The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  So Japie said that he couldn’t call to mind that particular name. But there were lots of other names that the young sea-cadets called the captain of the training ship. Not loud enough for him to hear, of course. He couldn’t remember if sea-colonel was one of them, Japie said. But one name he could recall was son of a sea-cook.

  “Anyway, they’re making quite a lot of jokes about it in the papers,” At Naudé went on. “But I can’t see anything funny about it. I mean, if a man is a sea-colonel, what else could you call him, really?”

  Young Japie Maasdyk was just opening his mouth to say the word, when Chris Welman signalled to him to be careful not to use bad language, at the same time pointing in the direction of the kitchen, where Jurie Steyn’s wife was. From the quick way in which Japie picked up the signal, we could see that he had learnt a thing or two during the time he was at the naval college.

  Gysbert van Tonder started telling us about a sea-soldier that he met, once, in Zeerust. And so he knew the sort, Gysbert van Tonder said. Only, of course, he didn’t want young Japie Maasdyk to think that he intended any personal reflection on himself. Thereupon Japie Maasdyk said Good Lord, no.

  “Why, to come back here and listen to all of you talking,” Japie said, “it’s almost as though I’ve never been away. You were talking exactly the same things when I left. And I feel just as though I have missed nothing in between. Nothing worthwhile, that is.”

  We said that it was most friendly of Japie Maasdyk to talk like that. It was good to think that his having been on the high seas, and all, hadn’t changed him from the little Bushveld boy with a freckled face and sore toes that we had seen growing up in front of us, we said. At Naudé was even able to remember the time when the new ouderling went to call at the Maasdyk farmhouse. And the only member of the family that the ouderling found at home was little Japie.

  “And you stood under a camel-thorn tree, talking to the ouderling,” At Naudé went on, laughing so much that the tears ran down his cheeks. “And you stood on one foot. On your left foot. You stood with your right foot resting on your left knee. Every little Bushveld boy stands that way when he’s shy. And because the ouderling had much wisdom, he knew what you meant when you said that your parents weren’t at home. The ouderling knew that your mother was in the kitchen and that your father had run away into the bush to hide. Like we all do in these parts when we see a stranger driving up to the front door. Ha, ha, ha.”

  We all laughed at that, of course. And it seemed as though Japie Maasdyk was gratified to think that we felt that he was still one of us, and that the time he had spent aboard the training ship had not changed him in any way. From the way he kept his eyes fixed straight on the floor in front of him, the while his face turned red as a beetroot, we could see just how gratified Japie Maasdyk was.

  Gysbert van Tonder went on with his story about the sailor he encountered in Zeerust. And although we knew that in the story he wasn’t making even an indirect sort of reference to Japie Maasdyk – since he had given us his personal assurance on that point – nevertheless, as Gysbert went on talking, more than one of us sitting in that voorkamer on that afternoon found his thoughts going, in spite of himself, to that little hand trunk in which Japie Maasdyk’s blue uniform was all neatly parcelled up.

  “That sea-trooper now,” Gysbert van Tonder was saying, “well, I know the sort of man. He was swaying from side to side as he walked along that Zeerust pavement. And when he went into the bar he missed the first step. It would seem, from what he told me, that at sea all ship-soldiers walk like that. And when I saw what he had to drink – and it was before midday, too – I understood why. He tried to explain to me, of course, that the reason he walked that way was because the submar-ine he was employed on was so unsteady on its keel. All the same, it gave me a pretty good idea why that submarine was so unsteady. If the other underwater infantrymen were like him, I mean. He told me that he hadn’t found his land-legs yet.”

  When Gysbert van Tonder spoke about land-legs, it gave Jurie Steyn an idea. In that way, Jurie Steyn was enabled to say a few words derived from his personal knowledge of the lore of the seafarer.

  Jurie Steyn dealt with the answer that our Volksraad member had given a questioner at a meeting some years ago. The questioner had asked our Volksraad member if it wasn’t a waste of money, and all that, keeping up a South African Navy, with the sea so far away. And with the Molopo River having been dry for the past four years because of the drought, the questioner added.

