The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  He consulted his notes in a dispirited sort of way.

  “Yes,” Penzhorn went on, “the Indian store at Ramoutsa. Most of the farmers use also another word, I’ve noticed, in place of Indian. Now, what can one do with material like that? What I want to know are things about the veld. About the ways of the bush and the way the farmers think here … I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t think here.”

  At Naudé pulled Penzhorn up sharp, then. And he asked him, what with the white ants and galblaas, if he thought a farmer ever got time to think. And he asked him, with the controlled price of mealies 24s. a bag, instead of 24s 9d., as we had all expected, what he thought the Marico farmer had left to think with? By that time Fritz Pretorius was telling us, with a wild sort of laugh, about the last cheque he got from the creamery, and Hans van Tonder was saying things about those contour walls that the Agriculture Department man had suggested to stop soil erosion.

  “The Agriculture Department man looks like a contour wall himself,” Hans van Tonder said, “with those sticking up eyebrows.”

  Meanwhile, Jurie Steyn was stating, not in any spirit of bitterness, but just as a fact, the exact difference that the new increase in railway tariffs meant to the price of seven-and-a-half-inch piping.

  Gabriel Penzhorn closed his notebook.

  “I don’t mean that sort of talk,” he said. “Buying and selling. The low language of barter and the market-place. I can get that sort of talk from any produce merchant in Newtown. Or from any stockbroker I care to drop in on. But I don’t care to. What I came here for was –”

  That was the moment when Jurie Steyn’s wife, having overheard part of our conversation, flounced in from the kitchen.

  “And what about eggs?” she demanded. “If I showed you what I pay for bone-meal then you would have something to write in your little notebook. Why should there be all that difference between the retail price of eggs and the price I get? I tell you it’s the middlem –”

  “Veld lore,” Gabriel Penzhorn interrupted, sounding quite savage, now. “That’s what I came here for. But I can see you don’t know what it is, or anything about it. I want to know about things like the red sky in the morning is the shepherd’s warning. Morgen rood, plomp in die sloot. I want to know about how you can tell from the yellowing grass on the edge of a veld footpath that it is going to be an early winter. I want to know about when the tinktinkies fly low over the dam is it going to be a heavy downpour or a slow motreën. I want to know when the wren-warbler –”

  “I know if the tinktinkies fly low over my dam, the next thing they’ll be doing is sitting high up eating my cling-peaches in the orchard,” At Naudé said. “And if that canning factory at Welgevonden ever thinks I’m going to deal with them again …”

  In the meantime, Jurie Steyn’s wife was talking about the time she changed her Leghorns from mealies and skim milk to a standard ration. They went into a six-month moult, Jurie Steyn’s wife said.

  When the lorry from Groblersdal arrived Hans van Tonder was feeling in his pockets to show us an account he had got only the other day for cement. And Gabriel Penzhorn, in a voice that was almost pathetic, was saying something, over and over again, about the red sky at night.

  The driver told us afterwards that on the way back in the lorry Gabriel Penzhorn made a certain remark to him. If we did not know otherwise, we might perhaps have thought that Gabriel Penzhorn had overheard some of the earlier part of our conversation in the voorkamer that morning.

  “The Marico,” Gabriel Penzhorn said to the lorry-driver, “stinks.”

  Ghost Trouble

  They were having ghost trouble again in the Spelonksdrift area, Chris Welman said to us when we were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s post office. The worst kind of ghost trouble, Chris Welman added.

  We could guess what that meant.

  Everybody knew, of course, that Spelonksdrift was swarming with ghosts, any time after midnight. The ghosts came out of the caves in the Dwarsberge nearby. During the day it was quite all right. Then even the most difficult spectres would go and lie down in the hollowed-out places at the foot of the koppie and try and get some rest. But after dark they would make their way to the drift, dragging chains and carrying on generally. That much we all knew. I mean, there was not even a Mtosa cattle-herd so ignorant as willingly to venture near the drift after nightfall.

  When it came to having to do with ghosts, a Mtosa could be almost as educated as a white man.

