The Power of One (33 page)

After all his years of incarceration he was a polished performer, no less a maestro at his profession than Doc was at his. Perhaps more so, for as a procurer, Geel Piet was a genius.

Geel Piet ran the prison black market in tobacco, sugar, salt, and
dagga
(cannabis). In the end, he controlled the mail coming into and going out of the prison and thus the money brought in. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of boxing and a rare gift for spotting errors of style and weakness in performance. My desire to become a boxer was all too apparent, but it was the sixth sense of men who have to survive on their wits, and who have to sniff the air before every move and wager everything on a chance observation or a cunning guess, that told him I was an easy mark.

It took just over a year for Geel Piet to ingratiate himself to the point where I would unknowingly begin to serve him. Our entire relationship was built upon small conversations eked out over weeks until an understanding formed that eventually led to the conspiracy that made me present him with a leaf of tobacco.

I had been culling a patch of
Euphorbia pseudocactus,
a cactuslike plant that grows close to the ground and is extremely thorny. It has a habit of spreading quickly under ideal conditions, and it had started to invade territory in the cactus garden which didn't rightly belong to it. Because of the thorns I had put Doc's cutting in a galvanized bucket I'd brought from the garden shed at home. Almost without thinking, I had lined the bottom of the bucket with a large tobacco leaf. Something must have made me do it: perhaps Geel Piet, somehow, with his patience and snatches of seemingly unconnected dialogue. Tobacco is, after all, the greatest luxury and the most essential commodity in the prison system. With the war on, the normal shortage behind the walls had become severe, so that it was more highly prized than ever.

I was never searched as I entered the prison, although on this particular day, as I was carrying a bucket rather than a bag, a mildly curious guard wanted to know what was in the bucket and came over to take a look. In fact, I had not been worried, having entirely forgotten about the tobacco leaf. “Funny how he likes all these ugly plants, hey?” the guard said, for Doc's cactus garden was directly outside the warder's mess and was the butt of many a joke, most of them about cactus being just the sort of plant for a prison: “If the prisoners revolt, we'll all hide in the professor's garden, those blery kaffirs wouldn't be game to try to get us out.”

I had taken the bucket through to the hall after the squad workout, and as usual Geel Piet, who was becoming more and more useful and who, over the ensuing year, would assume the place of personal servant to Doc, took the bucket with the cuttings to Doc's garden. He had returned with it, his permanently broken face wreathed with smiles. “I will help you to be a great boxer,” he said simply. And that was how it all got started.

I broached the subject of the tobacco to my granpa when I returned home that afternoon after school. I did not really think about the moral issue involved. After a year of going in and out of the prison each weekday, I had come to understand the system. Morality was suspended, war existed between two sides, and even at the age of eight I could see the odds were heavily biased toward one of them. The prison warders were an extension of the kids at the hostel: a brutal force confronting a defenseless one where crimes supposed or otherwise were being paid for. The idea of committing further petty crime in this sort of atmosphere and being brutally, often savagely, punished was bizarre and quite unreal. Doc and I were not a part of either side; we were an audience who would, from time to time, make a decision to enter the play. While we couldn't change the plot, we could relieve the actors of their tedium.

My granpa was generally suspicious of unquestioning moral rectitude, preferring to judge each item as it came to him; as prepared to have Inkosi-Inkosikazi cure his gallstones as he was to give the Boers credit for being musicians and good shots. We sat on one of the steps leading up to a terrace. Between much tamping, tapping, and lighting of pipe and staring into the distance over the paint-faded and rust-stained roof, and after ascertaining that I was never searched, he decided that the prisoners should have the tobacco.

“Poor black buggers, it's worse for them than it was in England in the seventeenth century. Most of them are in for crimes that deserve no more than a tongue-lashing.”

He was wrong. Barberton was a heavy-security prison, and most of the prisoners, except for the politicals, had committed crimes that were worthy of formal punishment in any society.