  “The Volksraad member spoke very beautiful things, then,” Jurie Steyn said. “He explained about how our forefathers that came over with Jan van Riebeeck were all ship-military men. They were common sea-soldiers who, with their trusty sea-pots filled with common boiling lead, kept the Spaniards at arm’s length for eighty years. Arm’s length did not, perhaps, amount to very much, our Volksraad member said, but eighty years did count for something, and we all cheered.”

  Chris Welman said “Hear, hear,” then, and several of us clapped. We knew that Jurie Steyn had allowed his name to go forward as a candidate for the next school committee elections, and from the way he spoke now, it seemed that he was likely to get in. A strong stand in the war against Spain was still a better bet than parallel-medium education.

  “I remember that our Volksraad member said that the call of the sea was in our blood,” Jurie Steyn continued. “He said that, when he first got elected, and he got a free pass to Cape Town, and he alighted from the train at the docks, by mistake, and he saw all that blue water for the first time in his life – he said how very moved he was. He said that he wanted to climb up to the top of one of those cranes, there, and empty a sea-pot full of boiling lead – or whatever was in that sea-pot – onto anybody passing within throwing distance and speaking out of his turn. That had been a hard-fought election, our Volksraad member said, just like the war against Spain had also been hard-fought, and his Sea Beggar blood was up.”

  It was after we had cheered Jurie Steyn for the second time that we realised how strange a thing it was to be a politician. For Jurie Steyn, who had never been to sea, received all our applause, while young Japie Maasdyk, with his blue uniform no doubt getting more and more crumpled in the hand baggage, the longer Jurie Steyn spoke, got no kind of recognition at all as a ship-private, in spite of the fact that he had been trained for the work. Whereas, if we had been told that in addition to being postmaster for the area Jurie Steyn had also been appointed sea-colonel for the whole of the Dwarsberge we would not have been at all surprised. There was something about Jurie Steyn that made you think, somehow, of a sea-colonel.

  Oupa Bekker tried to say something, just about then. But we shut him up, the moment he sought to raise a skinny hand. We wouldn’t stand for him stopping one of three, with his long grey beard and glittering eye. In the Dwarsberge there was no room for an ancient sea-private talking about an albatross. Quite rightly, we did not wish to hear about a sadder and a wiser man rising the morrow morn.

  Shortly afterwards, Jurie Steyn’s wife brought in coffee. When she went out of the voorkamer again, with an empty tray, she gave one look over her shoulder at Japie Maasdyk. There really was something about a sailor, we felt then.

  But it was when, there being no other form of transport at that late hour, Jurie Steyn lent Japie Maasdyk his horse, that we realised how much Japie had indeed learnt at that naval college. From the awkward way he sat on that horse you could see that they had truly made Japie Maasdyk a sea-burgher.

  III

  Oom At Geel, Cape rebel, soldier, farmer and the man who sold Bosman the rifle with which he later killed his stepbrother, Nietverdiend. 1964

  Idle Talk

  “You know,” Jurie Steyn said, right out of nothing, sort of – since we weren’t talking of his voorkamer at all, at that moment, but of the best way of crating a pig that you are sending to the market – “there is something about my post office. I can’t quite explain it, but I have noticed that each time there is a small ga
thering of farmers here, waiting for the lorry, well, quite a lot of sense seems to be talked here, somehow. You know what I mean – sense.”

  Gysbert van Tonder said, then, in a dignified kind of manner, that it wasn’t clear to him why Jurie Steyn should give his voorkamer all the credit for it.

  “If we were sitting out on the veld, under a camel-thorn tree, say,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “and we were talking sensible things, as we always do, then there would be much reason and sound judgment in whatever we had to say. You haven’t got to be in the konsistorie of the church in Zeerust in order to make a judicious remark. Indeed, Jurie, with all respect to your wife’s cousin, who is a deacon, I actually think that some of the things I have heard said that have been least thoughtful, have been said in the Zeerust konsistorie.”

  Chris Welman said that, in talking that way, Gysbert van Tonder was being equally unfair. There was something about the way you felt when you were in the vestry, Chris Welman said, with the walls so clean and high and whitewashed, and with a couple of elders next to you that looked – well, if not clean, exactly, then at least high up and whitewashed. Anyway, you couldn’t be yourself, then, quite, Chris Welman said.