  Again, with regard to ghosts, we still remember the time when the new schoolteacher, Charlie Rossouw, who was fresh from college, taught the Standard Five class, in the history lesson, about the Great Trek. He was talking about the Voortrekker leader, Lodewyk Loggenberg, and about the route his party took, and about the Dagboek that Lodewyk Loggenberg kept. The young schoolteacher said that he did not want his class to think of history as just names of persons that they had to remember, but that the Voortrekkers belonged to their own nation, and were people like their own fathers, say, or – if that was too unpleasant a thought – perhaps like their uncles. Or maybe even like the second cousins of their aunts’ half-sisters by marriage. That young schoolteacher was very thorough in his way.

  Then, drawing on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, Charlie Rossouw explained to the class that Lodewyk Loggenberg had passed through the Groot Marico with his wagons. “Perhaps the trek passed right in front of where this schoolhouse is today,” the teacher said. “Maybe Lodewyk Loggenberg’s long line of wagons, with voorryers and agterryers and with the Staats Bybel in the bok and with copper moulds from which to make candles six at a time after you fixed the wick in the middle, properly (I mean, you know the difference now between a form candle and a water candle: we did that last week) – maybe these Voortrekkers passed along right here, and the tracks that their wagon-wheels made over the veld were the beginning of what we today call the Government Road. Think of that. I wonder what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek when he went along this way towards Spelonksdrift? What he thought of this part of the country, I mean. That grand old Patriarch. Does anybody know what a Patriarch is?”

  Practically every child in his Standard Five class put up his or her hand, then. No, they did not know what a Patriarch was. But they did know what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek about Spelonksdrift. And they told the schoolmaster. And the schoolmaster, because he was young and fresh from college, laughed in a lighthearted manner at the answers the pupils gave him. It was all the same answer, really. And it was only after Faans Grobler, who was chairman of our school committee, had spoken earnestly to Charlie Rossouw about how serious a thing it was to laugh at a Standard Five pupil when he gave the right answer, that Charlie Rossouw went to Zeerust on a push bicycle over a weekend. Charlie Rossouw spent several hours in the public library at Zeerust. When he came back he was a changed man.

  After that, he put in even more time than he had done in the Zeerust library in explaining to Standard Five – which was the top class – that he had not known, until then, that that particular passage about the haunted character of the Spelonksdrift appeared in Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek. He had never been taught that at university, Charlie Rossouw said. But it was clear enough, now, of course. He had read it in print. It gave him an insight into Lodewyk Loggenberg’s mind that he did not have before, he acknowledged. But then, while he was at the teachers’ college, he was not able to go into all those details about South African history. He had to study subjects like blackboard work and cardboard modelling and the theory of education and the depth of the Indian Ocean and the Scholastic Philosophers, including Archbishop Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus. And there was also Albertus Magnus, Charlie Rossouw said. So he should not be blamed for not knowing everything Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek. He had been so busy, night after night, trying to make out what Duns Scotus was trying to get at. But now that he had himself gone into the world a bit, the schoolmaster said, it seemed to him that there was
quite a lot in common between Duns Scotus and Lodewyk Loggenberg. In his opinion, they would both of them have got pretty high marks for cardboard modelling.

  Francina Smit, who was in Standard Five, and who was good at arithmetic, said afterwards that Charlie Rossouw made that remark with what she could only describe as a sneer.

  All the same, Charlie Rossouw said to his class, even though it was true that Lodewyk Loggenberg had written those things about Spelonksdrift in his Dagboek, it would be best if the class kept quiet about it when the inspector came. He was sure that the school inspector would misunderstand an answer like that. He did not believe that the school inspector knew Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek very well. He even went so far as to doubt whether the school inspector knew much about Thomas Aquinas.

