The Power of One

FOURTEEN

By the time we got to the last fight of the evening, the Barberton Blues had won five of the eight finals and only the heavyweight division remained. Naturally it was the event from which the crowd expected the most and they were not disappointed. Gert was matched with a giant of a man called Potgieter, a railway fettler from Kaapmuiden who was six foot seven and a half and weighed two hundred and eighty-nine pounds. Gert was no lightweight and at six foot one he weighed two hundred and twenty.

Potgieter was a better boxer than he first appeared and in the first round he had Gert hanging on twice, but Gert won the round by landing more clean punches. In the heavyweight division a knockdown did not mean the end of the fight and in the second round Potgieter, way behind on points, connected with an uppercut under the heart which doubled Gert up like a collapsed mattress before he dropped to the canvas. The bell went at the count of five but it looked all over for him anyway.

To our surprise he came out for the final round and started hitting Potgieter almost at will. The big man knew he was behind on points so he dropped his defence, confident he could take anything Gert dished out. Gert dished out plenty and there was blood all over the giant’s face and one eye was completely closed. He smiled throughout the fight, a grotesque, dangerous-looking smile from a mouth that was missing the front teeth. Gert’s straight left and right were working like pistons into a face that was moving relentlessly forward. Potgieter chopped his way to within range of Gert and finally managed to trap him in a corner. The uppercut seemed to be in slow motion as it caught Gert on the point of the jaw. The warder was out cold even before his legs had started to buckle and we thought he’d been killed. The referee counted him out and Klipkop and Lieutenant Smit lifted him unconscious from the floor and carried him to his corner. Gert had, as usual, fought with too much heart and not enough head. If only he had known about Mozart.

It was after ten o’clock when we left Nelspruit. We kids huddled together in the back of the utility, sharing two rough prison blankets. The indigo night was pricked with sharp cold stars. We’d spent what energy remained in lavish praise of each other and of the glorious Barberton Blues, and now we were silent and sleepy. Klipkop drove this time, as Gert was not in such good shape and had gone home in the thirty-nine Chevy with Lieutenant Smit.

Bokkie, Fonnie, Nels and Maatie were soon sleeping fitfully. Jolts woke them momentarily, their dulled eyes opening for a minute before heavy lids shut them down again. I was enormously tired as well, but couldn’t doze off. In my mind each of my three fights kept repeating themselves. I played them back in sequence as though they were scenes on a loop of film which I was able to edit in my imagination, snipping here, joining there, remaking the fights, seeing them in my mind as they should have been.

I didn’t know it then, but this ability totally to recall a fight scenario made me a lot more dangerous when I met an opponent for the second time. In the years ahead I also taught myself to fight as a southpaw, so I could switch if necessary in the middle of a fight, as though it were entirely natural for me to do so.

It was nearly midnight when the ute stopped outside our house. Everything was in darkness. I crept around the back because the kitchen door was never locked. A candle stub burned on the kitchen table and on the floor, each rolled in a blanket, lay Dum and Dee. I tried to tiptoe past but they both shot up into sitting positions, like Egyptian mummies suddenly come to life, the whites of their eyes showing big with alarm.

They were overjoyed at my return and switched on the light to examine me. They burst into tears when they saw my swollen ear and it took some effort to calm them. When I told them that I had won, they showed only polite joy. They clucked and tut-tutted like a pair of old abafazi around a cooking pot and declared they’d be up at dawn to look for poultice weed against the horrible bruises which were undoubtedly concealing themselves all over my body. Despite my protests, for I was almost too tired to stand up, Dum sat me down and washed my face, hands and feet with water from a kettle kept warm on the stove. Dee dried me on a coarse towel and at last I was allowed to totter off to bed.

At Sunday School the next morning Pastor Mulvery noticed my fat ear and gave me a lightning on/off smile showing his escape-attempting front teeth. ‘Have you been listening to the devil again, Peekay?’ He hee-hawed quite a lot over his clever joke and no doubt repeated it to the Lord later. He always said you had to tell the Lord everything.

I remained unsaved, unborn again, despite the fact that I was officially slated in the minds of every lady in the church as my mother’s special prayer burden. I guess if they’d known what was going on in the prison they’d have mounted a whole revival campaign to try and bring me to the Lord. Once I asked in Sunday school if black was equal with white in heaven. The Sunday school teacher, a lady with big breasts and a sharp nose named Mrs Kostler who looked like a fat pigeon, stopped in mid-reply and sent one of the other kids to look for Pastor Mulvery.

‘Not exactly, but not exactly not,’ Pastor Mulvery said, and then thumbing through Mrs Kostler’s Bible he read, ‘“In my father’s house are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you”.’ He put the Bible aside. ‘Many mansions is the Lord’s way of saying that He loves all of mankind but that He recognises there are differences, like black and white. So He has a place for black angels and another place for white angels,’ he said smugly. I could see he was pretty pleased with his reply.

A girl called Zoe Prinsloo asked, ‘Does that mean we don’t have to have dirty Kaffirs in our mansion?’

‘Ag man, Zoe,’ Mrs Kostler cried, ‘in heaven nobody is dirty, you hear, not even Kaffirs!’

‘Will they still work for us?’ I asked.

Mrs Kostler looked to Pastor Mulvery for a reply. ‘Of course not, nobody works in heaven,’ he said, a little impatiently.

‘If nobody is dirty and nobody works in heaven and black and white are equal, why then can’t they live in the same place as us?’

Pastor Mulvery gave a deep sigh. ‘Because they are black and it wouldn’t be right, that’s all. The Lord knows more about such things than we do, man. We mustn’t question the wisdom of the Lord. When you are born again you’ll understand His infinite wisdom and you won’t ask such silly questions.’ I knew Mrs Kostler would report all this back at the next ladies’ prayer meeting and I’d have to face another session with my mother. It wasn’t easy being a sinner.

