The Power of One (24 page)

The concert would always end with the All Saints Anglican Church choir singing “White Cliffs of Dover” with the audience joining in. To show the
rooinek
majority where their loyalty lay, the warders and their families would leave the town hall prior to the mass rendition of “White Cliffs.” This would be accompanied by some booing and catcalls from less well bred members of the remaining audience.

Germany had covertly helped the Boers during the Boer War. Apart from arms and ammunition sold for profit, she had donated food and medical supplies and had even sent medical orderlies and doctors to the harassed Boers, who, due to the British scorched-earth policy, were dying less from the aim of the British Lee-Metfords than from a land which could no longer feed them. To the Boers, Germany was an old and trusted friend in a country where a contract was a handshake and declared friendship a bond that continued beyond the grave. Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Reformed Church, where Jews were thought of as Christ killers, had always existed, and the concept of the superiority of some races over others was never for one moment in doubt. In this context, to many Boers Adolf Hitler was only doing his job and, to some minds, doing it damn well.

After the warders and other Nazi sympathizers had walked out, the remainder of the audience would stand up, lock arms, and sing “White Cliffs of Dover” at least twice to confirm doubly their love for a Britain facing her darkest hour. To bring the concert to a tearful close, the concert party, with warders and other Afrikaners missing, would gather on the stage, each of us holding a long-stemmed rose delivered earlier by me as a sign of our family's inherent good breeding. With the misty-eyed audience fresh from the mawkishly sentimental journey to a country most of us would never see, we stood to rigid attention while a scratchy 78-RPM record rendered “God Save the King.” Whereupon the cast hurled the long-stemmed roses into the audience.

My granpa, my mother, and I then walked home, having politely refused the mayor's invitation to the traditional postconcert party for the cast at the Phoenix Hotel. Worldly parties, typified by one such as this, where drinking, smoking, and dancing took place, were pretty high up on the Lord's banned list.

The next issue of
The Goldfields News
would report the concert, with the warder walkout splashed across the front page. Tongues wagged for days. Important people suggested that the military be brought in to wipe out this nest of Nazi vipers or that the prison be moved to Nelspruit, an Afrikaans town forty miles away, where most of the prisoners had probably come from in the first place.

My granpa, with his experience in fighting the Boers, had once been canvassed for his opinion by Mr. Hankin, the editor of
The Goldfields News.
But they hadn't printed what he'd said. What he'd said was: “I spent most of the Boer War shitting my breeches as a stretcher bearer. The only thing those buggers do better than music is shoot. Without them the concert wouldn't be worth a cardboard boot.”

Maybe Mr. Hankin thought his newspaper gave the family enough publicity, because he never again asked my granpa for his opinion on anything, even though the prison warders did the same thing at every concert for the duration of the war. Mrs. Boxall, who was the town's correspondent on matters cultural, could always be relied on to devote most of her column, “Clippings from a Cultured Garden by Fiona Boxall,” to my performance. For days after it appeared, my mother was in a state of dazed euphoria and I was conscripted to deliver a bunch of roses to the library twice a week for a month.

In the process of keeping faith with my mother, Doc instilled in me an abiding love for music. What my clumsy hands could never play, I could hear quite clearly in my head. A love of music was, among his many gifts to me, perhaps the most important of them all, and he continued to teach me even after his calm and gentle life was thrown into turmoil and the joy of being alone with him on the high cliffs and
krartse
was stolen from my childhood.

I
had been enrolled at the local school when the new term began at the end of January. Six was the starting age for grade one, but after a few days it was clear that my year spent in a mixed-age class at boarding school had put me well ahead of the rest of the kids. I was pushed up to grade three, where I easily held my own against kids two years older than I. Doing the Judge's arithmetic, my early grounding in reading, a comprehensive understanding of Afrikaans in a classroom of English-speaking kids coming without enthusiasm to the language for the first time, and Doc's demand from our first day that I write up my field notes all gave me a hugely unfair advantage. I might possibly have been elevated even further but for the embarrassment it would have caused.

