The Power of One (60 page)

Puberty had taken a fierce and urgent grip on all of us so that the fantasy of fucking was never more than an unuttered sentence away. But my mind, when it wasn't on sex, was different. I guess it had always been, but now the dichotomy was beginning to show. I didn't feel superior, there was nothing to be superior about, my mind simply seemed to gaze over different intellectual landscapes. I daresay that had I not been a boxer and rugby player and greatly respected for the former, the rest of the chaps in Barberton would have dismissed me as a brain and a bit of a loner.

I found Doc, Mrs. Boxall, Miss Bornstein, and old Mr. Bornstein a source of stimulation, but the adult mind has lost much of its craziness, its zany quality, and I missed the verbal jousting that Morrie supplied in our day-to-day relationship at school. In fact, when I got back to school after the holidays, it would take me a couple of days to get my verbal ripostes sharp and my timing right again.

“Christ, Peekay, your brain's addled by too much deep and meaningful discussion about the weather and the crops and whether the locusts will come again this year!” Morrie would tease. Atherton, Pissy, and Cunning-Spider also shared an intelligence that would readily mix into a really good verbal joust over an abstract point simply for the love of argument itself.

Morrie would contend that anything, no matter how banal, could be raised to the level of intelligent debate if the minds that attended to it were good enough. He told the story of the little cobbler in a
shtetl
in Russia who was spreading honey on a piece of bread when the bread fell to the floor. To his amazement the bread fell right side up. “How can this be?” he said, and with the slice of bread in his hand he ran to consult the rabbi and the village elders. “We are Jews in Russia, how can it be that I spread honey on my bread and when it fell to the floor it landed right side up? Since when did luck such as this come to a Jew?” The rabbi and the elders pondered the point for several days, consulting the Torah frequently. Finally they called the little cobbler to the synagogue. The rabbi pronounced the verdict: “The answer, my boy, is quite clear. You honeyed your bread on the wrong side.”

We had all cawed and moaned at the story, but Morrie, as usual, had made his point: good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

THAT
Easter holiday Doc and I had planned an overnight hike to a waterfall we knew about some twelve miles past Saddleback Pass. As waterfalls go, it wasn't a major one, but it tumbled down through an area of rain forest which, on our only previous visit, we'd come across too late to explore properly. The cliffs rising above the forest looked interesting, and Doc was sure we'd find succulents and several species of dwarf aloe in the rocky crags and ledges. I had been concerned when Doc had suggested the hike; it was a good twenty miles across the mountains, and Doc was over eighty. Just how far over, no one knew, and while he was as lean as a twist of licorice and tough as a mountain goat, it was a hard day's march by any standards. In the notes he had made on our previous trip nearly eight years earlier, he'd noted that the hike had been an exhausting one.

He had answered my protests with typical Doc logic. “Peekay, if not now it will be never again. Our work is unfinished, the topography, see, I have made a drawing here in my notes, suggests limestone in the cliffs. If this is true, it is rare, almost impossible, some geological freak happenings, maybe?”

Doc knew he'd stirred my need for adventure, and the prospect of finding something that shouldn't be there allowed me to brush my concern aside and agree that we should undertake the trip.

Doc had managed to postpone his little girls for Friday, and we set out at dawn with our blanket rolls, billy cans, and enough food for two days, as well as a hurricane lamp, Doc's eight-battery Eveready torch, rope, a small hammer, and a dozen

homemade metal spikes hooked at the ends to secure the rope if necessary. Gert had made these for Doc in the prison metal shop soon after he'd left prison, and they'd been invaluable for scrambling up rock faces now that Doc wasn't as young a mountain goat as he pretended to be.

By the time the sun rose over the escarpment and filled the De Kaap Valley, we had climbed the foothills and were into the mountains proper. The aloe and thorn scrub were replaced by scree and tussock grass, turning to rocky crags where the wind can be cold even on a hot day. We often saw an eagle high above us, seemingly drifting without purpose, carried by the currents of air. With a stop for lunch of cheese and cream crackers washed down by a billy of sweet black tea, we crossed Saddleback Pass in the early afternoon and started the climb down the other side. By late afternoon we'd reached the peculiar formation of mountain cliffs rising above the deep
kloof of
rain forest Doc had noted in his diary.

We made camp beside a mountain brook flowing from the waterfall, which dropped like a bridal veil down the far edge of the cliffs above us. I had chosen our campsite on the edge of the rain forest, where an overhanging rock protected us from the wind. It can get bitterly cold during the night in the mountains, and we set about collecting firewood before we lost the light. High above us we first heard and then saw a troop of baboons climbing the strange cliff face and running along the white ledges eroded into the face of the rock. Their urgent barking echoed down into the
kloof
where we'd made our camp.

