The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “There isn’t a day passes but I hear something like ‘Uit die Ou Dae’ over the wireless. Or ‘Toeka se Tyd’, or ‘So Het die Ou Mense Gelewe’, or ‘Ja-nee’.

  “And I get sick of it. I just can’t help it, but I do. And then … when I come here and sit down in Jurie Steyn’s post office, and I hear Oupa Bekker talk of the old days, and I realise that he didn’t have any trouble with cases and cases of dynamite, either (I mean, otherwise he wouldn’t be here), well, it isn’t that I wish Oupa Bekker any harm, you understand.

  “But I’ve heard everything he’s got to say. Every time Oupa Bekker speaks it sounds to me as though he is being introduced by a wireless announcer, and as though there is somebody playing the piano for background effects. I mean, Oupa Bekker isn’t real to me, anymore.

  “Even the way he spits behind his chair – well, it looks to me like a put on sort of spit, if you know what I mean. I don’t feel that Oupa Bekker is spitting just because he’s got to.”

  We looked at At Naudé in amazement. It was clear that he was in a pretty bad way. There was no telling how far this sort of thing could go. We felt that we wanted to help him, if we could. The next thing he would do, he would start crying, and right here in front of us. And all because of his nerves. We had seen just that same thing happen before, with a stranger from the city.

  The stranger had been with us for quite a while, and was really trying to understand us, and the things going on in our minds. And he was taking notes, even. And then one day – just like that – he started crying. We felt that At Naudé was going the same way, through too much civilisation that he was getting over the wireless and from reading news-papers.

  It came as a relief to us – for At Naudé’s sake – to hear Oupa Bekker’s voice once more.

  “The last time I went to Durban wasn’t in the old days, but two years ago,” Oupa Bekker said. “And why I said that it was like a story was because I went there by train. I had never before in my life travelled so far by train. And that was a wonderful thing for me. Because I would never have believed, otherwise, that you could journey so far by train. We didn’t once have to get out and walk. Or change to a post-cart. Or mount a horse ready-saddled that would take us along a bridle-path over the worst part of the rante –”

  “Then it couldn’t have been in the Union,” Chris Welman shouted out, trying to be really funny. “You couldn’t have been travelling on the S. A. R.”

  We were pleased that Oupa Bekker ignored Chris Welman.

  “No trouble over the whole journey,” Oupa Bekker continued. “It was only when I got off at the station and a Zulu came and pulled my portmanteau out of my hands. But I had never in my life seen a Zulu like that. He had bull’s horns on his head and sea-shells on his feet. That was just how my grandfather had told me that the Zulus were dressed at Vechtkop.”

  We laughed at that, of course. After all, those of us who had been to Durban knew that about the Durban rickshaw-pullers – the way they dressed up to look ferocious. But all they did was to transport you and your luggage to a hotel.

  “That sort of talk,” At Naudé began, his lip curling, “and I suppose when you got to the hotel –”

  “That’s why I say that Durban is so uncivilised,” Oupa Bekker explained. “Because it was only when we got to the hotel that the rickshaw-puller started apologising for all the boot-polish brown that was coming off his chin. He was working his way through college, he told me. He said it was steadier work than looking after babies or mowing lawns, the sea-shells on him rattling as he spoke. He was a divinity student, the rickshaw-puller said.”

  Sleepy Afternoon

  T he heat on that midsummer afternoon was overpowering.

  Alida, the native girl working in the kitchen, had several times at Jurie Steyn’s exhortation entered the voorkamer and hit at the flies with a sizeable twig plucked from a maroela tree. The leaves on the twig were heavy with summer.

  “Chase them outside,” Jurie Steyn said to the native girl. “As far outside as you like … No, no, Alida, that’s not the way to drive a fly – swishing sideways, like that. They only go and hide in the rafters, then. Chase them right out to the manure heap where that arsenic fly-trap is.”

  We recognised that that was the last place where those flies would go, of course. If it was this new kind of DDT, the flies, recovering from their first astonishment, would come back two or three generations later for more, perhaps. But there was a finality about arsenic. That was why the flies kept away from the fly-trap.