I quickly earned a reputation, rather unjustly, for being clever. Doc had persuaded me to drop my camouflage and not to play dumb. “To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin. Absoloodle!” I had needed little encouragement. Under his direction my mind was constantly hungry, and I soon found the schoolwork tedious and simplistic. Doc became my real teacher, and school was simply time spent between eight and one o'clock, when I would rush from the classroom to his cottage hidden in the cactus garden.

His thorny garden was a never-ending source of delight. It covered half an acre on the more or less flat top of a small hill that overlooked the town and valley. A ten-minute climb to solitude up a little dirt-and-rock road that led nowhere else. His cactus garden may well have been the best private collection of cacti
and succulents in the world. I, who grew to be an expert on cacti, have never seen a better one.

Doc's cottage had three rooms and a lean-to kitchen. The three rooms were called the music room, the book room, and the whisky room, each having its specified purpose, music, study, and drinking himself to sleep. For in all things, even in drunkenness, Doc had a tidy mind.

In the first year we spent together I never once witnessed him drunk, though when I arrived just after dawn for my music lesson I often had to wake him, whereupon he would stumble outside to retch and cough. Then he would come to sit beside the Steinway, his blue eyes red-rimmed and dulled from the previous night's whisky, his long fingers wrapped around the enamel mug of bitter black coffee I had made him on the Primus. Doc never talked about drinking. All he would sometimes say as I set my music out on the big Steinway was, “Pianissimo, Peekay, the wolves were howling in my head last night.” I would look through my music for something soft and easy on the nerves. Perhaps this is why, as I grew older and more proficient, I seemed more attracted to playing Chopin. There is a great deal less fortissimo in a Chopin etude than in Liszt or Brahms, and Doc's early morning hangovers may, over that first year, have somehow inclined me to softer music.

It was the cactus garden that testified to “his problem with Doctor Bottle,” as my mother would call any person who ever held strong drink to his lips. Bordering both sides of the path for a hundred yards through the cactus garden were embedded Johnny Walker bottles, their square bases shining in the sun like parallel silver snakes, winding around the cactus and aloe and blazing orange and pink portulaca. Each bottle represented an attempt to obliviate some private torture. Doc made no apology for his drinking. He seldom even mentioned it, and when he did it was always blamed quietly and politely on the wolves, which I imagined slavering away, great red tongues lolling, gnashing teeth chomping up Doc's brains.

It was at sunset on a Saturday afternoon late in January 1941, a little more than a year after Doc and I had first met on the hill behind the rose garden. We'd spent the day in the hills and had almost arrived back at Doc's cottage. We'd found a patch of
Senecio serpens
high up in a dry
kloof,
growing over the tailings of an old digging. It was a nice find, although blue chalksticks, as they are commonly called, are not too rare unless they flower in an unusual color. We had decided to plant them in the cactus garden and wait until they flowered again. That was the magic of the cactus garden. Some succulents can play dumb, a common blue chalkstick can turn from a Cinderella into a princess in front of your very eyes. I was the first to notice the army van with the white-stenciled
MILITARY POLICE
on its hood. The van was parked directly in front of the whisky bottle path that led to the cottage, hidden from view amid the tall cactus. Two men leaned against the front mudguard smoking, their red-banded khaki caps resting on the hood of the van, which had been turned to face down the hill. Doc was explaining the differences between
Senecio serpens
and the lighter-colored
Glottiphyllum uncatum,
banging his long hiking stick into the ground as he walked and getting generally excited, as he did when his mind was absorbed in esoteric botanical detail.

The two men saw us approach and, dropping their cigarettes, ground them underfoot. Clearing their throats almost simultaneously, they reached for their caps and carefully placed them back on their heads the way men do when they are about to undertake an unpleasant duty. Both wore khaki bush shirts, shorts, brown boots, puttees, and khaki stockings, though one of them wore the polished Sam Browne belt of an officer while the other, a sergeant, wore a white webbing one. The officer stepped right in front of Doc, who stopped and looked up in surprise. Doc was taller than the officer by at least a foot, so the military man was obliged to look up at him. He had a thin black pencil moustache just like Pik Botha's, and although he was not standing at attention his body seemed permanently rigid. From the top pocket of his tunic he removed a piece of paper, which he held up.

