The Covenant (169 page)

In the excited discussion which ensued, the Johannesburg man had the good sense to ask, “By the way, has anyone else staked you? I mean, would there be outstanding claims ahead of mine?”

For Pik Prinsloo to lie about his diamond business was impossible: “I owe four men ahead of you.” Then, grabbing the stranger’s arm, he added quickly, “But they was long ago. Maybe twenty years.”

The Johannesburg man drew back, looked at the old digger, and hesitated. But then he saw that wizened face, the lips without teeth, so that nose and chin almost met, the torn undershirt, the sockless feet and the deep fire burning inside the watery eyes, and he knew that if he intended gambling on some self-deceived diamond man, this was the kind he had been seeking.

“How much would you need to move north?” he asked quietly.

Without hesitation, for he had been calculating such problems for fifty years, Pik replied, “Three hundred and fifty rand.”

“You have it,” the man said, and that was how in the New Year of 1978, Prinsloo and his nagging sister drove their donkeys north to the Swartstroom, parked their house-wagon in a field some miles north of Sannie’s Tits, and started their prospecting.

Old Pik had been attracted to this particular stream by signs he had seen many years before, the harbingers of diamonds: agates and flecks of reddish garnet mixed in with ilmenite, the jet-black rock which had first been identified and named at the Ilmen Mountains in Russia. The more he studied the stream in those days, the more convinced he had become that it must be diamantiferous. “The bantoms are heavy and black,” he told his sister in their filthy wagon. “There’s got to be diamonds here.”

“If there was,” she grumbled, “somebody else would’ve noticed.”

“Maybe somebody else wasn’t as smart as me,” he said, but when weeks passed without a find, she insisted that he head south to sites which had been proclaimed.

Now he still had more than three hundred rand, enough, counting his state pension, to live on for three years at the frugal rate at which he and his sister ate. One huge can of baked beans, the top knocked off by a dulled opener, a pot of mealie meal and some scraggy mutton would suffice for three days, bent forks scraping over the tin plates. “Ek sê vir jou, Netje. [I’m telling you, Netje.] There’s diamonds this time, and I’m the one to find the damned things.”

Jamming his beaten hat with its torn wide brim onto his uncombed head, he hunched up his shoulders as if marching to war, and went forth to probe the Swartstroom.

Fortunately, the level of the stream was low, so that he could concentrate on the meanders of this remnant of the mighty rivers which had cut away the earth. He worked only the inside of the bends, for there the water slowed and dropped whatever heavy objects it might be carrying. If there were diamonds, they would be hiding here, so day after day he dug the gravel and passed it through his sieves. When he eliminated the larger rocks, which he inspected fleetingly, he was left with a residue which might conceivably hide a diamond, and this he sieved carefully, with much water and a poetic, drifting motion that swirled the gravel about in such a way as to gravitate the heavier bantom to the bottom and into the center. Thus, when he flipped the sieve over onto a flat surface, any diamond would be on top, in the center.

On a hot morning in January 1978 he carried his sieve to the shaded area where he always did his inspecting, flipped it, and with a curious knifelike scraper, which he had been using for more than forty years, sorted the agates, certain that on this lucky day he was destined to find a diamond. None appeared. Had one been in the rubble it would have shone so brilliantly in the shadows that he would have spotted it within seconds, but none did. Instead he saw something which pleased him mightily, so that he ran from his pan to call his sister: “Netje! Look at what we have!”

In her felt slippers and faded cotton dress she came grumbling from the house-wagon, picking her way along the rocky footpath to the stream, where she studied the mess left by the sorting and snorted, “Gemors, man. Nothing!”

“The little ones!” Pik cried with bursting excitement.

She looked at the little ones and saw nothing, at which her exasperated brother shouted, “The little red ones! They’re garnets!”

Beside them she saw the ilmenite, too, glistening black, and then even she had to concede that this stream was worth searching.

January and February, the sweating months, were spent probing the inner banks where the water slowed, and although not a single diamond chip was found, garnet and ilmenite continued to show in faint traces, signs as positive as if someone had posted a notice:
DIAMONDS HIDING HERE
.