She would send me to my room and come and sit on my bed and sigh quite a lot. Then she would say, ‘I’m very disappointed in you, son-boy. Mrs Kostler says that you were questioning the word of God. Why do you mock the Lord so? You are not too young for His wrath. “I am not mocked,” sayeth the Lord. I pray for your precious soul every day, but you harden your heart and one day the Lord will not proffer up unto you His mercy and His everlasting forgiveness and you will be damned.’ She would sigh a few more times. It was the sighs that got to me, I couldn’t bear to think I was hurting her so much. But I didn’t really know how to stop either. It was natural for me to ask questions. Doc demanded them, had trained my mind to search for truth. To confront that which lacked logic or offended common sense was as natural for me as climbing trees. I was a sleuth in search of the truth and once on the track of biblical malpractice I found it impossible to let a contradiction pass or an assumption go unquestioned.

I would ask for forgiveness and agree to apologise to Mrs Kostler or whoever at the Apostolic Faith Mission I might have offended. But it was never enough. My mother demanded an orgy of confession. She wanted me to renounce my sins, retract my point of view and go down on my knees and beg forgiveness from the Lord. I couldn’t do it and so I compounded her disappointment in me.

So she would make me stay in my room and go without supper instead.

I kept a stick of biltong under my mattress for these occasions. Marie often brought these hard sticks of dried game home from the farm and Dee and Dum and I, being the only ones without false teeth, were the only ones who could eat it. I would sit in bed reading, cutting off delicious slivers of sun-dried venison with my Joseph Rogers pocket knife. It was Doc’s really, but I was minding it for him while he was in prison.

Marie had surrendered to the army of the Lord and in some measure made up for my recalcitrance. Creating born-again Christians for Pentecostals was like scalp hunting for Red Indians. Occasionally there was a really big coup, when a well-known drunk or fornicator or even a three-pack-a-day cigarette smoker was brought trembling to his knees before the Lord. This person then testified in front of the congregation. I’m telling you, some of these past sinners washed in the blood of the Lamb really got carried away when the congregation started to respond. When the hallelujaing and praise the Lording and spontaneous bursting into song and clapping of hands and sighs of joy were going on, the convert would be crying and sniffing and having a really good time telling about all his really bad deeds. Every time the testimony got really juicy a silence fell on the congregation as they soaked up the last drop of vicarious sin. I have to admit, it was pretty impressive when a repentant drunk was saved. One day you would have to cross the road so as not to go near him and the next, after he was born again, he was called brother, shaken warmly by the hand and loved by everybody. I guess the Lord has to be given credit for that.

But sometimes being born again didn’t last and the person who used to be loved was said to have backslid. Backsliding was the worst thing that could happen in the Apostolic Faith Mission. It meant all the spontaneous love had been wasted and that the devil had won. Mind you, this was generally seen as a temporary setback. To the Pentecostals the things of the flesh, tempting as they might be, didn’t compensate for the promise of everlasting life. Once you were born again and then became a backslider you challenged this premise and jeopardised the whole glorious presumption of pay now play later. The born-again Christians were all working very hard for their segregated mansions in heaven.

I think I instinctively recognised winners and losers and it seemed to me the members of the Apostolic Faith Mission were to be found more often on the losers’ side of life. This was a situation which they seemed to enjoy. ‘Blessed are the poor, for they shall see the kingdom of God.’ A converted drunk or a sinner who admitted to adultery was such an obvious loser that he just naturally belonged. Backsliding was therefore not easily accepted and a lot of work went into bringing the lost child back to the Lord. The stakes were pretty high. In return for bringing a really lost soul to the Lord you gained a fair amount of real estate in the sky, according to Pastor Mulvery. At least a two-storey mansion set back from the street with trees and green lawns where the soft breezes carried the glissando of harps. Which was a damn sight better than the crackle of hell and the dreadful moans of the everlastingly condemned.

For the drunks who were smart enough to become born again and then backslide, the Apostolic Faith Mission served as a sort of drying-out clinic where love and reassurance, fresh clothes and a new start could be found from time to time. Really juicy backsliding testimonies filled the church and gave everyone present a precious time with the Lord, and Pastor Mulvery a bigger collection plate. Church members put a lot more work and enthusiasm into a bad sinner than someone like Marie who came to them meek as a lamb without any spiritual blemishes, hardly worth a spontaneous halleluja and certainly not worth a good public weep to the glory of the Lord.

Marie’s spiritual moment of glory came later when she testified in front of the congregation and told how she had brought an eighty-nine-year-old Boer to the Lord on his death-bed. How he had been afraid to die and when she had brought him to Christ he had closed his eyes and with a soft sigh gone to meet his maker.

I had privately thought this an almost perfect solution. The old man had spent his life as a sinner and then, at the last possible moment, was snatched from the jaws of hell by a pimply-faced girl whose heart was filled with love and compassion. I wondered briefly whether this entitled him to a full heavenly mansion or maybe just the garden shed at the bottom of Marie’s garden? Anyway, she got a terrific response from the congregation. Snatching lost souls from the brink of the fiery furnace was pretty high on the list of important conversions and it immediately altered her previous status of sweet girl to that of a capable and resourceful soldier in the army of the Lord.

Like me, Dum and Dee were holding out, although to them the whole business was a bit confusing and their true status was never really known. They had been semi-ordered to be born again by my mother and naturally they had complied. My mother gave them a Shangaan Bible but it was left to me to teach them to read it and we had concentrated more on the Old Testament where the stories of the warriors, drought and famine were much more to their liking. Their favourite was the one about Ruth in the cornfield trying to find enough corn to feed her family after the harvesters had been through the fields. The concept of a white man coming along and forgiving everyone’s sins and then getting nailed to a post for his trouble to Dum and Dee seemed a highly unlikely story. As Dum pointed out, white men never forgive sins, they only punish you for them, especially if you are black. To accept the black man’s sins and agree to be responsible and even crucified for them only proved he must have been crazy. Dee then asked, if he’d already done the dying for black people’s sins, why was the white man always punishing the black man? I was prepared to agree she had a point and as I also found the miracles very suspect, we just naturally stayed with the Old Testament, which had witchdoctors like Elijah and great leader kings like Moses and fierce and independent generals like Joshua. A book like this made sense and posed all the problems and terrors their own legends told about.

