Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

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.