The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  We went on discussing last year’s Father Christmas at Policansky’s store for quite a long time.

  As far as looks went, Doors Perske should have made a very good Santa Claus. He was fat and he had a red face. The circumstance of his face being on some occasions more red than on others would as likely as not escape the innocent observation of childhood.

  But where Doors Perske went wrong was in his being essentially an odd-job man. For years he had contrived to exist in the small town of Bekkersdal by getting a contract to erect a sty, or to chop wood, or to dig a well. And that was how he had learnt to sub.

  And so, when he was Santa Claus in Policansky’s store, Doors Perske would every so often go and get a small advance against his pay from the bookkeeper. After a bit, the sight of Santa Claus entering the local public bar for a quick one no longer excited comment. The bartender no longer thought it funny to ask if he’d come down the chimney. No scoffing customers asked anymore could he go and hold his reindeer.

  In Policansky’s store, too, everything was, at first, all right. If, in shaking hands with Doors Perske, a small child detected his beery breath, the small child would not think much of it. Since he had a father – or, maybe, a stepfather – of his own, the small child would not see anything incongruous in Father Christmas having had a few.

  One day Doors Perske’s wife had come charging into the toy department, swearing at Father Christmas and loudly accusing him of subbing on his wages, on the sly. And Doors Perske had called his wife an old –––, and had ungraciously clouted her one on the ear before bundling her out of the store. But even that incident did not have a disillusioning effect on the minds of David Policansky’s juvenile clientele.

  For the altercation had taken place at the counter where there were prams and dolls’-houses and little crockery sets, and the children thronging that part of the shop were familiar with domestic scenes of the sort they had just witnessed. All they thought was that Father Christmas had just had a fight with Mother Christmas.

  But it was the day before Christmas Eve that Doors Perske got the sack. He had just come back from the bar, again. And the first thing he had to do was to stumble over the shilling dips. Then, to save himself, he grabbed at an assortment of glassware stacked halfway up to the ceiling. This was foolish – as he realised next moment. The glassware offered him no sort of purchase at all. All that happened was that the whole shop shook when it fell. The next thing that went was the counter with the toy soldiers. And there didn’t seem anything very martial in the way the little leaden soldiers – no longer in their neat toy-rows – were scattered around, lying in heaps and with pieces broken off them: it looked too much like the real thing. Grim, it looked.

  When Policansky came rushing in, it was to find Doors Perske sitting in a wash-tub, with a teddy-bear in his arms. His red cap had come off and his Father Christmas beard was halfway round his neck. And from the position of his beard the children in the shop knew that he wasn’t Father Christmas but just a dressed-up drunk.

  “I couldn’t get a proper grip on those glasses,” Doors Perske explained. “That’s how I fell.”

  Policansky got a proper grip on Santa Claus, all right. And he ran him out of his shop and when he got to the pavement he kicked Father Christmas, and told him not to come back again.

  “Go on, there isn’t any Father Christmas,” Doors Perske jeered, suddenly recovering himself, when he got to the corner. “It’s just a lie that you make up for kids.”

  David Policansky’s face twisted into a half-smile. “I wish I could believe you,” he said, surveying the wreckage of his shop through the door. “I wish I could believe there wasn’t a Father Christmas.”

  … At this Time of Year

  It was always about now, Jurie Steyn said, with the year drawing to an end, that he got all sorts of queer feelings. He didn’t know how to say them, quite. But one feeling he did get, and that he had no difficulty in explaining, he said, was a homesickness to be back again in the Western Province where he had spent his early childhood.

  Jurie Steyn heaved a medium-length sigh, then, thinking back on the years when he was young.

  “Not that I haven’t got a deep love for the Transvaal,” Jurie Steyn added, in case we should get him wrong. “I am, after all, a Transvaler –”

  And so we said, yes, it was quite all right. We understood his feelings for the old Cape Colony. He needn’t explain, we said.