My mother claimed Dee and Dum, along with Marie, on her personal born-again list. There were others, for on Wednesday afternoons she stopped sewing and headed for the hospital with a marked Bible and a bagful of tracts. The tracts had headings such as, Sinner snatched from certain hellfire and The man who talked to God about sin and Salvation: God’s precious promise. The one she claimed was the big artillery in the hospital environment was called, Hell is one mortal blink away. She had taken Pastor Mulvery’s place after I was released from hospital, and from time to time found worthy sinners lurking behind starched sheets. They were usually fraught with the anxiety of fresh stitches from a hysterectomy or a gall-bladder operation and ripe for the softening-up process. My mother began by enquiring about the operation. She was an expert, perhaps even the world champion, on operations. She seemed to have undergone all the major operations a woman can expect and a few others on the side just to round out her experience. At the drop of a medical complaint she could detail every phase of an operation from the first tiny suspicious pangs of pain to the post-operative depression. My gift for recalling every detail of a fight must have come from her, for she could do the same with operations, even the bits when she was under anaesthetic.

Having determined how long the sinner was likely to be in hospital and therefore how captive as an audience, the spiritual ear bashing began; Marie did the follow-up work for the Lord, keeping the sinner Christwise until the next Wednesday visit. They shared the souls they saved and often witnessed together at the Sunday morning meeting where they basked in the warmth of the spiritual love they received from the congregation. The Lord had a couple of stormtroopers in them, all right. Pastor Mulvery used to refer to them as ‘the sisters of redemption’, adding that the Lord had touched them in a special way.

Marie was still very conscious of her pimples. One day my mother said enough was enough, if the Lord cared about every sparrow that fell, then surely he cared equally about Marie’s pimples. The two of them went down on their knees and exhorted the Lord to cast out the pimple demon. To my complete surprise He did. Within a year Marie’s face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and she turned out to be quite pretty underneath. That was a mighty testimony session, with Marie crying and ruining her new-found prettiness and my mother telling the dramatic story of the Lord’s wonderful pimple cure. Pastor Mulvery did a neat little summary afterwards by saying the Lord’s rewards are not only in heaven where the big pay-out takes place but also on earth as instanced by the demise of Marie’s pimples. My mother’s faith and her work with Marie for the Lord had been rewarded personally by Him.

When I first told Doc about the concerted prayer campaign for the removal of Marie’s pimples, he suggested that I advise her to eat lots of salad, no fat, and lean meat only, twice a week. Marie tried it, found she liked it better than the stodgy hospital food, and kept to this diet fairly diligently. When I told him of the cure through prayer he declared that some things were too mysterious for words. I thought about it a little more and finally made the connection between the diet and the cure, and I asked him why he hadn’t pointed out the possibility of the change in diet making the difference.

‘Peekay,’ he said, ‘in this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for a man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation.’ He paused for a moment and tapped his fingers on the edge of the keyboard. ‘The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery.’ It was an answer which left me confused for some years, for Doc worshipped the truth and had always demanded it between us at any cost.

Geel Piet had not expected me to win through to the finals in Nelspruit. The most he had hoped for was a berth in the semis. His delight at the Monday morning training session knew no bounds. ‘The people are very happy. I’m telling you, since we heard the news they have talked about nothing else, man. The Zulus say you are surely a Zulu chief disguised as a white man, for only a Zulu can fight with this much courage.’ He laughed. ‘When we heard the news, everybody who had a stompie smoked it and the warders could not stop the people singing in the night.’

In fact, one of the warders told Doc and me at breakfast on Monday morning that there had been a strange feeling in the prison on Saturday night and they had alerted off-duty men to be on standby. He said that at about seven o’clock, before any of the warders knew the results, one of the old lags told him I had won. He had only officially been told after midnight, when the news came from the warder on duty at the gates within minutes of the return of Lieutenant Smit to the prison. ‘Wragdig, man. Kaffirs are funny that way. Sometimes they just know things without the telephone or anything. I seen it before in Pollsmoor when a prisoner is going to be hanged. The decision is made not even in the jail but they know even before the instructions come to the Kommandant. An old lag once told me they send out their combined energy to find out. I dunno how it works, man, but I’m telling you they blêrrie well know.’

At my piano lesson on Monday, Doc found an excuse for Geel Piet to come into the hall and I played back the three fights blow by blow to him. He nearly died laughing when I told him about my pants falling down. I added that I would get my mother to shorten them and tighten the elastic around the waist. It was Geel Piet who cottoned on to why Killer Kroon had the asthma attack.

‘He is not used to boxing three rounds hard. Probably he never even boxed three rounds before, because he always got a TKO decision like the first two fights. Then you come along and he has to chase you all over the place, man, and you keep hitting him under the heart. So what do you think happens? He has to breathe harder and harder, man, and the strain brings on his asthma attack. I had an aunty in Cape Town who couldn’t even climb some steps without getting an asthma attack. I’m telling you, it’s the truth, man. You found his weakness and you attacked it.’ He smiled, ‘Hey man, blêrrie lucky he had a bad left hook. When you came in under his right cross he could’ve done some real damage with a good left hook.’

That morning Lieutenant Smit had made a short speech to us all. ‘I’m proud of you all, you hear? Not one boxer let us down, even those of you who lost, you fought good.’ He turned to Klipkop. ‘Wait until the Potgieter turns professional, man, I’m telling you, you in for a lot of trouble.’

‘Let him come,’ Klipkop mumbled.

‘Gert, you done good. You hit him maybe ten times for every one time he hit you but two hundred and twenty pounds isn’t two hundred and eighty pounds. That big ape belongs in the jungle.’ We all laughed and then he said, ‘I left the smallest for last. The under twelve finals was the best boxing match I have ever seen.’ Fonnie Kruger punched me in the ribs and I didn’t know how to stop my face burning. ‘No, honest man, if you all want a lesson in boxing then watch Peekay.’ He paused and looked directly at Geel Piet standing twenty paces behind us. ‘Geel Piet, you just a yellow Kaffir, but I got to hand it to you, you a good coach.’

We all looked round to see Geel Piet cover his face with both hands and dance from one foot to another as though he were standing on hot coals.

‘Don’t think you can get cheeky now, you hear?’ Lieutenant Smit said. But there was a hint of amusement in his voice.