“Good afternoon, sir. You are Karl von Vollensteen, Professor Karl von Vollensteen?” he asked in a sententious voice.

“Ja,
this is me,” Doc said, surprised that anyone would question so obvious a fact.

The officer cleared his throat and proceeded to read from the paper he held in front of him. “Under the Aliens Act of 1939 and by the authority vested in me by the Provost Marshal of the South African Armed Forces, I arrest you. You are charged with conspiracy to undermine the security of a nation at war.” He handed the paper to Doc. “You will have to come with me, sir. The civilian police under the direction of military security will search your premises, and you will be detained at Barberton prison until your case can be heard.”

To my surprise Doc made no protest. His face was sad as he looked down at the officer and handed him back the piece of paper without even glancing at it. He raised his head to look over the officer and past where the sergeant was standing next to the van, his gaze following the line of the cactus garden. He turned slowly, his eyes filled with pain, taking in the hills, the marvelous aloe-dotted hills, his garden of Eden for twenty years in the Africa he so savagely loved. Finally he turned to look over the town, across the valley to the sun beginning to dip behind the escarpment.

“TTie stupidity. Already the stupidity begins again,” he said softly. Then, turning to me, he patted my shoulder. “You must plant the
Senecio serpens
to get the morning sun, they like that.” He removed his bush hat and absentmindedly put it on the roof of the van. He got his red bandanna from his overalls and slowly wiped his face and sniffed into it and pushed his nose around before returning it to the pocket of his overalls. Then he lifted his bush hat from the roof of the van and put it on my head. I looked up at him in surprise; Doc didn't play that sort of childish game. But his eyes were sad and his voice soft, barely above a whisper. “So, now you are the boss of the cactus garden, Peekay.” I wanted to cry, and I think Doc wanted to as well. But we didn't. We both knew enough not to show our feelings in front of the military.

Turning to the officer, Doc said, “You will please allow me first to shave and change my clothes. A man must go to prison in his best clothes.”

The officer rolled his eyes heavenward. From the number of cigarette butts on the ground, they had been waiting for some time, and he obviously wanted to get going. “Orright, Professor, but make it snappy.” Turning to the sergeant in an official manner, he rapped, “Sergeant! Escort the prisoner to his house for kit change and ablutions.”

We walked slowly down the whisky bottle path and Doc dropped his canvas shoulder bag on the open verandah. I followed him into the dark little cottage. “Do not light the lamps, Peekay, the light is soft and we will soon be gone.” I followed him to the lean-to kitchen, where he placed an enamel basin on the hard earth floor and poured water into it from a jug. I took the jug and refilled it from the rainwater tank behind the cottage. Doc's cottage, isolated from the town by the small hill, had no running water. He stripped down in the lean-to kitchen and, using a
loofah
, washed himself from head to toe. I brought him the fresh jug of water and, stepping out of the lean-to into the garden, he stood beside a tall cactus and poured it over his head, giving the cactus the benefit of the overflow. Then he wiped himself briskly with an almost threadbare towel. He was brown all over, for we often lay on a rock in the hills to sun ourselves after a swim in a mountain creek. His thin body was hard and sinewy, and the snowy white hair on his chest seemed incongruous. I had seen my granpa nude, and while he too was a thin man, he didn't have the same hard-as-nails look.

