Nor did the latest intelligence, as supplied by the lorry-driver’s assistant – to the effect that the go-slow strike had been called off – make any impression on Jurie Steyn. Half-speed and more pay was quite good enough for him, he said. He asked for nothing better. He could keep it up longer even than the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs could, Jurie Steyn reckoned.
Black Magic
Naturally, we in the Marico are not superstitious. We do not believe in absurdities like sorcery and witchcraft, and all that. We accept a thing as a truth only after we have had proper evidence in support of it.
That is where we white people are different from the Mtosas, who will listen to anything that a witch-doctor tells them, no matter if it is a witch-doctor who is out of training, even, and has got to think first before he talks.
Whereas, a white Marico farmer would naturally laugh at information supplied to him by a witch-doctor, unless the witch-doctor could bring actual proof of what he was saying.
That was why Gysbert van Tonder was highly amused when a witch-doctor came round to his back door at the New Year and said that he had thrown the bones and had read in the bones something that was of great importance for Gysbert van Tonder.
The witch-doctor wore a flannel night-shirt with the skins of polecats sewn on it that seemed to need proper curing as much as the flannel night-shirt did. He carried his little bag of dolosse in one hand, and in his other hand he held a tattered umbrella.
And he wore spectacles. Taken all round, he was as proper looking a witch-doctor as you would see anywhere between the Dwarsberge and the Limpopo. What was more, he smelt like a good witch-doctor. Gysbert van Tonder noticed that part about the witch-doctor the moment he opened his back door to that knock that came at the New Year.
Well, Gysbert van Tonder is, of course, as far from superstitious as any man you can think of. But, as he admitted afterwards – talking about it in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer – when he smelt that witch-doctor at fairly close quarters, Gysbert van Tonder was to a quite considerable degree overawed. It was only when the witch-doctor started talking, however, that a broad smile came over Gysbert van Tonder’s face.
For the witch-doctor said that he had thrown the bones in his hut on the previous night, and there had been a message about Gysbert van Tonder in the bones. Thereupon (having first requested the witch-doctor to stand a little to leeward side of him) Gysbert van Tonder assured the witch-doctor in as affable a way as you liked that he now realised that what the witch-doctor had come round for was a New Year present. There was consequently no need for the witch-doctor to have introduced make-believe – talking about having thrown the bones, and all that.
Gysbert van Tonder explained that to the witch-doctor in Sechuana, Gysbert concluding his remarks with a quick downward movement of his left eyelid, a form of communication whose significance, while it embraced, was not exclusively confined to, the language of the Bechuanas.
And because he was in a generous mood, this being the New Year and all, Gysbert van Tonder said to the witch-doctor that he could help himself to as much as he liked of the insides of a goat that Gysbert had but recently slaughtered, the said insides lying out there on a heap next to the stables.
Of course, Gysbert van Tonder would have been kind like that to a witch-doctor in any case, the New Year or not. Even though you are not superstitious, it is always as well to keep on the right side of a witch-doctor. You never know.
So you can imagine how surprised Gysbert van Tonder was when the witch-doctor did not appear at all grateful. With a wave of the umbrella that he had in one hand, the witch-doctor explained that he hadn’t called round just for a dinner. He didn’t wish to take up much of Baas van Tonder’s time, the witch-doctor said, because he knew what a busy man Baas Gysbert was.
And what disconcerted Gysbert van Tonder somewhat was that, when the witch-doctor made that remark, he saw fit to imitate Gysbert van Tonder’s bit of pantomime of earlier on … The witch-doctor’s left eyelid fluttered swiftly down onto the top part of his wrinkled cheek.
Gysbert – as he said to us afterwards – would in the ordinary course of things have kicked the witch-doctor for that. Or for less than that, even. What restrained him, Gysbert van Tonder said, was that it was still the season of goodwill – even though it was a few days late, perhaps – and the fact that he didn’t like getting too near the witch-doctor, in spite of the wind blowing in the other direction.
It was then that the witch-doctor informed Gysbert van Tonder about what he had seen on the previous night, when he had thrown the dolosse in his hut, the moon being at the half.