  Jurie Steyn would have expostulated with the kitchen maid in even sterner tones. Only, the heat of the afternoon was making him feel sleepy.

  It was consequently left to Gysbert van Tonder to tell Alida what he really thought. That was when, in obedience to Jurie Steyn’s injunction, she started performing an oscillating motion with the maroela twig, which made the leaves thrash around in a quite smart fashion, face-high. To a person sitting on a riempies chair, say, the leaves of the maroela twig would come just about face-high, then, that was.

  Several of us felt that it wasn’t altogether nice the words Gysbert van Tonder saw fit to use in reprimanding Alida, who was, after all, only an ignorant Bechuana servant woman.

  Some of the words were what Gysbert van Tonder employed when he stooped down to retrieve his pipe from where it had landed on the floor. The rest of the words were what Gysbert van Tonder said when he discovered the size of the hole that the roll-tobacco embers from his pipe had burnt in his trouser leg.

  “Hitting a white man’s pipe out of his mouth with that huge branch,” Gysbert van Tonder announced to us after the native girl had gone back into the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind her. “I’m sure she did it on purpose. No respect for a white person, anymore. It’s these liberal politicians. Next thing is –”

  “And look at my ear,” Chris Welman said, interrupting him. “But look at it – what are you kêrels laughing at? … Well, I understand now what At Naudé meant last time when he spoke about how you all carry on here, in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, laughing at nothing and getting the Marico District a bad name, because of it … All right, say I have got big ears. But that’s not the point.

  “What I want to say is, just take a look at how Alida hit me with the stick part of that maroela branch on my ear. I would like to know what would have been left of my ear, if it wasn’t that I was thoughtful enough to be sitting here in the voorkamer with my hat on, at the time. Just supposing I had taken my hat off –”

  To our surprise, the person that showed the least sympathy for Chris Welman was Gysbert van Tonder himself. There was a thing for you now, all right. We would have imagined that, because he had suffered the same kind of misfortune, Gysbert van Tonder would be the first to stand up for Chris Welman, and to say it was a disgrace to the Marico that Jurie Steyn should have so depraved a Bechuana as Alida working in his kitchen.

  Instead, Gysbert van Tonder actually slapped his leg, once or twice, laughing. Even though we could see that that action occasioned Gysbert van Tonder a certain measure of discomfort – each time he hit himself on the blistered part of his leg, from where the lighted shreds of Piet Retief roll-tobacco had fallen – that seemed to make no difference to the way Gysbert van Tonder was laughing.

  But human nature is that way, of course.

  Moreover, it was a particularly hot afternoon.

  “I can’t see how it helped you very much,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked to Chris Welman, his fellow victim, at the end, “that you had your hat on. Seeing that you wear your ears outside of your hat, pressed down flat by the brim. Or did you perhaps not know that? What I want to say is that it couldn’t have helped much, your having your hat on when Alida hit.”

  Gysbert van Tonder seemed to be making use of a good deal of unnecessary repetition. No doubt, the languor of the hot afternoon had a lot to do with it.

  “Flies,” Oupa Bekker was saying. “Zizz-zz, like that. You know, I can go on watching a fly for hours. Or
if it’s not a fly, it’s an ant. Or else, perhaps, a dung-beetle, if there is one around. But all the same, I think a fly is the most instructive to watch. Only, it’s got to be on a hot afternoon, like this, naturally. And then you’ve got to lie on a bed, flat on your back for it.”

  Then At Naudé said, yes, that part, of course, you had to have. And then you had to lie so flat that you could feel the bed for the whole length of your spine, every inch. And it had to be an afternoon when you knew you should be out on the lands. It was on such an afternoon that you could really appreciate a fly properly, watching that fly fly around, At Naudé said.

  On an afternoon when you knew you had to be out on the lands, instead, supervising that there was enough seed in the hopper of the mealie-planter.