  A little later, when Charlie Rossouw was sacked from the Education Department, we in the Groot Marico were pleased about it. There was just something about Charlie Rossouw that made us feel that he was getting too big for his boots. The next thing he would be telling his class was that the earth turns around the sun. Whereas you’ve only got to lie in the tamboekie grass on Abjaterskop towards evening and watch, and you’ll see for yourself it isn’t so. All those astronomers and people like that – where would they be if they once lay on Abjaterskop in the setting sun, and shredded a plug of roll-tobacco with a pocket knife, in the setting sun, and looked about them, and thought a little? Put an astronomer on top of Abjaterskop, in the setting sun, and with a plug of roll-tobacco, and lying in the tamboekie grass, and where would he be?

  Anyway, even though we who were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voor-kamer that also served as the Drogevlei post office were not astronomers, or anywhere near, we were nevertheless much impressed by Chris Welman’s statement that they were having ghost trouble at Spelonksdrift. When it came to seeing a ghost you didn’t need to be an astronomer and to have a telescope: a ghost was something that you could actually see best just with the naked eye.

  Now, if the spirits of the dead were content to haunt only the drift after nightfall, then no harm would come to any human being. No human being was ever there after nightfall. It was when a pale apparition took to the road, and wandered through the poort to have a look round, that unfortunate incidents occurred.

  If you were travelling along the Government Road at night and you saw a person walking – or riding on horseback, even – and you saw the moon shining through that person, then you would know, of course, that you had met a ghost. If there was no moon, then you would see the stars shining through the ghost. Or you might even see a withaak tree or a piece of road showing through the ghost.

  Gysbert van Tonder once encountered an elderly ghost, riding a mule, right in the middle of the poort. And Gysbert van Tonder held long converse with the ghost, whom he took to be an elderly farmer that had come back from a dance at Nietverdiend – coming back so late because he was elderly. It was when Gysbert van Tonder recognised the mule that the elderly farmer was sitting on as old Koffiebek, that had belonged to his grandfather and that had died many years before of grass-belly, that Gysbert van Tonder grew to have doubts. What made him suspicious, Gysbert van Tonder said, was that he had never in his life seen Koffiebek standing so still, with a man on his back, talking. During the whole conversation Koffiebek did not once try to bite a chunk out of his rider’s leg. In the same moment Gysbert van Tonder realised that it was because there wasn’t much of his rider for Koffiebek to bite.

  “What made it all so queer,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “was that I had been talking to the elderly farmer on the mule about a new comet that there was in the sky, then. And I had asked him if he thought it meant the end of the world, and he said he hoped not, because there were several things that he wanted to do still. And it didn’t strike me that, all the time we were talking about the comet, the old farmer was sitting between me and the comet, and I was seeing the comet through the middle of his left lung. I could see his right lung, too, the way it swelled out when he breathed.”

  It was getting late, not only in Jurie Steyn’s post office, but everywhere in the Marico, and the lorry from Bekkersdal had not yet arrived with our letters and milk-cans. They must be having trouble along the road, we said to each other.

  And because of the line of conversation that Chris Welman had started we were glad when Jurie Steyn, on his return from the milking shed, lit the paraffin lamp in the voorkamer before it was properly dark.

  Oupa Bekker had been very quiet, most of the evening. Several times he had looked out into the gathering dusk, shaking his head at it. But after Jurie Steyn had lit the oil-lamp, Oupa Bekker cheered up a good deal. Then he started telling us about the time when he encountered a ghost near Spelonksdrift, in the old days.

  “I had lost my way in the dark,” Oupa Bekker declared, “and so I thought that that stretch of water was just an ordinary crossing over the Molopo River. I had no idea that it was Spelonksdrift. So I pulled up at the edge of the stream to let my horse drink. Mind you, I should have known that it was Spelonksdrift just through my horse not having been at all thirsty. Indeed, afterwards it struck me that I had never before seen a horse with so little taste for water. All he did was to look slowly about him and shiver.”

  At Naudé asked Jurie Steyn’s wife to turn the paraffin lamp up a bit higher, just about then. He said he was thinking of the lorry-driver. The lorry-driver would be able to see the light in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer from a long way off, if the lamp was turned up properly, At Naudé explained. It was queer how several of us, at that moment, started feeling concern for the lorry-driver. We all seemed to remember, at once, that he was a married man with five children. Jurie Steyn’s wife did not have to turn much on the screw to make the lamp burn brighter. We men did it all for her. But then, of course, we Marico men are chivalrous that way.

