Читать книгу The Complete Voorkamer Stories - Herman Charles Bosman - Страница 19

Jurie Steyn jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the square crate in the corner of the voorkamer. “That is for Piet Siener,” he announced. “Funny he hasn’t come to fetch it. Maybe he doesn’t know it has arrived.”

We realised that this was a joke of Jurie Steyn’s, of course. As though there was anything Piet Siener, living away at the back of Kalkbult, didn’t know …

I mean, that was why we called him Piet Siener. He not only knew everything that happened, but he also knew it before it happened. Some of his more fervent admirers in the Groot Marico even went so far as to say that Piet Siener also knew about things that didn’t happen at all.

So when Jurie Steyn said that maybe Piet Siener didn’t know that that square box had come for him on the Government lorry, and was waiting to be fetched – well, we understood right away that Jurie Steyn was being playful.

“Piet Siener doesn’t go about much these days,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “There’s nearly always somebody at his house, wanting to know from him about the future. They say he gets it out of the ground. That’s why you always see him walking about his farm with his eyes down, like that. It’s a great gift, knowing everything, the way he does. And he won’t take money for telling you what you want to know. All he’ll take is just a little present, perhaps.”

Then Johnny Coen told us about the last time he went to Kalkbult about something he was keen on getting enlightenment on.

“I came across Piet Siener on his lands,” Johnny Coen said. “He was walking about with his eyes cast down, just like Gysbert said. Piet Siener was walking over uneven ground to try out a new pair of shop boots that his last visitor had made him a little present of.”

But Piet Siener was actually looking more at his feet than at the ground, Johnny Coen added. It seemed that it was a pair of somewhat tight shop boots.

“And what did Piet Siener say?” At Naudé asked. “Did he tell you when Minnie Nienaber would be coming back from Johannesburg?”

Johnny Coen looked mildly surprised.

“Well, I did, as a matter of fact, mention something along those lines to Piet Siener,” he said. “I’m sure I don’t know how you guessed, though. You don’t seem too bad yourself at being a seer.”

But Gysbert van Tonder said that there was nobody in the Groot Marico north of Sephton’s Nek who wouldn’t have been able to guess, just immediately, what it was that Johnny Coen would want to go and see Piet Siener about.

“And, of course, Piet Siener guessed it, too,” Johnny Coen explained. “But in his case, naturally, he didn’t guess it so much as that he divined it. It gave me quite a turn, too, the way he was standing there on the veld with his black beard flowing in the wind and his eyes fixed on his feet divining, because all I said to him was that I had come to see him about a girl, and he asked me her name. And I said Minnie Nienaber. And he said, oh, that must be the daughter of Koos Nienaber. And I said, yes. And he asked me wasn’t she in Johannesburg, or something. He asked it just like that, with his eyes down and seeming as though his gaze would pierce right into the middle of the earth, if it wasn’t that his feet were in the way.”

And we all admitted then that Piet Siener did indeed have very great gifts. And he was so very modest about it, too, we said. It was almost because it was so easy for him to be a seer that he didn’t value it. And so we were not surprised when Johnny Coen told us that when he offered Piet Siener his watch and chain, he wouldn’t take it.

“Piet Siener was quite cross about it, too,” Johnny Coen proceeded. “He said that what he had told me was nothing – just nothing at all. And he said he already had over two dozen watches and chains, and what he would do with any more he just didn’t know. I felt that was one of the few things that Piet Siener really didn’t know. And he said that if I had no more use for my new guitar with the picture of gold angels on it, and if I was determined to give him a little present …”

So we said that that was Piet Siener all over. He would never accept from you anything that you thought something of. If you did give him a present, then it had to be something that you were finished with.

“Like the time I went to see Piet Siener about a cure for my wife’s asthma,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “It was just after I had bought that mealie-planter with the green wheels. I did not say anything to Piet Siener about my wife’s asthma. There was no need for me to. In fact, before I could tell him what I had come about, he told me something quite different. That’s how great a seer he is. He said he could see a most awful disaster hanging over my head. No, he wouldn’t tell me what that disaster was, because if he did tell me it would turn my hair grey overnight, having that size of calamity hanging over my head. It was more than flesh and blood could stand.

“But there was still time to turn that misfortune aside from me onto someone else. So I asked him would he turn it aside onto the market master in Zeerust, and I wouldn’t care how much of a disaster it was then, I said. And Piet Siener said all right. And he said that if I had to give him a little present, well, if I had perhaps thought of throwing away my mealie-planter with the green wheels, then I mustn’t do any such thing. He would take it, he said.”

After that Jurie Steyn told us about the last time Piet Siener came to his post office, and about how there was in the post bag for Jurie Steyn a new kind of hair clipper he had ordered from Johannesburg, having seen a picture of it in the Kerkbode. “I told Piet Siener what was in the parcel,” Jurie continued. “And do you know what, before I had unwrapped it, even, Piet Siener said I mustn’t throw it away on the rubbish heap, or give it to the first Bechuana I saw.”

“Well, can you beat that?” At Naudé asked, and in his tone there was real admiration.

It was while we were still talking about how wonderful he was that Piet Siener himself came into the post office. He walked with a quick step, his black beard flapping. You could see he was excited.

Then he walked straight up to the counter and said to Jurie Steyn: “There’s something come for me in a small packing case. It was sent free on rail.”

We nudged each other when we heard that. We felt that there was just nothing you could keep from the seer.

“I got the rail note yesterday,” Piet Siener said, producing a piece of paper from his pocket. “Weight 98 lb., it says on the consignment. I’ll take it with me.”

Jurie Steyn pointed to the crate in the corner.

“I could have guessed as much,” Piet Siener said when he lifted the crate and then turned it round. “Look, it says ‘This side up, with care.’ Instead of that you’ve got it standing on its end. I could have guessed that would happen.”

“You mean you could have divined it,” At Naudé said. But we didn’t laugh. The moment seemed too solemn, somehow.

Jurie Steyn apologised and said there was no doubt something very precious inside. And we realised that Jurie spoke those words as though he meant them. It wasn’t the way he usually apologised to people in his post office, that made you feel sorry you had brought the matter up at all.

Piet Siener said that it was all right, then. But he said that what was inside that crate was something of such importance that you couldn’t be careful enough with it. He had ordered it from America, he said. And it was the latest invention in electro-biology and some kind of rays that he hadn’t quite got the hang of yet, but that he was still studying the pamphlet. By means of that instrument you could tell if there was gold or diamonds under the ground.

“You can stand it on a tripod anywhere you like,” Piet Siener explained. “And it will tell you what minerals there are in the crust of the earth under your feet up to a depth of two miles. Think of that – two miles.”

We did think of it, after Piet Siener had gone out with the crate. And we said he couldn’t be much of a siener if he didn’t know what was two miles under the ground without having to look through an electric instrument that he had to order from America. And we thought nothing of his gift anymore.

He could throw his seer’s mantle away on the rubbish heap, now, for all we cared. Or he could make a present of it to the first down-and-out Bechuana passing along the road.