  Yes, he ended up very lamely.

  Jurie Steyn felt called on, then, to come to the defence of his wife’s cousin, Deacon Kirstein. For it wasn’t a happy picture, somehow, that Chris Welman had left us with, of the deacons and elders meeting in the Zeerust konsistorie before a church service. And with Deacon Kirstein perhaps looking more whitewashed than any of them.

  “I can’t understand Chris Welman talking that way,” Jurie Steyn said, primly. “Because if Chris Welman’s name ever had to be put forward, for a deacon, I am sure that nobody would talk against him and mention a truckload of Afrikander oxen that a –”

  “That a what?” Gysbert van Tonder demanded, his voice sounding almost fierce.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” Jurie Steyn answered. “I don’t know what you are suggesting, even, Gysbert. I was just trying to say that if Chris Welman’s name, now, had to be put forward as deacon, well, there would be nothing against him, if you know what I mean. Chris Welman’s name would be held in great respect.”

  Gysbert van Tonder was on the point of replying. But we realised that he pulled himself up short. Jurie Steyn had caught him, all right. For what Gysbert van Tonder might have said was that maybe there was nothing at all against Chris Welman as an honourable burgher and a regular churchgoer. But there was Chris Welman’s son, Tobie …

  It was almost as though Jurie Steyn had challenged Gysbert van Tonder to mention the name of Chris Welman’s son. For then there would, indeed, have been trouble. In any case, Gysbert van Tonder sat silent for a few moments. And you could see that it was on the tip of his tongue to talk about Chris Welman’s son, Tobie. And to say that Chris Welman might be a good churchgoer, and all that. But that Chris Welman’s son, Tobie, was even more regular. Singing a lot of hymns and psalms every Sunday without fail, for almost three years, in the chapel of the reform school.

  From his silence, it was clear that that was something Gysbert van Tonder dared not mention. So Gysbert van Tonder contented himself with explaining that whatever Jurie Steyn was hinting at, about the time the stationmaster refused to have those oxen trucked unless he knew who the owner was, well – Gysbert van Tonder said – a lot of people had already had occasion to complain about how officious that stationmaster was.

  “What about the time our Volksraad member’s brother-in-law himself went down to the station and spoke to the stationmaster very firmly?” Gysbert van Tonder went on. “And he asked the stationmaster if he thought that every farmer in the Groot Marico was a cattle thief. He asked him that straight out, because he had brought witnesses with him. And the stationmaster said, no, but he knew that every Marico farmer was a cattle farmer, and he knew that any cattle farmer could make a mistake.”

  We all said, then, that that was quite a different thing. And we said that if you weren’t there to see to it yourself, and you left it to a Bechuana herd-boy to go and have a lot of cattle railed to Johannesburg, why, mistakes were almost sure to happen, we said. Thereupon At Naudé started telling us about a mistake that one of his Bechuana herd-boys had made on a certain occasion, as a result of which six of Koos Nienaber’s best trek-oxen got railed to Johannesburg along with some scrub animals that At Naudé was sending to the market.

  “That was the time Koos Nienaber went to Johannesburg to have his old Mauser mended,” At Naudé explained. “And it just happened that because he didn’t know where to get off, Koos Nienaber was shunted onto a siding, somewhere, past Johannesburg station. And what should take place but that Koos Nienaber alighted from his second-class compartment just at the same time that his six trek-oxen should be walking out of a truck on the other side of the line. That caused quite a lot of trouble, of course. And before he got his six trek-oxen back, Koos Nie-naber had to explain to a magistrate what he meant by loading all the five chambers of his Mauser on a railway platform, even though the bolt action and foresight of the Mauser were in need of repair. I believe the magistrate said that there were quite enough brawls and ugly scenes that had to do with gun-play taking place in Johannesburg every day, without a farmer having to come all the way from the Marico with a rusty Mauser to add to all that unpleasantness. Naturally, I gave my Bechuana herd-boy a good straight talking-to about it afterwards, for being so ignorant.”

