The Power of One (28 page)

The area between the gate and the administration block was completely bare. Lawn stretched from either side of the gravel driveway for about five feet and thereafter the square turned into a parade ground of sun-hardened red clay. The strip of living green on either side of the pathway was a brilliant though incongruous contrast to the baked earth of the parade ground and the dead blue-gray walls and buildings. I could see a warder's head in the window of a little tower built onto and jutting out from the wall. There was a stretch of walkway for fifty feet on either side of the tower. Two guards with rifles slung over their shoulders paced up and down this walkway. I seemed to be the only person on the ground below them, and I wondered how, on my way out, they'd know I wasn't a prisoner trying to escape. Maybe they'd give me a white flag to carry or something.

It was one of the longest walks of my life. I could sense the oppression of the place, the terrible silence. Without trees, no cicadas hummed the air to life. No birds punctuated the stillness. My bare feet on the gravel made an exaggerated sound. There were tiny dark windows arranged three stories high. Each was divided by two vertical steel bars. I imagined hundreds of eyes hungrily devouring my freedom as they watched from the prison darkness.

The door of the administration block was open, and after hesitating I put my head around it. Inside was a small hallway that had the same wax polish smell of the magistrate's courts. Three benches, arranged like chureh pews, filled half the hallway, and there was a window with bars set into a wall. Through the bars I could see an office. I walked into the hallway and sat on the front bench and waited.

I don't know how long I sat there, but it seemed to be a very long time. I would see two men in uniform pass the grill window occasionally, but they never looked out. I could hear them talking on the phone. After I'd been there for ages and ages I heard the voice of a man on the phone behind the grill. He was shouting in Afrikaans and seemed very angry.

“He hasn't arrived, you
domkopl
Are you sure you directed him to this building? We can't have a blery kid walking around the prison. It's been almost half an hour and there's no sign of him. We'll have to look for him now, and it's all your blery fault!” I could hear the receiver being slammed back into its cradle. “
Komi
” I heard the voice say to someone else, and a moment later a door opened and a big man followed by another big man who looked younger than the first one came out.

The big man saw me as he entered the hallway. “Jesus Christ! Where have you been?” he shouted at me.

“I been here, I been here all the time, Meneer,” I rasped.

“Well, why didn't you make yourself known, then?” he asked in a slightly mollified voice, possibly because he had noticed my wired jaw.

I pointed to the two notices on the wall behind the benches. “It says on that notice ‘Wait here' and on that other one it says ‘Silence,' I replied fearfully.

The younger of the two men suddenly laughed. “I think the kid won the first round, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Okay, man, I admit you got me there fair and square,” the older one chuckled.
“Kom,
we must take down your name and things.”

They led me into the office and after taking my name, address, and age the older one made a phone call and asked to speak to the kommandant. Then he put the phone down. “The kommandant wants to see you, but he's doing an inspection now. We have to wait twenty minutes.” He turned to the younger warder. “Klipkop, get Peekay here a cup of tea and a biscuit.” I wondered how someone could be called “Klipkop.” In Afrikaans it means “stonehead.” But when I looked at the tall blond man, his rawboned features looked as though they could well have been carved out of stone.

Klipkop rose and held out his hand. “Seeing we're going to be here for a while, we might as well introduce ourselves. Oudendaal, Johannes Oudendaal,” he said formally in the Afrikaans manner, giving his surname first, then repeating it attached to his Christian name. “This is Lieutenant Smit.” He indicated the older warder, who stretched out his hand without looking at me. I took it briefly, blushing with embarrassment. I wondered whether Lieutenant Smit was related to Jackhammer Smit, maybe his brother? But I didn't have the courage to ask. After all, Smit is a pretty common Afrikaans name. If he was, I hoped he was a better type than the miner. “Come, I'll show you where we make tea,” Klipkop said. “There's a kaffir who makes it, but if we want a cup in between we make it ourselves, it's very handy. Every week we put in a shilling for milk and sugar and biscuits, but the authorities supply tea. You got to watch the kaffir, or the black bastard pinches everything. I'm telling you, man, this place is full of thieves.”

