The result was that he afterwards set our feelings at rest with quite simple words.
“I am going to the opera in Johannesburg with my own money,” the schoolmaster said, “that I have saved up. I know I sort of tried to lie to you at the start.
“But I don’t want you to think I’ve changed just because I’ve now got a rich father-in-law. I wouldn’t take his money, even if –”
“Even if he offered you some,” Gysbert van Tonder said, trying to sound sardonic.
Young Vermaak smiled.
“Yes,” he said, “even if he offered me some – which he hasn’t. And this cigarette case of mine is only rolled gold. What’s more, it was engraved by a Zeerust watchmaker. What Joburg engraver can make scrolls and flourishes like that today, I mean? Here, take a look.”
Home Town
Oupa Bekker told us about how he had once gone back – very many years later – to revisit a village where he had lived as a child. Jurie Steyn asked him how many years, but he did not answer. He pretended to be too deaf to hear Jurie Steyn’s question.
That was a peculiarity of Oupa Bekker’s. He not infrequently, by implication, made claims to great age. But he never allowed himself to be pinned down into stating how old he actually was in terms of years. It seemed that he wanted to give himself a certain measure of room for manoeuvering in, on that score.
Nor did Oupa Bekker acquaint us with the name of the little place that he went back to have a look at after an interval of many years. But that did not matter. Since, for each of us, they were the remembered scenes of our own childhood, that Oupa Bekker spoke about.
“Of course, there was a railway station, now, which there of course hadn’t been before,” Oupa Bekker said.
“Yes, and tarred streets and a filling station with petrol pumps,” Chris Welman said.
“And a fish and chips shop and a milk bar with high stools,” Gysbert van Tonder said.
“And where there had been an old garden wall of red brick with honeysuckle growing over it –” Jurie Steyn began.
“No, not honeysuckle,” Chris Welman interrupted him, “but a creeper with those broad leaves and blue flowers. I forget what it’s called, now.”
“And the wall isn’t red brick,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “but a whitewashed earth wall.”
They were in general agreement, however, that whatever building had been erected on the site of that old garden wall must be something pretty awful, anyway.
Oupa Bekker took our remarks in bad part.
“Who’s telling this – me or the lot of you?” he asked.
Then he went on to say that from the station there was a bit of a rise before you got to the village itself.
“And so you decided to walk,” Jurie Steyn said, “so you could enjoy each moment of it, recalling how you had run over the veld there as a carefree boy.”
“Yes,” Oupa Bekker snapped. “That’s what I did do. I did walk. But the way you’re carrying on I’m sorry now I didn’t take a taxi, instead.”
That shut Jurie Steyn up for a while. And so Oupa Bekker told us how, having deposited his suitcase in the railway cloakroom, he set off along that road, which was tarred now (as Chris Welman had said it would be), and there was a soft wind blowing that was always there, on the rise, when in the village in the hollow the air was very still.
And Oupa Bekker said that he thought what a strange thing it was that, after all those years, the same wind should still be there. You think of the wind as something that blows and is gone, Oupa Bekker said. And yet after so many long years there, on the rise, there that wind still was, and not changed in any way.
So Chris Welman said that was how it always was. When you revisited a place after a long interval, the first impression you always got was that it hadn’t changed. The first building you would see, as likely as not, would be the church. And the church steeple would look just like it did when you were a child, except not so tall, anymore. Only afterwards you found out how much the place had really altered.
“And when you were a child the steeple even then needed paint on it,” Gysbert van Tonder observed.
“What I noticed,” Oupa Bekker proceeded, getting bitter at the interruptions, “what I noticed, as I walked up the rise, was that rise was not as high as it had seemed when I was a boy. Only, when I was a boy I could get up over it easier. Maybe it was the fault of the tarred road. But when Chris Welman says that the church steeple did not look so tall anymore, then he’s quite wrong. Because the church steeple looked taller, when I got there. And the church looked three times bigger than it used to be. And it seemed to be standing right at the other end of the kerkplein from where it had stood in the old days. And why it all looked like that to me was because the church had been rebuilt on the other end of the plein. And it was three times bigger.”
That should have put Chris Welman in his place. But it didn’t. Instead, a twinkle came into his eye.
“Where was the bar, Oupa Bekker?” he asked. “I hope you found that, all right. I mean, they didn’t go and shift the saloon bar, too, did they, where you couldn’t find it?”
Oupa Bekker said he was coming to that.
First he had walked about the kerkplein a good while, searching for the site of the old church.
And then he came across a row of stones that were half-buried in the long grass, and that he knew were the foundations of the old church. He went and sat on a stone, Oupa Bekker said, and a –
“And a host of childhood memories came back to you,” Jurie Steyn said.
Then Oupa Bekker got really huffy.
“Look here,” Oupa Bekker said. “I only hope that the same thing happens to you, all of you, as what happened to me. I only hope that one day, when you take it into your minds to go and visit your childhood homes again, you’ll also find everything as changed as what I found it, that’s all. Then you won’t see anything to laugh at, in it.