Doc put his field glasses onto the cliff. “It's too much shadow now, but I think tomorrow we find up there for sure something.”

Darkness comes quickly in the mountains, and less than an hour after we'd arrived the sun had set, throwing the deep
kloof
into shadow. Even though there was still some light I got the fire for supper going, the dry branches crackling and popping with plenty of smoke to ward off the mosquitoes which always seem to come from nowhere moments after sunset. I set about making our supper while Doc washed at the stream. Chopping an onion and two tomatoes into a billy can, I then upended a can of bully beef into the billy, mashing it all together with my hunting knife, ready for when the fire would glow down so that it would cook slowly. I'd already trapped two large sweet potatoes under the unmade fire so that we'd be able to pluck them out of the cooking embers later for dessert. The rain forest grew

dark first, the clear outlines of the giant tree ferns smudged and then blackened into darkness while high up in a yellowwood tree a couple of green louries called out one last time before they called it a day. Next the valley on the edge of the forest where we'd camped dimmed for the night, closing out the light, blurring rock and bush and tree. Finally the sky on the high ridge above us pulled a dark sheet over us and pinned it with stars. The distant sound of falling water from the falls seemed to emphasize the silence. Doc spoke quietly in the night. “No one has written a great symphony or even a concerto about Africa. Why is this so?”

He hadn't expected an answer, and I waited for him to continue.

“The music of Africa is too wild, too free, too accustomed to death for romance. Africa is too crude a stage for the small scratching of the violin, too majestic for the piano. Africa is only right for drums. The drum carries its rhythm but does not steal its music. Timpani is the background, the music of Africa is in the voices of the people. They are its instruments, more subtle, more beautiful, infinitely more noble than the scratching, thumping, banging, and blowing of brass and wind and vellum, strings and keyboard.”

“What about ‘Requiem for Geel Piet'?” I asked.

Doc chuckled. “For twenty years I have tried to compose ten or even five minutes of music, good music for the great Southland. And then, after twenty years of failure, I find it in the chain gangs, in the rhythm of a pick and the sweat of black backs and the vicious crack of the
sjambok
and the almost noiseless thud of the donkey prick. The voice music is not the keening of despair but the expression of a certainty that Africa will live and the spirit will survive brutality. The music of Africa is in the soul, and its instruments are the voices of its people. Such a
domkop,
Peekay. All the time it is waiting absoloodle under my long German nose. ‘Requiem for Geel Piet' is not my music, it is the music of the People. The necklace is only mine because I strung the beads.”

I handed Doc a steaming plate of bully beef. Then, using a short stick, I rolled the two sweet potatoes from the embers to cool a little for later. We ate in silence. Doc never took food for granted and would chew for ages before swallowing. I added a couple of logs to build the fire up again and then walked down to the stream to wash the plates and fill the billy.

After I'd made coffee and poured a tablespoon of condensed milk into the tin mug just the way Doc liked it, I placed the steaming cup next to him and sliced open his sweet potato. Steam rose from its fat, succulent belly and to this too I added condensed milk as a special treat. The mosquitoes, kept at bay by the early smoke from the fire, were out in force again. I rubbed citronella oil over my arms and legs and handed the bottle to Doc. The oil smelled pretty bad, but it was a damn sight better than being bitten half to death. We'd been going since four-fifteen in the morning and were exhausted. Too tired to wash the mugs, I wrapped myself in my blanket. Checking first to see that Doc lay well clear of the fire, I curled up under the overhang of the rock so that my blanket wouldn't be wet with dew in the morning and went to sleep.

I awoke at dawn, and, keeping my blanket wrapped around me, I built the fire up again. The valley was shrouded in mist and the rain forest which began not twenty yards from our camp site was invisible. Minutes after the sun hit the valley the mist would vanish, but until it did the cold would remain. My hands were freezing as I filled the billy from the stream for coffee. Doc was snoring away, tightly wrapped in his blanket, and I let him sleep on until I'd made his coffee and blown a generous tablespoon's worth of condensed milk into it. I did the same for myself and the steaming mug soon warmed my hands. I didn't wake Doc; I knew the smell of the fresh brewed coffee would do that for me. Doc loved coffee more, I think, than he loved his cactus garden and almost as much as Beethoven and J. S. Bach. Pretty soon his nostrils began to twitch, and grunting to himself he sat up in his blanket and knuckled his eyes open. High up through the mist we could hear the barking of the baboons; the sun must have reached them, and they were moving on.