I followed him into a small kitchen behind the office and he put water into an electric jug and plugged it in. “Peekay, that's a name I haven't heard before.”

“It's just a name I gave myself. Now it's my real name,” I said.

“Ja,
I know, man, it's the same with me. They call me Klipkop because I box and can take any amount of head punches. Now I sometimes find it hard to remember my born name.”

For a moment I was stunned. “You box?” I asked.

“Ag; ja,
man. In this place if you want to get on you have to box, but I like it anyway. On the weekend we travel all over the place to fight. It's much better than rugby, man.” He took three mugs down from a cupboard above the small sink. “Lieutenant Smit is the boxing coach. He used to be a heavyweight.” He paused as he spooned a heaped tablespoon full of tea from a much-used tea caddy into the pot. “But all the easy stuff is over now, man. Next month I have my first professional fight. There's good money in the fight game. I've got a
nooi
in Sabie, and we're thinking of getting married.” He poured the water from the electric jug into the tin teapot and then stirred it with the tablespoon before placing the lid on the pot. “Do you box, Peekay?” He asked the question to be polite and did not expect my reaction.

My heart was pounding as I spoke. “No, but can you teach me please, Meneer Oudendaal?”

He looked at me in surprise and must have seen the pleading in my eyes. “First your jaw has got to get better, but I think you're a bit young anyway. Lieutenant Smit teaches also the warders' kids, but I think the youngest in the junior squad is already ten years.”

“I can be ten. I'm ten in class already. I could be ten in boxing easily, and my jaw will be better in eight weeks,” I begged.

“Hey, whoa! Not so fast! Ten is ten. On the form we wrote you were seven years old only.”

“If you fight first with the head and then with the heart, you can be ten years old,” I said.

“Magtig,
you're a hard one to understand, Peekay. You'll have to ask Lieutenant Smit, he's the boss. But if you ask me, I don't think you've got a snowball's hope in hell.”

“Will you at least ask him for me?” I rasped. The excitement made me overproject so that my throat was strained.

“I'll ask him, man, but I already told you what he'll say.” He picked up the pot and poured tea into the three enamel mugs, added milk and three teaspoons of sugar, and stirred them all. He went to the cupboard and took out a tin and pried it open. “That blery kaffir! We had nearly a quarter of a packet of Marie biscuits in here, now they all gone. It's time that black bastard went back into a work gang. Take your cup and bring the milk, Peekay. If you come again, next time we'll have biscuits.”

“Please, Meneer Oudendaal, you won't forget to ask the lieutenant? You see, I've got to start boxing because I have to become the welterweight champion of the world.”

I said it without thinking. It was more a thought expressed aloud than a statement. Klipkop whistled. “Well, you're right, man, with an ambition like that you've got to get started early.” He paused, two steaming cups in one hand, the teapot with the sugar bowl balanced where the teapot lid would normally have been in the other. “Me, I'll be happy if I can beat the lieutenant's brother in Nelspruit next month.” He turned and looked over his shoulder at me. “You can call me Klipkop if you like, I won't mind, man.”

I followed him back into the office where Lieutenant Smit was working on some papers. Klipkop put a mug of tea down in front of him. “Peekay wants to ask you something, Lieutenant,” he said and turned to me. “Ask him, man.”

Lieutenant Smit hadn't looked up from his papers, but he gave a short grunt. “Please, sir, will you teach me how to box?” I asked, my voice down to a tiny squeak.

He still didn't look at me but instead lifted the tea to his lips and, first blowing the steam from the surface, took a sip from the mug. “You are too young, Peekay. In three years come back. Then we will see.” He was taller than I even when he was sitting down, and now he looked down at me. “We read about you in the paper. You have lots of guts, that's a good start, but you are not even big for seven like a Boer kid.” He ruffled my hair. “Soon you will be ten, just you watch.”

