The Power of One (29 page)

We entered a large office, dark brown and filled with dead animals. A kudu head was mounted directly behind the kommandant's desk with a sable antelope head beside it, the elegant curved horns touching the wall. There were gemsbok and eland heads to complete the display of larger antelope, and next to them, in a cluster of five heads, were the smaller variety of buck: gray duiker, klipspringer, steenbok, reebok, and springbok. I turned to face the wall behind me, for it too was covered in trophies. This time a large black-maned lion looked down at me, mouth in the full roar position. Next to it were a leopard and a cheetah. All the carnivores were on one side of the door, while on the other were their most common prey, a zebra and a black wildebeest. Below these, fixed to brackets on the wall, were a Boer Mauser and a British Lee-Metford. Immediately below these two Boer War rifles was a long-shafted Zulu throwing
asegai.
The rest of the wall space was taken up with small framed pictures, mostly of hunting parties standing over dead animals.

The room was furnished with two heavy leather club chairs and a large matching sofa, and on the polished floorboards were a zebra skin and a lion skin. Directly behind the kommandant's head and below the kudu and sable antelope hung two large portraits. One was of King George and the other of President Paul Kruger, the last president of the defeated Boer Republic. The picture of the Boer president was in an elegant oval walnut frame. King George looked to be the sort of official photograph in a cheap gilt frame issued to public institutions and requiring mandatory display.

Kommandant van Zyl rose from behind his desk, which was really a large ball-and-claw dining room table with a sheet of glass covering its surface. There was nothing on the table except the pad on which he appeared to be writing, his fountain pen, and an ashtray.

“Good morning, Smit. Sit down, please.” He turned to look down at me. “So this is the boy, eh?” He walked out from behind his desk and stuck out a huge hand. “Good morning, Peekay.” He was even bigger than Lieutenant Smit, and his tummy stuck out in front of him even more than Harry Crown's. Like the lieutenant and Klipkop, he wore the gray military-style uniform of a prison warder. The only difference was four stars and a crown on his shoulder tabs and a small tab of blue velvet inserted into the top of his lapels. I shook his hand shyly, not quite
knowing
what to say.

“Sit, son.” He pointed to the remaining leather chair. I pushed myself up into the large chair. By sitting on the edge, I could make my feet almost reach the ground. Kommandant van Zyl sat down heavily on the sofa.

“So you want to see our professor?”

I nodded. “Yes, please, sir.”

The kommandant adjusted himself on the sofa, his body soaking up most of it. “The law says he must be detained and I must follow the law, but inside this place I
am
the law. In here he can come and go as he pleases, provided he stays within the gates. Also, he can have visitors in official visiting hours.” He looked at me and smiled. “I have decided to make an exception in your case. You can come any time you want, only not Sundays.” He paused and looked at me again. “How do you like that, hey? Two old
maats
together again.”

“Thank you, Meneer van Zyl,” I said.

“Ag,
man, it's nothing.” He looked at Lieutenant Smit as though he felt the need to explain his decision. “A friendship between a man and a boy is not a thing to be broken. This boy has no father. I know what that is like, man. My father died with the Carolina burghers at Spion Kop when I was the same age.”

“Yessir,” Lieutenant Smit said, looking down at his hands, which were folded in his lap.

“Make out a permanent pass for the boy so he can come anytime except Sunday, you hear?”

“Ja, kommandant.” Smit looked at the larger man. “What about the professor's peeano?”

Kommandant van Zyl slapped his hand on his thigh. “I clean forgot. Thank you, Smit.” He turned to me. “We are going to let the professor have his peeano here, there are already many musicians among us. Everybody thinks Boers are not cultured, but I'm telling you, man, when it comes to music we leave everyone for dead. For us it is an honor to have a man such as him in our prison community.
Magtig!
A real professor of music, here, in Barberton prison.
Wonderlik!”

“Thank you for letting me come to see him, Meneer.”

