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The Budget

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We were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at Drogevlei, waiting for the Government lorry from Bekkersdal, which brought us our letters and empty milk-cans. Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer had served as the Drogevlei post office for some years, and Jurie Steyn was postmaster. His complaint was that the post office didn’t pay. It didn’t pay him, he said, to be called away from his lands every time somebody came in for a penny stamp. What was more, Gysbert van Tonder could walk right into his voorkamer whenever he liked, and without knocking. Gysbert was Jurie Steyn’s neighbour, and Jurie had naturally not been on friendly terms with him since the time Gysbert van Tonder got a justice of the peace and a land-surveyor and a policeman riding a skimmel horse to explain to Jurie Steyn on what side of the vlei the boundary fence ran.

What gave Jurie Steyn some measure of satisfaction, he said, was the fact that his post office couldn’t pay the Government, either.

“Maybe it will pay better now,” At Naudé said. “Now that you can charge more for the stamps, I mean.”

At Naudé had a wireless, and was therefore always first with the news. Moreover, At Naudé made that remark with a slight sneer.

Now, Jurie Steyn is funny in that way. He doesn’t mind what he himself says about his post office. But he doesn’t care much for the ill-informed kind of comment that he sometimes gets from people who don’t know how exacting a postmaster’s duties are. I can still remember some of the things Jurie Steyn said to a stranger who dropped in one day for a half-crown postal order, when Jurie had been busy with the cream separator. The stranger spoke of the buttermilk smudges on the postal order, which made the ink run in a blue blotch when he tried to fill it in. It was then that Jurie Steyn asked the stranger if he thought Marico buttermilk wasn’t good enough for him, and what he thought he could get for half a crown. Jurie Steyn also started coming from behind the counter, so that he could explain better to the stranger what a man could get in the Bushveld for considerably less than half a crown. Unfortunately, the stranger couldn’t wait to hear. He said that he had left his engine running when he came into the post office.

From that it would appear that he was not such a complete stranger to the ways of the Groot Marico.

With regard to At Naudé’s remark now, however, we could see that Jurie Steyn would have preferred to let it pass. He took out a thick book with black covers and started ticking off lists with a pencil in an important sort of a way. But all the time we could sense the bitterness against At Naudé that was welling up inside him. When the pencil-point broke, Jurie Steyn couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Anyway, At,” he said, “even twopence a half-ounce is cheaper than getting a Mchopi runner to carry a letter in a long stick with a cleft in the end. But, of course, you wouldn’t understand about things like progress.”

Jurie Steyn shouldn’t have said that. Immediately three or four of us wanted to start talking at the same time.

“Cheaper, maybe,” Johnny Coen said, “but not better, or quicker – or – or – cleaner –” Johnny Coen almost choked with laughter. He thought he was being very clever.

Meanwhile, Chris Welman was trying to tell a story we had heard from him often before about a letter that was posted at Christmas time in Volksrust and arrived at its destination, Magoeba’s Kloof, twenty-eight years later, and on Dingaan’s Day.

“If a native runner took twenty-eight years to get from Volksrust to Magoeba’s Kloof,” Chris Welman said, “we would have known that he didn’t run much. He must at least have stopped once or twice at huts along the way for kaffir beer.”

Meanwhile, Oupa Sarel Bekker, who was one of the oldest inhabitants of the Marico and had known Bekkersdal before it was even a properly measured-out farm, started taking part in the conversation. But because Oupa Bekker was slightly deaf, and a bit queer in the head through advancing years, he thought we were saying that Jurie Steyn had been running along the main road, carrying a letter in a cleft stick. Accordingly, Oupa Bekker warned Jurie Steyn to be careful of mambas. The kloof was full of brown mambas at that time of year, Oupa Bekker said.

“All the same, in the days of the Republics you would not get a white man doing a thing like that,” Oupa Bekker went on, shaking his head. “Not even in the Republic of Goosen. And not even after the Republic of Goosen’s Minister of Finance had lost all the State revenues in an unfortunate game of poker that he had been invited to take part in at the Mafeking Hotel. And there was quite a big surplus, too, that year, which the Minister of Finance kept tucked away in an inside pocket right through the poker game, and which he could still remember having had on him when he went into the bar. Although he could never remember what happened to that surplus afterwards. The Minister 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.

The Complete Voorkamer Stories

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