Too Late the Phalarope Page 3

  Kappie came back from his dirty office with one of those envelopes that you can see through, that are used by dealers in stamps.

  — Look at those, he said.

  — Cape triangulars, Kappie. What did you pay?

  Kappie took them out with a pair of what the English call tweezers, as if he were holding a baby, if you held a baby that way.

  — Beautiful, eh? How much do you think, lieutenant.

  — I’ve no idea, Kappie.

  — Guess, lieutenant, guess.

  — Twelve pounds.

  Kappie was pleased by that.

  — Thirty-two pounds, he said. Four pounds for a single, but thirty-two pounds for the block.

  — Too much for me, Kappie.

  — It’s my only pleasure, said Kappie, as though sorry about his riches, for they said he was very rich, and wore old clothes and lived without a servant at the back of his shop, because all his money was going to his brother Abraham’s daughter over at the Royal. She could make music come out of a violin like no other being that I ever heard, like the cries and lamentations of men and nations forsaken, rising and rising till you felt you could bear them no longer, and would die if they did not fall. Kappie told me it was the sufferings of the Jews that came out of her violin, and that I could believe, for many of our Afrikaner liedjies are the same, being filled with heimwee for places of home and birth, recalling the hurts of the past, and wakening deep longings for something known only to the Creator.

  — But I have something else, said Kappie.

  His face was alight with pleasure, and he brought out another envelope from his pocket. This envelope you could see through also, and in it were a pair of our own stamps, one in Afrikaans and one in English. They were not separated but still together, for which they have some foreign word of their own that I cannot now remember. And for some odd reason of their own it is more valuable to have them like that, and it makes them cost a lot more money. If you cannot understand it, I cannot explain it, never having understood it myself.

  The lieutenant took the envelope and was as pleased as Kappie himself, and he said, Kappie, you’re a wonder. How much now? And don’t overcharge me.

  — I pay for these triangulars, lieutenant, thirty-two pounds. I say to the dealer, I figure these two South Africans for a present. So I get them for a present.

  The lieutenant said to him unwillingly, like a man feeling over-righteous, I can’t take presents, Kappie.

  Kappie was hurt.

  — You are not a policeman to me, he said.

  But when he saw that the lieutenant was unhappy, he said quickly, five shillings.

  Then he said stubbornly, a customer can beat me down, but he cannot beat me up.

  The lieutenant laughed.

  — Done, he said.

  Then suddenly Kappie put his own envelope into his pocket, and he said quickly to the lieutenant, put them away.

  But the lieutenant did not understand him, not until he heard behind him the voice of his father in one of his hearty and joking moods.

  —Môre, Kappie. Môre, Pieter. What are you up to there?

  The lieutenant turned and saluted his father.

  Well, what are you up to?

  The lieutenant held out the stamps. My brother looked at them, long enough to know they were stamps. Two giants looking at each other, one with a great stick that matched himself, the other with the small tweezers and the stamps. And the hearty and joking mood was gone.

  — Kaplan, I’ve some business for you.

  He took another short look at the stamps.

  — I’ll come back, he said, when … this other business is finished.

  He walked heavily out of the store and into the street.

  — I told you to put them away, lieutenant.

  — I didn’t understand you, Kappie.

  Kappie shrugged his shoulders.

  — Today he beats me in the business.

  — Why, Kappie?

  — When he calls me Kaplan, he always beats me in the business. When he calls me Kappie …

  He shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.

  — Then nobody wins in the business. These stamps make trouble, he said.

  — There was trouble long before the stamps, said the lieutenant.

  He looked at his friend.

  — I was born before the stamps.

  He picked up his stick.

  — Thank you, Kappie.

  He turned to go out of the store, but at the door Kappie caught up with him.

  — Lieutenant.

  — Yes.

  — You were right about the present.

  The lieutenant smiled, and his dark face was suddenly lit up, as though there were some lamp of the soul that turned off and on. When Kappie told me of it long after, I remembered the words of the book, the light of the body is the eye, and when the eye is true then is the body full of light, but when the eye is evil, then is the body dark. Darkness and light, how they fought for his soul, and the darkness destroyed him, the gentlest and bravest of men.

  THE LIEUTENANT WENT OUT OF THE STORE and into van Onselen Street, with the black mood on him, thinking of the stamps. He was fourteen years old when my brother forbade him to go on with the stamps. It was the first time he had not come top in his class, and my brother told me to put the stamps away, because they were interfering with the boy’s education. The boy was not sullen, he was never sullen. He stood there before his father, as though he could not believe what he heard, as though a great hurt were being done him that he had not deserved. And all the girl came out of him then, and looked out of his unbelieving eyes, that could not see how such a thing could be done.

  — You may go, said my brother.

  — Yes, father.

  Where he went I do not know, somewhere on the farm, perhaps to the Long Kloof, which was his favourite of them all.

  — The boy wasn’t well, said my sister-in-law.

  My brother looked at her out of his heavy eyes, then he turned to me.

  — I said put them away, he said.

