open for her. But I am surprised at old Koos Nienaber mentioning it to you. He’s usually so proud.”

  I noticed that Johnny Coen looked crestfallen for a moment, until Jurie Steyn made haste to explain that it didn’t mean that at all.

  According to what Koos Nienaber told him – Jurie Steyn said – it had become fashionable in Johannesburg for people to go and be attended to by a new sort of doctor, who didn’t worry about how sick your body was, but saw to it that he got your mind right. This kind of doctor could straighten out anything that was wrong with your mind, Jurie Steyn explained. And you didn’t have to be sick, even, to go along and get yourself treated by a doctor like that. It was a very fashionable thing to do, Jurie Steyn added.

  Johnny Coen looked relieved.

  “According to what Koos Nienaber told me,” Jurie Steyn said, “this new kind of doctor doesn’t test your heart anymore, by listening through that rubber tube thing. Instead, he just asks you what you dreamt last night. And then he works it all out with a dream-book. But it’s not just an ordinary dream-book that says if you dreamt last night of a herd of cattle it means that there is a grave peril ahead for some person that you haven’t met yet …”

  “Well, I dreamt a couple of nights ago that I was driving a lot of Afrikander cattle across the Bechuanaland Protectorate border,” Fritz Pretorius said. “Just like I have often done, on a night when there isn’t much of a moon. Only, what was funny about my dream was that I dreamt I was smuggling cattle into the Protectorate, instead of out of it. Can you imagine a Marico farmer doing a foolish thing like that? I suppose this dream means I am going mad, or something.”

  After At Naudé had said how surprised he was that Fritz Pretorius should have to be told in a dream what everybody knew about him in any case – and after Fritz Pretorius’s invitation to At Naudé to come and repeat that remark outside the post office had come to nothing – Jurie Steyn went on to explain further about what that new kind of treatment was that Minnie Nienaber was receiving from a new kind of doctor in Johannesburg, and that she had no need for.

  “It’s not the ordinary kind of dream-book, like that Napoleon dreambook on which my wife set so much store before we got married,” Jurie Steyn continued, “but it’s a dream-book written by professors. Minnie has been getting all sorts of fears, lately. Just silly sorts of fears, her father says. Nothing to worry about. I suppose anybody from the Groot Marico who has stayed in Johannesburg as long as Minnie Nienaber has done would get frightened in the same way. Only, what puzzles me is that it took her so long to start getting frightened …”

  “Maybe she has also begun to listen in to the wireless, like At Naudé,” Chris Welman said. “Maybe she has also started hearing things about the Jeppe gang. It’s queer that she wasn’t frightened like that, when she first went there. But I could have told her that Johannesburg was no place for a young girl. Why, you should have seen the Angus bull they awarded the Challenge Trophy to, the year I went down to the Agricultural Show with my Shorthorns. And they even tried to chase my fat cow, Vleisfontein III, out of the showgrounds. They said they thought it was some animal that had strayed in from across the railway line.”

  Thereupon At Naudé told us about a Rand Agricultural Show that he had attended. That was the year in which his Afrikander bull Doornboom IV, which he had fed on lucerne and turnips throughout the winter, was awarded the silver medal. An agricultural magazine even took a photograph of himself and of Doornboom IV, At Naudé said. But unfortunately, through some mistake that the printer made, the wrong words were printed under At Naudé’s photograph. Instead of being called “Proud Owner”, At Naudé was called “Silver Medal Pedigree Bull.” He complained to the magazine about it, afterwards, At Naudé said, but the editor just wrote back to say that none of his readers had noticed anything wrong.

  “That just shows you,” At Naudé said to us – and even though it had happened a long time ago, he still sounded quite indignant – ”and they couldn’t possibly have thought that I looked like Doornboom IV, because that was the year I shaved off my moustache.”

  What annoyed him most of all, At Naudé added, was that it stated under his photograph that he had been fed on lucerne and turnips for the whole winter.

