Whitethorn (45 page)

No more about Marie's wedding, except you'll never guess what my early Christmas present was. We'll start with boots. Marie and Sergeant Van Niekerk gave me a pair of brown boots. I don't know how she found the time, with babies kicking and cafés being sold and wedding arrangements having to be done and goosefeather quilts being sewn, but Marie knitted me three pairs of grey socks to go with the boots. How they got my foot size was dead simple, next to the kitchen steps was some damp sand, and I must have left some footprints behind. Sergeant Van Niekerk, who had also once done a detective course in Pietersburg, knew just how to measure my footprint and take the information to the bootmaker. Next thing you know, there's a perfect-fitting pair of boots that never once gave a single blister.

A boy's first pair of boots is very important. At The Boys Farm, you got them from the Government along with two pairs of socks when you were thirteen, and what that meant is that now you beginning to be a grown-up man. The boys who had them would spit-and-polish them until they shone better than Meneer Prinsloo's. Then they'd tie the laces together and wear the boots around their necks and resting on their chests until they got to church when they'd put them on and then after church put the boots around their necks again, so the Government didn't have to worry about the boots ever wearing out. But sometimes if the boy's feet would grow and the boots would get too small, the boys could apply for a new pair. When you got these from the Government you had to give the old pair, that sometimes had hardly been used and still had hundreds of miles of walking left in them, back to Meneer Prinsloo. He sold them in town and said he used the money for something called general expenses, which everyone said was just another name for his own wallet.

Then the next part of my early Christmas present was five white shirts made from some of Marie and Mevrou Booysens' single bed sheets, because now nobody could use the single sheets because both women were married and now slept in double beds with their husbands. Which is another thing I didn't know about being married, you are forced to sleep in one bed. Marie made the shirts on her Singer sewing machine. Boy, was she ever a sewer and a half! All the shirts were a bit big, but it didn't matter because they allowed me to grow into them, which was beginning to happen at long last, and you could always turn up the sleeves at the cuffs.

To top everything off, from Doctor Van Heerden came three pairs of grey flannel shorts and a navy blue blazer and a navy tie with silver stripes. On the blazer pocket was the school badge, which is a bishop's hat and a crossed mitre, and under these the words in Latin,
In deo speramus
. Doctor Van Heerden said it means ‘In God we trust'. Miss Phillips had bought the blazer and tie and the grey flannel material, and sent them up from Johannesburg to Doctor Van Heerden who paid her for them. Marie also made the shorts. A leather belt and six white handkerchiefs were from Meneer Van Niekerk and his wife, Anna, who also knitted me two pairs of grey socks and a navy blue jersey with the school colours on the ‘V' around the neck.

Being the best boy, my job is to stand next to the best man in church, Meneer Van Niekerk. Instead of being in my clean khaki shorts and shirt and bare feet, I am about the best-dressed person in the congregation, wearing boots and a blazer and tie and, of course, one of Marie's lovely new white shirts with the cuffs of the sleeves rolled up a bit. Talk about posh all of a sudden.

We're talking a lot about me and I apologise but it's just that I want you to get the picture of all this kindness that's coming my way. But Gawie is also in the same boat, with school uniforms and stuff he needs.

So the
Dominee
announces there's going to be a
braaivleis
, a fair and a
tiekiedraai
put on by the church, that's going to go all day Saturday and it's all in aid of the new Afrikaner genius, Gawie Grobler.