Geel Piet pulled his hands down over his face as though wiping away the expression concealed under them. ‘No, baas, thank you, baas. This yellow Kaffir is a very happy man, baas.’

The prison photographer came into the gym and Lieutenant Smit announced we were going to have our picture taken but not our fingerprints. We all laughed and the photographer lined us up, fussing around until he had got it just right. There was an explosion of light as he took the picture, and then he said he wanted to take another for luck. Lieutenant Smit looked about him as Doc entered the hall. ‘Come Professor, come stand here,’ he invited and then to everyone’s surprise he beckoned to Geel Piet. ‘You too, Kaffir,’ he said gruffly.

Klipkop stepped out of the photographer’s former arrangement. ‘No way, man! I’m not having my photo taken with a blêrrie Kaffir!’

Lieutenant Smit brought his hand up to his mouth and blew a couple of breathy notes down the centre of his closed fist. ‘That’s okay, sergeant Oudendaal,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Anybody else also want to step out?’

Geel Piet stepped out of where he was standing on the edge of the group. ‘I am too ugly for a heppy snap, baas,’ he grinned.

‘Get back, Kaffir!’ Lieutenant Smit commanded.

Geel Piet returned to the edge of the group, whereupon the remainder of the adult boxers stepped out of the group with the exception of Gert, then Bokkie de Beer moved away followed by the other kids. I could see they were real scared. Only Doc, Gert, Geel Piet and myself were left when Lieutenant Smit stepped back into the picture. ‘Okay, man, take the snap!’ he commanded.

The photograph captured the exact moment when I understood with conviction that racism is a primary force of evil designed to destroy good men.

We were all given a large ten by eight inch photograph of the Barberton Blues and the photographer gave Doc, Gert and me a copy of the second photograph. The lieutenant refused his copy which I begged from the photographer and gave to Geel Piet privately. He kept it in the piano stool and looked at it every day when he collected the prisoners’ mail.

Some weeks later Lieutenant Smit was promoted to captain and some people even started to talk about him as the next Kommandant. He called me aside after training session one morning and asked if I would return the second photo and get Doc’s copy back as well. I had no option but to obey, and Gert did the same. Lieutenant Smit tore them up but forgot about the extra copy. He obtained the plate from the prison photographer and destroyed this also. A man cannot be careful enough about his career and the second photograph had been aberrant to his normal behaviour. He had no intention of living to regret it.

Between Doc and Mrs Boxall, my education was in fairly safe hands. Mrs Boxall consulted with Doc by note and they decided on my serious reading. She was the expert on English literature and he on the sciences, music and Latin. The Barberton library, apart from containing Doc’s own botanical collection, had also been the recipient of two surprisingly good private collections and Mrs Boxall said it was choked with intellectual goodies for a growing mind. Both Doc and Mrs Boxall were natural teachers and enthusiasts who never lost patience when my young mind couldn’t keep up. Doc set exams and Mrs Boxall conducted them in the library. I had an exam on Tuesday and Friday every week and I grew to love this time spent with Mrs Boxall, who often violently disagreed with a conclusion reached by Doc. I was the carrier of debate notes and some of the intellectual arguments went on for weeks at a time. I was never excluded and I learned the value of debate and of having a point of view I was prepared to defend.

The three of us had been playing chess for some time. Doc and Mrs Boxall each had a board and Gert had made one more, turning the chess figures on the lathe in the prison workshop and doing the wood inlay for the board by hand. It was not as good as Doc’s ivory set but Doc said it was very well made and original. The two boards were set up, one with my game and the other with Mrs Boxall’s. Every morning I gave Doc Mrs Boxall’s move and he positioned it on the board and made his reply which I took back to her. We set ten minutes aside at the end of the lesson to play. At first that was enough for Doc to beat me but as the months and years went by, a game would often last a week.

I had never beaten Doc in four years and in two years Mrs Boxall only managed it once. It was the game the Russian Lenchinakov played when he beat the American Arnold Green in 1931 and she had studied it for three weeks. Even so she was lucky to pull it off. On her eighth move Doc realised she wasn’t playing her usual game. ‘Ask Madame Boxall who is playing for her this game?’ he instructed me. But it was already too late, he had walked into an audacious trap set so early in the game that he had not suspected she was capable of such a move.

When I brought her the news that Doc had conceded the game she jumped up from behind her desk and rubbed her hands gleefully together, a huge grin on her face. ‘By golly, it feels dashed good to beat the pompous old Teuton,’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell him not to be a bad sport, all’s fair in love and war!’

Two of me were emerging, a small boy approaching eleven who climbed trees, used a catapult, drove a billycart and led an eager gang in kleilat and other games against the Afrikaner kids, and a somewhat precocious child who often left the teachers at school in despair, unable to cope with my answers or even tolerate the fact that I was already well in advance of anything they had to teach. They simply awarded me first place in class every term and got on with the business of teaching the other kids.

In my tenth year a new teacher, Miss Bornstein, arrived at the school. She taught the senior class, getting them ready for the emotional leap into high school and while I was still two classes below the seniors she had summoned me to her classroom after school one Friday afternoon.

‘Hello, Peekay, come in,’ she said as I knocked on the door. She was seated at her table reading a book.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ I said, entering a little fearfully. She looked up and smiled and my head began to zing as though I’d been clocked a straight right between the eyes by Snotnose. Miss Bornstein was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She had long black hair and the biggest green eyes you’ve ever seen and a large mouth that shone with red lipstick. Her skin was lightly tanned and without a single blemish. At ten you are not supposed to be sexually attracted, but every nerve in my body cried out to be a closer part of this beautiful woman. She was dazzling and when she smiled her teeth were even and perfectly white. Except for the fact that she was not as willowy as the C to C cigarette lady painted on the clockface of the railway café in Tzaneen, she could have been the living version.

‘They tell me you’re rather clever, Peekay.’

‘No, miss,’ I said without false modesty. Despite the fact that I was accepted as the brightest child in the school, both Doc and Mrs Boxall had been careful to disabuse me of such a notion. ‘Cleverness is a false presumption,’ Doc had explained. ‘It is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.’