The sergeant had grown impatient waiting around the kitchen and had wandered into the music room, where he was playing “Chopsticks” on the Steinway. Doc seemed not to hear as he shaved carefully, stropping his cutthroat razor for ages until it was perfect. Then he dressed slowly in his white linen suit and black boots. Finally he placed a spare shirt and his shaving things in a sugar bag, and, walking through to the book room, he selected a large book from the very top shelf of one of the bookshelves he had constructed from bricks and pineboard planks. “Put it also in the bag, Peekay.” I took the large leather-bound volume from him and looked at the spine. It was an old book whose maroon leather binding was scuffed and mottled with rough brown leather spots showing through the once smooth and polished cover. The title embossed on the spine was hard to read as the gold had mostly worn away, leaving only the pale embossing. It read Cactaceae. Afrika und Amerika. K. J. von Vollensteen. I opened the heavy book to find that it was written in German. I walked into the whisky room, where Doc had left the sugar bag, and, using the edge of the blanket on the small, hard bed, I wiped the dust from the cover of the book and put it in the bag. On the packing case dresser next to the bed was half a bottle of Johnnie Walker and this too I put in the bag. Then, heaving it over my shoulder, I joined Doc, who was standing at the front door. He removed his panama hat from a hook on the wall and picked up his silver-handled walking stick leaning in the corner behind the door. “We are ready, sir,” he said, turning slowly to the sergeant, a few feet away in the music room.

The sergeant rose from the piano stool. “That's a blery good peeana you got there, Professor. Once in the bioscope I saw this fillim star dance on the top of a peeana just like this one, only it was all white. I think it was Greeta Garbo, but I'm not sure.”

He took a last look around the cottage. “Okay, man, let's go.” He took the sugar bag from my shoulder and looked into it. “Hey, what's this? You can't take whisky where you going, are you stupid or something?” I started to apologize, but he checked me with his hand and grinned. “If you like, we can have a quick spot now,
oubaasT
He said to Doc. “Who knows when you'll get another chance, hey?” He gave him a conspiratorial wink and uncorked the bottle. Raising it to his lips, he took a long drag of whisky. He winced as he withdrew the bottle from his mouth, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and the top of the bottle with the palm of his hand.
“Lekker,
man, that's blery good whisky! No use leaving it lying around, hey?” He handed the bottle to Doc, who raised his hand in refusal. “C'mon, don't be stupid, man. It's going to be a long time between drinks, better make the most of it.” He held it toward Doc after taking another long swig. In two goes he had reduced the whisky to less than a quarter of a bottle. Doc took the bottle of Johnnie Walker and held it briefly to his lips without opening his mouth before handing it back. The sergeant shrugged. “Suit yourself, man, all the more for me, it's blery good whisky. Who knows? Tomorrow maybe we're all dead.” He took another long swig and walked over to the piano. “In this fillim this man was playing the peeana like at a funeral, then a drunk tipped some whisky on it and suddenly it was playing like mad.” He tipped the remaining whisky over the keys of the Steinway. Doc, who had been standing passively waiting, seemed to come alive. He raised his stick and rushed at the sergeant.

“Schweinhund!
Do not defile the instrument of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach!” He brought his cane down hard onto the sergeant's wrist and the bottle fell from his hand to smash on the cement floor. Gripping his wrist, the sergeant danced in agony amid the broken glass. Doc, using the sleeve of his linen jacket, ran his arms across the keys in an attempt to wipe them and sent the piano into a glissando. Then he turned and walked toward the front door.

“You fucking Nazi bastard!” the sergeant yelled. I hurried after Doc and he caught up with us on the path outside the cottage. “I'll show you, you child fucker!” He was trying to remove a pair of handcuffs from his belt as he ran. “Stop! You're under military arrest!” But Doc, his head held high, simply continued down the path toward the van. The sergeant grabbed Doc's arm and locked a handcuff around his compliant wrist. Doc seemed hardly to notice and just kept walking, obliging the sergeant to hang onto the other handcuff as though he were being dragged along like a prisoner. He took a swinging kick at Doc, knocking his legs from under him and bringing the old man to his knees on the path. In his fury and humiliation he aimed a second kick just as, screaming, I flung myself at his legs. The army boot intended for Doc's ribs caught me under the chin, knocking me unconscious.