“And I only hope you also feel as lonely as what I felt, when I turned away from the kerkplein and walked down the main street of the village, and everywhere I saw only strange faces and strange buildings, and there was nobody I could say to – and there was nobody who was interested, even – that that was my home town. But, of course, it wasn’t the place, anymore, that I had spent my childhood in. Not the way they had changed it, it wasn’t.”
Chris Welman started feeling sorry for Oupa Bekker then.
“Was it really as altered as all that, Oupa?” he asked.
“Altered?” Oupa Bekker repeated. “Take the hotel, now. It used to be a wood-and-iron building with a long veranda. Now it was a double-storey brick building. And where there had been a hitching-post in front of it that we children used to swing on, there was now one of those upright iron box things that have to do with electricity. Electricity – why, in the old days we had hardly even paraffin lamps.”
It all sounded quite sad. But then, as Gysbert van Tonder remarked, there had to be such a thing as progress. We couldn’t expect the world just to stand still for Oupa Bekker’s sake, or for any one of our sakes, for that matter, either.
“I went to look for the place that we children used to call the river,” Oupa Bekker went on, “and that we used to fish in, and that people used to lead water into their gardens from, and that had a bridge over it.”
Well, we knew what was coming, of course. And we almost wished that Oupa Bekker wouldn’t go to the length of telling us about it. Because they would have put pipes there, of course. And the stream would have been covered up. And where the bridge had been there would now be the new power station. Or the glue factory.
We would rather not think what there was on the site of the garden wall that Jurie Steyn and Chris Welman and Gysbert van Tonder had spoken about earlier.
The piece of garden wall that every person who spent his childhood in a village remembers. A red-brick and honeysuckle wall, or a whitewashed wall wildly rich with convolvulus.
“After I had had dinner in the hotel,”
Oupa Bekker proceeded – and without his having to say so, we gathered that he did not eat much: his voice told us all that – “I went to the bioscope. I had been there earlier in the day, and it had said that there would be an afternoon show.
“It was a picture about cowboys and Indians, or about cowboys and something. Or it might not even have been cowboys. I’m not sure. Seeing that the talking was all in English, I couldn’t understand very much of it.
“But there was a coach in the picture, like the Zeederberg coaches they used to have here in the old days, before they had trains, much. And there was a fat man in the picture with a black manel who had other fat men under him. And he looked important, like a raadslid that they had in that village when I was a boy. And that fat-man-with-the-manel’s job seemed to be to work out for the other fat men what was the best way to rob that Zeederberg coach, every time.
“And after a while, sitting in that bioscope, I began to get quite happy again, and I didn’t mind so much that my home town had changed. Because the place they had there, on the picture, where all those things were going on, was just like my village had been when I was a boy. And there was the same sort of riding on horses, that I remembered well. And the hotel in the picture had the same kind of veranda. And although I didn’t actually see any children swinging on the hitching-post, they might have been, but the picture just didn’t show it. Anyway, I knew it was the same hitching-post. I mean, I would know it anywhere.
“And I was pleased to see the bridge, too. It was exactly the same bridge that we had over our stream, in the old days. And there was a young fellow who wasn’t as fat as the fat-man-in-the-manel’s men, and who seemed to be on the opposite side from what they were on, and got in their way, every time. And the young fellow stood on that very bridge that I remembered from my childhood. He stood on the bridge with a lovely girl in his arms. And if you had looked under the bridge I am sure there would have been the same pieces of tree-trunk washed up under the side of it.
“And afterwards, when there was shooting in the hotel, it was exactly the same paraffin lamps and candles they had there that used to be in the village hotel in the old days, before they had made it into two storeys.”
Afterwards, Oupa Bekker said, when it came to the end of the picture, and that lovely girl got married to the young fellow who wasn’t as fat as the man-in-the-manel’s men were fat, he felt happier than he had done for a considerable while – happier than he had felt at any time since he got off the train, that morning, and saw that the road over the rise was tarred.
“Because the church they got married in was the old church just as I had known it,” Oupa Bekker said. “It was like the church used to be, before they made it three times bigger and moved it to the other end of the plein.”
And when he went back to the station in the evening, Oupa Bekker said, descending the rise with the light wind that he knew so well blowing about him, it was with much satisfaction that he realised how, through all those years, his home town had not changed.
“But that bioscope itself,” Jurie Steyn said. “That must be quite a new thing, I should imagine. They certainly couldn’t have had a bioscope in that village when you were a boy.”
“No,” Oupa Bekker said. “Where they built that bioscope there was, before that, when I was a boy, a stretch of garden wall with creeper over it.”
Monument to a Hero
We all said afterwards, talking about it in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, that the unveiling of the monument erected to the memory of Hartman van Beek had been a most impressive ceremony. We felt privil-eged to have been present at a great and unforgettable occasion, we said, talking like some of the speakers at the unveiling.
“What I think was the best was Dominee Welthagen’s address,” Chris Welman started to say, when Jurie Steyn interrupted him.
“What about the Volksraad member’s words?” Jurie asked. “There was something for you, now. How the Volksraad member said that at last and after many years we were honouring the debt we owed the memory of Hartman van Beek, rearing a pillar of plain granite –”
“That was like Hartman van Beek’s own life had been, strong and plain,” Chris Welman interjected. “But Dominee Welthagen said that also.”