It was the administration of the prisoners' life that was the real crime, and it was not unusual for a prisoner to be beaten to death for a comparatively minor infringement of prison rules. Such occasions were discussed among the warders quietly, almost secretly, but with an inner glee.

I think my granpa was partly influenced by the thought that the mounting stock of tobacco leaves from Marie's farm would start to decrease and that in some small way he too was fighting the sort of injustice he abhorred. He carefully instructed me in the use of tobacco-infused water for insect control and gave me a note to Doc explaining how it was done. The plan was for Doc to set up his own drum beside the cactus garden and infuse it with two tobacco leaves at rare intervals. In the event of a single load of tobacco entering the prison being discovered, Doc, a non-smoker, could quite easily explain its destination.

Doc had requested to remain in Barberton prison rather than be transported to an internment camp in the highveld. The thought of being away from his beloved mountains, his cactus garden, and his piano was more than he could bear, and I'm sure our friendship also played a large part in his reluctance to leave Barberton. Kommandant van Zyl, who had come to regard Doc as the personal property of the prison and a constant thorn in the side of the English-speaking town, was more than happy to cooperate. I think in the end the military authorities must have given up trying to extricate him from the civil prison system, and Doc spent the remainder of the war under the benign supervision of the kommandant.

Of course, Doc was coconspirator in what became a sophisticated smuggling system. Being in the prison constantly, he was there when the work gangs returned at night and left again at dawn. He was forced to see an aspect of Africa he had never witnessed. Doc was a man who preferred not to take sides in any issue other than one of the intellect. Rather than face the dilemma of black and white confrontation and the preordained decision of white superiority, he had chosen to avoid it altogether by not having servants or any dependence on black Africa. But he was also a compassionate and fair-minded man, and the unthinking brutality of the warders offended him deeply. Both of us lacked the wisdom or the knowledge of the baser side of men, though I had probably had more experience of this than Doc had. We saw the brutality around us not as a matter of taking an emotional side or of good versus evil, but as the nature of evil

itself, where good and bad do not come into play. Intellectually, we were simply forced to take the side of the prisoners. Man brutalized thinks only of his survival. Geel Piet was as ruthless as his oppressors and of necessity a great deal more cunning. The power the tobacco and the other things which later came into the prison gave him was enormous, and he used it to ensure his own survival and to serve his own ends as ruthlessly and as carelessly as the warders used their superiority.

As it turned out, he spoke English passably but had chosen Afrikaans to make his mark with me, knowing that Doc would then not be in a position to understand what he was saying and therefore to see through his long and carefully planned campaign. His next conquest, after me, was to be Doc. He became the perfect servant to him, a humble man who strove to anticipate Doc's every need while never intruding into the world Doc and I shared as expatriates of an orderly social environment.

Geel Piet successfully contrived to get into the gymnasium while the squad was working out. At first he was a familiar shadow, hardly noticed, polishing the floor or cleaning the windows. Then gradually, over a year, he became the laundry boy, picking up the sweaty shorts and jockstraps and boxing boots in the shower room and returning them the next day freshly laundered and polished. By the time I could throw a medicine ball over Klipkop's head, Geel Piet had established himself as an authority on boxing. The lieutenant gave him the job of supervising the progress of the kids in the squad, only occasionally taking over when he felt it necessary to establish his superiority by deliberately contradicting an instruction from Geel Piet to one of us.

The standard of the young boxers improved measurably under Geel Piet's direction, for, despite his background, the old lag was a maker of boxers. When he hadn't been in prison he'd worked in gymnasiums and somewhere in the dim past had been the colored lightweight champion of Cape Province. He had a way of teaching kids that made even the Boer kids respect him, though at first it was only their fear of Lieutenant Smit that prevented them from refusing to be coached by a blery yellow kaffir.

