Sheila Roberts holds an MA (University of South Africa, 1972) and a D Litt (University of Pretoria, 1977). She has published three novels, three collections of short stories, and three chapbooks of poetry. She frequently publishes articles on South African literature, a subject she also teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she is a professor and the coordinator of creative writing.

Sersant-Majoor

Now here he sits, God, his hands and face cut up. Observe him with Your vast tolerance and irony, this retired old white-haired Sersant-Majoor with a bok-baardtjie which, in his old United Party pride, he believes makes him look just like the late-lamented Oom Jannie Smuts; an old man who will join You sooner than he thinks because of the trouble with his piepie occasioned by that (commonly-miscalled) prostrate; a man who, strange as it may seem, will be grievously mourned by his previously disrespectful daughters, the poodley one in the USA in particular; daughters whom You will no doubt punish in their turn, God; for he is now sitting on a kitchen chair facing his wife on another kitchen chair, her ancient shabby, shabby because of being much used, plastic First Aid Kit on the table at her right and to his left, for she has been commanded five times in five minutes to minister to him, but much against her will, though she never had very much will — though You did indeed endow her with Free Will and all of us with Original Sin — to clean up and bandaid and bandage all the stabs and cuts covering his dirty hands and face.

Not that he ever gets dirty if he can help it; no, he explains yet once again to his wife Tinkie, bored these last fifty-seven years, that he is a man who takes pride in his cleanliness of body, mind, and mouth (to some extent), exactly as they taught him in the orphanage and the Verdedigingsmag, that fine Institution that also taught him Afrikaans; a decent man who, maintaining silence, will get up and leave the room if his visiting grown-up daughter from Yankyland (his funny word) says Fuck it, but he couldn’t help getting dirty today as he feinted with his fists and finally wrestled with that bloody black swine who was trying to rob him, and he’s like a poor weesling now having to be patched up and soothed by some nurse, but she’s not a nurse (he wishes she was), she’s his wife and she’s always been a very deurmekaar and lammetjie-lil sort of person and, since his retirement, not a soothing matjie at all, one who now would rather he went to hospital and left her in peace, but he doesn’t want to go back to hospital, he’s been there more than enough having his back-passage checked while he wears a back-to-front lady’s nightie with a bow at the neck, thank you very much; and today how can he help it when he’s pushed to do what he’s never done before, which is tjank like a brakkie; not even in Italy in 1944 when he had that fragment of shrapnel in his left buttock dug out did he tjank; now he has to cry eina jong and ouch and versigtig, Tinkie, and gurgle in his tobacco-hardened throat like a rusty hand-drill because of the stinging of the iodine she’s splashing as if it’s water at his wounds, why iodine, he wants to know as, surely, there must be medesyntjies on the market that smart less on open wounds, but then Tinkie would never know about that, being the nearly mank and of course rather toe ou vrou that she is, and he does worry about her back pains except that she won’t let him help her any more after that time when he’d rubbed her with Winter Green and then got the hairdryer trained onto her back, burning her but not meaning to, and having to listen to her call him a fucking old dingus-sucking bastard — Yeesus, words like that out of the toothless mouth of a Roomse-Katolieke wife and mother of many years and he shaken so rigid that he had to bloody-well throw the hair-dryer on the floor and break it and then spend his money to buy a new one the next day. But now he is suffering many burning pains himself and she has got to maar help him, like it or not, but gently, not that he has always been gentle with people in his life, die Here weet he had to bliksem his batman and the garden-boy once in a while for their nonsense, but he never lifted his hand to a woman, one of his repeated orders, even to the troepies who laughed behind his back, being A real man only hits somebody capable of hitting him back. Onthou nou, julle asjasse! And he has always been a real man, a clean man, a man of his word, and a fair man, as well Tinkie knows, very fair in his treatment of that black donder named Johnson, a fancy story-teller who promised him that he knew from old experience how to paint the insides of a house, not much of a house, only a small house, mind you, but one this Honorably Discharged Sergeant-Major (who would have been promoted years ago to Tweede-Luitenant if only his Afrikaans had improved) had put his savings into — there’s no flies on him — as an investment of course starting from when he draws rent from tenants, but who knows when he’ll get a tenant now that some rooms look as if they were painted by a strond-gilder, a drunk Tretchikov. And Johnson’s run away, the police after him, he hopes, and he can only plead now, Ag die Here tog, Tinkie, moenie so druk nie with those cotton things and wipe softly with the flannel, clean me up nicely but carefully, it’s all very well for you, you were not the one attacked by a Zulu with a knife and you don’t have to stop now to ask me how I guessed he was a Zulu, you know better than that, you know that when we were first married I worked underground with Zulus and Xhosas and Tswanas and Mshangaans, die hele blerry lot, and the Mshangaans were some of the best workers after the Zulus, so I recognized Johnson’s nation and thought bakgat, and tried to talk to him man to man, even if he did show some teeth as if he had a bloody pain in his face when he heard my fanagalo, and I never imagined in my worst dreams — Inkatha on the rampage ensovoorts — after I’d been paying him fairly and regularly each Friday for his work, that he would pull out a dirty knife with a loose handle and order me to hand over my sakkie, order me, a Sersant-Majoor these last forty years before retirement and used to giving orders and having them obeyed at the double; but no, he orders me as if he’s Gatcha himself and sticks me here, here, here, little stabs through my jersey and he wants my money. But you know me, Tinkie, even though you don’t try to make conversation with me these days, you know that I’m a bok ready for anything and always have been but not, ouch, eina, Domkop, stadig, stadig, not a moffie ready to hand over geldjies at the first threat, no, so I hit his hand up and out and lifted my knee to his ballas, which is not easy to do at my age, my knees being mos stiff, and the next thing he’s grabbing me round the chest and I’m holding onto his arms and we do a silly bloody Vienna-woods waltz around the paint-flecked floor because he didn’t do as I told him and put down sheets first, oh no, and I could see as we twirled around like bloody Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire that he hadn’t started painting that room at all, and I was not going to pay him anything, never mind give him all my money, but he tried his best to get me down on the floorboards, and he did just that and was sticking and cutting me all over with his onnosele little knife but I didn’t let him get near the wallet in my back-pocket, not a damn, and he had to maar give up when I fought back and run away like the bangbroekige piece of sh ... rubbish that he was, and I could get up then and go to find a telephone, but — Tinkie, eina, rather maar leave my eyelids alone, I’ll take care of them, just the cuts on my hands now — but whenever you want a telephone there is never one in sight, just like with the slapgat police, so I had to walk to a house on the next block and knock at the door, and knock and knock, until at last an old tannie with a gesiggie like a drowned bat puts her head around a crack opened on a chain and calls out in a voice like a budgie with a sore throat, What do you want here, Tottie? So I point out to her that I’m a white man and ask her if I could use her telephone, but she says, What do you want to telephone for, and I say, I want to telephone for the police because I’ve been attacked, can’t you see the blood Ou Tannie, and she says she doesn’t trust anybody these days and that even if I am a white man, if she lets me in I might rape her, and I felt naar up and down my guts because I could no more have raped that ou dingetjie than I could’ve raped Johnson, though I could easily have stuck a hot poker up his black arse to let him feel what I feel every day, so I said, Look, Lady, for your information I can’t do It anymore because of the trouble with my piepie and, secondly, I don’t want to steal your telephone, I just want to make a call, and I’ll pay you; but not a damn, she won’t let me in instead she lies to me, saying she’ll call the police for me, but, Tinkie, they’re not here, are they, so where are they, where do the polisie go looking for a wounded old army-man if not at these Kroonstad Military Retirement Flats, and a thief with a useless knife if not in the swatter-camp? Where, I want to know, and it’s all very well for you to point out to me that at my age I shouldn’t struggle and fight with Zulus, that I should give up my money rather than end up finish-en-klaar on a dirty floor, except that if I give up my money that easily, what are you going to live on when I’m gone Tinkie? Tinkie, you’ve got nothing saved and you’re going to need my Mine Workers’ and Military Pensions, apart from the cash in the bank. But I’m not dying yet, I’ve still got fight in me, and, oh for God’s sake, Tinkie dammit, give that cotton-wool to me and push the iodine over here, I’ll do my hands myself and I will shut up and talk no more if you’ll go and make me a moerse groot dop-en-damwater and yourself a cuppa tea — to drink in your own room if that’s what you want, Here, Tinkie, what happened to you? You used to smaak me and I never finished before you, as you can well remember, but now I have this trouble with my piepie, and, God knows, I always handed over my pay-packet to you, not like the bloody Boere in this Military Camp, who couldn’t give a continental damn for wife and child. So, I drank a bit in my life. But Tinkie ... All right, go!

