The Power of One (68 page)

The hole appeared deeper than I had first suspected, deeper and wider, and behind the knife was Doc's gold hunter. With the tip of the knife I pulled the fob chain out and then the beautiful old gold pocket watch. I stuffed the watch and chain into my trouser pocket and with clumsy, trembling hands picked at the cotton thread tying the note to the black bone handle of the knife.

It was a page torn from one of Doc's small field notepads, and margin to margin from the top to the bottom of one side of the page were musical notes, minute in size but exact, a precisely written piece of music. I turned the page. In Doc's neat handwriting was a short note centered on the page.

My Dear Peekay,

In all the world no man has such a friend as you. Last night is come some music to my head, when it is coming I know it is time for me to go. Maybe, who can say, it is the music for Africa? Maybe only it is my music to you? Not so good as Mozart, never like Mr. Beethoven or like Mr. Brahms, but maybe better than a Chopin nocturne. Such a little piece of music for such a long life. I am such
dummkopf.
But not such
dummkopf
that I don't let you be my friend. For this I am having eleven out of ten. I must go into the crystal cave of Africa now. You must not follow until it is your time also. Maybe in one hundred thousand years we will meet again.

Good-bye, Mr. Schmarty-Pants welterweight champion of the world.

Your friend,

Doc

I had done my crying for Doc, and the note gave me comfort. Doc was safe and where he wanted to be, and his secret would be kept forever. I entered the tunnel leading to the outer cave. Testing the rope handrail we'd built for Doc's entry to the cave the first time, I found it still strong. He would not have had a great deal of difficulty getting into the narrow entrance. It took me only a few minutes to work the steel hook out of the tunnel wall and to remove the rope.

I returned to the cliff shelf and removed the second spike and put the two spikes and the rope into my rucksack. In a very few years the small holes the spikes had made would be eroded from the rock face, leaving no trace of man. Only the baboons or an occasional leopard would visit the outer cave, but none would enter the dark, damp inner crystal cave of Africa. Doc would be safe for the hundred thousand years it would take to turn him into crystal, forever a part of Africa.

I was home again just as the moon was rising over the valley. The pain, the deep dull pain under my heart, had lifted. Sadness remained, but I was now proud that Doc had achieved what he wanted to do. And we would always be bound together, he was very much a part of me. He had found a small, frightened, and confused little boy and had given him confidence and music and learning and a love for Africa and taught him not to fear things. Now I didn't know where the boy began and Doc ended. I had been given all the gifts he had. Now that Doc was resting right, I knew we could never be separated from each other.

The coffeepot left at four the next day to connect with the allnight sleeper from Kaapmuiden to Johannesburg. That last morning at home I walked into the front room and opened the Steinway and started to practice Doc's music, which I'd earlier transcribed onto three sheets of music manuscript After I picked at the notes for an hour, the melody began to form. It was a nocturne with a recurring musical phrase running through it. Very beautiful, it was unmistakably African, with a sadness and yearning for something that seems to be in the music of all of the People. The musical phrasing and a recurring melody were somehow familiar, like something I'd heard in a dream or the dreamtime or that simply races unknown through your blood. And then I realized what it was. It was the chant to the Tadpole Angel.

I stopped, bewildered. Doc had never heard the chant, which had started only after I had gone to boarding school. I played the music again. It was no coincidence. The chant was clearly a part of the music. It ran through the nocturne, repeating itself in a dozen variations but always there: clear, unmistakable, wild, beautiful. Onoshobishobi Ingelosi... shobi... shobi... Ingelosi, the piano notes enunciated as clearly as if the People themselves were singing it.

It was getting late and it was time to say my good-byes to Mrs. Boxall, old Mr. Bornstein, and Miss Bornstein. Gert had promised to pick me up and run us down to the station in the prison's new Chevy, which meant my mother and my granpa didn't have to rely on Pastor Mulvery, whose anxious-to-escape front teeth and unctuous presence I found increasingly depressing. I was glad that he wouldn't add to the awkwardness I always felt at departures.

I put Doc's music between the pages of a slim volume of poetry by Wilfred Owen that Mrs. Boxall had given me. “Not as soppy as Rupert Brooke, but a better war poet, I feel sure,” she had said.

Leaving home with the knowledge that when I returned it would be to a place that no longer meant Doc made this parting almost unbearably sad for me. My mother tried to chat brightly, but she wasn't much of a bright chatterer and my granpa just tapped and tamped and puffed and turned and looked up at the mountains and said, “The cumulus nimbus is building up. Could be a storm tonight, just as the Frensman are in loose bud.” Frensman was a deep red long-stemmed rose, and unless the petals were still in tight bud the storm would damage them. Gert, who at the best of times didn't have too much small talk, added to my sense of foreboding and made the waiting for the coffeepot to pull out almost unbearably long. I put my hand into the pocket of a new pair of gray flannel slacks made for me by old Mr. Bornstein and took out Doc's hunter. I was about to click it open when I was conscious of my stupidity and quickly slipped the beautiful old watch back into my pocket. My haste in doing so immediately pointed to my guilt. I thought I might have escaped detection, but after a couple of minutes, when my mother had turned to talk to my granpa, Gert whispered, “So you found him, hey? I'm blery glad, Peekay.” I ignored his remark, pretending not to hear him, and I knew Gert would remain silent.

A whistle warned of our departure, and the small crowd on the platform became animated, as happens when an overextended farewell is suddenly terminated. It occurred in our group too, each of us secretly glad that the waiting was over. “Look after yourself, son-boy,” my mother said, offering the side of her powdered cheek.

“There's a good lad.” Puff, puff, my granpa shook my hand. As I looked into his face I realized that his blue eyes had become a little rheumy and that the skin around his cheeks and mouth stretched tightly, as happens with thin men when they begin to grow old.

