The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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ill so suddenly, Oom Tobie?” Jurie Steyn asked, doing his best to keep a straight face.
“Well, no,” Oom Tobie replied in all honesty. “When he helped me back onto the stoep from the place where we were going to put up the fence, Pieterse said he had felt for quite some days that I had this illness coming on. It wasn’t so much anything he could see about me as what he felt, he said. And he could remember the exact time, too, when he first had that feeling. It was the afternoon when the poles and the rolls of barbed wire came from Ramoutsa. He didn’t himself feel too good, either, that afternoon, he said. It was as though there was something unhealthy in the air. He’s an extraordinary fellow, Pieterse. But that’s because he’s Cape Coloured, I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s some part of him Slams, too. You know these Malays …”
Chris Welman asked Oom Tobie what he thought his illness was, this time. “Well, I know it can’t be the horse-sickness,” Oom Tobie said, “because I had the horse-sickness last year. And when you’ve had the horse-sickness once you don’t get it again. You’re salted.”
The new schoolteacher, Vermaak, who wasn’t long out of college, and whom Jurie Steyn’s wife seemed to think a lot of, on account of his education, then said that it was the first time he had ever heard of a human being getting horse-sickness.
Several of us, speaking at the same time, told the schoolteacher that there were lots of things he had never heard of, and that a white man getting horse-sickness was what he now had an opportunity of getting instructed about. We told him that if he remained in the Groot Marico longer, and observed a little, he would no doubt learn things that would surprise him, yet.
The schoolmaster said that that had already happened to him. Just from looking around, he said.
“What I have got this time, now, is, I think, the blue-tongue,” Oom Tobie continued. “Mind you, I used to think that only sheep get the bluetongue. When there is rain after a long drought – that is the worst time for the blue-tongue. And you know the dry spell was pretty long, here in the district, before these rains started. So I think it must be blue-tongue.”
Gysbert van Tonder asked Oom Tobie to put his tongue out, so we could see. We all pretended to take a lot of interest in Oom Tobie’s tongue, then. It was, of course, quite an ordinary-looking sort of tongue, perhaps somewhat on the thick side and with tobacco-juice stains in the cracks. Oom Tobie first protruded his tongue out straight in front of his face as far as it would go – a by no means inconsiderable distance. Then he let his tongue hang down on his chin, for a bit.
Oom Tobie was engaged in lifting his tongue up again, in the direction of his eyebrows, so that we could see the underneath part of it, when Jurie Steyn’s wife came into the voorkamer from the kitchen. From her remarks, then, it was clear that she had not heard any of our previous conversation.
“I am ashamed of you, Oom Tobie,” Jurie Steyn’s wife announced, speaking very severely. “Sticking out your tongue at Mr Vermaak like that.”
The schoolmaster was sharing the riempies bench with Oom Tobie.
Oom Tobie started to explain what it was all about. But because he forgot, in the excitement of the moment, to put his tongue back again, first, all he could utter was a sequence of somewhat peculiar noises.
“If you disagree with Mr Vermaak on any subject,” Jurie Steyn’s wife went on, “then you can at least discuss the matter with him in a respectable sort of way. To stick out your tongue at a man, and to wobble it, is no way to carry on a discussion, Oom Tobie. I can only hope that Mr Vermaak does not think everybody in the Bushveld is so unrefined.”
By that time Oom Tobie had found his tongue again, however, in quite a literal way. And in a few simple sentences he was able to acquaint Jurie Steyn’s wife with the facts of the situation. Oom Tobie might have made those sentences even simpler, perhaps. Only he happened, out of the corner of his eye, to catch a glimpse of Jurie Steyn behind the counter. And Oom Tobie was sick enough on account of the blue-tongue. He did not want to become still more of an invalid as a result of a misunderstanding with Jurie Steyn, who was known for his strength and ill-temper.
“But if it’s the blue-tongue in sheep that I’ve got,” Oom Tobie proceeded, hastily, “then it won’t show first in my tongue, so much. You see it first in the limp sort of way my wool hangs. It was the same with the horse-sickness. The first sign of it was a feeling of stiffness just behind the fetlock. It was several days before I started getting the snuffles –”
Gysbert van Tonder interrupted Oom Tobie at that point.
“Tell us, Oom Tobie …” Gysbert van Tonder began, and as he spoke his glance travelled in the direction of young Vermaak, the school-teacher. We guessed what was going on in Gysbert van Tonder’s mind. We felt the same way about it, too. You see, in the Marico we might perhaps laugh at Oom Tobie, and invent a nickname for him, and we didn’t mind if the Klipkop tribe of Bushmen in the Kalahari also spoke of him by that nickname. Those things we could understand. But even when we laughed at Oom Tobie, we also had a respect for him. And we didn’t like the idea that a stranger straight from university, like young Vermaak, wearing city clothes and all, should not give Oom Tobie his due. For that matter, the Klipkop Bushmen still gave Oom Tobie his due. And they did not wear city clothes. Not by a long chalk the Klipkop Bushmen didn’t.
And what we were genuinely proud of Oom Tobie about was the fact that he had had more wild and domestic animal diseases than any man you could come across anywhere in Africa. At catch-weights and with no holds barred, we could put him, in his own line, against any sick man from Woodstock Beach to the Zambezi. And while we could laugh at him as much as we wanted, we did not like strangers to.
Consequently, when Gysbert van Tonder turned to Oom Tobie with a determined expression on his face, we knew what Gysbert was going to say. He was going to ask Oom Tobie, salted with horse-sickness and all, really to show his paces.
“Tell us,” Gysbert van Tonder said, getting up from his chair and folding his arms across his chest. “Tell us, Oom Tobie, about the time you had snake-sickness.”
Thus encouraged, Oom Tobie told us, and with an elaborate amount of detail.
“But I wouldn’t like to have to go through all that again,” he ended up.
“All the time I was suffering from snake disease I felt so low, if you understand what I mean. With my backside right on the ground, as it were.”
Chris Welman coughed, then.
For Jurie Steyn’s wife was still present, and it seemed as though Oom Tobie was perhaps getting a bit coarse. To our surprise, however, Jurie Steyn himself said that it was quite in order. When you were talking about snakes, it was only natural that you should talk about them as they were, he said. It would be ungodly to pretend that a snake was different from what we all knew a snake to be.
He spoke with a warmth that made us all feel uncomfortable.
“For that matter,” Jurie Steyn added, with a sort of careful deliberation, “there is more than just one kind of snake right here in the Marico. There are lots of kinds.”
I noticed that the young schoolteacher looked down, when Jurie spoke like that. I also noticed that shortly afterwards Jurie Steyn’s wife went back to the kitchen.
We were glad when Oom Tobie started talking about his illness again. It seemed to remove quite a lot of strain.
“Maybe it isn’t the blue-tongue,” Oom Tobie said, “because I felt it coming on even before the time that Pieterse spoke to me about it. I felt it after I had bought that barbed wire at the store at Ramoutsa. So I think maybe it’s something I ate. I ate two bananas. They gave me those two bananas as a bonsella for all the wire I bought.”
Shortly afterwards the Government lorry came. And I still remember what At Naudé, who reads the newspapers, said when Oom Tobie, all buttoned up in his coat and scarf, and with a cushion under his arm, climbed aboard the lorry.
“Oom Tobie looks like he’s a Member of Parliament,” At Naudé said, “fixed