  “It’s very funny,” Jurie Steyn said, just then, “but all this talk of yours fits in with what Minnie Nienaber said in her letter. That was the reason why, in the end, she decided to go along and get herself psycho-analysed. I mean, there was nothing wrong with her, of course. They say you have got to have nothing wrong with you, before you can get psycho-analysed. This new kind of doctor can’t do anything for you if there is something the matter with you –”

  “I don’t know of any doctor that can do anything for you when there is something the matter with you,” Oupa Bekker interrupted. “The last time I went to see a doctor was during the rinderpest. The doctor said I must wear a piece of leopard skin behind my left ear. That would keep the rinderpest away from my oxen, he said, and it would at the same time cure me of my rheumatism. The doctor only said that after he had thrown the bones for the second time. The first time he threw the bones the doctor said –”

  But by that time we were all laughing very loudly. We didn’t mean that kind of a doctor, we said to Oupa Bekker. We did not mean a Mshangaan witch-doctor. We meant a white doctor, who had been to a university, and all that.

  Oupa Bekker was silent for a few moments.

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said at last. “Because all my cattle died of the rinderpest. Mind you, I have never had rheumatism since that time. Perhaps all that that witch-doctor could cure was rheumatism. From what Jurie Steyn tells us, I can see he was just old-fashioned. It seems that a doctor is of no use today, unless he can cure nothing at all. But I still say I don’t think much of that doctor that threw the bones upward of fifty years ago. For I was more concerned about my cattle’s rinderpest than about my own ailment. All the same, if you want a cure for rheumatism – there it is. A piece of leopard skin tied behind your left ear. The skin from just an ordinary piece of leopard.”

  With all this talk, it was quite a while before Jurie Steyn could get a word in. But what he had to say, then, was quite interesting.

  “You don’t seem to realise it,” Jurie Steyn said, “but you have been talking all this while about Minnie Nienaber’s symptoms. The reason why she went to get herself psycho-analysed, I mean. It was about those awful dreams she has been having of late. Chris Welman has mentioned his prize cow that got chased out of the Rand Show, and At Naudé has told us about his silver-medal bull, and Oupa Bekker has reminded us of the old days, when this part of the Marico was all leopard country. Well, that was Minnie Nienaber’s trouble. That was why she went to that new kind of doctor. She had the most awful dreams – Koos Nie-naber tells me. She dreamt of being ordered to leave places – night clubs, and so on, Koos Nienaber says. And she also used to dream regularly of being chased by wild bulls. And of being chased by Natal Indians with long sugarcane knives. And latterly she had nightmares almost every night, through dreaming that she was being chased by a leopard. That was wh
y, in the end, she went to have herself psycho-analysed.”

  We discussed Minnie Nienaber’s troubles at some length. And we ended up by saying that we would like to know where the Afrikaner people would be today, if our women could run to a new sort of doctor, every time they dreamt of being chased by a wild animal. If Louis Trichardt’s wife dreamt that she was being chased by a rhinoceros, we said, then she would jolly well have to escape from that rhinoceros in her dream. She would not be able to come to her husband with her dream-troubles next day, seeing that he already had so many Voortrekker problems on his mind.

  Indeed, the whole discussion would have ended in quite a sensible and commonplace sort of fashion, were it not for the strange way in which Johnny Coen reacted.

  “You know, Oupa Bekker,” Johnny Coen said, “you spoke about going to Johannesburg. Well, you can come with me, if you like. I know you aren’t really going to join the Jeppe gang. But I am going to look for Minnie Nienaber. Dreams and all that – I know it’s just a lot of nonsense. But I feel somehow – I know that Minnie needs me.”