  In the meantime, Oupa Bekker had been drooling on in his old-man way of talking, with the result that when we were back in our seats again we found that we had missed the in-between part of his story. All we heard was the end part. We heard about his dispute with the ghost, which had ended in the ghost letting him have it across the chops with the back of his hand.

  “So I went next day to see Dr Angus Stuart,” Oupa Bekker continued. “In those days he was the only doctor between here and Rysmierbult. I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened at Spelonksdrift. I just showed him my face, with those red marks on it … And do you know what? After he had had a good look at those marks through a magnifying glass, the doctor said that they could have been caused only by a ghost hitting me over the jaw with the back of a blue-flame hand.”

  That story started Johnny Coen off telling us about the time he was walking through the poort one night, with Dawie Ferreira who had once been a policeman at Newclare. And while he and Dawie Ferreira were walking through the poort, a Bechuana through whom they could see the Milky Way shining came up to them. In addition to having the Milky Way visible through his spine, the Bechuana was also carrying his head under his arm. But Dawie Ferreira, because he was a former policeman, knew how to deal with that Bechuana, Johnny Coen said. He promptly asked him where his pass was for being on a public road at that time of night. You couldn’t see the Bechuana for dust after that, Johnny Coen said. In fact, the dust that the Bechuana with his head under his arm raised on the Government Road of the Marico seemed to become part of, and to reach beyond, the Milky Way that shone through his milt and was also a road.

  The lorry from Bekkersdal arrived very late. The driver looked perturbed.

  “We had big-end trouble at Spelonksdrift,” the lorry-driver said, “and an old farmer riding a mule came up and gave me a lot of sauce. He acted as though he was a ghost, or something. As though I’d take notice of that sort of nonsense. I saw through him, all right. Then he sloshed me one across the jaw. When I tried to land him one back he was gone.”

  The lorry-driver had marks on his cheek that could have been caused by a back-hander from an elderly farmer riding a mule.


  Oom Tobie’s Sickness

  From the way he was muffled to the chin in a khaki overcoat and his wife’s scarf in the heat of the day, we knew why Tobias Schutte was sitting on the riempies bench in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. We knew that Tobias Schutte was going by lorry to Bekkersdal to get some more medical treatment. There was nobody in the Groot Marico who suffered as regularly and acutely from maladies – imaginary or otherwise – as did Tobias Schutte. For that reason he was known as “Iepekonders Oom Tobie” from this side of the Pilanesberg right to the Kalahari: a good way into the Kalahari, sometimes – the exact distance depending on how far the Klipkop Bushmen had to go into the desert to find msumas.

  “You look to be in a pretty bad way again, Oom Tobie,” Chris Welman said in a tone that Oom Tobie accepted as implying sympathy. Nobody else in the voorkamer took it up that way, however. To the rest of us, Chris Welman’s remark was just a plain sneer. “What’s it this time, Oom Tobie,” he went on, “the miltsiek or St. Vitus’s dance? But you got it while you were working, I’ll bet.”

  “Just before I started working, to be exact,” Oom Tobie replied. “I was just getting ready to plant in the first pole for the new cattle camp when the sickness overtook me. Of a sudden I came all over queer. So I just had to leave the whole job to the Cape Coloured man, Pieterse, and the Bechuanas. The planting of the poles, the wiring, chasing away meerkats – I had to leave it all to them. They are at it now. I don’t know what I’d do without Pieterse. I must give him an old pair of trousers again, one of these days. I’ve got a pair that are quite good still, except that they are worn out in the seat. It’s queer how all my trousers get worn out like that, in the seat. The clothes you get today aren’t what they used to be. I buy a new pair of trousers to wear when I go out on the lands, and before I know where I am they’re frayed all thin, at the seat …”