Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

After orange juice and sandwiches I was free. Some days I’d spend the afternoon with Mrs Boxall or help Granpa in the garden or play a little snooker down at the Impala Hotel with John Hopkins and Geoffrey Scruby and some of the other guys all of whom, like me, were going to boarding school. They’d drink a couple of beers and smoke a little and we’d all generally act a bit tough with each other, though I was always in training and neither smoked nor drank.

I was beginning to understand how intellect separates men. For common ground we would talk rugby and cricket and girls. Daily we destroyed the reputations of the girls who’d been in class with us in primary school and who were now supposedly screwing like rattlesnakes. We never quite worked out with whom, it was always supposed to be someone older than ourselves, like Paul Everingham and Bob Goodhead who were in form six at Jeepe High and both had their school colours for rugby and cricket.

Puberty had taken a fierce and urgent grip on all of us so that the fantasy of fucking was never more than an unuttered sentence away. But my mind, when it wasn’t on sex, was different. I guess it had always been, but now the dichotomy was beginning to show. I didn’t feel superior, there was nothing to be superior about, my mind simply seemed to gaze over different intellectual landscapes. I dare say had I not been a boxer and rugby player and greatly respected for the former, the rest of the chaps in Barberton would have dismissed me as a brain and a bit of a loner.

I found Doc, Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein and old Mr Bornstein a source of stimulation, but the adult mind has lost much of its craziness, its zany quality and I missed the verbal jousting that Hymie supplied in our day-to-day relationship at school. In fact, when I got back to school after the holidays, it would take me a couple of days to get my verbal riposte sharp and my timing right again.

‘Christ, Peekay, your brain’s addled by too much deep and meaningful discussion about the weather and the crops and whether the locusts will come again this year!’ Hymie would tease. Atherton, Pissy and Cunning-Spider also shared an intelligence which would readily mix into a really good verbal over an abstract point simply for the love of argument itself.

Hymie would contend that anything, no matter how banal, could be raised to the level of intelligent debate if the minds which attended to it were good enough. He told the story of the little cobbler in a shtetl in Russia who was spreading honey on a piece of bread when the bread fell to the floor. To his amazement the bread fell right side up. ‘How can this be?’ he said, and with the slice of bread in his hand he ran to consult the rabbi and the village elders. ‘We are Jews in Russia, how can it be that I spread honey on my bread and when it fell to the floor it landed right side up? Since when did luck such as this come to a Jew?’ The rabbi and the elders pondered the point for several days, consulting the Torah frequently. Finally they called the little cobbler to the synagogue. The rabbi pronounced the verdict, ‘The answer my boy is quite clear, you honeyed your bread on the wrong side.’

We had all cawed and moaned at the story but Hymie, as usual, had made his point, good conversational debate was an end in itself and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

That Easter holiday Doc and I had planned an overnight hike to a waterfall we knew about some twelve miles past Saddleback Pass. As waterfalls go it wasn’t a major one but it tumbled down through an area of rainforest which, in our only previous visit, we’d come across too late to explore properly. The cliffs rising above the forest looked interesting and Doc was sure we’d find succulents and several species of dwarf aloe in the rocky crags and ledges. I had been concerned when Doc had suggested the hike, it was a good twenty miles across the mountains and Doc was over eighty. Just how far over no one knew and while he was as lean as a twist of liquorice and tough as a mountain goat it was a hard day’s march by any standards, and in the notes he had made on our previous trip nearly eight years earlier, he’d noted that the hike had been an exhausting one.

He had answered my protests with typical Doc logic. ‘Peekay, if not now it will be never again. Our work here is unfinished, the topography, see I have made a drawing here in my notes, suggests limestone in the cliffs. If this is true it is rare, almost impossible, some geological freak happenings maybe?

Doc knew he’d stirred my need for adventure, and the prospect of finding something that shouldn’t be there allowed me to brush my concern aside and agree that we should undertake the trip.

Doc had managed to postpone his little girls for Friday and we set out at dawn with our blanket rolls, billy cans and enough food for two days, as well as a hurricane lamp, Doc’s eight-battery Eveready torch, rope, a small hammer and a dozen homemade metal spikes hooked at the ends to secure the rope if necessary. Gert had made these for Doc in the prison metal shop soon after he’d left prison and they’d been invaluable for scrambling up rock faces now that Doc wasn’t as young a mountain goat as he pretended to be.

By the time the sun rose over the escarpment and filled the de Kaap valley, we had climbed the foothills and were into the mountains proper. The aloe and thorn scrub were replaced by scree and tussock grass, turning to rocky crags where the wind can be cold even on a hot day. We often saw an eagle high above us seemingly drifting without purpose, carried by the currents of air. With a stop for lunch of cheese and cream crackers, washed down by a billy of sweet black tea, we crossed Saddleback Pass in the early afternoon and started the climb down the other side. By late afternoon we’d reached the peculiar formation of mountain cliffs rising above the deep kloof of rainforest Doc had noted in his diary.

We made camp beside a mountain brook flowing from the waterfall which dropped like a bridal veil down the far edge of the cliffs above us. I had chosen our campsite on the edge of the rainforest where an overhanging rock protected us from the wind. It can get bitterly cold during the night in the mountains and we set about collecting firewood before we lost the light. High above us we first heard and then saw a troop of baboons climbing the strange cliff face and running along the white ledges eroded into the face of the rock. Their urgent barking echoed down into the kloof where we’d made our camp.

Doc put his field glasses onto the cliff. ‘It’s too much shadow now, but I think tomorrow we find up there for sure something.’

Darkness comes quickly in the mountains and less than an hour after we’d arrived the sun had set, throwing the deep kloof into shadow. Even though there was still some light I got the fire for supper going, the dry branches crackling and popping with plenty of smoke to ward off the mosquitoes which always seem to come from nowhere moments after sunset. I set about making our supper while Doc washed at the stream. Chopping an onion and two tomatoes into a billy can, I then upended a can of bully beef into the billy, mashing it all together with my hunting knife, ready for when the fire would glow down so that it would cook slowly. I’d already trapped two large sweet potatoes under the unmade fire so that we’d be able to pluck them out of the cooking embers later for dessert. The rainforest grew dark first, the clear outlines of the giant tree ferns smudged and then blackened into darkness while high up in a yellow wood tree a couple of green loeries called out one last time before they called it a day. Next the valley on the edge of the forest where we’d camped dimmed down for the night, closing out the light, blurring rock and bush and tree. Finally the sky on the high ridge above us pulled a dark sheet over us and pinned it with stars. The distant sound of falling water from the falls seemed to emphasise the silence. Doc spoke quietly in the night. ‘No one has written a great symphony or even a concerto about Africa. Why is this so?’