Читать книгу The Complete Voorkamer Stories - Herman Charles Bosman - Страница 8

“Koos Nienaber got a letter from his daughter, Minnie, last week,” Jurie Steyn announced to several of us sitting in his voorkamer that served as the Drogevlei post office. “It’s two years now that she has been working in an office in Johannesburg. You wouldn’t think it. Two years …”

“What was in the letter?” At Naudé asked, coming to the point.

“Well,” Jurie Steyn began, “Minnie says that …”

Jurie Steyn was quick to sense our amusement.

“If that’s how you carry on,” he announced, “I won’t tell you anything. I know what you are all thinking, laughing in that silly way. Well, just let one of you try and be postmaster, like me, in between milking and ploughing and getting the wrong statements from the creamery and the pigs rooting up the sweet-potatoes – not to talk about the calving season, even – and then see how much time you’ll have left over for steaming open and reading other people’s letters.”

Johnny Coen, who was young and was more than a little interested in Minnie Nienaber, hastened to set Jurie Steyn’s mind at rest.

“You know, we make the same sort of joke about every postmaster in the Bushveld,” Johnny Coen said. “We don’t mean anything by it. It’s a very old joke. Now, if we were living in Johannesburg, like Minnie Nienaber, we might perhaps be able to think out some newer sort of things to say –”

“What we would say,” At Naudé interrupted – At Naudé always being up-to-date, since he has a wireless and reads a newspaper every week – “What we would say is that you sublet your post office as a hideout for the Jeppe gang.”

Naturally, we did not know what the Jeppe gang was. At Naudé took quite a long time to explain. When he had finished, Oupa Bekker, who is the oldest inhabitant of the Marico Bushveld, said that there seemed to him to be something spirited about the Jeppe gang, which reminded him a lot of his own youth in the Pilanesberg area of the Waterberg District. Oupa Bekker said that he had several times, lately, thought of visiting his youngest grand-daughter in Johannesburg. Maybe they could teach him a few things in Johannesburg, he said. And maybe, also, he could teach them a thing or two.

But all this talk was getting us away from Minnie Nienaber’s letter. And once again it was Johnny Coen that brought the subject round to Jurie Steyn’s first remark.

“It must be that Koos Nienaber told you what was in his daughter’s letter,” Johnny Coen said. “Koos Nienaber must have come round here and told you. Otherwise you would never have known, I mean. You couldn’t possibly have known.”

That was what had happened, Jurie Steyn acknowledged. He went on to say that he was grateful to Johnny Coen for not harbouring those unworthy suspicions against him that were sometimes entertained by people living in the Groot Marico who did not have Johnny Coen’s advantages of education and worldly experience. We knew that he just said that to flatter Johnny Coen, who had once been a railway shunter at Ottoshoop.

Thereupon Jurie Steyn acquainted us in detail with the contents of Minnie Nienaber’s letter, as retailed to him by her father, Koos Nie-naber.

“Koos said that Minnie has been,” Jurie Steyn said, “has been – well, just a minute – oh, yes, here it is – I got old Koos Nienaber to write it down for me – she’s been psycho – psycho-analysed. Here it is, written down and all – ‘sielsontleding’.”

I won’t deny that we were all much impressed. It was something that we had never heard of before. Jurie Steyn saw the effect his statement had made on us.

“Yes,” he repeated, sure of himself – and more sure of the word, too, now –”yes, in the gold-mining city of Johannesburg, Minnie Nienaber got psycho-analysed.”

After a few moments of silence, Gysbert van Tonder made himself heard. Gysbert often spoke out of his turn, that way.

“Well, it’s not the first time a thing like that happened to a girl living in Johannesburg on her own,” Gysbert said. “One thing, the door of her parents’ home will always remain open for her. But I am surprised at old Koos Nienaber mentioning it to you. He’s usually so proud.”

I noticed that Johnny Coen looked crestfallen for a moment, until Jurie Steyn made haste to explain that it didn’t mean that at all.

According to what Koos Nienaber told him – Jurie Steyn said – it had become fashionable in Johannesburg for people to go and be attended to by a new sort of doctor, who didn’t worry about how sick your body was, but saw to it that he got your mind right. This kind of doctor could straighten out anything that was wrong with your mind, Jurie Steyn explained. And you didn’t have to be sick, even, to go along and get yourself treated by a doctor like that. It was a very fashionable thing to do, Jurie Steyn added.

Johnny Coen looked relieved.

“According to what Koos Nienaber told me,” Jurie Steyn said, “this new kind of doctor doesn’t test your heart anymore, by listening through that rubber tube thing. Instead, he just asks you what you dreamt last night. And then he works it all out with a dream-book. But it’s not just an ordinary dream-book that says if you dreamt last night of a herd of cattle it means that there is a grave peril ahead for some person that you haven’t met yet …”

“Well, I dreamt a couple of nights ago that I was driving a lot of Afrikander cattle across the Bechuanaland Protectorate border,” Fritz Pretorius said. “Just like I have often done, on a night when there isn’t much of a moon. Only, what was funny about my dream was that I dreamt I was smuggling cattle into the Protectorate, instead of out of it. Can you imagine a Marico farmer doing a foolish thing like that? I suppose this dream means I am going mad, or something.”

After At Naudé had said how surprised he was that Fritz Pretorius should have to be told in a dream what everybody knew about him in any case – and after Fritz Pretorius’s invitation to At Naudé to come and repeat that remark outside the post office had come to nothing – Jurie Steyn went on to explain further about what that new kind of treatment was that Minnie Nienaber was receiving from a new kind of doctor in Johannesburg, and that she had no need for.

