Tandia (64 page)

Gideon stopped laughing and rose, his face serious, but it was obvious he was not afraid. He raised his good hand and when he spoke his voice was quiet and controlled. 'Sit, please, Lieutenant Geldenhuis.'

To his surprise Geldenhuis found himself responding. He moved back and, picking up the chair, he righted it and sat down slowly. 'I asked you a question, man!' he repeated, but his voice had lost some of its authority.

'Lieutenant, the fight is in three months. My hand, it will be better.' Gideon paused. 'Then I will beat you.'

Geldenhuis realized he'd been duped, forced into losing control by the black fighter. But now he was sufficiently back in control not to want to respond physically again. 'That'll be the frosty Friday!' He said it the way a schoolboy might and to anyone listening it would have sounded like a lighthearted response, two friends challenging each other. Nevertheless he was deeply shocked at the sudden, turn of events. One moment he had had the kaffir eating out of his hand and the next he'd lost control of the situation. He couldn't remember when last he'd been made to seem such a complete fool. A sudden hatred burned in him for the Zulu welterweight.

'I think you must let me go, Lieutenant,' Gideon said calmly. 'I think if in the newspaper they read you have arrest me for this thing and then you break my hand, I do not think the people, your people, the white people, will think it is for treason. I think they will say, "That policeman, he is afraid to fight Gideon Mandoma. Look what he do, he arrest him and he break his hand!" Haya, haya, haya, I do not think Peekay, he will fight you. He is the
Onoshobishobi Ingelosi,
he is a very strong man! I think he will not fight a coward, a Boer policeman who is afraid to fight a Zulu?' Gideon paused to let the barb find its mark. 'I think the
Onoshobishobi Ingelosi,
he will spit on you!' Gideon turned and made a spitting motion to the side.

Geldenhuis wanted to take his revolver out and put it to the black man's forehead and squeeze the trigger six times, let the whole fucking chamber go! Instead he fought down his anger and his voice was under control when he spoke. 'Come, we will drop you near Meadowlands.'

'Thank you, sir.' Gideon immediately assumed the body language of the black man facing authority, the mime of the oppressed. He had taken his insult further than he could ever have imagined possible and Geldenhuis hadn't put a bullet into him. He would keep the rest for when they met in the ring. A pair of six-ounce gloves would do the talking for him.

Gideon knew that he'd made a mortal enemy of the policeman for life and this wasn't a very intelligent thing to do. The African depends on indifference to keep him safe from the white man; any sharper focus is always dangerous. Geldenhuis would hunt him for as long as they both stayed alive. Mandoma was going to have to try to kill him in the ring. Despite his fear of the eventual outcome and the certain knowledge that Geldenhuis would never give up until he'd destroyed him, he felt good, better than he could remember feeling at any time in his life.

He grinned at Geldenhuis. 'Maybe your van can take me to Baragwanath Hospital. They can put for the plaster, then soon my hand will be better, you will see.'

There is a turn in the narrow mountain road about twenty minutes out of Nelspruit on the way to Barberton when suddenly the escarpment drops sharply away at your feet. Below is the bushveld proper, a 'valley' that stretches to a line of round-shouldered hills twenty miles across. Behind these hills the high mountains rise and artists who come to paint the valley are apt to use too much cobalt when deciding the blue for them. They seem unwilling to allow the mountains to blend, as they do, almost perfectly with the sky. Unlike most valleys, this one hasn't been worn down by a patient river system and smoothed through millennia by tumultuous flood. It is pimpled with hazy purple
koppies
and threaded by a river that seems to meander in lazy loops as though reluctant to leave so beautiful a place. At the far side of the valley, resembling a bucketful of white pebbles carelessly scattered between the buttresses of two green hills, lies the little town of Barberton.

Peekay pulled his car into the lookout at the side of the road. The unprepossessing name of the valley is the 'de Kaap', meaning simply, 'the Cape', named for the blanket of low cloud that sometimes covers it as you descend down from the escarpment. Though this wasn't the name Peekay thought of as he sat looking across at the small town which had shaped so much of his life; he recalled the name Doe had given the valley on a day, not much different to this one, ten years before.

They'd departed before dawn and by sunrise the old man and the boy had climbed beyond the green hills and into the high mountains. The morning had been spent on a rocky
krans
looking for cacti and now they were resting in the shade of an overhanging rock waiting for the fiercest part of the noon heat to pass. Far below them, lacquered in brilliant light, the bushveld spread across the valley, its space filled so completely with the shrill of cicadas that their sound seemed to paraphrase the silence. Not that Peekay could hear them, but he knew they were there in the flat-topped fever trees throwing circles of dark shadow that looked like black holes in the heat-bright landscape. High above them a chicken hawk drifted on a thermal current, adding to the somnambulating noontime stillness.

