Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Michiel Heyns is an award-winning literary translator and author of nine novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale, Bodies Politic, Invisible Furies, Lost Ground, A Sportful Malice, I am Pandarus, and A Poor Season for Whales. He was previously professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch.

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The Children's Day

By Michiel Heyns

Tin House Books

Copyright © 2009 Michiel Heyns
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9802436-6-6

Chapter One

1962 Children naturally take an interest in any newcomer, whether as object of their charity or as victim of their persecution. Thus even Fanie van den Bergh created a little hush of attention when he was brought into the classroom by the principal, Mr. Viljoen, and assigned a desk by Miss Jordaan in the front of the class, across the aisle from mine. On a first frankly exploratory stare, he seemed candidate for neither charity nor persecution - that is, he seemed just ordinary. He was very thin, but then so were many of the children in the class; he was poorly dressed in slightly grubby clothes, but again that was hardly noteworthy in Verkeerdespruit. He was wearing a pair of scuffed shoes, which did set him apart from the predominantly barefooted class, but that was understood as a concession to his first day at school. Verkeerdespruit people, my mother used to say, had to prove that they possessed shoes. I never wore shoes, not even on the last day of term when everybody else did. In the course of the morning Miss Jordaan asked her new pupil a few questions, partly to make him feel at home and partly, I suppose, because she also felt a certain curiosity: she hadn't been in Verkeerdespruit long enough to have ceased hoping for an exception. Fanie certainly was not it: her questions elicited only the usual dour silence of ignorance or shyness or both. She and the twenty-five members of the Standards One and Two class settled down again to their routine, and Fanie van den Bergh took his unremarkable place in the unexacting primary educational system of the Orange Free State. At first break what curiosity remained was soon satisfied: Fanie was willing to join in games of kennetjie, which suggested an acceptable combination of conformity and defiance of authority; kennetjie, a somewhat rudimentary game in which the bat was a long stick and the ball was a short stick, was officially outlawed since Marius Venter had received a cut on his forehead while trying to field one of Louis van Niekerk's more vigorous efforts. Fanie was uncommunicative about his origins, though he admitted to coming from Ficksburg, which was neither near enough to make him one of us nor far enough to be exotic. He was nine years old, which was the standard age in our class, except for Tjaart Bothma, whose father had taken him out of school for a year because he had found a reference to evolution in our Nature Studies book. It was generally believed that Tjaart's father, who was known as Bobbejaan-Bakkies Bothma, Baboon-face Bothma, felt as strongly as he did about the theory of evolution because it accounted so unflatteringly for his own appearance; but we did not generally refer to baboons in Tjaart's company, because his year's advantage in age gave him a disproportionate advantage in size. The only slightly unusual thing about Fanie was that he had neither brothers nor sisters: one-child families were not common in Verkeerdespruit in 1962. Although I myself was in fact an only child, this did not seem to require explanation, since I was used to our family being slightly different from the rest of the village. But Fanie was in every other respect so ordinary that even this slight deviation from the four-child norm of the time and place seemed an anomaly. His father was the new barman at Loubser's Hotel, replacing Schalk Redelinghuis, who, rumor ran, had drunk up all the profits. From this we deduced that his father was a man of sober habits, and Louis van Niekerk stated with knowing emphasis, "Then that's why he's an only child." "Why?" I asked reluctantly, unwilling to give Louis an opening to show off his powers of deduction. "Because his father's a barman, of course," he said smugly. "That means he comes home too late." I wanted to ask too late for what, but since that was clearly what Louis van Niekerk wanted me to do, I simply said, "Oh," and pretended to take a thorn out of my foot. So Fanie van den Bergh, having been explained and categorized, ceased to occupy our minds. Nobody was nasty to him, and some were friendly: those with no particular friend who thought that perhaps Fanie might be it, and others like myself who had been taught that one should be kind to strangers. I can't remember that I was ever given a reason for this precept, but I accepted it as I accepted that one should not wipe one's nose on one's sleeve or talk of kaffirs - a sign of our difference from the rest of Verkeerdespruit. My father was the magistrate, and we lived in the secondbiggest house in Verkeerdespruit after the pastorie-the third-biggest in fact - but the biggest of all belonged to Dr. Mazwai in the location and thus did not count. Nor did the pastorie really, because that belonged to the church, which meant that we paid for it with the sixpences we put in the collection plate. So it was possible to believe that we owned the biggest house in Verkeerdespruit, and I believed it. Apart from this, my father was English-speaking, which was if not unique then relatively rare in Verkeerdespruit; my name, Simon, was supposed to be pronounced in the English way, though this was regarded as an affectation by my peers. My parents came from the Cape, which was bigger even than Bloemfontein and generally accepted to be considerably more advanced. As for Verkeerdespruit ... Verkeerdespruit had no claims to the regard of the rest of the world. It featured in our school history book only as the home of a minor "friendly" native tribe - which meant that they had not put up any resistance to the occupation of their land by the Voortrekkers - and as the place where two Voortrekker leaders, having no enemy against which to unite, had quarreled with each other, causing one group to trek on in a huff to meet obliteration at the hands of a less docile indigenous community in Natal and leaving the other to settle what became, not very spectacularly, the white village of Verkeerdespruit. Even the name Verkeerdespruit, the wrong creek, had something depressed about it, as if the founders had recognized their mistake but lacked the initiative to do anything about it. The heroic group that had set off to annihilation elsewhere was commemorated annually in a lugubrious ceremony around the square of cement imprinted with the tracks of the ox wagon that had visited Verkeerdespruit during the centennial ox wagon trek of 1938. The square of cement also bore the distinct imprint of a high-heeled shoe, according to popular legend belonging to the mayor's wife, who had a drinking problem. All in all, my ambitions were larger than my environment. I knew, in any case, that I was going to be sent to Free State College in Bloemfontein after Standard Five. My mother said that after a certain age you needed more from school than what she called The Basics; Verkeerdespruit, she said, was probably as Basic as you could get without severe mental deprivation. So in being nice to Fanie van den Bergh I was simply demonstrating a standard of behavior more exacting than that of the rest of Verkeerdespruit. I told my mother about the new boy, and she went to visit his mother, as she visited all newcomers to the village, partly as her social duty, partly in her capacity as secretary of the Oranje Vrouevereniging, or OVV, a women's charitable organization that looked after poor white people. She reported that the Van den Berghs were indeed very poor and that she would have to make regular visits, which she...