“The way the bones fell, Baas Gysbert,” the witch-doctor said, “I could see a ghost talking to Baas Gysbert. I think the ghost was Baas Gysbert’s grandfather or Baas Gysbert’s great-grandfather, even. He was very old. And I knew by the ghost’s feet that he was of Baas Gysbert’s family. The ghost had the same kind of feet as what Baas Gysbert has got – big and with the same kind of flatness. Has Baas Gysbert got a grandfather or a great-grandfather, perhaps, that is today a ghost?”
Gysbert van Tonder started getting annoyed. His eyes travelled to his veldskoens, which he contemplated thoughtfully for a few moments.
“You got pretty big feet yourself,” Gysbert remarked to the witch-doctor, then. “Flat, too. About as flat as any feet I’ve ever seen. Anyway, how can you tell all that rubbish from just throwing a sackful of bones? If it wasn’t that it’s New Year, and it’s therefore a sin to do it, I’d set my dogs onto you. I’ve got an old Boer bulldog that’s chased just about everything in his time. He’d be glad of the chance of chasing a witch-doctor, also, while he’s still got proper teeth. Even if my feet are maybe a little what you call flat, you got no right to come and talk to me like that at the back door of my own farm.”
The witch-doctor said then that he was sorry, and that he didn’t mean it that way at all. It was only that the elderly ghost with – with that kind of feet – was explaining where the money was hidden. And so he thought it was his duty to come and tell Gysbert van Tonder about it. The witch-doctor was still going on, apologising some more, when it suddenly dawned on Gysbert what he had been saying.
“Money?” Gysbert van Tonder ejaculated. “What’s that you’ve been saying about money? Look, never mind about the insides of that goat. I’ll give you a piece of the goat itself. It’s more than I and my family can eat, and goat doesn’t keep too well in this weather. But what’s that you’ve been saying about money?”
“It’s about where the money is hidden –” the witch-doctor repeated. Then he stopped suddenly and took a step backwards. The Boer bulldog that Gysbert van Tonder had been talking about had come sidling up from behind the water-tank and was sniffing at the witch-doctor’s polecat skins.
It was evident, from the way he was growling, that the Boer bulldog was displeased about something. Gysbert van Tonder acted quickly. The Boer bulldog streaked off in the direction of a clump of camel-thorns, yelping. The witch-doctor wiped some stray beads of sweat from his forehead.
“Au,” the witch-doctor said. The witch-doctor was glad that he was not being chased. There was something about the easy loping gait of the Boer bulldog that you could not but admire.
“You dirty, lazy brute!” Gysbert van Tonder shouted out after the retreating bulldog. Then, turning to the witch-doctor, he said: “I got him a good one, didn’t I? I’m glad I stopped him before he could bite a piece out of you. He frightened you a bit, though, I’m sure.”
Suddenly an idea occurred to Gysbert van Tonder.
“I’ll tell you what, seeing it’s the New Year, and all,” Gysbert said – and before he realised what he was doing, his left eyelid again came down in a swift wink – “what would put you right would be a little – you know, just a little –”
“Yes, thank you very much, my baas,” the witch-doctor said. “Yes, please, just a little.”
And this time, when the witch-doctor winked, Gysbert van Tonder was not s
o very annoyed, somehow.
After the witch-doctor had downed at a single gulp what was in the pannikin that Gysbert van Tonder had fetched for him out of the black jar in the kitchen, the two men stood looking at each other for some moments, in silence. Gysbert van Tonder didn’t quite know how to reopen the subject.
“What – what the ghost was saying, now –” Gysbert began, and coughed.
He found himself restrained by an unwonted sense of the fastidious. It was strange how squeamish they had become in their conversational intercourse, the white man and the Bechuana witch-doctor. It was as though the unseen powers that institute African taboos had already got to work, prohibiting the free use of certain consecrated words.
First, the witch-doctor couldn’t talk about feet – especially if those feet were big and flat – without Gysbert van Tonder getting hot under the collar. Then, as though by common accord, both Gysbert van Tonder and the witch-doctor refrained from mentioning that what the witch-doctor had drunk out of the pannikin was apricot brandy – and, what was more, good apricot brandy.
