The Power of One

“
QUITE SIMPLY, IT'S PURE MAGIC....

This novel has such integrity, force and power it left me breathless. I found I couldn't put it down.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford

“Riveting ... The metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others. No goody-goody, Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Bryce Courtenay transports us to the South Africa of the late 1930's...It is the people of the sun-baked plains of Africa who tug at the heart strings in this book Courtenay draws them all with a fierce and violent love.”

The Washington Post Book World

“THE POWER OF ONE has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama in the boxing ring.”

The New York Times

“An appealing book . . . Offers fine bursts of Mark Twainish wit.”

The New York Times Book Review

“From Jack London's
A Piece of Steak
through Hemingway's
Fifty Grand
, boxing stories have been set against a backdrop of scuzzy gyms and sleazier promoters. They have also been told in gritty, deadpan prose, implying that even the fight game's winners are losers in the long run. Now comes THE POWER OF ONE, a sprawling, exuberant and occasionally brilliant first novel to reverse that century-old thesis.”

Sports Illustrated

“THE POWER OF ONE has the power to move the reader. It is a full, richly developed narrative and in the hands of Courtenay, an excellent storyteller, moves at a pace that . . . never flags.”

L.A. Life/Daily News

“Engrossing, entertaining, nicely written, frightening . . . His message of the ridiculousness of racial hatred rings clearly through the book.”

Detroit Free Press

“Thoroughly entertaining... Part Charles Dickens, part Horatio Alger, with a heady dose of magical realism thrown in for good measure.”

The Raleigh News & Observer

“In the grand tradition... If you like a good, brash novel of a winner, you'll like this book.”

The Wichita Eagle-Beacon

“This one is a winner. Original, refreshing, informative and unforgettable.”

Roanoke Times & World-News

“Brilliant... Always gripping... Captures a boy's agony and despair, courage and triumph.”

Wilmington Sunday News Journal

“A near-perfect popular novel, grand in theme, rich in narrative vigor... Readers will remember it.”

Library Journal

The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay

First published in Canada by

Little, Brown and Company (Canada) Limited

This edition published in 1999 by

McArthur & Company

322 King Street West, Suite 402

Toronto, Ontario

M5V 1J2

www.mcarthur-co.com

All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Courtenay, Bryce, 1933-

The power of one

ISBN 1-55278-012-0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-55278-905-6 (epub)

I. Title

PR9619.3.C598P68 823 C99-930728-2

Ebook development by Wild Element www.wildelement.ca

For Maude Jasmine Greer and Enda Murphy.

Here is the book I promised you so long ago.

Acknowledgments

A book is essentially about characters, about the shadowy figures that people a writer's imagination until, expurgated at last, they end up with some sort of wholeness on the page. We always think of a book as a lonely business: black coffee, white paper, and time. Yet no book gets under way without a support crew, those people who are the real-life characters who help to make it happen. First, my wife, Benita, who went without a husband for the year it took me to write this book. Others helped with advice, legwork, research, and the million chores that go into making a book happen: Adam Courtenay, my second son, who as a young journalist became, with Peter Keeble, my continuity reader; Alex Hamill and Owen Denmeade; Linda Van Niekerk; Nan Chignall; Sian Powell; Annette Dupree; Jill Hickson; Tony Lunn; Ken Cato; Joe Loewy; Laura Longrigg; and Kate Medina. I thank you all.

THIS
is what happened.

Before my life started properly, I was doing the usual mewling and sucking, which in my case occurred on a pair of huge, soft black breasts. In the African tradition I continued to suckle for my first two and a half years, after which my Zulu wet nurse became my nanny. She was a person made for laughter, warmth, and softness and she would clasp me to her breasts and stroke my golden curls with a hand so large it seemed to palm my whole head. My hurts were soothed with a song about a brave young warrior hunting a lion and a women's song about doing the washing down on the big rock beside the river where, at sunset, the baboons would come out of the hills to drink.

My life proper started at the age of five, when my mother had her nervous breakdown. I was torn from my lovely black nanny with her big white smile and sent to boarding school.

Then began a time of yellow wedges of pumpkin, burnt black and bitter at the edges; mashed potato with glassy lumps; meat aproned with gristle in gray gravy; diced carrots; warm, wet, flatulent cabbage; beds that wet themselves in the morning; and an entirely new sensation called loneliness.

I was the youngest child in the school by two years, and I spoke only English, the infected tongue that had spread like a plague into the sacred land and contaminated the pure, sweet waters of Afrikanerdom.

The Boer War had created great malevolent feelings against the English, who were called
rooineks.
It was a hate that had entered the Afrikaner bloodstream and pocked the hearts and minds of the next generation. To the boys at school, I was the first live example of the congenital hate they carried for my kind.

I spoke the language that had pronounced the sentences that had killed their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the world's first concentration camps, where they had died like flies from dysentery, malaria, and blackwater fever. To the bitter Calvinist farmers, the sins of the fathers had been visited upon the sons, unto the third generation. I was infected.