  “And the things I’ve seen about flies in my time,” Oupa Bekker continued. “When I’ve been lying on my back in the bedroom in the ploughing season or on a harvesting afternoon. That photograph of the first Molopo church council, now, where I’m sitting only two away from the dominee in the middle …

  “I would have been sitting right next to the dominee, seeing I was senior diaken, if only Rooi Visagie hadn’t come and plonked himself in between us, Rooi Visagie keeping the dominee’s mind occupied with questions he was asking him about St. Peter’s witness in the holy Formulier of the Communion.

  “And if it wasn’t that we realised full well it couldn’t be, it would almost have looked as though the dominee didn’t know the answer, the way he was scratching his head, right up to the time when the photo-grapher said would we please look straight at the camera, and not smile, seeing that he only had one plate. That was in the old days, of course.”

  So Chris Welman said that he accepted it, that it was in the old days. He said that he also accepted that it might have been a very warm day, also, just like now. But that was no excuse for Oupa Bekker to wander so far away from what he had started off with.

  Not that he himself cared very much, really, Chris Welman added. It was, after all, a sleepy sort of afternoon, and it was not unpleasant to think of that other afternoon, long ago, when a photograph was being taken of the members of the Molopo church council, in the same kind of hot sun.

  Although it might have been better, perhaps, for everybody (Chris Welman added, quickly) if a cloud had come across the sky in a sudden manner, just about when the photographer was putting his head under the black cloth.

  But what was it Oupa Bekker was saying about that fly? – Chris Welman asked.

  “Insulting,” Oupa Bekker said. “There’s one fly I’ve seen walk round and round on that photograph with its gold frame, and with no respect for its being the church council, that you would notice. Then he goes and stands right on the dominee’s white tie and he turns his head sideways, studying it.

  “He hasn’t seen a tie like that in his life, of course, and so he doesn’t know any better than to stare. When he gets tired of just staring he wipes his feet a few times on the dominee’s tie and moves across to Rooi Visagie. What he looks at most is the mended place in Rooi Visagie’s manel that comes out very clearly on the photograph. And he gets very superior about it, too. You’ve got no idea – fluttering his wings all sniffy. He’s got no mended places in his manel, the fly thinks.

  “I can’t say I don’t feel pleased about that bit, mind you, seeing that if it wasn’t for Rooi Visagie’s dishonesty, it would have been me sitting there next to the dominee, and not Rooi Visagie. But maybe next time there’s a church council photograph taken it will be put right … Anyway, the next one the fly comes to is me.

  “What I think he admires about me most is the way I wore my moustache in those days. He stands on one leg to admire it properly. It’s queer to think that a simple-hearted creature like a fly should yet have so much judgment – and –”

  Several of us shook our heads sadly, then.

  It was, indeed, a depressing reflection, to think that old age, combined with the heat, could make Oupa Bekker go so foolish in his mind. We got the uncomfortable feeling that we might perhaps go that way ourselves, some day. We could not expect our mental powers always to be as keen as what they were now.

  We sat for a while in silence. The flies came out from their temporary places of refuge in the rafters and buzzed about our heads. Zizzzimm, the flies went. So they buzzed about the portrait of the Molopo church council in the gold frame, in Oupa Bekker’s bedroom. So they had buzzed long ago around the photographer’s camera on a day of sunshine that would come again no more.

  The lorry from Bekkersdal was late, that afternoon.

  And the silence that had descended on us persisted until the lorry-driver’s assistant came in at the front door. With the heat, he looked limp and wilted. He seemed very different from his usual spruce self.

  On his job, the lorry-driver’s assistant prided himself on how nattily he always turned out. For there were unofficial stops along the way where he would alight for coffee, to the irritation of passengers on the Government lorry who paid for their seats.

  What annoyed the passengers more than anything else was the long time that the lorry-driver’s assistant would spend in taking his coffee from the hands of the farmer’s daughter on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, at each of those unofficial stops.

  And the silly way he would pretend to catch her hand, each time he passed back the empty cup.

  You would be pretty fed-up, too, if you had a ticket to be on that lorry, and the farmer’s daughter acted as though you didn’t exist at all.

