found him there and had cut him down.
We walked into the circle of huts. The kaffirs lay on the ground under their blankets. But nobody lay in front of that hut where, on that last occasion, I had seen Paulus. Only in front of the door that same kaffir woman was sitting, still stringing white beads on to copper wires. She did not speak when we came up. She just shifted away from the door to let us pass in, and as she moved aside I saw that she was with child.
Inside there was something under a blanket. We knew that it was Paulus. So he lay the day I saw him for the first time with the Mtosas, with the exception that now the blanket was over his head as well. Only his bare toes stuck out underneath the blanket, and on them was red clay that seemed to be freshly dried. Apparently the kaffirs had not found him hanging from the tree until the morning.
Between us we carried the body to the mule-cart.
Then for the first time Hendrik spoke.
“I will not have him back on my farm,” he said. “Let him stay out here with the kaffirs. Then he will be near later on, for his child by the kaffir woman to come to him.”
But, although Hendrik’s voice sounded bitter, there was also sadness in it.
So, by the side of the road to Ramoutsa, amongst the withaaks, we made a grave for Paulus Oberholzer. But the ground was hard. Therefore it was not until late in the afternoon that we had dug a grave deep enough to bury him.
“I knew the Lord would make it right,” Hendrik said when we got into the mule-cart.
The Gramophone
That was a terrible thing that happened with Krisjan Lemmer, Oom Schalk Lourens said. It was pretty bad for me, of course, but it was much worse for Krisjan.
I remember well when it happened, for that was the time when the first gramophone came into the Marico Bushveld. Krisjan bought the machine off a Jew trader from Pretoria. It’s funny when you come to think of it. When there is anything that we Boers don’t want you can be quite sure that the Jew traders will bring it to us, and that we’ll buy it, too.
I remember how I laughed when a Jew came to my house once with a hollow piece of glass that had a lot of silver stuff in it. The Jew told me that the silver in the glass moved up and down to show you if it was hot or cold. Of course, I said that was all nonsense. I know when it is cold enough for me to put on my woollen shirt and jacket, without having first to go and look at that piece of glass. And I also know when it is too hot to work – which it is almost all the year round in this part of the Marico Bushveld. In the end I bought the thing. But it has never been the same since little Annie stirred her coffee with it.
Anyway, if the Jew traders could bring us the miltsiek, we would buy that off them as well, and pay them so much down, and the rest when all our cattle are dead.
Therefore, when a trader brought Krisjan Lemmer a second-hand gramophone, Krisjan sold some sheep and bought the thing. For many miles round the people came to hear the machine talk. Krisjan was very proud of his gramophone, and when he turned the handle and put in the little sharp pins, it was just like a child that has found something new to play with. The people who came to hear the gramophone said it was very wonderful what things man would think of making when once the devil had taken a hold on him properly. They said that, if nothing else, the devil has got good brains. I also thought it was wonderful, not that the gramophone could talk, but that people wanted to listen to it doing something that a child of seven could do as well. Most of the songs the gramophone played were in English. But there was one song in Afrikaans. It was “O Brandewyn laat my staan.” Krisjan played that often; the man on the round plate sang it rather well. Only the way he pronounced the words made it seem as though he was a German trying to make “O Brandewyn laat my staan” sound English. It was just like the rooineks, I thought. First they took our country and governed it for us in a better way than we could do ourselves; now they wanted to make improvements in our language for us.
But if people spoke much about Krisjan Lemmer’s gramophone, they spoke a great deal more about the unhappy way in which he and his wife lived together. Krisjan Lemmer was then about thirty-five. He was a big, strongly built man, and when he moved about you could see the muscles of his shoulders stand out under his shirt. He was also a surprisingly good-natured man who seldom became annoyed about anything. Even with the big drought, when he had to pump water for his cattle all day and the pump broke, so that he could get no water for his cattle, he just walked into the house and lit his pipe and said that it was the Lord’s will. He said that perhaps it was as well that the pump broke, because, if the Lord wanted the cattle to get water, He wouldn’t have sent the drought. That was the kind of man Krisjan Lemmer was. And he would never have set hand to the pump again, either, was it not that the next day rain fell, whereby Krisjan knew that the Lord meant him to understand that the drought was over. Yet, when anything angered him he was bad.
But the unfortunate part of Krisjan Lemmer was that he could not get on with his wife Susannah. Always they quarrelled. Susannah, as we knew, was a good deal younger than her husband, but often she didn’t look so very much younger. She was small and fair. Her skin had not been much darkened by the Bushveld sun, for she always wore a very wide kappie, the folds of which she pinned down over the upper part of her face whenever she went out of the house. Her hair was the colour of the beard you see on the yellow mealies just after they have ripened. She had very quiet ways. In company she hardly ever talked, unless it was to say that the Indian shopkeeper in Ramoutsa put roasted kremetart roots with the coffee he sold us, or that the spokes of the mule-cart came loose if you didn’t pour water over them.
You see, what she said were things that everybody knew and that no one argued about. Even the Indian storekeeper didn’t argue about the kremetart roots. He knew that was the best part of his coffee. And yet, although she was so quiet and unassuming, Susannah was always quarrelling with her husband. This, of course, was foolish of her, especially as Krisjan was a man with gentle ways until somebody purposely annoyed him. Then he was not quite so gentle. For instance, there was the time when the chief of the Mtosa kaffirs passed him in the veld and said “Good morning” without taking the leopard skin off his head and calling Krisjan baas. Krisjan was fined ten pounds by the magistrate and had to pay for the doctor during the three months that the Mtosa chief walked with a stick.
One day I went to Krisjan Lemmer’s farm to borrow a roll of baling-wire for the teff. Krisjan had just left for the krantz to see if he could shoot a ribbok. Susannah was at home alone. I could see that she had been crying. So I went and sat next to her on the riempiesbank and took her hand.
“Don’t cry, Susannah,” I said, “everything will be all right. You must just learn to understand Krisjan a little better. He is not a bad fellow in his way.”
At first she was angry with me for saying anything against Krisjan, and she told me to go home. But afterwards she became more reasonable about it, allowing me to move up a bit closer to her and to hold her hand a little tighter. In that way I comforted her. I would have comforted her even more, perhaps, only I couldn’t be sure how long Krisjan would remain in the krantz; and I didn’t like what happened to the Mtosa kaffir chief.
I asked her to play the gramophone for me, not because I wanted to hear it, but because you always pretend to take an interest in the things that your friends like, especially when you borrow a roll of baling-wire off them. When anybody visits me and gets my youngest son Willie to recite texts from the Bible, I know that before he leaves he is going to ask me if I will be using my mealie-planter this week.
So Susannah put the round plate on the thing,
