The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
region: fragmented, diverse and discordant, it brings little solace to the marginalised men in the voorkamer and they often wilfully misunderstand At Naudé as a form of retribution. Scornfully pushing aside his information about “stone-throwings in Johannesburg locations and about how many new kinds of bombs the Russians had got”, they are more interested in whether it “was true that the ouderling at Pilanesberg really forgot himself in the way that Jurie Steyn’s wife had heard about from a kraal Mtosa at the kitchen door … Now, there was news for you” (“News Story”).
Tant Nellie Haasbroek and her grandson. Tant Nellie was Bosman’s landlady. Heimwee-berg. 1964
Bosman situates Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at the boundary between the old and the new. This is suggested by the room itself: it is simultaneously an old-world waiting room, where guests are served coffee while passing the time of day in leisurely loquacity, and an actual post office, rather poorly equipped but nevertheless the sorting-house of information and communication. Jurie Steyn may loyally hang his stamps to dry on the wall when the leaky roof lets in the rain, and he may take great pride in his brass scales and new wire-netting, but once modern developments reach the Marico in earnest, he too will be superseded. The institution of Jurie Steyn’s post office is on the brink of passing away, and with it the last vestiges of its old-world charm.
This volume is intended to capture some of this charm, with Bosman’s classic Voorkamer stories presented here in their entirety and original sequence, enhanced by David Goldblatt’s 1960s Marico portraits, which have been used as visual lead-ins to the various story-clusters.
The closing item here, “Homecoming” (which, appropriately, deals with the return of a disillusioned Marico native to his home district), was also the last piece Bosman wrote. Uncannily, as if the writer were attempting a trickster’s last twist, it appeared on the Friday just after his death. The concluding piece to this volume thus contains Bosman’s last contribution to the literary culture of a country he loved deeply and captured with such enduring vitality. It represents his final homecoming.
Craig MacKenzie
Johannesburg, 2011
I
Frik Loubser (behind the counter of his shop and post office) and the driver of the “Government lorry”. Near Nietverdiend. December 1964
The Budget
We were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at Drogevlei, waiting for the Government lorry from Bekkersdal, which brought us our letters and empty milk-cans. Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer had served as the Drogevlei post office for some years, and Jurie Steyn was postmaster. His complaint was that the post office didn’t pay. It didn’t pay him, he said, to be called away from his lands every time somebody came in for a penny stamp. What was more, Gysbert van Tonder could walk right into his voorkamer whenever he liked, and without knocking. Gysbert was Jurie Steyn’s neighbour, and Jurie had naturally not been on friendly terms with him since the time Gysbert van Tonder got a justice of the peace and a land-surveyor and a policeman riding a skimmel horse to explain to Jurie Steyn on what side of the vlei the boundary fence ran.
What gave Jurie Steyn some measure of satisfaction, he said, was the fact that his post office couldn’t pay the Government, either.
“Maybe it will pay better now,” At Naudé said. “Now that you can charge more for the stamps, I mean.”
At Naudé had a wireless, and was therefore always first with the news. Moreover, At Naudé made that remark with a slight sneer.
Now, Jurie Steyn is funny in that way. He doesn’t mind what he himself says about his post office. But he doesn’t care much for the ill-informed kind of comment that he sometimes gets from people who don’t know how exacting a postmaster’s duties are. I can still remember some of the things Jurie Steyn said to a stranger who dropped in one day for a half-crown postal order, when Jurie had been busy with the cream separator. The stranger spoke of the buttermilk smudges on the postal order, which made the ink run in a blue blotch when he tried to fill it in. It was then that Jurie Steyn asked the stranger if he thought Marico buttermilk wasn’t good enough for him, and what he thought he could get for half a crown. Jurie Steyn also started coming from behind the counter, so that he could explain better to the stranger what a man could get in the Bushveld for considerably less than half a crown. Unfortunately, the stranger couldn’t wait to hear. He said that he had left his engine running when he came into the post office.
From that it would appear that he was not such a complete stranger to the ways of the Groot Marico.
With regard to At Naudé’s remark now, however, we could see that Jurie Steyn would have preferred to let it pass. He took out a thick book with black covers and started ticking off lists with a pencil in an important sort of a way. But all the time we could sense the bitterness against At Naudé that was welling up inside him. When the pencil-point broke, Jurie Steyn couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Anyway, At,” he said, “even twopence a half-ounce is cheaper than getting a Mchopi runner to carry a letter in a long stick with a cleft in the end. But, of course, you wouldn’t understand about things like progress.”
Jurie Steyn shouldn’t have said that. Immediately three or four of us wanted to start talking at the same time.
“Cheaper, maybe,” Johnny Coen said, “but not better, or quicker – or – or – cleaner –” Johnny Coen almost choked with laughter. He thought he was being very clever.
Meanwhile, Chris Welman was trying to tell a story we had heard from him often before about a letter that was posted at Christmas time in Volksrust and arrived at its destination, Magoeba’s Kloof, twenty-eight years later, and on Dingaan’s Day.
“If a native runner took twenty-eight years to get from Volksrust to Magoeba’s Kloof,” Chris Welman said, “we would have known that he didn’t run much. He must at least have stopped once or twice at huts along the way for kaffir beer.”
Meanwhile, Oupa Sarel Bekker, who was one of the oldest inhabitants of the Marico and had known Bekkersdal before it was even a properly measured-out farm, started taking part in the conversation. But because Oupa Bekker was slightly deaf, and a bit queer in the head through advancing years, he thought we were saying that Jurie Steyn had been running along the main road, carrying a letter in a cleft stick. Accordingly, Oupa Bekker warned Jurie Steyn to be careful of mambas. The kloof was full of brown mambas at that time of year, Oupa Bekker said.
“All the same, in the days of the Republics you would not get a white man doing a thing like that,” Oupa Bekker went on, shaking his head. “Not even in the Republic of Goosen. And not even after the Republic of Goosen’s Minister of Finance had lost all the State revenues in an unfortunate game of poker that he had been invited to take part in at the Mafeking Hotel. And there was quite a big surplus, too, that year, which the Minister of Finance kept tucked away in an inside pocket right through the poker game, and which he could still remember having had on him when he went into the bar. Although he could never remember what happened to that surplus afterwards. The Minister of Finance never went back to Goosen, of course. He stayed on in Mafeking. When I saw him again he was offering to help carry people’s luggage from the Zeederberg coach station to the hotel.”
Oupa Bekker was getting ready to say a lot more, when Jurie Steyn interrupted him, demanding to know what all that had got to do with his post office.
“I said that even when things were very bad in the old days, you would still never see a white postmaster running in the sun with a letter in a cleft stick,” Oupa Bekker explained, adding, “like a Mchopi.”
Jurie Steyn’s wife did not want any unpleasantness. So she came and sat on the riempies bench next to Oupa Bekker and made it clear to him, in a friendly sort of way, what the discussion was all about.