So he kept searching, and then one morning in October, after he had gobbled two spoonfuls of cold pap, he shuffled out, heart high and trousers dragging, to a new bend in the Swartstroom, and on the first panning, when he flipped the gravel, there in the middle of the small mound rested a shimmering gem larger than the end of his thumb.

There could be no mistake about it, for although the stone lay in shadow it glimmered like a light in darkness, vibrating even through the film of muddy deposit that clouded it. It was a diamond, the biggest old Pik had ever found in fifty-two years of searching, and he was so stunned by his discovery that when he tried to shout for Netje, no sound came from his throat.

And that was good, because as soon as he hefted the diamond, and cleaned it, and studied it in sunlight, seeing that it had pentagon-shaped faces and what appeared to be a good color, he realized that he must keep his find secret until such time as he had explored the vicinity. But this posed a problem. South African diamond law was
bitterly severe where possession of uncut gems was concerned; and the most reviled profession a man could follow was I.D.B.—illegal diamond buyer.

The finding of even the smallest diamond became an act encased in legal paperwork. Within twenty-four hours Pik had, by law, to enter his diamond in his personal register, stating its site of finding, its approximate weight and likely value. Then within three days he must carry his diamond to some police station and register it, and he could not simply report that he had found such-and-such a stone of such-and-such weight; he must show it to them physically, and allow them to describe and weigh it. These details would be entered in both his register and the police record, and stamped. And as soon as that was done, the world would be informed that Pik Prinsloo had found a diamond stream, and hungry men would flood the place.

Pik was familiar with this procedure; indeed, he had often dreamed of chaperoning a real diamond through the intricate process, but now that he had control of one, he sought to protect himself. He wanted four or five days to inspect this bend on the chance that it contained a parcel of equal gems, but to delay involved illegality, and he had seen too many men go to jail for ignoring the strict rules.

What to do? He sat for some time with the diamond in his cupped hands, convincing himself that it was as fine a stone as he had first believed: Hell, this one’ll bring two thousand rand! The thought staggered him, so he studied the stone again. It was a good one and it really could bring as much as two thousand rand: God Almagtig! We’re rich! Trembling, he spit on the diamond, polished it, and was sitting with it in the sun when he became aware that a drop of moisture had fallen upon it. He was sweating, and it was then that he buried the diamond beneath a well-marked rock and returned feverishly to the stream.

He dug and sieved and gravitated all that day, but found nothing. At dusk he returned to the house-wagon, tethered the mules, and came in to supper. “Why you so nervous?” his sister asked, and he said his head ached. But when he got up twice during the night to stand barefooted outside the door, staring toward the rock where his diamond lay, his canny sister whispered as he came back in, “You found one, didn’t you?” And he could not repress his surging excitement.

In mumbles that came rushing forth through his toothless gums, he told her of his legendary find: “Bigger than my thumb. Fine color, fine color. Netje, this one could bring two thousand rand.”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” she growled.

“It could. Honestly it could. When you see it …”

“So you hid it under a rock?”

“I want to search the stream.”

“You want to go to jail. You enter it in the book, proper. You take it to the police.”

“I got to protect myself.”

But she was adamant, and as soon as enough light showed in the east for them to see, she marched to the rock, and when the diamond was placed in her hands, and its true weight and color were evident, tears came to her eyes. “It’s a real diamond,” she conceded, but the concept of two thousand rand was beyond her.

In the house-wagon it was she who took down Pik’s register and in an almost illiterate scrawl wrote: “Swartstroom, by the three acacias, 11 October 1978, about five carats, color good. Maybe two thousand rand.” That afternoon she and Pik walked six miles to the nearest police station to register their find.

Once the diamond was legally registered, it became Pik Prinsloo’s property, to dispose of as he wished, but only through established channels. If he allowed this stone to fall into the hands of some I.D.B., both he and the buyer would go to jail; he must take it personally to the diamond market at Boskuil, two hundred and sixty miles to the west. The trip could be made by train—four hours to Johannesburg, five more to Boskuil—but old Pik felt that with such an impressive stone, he ought to travel by private auto, so with great difficulty, because he hated telephones, he called his backer in Johannesburg: “We got the biggest diamond in my life. Let’s go to Boskuil and sell it for two thousand rand.”

