The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  Johnny Coen remarked that next time Gysbert van Tonder had an American tourist on his hands, he need not take him to the Limpopo, but could just show him around the Marico farms.

  It was then that Gysbert van Tonder asked Org Losper straight out what his business was. And, to our surprise, the stranger was very frank about it.

  “It is a new job that has been made for me by the Department of Defence,” Org Losper said. “There wasn’t that post before. You see, I worked very hard at the last elections, getting people’s names taken off the electoral roll. You have no idea how many names I got taken off. I even got some of our candidate’s supporters crossed off. But you know how it is, we all make mistakes. It is a very secret post. It is a top Defence secret. I am under oath not to disclose anything about it. But I am free to tell you that I am making certain investigations on behalf of the Department of Defence. I am trying to find out whether something has been seen here. But, of course, the post has been made for me, if you understand what I mean.”

  We said we understood, all right. And we also knew that, since he was under oath about it, the nature of Org Losper’s investigations in the Groot Marico would leak out sooner or later.

  As it happened, we found out within the next couple of days. A Mahalapi who worked for Adriaan Geel told us. And then we realised how difficult Org Losper’s work was. And we no longer envied him his Government job – even though it had been especially created for him.

  If you know the Mtosas, you’ll understand why Org Losper’s job was so hard. For instance, there was only one member of the whole Mtosa tribe who had ever had any close contact with white men. And he had unfortunately grown up among Trekboers, whose last piece of crockery that they had brought with them from the Cape had got broken almost a generation earlier.

  We felt that the Department of Defence could have made an easier job for Org Losper than to send him round asking those questions of the Mtosas, they who did not even know what ordinary kitchen saucers were, leave alone flying ones.

  Bull-calf

  The Government lorry from Bekkersdal was late. Jurie Steyn had several times come from behind his post office counter and had stood at the front door, gazing in the direction of the poort.

  “How am I going to get through the milking?” he asked in an aggrieved tone, cupping a hand over his eyes some more and staring across the kameeldorings. “I’ve had these mailbags ready and everything since early this morning – before the cattle went out of the kraal, even.”

  Johnny Coen looked at the untidy bundles on the counter and his lip curled.

  “Next time you make up the mailbags in the kraal, you should perhaps wait until the cattle have gone out,” Johnny Coen said. “Then they wouldn’t walk over the mailbags … Or was it pigs?”

  To our surprise, Jurie Steyn did not take offence.

  “I really do believe, sometimes,” he replied, thoughtfully, “that it would be better if I did go and do my post office work in the stable. I get no peace here, in the voorkamer. It is that Duusman. He’s been chewing the mailbags again. It’s a habit I despise in him. But that’s the worst of rearing a bull-calf by hand. I’ve sometimes thought I’ll just give Duusman the voorkamer and I’ll move into the stable. That’s at least one place that Duusman never goes into, anyway. He won’t be seen in a stable – not him. He’s much too stuck-up.”

  Gysbert van Tonder said that that showed you how intelligent a handraised bull-calf like Duusman could be. To be able to tell the difference between Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer and a stable. Many a human being would hardly know the difference, even. Not at first glance, that was, Gysbert explained.

  Now, although he was always saying things to Duusman’s detriment, Jurie Steyn was secretly very proud of his hansbul, and he really thought that Duusman was different from any other bull-calf in the Marico that had been brought up by hand. And so Jurie Steyn felt not a little flattered at Gysbert van Tonder’s remark.

  “I won’t say Duusman hasn’t got brains,” Jurie Steyn acknowledged, modestly, “if only he’ll use them in the right way.”

  We could not help feeling that, with those words, Jurie Steyn would like us to think that he himself had brains – just because he had brought Duusman up by hand.

  In the meantime, Oupa Bekker had been nodding his head up and down.

  “It’s all very well rearing a calf or a goat or a sheep by hand,” he announced, “but you mustn’t also educate him. The moment a bull-calf gets educated above his station in life, he’s got no more respect for you. He doesn’t seem to understand that, just because you’re older than he is, you must know more.”