And now, finally, Gysbert van Tonder couldn’t bring himself to talk about money, just straight out. It is well to keep away from the black arts. They get you enthralled before you know where you are.
Gysbert van Tonder coughed again. “The ghost with the big – I mean, that rather old sort of ghost,” Gysbert van Tonder started again. “That ghost, you know, that you were talking about. He mentioned something that was hidden somewhere, I think you said …”
“Oh, yes, the money, Baas Gysbert,” the witch-doctor said, his face lighting up with intelligence and apricot brandy. “Oh, yes, the money that is buried here on Baas Gysbert’s farm.”
So much Gysbert van Tonder enlarged on to us about his first meeting with the witch-doctor at the New Year. There were certain things, too, that he left out, but that we, sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, could guess.
Gysbert told us that he had already dug in several places, and pretty deep, too, sometimes.
Mostly, it was at the foot of trees. But there were other places, too, where he had dug. Like right under the bakoond at the side of his house. That was a pretty deep hole, Gysbert van Tonder commented, and because of the crack that came into the bakoond through that, the bakoond was not so good for baking bread in, anymore, although it might perhaps still do for the more ordinary sort of cooking.
“But surely you didn’t go just by what the witch-doctor said,” At Naudé enquired. “I mean, you must have asked him for proof. How do you know that he wasn’t just telling a lot of lies?”
But Gysbert van Tonder had a proper answer to that. He said that At Naudé must not think that he was just an ignorant Mtosa. He interrogated the witch-doctor all right, Gysbert said, but the witch-doctor was able to prove that the bones he had in his sack were the very same bones that he threw in his hut that night he threw the bones. What was more, the witch-doctor said he could still go and point out in his hut to Gysbert van Tonder the exact place where he was sitting on the floor of his hut, that time.
We agreed that that was convincing enough.
“I’ve given the witch-doctor a few goats, since then,” Gysbert van Tonder said, after a pause. “Live ones, I mean, that he can take back home with him, when he leaves. And you know, I sometimes almost wish that he would go. I have dug so many holes, already … I don’t know. It sometimes looks like just a waste of time to me.”
Thereupon Chris Welman asked what the trouble was. Why couldn’t the witch-doctor just take Gysbert to the right place – that was, if there was a right place, Chris Welman wanted to know.
“That’s it,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “that’s the whole difficulty. The witch-doctor says that the ghost didn’t talk very distinctly. And that was another thing that made me believe that the witch-doctor was telling the truth. After all, a ghost wouldn’t talk too distinctly. But there was another reason, also, why I believed the witch-doctor.”
And we knew what that reason was, of course. And we knew that Gysbert van Tonder would never mention it. Because that would inevit-ably call to mind the unhappy nom-de-guerre of Doors Kalkoenvoet that, because of his slab-like pedal extremities, Gysbert van Tonder’s grandfather had borne with him to the grave.
We knew that what Gysbert van Tonder would never admit to us was that why he had listened to the witch-doctor in the first place was because the witch-doctor had been so crudely accurate in describing the kind of feet that Gysbert van Tonder and his forebears on the Van Tonder side had.
“I know the witch-doctor is doing his best, of course,” Gysbert van Tonder resumed. “But I’ll tell you how I felt the other night. It was the night when I got out of bed to fetch an eiderdown out of the loft for him, because he was complaining of the cold. I felt that I should rather have kicked the witch-doctor, that day, than my Boer bull.”
After Gysbert van Tonder had left we said, discussing the matter among ourselves, that black magic, as practised by Bechuana witch-doctors, was indeed an awful thing.
“As far as I can see,” Jurie Steyn observed, “Gysbert van Tonder guessed right the first time. All the witch-doctor came round for was a New Year present. And it seems he got it, all right.”
Oupa Bekker sniffed.
“Giving him a goat, too,” Oupa Bekker said. “Well, it looks to me that, whoever the goat is, in all this, it’s not the witch-doctor that’s the goat.”