Miss Bornstein tried me on Latin vocabulary and then on my Latin verbs. It was pretty simple stuff but as Latin was only taught in high school in South Africa she seemed impressed. She then made me sit at a desk and handed me the book she had been reading. ‘Do as many of these as you can in ten minutes,’ she instructed.

The book had thirty pages and was full of little drawings and sentences with missing words and trick questions where you had to pick the answer from several choices. It was like old home work for me. This was Doc’s personal territory and he had a great many books on logic and thinking, as he would call it, out of the square. Miss Bornstein’s book was for beginners and I finished the whole thing in under five minutes.

I had to wait while she marked the answers. After the first page she looked up and chewed on the end of her pencil and then tapped it against her beautiful white teeth, her long, polished red nails holding the pencil lightly so that it bounced making a rat-tat-tat-tat sound. Then, using it to point at me, she said, ‘I wouldn’t say you were stupid, Peekay.’ She turned to the last page and marked it, I guess because the book was supposed to go from easy to hard. She looked up again. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that at all.’

After that she made me read a book out loud and do a writing test and then she opened her suitcase, brought out a chess board and set it up. ‘You open,’ she said. I used one of Doc’s favourite openings and she whistled through her teeth as she studied it. After an hour I conceded the game. Doc said it was the thing to do when you were going to stalemate anyway. It made your opponent less wary and therefore gave you an advantage next time. ‘But only do this in a friendly match,’ he cautioned. ‘Chess is war and in war nothing can be predicted except death.’

Miss Bornstein looked up at me, a flicker of annoyance crossing her face. ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ she said. ‘When I play chess I’m your opponent and not to be patronised like some silly woman!’

I blushed furiously. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ I said, mortified and wondering what the word meant.

‘Miss Bornstein please, Peekay. “Miss” sounds just like any other kid who doesn’t know any better. Samantha Bornstein. You may call me Sam in private, if you like. I think you and I are going to see quite a lot of each other.’

The idea of calling this beautiful creature by her Christian name was unthinkable. And by a boy’s name, a common boy’s name like Sam, plainly impossible.

Miss Bornstein thanked me for coming and said that on Monday I was to report to her class. ‘Though I can’t for the life of me think what we’re going to do with you, but at least you’ll make a worthy chess opponent,’ she said, with a throatiness in her voice that made my chest feel tight.

I told Doc about the whole incident on Monday morning and at the end he asked two questions. ‘Tell me, Peekay, how bad in love are you?’

I told him that I didn’t know much about love but it was like being hit in the head with a really good punch.

‘I think maybe you in love bad, Peekay. About women I don’t know so much, but I know this, I think it is not so smart to tell Madame Boxall. I will think about this. Maybe Geel Piet can help also?’ We left it at that for the time being.

‘Next question, please! Madame Bornstein, she plays chess maybe better than Madam Boxall?’

I told Doc that Miss Bornstein was a good chess player and had I not used one of his sneakiest openings she would most likely have beaten me. ‘She’s much more cunning than Mrs Boxall,’ I concluded.

‘Hurrumph! Cunning? This is goot,’ he grunted and opened the book at my music lesson. At the end of the practice he handed me a hastily scrawled note. ‘Please, with my compliments, to give this to your Madame Bornstein and tomorrow you bring the reply if you please.’ I knew better than to open the note.

‘Please, Doc, don’t tell her I’m in love with her,’ I pleaded.

Doc looked askance. ‘This I would never do, Peekay. Absoloodle. To be in love is a very private business.’

With Lieutenant Smit’s promotion to captain, Sergeant Borman became the new lieutenant. This was not a popular promotion, though it was not unexpected. Borman had been sucking up to the Kommandant ever since he’d come down from Pretoria. He let it be known that his wife’s asthma had curtailed a promising career at Pretoria Central, where to survive a warder had to be tougher and smarter than the hard case rapists, grievous bodily harms, thugs, thieves and con merchants. A sergeant under these conditions, he hinted, was easily the equivalent of lieutenant in a small-time prison such as Barberton. He demonstrated at every opportunity that he was tougher and harder than any of the other warders. A glance as he passed was sufficient to get him going.

‘Who you looking at, Kaffir? You trying to be cheeky, hey?’

‘No baas, no inkosi, I not cheeky, I not look.’

‘Don’t tell me you not cheeky. I know what you thinking, Kaffir! On the outside you all gentle Jesus and on the inside you a black devil, you hear.’

‘No, inkosi. Inside same like outside.’

‘That will be the blêrrie day, Kaffir. Come here. Come!’ The prisoner would hasten towards Borman and stand head bowed to ragged attention. ‘Look me straight in the eyes, Kaffir.’

‘No, baas. I not look you.’

‘Look, you black bastard! When I tell you to look, you look, you hear?’ The prisoner would lift terror-stricken eyes to meet those of the sergeant. ‘Ja, it’s true, man, inside is filth.’ He would hit the African with a hard punch into the gut, doubling him over. ‘Stand up, you black bastard, we got to get the filth out, we-got-to-get-it-out!’ He would hit the prisoner again and again in the same spot. ‘Vomit out the filth, make clean inside!’

Most Africans from the lowveld have weak stomachs from having been infected with Bilharzia. The larvae, found in river water, enter the system through the skin and eventually attack the liver and the kidneys. Three or four hard punches in the gut will generally cause severe vomiting and great pain.

Borman would look at the vomit on the floor and over the prisoner’s hands as the man tried physically to hold back the contents of his gut. ‘Ag sis! Now look what you done! Why did you make dirty on the nice clean floor?’ The donkey prick would come down hard across the prisoner’s neck. ‘Because you a fucking animal, that’s why.’ He would continue to hit the prisoner until the prisoner collapsed.

Making an unnecessary mess was a major prison offence and entitled a warder to use the donkey prick in an official capacity. Borman took great pride in the fact that he could legitimise an interrogation within three or four minutes from the time he started to taunt a prisoner. The English equivalent of the name the prisoners gave him was, ‘Shit for Brains’. When he was anywhere near you would hear the chant go out, ‘Move away, move away, here comes Shit for Brains. Here comes he whose mother threw away her child, kept the placenta, and called it Shit for Brains.’