'This valley, it begins in another place, not so long ago.' Doc pointed his walking stick across the valley and over the smudge of purple blue which marked the distant escarpment. Somehow Peekay had known he was pointing still further yet, up beyond the horn of Africa, five thousand miles to the north. This knowledge was some sort of symbiotic thing he and Doc shared.

'It begins one day, maybe three million years away. Somewhere near the Dead Sea the earth begins to shift and part. Here is happening a great fault which comes through the Gulf of Aqaba and goes south, making also the trough of the Red Sea and ploughing a deep furrow into Africa.'

Doc's eyes were slightly narrowed, as though he was straining to see into the past. 'Then also it comes to Ethiopia and splits open the mountains like a pumpkin and goes a little bit west, above Lake Nyasa.'

Doc paused, looking over at Peekay and then back across the horizon, in his mind retracing the creation of the Great Rift Valley. 'Now is coming also a volcanic eruption and making Mount Kilimanjaro. Such a beautiful strange mountain that is coming from nowhere and standing alone, six thousand metres in the sky, the highest in Africa. Great lakes come also, Albert, Edward, Kivu, Victoria, Tanganyika, some so big the moon makes only for them a special tide. At last it is enough and in Western Mozambique it stops.'

Doc held up a finger. 'Nearly and almost stopping, but not absolute!' He made several small plopping sounds with his lips. 'Some rock, just a little, is turning.' Using his walking stick Doc indicated a sharp turn to the east. 'Maybe even only some spare rocks and lava is doing this.' He repeated the soft plopping sound, seeming to indicate that this eastern turn was an afterthought, a volcanic splutter, a mere groan of shifting rock in the final progress of the great fault that had left a gaping wound four thousand miles down the spine of Africa.

'Then we are waiting a few million years before we can see what is left from this kefuffle.' The excitement showed in Doc's pale blue eyes. He spoke as though in awe. 'What is left is this!' With his cane he swept the valley below. 'I think we will call it "God's toe mark!'" He seemed to consider this for a moment. 'Ja, this is a good name for the most beautiful place in the world, eh Peekay?'

'God's toe print?' Peekay suggested.

'Ja, this is better. God's toe print, absoloodle!' From that moment on Peekay had always thought of himself as living in God's toe print. He opened the door of the car and went to sit on a small, dark rock, mottled with white letchin spots. The air was dry, as it always is at this time of year in the valley, and the African sun felt good on his back, seeping into the muscle and bone of him, into the tiredness and the hurt.

Waiting for him twenty miles across the valley were people he loved.' Mrs Boxall, Captain Smit and Gert his great friend, Dee and Dum and his grandpa and of course his mother - though his relationship with his mother had always been a difficult one.

Peekay wondered briefly whether it would improve this time around. His mother's tight-lipped Pentecostal piety had made much of his childhood an unequal confrontation between himself on the one side and his mother and the Lord on the other. As a small child he'd often wondered how the Lord, who seemed to be constantly required at his mother's side, found time to do anything else but be with her. With this powerful combination ranged against him Peekay had been happy to come under the altogether delightful and spiritually undemanding surrogate parentage of Doc and Mrs Boxall.

It was Captain Smit who, with Geel Piet, had been largely responsible for the physical aspect of Peekay's life, for the fight in his hands. The Afrikaner tribe are a physical people with the hardness and independence of spirit based on three hundred years of survival in a harsh and hostile wilderness. They think with their fists and their guns and believe in a God of vengeance and wrath, largely dismissing the New Testament as someone else's God gone soft.

Captain Smit's intelligence was of the kind that summed a man up, drew a line in the dirt at his feet and dared him to cross it. It was born of six generations of frontiersmen where confrontation and harsh, sudden retribution kept a man on top. A man who wasn't prepared to defend himself or his kith and kin with his fists was worthless.

He thought little of the other side of his young fighter, recognizing only obliquely that Peekay was good at book learning. To him Peekay was a boxer, the best boxer he'd ever known. Only one other thing counted, his honour as a man; and Captain Smit knew Peekay was a man who could be counted on to stand with his friends.

Captain Smit had seen the championship fight at the local bioscope, not only on the night of the premier, but also on three subsequent occasions. Twice he'd come away convinced Peekay had won and on the two other occasions he wasn't so sure. If Peekay was going to win the return fight against the American negro it would have to be through something he possessed which the black man didn't. He decided to see the film once more; this time he would 'feel' the fight with his eyes to see if he could find what it was his beloved boxer needed.

Yet, it was apparent to him this wasn't a fight in the sense that two opponents strike at each other until one drops or is accorded the winner. This was a kinetic explosion, two unstoppable but perfectly matched wills coming together, each mind determined to triumph over the other.

But could a black man's will triumph over a white man's? How could he be as intelligent? Smit's heart began to beat faster as he realized Peekay must have a weakness; this was the only plaUSible explanation. It had something to do with his upbringing, the part of Peekay he didn't know.

