The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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about it, afterwards, At Naudé said, but the editor just wrote back to say that none of his readers had noticed anything wrong.
“That just shows you,” At Naudé said to us – and even though it had happened a long time ago, he still sounded quite indignant – ”and they couldn’t possibly have thought that I looked like Doornboom IV, because that was the year I shaved off my moustache.”
What annoyed him most of all, At Naudé added, was that it stated under his photograph that he had been fed on lucerne and turnips for the whole winter.
“It’s very funny,” Jurie Steyn said, just then, “but all this talk of yours fits in with what Minnie Nienaber said in her letter. That was the reason why, in the end, she decided to go along and get herself psycho-analysed. I mean, there was nothing wrong with her, of course. They say you have got to have nothing wrong with you, before you can get psycho-analysed. This new kind of doctor can’t do anything for you if there is something the matter with you –”
“I don’t know of any doctor that can do anything for you when there is something the matter with you,” Oupa Bekker interrupted. “The last time I went to see a doctor was during the rinderpest. The doctor said I must wear a piece of leopard skin behind my left ear. That would keep the rinderpest away from my oxen, he said, and it would at the same time cure me of my rheumatism. The doctor only said that after he had thrown the bones for the second time. The first time he threw the bones the doctor said –”
But by that time we were all laughing very loudly. We didn’t mean that kind of a doctor, we said to Oupa Bekker. We did not mean a Mshangaan witch-doctor. We meant a white doctor, who had been to a university, and all that.
Oupa Bekker was silent for a few moments.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said at last. “Because all my cattle died of the rinderpest. Mind you, I have never had rheumatism since that time. Perhaps all that that witch-doctor could cure was rheumatism. From what Jurie Steyn tells us, I can see he was just old-fashioned. It seems that a doctor is of no use today, unless he can cure nothing at all. But I still say I don’t think much of that doctor that threw the bones upward of fifty years ago. For I was more concerned about my cattle’s rinderpest than about my own ailment. All the same, if you want a cure for rheumatism – there it is. A piece of leopard skin tied behind your left ear. The skin from just an ordinary piece of leopard.”
With all this talk, it was quite a while before Jurie Steyn could get a word in. But what he had to say, then, was quite interesting.
“You don’t seem to realise it,” Jurie Steyn said, “but you have been talking all this while about Minnie Nienaber’s symptoms. The reason why she went to get herself psycho-analysed, I mean. It was about those awful dreams she has been having of late. Chris Welman has mentioned his prize cow that got chased out of the Rand Show, and At Naudé has told us about his silver-medal bull, and Oupa Bekker has reminded us of the old days, when this part of the Marico was all leopard country. Well, that was Minnie Nienaber’s trouble. That was why she went to that new kind of doctor. She had the most awful dreams – Koos Nie-naber tells me. She dreamt of being ordered to leave places – night clubs, and so on, Koos Nienaber says. And she also used to dream regularly of being chased by wild bulls. And of being chased by Natal Indians with long sugarcane knives. And latterly she had nightmares almost every night, through dreaming that she was being chased by a leopard. That was why, in the end, she went to have herself psycho-analysed.”
We discussed Minnie Nienaber’s troubles at some length. And we ended up by saying that we would like to know where the Afrikaner people would be today, if our women could run to a new sort of doctor, every time they dreamt of being chased by a wild animal. If Louis Trichardt’s wife dreamt that she was being chased by a rhinoceros, we said, then she would jolly well have to escape from that rhinoceros in her dream. She would not be able to come to her husband with her dream-troubles next day, seeing that he already had so many Voortrekker problems on his mind.
Indeed, the whole discussion would have ended in quite a sensible and commonplace sort of fashion, were it not for the strange way in which Johnny Coen reacted.
“You know, Oupa Bekker,” Johnny Coen said, “you spoke about going to Johannesburg. Well, you can come with me, if you like. I know you aren’t really going to join the Jeppe gang. But I am going to look for Minnie Nienaber. Dreams and all that – I know it’s just a lot of nonsense. But I feel somehow – I know that Minnie needs me.”
Secret Agent
The stranger who arrived on the Government lorry from Bekkersdal told us that his name was Losper. He was having a look round that part of the Marico, he said, and he did not expect to stay more than a few days. He was dressed in city clothes and carried a leather briefcase. But because he did not wear pointed black shoes and did not say how sad it was that Flip Prinsloo should have died so suddenly at the age of sixty-eight, of snakebite, we knew that he was not a life insurance agent. Furthermore, because he did not once seek to steer the conversation round to the sinful practices of some people who offered a man a quite substantial bribe when he was just carrying out his duty, we also knew that the stranger was not a plain-clothes man who had been sent round to investigate the increase in cattle-smuggling over the Conventie-lyn. Quite a number of us breathed more easily, then.
Nevertheless, we were naturally intrigued to know what Meneer Losper had come there for. But with the exception of Gysbert van Tonder – who did not have much manners since the time he had accompanied a couple of Americans on safari to the lower reaches of the Limpopo – we were all too polite to ask a man straight out what his business was, and then explain to him how he could do it better.
That trip with the two Americans influenced Gysbert van Tonder’s mind, all right. For he came back talking very loudly. And he bought a waistcoat at the Indian store especially so that he could carry a cigar in it. And he spoke of himself as Gysbert O. van Tonder. And he once also slapped Dominee Welthagen on the back to express his appreciation of the Nagmaal sermon Dominee Welthagen had delivered on the Holy Patriarchs and the Prophets.
When Gysbert van Tonder came back from that journey, we understood how right the Voortrekker, Hendrik Potgieter, had been over a hundred years ago, when he said that the parts around the lower end of the Limpopo were no fit place for a white man.
We asked Gysbert van Tonder how that part of the country affected the two Americans. And he said he did not think it affected them much. But it was a queer sort of area, all round, Gysbert explained. And there was a lot of that back-slapping business, too. He said he could still remember how one of the Americans slapped Chief Umfutusu on the back and how Chief Umfutusu, in his turn, slapped the American on the ear with a clay pot full of greenish drink that the chief was holding in his hand at the time.
The American was very pleased about it, Gysbert van Tonder said, and he devoted a lot of space to it in his diary. The American classed Chief Umfutusu’s action as among the less understood tribal customs that had to do with welcoming distinguished white travellers. Later on, when Gysbert van Tonder and the Americans came to a Mshangaan village that was having some trouble with hut tax, the American who kept the diary was able to write a lot more about what he called an obscure African ritual that that tribe observed in welcoming a superior order of stranger. For that whole Mshangaan village, men, women and children, had rushed out and pelted Gysbert and the two Americans with wet cow-dung.
In his diary the American compared this incident with the ceremonial greeting that a tribe of Bavendas once accorded the explorer Stanley, when they threw him backwards into a dam – to show respect, as Stanley explained, afterwards.
Well anyway, here was this stranger, Losper, a middle-aged man with a suitcase, sitting in the post office and asking Jurie Steyn if he could put him up in a spare room for a few days, while he had a look round.
“I’ll pay the same rates as I paid in the Boardinghouse in Zeerust,” Meneer Losper said. “Not that I think you might overcharge me, of course, but I am only allowed a fixed sum by the department for accommodation and travelling expenses.”
“Look here, Neef Losper,” Jurie Steyn said,