Doc gripped the mug I gave him in both hands, then, looking up in the direction of the cliffs invisible above him in the mist, he said, “Today will be different, Peekay.” The barking of the baboons echoed down the misty valley.
“Ja,
for sure and absoloodle, today we find something.” He took a careful sip of coffee. “I hope you sleep good, Peekay?” he asked.

I cooked two sausages and a couple of rashers of bacon and then split the sausages down the center and laid them on two slices of bread, topped them with bacon, and sandwiched them with two more thick slices of bread. I handed one of the crude sandwiches to Doc and ate the other myself, holding it to my mouth with both hands.

While we were having a second cup of coffee the sun was beginning to dazzle its way through the mist, and seemingly in minutes the valley was filled with sunshine. A few patches of mist hung near the floor of the rain forest, but they too were soon gone. Above us the strange-looking cliffs looked less foreboding in the bright morning light, and I scanned them to see how we might set about the climb.

In a mist-shrouded landscape, sounds are always exaggerated. Now, with the mist gone, the morning settled down into all its reassuring components—the chatter of birds, running water, the urgent whir of a grasshopper, and in fact the generally busy noises of the mountain day coming fully to life. I walked over to a small clump of bushes and was in the half-squat position with my pants around my ankles when two plump bush partridges whirred from the underbrush directly beside me. I rose, my pants still around my ankles, and, squinting down the barrel of an imaginary shotgun, I let them have it, first with the left and then pulling carefully around to get the second bird with the right barrel. I then watched, laughing, as they disappeared like a couple of Hurricane fighters over a small ridge beyond me.

After washing I cleaned up camp and stowed our stuff under the overhanging rock, sprinkling our blanket rolls with citronella oil. If anything approached, particularly a scorpion looking for a nice warm place to nestle, the unfamiliar smell of the oil would drive it away.

Doc slung the rope around his neck and hung his eight-battery Eveready torch from his belt. I took a small climber's rucksack with water bottle, trowel for digging footholds, hammer, metal spikes, paraffin lamp, and Doc's field glasses. The climb didn't look too bad; buttresses of rock led to long ridges eroded into the face of the rock, as though the cliff face itself were made from a composition of hard and soft rock. It was these seemingly soft, white striations of rock that had first caught Doc's interest and that he was pretty sure would be dolomite or some sort of limestone. The torch and the paraffin lamp were a giveaway. Doc, always a romantic, was hoping we'd find a cave in the cliff face, a prospect which appealed to me enormously.

We climbed for an hour, the going not too hard. Doc, despite his age, was a skilled mountaineer who took no chances, and whereas I might have made it to the first ridge of eroded rock perhaps a hundred feet from the ground in half the time it took us, our progress was sure and the way back carefully mapped out in our minds. Getting down a steep face can often be more difficult than getting up it. The first ridge of eroded rock proved Doc's theory to be right; the material was dolomite that had been worn away by tens of thousands of years of wind and rain to make deep ledges with overhangs cut into the cliff face. We followed the ledge until we found a way back onto the cliff face, and continued to climb. It took us another hour to get another hundred feet up the cliff to yet another ledge. This one, more exposed to the wind, had been cut deeper into the rock, and we could smell where the baboons had settled for the night. Another fifty feet up the face and we came to a third ridge, deeper yet again. Walking along this ridge we found it gouged deeper and deeper into the cliff face until it came to a sudden end. We'd reached a blind alley; there seemed to be no way of getting back onto the face so that we could climb higher.

By now we'd been going almost three hours and the sun, beating onto the face of the cliff, was hot. Doc's khaki shirt was wet with perspiration, and I suggested we sit down for a drink and a rest. The ridge we were sitting on was, I judged, about a hundred feet from the top of the cliff, but it appeared impossible to go any further. Down below us we could see the canopy of the rain forest, with one old yellowwood tree, its branches stretching clear to the sky fifty feet above the canopy of the forest and no more than a hundred feet below where we were sitting. Doc said it could well be a thousand years old. The cliff face was shaped in a wide arc and on our right, about a hundred feet below us, the waterfall gushed from the rock face, more a fine, misty spray than a gush, really, but sufficient to feed the stream we'd camped beside.

Doc took his notebook from the rucksack and turned to a crude sketch he'd made of the cliff from ground level the previous afternoon.
“Ja,
we are sitting now in the deepest ledge, above is harder rock and not so deep striations.” He sighed, clearly puzzled. Doc didn't like to be wrong about his observations, which he would have permitted himself to voice only after a great deal of careful consideration. “Well, Peekay, we found dolomite and also there is water, but no cave. This is very strange. You can see the waterfall comes straight from the cliff. The stream must run deep inside the face of the cliff. There should be caves.
Ja,
this is so, absoloodle.”