The Power of One (17 page)

“Nee, nee,
Mevrou Hettie, I have already had breakfast,” I protested.

“Nonsense, child, you are no bigger than a sparrow. What will your mama say if I hand you over like this? We must feed you up and that's all there is to it.”

Hennie Venter left us to fetch breakfast and I imagined Big Hettie feeding me up in the next eight hours so that I arrived in Barberton as big as, if not bigger than, the Judge. There my granpa would be, looking around for a real skinny kid to get off the train, and there I'd be, big as the Judge. What a nasty shock he would get! “I already ate a whole plate of things, Mevrou Hettie,” I said again.

“Never mind, Peekay, a little more never hurt. You've got to be like the bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, they eat as much as they can get in the good times till their bottoms stick out like their stomachs. Then when the bad times come they live off their own fat.” She chuckled softly. “I reckon a person like me could go a whole year, or even more, living off their own fat, but you, my poor little blossom, I doubt if you'll get to Kaapmuiden.”

Hennie Venter returned with a large tray of food, which he carefully balanced on Big Hettie's stomach. He left us to serve breakfast to the other passengers in the dining car, closing the door behind him and promising to return later.

The tray went up and down as Big Hettie breathed. She could only see what to take from a plate on a down breath, for on an up breath the tray raised above her eye level. I managed to eat one more sausage. Big Hettie didn't seem to notice and polished off my breakfast as well. Though when she finished she said, “You'll never get to play rugby for the Springboks if you eat like a bird, Peekay.”

“That's okay, Mevrou Hettie,” I answered. “I'm going to be a welterweight, which is not so big.”

She seemed amused. “Just like that good-for-nothing Hoppie Groenewald, huh? Well you could do worse, I suppose. Not a bad bone in his body, that one. He could have made it in the big time, but he doesn't hate. Not even kaffirs, which isn't natural.”

I was shocked. Hoppie hadn't said anything to me about the necessity to hate.

“How do you learn to hate, Mevrou Hettie?” I was fearful that it might prove to be something beyond the ability of a five-, really six-year-old. Perhaps that's why Hoppie hadn't mentioned this hate business. But hadn't he said I was a natural? If I was a natural, then I would be able to learn it for sure.

“The killer instinct. He hasn't got the killer instinct. You can tell when a fighter's got it. It's proper hate, like the Boers hate the
rooineks
. It has to be blind hate like that, them or us, him or me, nothing less. Hoppie Groenewald just never learned to hate.”

“Then I will learn to hate also,” I said with conviction.

Big Hettie rocked with laughter. “Plenty of time for that, Peekay. Better still to concentrate on love, there is already too much hate in this land of ours. This country has been starved of love too long.”

I wasn't listening; my mind was busy with the need to learn to hate. “Didn't Hoppie hate Jackhammer Smit?”

“That was pride. Hoppie has plenty of that. And courage and even brains.” Big Hettie suddenly sensed my anxiety. “Look here, man, maybe that's enough.” She chuckled softly, “He sure outfoxed that big ape Smit!”

I cast my mind back to when I had done the Judge's homework, just like that! I had no doubt I had brains. But during the torture sessions I hadn't shown any pride and precious little courage, although I had to admit to myself I wasn't at all sure what pride meant. Maybe I was fatally flawed? Only brains and nothing to go with them?

“How do you learn to have pride and courage, Mevrou Hettie?”

“My goodness me, we are full of questions, Peekay. Now let me see.” She thought for a few moments and then replied, “Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.” She looked up to see the confusion in my face. “Never mind, Peekay, the understanding will come suddenly when you need it.”

I wasn't at all sure about that. Big Hettie's advice seemed downright stupid to me. I knew already that camouflage was the only way, that bowing your head with the rest was the best way to survive. Take the incident with Miss du Plessis, hadn't I raised my head then and she damn near cut it off? And Granpa Chook, if he hadn't shat in the Judge's mouth, we'd still be together.

There were no two ways about it, when you stood out in the crowd, trouble was sure to follow.

Maybe there was something more to understand; the world of grown-ups seemed very complicated. I was good at remembering things, so I tucked Big Hettie's words away. Someday they might make sense.