Lieutenant Borman was too old to belong to the boxing squad, but he often talked big about the fighter he had once been. Gert said that a man who talks about how tough he is is probably yellow. But, while the warders didn’t like Borman, they respected him for being a professional. He spoke Fanagalo pretty well and since most prisoners learn to speak this African lingua franca, he used the African way of frightening the soul with word pictures. It was not uncommon for a prisoner to be reduced by him to a state of abject terror without physical torture. If there was any trouble in the prison, the Kommandant soon learned to put Sergeant Borman in charge. It was this facility to terrorise the prisoners, both physically and mentally, that had made him the Kommandant’s choice to take over when Lieutenant Smit was promoted.

Lieutenant Borman deeply resented the freedom Geel Piet had achieved in the gymnasium under Captain Smit. ‘Give a lag a blêrrie pinkie and before you know it they eaten your whole hand off up your shoulder,’ he would insist. Geel Piet was careful to keep out of his way. When Borman entered the gym, unless he was in the ring actually coaching one of the kids, Geel Piet would quietly slip away. Lieutenant Borman’s eyes would follow his as he crept out. ‘He will get me. One day, for sure, he will get me. All I can say is I hope I come out the other side alive,’ the battered little coloured man confided in me.

Captain Smit would watch Geel Piet leave the gymnasium when Borman entered, but he remained silent. Borman was not overly impressed with Doc or myself. He saw the unholy alliance of Doc, Geel Piet and myself as a basic breakdown of the system. Because he was a professional, he was quick to realise that such a break in the normal discipline of the prison could lead to other things. As a sergeant his influence did not carry to the Kommandant. But as a lieutenant his power increased enormously.

Had it not been for the Kommandant’s desire to keep Doc sweet for the bi-annual visit of the inspector of prisons, Lieutenant Borman would almost certainly have had his way and our freedom within the prison would have been severely curtailed.

The Kommandant was a man who saw things in simple terms. Doc at his Steinway was the cultural component of the Inspector’s visit. A braaivleis and tiekiedraai, the fun; a boxing and shooting match, the physical; showing the Kommandant as a man of culture who was nevertheless a fun-loving disciplinarian. He had no intention of allowing Lieutenant Borman to disrupt his careful plan. Nevertheless, it was apparent to us that Borman was patient and relentless, determined to find something which would lead to our destruction.

The war in Europe was rapidly drawing to a close. The Allies had crossed the Rhine and were moving towards Berlin. Doc was terribly excited. After four years’ incarceration he had a deep need for the soft green hills, the wind-swept mountains and the wooded kloofs. We would talk about walking all the way to saddle back mountain on the border of Swaziland and tears would come into his eyes. It was as though, now that the prisoner years were almost over, he dared to think for the first time of freedom. He would look over the prison walls to the green hills beyond and his voice would tremble. ‘The years of hate are nearly over, it is soon time to love again, time to climb high with the sun on the back until a person can reach up and touch nearly the sky.’

Doc’s second book on the cacti of Southern Africa had been written while he was in prison. This one was in English, each page edited by Mrs Boxall who in the end had come to confess that there was more to the jolly old cactus than she could possibly have imagined. Doc now talked of making the photographic plates and Mrs Boxall went to see Jimmy Winter at the chemist to get him to put aside one spool of precious rationed film each month until she had three dozen waiting for Doc on his release. Jimmy Winter was an artist who, when he wasn’t running his chemist shop, loved to paint the hills. Before Doc went to prison he would sometimes come across him in some lonely spot high up on a mountain top painting away.

By the time the Allies had crossed the Rhine, precious few music lessons were taking place. We spent most of the hour discussing our plans for Doc’s release. He made me describe the cactus garden and the rate of growth of each plant and he talked happily about the extensions he would need to accommodate the stuff we would find waiting for us in the hills. Also, all the photos we needed for his book.

Like me, Miss Bornstein had never managed to beat Doc at chess. So she introduced her grandfather, Mr Isaac Bornstein, who was referred to as Old Mr Bornstein. Old Mr Bornstein turned out to be a match for Doc and the two of them were having a mighty go at each other, with Doc clucking and shaking his head as he read Old Mr Bornstein’s latest move. ‘Such a German, but very clever, ja this move is goot.’ He would move over to the board which rested on top of the upright piano, make Old Mr Bornstein’s move and think for a while and then make his own. ‘… But not so clever as me, Mr Schmarty Pantz Isaac!’

To Doc’s surprise Mrs Boxall had accepted Miss Bornstein quite happily and the two of them were really making a go of the Sandwich Fund, which was sending out weekly bundles to prisoners’ families, as well as food parcels. They discussed the time when, with the war over, it would be necessary to come clean, but decided the end of the war wouldn’t bring about the end of human need and they’d find some excuse to continue.

Doc, Geel Piet and I had discussed the matter of my love for Miss Bornstein and, I must say, neither of them was a lot of help. Between the three of us we knew very little about women. Geel Piet never had a mother, or at least he could never remember having one. His aunty, the one with asthma who couldn’t climb up steps, had taken him in with her nine kids and then when she got sick and couldn’t manage he had gone to an orphanage and at the age of ten had been thrown onto the streets.

Doc had been a bachelor, though evidently not a very promiscuous one. He spoke with horror of the big-bosomed Frauleins who demanded to see him after concerts and came to the conservatorium with invitations to dinner or afternoon tea. Sometimes, when they were very persistent and he could no longer politely refuse, he went, only to find his hostess, with a very revealing décolletage, the only other guest. These moments of terror had scared him off women, seemingly forever.

Geel Piet was quick to point out that his adult experience with women was entirely inappropriate and had no relevance to my predicament. The two of them finally decided that regular bunches of roses from my granpa’s garden was all that was needed. The rest would take care of itself.

I was not quite sure what the rest was. ‘I think maybe just let the roses do the talking, Peekay,’ Doc advised and Geel Piet had added that he’d heard somewhere that lots of roses sent to a lady always did the trick. I wondered for some time what the trick was until Bokkie de Beer told me. I was unable to imagine myself doing the trick with Miss Bornstein.