I had had no previous warning that I was wicked and it came as a fearful surprise. I was blubbing to myself in the little kids' dormitory when suddenly I was dragged from under my horrid camphor-smelling blanket by two eleven-year-olds and taken to the seniors' dormitory to stand trial before the council of war.

My trial, of course, was a travesty of justice. But then, what could I expect? I had been caught deep behind enemy lines and everyone, even a five-year-old, knows this means the death sentence. I stood gibbering, unable to understand the language of the stentorian twelve-year-old judge, or the reason for the hilarity when sentence was passed. But I guessed the worst.

I wasn't quite sure what death was. I knew it was something that happened on the farm in the slaughterhouse to pigs and goats and an occasional heifer. The squeal from the pigs was so awful that I knew it wasn't much of an experience, even for pigs.

And I knew something else for sure; death wasn't as good as life. Now death was about to happen to me before I could really get the hang of life. Trying hard to hold back my tears, I was dragged off.

It must have been a full moon that night because the shower room was bathed in blue light. The stark granite walls of the shower recesses stood sharply angled against the wet cement floor. I had never been in a shower room before, and this place resembled the slaughterhouse on the farm. It even smelled the same, of urine and blue carbolic soap, so I guessed this was where my death would take place.

My eyes were a bit swollen from crying but I could see where the meat hooks were supposed to hang. Each granite slab had a pipe protruding from the wall behind it, with a knob on the end. They would suspend me from one of these and I would be dead, just like the pigs.

I was told to remove my pajamas and to kneel inside the shower recess facing the wall. I looked directly down into the hole in the floor where all the blood would drain away.

I closed my eyes and said a silent, sobbing prayer. My prayer wasn't to God, but to my nanny. It seemed the more urgent thing to do. When she couldn't solve a problem for me, she'd say, “We must ask Inkosi-Inkosikazi, the great medicine man, he will know what to do. “Although we never actually called on the services of the great man, it didn't seem to matter; it was comforting to know he was available when needed.

But it was too late to get a message through to Nanny, much less have her pass it on. I felt a sudden splash on my neck and assumed it was warm blood trickling over my trembling, naked body and across the cold cement floor and into the drain. Funny, I didn't feel dead. But there you go. Who knows what dead feels like?

When the Judge and his council of war had all pissed on me, they left. After a while it got very quiet, just a drip, drip, drip from someplace overhead and a sniff from me that sounded as though it came from somewhere else.

As I had never seen a shower, I didn't know how to turn one on and so had no way of washing myself. I had always been bathed by my nanny in a tin tub in front of the kitchen stove. I'd stand up and she'd soap me all over and Dee and Dum, the two kitchen maids who were twins, would giggle behind their hands when she soaped my little acorn. Sometimes it would just stand right up on its own and everyone would have an extra good giggle. That's how I knew it was special. Just how special, I was soon to find out.

I tried to dry myself with my pajamas, which were wet in patches from lying on the floor, and then I put them back on. I didn't bother to do up the buttons because my hands were shaking a lot. I wandered around that big dark place until I found the small kids' dormitory. There I crept under my blanket and came to the end of my first day in life.

I am unable to report that the second day of my life was much better than the first. Things started to go wrong from the moment I awoke. Kids surrounded my bed, holding their noses and making loud groaning sounds. Let me tell you something, there was plenty to groan about. I smelt worse than a kaffir toilet, worse than the pigs at home. Worse even than both put together.

The kids scattered as a very large person with a smudge of dark hair above her lip entered. It was the same lady who had left me in the dormitory the previous evening. “Good morning,

Mevrou!” the kids chorused, each standing stiffly to attention at the foot of his bed.

The large person called Mevrou glared at me. “
Kom
!” she said in a fierce voice. Grabbing me by the ear, she twisted me out of the stinking bed and led me back to the slaughterhouse. With her free hand she removed my unbuttoned pajama jacket and pulled my pants down to my ankles. “Step!” she barked.

I thought desperately, she's even bigger than Nanny. If she pisses on me I will surely drown. I stepped out of my pajama pants and, releasing my ear, she pushed me into the shower recess. There was a sudden hissing sound and needles of icy water drilled into me.

If you've never had a shower or even an unexpected icy-cold drenching, it's not too hard to believe that maybe this is death. I had my eyes tightly shut, but the hail of water was remorseless, a thousand pricks at a time drilling into my skin. How could so much piss possibly come out of one person?

Death was cold as ice. Hell was supposed to be fire and brimstone, and here I was freezing to death. It was very frightening, but like so much lately, quite the opposite of what I had been led to expect.

“When you go to boarding school you'll sleep in a big room with lots of little friends so you won't be afraid of the dark anymore. “How exciting it had all sounded.

