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.
“You see, Oupa,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said finally, after a pause for breath, “that’s just what we have been saying. We’ve been saying that in the old days, before they had proper post offices, people used to send letters with Mchopi runners.”
“But that’s what I’ve been saying also,” Oupa Bekker persisted. “I say, why doesn’t Jurie rather go in his mule-cart?”
Jurie Steyn’s wife gave it up after that. Especially when Jurie Steyn himself walked over to where Oupa Bekker was sitting.
“You know, Oupa,” Jurie said, talking very quietly, “you have been an ouderling for many years, and we all respect you in the Groot Ma-rico. We also respect your grey hairs. But you must not lose that respect through – through talking about things that you don’t understand.”
Oupa Bekker tightened his grip on his tamboetie-wood walking-stick.
“Now if you had spoken to me like that in the Republican days, Jurie Steyn,” the old man said, in a cracked voice. “In the Republic of Stella-land, for instance –”
“You and your republics, Oupa,” Jurie Steyn said, giving up the argument and turning back to the counter. “Goosen, Stellaland, Lydenburg – I suppose you were also in the Ohrigstad Republic?”
Oupa Bekker sat up very stiffly on the riempies bench, then.
“In the Ohrigstad Republic,” he declared, and in his eyes there gleamed for a moment a light as from a great past, “in the Republic of Ohrigstad I had the honour to be the Minister of Finance.”
“Honour,” Jurie Steyn repeated, sarcastically, but yet not speaking loud enough for Oupa Bekker to hear. “I wonder how he lost the money in the State’s skatkis. Playing snakes and ladders, I suppose.”
All the same, there were those of us who were much interested in Oupa Bekker’s statement. Johnny Coen moved his chair closer to Oupa Bekker, then. Even though Ohrigstad had been only a small republic, and hadn’t lasted very long, still there was something about the sound of the words “Minister of Finance” that could not but awaken in us a sense of awe.
“I hope you deposited the State revenues in the Reserve Bank, in a proper manner,” At Naudé said, winking at us, but impressed all the same.
“There was no Reserve Bank in those days,” Oupa Bekker said, “or any other kind of banks either, in the Republic of Ohrigstad. No, I just kept the national treasury in a stocking under my mattress. It was the safest place, of course.”
Johnny Coen put the next question.
“What was the most difficult part of being Finance Minister, Oupa?” he asked. “I suppose it was making the budget balance?”
“Money was the hardest thing,” Oupa Bekker said, sighing.
“It still is,” Chris Welman interjected. “You don’t need to have been a Finance Minister, either, to know that.”
“But, of course, it wasn’t as bad as today,” Oupa Bekker went on. “Being Minister of Finance, I mean. For instance, we didn’t need to worry about finding money for education, because there just wasn’t any, of course.”
Jurie Steyn coughed in a significant kind of way, then, but Oupa Bekker ignored him.
“I don’t think,” he went on, “that we would have stood for education in the Ohrigstad Republic. We knew we were better off without it. And then there was no need to spend money on railways and harbours, because there weren’t any, either. Or hospitals. We lived a healthy life in those days, except maybe for lions. And if you died from a lion, there wasn’t much of you left over that could be taken to a hospital. Of course, we had to spend a good bit of money on defence, in those days. Gunpowder and lead, and oil to make the springs of our Ou-Sannas work more smoothly. You see, we were expecting trouble any day from Paul Kruger and the Doppers. But it was hard for me to know how to work out a popular budget, especially as there were only seventeen income-tax payers in the whole of the Republic. I thought of imposing a tax on the President’s state coach, even. I found that that suggestion was very popular with the income-tax paying group. But you have no idea how much it annoyed the President.
“I imposed all sorts of taxes afterwards, which nobody would have to pay. These taxes didn’t bring in much in the way of money, of course. But they were very popular, all the same. And I can still remember how popular my budget was, the year I put a very heavy tax on opium. I had heard somewhere about an opium tax. Naturally, of course, I did not expect this tax to bring in a penny. But I knew how glad the burghers of the Ohrigstad Republic would be, each one of them, to think that there was a tax that they escaped. In the end I had to repeal the tax on opium, however. That was when one of our seventeen income-tax payers threatened to emigrate to the Cape. This income-tax payer had a yellowish complexion and sloping eyes, and ran the only laundry in the Ohrigstad Republic.”
Oupa Bekker was still talking about the measures he introduced to counteract inflation in the early days of the Republic of Ohrigstad, when the lorry from Bekkersdal arrived in a cloud of dust. The next few minutes were taken up with a hurried sorting of letters and packages, all of which proceeded to the background noises of clanking milk-cans. Oupa Bekker left when the lorry arrived, since he was expecting neither correspondence nor a milk-can. The lorry-driver and his assistant seated themselves on the riempies bench which the old man had vacated. Jurie Steyn’s wife brought them in coffee.
“You know,” Jurie Steyn said to Chris Welman, in between putting sealing wax on a letter he was getting ready for the mailbag. “I often wonder what is going to happen to Oupa Bekker – such an old man and all, and still such a liar. All that Finance Minister rubbish of his. How they ever appointed him an ouderling in the church, I don’t know. For one thing, I mean, he couldn’t have been born, at the time of the Ohrigstad Republic.” Jurie reflected for a few moments. “Or could he?”
“I don’t know,” Chris Welman answered truthfully.
A little later the lorry-driver and his assistant departed. We heard them putting water in the radiator. Some time afterwards we heard them starting up the engine, noisily, the driver swearing quite a lot to himself.
It was when the lorry had already started to move off that Jurie Steyn remembered about the registered letter on which he had put the seals. He grabbed up the letter and was over the counter in a single bound.
Chris Welman and I followed him to the door. We watched Jurie Steyn for a considerable distance, streaking along in the sun behind the lorry and shouting and waving the letter in front of him, and jumping over thorn-bushes.
“Just like a Mchopi runner,” I heard Chris Welman say.