Nanny was the only grown-up I knew who answered questions properly, and she wasn't really a grown-up because she was a nanny. When you asked her a thing she would answer with a story or a song and when she hadn't an answer she would say, “That is a matter for later finding out.” She was always right, sooner or later the answer would come from somewhere. It seemed to me that white people grown-ups always had to have an answer on the spot. Like Pik Botha, they lived most of their lives being miserable and asking “Why me?” all the time. Nanny would say, “Sadness has a season and will pass.” Then she would laugh and hug me and say, “But it isn't the season for sadness yet.”

I kept wetting the towel for Big Hettie and got her two Aspro from her handbag. She told me to scrounge around because she might have some peppermints in there. I found half a packet, and she said, “Give me a couple and try one yourself, Peekay.”

I took two large round white peppermints out of the pack and put them in her hand and popped a third into my mouth. At first nothing. Then, pow! I lasted about two good sucks and then spat the peppermint into my hand. It was like swallowing fire! I watched Big Hettie suck away happily. Talk about courage! But I must say, those peppermints cleaned up her breath.

Big Hettie and I just lay there, she on the floor and me on the bunk. She talked about her life, which seemed to have been quite a good one, but with some sadness also. Mostly she talked about men.

“Men, Peekay, are a good woman's downfall. Most of them are rotten, but you've got to have them anyway. Without a man a woman's life is more rotten than with one. It's no use pretending you don't care, that you're stronger than a man. Because even if it is true, it means nothing except loneliness. Men are pigs who sleep with kaffir women and get drunk and beat you up. But a good beating never hurt, and sometimes it's the only way those stupid men can show you they love you. It's stupid, heh?”

I tried to imagine a man beating up Big Hettie. “My granpa couldn't beat up a flea,” I said, trying to comfort her. Big Hettie stood six feet seven inches and weighed nobody knows how much. Even the Judge with all his storm troopers couldn't get the better of her.

“Once I loved this little flyweight,” she continued. “That's how I learned about boxing, Peekay. It was during the Great Depression and you couldn't find work nowhere, man. Me and that little flyweight, we used to travel all over the Transvaal and once to the Orange Free State to fight. There was never another flyweight to fight, the Boers like to see the bigger men, and so he always had to fight way out of his division. A middleweight usually. If he was lucky he'd get a welterweight, but it didn't happen very often.

“That little flyweight of mine was game and lie loved to fight, but you can't give away that much weight and he used to take some terrible poundings and nearly always lost. Afterward I'd patch him up and he'd make me talk to him about the fight. Blow by blow, where he was good and where he went wrong. I'd tell him how he was always winning, which was true, he'd be a mile ahead on points and then the big ape he was fighting would catch him a lucky shot and put him away. And he used to look at me and say, ‘Next time, Hettie, you'll see, I'll win for sure.'

“And then we would buy a bottle of cheap brandy and drive out of the town we were in and sit in the back of the Model T and get drunk. When he was drunk it was his turn to replay the fight, only he'd get it all mixed up in his head and he'd think he was still in the fight and I was his opponent and he'd beat the shit out of me. And I always let him, because he had to have some wins for his pride.

“Then when I had taken a beating and he had counted me out, we would drink some more and replay the fight again, which this time he won fair and square. We would then find some nice place behind some bushes and take our blankets and make love. I'm telling you, Peekay, most merx can't get it up when they're drunk, but not my flyweight, he could go all night. What a man he was. They were good times. Oh, oh, such good times.”

Big Hettie's story worried me no end. Here it seemed big always beat small, except in a setup. “Hoppie was smaller than Jackhammer Smit and he beat him fair and square?” I said somewhat defensively.

“
Ja
, that is true, Hoppie has brains. My flyweight had mashed potato for brains. But I loved that little flea bite until the day he died from taking on one big ape too many.” Big Hettie's eyes welled with tears. “He was coming out for the sixth round when he staggered and fell. The crowd booed and booed, but he never faked anything in his life, and I knew something terrible had happened. He had a brain hemorrhage, just like that. I carried him out of the hall in my arms and we sat on the grass outside in the fresh air with lots of stupid people in a circle looking down at us. But I didn't see any of them, just my darling little flyweight. And then he died right there in my arms.” Big Hettie was sobbing softly.

