The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
were talking about the book-writing man, Gabriel Penzhorn, who was in the Marico on a visit, wearing a white helmet above his spectacles and with a notebook and a fountain pen below his spectacles. He had come to the Marico to get local colour and atmosphere, he said, for his new South African novel. What was wrong with his last novel, it would seem, was that it did not have enough local colour and atmosphere in it.
So we told Penzhorn that the best place for him to get atmosphere in these parts was in that kloof other side Lobatse, where that gas came out from. Only last term the schoolteacher had taken the children there, and he had explained to them about the wonders of Nature. We said to Gabriel Penzhorn that there was atmosphere for him, all right. In fact, the schoolmaster had told the children that there was a whole gaseous envelope of it. Penzhorn could even collect some of it in a glass jar, with a piece of rubber tubing on it, like the schoolmaster had done.
And as for local colour, well, we said, there was that stretch of blue bush on this side of Abjaterskop, which we called the bloubos. It wasn’t really blue, we said, but it only looked blue. All the same, it was the best piece of blue bush we had seen anywhere in the Northern Transvaal. The schoolmaster had brought a piece of that home with him also, we explained.
Gabriel Penzhorn made it clear, however, that that stretch of blue bush was not the sort of local colour he wanted at all. Nor was he much interested in the kind of atmosphere that he could go and collect in a bottle with a piece of rubber tubing, just from other side Lobatse.
From that we could see that Gabriel Penzhorn was particular. We did not blame him for it, of course. We realised that if it was things that a writer had to put into a book, then only the best could be good enough. Nevertheless, since most of us had been born in the Marico, and we took pride in our district, we could not help feeling just a little hurt.
“As far as I can see,” Johnny Coen said to us one day in Jurie Steyn’s post office, “what this book-writing man wants is not atmosphere, but stinks. Perhaps that’s the sort of books he writes. I wonder. Have they got pictures in, does anybody know?”
But nobody knew.
“Well, if it’s stinks that Penzhorn wants,” Johnny Coen proceeded, “just let him go and stand on the siding at Ottoshoop when they open a truck of Bird Island guano. Phew! He won’t even need a glass jar to collect that sort of atmosphere in. He can just hold his white helmet in his hand and let a few whiffs of guano atmosphere float into it. But if he puts a white helmetful of that kind of atmosphere into his next book, I think the police will have something to say.”
Oupa Bekker looked reflective. At first we thought that he hadn’t been following much of our conversation, since it was intellectual, having to do with books. We knew that Oupa Bekker had led more of an open-air sort of life, having lived in the Transvaal in the old days, when the Transvaal did not set much store on book learning. But to our surprise we found that Oupa Bekker could take part in a talk about culture as well as any of us. What was more, he did not give himself any airs on account of his having this accomplishment, either.
“Stinks?” Oupa Bekker enquired. “Stinks? Well, let me tell you. There never have been any stinks like the kind we had when we were running that tannery on the Molopo River in the rainy season, in the old days. We thought that the water of the Molopo that the flour-mill on the erf next to us didn’t use for their water-wheel would be all right for us with our tannery. We didn’t need running water. Just ordinary standing water was good enough for us. And when I say standing water, I mean standing. You have got no idea how it stood. And we didn’t tan just plain ox-hides and sheepskins, but every kind of skin we could get. Tanning was our business, you understand. We tanned lion and zebra skins along with the elephant and rhinoceros hides. After a while the man who owned the flour-mill couldn’t stand it any longer. So he moved higher up the river. And if I tell you that he was a Bulgarian and he couldn’t stand it, that will possibly give you an idea of what that tannery smelt like. Then, one day, a farmer came from the Dwarsberge … Yes, they are still the same Dwarsberge, and they haven’t changed much with the years. Only, today I can’t see as far from the top of the Dwarsberge as I could when I was young. And they look different, also, somehow, with that little whitewashed house no longer in the poort, and with Lettie Gouws no longer standing at the front gate, in an apron with blue squares.”
Oupa Bekker paused and sighed. But it was quite a light sigh, that was not so much regret for the past as a tribute to the sweetness of vanished youth.
“Anyway,” Oupa Bekker continued, “this farmer from the Dwarsberge brought us a wagon-load of polecat skins. You can imagine what that stink was like. Even before we started tanning them, I mean. Above the smell of the tannery we could smell that load of muishond when the wagon was still fording the drift at Steekgrasvlei. Bill Knoetze – that was my partner – and I felt that this was going slightly too far, even though we were in the tanning business. At first we tried to laugh it off, in the way that we have in the Marico. We tried to pretend to the farmer from the Dwarsberge when he came into the office that we thought it was he that stank like that. And we asked him if he couldn’t do something about it. Like getting himself buried, say. But the farmer said no, it wasn’t him. It was just his wagon. He made that statement after he had held out his hand for us to shake and Bill Knoetze, before taking the farmer’s hand, had play-acted that he was going to faint. And it wasn’t just all play-acting either. How he knew that there was something about his wagon, the farmer said, that was peculiar, was through his having passed mule-carts along the road. And he noticed that the mules shied.
“All the same, that was how we came to give up the first tanning business that had ever been set up along the Molopo. Bill Knoetze left after that wagon-load of polecat skins had been in the tanning fluid for about a fortnight. I left a week later. But just before that the Chief of the Mahalapis had come from T’lakieng to find out if we had koedoe leather that he wanted for veldskoens. And when he walked with us through the tannery the Chief of the Mahalapis sniffed the breeze several times, as though trying to make up his mind about something. In the end, the Chief said it would appear to him as though we had a flower garden somewhere near. And he asked could he take a bunch of asters back to his kraal with him for his youngest wife, who had been to mission school and liked such things. It was too dry at T’lakieng for geraniums, the Chief said.”
Oupa Bekker was still talking when Gabriel Penzhorn walked into Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. He intended taking the lorry back to civilisation, Penzhorn explained to us. His stay in the Marico had been quite interesting, he said. He didn’t say it with enthusiasm, however. And he added that he had not been able to write as many things in his notebook as he had hoped to.
“They all say the same thing,” Gabriel Penzhorn proceeded. “I no sooner tell a farmer or his wife that I am a novelist and that I am looking for material to put into my next book, than he or she tells me – sometimes both of them together tell me – about the kind of book that they would write if they only had time; or if only they remembered to order some ink, next time they went to the Indian store at Ramoutsa.”
He consulted his notes in a dispirited sort of way.
“Yes,” Penzhorn went on, “the Indian store at Ramoutsa. Most of the farmers use also another word, I’ve noticed, in place of Indian. Now, what can one do with material like that? What I want to know are things about the veld. About the ways of the bush and the way the farmers think here … I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t think here.”
At Naudé pulled Penzhorn up sharp, then. And he asked him, what with the white ants and galblaas, if he thought a farmer ever got time to think. And he asked him, with the controlled price of mealies 24s. a bag, instead of 24s 9d., as we had all expected, what he thought the Marico farmer had left to think with? By that time Fritz Pretorius was telling us, with a wild sort of laugh, about the last cheque he got from the creamery, and Hans van Tonder was saying things about those contour walls that the Agriculture Department man had suggested to stop soil erosion.
“The Agriculture Department man looks like a contour wall himself,” Hans van Tonder said, “with those sticking up eyebrows.”
Meanwhile, Jurie Steyn was stating, not in any spirit of bitterness, but just as a fact, the exact