He realized, of course, that Peekay was highly intelligent, a real
slimmetjie;
you don't go getting scholarships to posh rooinek schools in Johannesburg for nothing. But, because it wasn't the sort of smart he understood, the sort you could use in a 'boxing ring, he hadn't taken the trouble to learn about it. Now it occurred to him that the flaw in Peekay might have something to do with his education. Too many brains could ruin a good man. He'd seen this before in the prison system; a warder who thought before he hit a kaffir was useless. Pretty soon there would be chaos around him. If you thought too long about something, that something soon ate you up.

Captain Smit's own education had been pretty basic. He'd attended a backwoods farm school, innovated by the British, who required that all children reach a primary level where they learned to read and write and do a few essential sums. Among the generally knot-headed farmers' sons he was considered brighter than most. Nevertheless he hadn't developed a lot of respect for book learning when he left at the age of eleven. As a boy he'd believed his father when he said, 'If a man can sign his name, count the number of cattle he owns, read God's meaning from the Book and sing from the hymnal, then he has all the education he will ever need.' Captain Smit came from more than 270 years of
trekboers,
backveld cattle farmers, who had first trekked east from the Cape Colony and across the Great Fish River into the wilderness less than thirty years after the colony had been established in 1652. They were the first white generation to be born on African soil and were contemptuous of the narrow, pinching ways and old-world restrictions placed on their burgher parents by the Council of Justice, a body of men appointed by the Dutch East India Company to preserve the ways of European justice in the fledgling colony. They left the carefully tended vineyards and fields of their dour Dutch and French Huguenot parents and became nomads wandering in the wilderness, men who lived by the gun and listened only to the words of a vengeful white God whose tribe they considered they'd become.

Captain Smit's grandfather lost his life in the Boer War, at the battle of Paardeberg, when a British howitzer shell exploded safely outside the perimeter of the Boer encampment, but on precisely the spot where he'd chosen to defecate. He became somewhat of a legend among his fellow commandos as the only Boer the British had managed to catch with his pants actually down.

After the Boer War Johannes, Captain Smit's father, returned to his farm. He suffered from malnutrition and chronic dysentery and his six-foot-six frame, grown to manhood in a saddle he seldom vacated, was skeletal. His dark eyes burned with fever and the fire of an enduring, all-consuming hate for the British. Not yet out of his teens, Johannes the Boer found utter devastation on his return from his defeated commando. His family home and the outhouses and cattle pens had been fired and raised to the ground, a part of the British scorched-earth policy. His father's cattle had been driven away, meat for the devil General Kitchener's rapacious
khakies,
the coward women-and-children killers he called his British soldiers. His mother and all six of his brothers and sisters had been placed in a concentration camp where they'd perished, wiped out by dysentery and blackwater fever.

The embittered nineteen-year-old set about farming and raising a family, instilling into his children a congenital hate for the rooinek. This, along with the ability to shoot straight, was his only gift to his two sons. Times had changed; under British rule land was no longer cheap or for the taking and without cattle he could never hope to become more than a subsistence farmer, barely able to scratch enough from the soil to feed a barefoot wife and five ragged children.

His oldest son, Constand, had joined the prison service at the age of sixteen. The first of ten generations of his trekboer family to come out of isolation, leaving the dreaming land with its mystical tribal significance to join a gregarious white society. The young warder recruit soon discovered he was regarded as
platteland
scum. Even among his Afrikaner contemporaries he was Boer riff-raff, a poor-white person to be regarded as hardly better than a kaffir. The boots he was given for the job were the first he'd owned and when he'd been handed his uniform at the recruiting depot, he'd sniffed at it, trying to trap forever in his memory the heady camphored smell of new cloth, of clothes that he would be the first to wear.

But Constand kept his head and remembered his father's advice, that a closed mouth catches no flies, and he struggled to learn the strange new city ways. He was, in all other respects, ideally suited to his new vocation. He knew how to handle kaffirs, he was tough and could use his fists, and he could shoot straight. For all his uncouth ways, these counted in his favour in the brutal prison society he encountered, and he slowly climbed up the prison social scale, earning popularity as a handy heavyweight boxer while learning all he could of social graces and town manners. It had taken him twenty-four years to reach the rank of captain; but now, five years into his rank, he felt no need to move on. The Kommandant at Barberton prison thought- of him as the finest man he'd ever had under his command and certain to replace him when he retired from the service. Thus it was all the more surprising that Peekay, as a seven-year-old, had somehow crept past the block houses and the booby traps and the early warning systems in the mind of this prison officer to find a way past the hate to his heart. A rooinek kid had somehow reached a part of Captain Smit which he'd long thought of as dead.

Now, watching the silver screen, Captain Smit's eyes searched for a new clue. Then he saw it, and like most conundrums resolved, he wondered how he could ever have missed a sign so obvious. He'd been concentrating on Peekay and not the kaffir fighter. Behind the toughness and the skill and the intelligence there was something in the black fighter's eyes which was missing in those of his own fighter; there was an absence of 'the power' in Peekay's eyes.