  Secret Agent

  The stranger who arrived on the Government lorry from Bekkersdal told us that his name was Losper. He was having a look round that part of the Marico, he said, and he did not expect to stay more than a few days. He was dressed in city clothes and carried a leather briefcase. But because he did not wear pointed black shoes and did not say how sad it was that Flip Prinsloo should have died so suddenly at the age of sixty-eight, of snakebite, we knew that he was not a life insurance agent. Furthermore, because he did not once seek to steer the conversation round to the sinful practices of some people who offered a man a quite substantial bribe when he was just carrying out his duty, we also knew that the stranger was not a plain-clothes man who had been sent round to investigate the increase in cattle-smuggling over the Conventie-lyn. Quite a number of us breathed more easily, then.

  Nevertheless, we were naturally intrigued to know what Meneer Losper had come there for. But with the exception of Gysbert van Tonder – who did not have much manners since the time he had accompanied a couple of Americans on safari to the lower reaches of the Limpopo – we were all too polite to ask a man straight out what his business was, and then explain to him how he could do it better.

  That trip with the two Americans influenced Gysbert van Tonder’s mind, all right. For he came back talking very loudly. And he bought a waistcoat at the Indian store especially so that he could carry a cigar in it. And he spoke of himself as Gysbert O. van Tonder. And he once also slapped Dominee Welthagen on the back to express his appreciation of the Nagmaal sermon Dominee Welthagen had delivered on the Holy Patriarchs and the Prophets.

  When Gysbert van Tonder came back from that journey, we understood how right the Voortrekker, Hendrik Potgieter, had been over a hundred years ago, when he said that the parts around the lower end of the Limpopo were no fit place for a white man.

  We asked Gysbert van Tonder how that part of the country affected the two Americans. And he said he did not think it affected them much. But it was a queer sort of area, all round, Gysbert explained. And there was a lot of that back-slapping business, too. He said he could still remember how one of the Americans slapped Chief Umfutusu on the back and how Chief Umfutusu, in his turn, slapped the American on the ear with a clay pot full of greenish drink that the chief was holding in his hand at the time.

  The American was very pleased about it, Gysbert van Tonder said, and he devoted a lot of space to it in his diary. The American classed Chief Umfutusu’s action as among the less understood tribal customs that had to do with welcoming distinguished white travellers. Later on, when Gysbert van Tonder and the Americans came to a Mshangaan village that was having some trouble with hut tax, the American who kept the diary was able to write a lot more about what he called an obscure African ritual that that tribe observed in welcoming a superior order of stranger. For that whole Mshangaan village, men, women and children, had rushed out and pelted Gysbert and the two Americans with wet cow-dung.

  In his diary the American compared this incident with the ceremonial greeting that a tribe of Bavendas once accorded the explorer Stanley, when they threw him backwards into a dam – to show respect, as Stanley explained, afterwards.

  Well anyway, here was this stranger, Losper, a middle-aged man with a suitcase, sitting in the post office and asking Jurie Steyn if he could put him up in a spare room for a few days, while he had a look round.

  “I’ll pay the same rates as I paid in the Boardinghouse in Zeerust,” Meneer Losper said. “Not that I think you might overcharge me, of course, but I am only allowed a fixed sum by the department for accommodation and travelling expenses.”

  “Look here, Neef Losper,” Jurie Steyn said, “you didn’t tell me your first name, so I can only call you Neef Losper –”

  “My first name is Org,” the stranger said.

  “Well, then, Neef Org,” Jurie Steyn went on. “From the way you talk I can see that you are unacquainted with the customs of the Groot Marico. In the first place, I am a postmaster and a farmer. I don’t know which is the worst job, what with money orders and the blue-tongue. I have got to put axle-grease on my mule-cart and sealing wax on the mailbag. And sometimes I get mixed up. Any man in my position would. One day I’ll paste a revenue stamp on my off-mule and I’ll brand a half-moon and a bar on the Bekkersdal mailbag. Then there will be trouble. There will be trouble with my off-mule, I mean. The post office won’t notice any difference. But my off-mule is funny, that way. He’ll pull the mule-cart, all right. But then everything has got to be the way he wants it. He won’t have people laughing at him because he’s got a revenue stamp stuck on his behind. I sometimes think that my off-mule knows that a shilling revenue stamp is what you put on a piece of paper after you’ve told a justice of the peace a lot of lies –”

  “Not lies,” Gysbert van Tonder interjected.

