The Power of One (45 page)

When I reached the gymnasium I switched on the lights in the gym and the shower room. The lights above the boxing ring were on the wall opposite and the ring was in semidarkness, but there was enough light for me to see into the box containing the boxing gloves and I quickly selected one of two pairs I liked to use. I went to the showers, where I undressed and put on my boxing singlet, shorts, socks, and boots. Then I loosely tied the laces of the gloves together and slung them around my neck for Doc to lace up for me later.

I returned to find Doc still alone in the hall, the expression of concern showing clearly on his face as he absentmindedly gloved me up. “It is too late to wait longer, we must go now. I will tell Geel Piet I am very cross because this happens.”

The door I'd used to enter the building couldn't be opened from the inside, so we left the hall and walked down the long passage into the main administration building that led out to the parade ground. We passed through the small hallway where I had first entered the prison four years earlier. The lights were out in what was then Lieutenant Smit's office but which was now occupied by Lieutenant Borman. I allowed Doc to walk ahead and moved over to the service window and peered for a moment into the darkened office. In the half light I could see where Klipkop sat and next to him the larger desk which was Lieutenant Borman's. My eyes wandered around the room and stopped when they rested on a thin strip of light showing under the door of the interrogation room, which led off from the main office. The door must have been slightly ajar, because I heard the unmistakable thud of a blow and a sudden sharp groan such as men make when they receive a hard punch to the solar plexus. It was not an unusual occurrence, but it seemed inappropriate on this full moon night of the playing of the “Concerto of the Great Southland.”

The prisoners were already seated in their marked-off sections when we arrived, the warders walking up and down the corridors striking their
sjamboks
against the sides of their legs and looking businesslike. The prisoners avoided looking at them, almost as though they were not there. Talking was not allowed, but as we passed I could see the people smiling, and a low murmur swept over the seated prisoners as Doc and I stepped onto the platform.

The kommandant arrived shortly after we did and stood on the platform to address the prisoners. Lieutenant Borman was to have done the translation into Fanagalo but appeared not to have arrived. The kommandant was clearly annoyed by this, and after a few minutes, during which he looked at his watch repeatedly, he started to speak in Afrikaans.

“Listen to me, you hear,” he said, and I quickly translated into Zulu. He looked surprised. “Can you translate, Peekay?” I nodded. “Okay, then I will speak and stop after every sentence so you can catch up.”

The kommandant was uncomfortable talking to the prisoners, and he spoke too loudly and too harshly. “This concert is a gift to you all from the professor, who is not a dirty criminal like all of you, you hear? I don't know why an important person like him wants to make a concert for kaffirs, not only kaffirs, but criminals as well. But that's what he wants, so you got it because I am a man of my word. I just want you to know it won't happen again and I don't want any trouble, you hear, you just listen to the peeano and you sing, then we march you back to your cells.” He turned to me, snorting nervously through his nostrils. “That's all. You tell them what I said now.”

I said that the kommandant welcomed them and that the professor welcomed them and thanked them for coming to his great singing
indaba.
That he hoped that they would sing each tribe better than the other so they would be proud. That they should watch my hands, and I took my boxing gloves off to demonstrate the hand movements. When I had finished, the sea of faces in front of me were smiling fit to burst, and then spontaneously they started to clap. “You done a good job, Peekay,” the kommandant said, pleased at this spontaneous response to his speech.

Doc played the “Concerto for the Great Southland” through entirely and the prisoners listened quietly with nods of approval as they heard the melodies of their own tribal songs. At the end they all clapped furiously.

I then stood up and showed them how I would bring each tribe into its part and stop them by fading their voices out or simply ending a song or a passage with a downward stroke of the hands, a slicing gesture. I asked them to raise their hands if they understood, and a sea of hands rose.

Doc played the prelude, which was a musical medley of each of the melodies, and then I brought in the Sotha singers. Their voices melded into the night as though they had caused the early summer air to vibrate with a deep harmony before they broke into song. It was the most beautiful male singing I had ever heard. They seemed instinctively to understand what was required of them and followed every gesture as though anticipating it. They were followed by the Ndebele, who carried a more strident melody and whose voices rose deep and true, repeating the thread of the song carried by a single high-pitched male voice, chasing the single voice, sometimes even catching it to surround it and nourish it with beautiful harmony before allowing it to escape once more to carry the song forward again. The Swazis followed, as beautiful as any, then the Shangaans. Each tribe sounded different, seemingly building on the tribe before, each separated by a common refrain that was hauntingly African and seemed somehow to be a mixture of all. The Zulus took the last part, which rose in power and majesty as they sang the victory song of the great Shaka, using the flats of their hands to bang on the ground as the mighty Zulu
impi
had done with their feet, until the parade ground appeared to shake. The other tribes soon got the rhythm, and they too hit the ground to add to the effect. The concerto lasted for half an hour, the last part being the by now familiar refrain which all the tribes hummed in a glorious finale. Never had a composer's work had a stranger debut and never a greater one. Eventually the composition would be played by philharmonic and symphony orchestras around the world, accompanied by some of the world's most famous choirs, but it would never sound better than it did under the African moon in the prison yard when three hundred and fifty black inmates lost themselves in their pride and love for their tribal lands.

Doc rose from the Steinway and turned to the mass of black faces. He was crying unashamedly and fumbling for his bandanna, and many of the Africans were weeping with him. Then, without warning, came a roar of approval from the people that

would have been impossible to stop. Doc would later tell me that it was the greatest moment of his life, but what they were saying was “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Tadpole Angel! Tadpole Angel!” chanted over and over again.