  “And because I’ve said that I passed my young years in the Cape,” Jurie Steyn went on, the suggestion of a combative look coming into his eye, “that doesn’t mean to say that I am old, today.”

  We hastened to reassure him on that point, too – but not very convincingly, it seemed. Gysbert van Tonder even coughed.

  “I know what you mean, Jurie,” young Johnny Coen said, quickly, hastening to forestall any unpleasantness that might ensue on Jurie Steyn demanding of Gysbert van Tonder what he meant by clearing his throat, that way. “It’s the place where you were born and bred and can’t ever forget. I was born in the Marico Bushveld, and you’ve got no idea how homesick I got the time I was working on the railway at Ottoshoop.

  “But, of course, Ottoshoop is at least ninety miles from here – further even, if you don’t go the road through Sephton’s Nek. So I know how you feel, Jurie. No matter how kind people are to you, even, if they’re not your own people you do get very lonely, sometimes. Oh, yes, I went through all that at Ottoshoop.”

  Johnny Coen went on to describe a wedding reception that he had attended at Ottoshoop while he was an exile in those parts.

  “They had spread white tablecloths over long tables on the front stoep,” Johnny Coen said. “And there was a man at the party who did balancing tricks with a chair and a wine-glass. And I got more and more sad. The only time I laughed a little was when the loose seat dropped out of the chair and caught the man on the back of his neck when he was at the same time throwing up two guavas and a fork.”

  Johnny Coen went on to say that, as it turned out, his neighbour at table was also a foreigner.

  “How I knew,” Johnny Coen said, “was when that man spoke to me. And he said I was looking pretty miserable. And he asked was it that I was in love with the bride, perhaps, and that another man had taken her away from me. And I said, no, I was from the Dwarsberge part of the Marico, and I felt most homesick for the Groot Marico when the people around me were happy, I said. And that was how I got talking to that Englishman sitting next to me at the table. And when somebody in the voorkamer starting playing ‘Home Sweet Home’ on the harmonium we were both of us crying onto the tablecloth. And I never used to think that an Englishman had any feelings, until then.

  “Another thing I found out afterwards that I had in common with the Englishman was that he didn’t like that man with the balancing tricks, either.”

  Thereupon Jurie Steyn said that he, too, wouldn’t like it very much if somebody were to start playing “Home Sweet Home” on a harmonium at this time of year. Of course, he knew it best as a German song, Jurie Steyn said, and it was called “Heimat Süsse Heimat”. But the tune was the same. He had heard the German missionaries at Kroondal sing it quite often. And they would cry onto the thick slices of that kind of red sausage that they had on their plates, Jurie said.

  “Take the Cape at this time of year, now,” Jurie Steyn said, “in the summer.”

  So we said, very well, we would take the Cape, then, if he put it like that.

  “Well, when it gets towards about now, towards about Christmas time and the end of the year,” Jurie Steyn proceeded, “why, I just can’t help it. I think of a little Boland dorp with white houses and water furrows at the side of the streets and oak-trees. Not that I haven’t got all the time in the world for moepel or a maroela or a kremetart or any other kind of Bushveld tree. For instance, I have often walked to the end of my farm by the poort, just to go and look at the withaaks there. No, it isn’t that. After all, an oak isn’t a proper South African tree, even
, but just imported.

  “All the same, when it gets towards Christmas, the thought of those oak-trees in the Cape comes into my mind just all of a sudden, sort of. And I get the feeling of how much nobler a kind of person I was in those days than what I am today. I think of how much more upright I was in my youth.”

  Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder said, yes, that he could well believe.

  We knew that Gysbert van Tonder – who was Jurie Steyn’s neighbour – was hinting about the last bit of neighbourly unpleasantness they had, which had to do with the impounding of a number of stray oxen. And we didn’t want to have that long argument all over again. Especially not with the Christmas season drawing near, and all.

  It was quite a good thing, therefore, that Oupa Bekker should have started talking then about a quite ordinary camel-thorn tree that grew on one side of Bekkersdal when it was first laid out as a dorp.