“Don't cry, Mevrou Hettie, please don't cry.” I quoted Nanny, “Sadness has a season and will pass.”

She stopped sobbing after a while and dabbed at her eyes with the damp towel. “He was the best. The very best of men.” She said it so softly I knew she was speaking to herself.

We talked about this and that deep into the hot morning. Big Hettie did most of the chatting as I had developed into a listener. Once I had been a regular chatterbox, but school had changed all that. A person of my status was not expected to talk much, and besides, listening is a good camouflage. I soon discovered that it is also an art. You learn not simply to listen to what people say. It's what people don't say that is important. If you listen hard enough you can hear the most amazing things going on behind the speaker's voice. Quite often there is a regular conniption going on. It takes years to make a good translation of this secondary soundtrack, and as a small child I could only define it as friendly or otherwise. For camouflage reasons this is often sufficient.

Around noon Hettie dozed off, this time her breathing was much better. Outside the compartment window the bushveld baked in the hot sun. The sunlight flattened the country in the foreground and smudged the horizon in a haze of heat. It is a time when the cicadas become so active that they fill the flat, hot space with a sound so constant it sings like silence in the brain. While I couldn't hear them for the clickity-clack of the carriage wheels, I knew they were out there, brushing the heat into their green membraned wings, energizing for the long sleep when their pupae would lie buried in the dark earth, sometimes for years, until a conjunction of the moon and the right soil temperature creates the moment for them to emerge and once again fill the noon space.

In the heat the compartment seemed to float, lifting off the silver rails and moving through time and space. Through hours and days and weeks and years, off the blue planet, past the moon and the sun, into centuries and millennia and eons. Skirting planets, weaving through the stars. Coming finally to a black hole in space, further even than the mind can think, beyond even the curve of infinity and the silver cord that rings the cosmos. There I would remain safely hidden until I could grow up to be welterweight champion of the world.

“Are you asleep, Peekay?” I opened my eyes to see Big Hettie looking at me. “A glass of water, if you please.” She ran her tongue over her dry lips and removed the towel from her forehead. She handed me the towel and I gave her the glass of water, which she gulped greedily. She handed the glass back and I refilled it. “You're one in a thousand, Peekay,” she said gratefully.

I wet the towel, folded it, and placed it over her head. “One in maybe even a million,” she sighed. I could see she was restless and kept licking her lips. “What's for lunch, do you think?”

“Meneer Venter hasn't been yet, Mevrou Hettie,” I answered.

“Ag,
man, I didn't mean
that
lunch. A person can't eat a train lunch. Breakfast is tolerable, lunch unbearable, and dinner unthinkable. Open up my hamper, Peekay, and let a person hear what is inside.” She laughed. “I'll tell you something, I wasn't concentrating too well when I packed it last night.”

I withdrew the slim bamboo rod threaded through the wicker and opened the large basket. Inside was enough food to feed an army. “Tell me what we got in there, darling,” Big Hettie said anxiously.

“Two roasted chickens, nearly a full leg of mutton, some corned beef, three mangoes, lots of cold potatoes and sweet potatoes too, two oranges, and there is also a big tin.”

“Thank the Lord, I brought the tin,” Big Hettie said with obvious relief. “Open it, Peekay. Quick, man, open the tin!” I was surprised at the urgency in her voice. I lifted the large round tin out of the hamper and, clamping it between my knees, struggled to remove the lid. It came away suddenly, sending me sprawling backward on the bunk, and the tin slid over the edge of the bunk, spilling half of a large chocolate cake onto Big Hettie's stomach. In two swift movements her arm rose and fell, the edge of her hand slicing through the thick layer of deep brown chocolate icing and rending the cake into two large pieces. She had started to pant and her eyes were glazed as she crammed her mouth full of cake. She grunted and snorted and even moaned as she demolished the first hunk and then reached greedily for the second.