And we said, no, it did not seem as though it was the witch-doctor, in all this, that resembled the well-known quadruped, allied to the sheep.
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
“It’s the clown,” Johnny Coen said, starting to laugh all over again. “The tall clown in the fancy dress – yellow and blue and the smart way of walking. I could go to the circus and see it all through again, just to laugh at that clown. He kept a straight face even when they chucked the bucket of water over him. It was a real scream to see his new clothes getting all soaked … oh, soaked. And he went on standing there in the middle of the ring as solemn as you like, not being able to make out where the water came from, even.”
Johnny Coen laughed as though he was seeing all that happening again, right in front of his eyes, and for the first time.
But Oupa Bekker said that what he liked best at the circus were the elephants. The way they stood on their hind legs and the way they walked on bottles, Oupa Bekker said, balancing themselves to music.
“It’s years ago since I was last able to balance myself to music,” Oupa Bekker continued, “leave alone walk on bottles.”
“Or stand on your hind legs,” Jurie Steyn commented – not loud enough for Oupa Bekker to hear, though.
In the old days there wasn’t any such thing in the Transvaal, Oupa Bekker went on, as walking on bottles. Even though the whole of the Marico up to the Limpopo was elephant country in those days, Oupa Bekker said – and, in consequence, he prided himself on knowing something of the habits of elephants – he would never have imagined their walking on bottles.
If an elephant had seen a bottle in his path he would simply have walked over it. To him an elephant in those days was just an elephant, Oupa Bekker said.
And the same thing applied to lions, when the Groot Marico was lion country, Oupa Bekker added. To him a lion was just a lion, and not a bookish person that – that, well, we all saw what those lions did at the circus, didn’t we, now? There was more than one white man in this part of the Marico that wasn’t nearly as well educated as some of those circus lions, Oupa Bekker said.
Of course, he acknowledged that not every white person in this part of the Marico had had those same opportunities of schooling as the lions had.
Then At Naudé said that what he just couldn’t get over, at the circus at Bekkersdal, were the trained zebras.
“And to think that this was also zebra country,” At Naudé remarked. “But I would never have imagined a zebra wearing a red ostrich feather on his head, just like he’s a Koranna Bushman. Or a zebra, while galloping do
wn to the waterhole, first stopping to write something on a blackboard with chalk.”
We spoke also about other animals that we had seen at the circus, and we said that the Groot Marico had at one time been that kind of animal’s country, too. And all the time we had never known what those animals were really like. That sort of thing made you think, we said.
When Jurie Steyn was talking about the mule we had seen at the circus, that could jump six feet, and Jurie was saying that the Groot Marico was also mule country, Gysbert van Tonder suddenly gave a short laugh.
“And the clowns, that Johnny Coen was mentioning,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “Well, it seems to me that for a pretty long while the Marico has been good clown country. And still is.”
That was something that made you think, too, didn’t it? – Gysbert van Tonder asked.
We were more than a little surprised, at a remark like that coming from Gysbert van Tonder. And several of us told him that we thought he should be the last person to talk. We proceeded to give Gysbert van Tonder some sound reasons, too, as to why we believed he should be the last person to talk. And some of the reasons we gave him had to do with things that hadn’t happened so long ago, either.
This discussion would probably have gone on for quite a while, with each of us being able to think up a fresh reason every few minutes, when Chris Welman started talking about the fine insouciance with which the red-coated ringmaster cracked his whip.
The ringmaster didn’t look very particular as to whether it was the gaily caparisoned horse he hit, or the blonde equestrienne hanging head downwards from the saddle, her golden locks trailing in the sawdust – so it seemed to Chris Welman, anyway.
“She didn’t once stop smiling, either,” Chris Welman said, “all the time the music played.”
From the way Chris Welman spoke, it was apparent that, in the sounds discoursed by the circus band, his ear detected no harsh disson-ances. Nor to his eye did the set smile of the equestrienne convey any suggestion of artifice. It was, however, significant, that in his unconscious mind he had, indeed, established a link between those two circus reciprocals – the music’s blare and the set smile.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 22
