The Power of One (43 page)

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. Among the three of us we knew very little about women. Geel Piet had 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 had gotten 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
frduleins
who demanded to see him after concerts and came to the conservatory 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 decolletage, 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. 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 that awaited the two of them.

Mr. Isaac Bornstein had arrived from Germany in 1936. He had escaped Hitler's persecution of the Jews 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 with Jews and kaffirs as the corrupters of pure Afrikanerdom. The war had helped them to grow into a powerful secret society that would one day become the covert rulers 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
veltkornet
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. Dingaan, 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 recognized 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 up 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 had 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 had 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 his 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 bush fires. 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 that had originally been fashioned for Doc's cactus garden. The homemade watering can had been doctored by Geel Piet. A false bottom had been inserted, leaving a space that was cunningly fitted with a lid to look like the real bottom. Filled with water, the homemade 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 else I'd brought into the false bottom of the can. It was natural enough for me to go to the warder's mess via Doc's cactus garden, as I often bought 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 had 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 colored man. They spoke to each other only 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 judgment and it was only to show who was the boss of the boxing squad. In the months that 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 schoolbook 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 warder's mess rather than the interior passage would seem both silly and, to an alert warder like Kronkie, suspicious. Nor would the drops be made every day or on the same days. Geel Piet was smart enough to know that little boys don't do the same thing all the time, 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 fortuitous 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 practicing. 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 footsteps ceased as he came to a halt just behind me.

“Good morning, Lieutenant Borman,” Doc and I 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?”