Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

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 towards 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 towards 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 ring. I moved over to drop the glove in and suddenly, with a certainty I knew always to trust, became aware that something was terribly wrong. I ran over to the wall opposite and turned the ring light on. For a split second the sudden blaze of light blinded me; then I saw the body in the centre of the ring.

Geel Piet lay face down, 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 haemorrhaged 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 colour 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 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 brother.’

The festivities in honour 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.’

Doc’s return to his cottage had been an emotional business. Dee and Dum had scrubbed and polished and his home had never been as clean and neat. Gert dropped Doc at the bottom of the hill as the roadway to the cottage had eroded over the four years he’d been away and it wasn’t a good idea to try to drive to the top. Gert reported the road would not allow the truck to return the Steinway; the very next day Klipkop sent a prison gang to repair the road. They worked on it furiously so that it would be ready on the day after the concert for the piano to be returned.

Doc had mentioned on his way home that his first job would be to extend the cactus garden. Gert told Captain Smit who instructed the warder ganger that, after they’d completed the road repairs, the work gang should construct the new terraces Doc required.

Mrs Boxall had ordered groceries from H. C. Duncan, the town’s leading grocery shop, and had made sure that the municipal ratcatcher had been up to the cottage to check the outside lavatory hole to see that no snakes or anything else had made their home down there in the past four years. He had dropped a bucket of chlorine pellets down the hole and for the first week you had to hold your nose against the sharp fumes when you entered. When Dee and Dum unpacked the box of groceries from H. C. Duncan they found that Mrs Boxall had included a parcel of her own which contained one of those really soft rolls of toilet paper. Goodness knows where she found it, because only the hard kind had been available since the war. Dee and Dum held the roll against their cheeks and exclaimed at its softness, marvelling that paper such as this could be used for such a silly purpose. I must say they had a point, Doc would have agreed, for he only ever used the Goldfields News .

Mrs Boxall also gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker for Doc which she said Mr Goodhead of the Barberton Bottle Store had been fearfully sweet and let her have. After my jaw incident and all the mentions I’d heard of the demon drink down at the Apostolic Faith Mission I wasn’t at all sure that Mrs Boxall was doing the right thing. I carried the whisky up to the cottage convinced that at any moment the Lord might send a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky to strike the bottle from my hand and possibly take me along with it. If God could part the Red Sea then striking a bottle of Johnnie Walker with a bolt from the blue seemed like a simple enough thing for Him to do.

For several weeks before Doc’s release Mrs Boxall had been sending the boy from the library to the cottage with his bike basket filled with Doc’s books. She referred to these books as not really the town’s property but simply ‘borrowed for the duration’. When Doc returned to his cottage on the morning after the people’s concert he found it exactly as it had been some four years before, with only the Steinway missing. He told me some weeks later that he sat down on the stoep and wept and wept because his friends had all been so lovely to him.

After school on the first day of Doc’s freedom I found him in his cactus garden cutting a dead trunk from a patch of halfmens; their proper name is Pachypodium namaquanum and they stand about seven feet tall and look like large, prickly elephant trunks sticking out of the ground.

I made coffee and we sat on the stoep for a while. Neither of us had mentioned Geel Piet, both unwilling to share our individual grief. After a while Doc brought up the loss by saying, ‘No more letters for the people. No more anything.’ Then we talked about the garden for a while and Doc pointed to an overgrown hedge of krans aloe which he had originally used as a windbreak and which was now beginning to intrude into the garden. ‘We are being invaded by Aloe arborescens . I will attack soon, ja in one week.’ I could see he loved the idea of making plans again, of being free to decide the divisions of the days and the weeks ahead.