From the first day Lieutenant Smit agreed that I could begin to box I was under Geel Piet's direction, and he treated me like new clay. From day one Geel Piet concentrated on defense. “If a man can't hit you, he can't hurt you,” he'd say. “The boxer who takes chances gets hit and gets hurt. Box, never fight, fighting is for heavyweights and
domkops.”

It wasn't what I had been waiting for two years to learn. But Doc persuaded me Geel Piet was right, and the logic, even to an eight-year-old, was irrefutable.

It was some weeks before I was allowed to get into the ring with an eleven-year-old from the squad. The boy's nickname was Snotnose, Snotnose Bronkhorst, because there was always a snolly bomb hovering from one or both of his nostrils. He was a big kid and a bully, but he had been with the squad for only a few weeks and he lacked any real know-how. He had pushed me away from the punching ball, and I had tripped over a rubber mat and fallen. Picking myself up, I had squared up to him, when Lieutenant Smit, seeming not to have noticed the incident, said he wanted to see us in the ring. My heart thumped as I realized that the moment had come.

We climbed into the ring, and it was Hoppie and Jackhammer Smit all over again, in size if not in skill. But to my satisfaction I had absorbed a great deal over the past two years and even more over the six weeks Geel Piet had been coaching me. Snotnose chased me all over the ring, taking wild swipes, any of which, had they landed, would have lifted me over the ropes. Over a period of three minutes I managed to make him miss with every blow while never even looking like landing one myself. After three minutes Lieutenant Smit blew his whistle for the sparring session to stop.

I noticed for the first time that most of the squad had gathered around the ring, and when the whistle blew they all clapped. It was one of the great moments of my life.

Peekay had completed his two-year apprenticeship. From now on it was all the way to welterweight championship of the world.

I turned to walk to my corner before climbing out of the ring, and, sensing something was wrong, I ducked just as a huge fist whistled through the air where my head had been a second before. Without thinking I brought my right up in an uppercut, using all the weight of my body behind the blow. It caught Snotnose Bronkhorst in the center of the solar plexus, and I could feel my glove sinking deep into the relaxed muscles of his stomach, forcing the air from his rib cage. He staggered for a moment and then, clutching his stomach, crumbled in agony onto the canvas, the wind completely knocked out of him. The cheers and laughter from the ringside bewildered me. Looking over the heads of the squad, I saw Geel Piet, unseen by any of them, dancing a jig in the background, his toothless mouth and funny lip stretched wide in uncontained delight.

Throwing caution to the winds, he yelled, “We have one, we have a boxer!” The colored man's intrusion into the general hilarity caused a sudden silence around the ring.

Lieutenant Smit advanced slowly toward Geel Piet. With a sudden explosion, Smit's fist caught him in the mouth. The little man dropped to the floor, blood spurting from his flattened nose.

“When I want an opinion from a fucking kaffir on who is a boxer around here, I'll ask for it, you hear?” Then, absently massaging the knuckles of his right hand, Smit turned back to the squad. “But the yellow bastard is right,” he said. “Get into the showers now, make haste. Bronkhorst, you are a
domkop,
” he added as Snotnose rose shakily to his feet.

I was still standing in the ring, a little bewildered at the fracas I had caused. I watched Geel Piet crab-crawl along the gym floor, making for the doorway. When he reached it, he got unsteadily to his feet and looked directly at me. Then he grinned and, without raising his hands, gave a furtive thumbs-up sign, a movement so slight it would have gone unnoticed to a casual observer. To my amazement, the expression on his battered face was one of happiness.

On my way to school that morning Snotnose Bronkhorst sprang from behind a tree and gave me a proper hiding, although I managed to get him with a right cross that snapped his head back as well as a solid uppercut in the balls that made him release me so that I could run for it.

It had been my experience that the Snotnoses of this world were a plentiful breed, and I thought it might be a good idea to learn street fighting as well as boxing. Geel Piet, I felt sure, would show me how to fight dirty as well.