The kommandant looked worried, and some of the warders had started to slap the
sjamboks
against the ground. “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!” Doc had risen from his seat to take a bow, and I jumped up onto it and started to wave my hands to indicate that the chanting must stop. Almost instantly there was silence. Doc looked up surprised, not sure what had happened. I said, “The great music wizard and I thank the people for singing, you are all men who tonight have brought honor to your tribes and you have brought great honor also to the great musical wizard and to me.” I would have lacked the maturity to make such a speech in English, but the African tongue is gracious and by its very nature fits such words easily. “You must go quietly now in the names of your wives and your children, for the Boers grow restless.” My voice was a thin piping sound in the night.

Suddenly a shower of stars sprayed across the sky above the town and then another and another, single red and green stars that burst high, cascades that danced in the heavens. The prisoners looked up in awe, some even covering their heads against the magic. A warder came hurrying up to the kommandant and whispered in his ear, and the kommandant turned toward Doc and then extended his hand. “You are free to go, Professor. The war in Europe is over. The Germans have surrendered.” He pointed in the direction of the town. “See the fireworks, the blery
rooineks
are already celebrating.” A final cascade of stars burst against the dark sky, and the black men cried out in awe; they had never seen such a happening before.

Was this not the final sign? Even the heavens spoke for the Tadpole Angel, spoke for all to see. The myth of the Tadpole Angel was complete. Now it could only grow and shape as legends are wont to do. Nothing I would ever do could change things. I had crossed the line to where only the greatest of the medicine men have ever been, perhaps even further, for not even the greatest were known by all the tribes and honored by all of the people. I had become a legend.

Each tribe rose when it was commanded to do so and marched silently away until the parade ground was empty but.for the guards who manned the walls and the kommandant.

“Magtig!
I have never seen such a thing in all my life, man,” the kommandant said, shaking his head. He turned to Doc. “Your music was beautiful, man, the most beautiful I have ever heard, and such singing we will never hear again. Peekay, someday you will make a great kommandant. I have never seen such command of black men. It is as though you are some kind of witch doctor, hey?”

Quite suddenly there was a single voice in the night as though from the direction of the gymnasium. “Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!” I heard it just the once, and the sad voices in my head began chattering; the trouble in this place had returned.

Doc was overwhelmed by the news of the German surrender and the excitement of the concert, and he sat on the piano stool for a long time, sniffling into his bandanna. The kommandant bade us goodnight and the floodlights had once more been switched off so that the moon, which had risen high in the sky, ruled the night again. Then I remembered Geel Piet. I turned to Doc, who looked up at me at the same time. We were thinking the same thing.

“Geel Piet never came. I cannot understand it. He would not have stayed away,” Doc said. I could see he felt guilty for not having thought about his absence sooner.

There was a scrunch of footsteps on gravel, and soon Gert appeared out of the darkness. “Captain Smit says it's late and school tomorrow, so I must drive you home now, Peekay.”

I was surprised, for I had expected to walk home, as always. “I'll go and get changed and take the gloves back,” I said, and I left Doc sitting on the piano stool, staring at his hands.

“It was a wonderful concert, Professor,” I heard Gert say in his halting English as I ran into the dark toward the gymnasium. I entered the side door to the gym and switched on the light, moving past the wooden horse and the medicine balls and giving the punching bag a straight left and a right hook. The big wooden box in which we kept the gloves was just to the side of the ring. I had tied the laces of my gloves together after the concert and had strung them around my neck as before. I secretly felt this made me seem more like a fighter. Now I took the gloves off and threw them toward the box from halfway across the gym. It was almost a good shot, with one glove landing inside the wooden box while the other hung over the rim. I moved over to drop the glove in and suddenly, with a certainty I knew always to trust, I became aware that something was terribly wrong. I ran over to the wall opposite and turned the ring lights on. For a split second the sudden blaze of light blinded me; then I saw the body in the center of the ring.

Geel Piet lay facedown, as though he had fallen, his arms stretched out to either side of him. His head lay in a pool of blood where he had hemorrhaged from the nose and mouth. Without thinking, I jumped into the ring, screaming, although I could hear no sound coming from me. I fell to my knees beside him and started to shake him, then I rose and took him by one of his arms and tried to pull him to his feet. I began bawling at him, “Get up, please get up! If you'll get up you'll be alive again!” But the little yellow man's body just flopped at the end of his arm and his head bounced in the pool of blood which splattered in an explosion of color around his face. Inside me the loneliness bird cackled, “He's dead . . . he's dead! He'll never be alive again!” I kept pulling him and trying to make him come alive. “Please, Geel Piet! Please get up! If you can get up, you'll be alive again! It's true! I promise it's true! Please!”

There was a trail of blood as I pulled him across the ring. And then I saw that in his other hand he held the picture of Captain Smit, Doc, Gert, myself, and himself. The corner of the photograph covering Captain Smit's head was soaked in blood. I dropped his hand and fell over his body and sobbed and sobbed. Then I felt myself being lifted up from Geel Piet's body by Captain Smit, who held me like a baby in his arms and rocked me as I sobbed uncontrollably into his chest. “Shhhh, don't cry, champ, don't cry,” he whispered as he rocked and rocked me. “Shhhh. I will avenge you, this I promise. Don't cry, champ, don't cry, little
boetie.”

The festivities in honor of the inspector of prisons were held on the following Saturday night. Doc tried to get out of playing; the death of Geel Piet had upset him dreadfully, and the idea of returning to the prison, even for the concert, filled him with apprehension. The kommandant didn't quite see it the same way; Geel Piet was simply another kaffir. “No, man! Fair is fair! I gave you your kaffir concert, now I want my brigadier concert! I'm a fair man, and I kept my word. I let you leave the prison the morning after Germany surrendered. A man's word is his word.”