The
Dominee
is in a good mood for once, and the beetle isn't munching angry-beard grass. At the end of his usual well-rounded sermon, that was about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when Judas Iscariot turns out to be a traitor and the cock crows thrice, he says, ‘Now we just had a sermon about loyalty and betrayal. To be loyal is to support your own kind and this is what I am asking you to do now. We need to help a boy, who has no mother and no father, but is still a genius. We are not a big community, but we are a generous one. So bring your canned fruits and vegetables and your jams and your sewing and embroidery, and sell it for charity next Saturday. We'll have a
braai
and a
tiekiedraai
and we must have enough money at the end to pay for Gawie Grobler's uniforms and a suitcase and some pocket money. Also, he needs socks, grey, if we have some knitters in the congregation. Now listen, this is God's work also, a boy like this from a small town who has brains can change the world of Afrikanerdom. Who knows, maybe he is also a Moses who can lead us out of the wilderness? So we calling Saturday “Meet the Genius”. I don't want to hear you couldn't come, you hear? Because, if we don't all support the next generation, then it is the same as the cock crowing thrice in the Garden of Gethsemane. It's finish and
klaar
for all of us. Our salvation and true revenge must come from the next generation.' He paused and looked around. ‘And God in His infinite mercy may have chosen an orphan to bring us justice.'

So the next Saturday the big event took place in the church grounds. As far as the business of Gawie the Afrikaner Boy Genius was concerned, two chairs were placed on a special platform, one for him and the other for Meneer Prinsloo, who was there as the official Government Father. And behind the chairs is a banner that says:

Meet the Genius 6d!

It's sixpence to shake their hand and congratulate them. A member of the congregation was standing there to take the money and encourage the crowd. He has an old-fashioned megaphone that helps his voice to be louder. ‘Roll up! Roll up! Meet the genius! Only sixpence a head, the body is free!' he yells. People like this joke and soon there's a long queue waiting to shake hands and say a kind word.

There's a tin bucket on the platform that you throw your sixpence into and it's going ‘ting, ting, ting' every minute or so and they're raking in the money. It doesn't take the Third Class Rooster long to get into the swing of things, and the announcer is saying, ‘Ask the genius anything you like, he'll know the answer. If he doesn't, then it's a stupid question below his dignity to answer.' Most people are too shy to ask, but some say things like, ‘What's 124 plus 209 minus sixty-three divided by nine?' And Gawie would think for a moment and say, ‘
Dertig
,
Meneer
,
baie dankie
.' Him giving them the answer straight off and then saying, ‘Thirty, thank you, Sir,' really impresses them. You'd hear people moving away from the platform saying things like, ‘Not only a genius, but also respectful. He will make a very good president.'

Then Doctor Dyke comes to the edge of the platform with this half smile on his face. ‘So tell me, genius, what is the theory of Pythagoras?' he asks. You could see Gawie was caught out, but luckily it's something I know. I'm standing near so I walk quickly to the back of Gawie's chair and whisper, ‘Say after me, Gawie
,
the square of the hypotenuse.' So Gawie says, ‘The square of the hippopotamus.' I'm trying not to laugh, ‘. . . of a right-angled triangle,' Gawie gets this part right ‘. . . is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.' Gawie completes this correctly, shouting it out loud to Doctor Dyke, who is standing far enough away for him not to hear me whispering behind the chair.

‘Not only correct, but also funny!' Doctor Dyke laughs. ‘Hippopotamus, eh? Very amusing. The boy has wit as well as brains. An Afrikaner genius is worth more than a sixpence, here, take two shillings, son.' Big ting.

In the chair next to Gawie, Meneer Prinsloo clears his throat and sticks his nose in the air. He still thinks it was Doctor Dyke who cut off Piet Retief's tail feathers so his own miserable Rhode Island Red rooster could win Best Rooster at the Pietersburg Agricultural Show. Then when Doctor Dyke had gone Meneer Prinsloo said, ‘He's just showing off, throwing two bob in the bucket.'

Anyway, the whole event is a big success and they going to do it every year for Gawie, so the town can take care of its own genius so he doesn't have to ask for handouts. After supper that night Meneer Prinsloo is smiling and still puffed up with pride from the whole day because more than a hundred people came up to him and congratulated him for producing a Government-owned genius. Sitting in the big leather chair on the ‘Meet the Genius' platform he had smiled modestly and said to these people, ‘On The Boys Farm they are all like my own sons, you hear?' Then he'd turn to face Gawie. ‘But right from the beginning I knew
this
boy was a
big
brain. It wasn't always easy because we on a strict budget and I don't believe in mollycoddling, you understand? But it was worth the sacrifice to bring him up with a few extra learning privileges. After all, a genius is a genius and God only makes a very few.' He'd shrug his shoulders, ‘What can I say? We can't all be geniuses. I only did my job to encourage him like any decent human being would do that is also a good Afrikaner.'