At that moment an African came into the room. He was quite old and looked very thin in the coarse knee-length gray canvas pants and shirt of a prisoner. In his hand he held the teapot lid. “I have come to make tea,
baas,
but the pot she is not here,” he said slowly in Afrikaans. He stood with his head bowed. In two bounds Klipkop had reached him, and, grabbing him by the front of his canvas shirt, he lifted him off his feet and gave him a tremendous swipe across the face. The blow landed with a loud, flat sound and the black man's face seemed to squash in slow motion as Klipkop's huge hand landed on the side of his nose and mouth. Klipkop released his grip, and the man fell at his feet, whimpering.

“You black bastard! You stole the Marie biscuits. Not just one, you piece of dog shit, you stole them all!” He gave him a kick in the rump.

“No,
baas!
Please,
baas!
I not stole biscuit. I good boy,
baas,”
the old man pleaded and, still holding the teapot lid, he locked his free arm around Klipkop's ankles.

The warder turned to Lieutenant Smit. “Please, Lieutenant, can't we transfer this black bastard to the stone quarry? First he steals sugar, now the Marie biscuits.” He looked down at the whimpering African at his feet. Blood from the prisoner's nose had dripped onto the shiny toe of his boot. Klipkop kicked him loose, sending the black man flying against the wall, where he hit the back of his head with a thud, the teapot lid clattering to the floor at his side. “He's bleeding on me, the filthy black shithouse is bleeding all over my boots!” He thrust one foot toward the dazed African slumped against the wall. “Lick it off, kaffir, make quick!” The stunned man bent over the proffered boot and licked the blood from the toe cap, then, without being told, did the same with the other boot, at the same time holding his hand up to his nose to prevent further blood spilling on the warder's boots. “Now wipe your filthy black spit off my boots, you black bastard, I don't want foot-and-mouth disease!” Lieutenant Smit, who hadn't even looked up, grinned at the joke. The African removed his canvas shirt and, trying to sniff back the blood, commenced to wipe Klipkop's boots with it. “On the floor also,” the warder said, pointing to several scarlet drops of blood on the floor. The black man wiped the drops of blood from the green linoleum floor. “Now get up and clear out, you bastard!” The African scrambled to his feet and Klipkop gave him a flying kick, which sent him sprawling again. Crawling on all fours, his shirt clutched in one hand, the black prisoner fled from the room.

Klipkop examined his hand. “They got heads made of blery cannon balls.” He grinned. “I'm learning, man, notice I didn't hit him this time with my fist.” He turned to me. “Always remember, when you hit a kaffir, stay away from his head. You can break your fist on their heads, just like that. Hit him in the face, that's orright, but never on the head, man.” He made a fist and rubbed it into the palm of his hand. “I got a big fight coming up. I can't afford a broken fist from a stinking kaflir's head.”

Lieutenant Smit hadn't said a word. He took another sip from his tea. “We can't send him to the quarry, man. He's had rheumatic fever, he'd die in a week. Besides, he is the first kaffir we've had who can make proper coffee and tea.” He pointed at the cup in front of him. “Not like this shit. I told you not to stir it and to warm the pot first.” He turned to look at Klipkop, with just a hint of a smile on his face. “Next time, man, ask before you hit. I ate the blery Marie biscuits. I never had breakfast this morning, so I ate them.”

Klipkop's mouth fell open. Then he grinned. “Okay, so I hit him because he steals the sugar, what's the difference?”

The phone rang and Lieutenant Smit picked it up and listened for a moment. “Right,” he said into the receiver and replaced it. He turned to me. “The kommandant is back. Come on, son.”

Grabbing Mrs. Boxall's books, I followed the lieutenant up a set of stairs to the second floor. We entered a small outer office where a lady sat behind a desk typing on a big black machine which had
remington corona
in gold letters on its back. “Go
right
in, Lieutenant Smit, the kommandant is waiting for you,” she said, smiling at me.