  “I wouldn’t say that’s always the case, Oupa,” Johnny Coen said. “I mean, it’s not just only age. There are also other things that broaden the mind – like travel, say.”

  We knew, of course, that Johnny Coen was referring to the time he was working on the railways at Ottoshoop.

  “Well, I wouldn’t object if Duusman took it into his head to travel a bit,” Jurie Steyn asserted. “It would do him good. He’ll soon find out that it’s not every hand-raised bull-calf that has got as good a home as he has. And he’s so inconsiderate. After he’s been loafing about the vlei all morning, Duusman will never think of wiping the clay from between his hooves before he comes walking into the voorkamer for his dish of kaboe-mealies. That’s a hand-raised bull-calf all over. But it’s my wife that spoilt him, of course. I knew right from the start that no good could come from her feeding him in the voorkamer. ‘Give Duusman his lunch in the kitchen, Truitjie,’ I used to say to my wife from the very beginning. ‘Then, later on, when he’s more grown up, he’ll be used to coming round to the back door for his meals. If Duusman gets into the habit of walking in at the front door he’ll start having ideas about himself before he’s much older. You watch if I’m not right.’ But she wouldn’t listen to me. Now you see what’s happening. I’m only looking forward to the day when Duusman will have grown so wide and fat that he won’t be able to come in through the door of the voorkamer anymore.”

  That was the moment when Oupa Bekker giggled. It was a disturbing sort of sound. Oupa Bekker was, after all, somebody aged and respected. Except when he said silly things – such as when he said that he could make quite a good living even if mealies were only ten shillings a bag, never mind the new price of twenty-four shillings. Then we knew that he was just aged.

  And the way Oupa Bekker giggled now was not pleasant. Even At Naudé looked unhappy. And At Naudé had a wireless set and had heard some queer noises coming over it in his time – and not merely as a result of his not having been properly tuned in, by any means. there was the time, for instance, when he invited several of us to come and listen in to what he informed us was an opera being broadcast, and right through, at intervals, At Naudé said, “Yes, I know what you kêrels think. You think it’s the atmospherics.”

  “What I want to say is,” Oupa Bekker remarked, after his laughter had set over into coughing and Chris Welman had slapped – some of us thought punched – the old man vigorously on the back, “if you think that will be the end of your trouble with a bull-calf that you’ve reared by hand –”

  Oupa Bekker gave signs of wanting to laugh again. But he stopped himself in time. That was when he saw Chris Welman, with a determined look in his eye, making a move to get out of his chair for the second time.

  Oupa Bekker pulled himself together, then.

  Before that, I had noticed a strained look on Chris Welman’s face. He did not seem to be himself, somehow. Chris Welman seemed to be taking it much too seriously, this nonsense that was being talked about Jurie Steyn’s bull-calf.

  “You say your wife has spoilt Duusman, Jurie?” Oupa Bekker asked.

  “Completely,” Jurie Steyn admitted.

  Oupa Bekker looked thoughtful.

  “But you don’t think,” he asked, “that you might also perhaps have had a hand in spoiling him? Think carefully, now.”

  “Well,” Jurie said, somewh
at reluctantly, “a little, maybe.”

  That seemed to be the sum of what Oupa Bekker wanted to know. In any case, he said nothing more. That made us all feel uncomfortable. It was a good deal worse than when he giggled in that annoying old-man sort of way, that was not much different from an old woman’s giggle. But now he remained silent. And you couldn’t go and thump an old man on his back just for keeping quiet. At least, in public you couldn’t. Not when people were looking.

  “Duusman chew?” Oupa Bekker asked.

  “Chew – how do you mean, chew?” Jurie Steyn repeated. We could see he was hedging.

  “Tobacco,” Oupa Bekker insisted, firmly.

  “Well,” Jurie Steyn said, “he does come in every morning for a plug of Piet Retief rolled tobacco. It started as a joke, of course. But, all right, if you put it that way, Duusman does chew. But he spits most of it out again. I started him off on the habit. It seemed funny to me, the idea of a bull-calf chewing. But he’s got into the habit, now. It seemed funny at the time, if you understand what I mean. But now, well, I think Duusman will burst the doorframe down if he doesn’t get his chew every morning –”

  “And you blame it on your wife,” Oupa Bekker said. And he started laughing again. And even when his laughter went up into very high notes he did not bother to look round to see how Chris Welman was taking it.