  When the boy came back he was silent. That was the day when he first armoured himself, against hurts and the world, for to his mother and me he said never a word. He was a man before he spoke of it again, jokingly. I thought then he had got over it, but now I know I was wrong. It was simply a man that could now afford to come out from his armour, it being complete. When he was seventeen years old, he passed first-class in his Matriculation Examination, and we were all proud of him. After dinner when my brother had read from the great Bible that our ancestor Andries van Vlaanderen had brought from the Cape on the Great Trek of 1836, he prayed, and gave thanks to the Creator for the boy’s success. When he finished, he said, Sophie, the stamps.

  I remember now my foolishness. I made as if I did not understand what stamps, though I had thought of them each day of these three years. But my brother looked at me, and rebuked my pretence without words. What foolish things we do to cover ourselves, and by doing them are uncovered. I brought back the books of the stamps, wrapped up in a parcel, and put them in front of him. Then my brother made one of his jokes, one of the jokes that only he understood. I do not believe he meant to hurt. I think that if he meant to laugh at anything he meant to laugh at himself. I think even he was acknowledging a kind of defeat. I think the hurt in it was to hurt himself. But who can explain such things to a boy?

  — Pieter, he said.

  The boy went and stood before him, and said, Yes, father.

  My brother smiled at him, a rare thing for him. And my sister-in-law and I, who understood him, knew that he was struggling to be kind, that kindness and sternness were struggling within him, so that the kindness came out all stern and struggling, confusing to a child.

  — I thought I would get you a rifle, he said. Then I thought you would rather have the stamps.

  The boy took the stamps, and made a little bow, and said, thank you, father. What my brother expected, I do not know. Did he think t
he boy would open them there, flushing with pleasure, and grateful? The boy sat down and put them on his knees, and whether by fear or constraint or hurt, I do not know, but he did nothing more at all. One did not often see my brother helpless, but he was helpless then, with a look that he tried to conceal, of bewilderment and anger and hurt. It was my sister-in-law who ended it. She rose and went to the boy and took up the parcel, and said to him, come with me. She took him to his room, and she who so seldom commanded, said, open it. He opened it, and there were his own books, with packets of stamps he had never seen before, that she and I had bought during the forbidden years, and all the new South Africans that he would have missed. Then he was moved and wept like a girl, and she comforted him, and they looked at the stamps. But he never brought them out again; he kept them always in his room. He never tired of counting them; he kept the totals in a book, and the dates opposite them. And if he got a new one, he would count them all again. If he reached a hundred mark, say eight hundred, he would put that and the date in big bold letters; when he reached the first thousand mark, he put that in big letters an inch high, and wrote after it PRESTASIE, which means ACHIEVEMENT. But when he reached the two thousand, he must have thought it childish, for he blotted it out, but the thick dark letters could still be seen if you knew what they had been.

  But they were never mentioned again in his father’s presence, nor I think did his father ever forgive him for having humbled him; for by now each had a strange power over the other, which made certain quite ordinary things impossible to speak of any more. And each had a power over me too, and because of that power I was silent, when I should have cried out not ceasing.

  So after his meeting with his father in Kappie’s store, the lieutenant walked to the police-station in a mood dark and black, because his father had said, when this other business is finished, as though he were talking to boys. It was because of this mood that he humbled Sergeant Steyn, and turned his dislike into enmity, so that when the weapon was put into his hand, the sergeant struck the lieutenant down, and all of us with him. This thing I know because it was one of the things that he wrote when he was in prison.

  He put his cap and his stick in his office, and when the sergeant called for him, went out to inspect the yard and the cells. It was a task he never enjoyed, for Steyn was a dour man, as the Scottish people say. When the war of 1939 burst on us, my nephew was in his first year in the Police, after taking his degree at Stellenbosch, and why he should join the Police I never knew. He took the red oath, which meant that he would go anywhere in Africa, and they gave him red flashes to put on his shoulders. But the red oath, to those who would not take it, meant only one thing, that the wearer of it was a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner would take part in. So some wore the flashes of the red oath, and some wore none, and this caused great bitterness in the Police, and great division amongst our people. And divisions in families too, even our own, for my brother said it was an English war, and would not believe the stories of Hitler and the Jews; but his wife and I were for the English, as we have always been in our hearts, since Louis Botha and Jan Smuts made us so. Then when Holland was invaded and Rotterdam destroyed … but let that wait.

  The boy was a great soldier in the war, as I knew he would be; he won the Distinguished Service Order and came back with a great row of medals, which my brother called uitheemse kaf, which means foreign trash, on his breast. They made him a major when he was twenty-four, and when he came back with that, what could they do but make him an officer in the Police. But Sergeant Steyn would not take the red oath, holding like my brother that it was an English war; and then he found himself, an older man, with a young man over him, lieutenant because he had been to the war.

  During these inspections the lieutenant and the sergeant never exchanged a word such as human beings might have exchanged with each other. Once when the sergeant’s wife was ill, and my nephew had enquired after her, the sergeant, polite and correct, had answered so that my nephew could never ask again. Almost as if he had said, my private life is my own. And on top of that was the dark black mood, brought on by the foolish stamps.