The fierce hissing noise and the deluge of icy piss stopped suddenly. I opened my eyes to find no Mevrou. Instead, the Judge stood before me, his pajama sleeve rolled up, his arm wet where he'd reached in to turn off the shower. Behind him stood the jury and all the smaller kids from my dormitory.

As the water cleared from my eyes I tried to smile. The Judge's wet arm shot out and, grabbing me by the wrist, he jerked me out of the granite recess. The jury formed a ring around me as I stood frightened, my hands cupped over my scrotum. My teeth were chattering out of control, a weird, glassy syncopation inside my head. The Judge reached out again and, taking both my wrists in one large hand, he pulled my hands away and pointed to my tiny acorn. “Why you piss your bed,
rooinek?”
he asked.

“Hey, look, there is no hat on his snake!” someone yelled. They all crowded closer, delighted at this monstrous find.

“Pisskop! Pisskop!” one of the smaller kids shouted, and in a moment all the small kids were chanting it.

“You hear, you a pisshead, “the Judge translated. “Who cut the hat off your snake, Pisskop?”

I looked down to where he was pointing, my teeth changing to a quieter timpani. All looked perfectly normal to me, although the tip was a bright blue color and had almost disappeared into its neat round collar of skin. I looked up at the Judge, confused.

The Judge dropped my arms and, using both his hands, parted his pajama fly. His “snake” monstrously large, hung level with my eyes and seemed to be made of a continuous sheath brought down to a point of ragged skin. A few stray hairs grew at its base. I must say, it wasn't much of a sight.

More serious trouble lay ahead of me for sure. I was a
rooinek
and a
pisskop.
I spoke the wrong language. And now I was obviously made differently. But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

By the end of the first term I had reduced my persecution time to no more than an hour a day. I had the art of survival almost down pat. Except for one thing: I had become a chronic bed wetter.

It is impossible to be a perfect adapter if you leave a wet patch behind you every morning. My day would begin with a bed-wetting caning from Mevrou, after which I would make the tedious journey alone to the showers to wash my rubber sheet. When the blue carbolic soap was rubbed against the stiff cane bristles of the large wooden scrubbing brush I was made to use, fiercely stinging specks of soap would shoot up into my eyes. But I soon worked out that you didn't need the soap like Mevrou said, you could give the sheet a good go under the shower and it would be okay.

My morning routine did serve a useful purpose. I learned that crying is a luxury good adapters have to forgo. I soon had the school record for being thrashed. The Judge said so. It was the first time in my life that I owned something that wasn't a positive disadvantage to adaptation. I wasn't just a hated
rooinek
and a
pisskop
, I was also a record holder. I can tell you, it felt good.

The Judge ordered that I be beaten up only a little at a time. A punch here, a flathander there, and if I could stop being a
pisskop
he'd stop even that, although he added, for a
rooinek,
this was probably impossible. I must confess, I was inclined to agree. No amount of resolve on my part or saying prayers to Nanny or even to God seemed to have the least effect.

Maybe it had something to do with my defective acorn? I forced a hole in the side pockets of my shorts through which my forefinger and thumb would fit. I took to secretly pulling my foreskin and holding it over the tip of my acorn as long as I could in the hope that it would lose elasticity and render me normal. Alas, except for a sore acorn, nothing happened. I was doomed to be a pisshead for the rest of my life.

The end of the first term finally came. I was to return home for the May holidays: home to Nanny, who would listen to my sadness and sleep on her mat at the foot of my bed so the bogeyman couldn't get me. I also intended to inquire whether my mother had stopped breaking down so I would be allowed to stay home.

I rode home joyfully in the dicky seat of Dr. Henny Boshoffs shiny new Chevrolet coupe. Dr. Henny was our district doctor and a local hero who played fly half for the Northern Transvaal rugby team. When the Judge saw who had come to pick me up, he shook me by the hand and promised things would be better next term.

It was Dr. Henny who had first told me about the nervous breakdown, and he now confirmed that my mother was “coming along nicely” but her nervous breakdown was still with her and she wouldn't be home just yet.

Sadly, this put the kibosh on my chances of staying home and never leaving again until I was as old as my granpa, and maybe not even then.

As we choofed along in the car, with me in the dicky seat open to the wind and the sunshine, I was no longer a
rooinek
and a
pisskop
but a great chief. We passed through African villages where squawking chickens, pumping their wings desperately, fled out of the way and yapping kaffir dogs, all ribs and snout and brindle markings, gave chase—although only after my speeding throne had safely passed. As a great chief, I was naturally above such common goings-on. Life was good. I can tell you for certain, life was very good.

Nanny wept great tears that ran down her cheeks and splashed onto her huge warm breasts. She kept rubbing her large dark hand over my shaved head, moaning and groaning as she held me close. I had expected to do all the crying when I got home, but there was no competing with her.

It was late summer. The days were filled with song as the field women picked cotton, working their way down the long rows, chatting and singing in perfect harmony while they plucked the fluffy white fiber heads from the sun-blackened cotton bolls.