  It was almost as though Oupa Bekker knew that Chris Welman would not slam him on the back again, even if Oupa Bekker’s laughter ended in his coughing his head off.

  “You yourself can’t stop chewing tobacco, no matter how hard you try – can you, now?” Oupa Bekker remarked to Jurie. “I know I can’t. And all I’ve got left are a few top teeth that aren’t near as good as yours or Duusman’s.”

  When Jurie Steyn did not answer, Oupa Bekker said that he should send Duusman to the butcher’s shop. But he did not think that Duusman would make even good butcher’s meat, Oupa Bekker added.

  Well, we all knew, of course, that if you had once reared a bull-calf by hand, you could never send him to the butcher’s shop, even if the land company were foreclosing on you.

  It was a relief to us all when the lorry arrived in dust and noise and with milk-cans and circulars from shopkeepers.

  But we should have felt more surprised, somehow, when, along with the driver and his assistant, there also alighted from the lorry young Tobie, Chris Welman’s son, who had gone to Johannesburg and whom we had not seen for several years.

  Tobie Welman was slim and good-looking, and he walked with a light step, and his black hair was slicked back from his forehead, and a cigarette dangled from his lip.

  And when Chris Welman walked out to meet Tobie, as though he had been expecting him, we wondered why he had not told us that his son was coming back. We would, after all, not have said anything about Tobie Welman having been in reform school.

  Duusman forced his way into the voorkamer, about then, lowing. “Moo,” Duusman said.

  Local Colour

  We were talking about the book-writing man, Gabriel Penzhorn, who was in the Marico on a visit, wearing a white helmet above his spectacles and with a notebook and a fountain pen below his spectacles. He had come to the Marico to get local colour and atmosphere, he said, for his new South African novel. What was wrong with his last novel, it would seem, was that it did not have enough local colour and atmosphere in it.

  So we told Penzhorn that the best place for him to get atmosphere in these parts was in that kloof other side Lobatse, where that gas came out from. Only last term the schoolteacher had taken the children there, and he had explained to them about the wonders of Nature. We said to Gabriel Penzhorn that there was atmosphere for him, all right. In fact, the schoolmaster had told the children that there was a whole gaseous envelope of it. Penzhorn could even collect some of it in a glass jar, with a piece of rubber tubing on it, like the schoolmaster had done.

  And as for local colour, well, we said, there was that stretch of blue bush on this side of Abjaterskop, which we called the bloubos. It wasn’t really blue, we said, but it only looked blue. All the same, it was the best piece of blue bush we had seen anywhere in the Northern Transvaal. The schoolmaster had brought a piece of that home with him also, we explained.

  Gabriel Penzhorn made it clear, however, that that stretch of blue bush was not the sort of local colour he wanted at all. Nor was he much interested in the kind of atmosphere that he could go and collect in a bottle with a piece of rubber tubing, just from other side Lobatse.

  From that we could see that Gabriel Penzhorn was particular. We did not blame him for it, of course. We realised that if it was things that a writer had to put into a book, then only the best could be good enough. Nevertheless, since most of us had been born in the Marico, and we took pride in our district, we could not help feeling just a little hurt.

  “As far as I can see,” Johnny Coen said to us one day in Jurie Steyn’s post office, “what this book-writing man wants is not atmosphere, but stinks. Perhaps that’s the sort of books he writes. I wonder. Have they got pictures in, does anybody know?”

  But nobody knew.

  “Well, if it’s stinks that Penzhorn wants,” Johnny Coen proceeded, “just let him go and stand on the siding at Ottoshoop when they open a truck of Bird Island guano. Phew! He won’t even need a glass jar to collect that sort of atmosphere in. He can just hold his white helmet in his hand and let a few whiffs of guano atmosphere float into it. But if he puts a white helmetful of that kind of atmosphere into his next book, I think the police will have something to say.”

