Young Japie Maasdyk was just opening his mouth to say the word, when Chris Welman signalled to him to be careful not to use bad language, at the same time pointing in the direction of the kitchen, where Jurie Steyn’s wife was. From the quick way in which Japie picked up the signal, we could see that he had learnt a thing or two during the time he was at the naval college.
Gysbert van Tonder started telling us about a sea-soldier that he met, once, in Zeerust. And so he knew the sort, Gysbert van Tonder said. Only, of course, he didn’t want young Japie Maasdyk to think that he intended any personal reflection on himself. Thereupon Japie Maasdyk said Good Lord, no.
“Why, to come back here and listen to all of you talking,” Japie said, “it’s almost as though I’ve never been away. You were talking exactly the same things when I left. And I feel just as though I have missed nothing in between. Nothing worthwhile, that is.”
We said that it was most friendly of Japie Maasdyk to talk like that. It was good to think that his having been on the high seas, and all, hadn’t changed him from the little Bushveld boy with a freckled face and sore toes that we had seen growing up in front of us, we said. At Naudé was even able to remember the time when the new ouderling went to call at the Maasdyk farmhouse. And the only member of the family that the ouderling found at home was little Japie.
“And you stood under a camel-thorn tree, talking to the ouderling,” At Naudé went on, laughing so much that the tears ran down his cheeks. “And you stood on one foot. On your left foot. You stood with your right foot resting on your left knee. Every little Bushveld boy stands that way when he’s shy. And because the ouderling had much wisdom, he knew what you meant when you said that your parents weren’t at home. The ouderling knew that your mother was in the kitchen and that your father had run away into the bush to hide. Like we all do in these parts when we see a stranger driving up to the front door. Ha, ha, ha.”
We all laughed at that, of course. And it seemed as though Japie Maasdyk was gratified to think that we felt that he was still one of us, and that the time he had spent aboard the training ship had not changed him in any way. From the way he kept his eyes fixed straight on the floor in front of him, the while his face turned red as a beetroot, we could see just how gratified Japie Maasdyk was.
Gysbert van Tonder went on with his story about the sailor he encountered in Zeerust. And although we knew that in the story he wasn’t making even an indirect sort of reference to Japie Maasdyk – since he had given us his personal assurance on that point – nevertheless, as Gysbert went on talking, more than one of us sitting in that voorkamer on that afternoon found his thoughts going, in spite of himself, to that little hand trunk in which Japie Maasdyk’s blue uniform was all neatly parcelled up.
“That sea-trooper now,” Gysbert van Tonder was saying, “well, I know the sort of man. He was swaying from side to side as he walked along that Zeerust pavement. And when he went into the bar he missed the first step. It would seem, from what he told me, that at sea all ship-soldiers walk like that. And when I saw what he had to drink – and it was before midday, too – I understood why. He tried to explain to me, of course, that the reason he walked that way was because the submar-ine he was employed on was so unsteady on its keel. All the same, it gave me a pretty good idea why that submarine was so unsteady. If the other underwater infantrymen were like him, I mean. He told me that he hadn’t found his land-legs yet.”
When Gysbert van Tonder spoke about land-legs, it gave Jurie Steyn an idea. In that way, Jurie Steyn was enabled to say a few words derived from his personal knowledge of the lore of the seafarer.
Jurie Steyn dealt with the answer that our Volksraad member had given a questioner at a meeting some years ago. The questioner had asked our Volksraad member if it wasn’t a waste of money, and all that, keeping up a South African Navy, with the sea so far away. And with the Molopo River having been dry for the past four years because of the drought, the questioner added.
“The Volksraad member spoke very beautiful things, then,” Jurie Steyn said. “He explained about how our forefathers that came over with Jan van Riebeeck were all ship-military men. They were common sea-soldiers who, with their trusty sea-pots filled with common boiling lead, kept the Spaniards at arm’s length for eighty years. Arm’s length did not, perhaps, amount to very much, our Volksraad member said, but eighty years did count for something, and we all cheered.”
Chris Welman said “Hear, hear,” then, and several of us clapped. We knew that Jurie Steyn had allowed his name to go forward as a candidate for the next school committee elections, and from the way he spoke now, it seemed that he was likely to get in. A strong stand in the war against Spain was still a better bet than parallel-medium education.
“I remember that our Volksraad member said that the call of the sea was in our blood,” Jurie Steyn continued. “He said that, when he first got elected, and he got a free pass to Cape Town, and he alighted from the train at the docks, by mistake, and he saw all that blue water for the first time in his life – he said how very moved he was. He said that he wanted to climb up to the top of one of those cranes, there, and empty a sea-pot full of boiling lead – or whatever was in that sea-pot – onto anybody passing within throwing distance and speaking out of his turn. That had been a hard-fought election, our Volksraad member said, just like the war against Spain had also been hard-fought, and his Sea Beggar blood was up.”
It was after we had cheered Jurie Steyn for the second time that we realised how strange a thing it was to be a politician. For Jurie Steyn, who had never been to sea, received all our applause, while young Japie Maasdyk, with his blue uniform no doubt getting more and more crumpled in the hand baggage, the longer Jurie Steyn spoke, got no kind of recognition at all as a ship-private, in spite of the fact that he had been trained for the work. Whereas, if we had been told that in addition to being postmaster for the area Jurie Steyn had also been appointed sea-colonel for the whole of the Dwarsberge we would not have been at all surprised. There was something about Jurie Steyn that made you think, somehow, of a sea-colonel.
Oupa Bekker tried to say something, just about then. But we shut him up, the moment he sought to raise a skinny hand. We wouldn’t stand for him stopping one of three, with his long grey beard and glittering eye. In the Dwarsberge there was no room for an ancient sea-private talking about an albatross. Quite rightly, we did not wish to hear about a sadder and a wiser man rising the morrow morn.
Shortly afterwards, Jurie Steyn’s wife brought in coffee. When she went out of the voorkamer again, with an empty tray, she gave one look over her shoulder at Japie Maasdyk. There really was something about a sailor, we felt then.
But it was when, there being no other form of transport at that late hour, Jurie Steyn lent Japie Maasdyk his horse, that we realised how much Japie had indeed learnt at that naval college. From the awkward way he sat on that horse you could see that they had truly made Japie Maasdyk a sea-burgher.
III
Oom At Geel, Cape rebel, soldier, farmer and the man who sold Bosman the rifle with which he later killed his stepbrother, Nietverdiend. 1964
Idle Talk
“You know,” Jurie Steyn said, right out of nothing, sort of – since we weren’t talking of his voorkamer at all, at that moment, but of the best way of crating a pig that you are sending to the market – “there is something about my post office. I can’t quite explain it, but I have noticed that each time there is a small gathering of farmers here, waiting for the lorry, well, quite a lot of sense seems to be talked here, somehow. You know what I mean – sense.”
Gysbert