So now Gawie Grobler has gone from
surrogaat
to Third Class Rooster to Afrikaner Genius, and I think he was very happy for a change. It's not every day you get called a genius. After we'd come out of the dining room he came up to me. ‘I still can't be your friend any more,
Voetsek
,' he said, ‘but now, what I'm going to do is let you have shit squares again. I'll put them under your mattress, you hear?' Then he asked, ‘That word you said that sounded like hippopotamus, what was it again?'

‘Hypotenuse,' I replied. ‘It's the side opposite the right angle in a triangle.'

‘
Ja
, that's right, I just forgot for a moment. Hypotenoose.'

‘Hypote
nuse
, it's like
news
, not
noose
.' He didn't say anything and just walked away. I don't suppose geniuses like to have ordinary people correcting them.

I was really pleased at getting the shit squares again. Keeping up with the war news was very hard work because there were six lavatories, and I'd have to secretly visit them all and go through the wad of shit squares on the wire hooks. If there was any war news on them I'd rip that square off the hook and so on. But you never got the full story in one go. Mostly you were left in mid-air with a headline that said, ‘Russians liberate —', and then ‘Jews burned in ga—', then ‘Dresden bombed —'. How did these Jews get themselves burned? Was the ‘ga' a garage, garden, gap, gang, gallery, gaol, garret? You'd look and look through the shit squares, and sometimes like a miracle you'd find the connecting piece. Mostly someone had already wiped their arse on where the Jews were burned, and it was gone forever, and you never knew what happened to them. Of course, months later you learned that the ‘ga' stood for terrible inhuman things, gas ovens.

But you could tell, even from these only-bits-of-shit-square-news, that Adolf Hitler was on his last legs. There was also other ways that things were going badly for the Germans because suddenly there were no more
Ossewabrandwag
meetings, and all the guys in uniforms had disappeared from the face of the earth. The
Dominee
had also stopped telling us that underneath everything Hitler was secretly a God-fearing man. But he did say when Italy surrendered in 1943, ‘What can you expect from Roman Catholics? They cowards that Hitler should have known would let him down in a crisis.'

Then one night at supper, Meneer Prinsloo said, ‘If anyone asks about the
Ossewabrandwag
you say nothing, you hear? If any boy says they know someone who is one, all I can say is God help him because that boy better start fearing for his life, and they going to hear the
sjambokking
he gets from me in Pretoria.'

The weeks flew by like a flock of startled birds. The school holidays soon came, and Christmas and January went, and it was time to say goodbye. Then the last day came, and after breakfast, Tinker and me went down to the big library rock. The grass around it was long since summer brown, grown green after the fire, and now dried out in the late January heat. The lemon-stemmed whitethorn was back, cicadas shredded the vapoury air, and the sky was a don't-care blue.

We climbed to the top of the rock, and Tinker sat on my lap and I stroked her silky little ears and began to sob. There was no use saying anything, so I just let the tears come from deep down in my chest where the loneliness stones lived. Tinker licked my wet face and I could feel her little heart beating against my chest. My throat was so full of pain I couldn't even say goodbye out loud. I just kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, and sobbed some more.

Then Tinker and me had to wait at the front gate for Marie and Mevrou Van Heerden to come and pick up Tinker and me and take us to the doctor's house. I had Tinker's old sack that she'd always slept on at the dairy with me, so she'd know she had to stay at her new home. We didn't have long to wait, and Marie could hardly fit in the front of the car as she was ‘any day now', with her stomach bigger than a prize pumpkin. The idea was for me to go home with them and spend the rest of the day to settle Tinker in, and then around four in the afternoon they'd drive me back to The Boys Farm to pack my suitcase and get into my school uniform.