Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

I was amazed that Solly Goldman, a cockney Jew from London, could read so much into my boxing after watching me for only two rounds. But he was true to his word. By the Christmas holidays I was a vastly improved boxer with a lot more power in both hands. We fought as usual in the Eastern Transvaal Championships that December and Captain Smit couldn’t believe the difference. The championships were in Barberton and it seemed the whole town turned out to see me box. My mother stayed at home but my granpa had a ringside seat with Doc, Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein and old Mr Bornstein. Miss Bornstein told me later that old Mr Bornstein winced every time I threw a punch, while Doc, by now a seasoned campaigner, pretended to take it all in his stride.

I was awarded the trophy for best boxer in the tournament, and afterwards my granpa and I walked home while Mrs Boxall drove Doc to his cottage. We reached the front gate and my granpa patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’ve never been so proud in my life, son,’ he said and then, to cover his embarrassment, reached into his white linen jacket for his pipe.

I had been home a week. The train from Johannesburg arrived at Nelspruit at nine a.m. on the previous Saturday morning. Usually I would then go on to Kaapmuiden and wait until mid-afternoon for the coffee pot to Barberton which would crawl exhausted into town about eight in the evening. But to my delight Gert was waiting for me at Nelspruit.

‘Ag man, we had to put in some papers here about a white drunk and disorderly who attacked a prison gang with a pick handle so Captain Smit said take the car and pick up Peekay at the same time.’ He extended his hand, ‘How goes it, man?’

On the road back to Barberton, Gert told me that Doc had been in a storm in the hills and had caught pneumonia and spent a week in hospital. ‘He’s looking old, Peekay. I reckon he’ll be making his peace pretty soon.’

I was stunned. ‘He’s a tough old bugger, he’ll be okay I’m telling you,’ I said, more to give myself comfort than as a reply.

‘Ja, he’s tough all right, but the old bugger must be eighty-five, maybe more, he can’t last forever, man.’

‘Well, he’s still climbing into the hills, that’s something at least.’

‘Not since he was sick, he talks about it, about when you get back, but I dunno, man, I reckon he’s finish and klaar. I told him I’ll send a gang any time to work in the cactus garden but he says he can still manage. But I dunno, man.’

I said nothing. A huge lump grew in my throat and the road in front of me blurred. The thought of Doc not being there when I returned home from school was too distressing even to contemplate.

‘Those two abafazi at your house look after him like he’s a chief. They spend all their spare time over at his place and they bring food every day and now they even shave him.’

Doc was the most independent person I’d ever known and I knew at once that Gert wasn’t imagining things. If Dee and Dum had to shave him his hands must have become very shaky.

I had bought Dee and Dum a Singer hand machine and they’d turned their sewing into a regular little business making cotton shifts for many of the local house servants. My mother and Marie had shown them how to cut out and how to make buttonholes and hem by hand and they were going great guns. I had learned by accident that Dee and Dum were using their small earnings from sewing to look after Doc who could no longer take in his little girls for music lessons. When I could after that, I would send them money for him. The Bank was a regular source of income and I could generally manage a pound a week and what with one or two other scams Hymie and I had going, between the girls and me, Doc was okay.

Realising that my mother would expect me home on the coffee pot, I asked Gert to drop me off at the bottom of Doc’s road. Hiding my suitcase under some bushes I climbed up to the cottage. He was sitting in the shade on the stoep in his favourite riempie chair and I thought he must be asleep. But he looked up and saw me approaching and rose from his chair a little stiffly, one hand on the small of his back. His six foot seven frame almost touched the rafters of the verandah and he seemed to be swaying slightly as his arms went out to me. I ran up to him and he put his hands on my shoulders and then I could no longer contain myself and I grabbed him fiercely.

‘Please, Doc, please don’t die,’ I sobbed.

Doc and I seldom showed emotion, our love each for the other was so fierce that it burned like a flame inside of us. But now I was suddenly overcome, Gert’s conversation on the way over mixed with the emotion of seeing him standing with his arms outstretched to me, frail as a wisp of smoke, was too much.

His hand came round and patted me on the back, ‘Absoloodle! We have no time to die, Peekay, the hills are still green and waiting, it is not yet time for the crystal cave of Africa.’

I pulled away from him and he sat down in his chair. Still sniffing, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘You’ve been sick, Doc. Gert told me you’ve been sick?’

‘Just a bad cold, Peekay. It was nothing.’

‘It was pneumonia!’

‘Ja this is true, but some pneumonia is big, some is small, this was a pickaninny , a very small pneumonia for sure and absoloodle.’ He rose again from the chair. ‘Come I make coffee, Peekay.’

‘Marie will tell me how bad it was.’

Doc threw up his hands. ‘Marie! Such a person! “Professor you must give your life to Jesus, there is not much time. You must choose between the eternal damnation of hellfire or the love of Jesus Christ.” I think maybe I stay a little longer here, miss, I say to this Marie. I think she was quite a lot disappointed. Ja, I think so,’ Doc said, chuckling as he poured a mug of strong black coffee for me, holding the coffee pot in both hands to stop himself shaking.

We sat on the verandah sipping our coffee in big tin mugs, Doc’s only half full so that he wouldn’t spill it. He was up to all his tricks to hide his frailty. We said very little, I could see Doc was happy I was back and I felt I would give him strength. We talked about the crystal cave of Africa, which Doc now regarded as our greatest discovery.

‘It is good we are together again, Peekay. On Christmas Day I will be eighty-seven years old.’

‘Doc, you’ve got to live until I’m welterweight champion of the world, you’ve got to make it until you’re at least ninety-four or five!’

Doc chuckled at the urgency in my voice and rose slowly from his chair. ‘Come, I show you Pachypodium namaquanum . It grows so big, maybe we have the world champion here also.’

As we walked together into the cactus garden, Doc still tall and straight as Pachypodium namaquanum himself, there seemed to be a little more spring in his step. ‘Next week we will go into the mountains, Peekay, it has been too long.’

We did, mostly skirting the foothills and taking the easy paths, but Doc seemed to gain strength and was much better by the time I returned to school in mid-January.

Nineteen forty-eight was a great year in South Africa’s history. Princess Elizabeth had recently toured and we’d all stood beside the road and waved flags and caught a glimpse of our future Queen as she rode past in a long black open Rolls-Royce.

It was the year South Africa got white bread, an event which excited a lot more people than catching a glimpse of the future Queen of England.

History will tell of how the election of the Nationalist Party, who still hold power in South Africa forty years later, was the turning point when the Afrikaner once again became the dominant force in the country. History is bound to treat this event with great pontification, showing how the struggle between the two white tribes of Africa reached its climax. In fact the turning point came, not because of an ideological clash between white and white, but because the Nationalists promised to bring back white bread to replace the healthier wholewheat loaf which had been introduced during the war. An already overfed white minority elected to vote on its stomach. Within a week of being elected, the Nationalists kept their promise and white South Africans derived great satisfaction from knowing that for once they had a new government which kept its word. Meanwhile, the black South Africans prepared to bend their backs to the sjambok and for the invention of a new game where they voluntarily fell on their heads from the third storey of police headquarters to the pavement below. It was curious that the whites, renowned for their sporting prowess, never learned how to play this game and there isn’t a single instance of a white South African becoming proficient at it. Nobody ever got their Springbok blazer for this new national game, even though a lot of very good heads played it with great courage.