  But when he came into Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer on that afternoon, you would never have thought that when he left Bekkersdal the lorry-driver’s assistant’s trousers were ironed as flat as a piece of Free State veld. Instead, he looked quite dishevelled. We attributed it to the heat.

  It was only when the lorry-driver’s assistant passed his hand over his forehead and said how awful something or other was, that we noticed his extreme pallor.

  “They carried him out there right in front of us, at Schuilpan,” the lorry-driver’s assistant said. “The police and the doctor. One of the policemen just yawned and said it was a sleepy afternoon. They reckon it’s suicide. He took arsenic that you use in fly-traps, they say, because he was going to be arrested for embezzling funds. Such a respected member of the community he was, too, Oom Rooi Visagie.”

  We looked at Oupa Bekker. Oupa Bekker seemed to take it even worse than the lorry-driver’s assistant had done. If he was glad that he would now be able to move up one place nearer the dominee next time there was a photograph, Oupa Bekker didn’t show it.

  “Here, you have my coffee,” Chris Welman said to the lorry-driver’s assistant. “It will help to pull you right.”

  But even after he had drunk the coffee, the lorry-driver’s assistant still looked sick. And from force of habit, when he handed back the cup to Chris Welman, he tried, playfully, to catch Chris Welman’s hand. We could see the lorry-driver’s assistant was in a pretty bad way, all right.

  That was when Alida came out of the kitchen, once more, with a twig plucked from a maroela. The leaves on the twig that she waved about were heavy with summer.

  “What the –” Gysbert van Tonder began shakily, stooping down for the second time that afternoon to pick up his pipe. “What the –” Gysbert van Tonder started again, brushing frantically at the live tobacco embers on his knees.

  Alarm Clock

  “A new kind of alarm clock,” At Naudé was saying about what he had read in the paper. “Of course, it still wakes you with that old clatter-clatter noise like hitting on tin. But where it is different is that it starts playing a soothing little tune straight afterwards that makes you feel all right again.

  “So you don’t feel so bad, thinking you’ve got to get up, now. Maybe you hum a few notes of that tune to yourself, too, as you reach under the bed for your trousers. Hey, tiddly hum tum you sing perhaps, even, as you rise to face another day. With a song in your heart, instead of swearing.”

 
We looked at each other with a certain measure of surprise, then. Not that it wasn’t interesting enough, what At Naudé had to tell us about the new kind of alarm clock. But what was more interesting was to learn what he did with his trousers when he went to bed at night.

  That just showed you what primitive habits a man could acquire, living like At Naudé. For we knew how much time At Naudé spent every day in listening in to the wireless and reading the newspapers.

  And we also knew that no good could come of it, a man cutting himself off from the world like that.

  “I wonder what they will invent next,” At Naudé went on, unaware of the mild stir he had caused.

  It was Jurie Steyn who pulled him up.

  “Perhaps they’ll invent a better place for a man to put his trousers at night than under the bed,” Jurie Steyn said. “I don’t say that for getting up in the morning, it’s not handy, of course –”

  The subtle irony in Jurie Steyn’s words was lost on At Naudé.

  “That’s what I say,” At Naudé went on. “What’s the sense of hanging up your trousers in a kiaat gentleman’s wardrobe like they advertise in the newspapers, when you want your trousers, first thing in the morning? I mean, I’m just a plain farmer. I’m no kiaat gentleman.”

  “No, or an imbuia gentleman,” Jurie Steyn said, to make it clear that he, too, was not unfamiliar with the contents of a certain class of full-page newspaper advertisement.

  “Or a solid polished walnut gentleman, either,” Jurie Steyn added. “I mean we can see all that about you by just looking at your trousers. But why don’t you hang them over a chair in front of your bed, instead? Instead of sticking them under the bed, that is.”

  There was also a four-foot convertible gentleman’s wardrobe in teak or oak, Jurie Steyn added, for good measure. But what a four-foot convertible gentleman was, he would sooner not think, Jurie said. It must be quite about the newest sort of invention that there was, he reckoned.