  Oupa Bekker looked reflective. At first we thought that he hadn’t been following much of our conversation, since it was intellectual, having to do with books. We knew that Oupa Bekker had led more of an open-air sort of life, having lived in the Transvaal in the old days, when the Transvaal did not set much store on book learning. But to our surprise we found that Oupa Bekker could take part in a talk about culture as well as any of us. What was more, he did not give himself any airs on account of his having this accomplishment, either.

  “Stinks?” Oupa Bekker enquired. “Stinks? Well, let me tell you. There never have been any stinks like the kind we had when we were running that tannery on the Molopo River in the rainy season, in the old days. We thought that the water of the Molopo that the flour-mill on the erf next to us didn’t use for their water-wheel would be all right for us with our tannery. We didn’t need running water. Just ordinary standing water was good enough for us. And when I say standing water, I mean standing. You have got no idea how it stood. And we didn’t tan just plain ox-hides and sheepskins, but every kind of skin we could get. Tanning was our business, you understand. We tanned lion and zebra skins along with the elephant and rhinoceros hides. After a while the man who owned the flour-mill couldn’t stand it any longer. So he moved higher up the river. And if I tell you that he was a Bulgarian and he couldn’t stand it, that will possibly give you an idea of what that tannery smelt like. Then, one day, a farmer came from the Dwarsberge … Yes, they are still the same Dwarsberge, and they haven’t changed much with the years. Only, today I can’t see as far from the top of the Dwarsberge as I could when I was young. And they look different, also, somehow, with that little whitewashed house no longer in the poort, and with Lettie Gouws no longer standing at the front gate, in an apron with blue squares.”

  Oupa Bekker paused and sighed. But it was quite a light sigh, that was not so much regret for the past as a tribute to the sweetness of vanished youth.

  “Anyway,” Oupa Bekker continued, “this farmer from the Dwarsberge brought us a wagon-load of polecat skins. You can imagine what that stink was like. Even before we started tanning them, I mean. Above the smell of the tannery we could smell that load of muishond when the wagon was still fording the drift at Steekgrasvlei. Bill Knoetze – that was my partner – and I felt that this was going slightly too far, even though we were in the tanning business. At first we tried to laugh it off, in the way that we have in the
Marico. We tried to pretend to the farmer from the Dwarsberge when he came into the office that we thought it was he that stank like that. And we asked him if he couldn’t do something about it. Like getting himself buried, say. But the farmer said no, it wasn’t him. It was just his wagon. He made that statement after he had held out his hand for us to shake and Bill Knoetze, before taking the farmer’s hand, had play-acted that he was going to faint. And it wasn’t just all play-acting either. How he knew that there was something about his wagon, the farmer said, that was peculiar, was through his having passed mule-carts along the road. And he noticed that the mules shied.

  “All the same, that was how we came to give up the first tanning business that had ever been set up along the Molopo. Bill Knoetze left after that wagon-load of polecat skins had been in the tanning fluid for about a fortnight. I left a week later. But just before that the Chief of the Mahalapis had come from T’lakieng to find out if we had koedoe leather that he wanted for veldskoens. And when he walked with us through the tannery the Chief of the Mahalapis sniffed the breeze several times, as though trying to make up his mind about something. In the end, the Chief said it would appear to him as though we had a flower garden somewhere near. And he asked could he take a bunch of asters back to his kraal with him for his youngest wife, who had been to mission school and liked such things. It was too dry at T’lakieng for geraniums, the Chief said.”

  Oupa Bekker was still talking when Gabriel Penzhorn walked into Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. He intended taking the lorry back to civilisation, Penzhorn explained to us. His stay in the Marico had been quite interesting, he said. He didn’t say it with enthusiasm, however. And he added that he had not been able to write as many things in his notebook as he had hoped to.

  “They all say the same thing,” Gabriel Penzhorn proceeded. “I no sooner tell a farmer or his wife that I am a novelist and that I am looking for material to put into my next book, than he or she tells me – sometimes both of them together tell me – about the kind of book that they would write if they only had time; or if only they remembered to order some ink, next time they went to the Indian store at Ramoutsa.”