Regard him, Lord, as he sits collapsed, sleeping off several brandies-and-water, his head on the kitchen table, circled by his arms in the unraveling sleeves of that ancient hand-knitted jersey, a little trickle of reddish saliva pooling at his open mouth on the scrubbed wood, looking as if he had been caught in a rain of tiny Band Aids and pieces of Elastoplast, dreaming of a brilliant and variable world, the same dreams he’d repeated so many times to his wife and daughters, forcing them to yawns, tears, and bone-thinning pains from the boredom of it all, but when his daughters look back now on the stories, they have to admit that the Old Man had had an interesting life of motor cycles, mine work, rock-falls, and street fights, lots of cash during the Depression Years, and then drinking, living it up in uniform, and punching-up the Ossewa Brandwag traitors along Mayfair and Fordsburg’s darkened dog-yodeling alleys, not caring a damn about Jerry and his rumbling planes as he and the other Sappers, wearing red tabs and confusing civilians into thinking they were Russians, moved with Harley-Davidsons and mine-sweepers through North Africa and into Italy, playing the bloody fool on the Austrian border in thick snow they’d never seen before, and, oh so charmed to hell that they readily parted with chocolate and cigarettes to the beautiful hungry Italian woman begging in the streets, ag such pretty things that some of the men, married and all, followed the women to their homes, and he did too, falling in love pointlessly and endlessly in Rome and getting a liking for spagetti, and then having to come back, heart-smashed, if you want to know the truth, to Brixton, Tinkie, babies, civilian life, and the National Party, though later he voted Nat himself but that was after he’d joined the Defence Force in his need to stay linked in some way to an experience that still made his untrained poetic tongue grow heated as the muddled words swelled in his throat, his eyes aching as he willed himself not to cry for a past so short and so bloody lovely, while in the bedrooms the babies cried, Tinkie slept, and the bottle on the kitchen table grew empty. But that was all so long ago, God, and kyk nou hoe hy loop-asof-hy-loop-nie, waiting for You to tug him up by his small white beard, not of course with the intention of burning his arse even further; no, rather with the intention of warming and comforting him at Your immense, also white, beard and Your pulsing blood-hot breast, pulsing with silent kindly laughter.

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