“The boy has nice manners. I like that,” he said to Lieutenant Smit. “It's nothing. You can come any time, you hear?” He hesitated for a moment. “Peekay, we need just a small favor. On Monday, about one o'clock, we will be having a nice little surprise for the town folk in the market square. I already telephoned the mayor, but I can't trust him to tell people. Will you inform Mrs. Boxall, who telephoned about you and who, I understand, is also a friend of the professor? Ask her to tell everyone, you hear?” I nodded, and he seemed pleased.
“Dankie,
Peekay, I think we will like each other a lot. Now Lieutenant Smit is going to take you to see the professor. I see you have some books for him.” He stretched his hand out. “Show me.” I jumped down from the big chair and handed the books to him. He opened the top one and leafed through it for a few moments. “Plants, I don't know much about plants. Animals, that's my specialty, you can ask me anything about animals, you name it.” He brought his hands up as though he were squinting down the barrel of a rifle, pulled an imaginary trigger, and made a small explosive sound. “I've shot it.” He lowered the imaginary rifle and grinned at me. He had two gold teeth. “I love wild animals,” he said. His hands returned to the books, which he handed back to me, and his face wore a look of benign satisfaction as he scanned the trophies around the walls.

Lieutenant Smit cleared his throat loudly and the Kommandant turned back to us. “Well, it's been nice to meet you, Peekay.” He patted me briefly on the shoulder. “If you want anything, you just come and see me, you hear?”

It was like the time I'd had to decide whether to offer to do the Judge's arithmetic. Like then, I was doing pretty well. Why risk it? If I got on the wrong side of the lieutenant, I stood to lose everything, even the chance of becoming a boxer once I turned ten.

“Please, Meneer van Zyl. Could I learn to box here?”

The kommandant had already risen from the sofa, preparing to dismiss us. “You want to box?” he looked at me. “That's the lieutenant's department.”

“I already told the boy he must wait until he is ten, then maybe,” Smit said, trying not to sound terse.

“When you're seven it's a long time to wait till you're ten. That's nearly half your life,” the kommandant said.

“We train at five-thirty in the morning. Unless he lived here, how could he get here?”

“I will get here, I promise. I will never miss, not even once. Please, Meneer Smit?”

Lieutenant Smit looked down at his boots for a long time. “We can try when your jaw is fixed. But I must have a note from your mother to say it's okay to teach you.” He looked up, appealing directly to the kommandant. “He is too small, kommandant.”

“He will grow, Smit. As I recall, you and your younger brother started very young. Is he still fighting?”

“Yes, sir, his next fight is against Oudendaal.”

“That's right, the lowveld heavyweight title next Saturday. You must get me tickets, lieutenant.”

“Yessir, your secretary has them, sir.”

Kommandant van Zyl ushered us to the door. “All the best, Peekay.”

When we reached the bottom of the stairs Smit stopped, and, getting down on his haunches, he grabbed me by the front of the shirt. He had said nothing when we left the kommandant's office, but I was too good at listening to silence not to know I was in real trouble. I closed my eyes, waiting for the clout across the head that must inevitably come. I hadn't been hit for a year except for a few hidings from my mother, which you couldn't really call hidings after what I'd been through. But the memory of a skull-stunning blow across the head was still very much a part of my experience. To my surprise, the blow didn't come, and I opened my eyes again to look straight into Lieutenant Smit's angry face. “I'm telling you flat, don't do that to me again, you hear? When I tell you something, I mean it, man!” He shook me hard, expecting me to cry; instead I held his gaze. “Who you looking at? You trying to be cheeky?”

“Please, Meneer, I saw your brother fight in Gravelotte last year. That's when I decided.”

A look of amazement crossed Smit's face, “You were there?
Wragtig?
You saw that fight?”

I nodded. “He fought Hoppie Groenewald—Kid Louis,” I corrected. Lieutenant Smit released his grip on the front of my shirt.

“I was there also.
Magtig!
That was a fight and a half. You saw it? Honest?” He rose from his haunches and suddenly his eyes grew wide. “The kid with Hoppie Groenewald! I remember now. We thought you was
his
kid.”