The man said he could break free late Friday afternoon—“Stop right there!” Pik shouted. “We got to be in Boskuil Friday morning. Only day the buyers come.”

So early Thursday his backer came for him and they got in the car and started for a location which had no equal in the world: a remote farm lost in the barren lands south of Johannesburg, where by tradition diamond buyers from all over the nation clustered in a collection of rough corrugated-iron shacks to see what the local adventurers might have found. The trip was not easy, for whenever Pik and his diamond left one magisterial jurisdiction to enter a new, he had to be
prepared to produce his registration papers so that the authorities could trace this one diamond across the country and be assured that it made its way into the hands of a licensed buyer. And when Pik reached the jurisdiction in which it was to be sold, he must register it anew.

The halts were tedious enough, but this October day was turning out to be one of the hottest of the new spring season, so that the car steamed inside, and Pik’s habit of not bathing now became a penetrating problem.

The Johannesburg man tried opening his window, then Pik’s, then all the windows, but even this flow of fresh air failed to alleviate the awful smell, and the man began to wonder if even a five-carat diamond was worth the torment. But at last they came to Boskuil farm, at about the same time as the evening train which brought the buyers for the Friday market. Office Number One had for some years been occupied by H. Steyn, Licensed Diamond Dealer of excellent reputation, and early Friday morning Mr. Steyn, a small, knowing man dressed in a dark suit, posted his certificate on the outer door, donned cuff guards, and placed his German-made six-power loupe on the table upon which his elbows rested.

First man in line was Pik Prinsloo, grubby khaki shirt, sagging trousers, hat with broken brim. For fifty-two years the diamond merchants had known this fellow, a splinter diamond here, a fragment there, and always the promise that one of these days … No buyer had ever handed old Pik more than three hundred rand at a time, and on this meager flow of capital he had survived.

H. Steyn, seeing the old fellow approach, assumed that once again Pik had found himself a quarter-carat stone worth a few pounds, but when he noticed that the smelly old man was trembling, and there was a wild light in his eye, he realized that this day was special. And when Pik’s backer started to enter the shack, Steyn noticed how the prospector waved him back: “You stay outside. This is my job.” There was some muffled conversation, at the end of which the old man screamed, “Of course I’ll tell you how much, and if I don’t, Mr. Steyn will. Now get out!”

“You have a stone?” Mr. Steyn asked.

Pik’s hands shook, but after an awkward moment he produced a matchbox, which he slid open with difficulty, and placed upon the table a diamond large enough to make H. Steyn cough. “You have your papers for this?” he asked.

“Papers?” old Pik shouted. “You’re damn right I got papers.” There was more fumbling, and when the familiar documents were spread before Mr. Steyn he pretended to read them, using this as an excuse for finding time to run through a series of hasty, silent calculations: Goodness, that looks to be at least five carats! It’s makable. Possibly a brilliant. Can’t see any big flaws. What’s the color? Might even be an ice-white. Probably cut down to about one-point-four carats. I could sell this to Tel Aviv for maybe ten thousand dollars. They could sell it to New York for fifteen thousand. Ultimate buyer, as much as twenty-eight thousand dollars. So I could afford to pay him fifteen hundred dollars a carat or seventy-five hundred in all. But that would be shaving it a little close. Best I ought to go would be fourteen hundred dollars a carat, or seven thousand in all. I’ll offer him thirteen fifty a carat, or sixty-seven fifty in all. Like all diamond buyers, he did his calculations in dollars, since America was the ultimate market, but since he had to pay in rand, he knew immediately what the exchange would be. It took $1.16 to purchase one rand, so that the final price of $6,750 worked out to about R5,800, and that was the figure he kept in mind as he prepared to speak.

While H. Steyn was completing his calculations, old Pik was pursuing his: It’s a good stone. It’s worth two thousand rand. And I saw his eyes light up when I placed it on the desk. Damn, I will ask two-five. Look at that diamond. He doesn’t see a diamond that good in a month. It could even go for two-six. Damn, I’ll go for two-six.