The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman

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him. It was the simplest sort of baboon trap of all … Yes, that one. A calabash with a hole in it just big enough for you to put your hand in, empty, but that you can’t get your hand out of again when you’re clutching a fistful of mealies that was put at the bottom of the calabash. Heilart Nortjé never got over that, really. He felt it was a very shameful thing that had happened to him. The thought that his son, in whom he had taken so much pride, should have allowed himself to be caught in the simplest form of monkey-trap.”

      When Oupa Bekker paused, Jurie Steyn said that it was indeed a sad story, and was, no doubt, perfectly true. There was just a certain tone in Jurie Steyn’s voice that made Oupa Bekker continue.

      “True in every particular,” Oupa Bekker declared, nodding his head a good number of times. “The landdrost came over to see about it, too. They sent for the landdrost so that he could make a report about it. I was there, that afternoon, in Heilart Nortjé’s voorkamer, when the landdrost came. And there were a good number of other people, also. And Heilart Nortjé’s son, half-tamed in some ways but still baboon-wild in others, was there also. The landdrost studied the birth certificate very carefully. Then the landdrost said that what he had just been present at surpassed ordinary human understanding. And the landdrost took off his hat in a very solemn fashion.

      “We all felt very embarrassed when Heilart Nortjé’s son grabbed the hat out of the landdrost’s hand and started biting pieces out of the crown.”

      When Oupa Bekker said those words it seemed to us like the end of a story. Consequently, we were disappointed when At Naudé started making further mention of that piece of news he had read in the daily paper. So there was nothing else for it but that we had to talk about Flippus Biljon. For Flippus Biljon’s case was just the opposite of the case of the man that At Naudé’s newspaper wrote about.

      Because he had been adopted by a coloured family, Flippus Biljon had always regarded himself as a coloured man. And then one day, quite by accident, Flippus Biljon saw his birth certificate. And from that birth certificate it was clear that Flippus Biljon was as white as you or I. You can imagine how Flippus Biljon must have felt about it. Especially after he had gone to see the magistrate at Bekkersdal, and the magistrate, after studying the birth certificate, confirmed the fact that Flippus Biljon was a white man.

      “Thank you, baas,” Flippus Biljon said. “Thank you very much, my basie.”

      Play within a Play

      “But what did Jacques le Français want to put a thing like that on for?” Gysbert van Tonder asked.

      In those words he conveyed something of what we all felt about the latest play with which the famous Afrikaans actor, Jacques le Français, was touring the platteland. A good number of us had gone over to Bekkersdal to attend the play. But – as always happens in such cases – those who hadn’t actually seen the play knew just as much about it as those who had. More, even, sometimes.

      “What I can’t understand is how the kerkraad allowed Jacques le Français to hire the church hall for a show like that,” Chris Welman said. “Especially when you think that the church hall is little more than a stone’s throw from the church itself.”

      Naturally, Jurie Steyn could not let that statement pass. Criticism of the church council implied also a certain measure of fault-finding with Deacon Kirstein, who was a first cousin of Jurie’s wife.

      “You can hardly call it a stone’s throw,” Jurie Steyn declared. “After all, the plein is on two morgen of ground and the church hall is at the furthest end from the church itself. And there is also a row of bluegums in between. Tall, well-grown bluegums. No, you can hardly call all that a stone’s throw, Chris.”

      So At Naudé said that what had no doubt happened was that Jacques le Français with his insinuating play-actor ways had got round the members of the kerkraad, somehow. With lies, as likely as not. Maybe he had told the deacons and elders that he was going to put on that play Ander Man se Kind again, which everybody approved of, seeing it was so instructive, the relentless way in which it showed up the sinful life led in the great city of Johannesburg and in which the girl in the play, Baba Haasbroek, got ensnared, because she was young and from the backveld, and didn’t know any better.

      “Although I don’t know if that play did any good, really,” At Naudé added, thoughtfully. “I mean, it was shortly after that that Drieka Basson of Enzelsberg left for Johannesburg, wasn’t it? Perhaps the play Ander Man se Kind was a bit too – well – relentless.”

      Thereupon Johnny Coen took a hand in the conversation.

      It seemed very long ago, the time Johnny Coen had gone to Johannesburg because of a girl that was alone there in that great city. And on his return to the Marico he had not spoken much of his visit, beyond mentioning that there were two men carved in stone holding up the doorway of a building near the station and that the pavements were so crowded that you could hardly walk on them. But for a good while after that he had looked more lonely in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer than any stranger could look in a great city.

      “I don’t know if you can say that that play of Jacques le Français’s about the girl that went to Johannesburg really is so very instructive,” Johnny Coen said. “There were certain things in it that are very true, of course. But there are also true things that could never go into one of Jacques le Français’s plays – or into any play, I think.”

      Gysbert van Tonder started to laugh, then. It was a short sort of laugh.

      “I remember what you said when you came back from Johannesburg, that time,” Gysbert van Tonder said to Johnny Coen. “You said the pavements were so crowded that there was hardly room to walk. Well, in the play, Ander Man se Kind, it wasn’t like that. The girl in the play, Baba Haasbroek, didn’t seem to have trouble to walk about on the pavement, I mean, half the time, in the play, she was walking on the pavement. Or if she wasn’t walking she was standing under a street-lamp.”

      It was then that At Naudé mentioned the girl in the new play that Jacques le Français had put on at Bekkersdal. Her name was Truida Ziemers. It was a made-up name, of course, At Naudé said. Just like Jacques le Français was a made-up name. His real name was Poggenpoel, or something. But how any Afrikaans writer could write a thing like that …

      “It wasn’t written by an Afrikaans dramatist,” young Vermaak, the schoolteacher, explained. “It is a translation from –”

      “To think that any Afrikaner should fall so low as to translate a thing like that, then,” Gysbert van Tonder interrupted him. “And what’s more, Jacques le Français or Jacobus Poggenpoel, or whatever his name is, is coloured. I could see he was coloured. No matter how he tried to make himself up, and all, to look white, it was a coloured man walking about there on the stage. How I didn’t notice it in the play Ander Man se Kind I don’t know. Maybe I sat too near the back, that time.”

      Young Vermaak did not know, of course, to what extent we were pulling his leg. He shook his head sadly. Then he started to explain, in a patient sort of way, that Jacques le Français was actually playing the role of a coloured man. He wasn’t supposed to be white. It was an import-ant part of the unfolding of the drama that Jacques le Français wasn’t a white man. It told you all that in the title of the play, the schoolmaster said.

      “What’s he then, a Frenchman?” Jurie Steyn asked. “Why didn’t they say so, straight out?”

      Several of us said after that, each in turn, that there was something you couldn’t understand, now. That a pretty girl like Truida Ziemers, with a blue flower in her hat, should fall in love with a

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