Gert gripped my hand in the traditional, excessively firm Afrikaner manner. “All the best, Peekay, see you in July, man.” He jumped into a boxing stance; it was a small physical joke to hide his awkwardness. “Keep your hands up, you hear.” He grinned and leaned forward so that only I could hear, “No more fighting kaffirs, you hear? Their heads is too hard, man.”

The coffeepot gave a blast of steam whistle, loud enough to belong to a much bigger, more important train. The people in the third class “Blacks Only” carriage yelled and screamed with delight, five or six heads and a dozen arms to each carriage waving bandannas and generally making the most of the farewell occasion as the little train slowly left the platform. I continued to wave until the train had passed the long bend that took the platform from sight. With a sigh of relief I leaned back into the green leather seat. I knew I'd have the compartment to myself until Kaapmuiden, and I cherished the idea of being on my own. It had been a long week since I had fought Gideon Mandoma.

Morrie was full of news when we got back to school. He'd worked out a formal business arrangement with Mr. Nguni, and now there were twenty young black boxers training at Solly's gym, as well as three black boxing officials who would be trained in the handling of boxers and would eventually sit for their referee's tickets.

Gideon Mandoma and three other young fighters were separated from the other blacks to do their workouts with me on Wednesday afternoons and before church on Sunday mornings. Gideon soon became more than just a good sparring partner. He laughed a lot and had a quick wit which delighted me. His English wasn't strong, and at first we mostly spoke in Zulu, until after a workout some three weeks into the term he patted me on the shoulder with his glove. “No more Zulu. Peekay, your Zulu comes from my mother's breast. Now my English must come from your fists. You must teach me English.” He propped and slowly stroked his hair in a backward movement the way Morrie would do it, lightly touching it as though preening in front of a mirror. “I have one good English words from Morrie.” He mimicked the way Morrie spat words out: “Cheeky bloody kaffir!” Gideon threw back his head and laughed happily. “This English I understand very good.”

It was then that I hit on the idea. “We're going to start a school for Solly's black boxers,” I announced to Morrie on the tram back to school after training.

“Christ, Peekay, isn't that going a bit far? Educate the blacks, and before you know where you are they'll want to take over the country.”

“It's as much theirs as it ours. More, actually,” I said, surprised at his outburst.

“You're perfectly right, but can't we let them take a little longer to find out? Keep the buggers in the dark as long as possible?”

“Morrie, what are you saying? I thought you were a liberal thinker.”

Morrie laughed. “First and foremost Fm a pragmatist, but there's bound to be a quid in it somewhere, although Fm buggered if I can see where. How do you propose going about it, integrate the Prince of Wales School?”

“C'mon, Morrie, take this seriously. If we go to Singe ‘n' Burn and put it to him as two Renaissance men and give him a whole line of bullshit about liberalism, blah, blah, blah, I'm sure he'll be in it. We could have the black school in one of the classrooms on a Saturday night.”

“Already I like it! One lesson a week shouldn't pose too much of a threat to white civilization as we know it on the southern tip of Africa.”

“Well, what do you reckon?”

“Offhand I can't think of a way to make any money out of it but, as Karl Marx, or was it Christ, said, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.' Okay, whatever you say.”

“Great! Because you have to open the subject with Singe ‘n' Burn by telling him that as a Jew you know what it's like to be an oppressed people.”

Morrie thought for a moment. “Fine, nothing to it. I simply go in and ask Singe ‘n' Burn to open a black school in this citadel of white privilege, pointing out to him that as the son of a multimillionaire and also as an expertly oppressed person for roughly nineteen hundred years . . .”

“Good. I'll make an appointment to see him after school tomorrow.”

Singe ‘n' Burn proved more difficult than we had anticipated. He was not at all sure of the attitude the Nationalist government might take to one of the country's most famous English-speaking private schools becoming the cradle of black adult learning.

There were, of course, black schools and some very good ones. But most Africans left school before they reached high school and a great many more after only two or three years of the most basic education. Some, perhaps a majority, never made it to school at all. If, in later years, they wished to learn to read and write, no adult school facilities existed for them.

We seemed to have reached a stalemate, with Singe ‘n' Burn promising to put the issue to the school governors, where it was almost certain to be defeated. Their idea of Christian gentlemen did not include the brotherhood of man if it meant lowering the color bar.

Our arguments had been sound but our politics naive. In South Africa, when a black skin is involved, politics and social justice have very little in common.

“We've been a couple of schmucks to think he'd buy it straight off like that. We're going to have to make the bastard feel guilty, it always works with a Renaissance man,” Morrie said. We were sitting in the prefects' common room, which was seldom used by the other prefects after school and was a nice private place to talk or work.

“I thought we'd already made him feel guilty.”

“Guilty in the mind, intellectual guilt yes. But guilty so it hurts inside, that's different. Jews are expert at soul guilt. Let me illustrate what I mean. Until we fought in Sophiatown, the only black people I knew well were Mary, our cook, and Jefferson, the butler. And, of course, the various other nameless servants who pretended to work around the place. The afternoon of the fight was the first time I had ever been close to African people. I mean, actually experienced them as people, not just servants or faithful family retainers, but as people with problems. I mean, just like other ordinary people. I haven't told you before, but the effect was shattering. I found myself liking them. More than that, I understood for the very first time how the persecuted Jew must have felt. When they sang for you—not just for Gideon, that was understandable, but for you also—the generosity of spirit made me ashamed of my white skin. That's the sort of guilt I mean.”

“Christ, Morrie, you didn't tell me any of this.”

“So what's to tell? You can't tell it, you have to feel it. That's what Singe ‘n' Burn needs. He needs to feel not what he is denying but whom he is denying. We're going to introduce him to Gideon.”