Mr Isaac offered to motor out to the prison to visit Doc, but this had been turned down by Doc who wouldn’t even let Mrs Boxall come to see him. Doc was a proud man and he was determined to meet his peers on equal terms. The prison put him at a distinct disadvantage and made him an object of sympathy. He could not bear such an idea. But now that the war was drawing to a close he talked often of visiting Herr Isaac, which was his name for Mr Isaac, and of the grand games of chess which awaited the two of them.

Mr Isaac Bornstein had arrived from Germany in 1936. He had escaped the Holocaust and had come to live with his family. Miss Bornstein’s father had come to South Africa as a young man in 1918. The Bornsteins were the only Jews in Barberton where he was in partnership with Mr Andrews as the town’s only firm of solicitors. Miss Bornstein, who had been lecturing at the university in Johannesburg, had returned home because her mother was dying of cancer.

I heard all this from Mrs Boxall who, it turned out, had known Miss Bornstein ‘since she was a gel’ and didn’t mind at all when she discovered I was in love with her. ‘She’ll make someone a fine wife and if she’s prepared to wait until after you’re the world champion, then the two of you will make a fine couple.’ Mrs Boxall knew that nothing, not even marriage to Miss Bornstein, was allowed to stand in the way of my being welterweight champion of the world. In the meantime I started the barrage of roses, which my granpa would select for me each Friday.

To my surprise my granpa seemed much more informed on the subject of being in love than Doc and Geel Piet and he examined me closely on the quality of my love. His had been of the highest quality involving the building of an entire rose garden with roses and even trees imported from England. When I said that I was not prepared to give up being world welterweight champion for Miss Bornstein, amid a lot of tapping and tamping and staring into space over the rusty roof, he announced that the quality of my love was certainly worth a dozen long-stemmed roses a week but fell short of a whole garden. I accepted this verdict although I knew it was impossible to love anybody more than I loved Miss Bornstein.

The Kommandant had long since accepted that Hitler wasn’t going to win the war and together with most of the warders had joined the Nelspruit chapter of the Oxwagon Guard, a neo-Nazi group dedicated to the restoration of independence for the Afrikaner people. The Oxwagon Guard was very similar to the Ku Klux Klan only it included the English in with Jews and Kaffirs as the corrupters of pure Afrikanerdom. The war had helped them to grow into a powerful secret society which would one day become the covert ruler of South Africa and the major influence in declaring it a republic. I heard all this from Snotnose whose father was a member. He went away on weekends to a training camp where they sat around a big bonfire and sang songs and plotted the downfall of the Smuts government. He also told me that the Kommandant was only a veldkornet and that Lieutenant Borman was the boss of the Barberton chapter. During the day the Kommandant could do anything he liked to Lieutenant Borman but at night, outside the prison, the warder from Pretoria was the boss. His wife didn’t have asthma at all, Lieutenant Borman had been sent down from Pretoria by ‘them’ to get the Oxwagon Guard started. Bokkie de Beer said all this was true and that he’d swear it on a stack of Bibles. He’d heard his ma and pa talking about it in the kitchen at home when he was supposed to be asleep.

I could understand their hatred for the English and the Kaffirs. After all there were those twenty-six thousand women and children still to pay for. And Boers just hate Kaffirs anyway. Dingane, the King of the Zulus, had murdered Piet Retief and all his men after he’d given his word he wouldn’t. So there was that to pay for as well. But why the Jews? I hadn’t heard of any nasty business between the Jews and the Boers and no one I asked seemed to have either. I’d only known two Jews in my whole life, I was in love with one of them and Harry Crown was the other. I even decided that when I grew up, I’d be a Jew. At one stage I thought that maybe I had been left on the doorstep as a baby by a wandering Jew and my mother had found me and decided not to tell me. This, I felt certain, explained my headless snake and the absence of a father. But when I asked my mother she seemed pretty shocked at the idea and told me that the Lord was not at all pleased with the Jews. That they had been scattered to the four corners of the earth because they hadn’t recognised Him when He came along and had nailed him to the cross. She was quite adamant that I hadn’t been found on the doorstep and that my circumcision was a simple matter of hygiene.

I’d read about circumcision in the bible; when King Herod heard about Jesus being born he sent his soldiers to kill all the babies who were circumcised. When I asked in Sunday school what being circumcised meant, Mrs Kostler pouted and replied that it wasn’t something I should know about at my age.

‘But it’s in the Bible, so it can’t be nasty, can it?’ I protested. So, as usual, she sent me to Pastor Mulvery who agreed that I should wait to find out. It was Geel Piet who finally told me, at the same time pointing out in the showers that I was in fact circumcised. It was then that my Jewish theory started to develop. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my mother was a born-again Christian and couldn’t tell a lie, I’m not so sure I would have believed her rather pathetic explanation about hygiene. Perhaps she asked the Lord for special permission to tell a lie so as not to hurt my feelings.

Snotnose couldn’t tell me why the Oxwagon Guard hated the Jews, but Bokkie de Beer said it was because they killed Jesus. Well, all I could think was, the Boers had mighty long memories and it was news to me that the Boers were around at the time of Jesus. But then my mother told me the Lord also allowed people to be born-again in other churches, except in the Catholic church, which was the instrument of the devil. She said there were even born-again Christians in the Dutch Reformed Church. This immediately explained everything. The Boers has simply gone along with the rest of Christianity in condemning the Jews by adding a hate straight from the Bible to the existing hate for the English and the Kaffirs. That way they were bound to get the Lord on their side. It was a neat trick all right, but I for one wasn’t falling for it. Quite plainly the Oxwagon Guard was the next threat now that Adolf Hitler had been disposed of, or nearly anyway. News of Germany’s imminent collapse was coming through on the wireless daily.

The Kommandant promised Doc he would be released the day peace was declared in Europe, whether his papers were in order or not. We were already into the first days of summer, and Doc and I had talked about being out of prison in time for the firebells, the exquisite little orange lilies no bigger than a two-shilling piece, flecked with specks of pure gold, which bloomed throughout the hills and mountains after the bushfires. Doc was disappointed when the firebells came and went and VE day had not arrived.