  The sergeant opened the cells for him, and in the corner by the jamb of one of the doors were some seeds of maize, used for the feeding of native prisoners who were waiting for the court, and who if sentenced, would be sent to prison.

  And the lieutenant said, what are those?

  The sergeant went red as a boy, and would have bent down to pick them up, but the lieutenant was in the way. The sergeant looked at him as though he might move, but the lieutenant did not move. Then the sergeant said stiffly, seeds of maize.

  Then he said, shall I pick them up, lieutenant?

  But the lieutenant said to him, with the black gall in his heart, it’s not your work to pick up seeds of maize, get the man whose work it is.

  — He’s drawing clothes, lieutenant. He’s wanted in court.

  So the lieutenant stooped and picked up the seeds of maize. The sergeant made a move to take them, but the lieutenant gave no attention to him, and walked himself to the garbage can, with a face of stone. He lifted the lid and threw the seeds in. Then he looked at the lid, at every part of the lid. Then he looked at every part of the can. Then he said with a fine and useless justice, they’re clean.

  Then something of his father came into him, and he said, I ought to know, it was my first work in the army.

  Then he finished his inspection, but by this time he was ashamed, and if he saw anything to speak of, he said not a word. He walked out of the yard and into his office, and sat there at his work, trying to get the foolish matter out of his mind.

  He was not long at his work before the captain came in, and he stood up at once. He and the captain always spoke in English, and why I cannot say; but it is so that when two men speak both our languages, they usually speak to each other only in the one, except perhaps when a third man is present, and they speak in the one that he knows the best.

  — Good morning, sir.

  — Good morning, van Vlaanderen. Sit down.

  My nephew sat down, and the captain went and stood by the window, and looked out into the yard.

  — What’s the matter with Steyn, he said.

  And when the lieutenant had told him, he said, were you severe?

  — I didn’t think so, sir.

  — A word from you is twice as severe because it comes from you.

  Because the lieutenant did not answer, he said, do you know that?

  And after a pause the lieutenant said, I know what you mean, sir.

  — Therefore, said the captain, you could say half what you mean.

  Then he said, to an older man, perhaps nothing at all.

  The lieutenant stood up again.

  — I’m sorry, sir, he said.

  — I’m not reprimanding you, said the captain; I’m telling you.

  He left the window and walked to the table.

  — You’ll go far, he said, farther than I ever will. Perhaps as far as can be gone. But you don’t need to do anything about it. It’ll come to you.

  — You understand, he said, Steyn didn’t speak to me. It was just something that I saw.

  — I understand, sir.

  — What about the girl Stephanie?

  The lieutenant told him.

  — Go down tomorrow, said the captain. You can have young Vorster and one of the native constables.

  Then he walked from the table to the door.

  — Did you hear about Smith, he asked.

  — No, sir.

  — Coetzee phoned from Sonop; he was sentenced this morning.

  — To what, sir?

  — Death.

  The two men stood there in a kind of heavy silence, as men stand in the presence of the name of death, neither looking at the other.

  — And the wife, sir?

  — A
year.

  Unsmiling the captain went out. And the lieutenant said to himself, God have mercy upon him, Lord Jesus have mercy upon him. And again he said, God have mercy upon me, Lord Jesus have mercy upon me.

  SO SMITH RECEIVED THE SENTENCE OF DEATH. None of our family knew the man Smith, but we knew people who had, and they all said the same, that he was just an ordinary man, quiet and inoffensive, who had little schooling and no great brains, and worked hard on a small and poor farm down towards Swaziland, and remote from the world. So here was someone who was known by someone you knew, and was given the sentence of death.

  His case was talked about privately, not before children or servants, not even before people in a room. If two men were talking about it in the street, they would do it in low voices; and if another joined them, even a friend, they might well talk at once of something else. A man might sit at his table with his grown-up family, and put down the newspaper angrily, and say in a strained voice, he must be hanged; they would all know what he meant, but they would not talk about it, they would let it rest. My brother would read about it, with a face of anger and revulsion, but he never talked about it to my sister-in-law or to me. Nella van Vlaanderen would neither read nor talk about it at all, and there were many women like her, as if by reading of it they would acknowledge that such things happened in the world. Others would read the newspaper in private, hiding their reading from others, attracted and repelled by its horror, ashamed of themselves and of a world where such things happened. As for jesting, there was hardly a man, and certainly no woman, who would jest about it, not even those who liked their jesting coarse and rough.

  For Smith, while his wife was with child, made also with child the black servant girl in the house. When she told him she was with child, he was filled with terror, and could think of nothing else by night or by day, nor did he touch her any more. So great was his fear, that either he told his wife or she read it in his face, or the girl told her. And so great was her own fear, or so did he impart his own to her, that they agreed to add to the terror, and planned the girl’s death. By night they took her to a river, and having drowned her, cut off her head, and buried it so that no one should know who it was, and the body they sank in the river with weights. Then they gave it out that the girl was run away, and got another.