  “A lot of lies,” Jurie Steyn went on, “about another man’s cattle straying into a person’s lucerne lands while that person was taking his sick child to Zeerust –”

  Gysbert van Tonder, who was Jurie Steyn’s neighbour, half rose out of his riempies chair, then, and made some sneering remarks about Jurie Steyn and his off-mule. He said he never had much time for either of them. And he said he would not like to describe the way his lucerne lands looked after Jurie Steyn’s cattle had finished straying over them. He said he would not like to use that expression, because there was a stranger present.

  Meneer Losper seemed interested, then, and sat well forward to listen. And it looked as though Gysbert van Tonder would have said the words, too. Only, At Naudé, who has a wireless to which he listens in regularly, put a stop to the argument. He said that this was a respectable voorkamer, with family portraits on the wall.

  “And there’s Jurie Steyn’s wife in the kitchen, too,” At Naudé said. “You can’t use the same sort of language here as in the Volksraad, where there are all men.”

  Actually, Jurie Steyn’s wife had gone out of the kitchen, about then. Ever since that young schoolmaster with the black hair parted in the middle had come to Bekkersdal, Jurie Steyn’s wife had taken a good deal of interest in education matters. Consequently, when the stranger, Org Losper, said he was from the department, Jurie Steyn’s wife thought right away – judging from his shifty appearance – that he might be a school inspector. And so sent a message to the young schoolmaster to warn him in time, so that he could put away the saws and hammers that he used for the private fretwork that he did in front of the class while the children were writing compositions.

  In the meantime, Jurie Steyn was getting to the point.

  “So you can’t expect me to be running a Boardinghouse as well as everything else, Neef Org,” he was saying. “But all the same, you are welcome to stay. And you can stay as long as you like. Only, you must not offer again to pay. If you had known more about these parts, you would also have known that the Groot Marico has got a very fine reputation for ho
spitality. When you come and stay with a man he gets insulted if you offer him money. But I shall be glad to invite you into my home as a member of my own family.”

  Then Org Losper said that that was exactly what he didn’t want, anymore. And he was firm about it, too.

  “When you’re a member of the family, you can’t say no to anything,” he explained. “In the Pilanesberg I tore my best trousers on the wire. I was helping, as a member of the family, to round up the donkeys for the watercart. At Nietverdiend a Large White bit a piece out of my second-best trousers and my leg. That was when I was a member of the family and was helping to carry buckets of swill to the pig troughs. The farmer said the Large White was just being playful that day. Well, maybe the Large White thought I was also a member of the family – his family, I mean. At Abjaterskop I nearly fell into a disused mineshaft on a farm there. Then I was a member of the family, assisting to throw a dead bull down the shaft. The bull had died of anthrax and I was helping to pull him by one haunch and I was walking backwards and when I jumped away from the opening of the mineshaft it was almost too late.

  “I can also tell you what happened to me in the Dwarsberge when I was also a member of the family. And also about what happened when I was a member of the family at Derdepoort. I did not know that that family was having a misunderstanding with the family next door about water rights. And it was when I was opening a water furrow with a shovel that a load of buckshot went through my hat. As a member of the family, I was standing ankle-deep in the mud at the time, and so I couldn’t run very fast. So you see, when I say I would rather pay, it is not that I am ignorant of the very fine tradition that the Marico has for the friendly and bountiful entertainment that it accords the stranger. But I do not wish to presume further on your kindness. If I have much more Bushveld hospitality I might never see my wife and children again. It’s all very well being a member of somebody else’s family. But I have a duty to my own family. I want to get back to them alive.”