We had already arranged for a new depository for the tobacco leaves, sugar and salt and, of course, the precious mail. These were placed in a watering can made of a four-gallon paraffin tin which had been fashioned originally for Doc’s cactus garden. The homemade watering can had been doctored by Geel Piet. A false bottom had been inserted leaving a space which was cunningly fitted with a lid to look like the real bottom. Filled with water the home-made watering can looked perfectly normal, and would even work if it became necessary to appear to be watering plants. It was left standing in Doc’s cactus garden and on my way to breakfast I would simply pass through the garden and put the mail and whatever I’d brought into the false bottom of the can. It was natural enough for me to go to the warders’ mess via Doc’s cactus garden as I often brought new plants for the garden. The warders almost never came this way and habitually used the passage in the interior of the building to get to the mess. We had been using this method for some months as the idea was to make it routine before Doc left and the piano stool with him. The Kommandant understood Doc’s need for his cactus garden and decided it would remain as a memorial to Doc’s stay, also allowing that Geel Piet could maintain it. As I would be continuing on with the boxing squad, the new system was nicely designed to work without Doc.

The writing of the letters proved to be a more difficult task. Geel Piet wrote with great difficulty at a very elementary level. Without Doc to take dictation, the prisoners would be unable to get messages to their families and contacts. This was solved when Geel Piet and I approached Captain Smit to ask if, for half an hour after boxing, I could give Geel Piet a lesson to improve his reading and writing. Captain Smit was reluctant to agree at first but finally gave his consent.

A strange relationship had grown up between the captain and the little coloured man. They only spoke to each other on the subject of boxing and Captain Smit would occasionally belittle a suggestion from Geel Piet to one of the boxers, but you could see that he respected Geel Piet’s judgement and it was only to show who was the boss of the boxing squad. In the months which followed my win against Killer Kroon I continued to enter the ring against bigger, stronger and older opponents, yet had never lost a fight. Captain Smit saw in me the consummate skill Geel Piet had as a coach and secretly admired him for it.

I knew this because Bokkie de Beer said Captain Smit had told his pa that I would be the South African Champion one day, ‘… because, man, he is getting the right coaching from the very beginning.’

Under the guise of learning how to read and write, Geel Piet would stare into a school book and dictate the prisoners’ letters to me. His facility for remembering names and addresses was quite remarkable. He claimed it was easy for him, he could remember the names of the horses and their odds for every Johannesburg maiden handicap since 1918.

We had the new system up and running well before VE day and while it wasn’t quite as foolproof or as convenient as the piano stool, it worked well enough. Geel Piet was too old a lag not to maintain absolute caution and he would never let me get careless or less mindful of the risks involved. For instance, on rainy days I would bring nothing to the prison as the idea of my taking the outside path in the rain to the warders’ mess rather than through the interior passage would seem both silly and, to an alert warder like Borman, suspicious. Nor would the drops be made every day or on the same days. Geel Piet was smart enough to know that little boys are not consistent and so he created this random pattern for my drops even allowing that on some dry days I would take the interior passage to the mess as well. While the system was clumsy and not as convenient as the old one, it was very fortunate that Doc was smart enough to initiate it some time before he left.

One morning, shortly after he had been promoted to lieutenant, Borman wandered into the hall while we were practising. This was simply not done. The Kommandant’s orders were that we should not be disturbed during our morning session, two geniuses at work, so to speak. Lieutenant Borman walked over to us, his boots making a hollow sound on the sprung floor. I continued to play until his foot steps ceased as he came to a halt just behind me.

‘Good morning, Lieutenant Borman,’ we both said together.

‘Morning,’ Borman said in a superior and disinterested way. He was carrying a cane not unlike the one Mevrou had carried and with it he tapped the leg of the piano stool. ‘Stan’ up, man’ he said to me. I rose, and he bent down on his knees and with his index finger and thumb stretched he measured the width of the seat. ‘A bit deep, hey, maybe something lives inside this seat?’ He got down on all fours and put his head under the seat. ‘Maybe a false bottom, hey?’ He tapped the bottom of the piano stool which gave off a hollow sound. ‘Very inter-res-ting, very clever too.’ Doc rose from his stool, inserted the key into my stool and raised the lid. Lieutenant Borman started to rise. Halfway up he could see that the seat was filled with sheets of music. Remaining in a crouched position he stared at Doc and me for what seemed like a long time. ‘You think this is funny, hey? You think this is playing a funny joke on a person?’

‘No, Lieutenant,’ Doc said, his voice surprisingly even. ‘I think only you should ask before you look. Inside lives only Klavier Meister Chopin.’ He opened the lid of his own stool, ‘And here lives also Herr Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and Bach and maybe are visiting also some others, perhaps Haydn, Liszt and Tchaikovsky, but not Strauss, definitely not Strauss. Like you, my dear Lieutenant, Strauss is not welcome when I am teaching.’

Lieutenant Borman rose to his full height. He was a big man with a roll of gut just beginning to spill over his belt, and was used to looking down at people, but Doc’s six foot seven left him five inches short as the two men stared at each other. The lieutenant was the first to drop his eyes from the gaze of Doc’s incredibly steady blue eyes. He laid the cane on top of the Steinway and hitched his pants up. ‘You think I don’t blêrrie know things is going on? You think I’m a blêrrie fool or something, hey? I got time, I got plenty of time, you hear?’ He picked up the cane then brought it up fast and down hard against the open lid of my piano stool, the blow knocking the lid back into place. The sound of the cane against the leather top echoed through the hall. He turned slowly to face Doc again, pointed the cane at Doc so that it touched him lightly on the breast bone as though it were a rapier. ‘Next time you try to be cheeky you come off secon’ bes’. I’m telling you now, you kraut bastard, I’m finish an’ klaar with you both!’ He turned and stormed out, his heavy military boots crashing and echoing through the empty hall.

‘Phew!’ I sighed as I closed the lid of Doc’s piano stool and sat down weakly on my own. Doc also sat down, reached over to the Chopin Nocturne No. 5 in F sharp major on the Steinway music rack and commenced to fan himself with it. He was silent for a while, seemingly lost in thought, then said softly, ‘Soon come the hills and the mountains.’