  At Naudé paused, as though inviting one of us to say something. But we had none of us any comment to make. For we had long ago heard Koos Nienaber’s side of the story. And from what he had told us, it would appear that all the fault did not lie with At Naudé’s herd-boy. At Naudé seemed to fit a little into the story, himself.

  “Anyway,” At Naudé added – smiling in a twisted sort of way – “what Koos Nienaber was most sore about, in court, was that that Johannesburg magistrate spoke of his Mauser as a rusty old fowling-piece.”

  Koos Nienaber didn’t object to the fowling-piece part of it, so much, At Naudé said. Because he wasn’t quite sure what a fowling-piece was. But it took him a long time to get over the idea of the magistrate saying that his Mauser was rusty.

  There was an uncomfortable silence, once again. It was broken by young Johnny Coen. Often, in the past, when there had been some misunderstanding in Jurie Steyn’s post office, Johnny Coen had said something to smooth matters over.

  “Maybe it’s like what it says in the Good Book,” Johnny Coen remarked. “Perhaps it’s to do with Mammon. Perhaps if we sought the Kingdom of Heaven more, then we wouldn’t have such thoughtless things happening. Like a farmer sending some of his own neighbour’s cattle to the market by mistake. It’s a mistake that happens with every truck-load, almost. I was working at Ottoshoop siding, and I know. It used to give the stationmaster there grey hairs. Loading a lot of cattle into a truck and then not knowing how many would have to be unloaded again before the engine came to fetch that truck. And all the time it was through some mistake, of course. A mistake on the part of an ignorant Bechuana herd-boy.”

  It was then that some of us remembered the mistakes that the herdboy of Deacon Kirstein had made, long ago, along those same lines. We felt not a little pained at having to mention those mistakes, considering the high regard in which we held Deacon Kirstein, who was Jurie Steyn’s wife’s cousin. We only made mention of it because of the circumstance that that mistake on the part of the deacon’s herd-boy had gone on over a period of years, before it was detected. And maybe the mistake would never have been found out, either, if it wasn’t that, along with a truck full of Deacon Kirstein’s Large White pigs, there was also loaded a span of mules belonging to a near neighbour of Deacon Kirstein’s.

  And because he was already a deacon, we all felt very sorry for Deacon Kirstein, to think that his herd-boy should be so ignorant. And we winked at each other a good deal, too, in those days, one Marico farmer winking at another. And we said that it was just too bad that Deacon Kirst
ein should have so uneducated a herd-boy, who couldn’t tell the difference between a Large White and a mule. And we would wink a lot more.

  That was the line that the conversation suddenly took, in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. We were just recalling the old days, we said to each other.

  And we were enjoying this talk about the past. And we could see that Jurie Steyn was enjoying it also. And then Johnny Coen tried to spoil everything. Johnny Coen, without anybody asking him, began to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. And let any of us that was without sin, Johnny Coen added, cast the first stone.

  Jurie Steyn summed it all up.

  “Maybe a lot of sense gets talked here in my post office,” Jurie Steyn said, “but a lot of –––, also.”

  Jurie Steyn said that word softly, because he didn’t want his wife to hear.

  Birth Certificate

  It was when At Naudé told us what he had read in the newspaper about a man who had thought all his life that he was white, and had then discovered that he was coloured, that the story of Flippus Biljon was called to mind. I mean, we all knew the story of Flippus Biljon. But because it was still early afternoon we did not immediately make mention of Flippus. Instead, we discussed, at considerable length, other instances that were within our knowledge of people who had grown up as one sort of person and had discovered in later life that they were in actual fact quite a different sort of person.

  Many of these stories that we recalled in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer as the shadows of the thorn-trees lengthened were based only on hearsay. It was the kind of story that you had heard, as a child, at your grandmother’s knee. But your grandmother would never admit, of course, that she had heard that story at her grandmother’s knee. Oh, no. She could remember very clearly how it all happened, just like it was yesterday. And she could tell you the name of the farm. And the name of the landdrost who was summoned to take note of the extraordinary occurrence, when it had to do with a more unusual sort of changeling, that is. And she would recall the solemn manner in which the landdrost took off his hat when he said that there were many things that were beyond human understanding.