So Jurie Steyn said that maybe Dominee Welthagen had used those words. He wouldn’t argue. But his point was that the Volksraad member had also said it. What was more, the Volksraad member had said it louder.
“Dominee Welthagen also declared,” Gysbert van Tonder said, for the first time taking part in the conversation, “that it was an inspiration to have said nothing more about Hartman van Beek but just to have carved his name and surname on the plain foot of the rough-hewn piece of granite. Hartman van Beek’s life had been like that, too – rough.”
But Jurie Steyn asked if we didn’t remember that the Volksraad member had said that same thing as well.
“Why, the Volksraad member said distinctly,” Jurie Steyn explained, “that he was sure that Hartman van Beek would have preferred to have just that piece of undressed stone, rather than a bronze statue of him riding a horse. Or a sculptured statue of himself standing up and holding in his hand a – well, the Volksraad member didn’t seem to know exactly what Hartman van Beek might be holding in his hand. A sword, likely. Or perhaps one of those long pieces of rolled-up paper with ‘Traktaat’ written on them. I don’t know. The Volksraad member didn’t say, either.”
“Dominee Welthagen,” Gysbert van Tonder went on, “said that Hartman van Beek would have liked that piece of raw stone better even than a sitting-down statue of himself, seeing that he was himself so unpolished. He didn’t care much for brass or something else that I couldn’t quite catch. I didn’t care much for it myself. It sounded too foreign.”
“Monumentum aere perennius,” the schoolmaster pronounced. “It’s Latin.”
Johnny Coen observed, then, that he was pleased that what the do-minee had spoken was Latin. He admitted that he had not been able to follow those words himself, exactly, either. But he had thought at the time, from the way the dominee uttered it, that it was another way of saying how ill-bred and unsmooth Hartman van Beek was, generally.
Johnny Coen said, straight out, that that was something he hadn’t liked at the unveiling ceremony, the way each speaker just tried to dig up new words to say how coarse and plain-spoken Hartman van Beek had been.
“Foul-mouthed, too, I thought one of the speakers was going to say about him,” Johnny Coen added, “but that speaker just seemed to stop himself in time.”
He could not sincerely feel, Johnny Coen went on, that an unveiling ceremony was the right occasion to pick for calling a person names. There was a time and place for everything, he said, and if Hartman van Beek was indeed some sort of an ugly customer, they shouldn’t have brought it all up then.
“What was more,” Johnny Coen said, “every time a speaker made a particularly dirty remark about Hartman van Beek, everybody cheered. When somebody described him as an unlettered son of the soil, there was wild applause.”
The conversation took a happier turn, however, when Gysbert van Tonder mentioned the horse commando that had circled the monument at sunset, Oupa Bekker riding in front.
Yes, that was something very fine, we all agreed. And what we would not forget easily, either, was the young men in Voortrekker dress firing a volley into the air as the sun was going down.
There was not the same unanimity of feeling, however, about the President Tableau, that was put on after it had got properly dark. For one thing, we had had to wait too long round that platform that had bucksails raised on it to look like a veld tent, with flaps that two Mchopis, standing one on each side of it, had to draw apart by pulling on ropes.
For another thing, we felt that they could have got some more suitable person to act the role of the president. Not that the one that took the part wasn’t good, we said.
After all, it wasn’t every day that we got somebody so prominent on the Afrikaans stage to come an
d present a tableau in the Groot Marico. We were honoured, of course, and we also felt that it was a great honour that was being conferred on Hartman van Beek, he being so unrefined and all. But there were some of the more conservative farmers present who felt that it would have been better if somebody else had been chosen, even if it was somebody that maybe couldn’t act so well.
Then it had taken some time to get the motor-car lamps fixed in such a way as to throw a searchlight beam on the place where the opening would come in the veld tent when, at a given signal, the Mchopis pulled on the ropes.
Members of the audience had started getting impatient.
“Maak klaar, kêrels,” some of them had said. “Ons moet ry.”
It was already well past milking time when the car headlights were switched on and a beam of light got trained onto the platform.
Through some slight error in the manipulation of the lamps, however, the light beam missed the flaps of the veld tent and instead illuminated, very vividly, the protuberant rump of a Mchopi, who was at that moment engaged in the act of picking up a cigarette end.
Before the error was rectified there were audible, around the platform, sundry sniggers of so homespun a character that they might almost have emanated from Hartman van Beek himself.
Nevertheless, we all agreed that what followed immediately afterwards was good.
When the bucksails in front of the veld tent were pulled aside, there stood revealed, in the full beam of the headlights, a frock-coated figure, broad-shouldered and robust, and wearing a top-hat and a presidential sash and side-whiskers. In the silence that followed the frock-coated figure boomed out, in a deep voice, the well-known words of the president’s last message.
Well, as we acknowledged freely afterwards, she was good. In this role, we said, Anna Wessels-Wessels was as good as in anything she had done since the play Dronk op haar Bruilof. But there was something about it that wasn’t just quite right, somehow. And it wasn’t just because she had left a hair-slide sticking out at the side of her top-hat.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 32