  “It was because of what Jurie Steyn said about oaks that made me think of it,” Oupa Bekker said. “I was there when Bekkersdal was proclaimed as a township, and the bush was cleared away and the surveyor measured out the streets and divided up the erfs. And the Kommandant-General and the Dominee had words about whether the plein in the middle of the dorp should be for the Dopper Church, with a pastorie next to it, or for the Dopper Church, with a house for the Kommandant-General’s son-in-law next to it, a site to be chosen for the pastorie that would be within easy walking distance for the Dominee.”

  Oupa Bekker said that in the end the Dominee decided that he wouldn’t mind walking a little distance. Oupa Bekker said he had no doubt that what made the Dominee come to that decision was because the Dominee did not wish to make the Kommandant-General unhappy.

  For it was well known throughout the Transvaal that few things made the Kommandant-General so unhappy as when he had to take firm steps against anybody who opposed him. And Oupa Bekker said it was also known that on occasion the Kommandant-General had taken steps that you might call even unusually firm against a person who stood in his way.

  “And so the Dominee agreed, in the end,” Oupa Bekker continued, “that a short brisk walk from his pastorie to the church, of a Sunday morning before the sermon, would be healthy for him. And so a house for the Kommandant-General was built on the measured-out erf on the plein next to the church. But all that happened – oh, so many years ago.”

  Oupa Bekker’s sigh would have been even more prolonged than Jurie Steyn’s had been. Only, because of his advanced years, Oupa Bekker didn’t have the breath for it.

  “All the same, that was a funny thing,” Chris Welman commented, “for the old days, that is. And so I suppose that’s the reason why –”

  Oupa Bekker nodded.

  For we knew where the pastorie was, today, in Bekkersdal. And we knew that the present-day minister, Dominee Welthagen, had to walk a fairish distance to the church, of a Sunday, just as his predecessor of three-quarters of a century ago had to do. But that first Dominee would no doubt have been able to take short cuts, since at that time Bekkersdal would not have been as built up as it was today.

  “And that erf that was measured out for the Kommandant-General’s son-in-law –” Chris Welman started to remark.

  “Yes, that’s the reason for all that trouble there, now,” Oupa Bekker said. “But the old people always knew that the Kommandant-General’s son-in-law was a bit thoughtless. All those empty bottles that used to lie in his back yard, for instance. And that back yard isn’t any more tidy today. Not with all those empty jam tins and all that garbage and all those empty fruit boxes lying in it. Why, that back yard looks worse than ever, now that it has been taken over for an Indian store. And right next to the Dopper Church, and all. No wonder there’s that trouble about it in Bekkersdal, now.”

  So we said, it was very sinful of the first Indian – who was the grandfather of the present Indian – to have gone and bought that erf right next to the Dopper Church to go and open an Indian store on.

  There should really have been a pastorie there, we said.

  “Bit of a pity the Kommandant-General’s son drank so much,” Johnny Coen observed.

  In the discussion that followed about what a scandal it was that there should be an Indian store next to the Dopper Church in Bekkersdal, Oupa Bekker was able only in an edgeways fashion to tell us about the camel-thorn tree that grew at the edge of the Bekkersdal township. And we were not able to pay much attention to Oupa Bekker’s story, then. Whereas it was quite a pretty story.

  It appears that the streets of the newly laid dorp were planted with jacarandas – an imported tree then coming into fashion. And at the end of one street, in exact line with the jacarandas, and at the same distance from its nearest jacaranda neighbour as the jacarandas were set apart from each other, there grew that indigenous old African camel-thorn tree.

  And although the street ended just before it came to him, the old camel-thorn tree really imagined that he was part of that jacaranda avenue. And he was as pleased as anything about it. And he started putting on airs, there, just as though he was also an imported tree, and not just an old camel-thorn that the veld was full of. And even though the municipality didn’t water him, like they watered the jacaranda, the camel-thorn remained as cheerful as ever. He knew he didn’t need watering.