We had reached the office again. Klipkop was on the floor doing push-ups. He broke his sequence and stood up rather foolishly as we entered. “You know the fight in Gravelotte my brother had against Groenewald the welterweight last year?” Klipkop nodded. “Peekay saw that fight. He is a personal friend of Groenewald.”

The warder laughed. “I lost a fiver on that fight. Who would have expected a welter to beat a light heavy?”

“I'm telling you, Groenewald isn't just an ordinary welter. You mark my words, if he comes out of this war he's going to be South African champ, you can put money on it,” Smit said. “He'd take you with one arm behind his back, man.”

Klipkop grinned. “That'll be the frosty Friday. No way, man! I'm going to do the same to your brother on Saturday as he did.”

“Don't be so blery sure of yourself, Oudendaal. Jackhammer Smit is no pushover. This time he'll be fit. Don't count your blery chickens before they hatch!”

Smit turned to me suddenly. “Okay, I changed my mind, you on the squad. But no fighting for two years, you hear? Just training and learning your punches and technique, you understand me?”

I nodded, overjoyed. My eyes brimmed with tears. I had taken the first step to becoming the welterweight champion of the world.

“Klipkop, take Peekay to see the professor. I'll make a phone call and you can meet him in the warder's mess.” He turned to me. “Come back when you're finished and I'll have your permanent pass ready for you.”

We left the administration block and passed through another building. “This is the gymnasium for the prison officers,” Klipkop said. We walked over to the punching bag and the boxing ring set up at one end of the large room. Large leather balls lay on the floor and Klipkop bent down and scooped one up in his hand. “Here, Peekay, hold on to this.” I put both my hands out, and he flipped the ball lightly into them. Suddenly I was sitting on the floor with Klipkop laughing over me. “It's a medicine ball, and it weighs fifteen pounds. When you can throw one of these over my head, you'll be strong enough to begin to box.” I got up, feeling very foolish. Then I bent down and tried to pick the large brown leather ball up. Using all my strength, I managed to lift it but was happy to let it drop again. “Not bad, Peekay,” Klipkop said with a grin. We were standing next to the ring and I liked the smell of the canvas and the sweat. I wondered how I could possibly wait two years before I climbed into the ring to face a real opponent.

We left the gymnasium and crossed the huge indoor courtyard, an area half the size of a football field which I had seen from the top of the hill on my first morning in Barberton. The
prison
blocks rose up on every side of the square, where two old lags were raking its neat gravel surface so all the rake lines ran diagonally across the quad. “It's Friday, diagonal lines. I like Monday best, when they make a big star in the middle,” Klipkop said. I wasn't sure what he meant, but I was soon to learn that each day had a different rake pattern. It was how the prisoners knew what day of the week it was.

“Where are all the prisoners, Klipkop?” I asked. The two old lags doing the raking were the only humans I had seen since leaving the administration building.

“Ag,
man, they're all out in work gangs. Most work on farms, some at the quarries and some at the sawmills at Frantzinos Rust. The people who hire them must call for their gangs at four o'clock in the morning, and they got to be back here by six o'clock at night. What you see around here in the daytime is just old lags, too old to work hard, like that black bastard who makes our tea. Also the murderers, they not allowed to come out of their cells, even to eat. But we don't keep them long, man. It's not good to have murderers around, the other kaffir prisoners get very restless.” He grinned. “The warders don't like them around also, so we hang them jolly quick smart, I'm telling you.”

“What about the white prisoners, do they also work in the gangs?”

Klipkop looked surprised. “No blery fear! Gangs is not a white man's work. Mostly white men are only here on transit to Pretoria. They don't have to work so hard, because they not here for long. If they real hard cases, like that guy who murdered his wife and three children in Noordkaap, we just locked him up till the district judge sentenced him, then we put him on the train to Pretoria. If you lucky, you get sent along as a guard. You get a day off in Pretoria and ten and sixpence expenses.”