“It’s not the ordinary kind of dream-book, like that Napoleon dreambook on which my wife set so much store before we got married,” Jurie Steyn continued, “but it’s a dream-book written by professors. Minnie has been getting all sorts of fears, lately. Just silly sorts of fears, her father says. Nothing to worry about. I suppose anybody from the Groot Marico who has stayed in Johannesburg as long as Minnie Nienaber has done would get frightened in the same way. Only, what puzzles me is that it took her so long to start getting frightened …”

“Maybe she has also begun to listen in to the wireless, like At Naudé,” Chris Welman said. “Maybe she has also started hearing things about the Jeppe gang. It’s queer that she wasn’t frightened like that, when she first went there. But I could have told her that Johannesburg was no place for a young girl. Why, you should have seen the Angus bull they awarded the Challenge Trophy to, the year I went down to the Agricultural Show with my Shorthorns. And they even tried to chase my fat cow, Vleisfontein III, out of the showgrounds. They said they thought it was some animal that had strayed in from across the railway line.”

Thereupon At Naudé told us about a Rand Agricultural Show that he had attended. That was the year in which his Afrikander bull Doornboom IV, which he had fed on lucerne and turnips throughout the winter, was awarded the silver medal. An agricultural magazine even took a photograph of himself and of Doornboom IV, At Naudé said. But unfortunately, through some mistake that the printer made, the wrong words were printed under At Naudé’s photograph. Instead of being called “Proud Owner”, At Naudé was called “Silver Medal Pedigree Bull.” He complained to the magazine about it, afterwards, At Naudé said, but the editor just wrote back to say that none of his readers had noticed anything wrong.

“That just shows you,” At Naudé said to us – and even though it had happened a long time ago, he still sounded quite indignant – ”and they couldn’t possibly have thought that I looked like Doornboom IV, because that was the year I shaved off my moustache.”

What annoyed him most of all, At Naudé added, was that it stated under his photograph that he had been fed on lucerne and turnips for the whole winter.

“It’s very funny,” Jurie Steyn said, just then, “but all this talk of yours fits in with what Minnie Nienaber said in her letter. That was the reason why, in the end, she decided to go along and get herself psycho-analysed. I mean, there was nothing wrong with her, of course. They say you have got to have nothing wrong with you, before you can get psycho-analysed. This new kind of doctor can’t do anything for you if there is something the matter with you –”

“I don’t know of any doctor that can do anything for you when there is something the matter with you,” Oupa Bekker interrupted. “The last time I went to see a doctor was during the rinderpest. The doctor said I must wear a piece of leopard skin behind my left ear. That would keep the rinderpest away from my oxen, he said, and it would at the same time cure me of my rheumatism. The doctor only said that after he had thrown the bones for the second time. The first time he threw the bones the doctor said –”

But by that time we were all laughing very loudly. We didn’t mean that kind of a doctor, we said to Oupa Bekker. We did not mean a Mshangaan witch-doctor. We meant a white doctor, who had been to a university, and all that.

Oupa Bekker was silent for a few moments.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said at last. “Because all my cattle died of the rinderpest. Mind you, I have never had rheumatism since that time. Perhaps all that that witch-doctor could cure was rheumatism. From what Jurie Steyn tells us, I can see he was just old-fashioned. It seems that a doctor is of no use today, unless he can cure nothing at all. But I still say I don’t think much of that doctor that threw the bones upward of fifty years ago. For I was more concerned about my cattle’s rinderpest than about my own ailment. All the same, if you want a cure for rheumatism – there it is. A piece of leopard skin tied behind your left ear. The skin from just an ordinary piece of leopard.”

With all this talk, it was quite a while before Jurie Steyn could get a word in. But what he had to say, then, was quite interesting.

“You don’t seem to realise it,” Jurie Steyn said, “but you have been talking all this while about Minnie Nienaber’s symptoms. The reason why she went to get herself psycho-analysed, I mean. It was about those awful dreams she has been having of late. Chris Welman has mentioned his prize cow that got chased out of the Rand Show, and At Naudé has told us about his silver-medal bull, and Oupa Bekker has reminded us of the old days, when this part of the Marico was all leopard country. Well, that was Minnie Nienaber’s trouble. That was why she went to that new kind of doctor. She had the most awful dreams – Koos Nie-naber tells me. She dreamt of being ordered to leave places – night clubs, and so on, Koos Nienaber says. And she also used to dream regularly of being chased by wild bulls. And of being chased by Natal Indians with long sugarcane knives. And latterly she had nightmares almost every night, through dreaming that she was being chased by a leopard. That was why, in the end, she went to have herself psycho-analysed.”

We discussed Minnie Nienaber’s troubles at some length. And we ended up by saying that we would like to know where the Afrikaner people would be today, if our women could run to a new sort of doctor, every time they dreamt of being chased by a wild animal. If Louis Trichardt’s wife dreamt that she was being chased by a rhinoceros, we said, then she would jolly well have to escape from that rhinoceros in her dream. She would not be able to come to her husband with her dream-troubles next day, seeing that he already had so many Voortrekker problems on his mind.

Indeed, the whole discussion would have ended in quite a sensible and commonplace sort of fashion, were it not for the strange way in which Johnny Coen reacted.

“You know, Oupa Bekker,” Johnny Coen said, “you spoke about going to Johannesburg. Well, you can come with me, if you like. I know you aren’t really going to join the Jeppe gang. But I am going to look for Minnie Nienaber. Dreams and all that – I know it’s just a lot of nonsense. But I feel somehow – I know that Minnie needs me.”