  Anyway, the point of Oupa Bekker’s story had to do with the first summer that the jacarandas in Bekkersdal came to flowering. And one night there was a terrible wind from the Kalahari, so that in the morning the sidewalks were thickly strewn with purple flowers, and there were more jacaranda blooms stuck on the thorns of the old camel-thorn tree than any jacaranda still had on its branches, then. And the purple blossoms lay thick about the lower part of the gnarled trunk of the camel-thorn. It was his hour, and so you couldn’t tell him from an imported tree.

  We didn’t hear very much of what Oupa Bekker had to say, however. We were too busy thinking out the right words for a strong letter we were drafting to our Member of Parliament. It had to do with the Indian Problem.

  But it was after the railway lorry from Bekkersdal had drawn up at the front door that Gysbert van Tonder really let himself go on the Indian Problem. It was when Gysbert found out that the roll of barbed wire he had ordered wasn’t on the lorry.

  “It’s the fault of the Indian storekeeper’s assistant,” the lorry-

  driver explained – although he used a different word in referring to the young Indian who was helping the old Indian in the Bekkersdal store. “I could see that the young Indian assistant wasn’t himself. The shop was all done out with Christmas stockings, and things. And that old gramophone they’ve got at the back of the shop was playing ‘Home Sweet Home’. And that young Indian assistant was busy crying onto the counter.

  “Saying that at this time of the year he always got homesick for Natal, the Indian assistant said. Well, that beats me, all right. How anybody can ever feel homesick for Natal, I just don’t know.”

  New-Year Glad Rags

  “Uren, dagen, maanden, jaren,

  Vliegen als een schaduw heen.”

  The partition had been removed between the two classrooms. Ink stains and the marks left behind by water that had leaked through the thatched roof in the last rains were now covered up with a coating of whitewash. All the blemishes on the schoolroom walls of that year and of former years were hidden away.

  For the more unhappy evidences of a year of educational activity within those walls the virginal film of unslaked lime served as both a mask and an immaculate cerement.

  Dominee Welthagen had come over specially from Bekkersdal to hold an end-of-year service in that little Bushveld schoolhouse that had for a night been changed over into a place of worship.

  Many of the desks were of the old-fashioned kind, seating a good number of pupils in a row and with the front parts detachable, so that their temporary conversion into pews had not presented much difficulty. There was that other, more modern kind of desk, however, with an iron framework, that obstinately continued
to look like nothing else but standard Transvaal Education Department equipment, no matter what you did to it.

  Nor did the blackboard standing on its easel in the corner take kindly to ecclesiastical disguise. Since this was a Calvinist service – and that sixteenth-century reformer’s views on idolatry were well known – you couldn’t go and hang an icon, say, in front of the blackboard.

  Maybe, if it had been a church service that Dominee Welthagen had come to conduct at some other time, the elders and deacons would not have been so energetic in altering the appearance of the schoolroom. But there seemed to be something about devotions arranged for the end of the year that called for a certain measure of stage-setting.

  After all, during the last few days of December one does, at times, become a prey to inner questionings. And it is only someone who is without human weaknesses of his own who will view with a cynical eye the earnest efforts of a deacon engaged in making a school cupboard look like an altar from the front. What is that thing inside the deacon – the cynic would ask – that the said deacon is trying to cloak? The answer, alas, is “Many things.” For there never has been a church deacon that did not have his share of frailties.

  The young schoolmaster was, strangely enough, very helpful.

  It wasn’t often that the schoolroom was used for a church service. And, generally speaking, a schoolmaster was not too keen on that sort of thing. In the first place, the church authorities would obtain permission direct from the Education Department head office in Pretoria to hold their service in the schoolroom, the schoolmaster’s share in the formalities being limited to handing over the key of the building when an elder presented himself at the front door with a letter and a couple of Mtosa women carrying buckets of whitewash.

  For the schoolmaster there was a certain amount of indignity in this situation.