The Power of One (23 page)

“Ja,
that is true. But, I think, maybe on cactus plants.” Doc's deep blue eyes showed his amusement. “For two years I have searched for the
Aloe microsfigma,
from here, zere, everywhere. Then, poof! Just by sitting on a rock,
Aloe microsfigma
comes. The boy is a genius. Absoloodle!”

“Whatever can you be talking about, Professor? What have you two been up to?” Whereas before she had been angry, now she was plainly charmed by him.

“Madame, we met on the mountaintop with only the face of God above us. The picture will capture the moment forever,” he shrugged his scrawny shoulders. “It was destiny, the new cactus man has come.”

My mother seemed unsure how to take this. “I am a born-again Christian, Professor. God's name is only used in praise in this house,” she said, mostly to cover her confusion but also as a caution to Doc not to assume an overfamiliar manner with the Almighty.

“God and I have no quarrels, madame. The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. Let me tell you how. It has humility, but it is not submissive. It grows where no other plant will grow. It does not complain when the sun bakes it back or the wind tears it from the cliff or drowns it in the dry sand of the desert or when it is thirsty. When the rains come it stores water for the hard times to come. In good times and in bad it will still flower. It protects itself against danger, but it harms no other plant. It adapts perfectly to almost any environment. It has patience and enjoys solitude. In Mexico there is a cactus that flowers only once every hundred years and at night. This is saintliness of an extraordinary kind, would you not agree? The cactus has properties that heal the wounds of men and from it come potions that can make man touch the face of God or stare into the mouth of hell. It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.” He paused and pointed to the little green plant in the jam tin.
“Kalanchoe thyrsiflora,
such a shy little lady. Two years I search to find her, now she grows happily in my cactus garden, where her big ears listen to all the gossip.”

“I'm sure that's all very nice, Professor, but what does it all mean?” my mother said. I could see she was confused, not knowing whether, in the end, Doc had praised or blasphemed God.

“My eyes are not so goot. If the boy will come with me to collect cactus specimens, I will teach him music. It is a fine plan,
ja!
Cactus for Mozart!”

My mother looked pleased, as though a new thought had come into her head. “His grandmother was very creative, an artist, you know. But I don't know if there were any musicians in the family, perhaps Dad will know.” She pointed to the two rose pictures on either side of the bookcase. “Her work,” she said modestly. “She only ever painted roses.”

Doc did not turn to look at the pictures. “When I came in I saw them already, very goot.”

The idea of a musician in the family was clearly to my mother's liking. The Boers are a naturally musical people, and any excuse for a gathering brought out the concertinas and guitars and even an occasional violin. In my mother's eyes it was their sole redeeming feature. The idea of a son who played the piano, let alone classical music, was a social triumph of the sort she had never expected to come her way. Even in this largely English-speaking town, a classical piano player in the family was a social equalizer almost as good as money.

I was to learn that the Apostolic Faith Mission, which believed in being born again, baptism by immersion, the gift of speaking in tongues, and faith healing, was deemed pretty low on the social scale. Barberton was not the sort of town that encouraged the crying out in prayer or sudden spontaneous religious combustion from the floor of a charismatic church. My mother was constantly fighting to remain loyal to the Lord and his religiously garrulous congregation while at the same time aspiring to the ranks of “nice people.”

• Old Pisskop at the piano promised to be the major instrument in balancing the family social scales. The bargain was struck just as Mrs. Cameron arrived for her fitting. In return for trekking around the hills as Doc's constant companion, I would receive free piano lessons. I had to work very hard on my camouflage to contain my delight. While I had no concept of what it meant to be musical, from the very beginning pitch and harmony had been a part of my life with Nanny.

I spent the long summer months mostly with Doc, climbing the hills around Barberton. Often we would venture into the dark
kloofs,
where the hills formed deep creases at the start of the true mountains. These green, moist gullies of tree fern and tall old yellowwood trees, their branches draped with beard lichen and the vines of wild grape, made a cool, dark contrast to the barren, sun-baked hills of aloe, thorn scrub, rock, and coarse grass.

Occasionally we saw a lone ironwood tree rising magnificently above the canopy. These relics had escaped the axes of the miners who had roamed these hills fifty years before in search of gold. The mountains were dotted with shafts sunk into the hills and mountainside, their dark pits and passages supported by timber which, before it was consigned to the tunnels, might have stood for a thousand years.

Doc taught me the names of the flowering plants. The sugarbush with its splashy white blossoms. A patch of brilliant orange-red seen in the distance usually meant wild pomegranate. I learned to differentiate between species of tree fuchsia, to stop and crush the leaves of the camphor bush and breathe its beautiful aromatic smell. I recognized the pale yellow blossoms of wild gardenia and the blooms of the water alder. The monkey rope strung from tall trees draped with club moss was given names such as traveler's joy, lemon capers, climbing saffron, milk rope, and David's roots. Nothing escaped Doc's curiosity, and he taught me the priceless lesson of identification. Soon trees and leaves, bushes, vines, and lichens began to assemble in my mind in a schematic order as he explained the nature of the ecosystems of bush and
kloof
and high mountain.

“Everything fits, Peekay. Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. One thing follows the other, everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest. See,” he would say, pointing to a tiny vine curled around a sapling, “that is a stinkwood sapling which can grow thirty meters, but the vine will win and the tree will be choked to death long before it will ever see the sky.”

He would often use an analogy from nature.
“Ja,
Peekay, always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.” He looked at me and continued. “The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.” His piercing blue eyes looked into mine. “Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you will grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.” He would sigh and squint at me. “Experts, what did I tell you about experts, Peekay?”

“You can't always go by expert opinion. A chicken, if you ask a chicken, should be stuffed with grasshoppers,
mielies,
and worms.” Even after repeating it a hundred times, I still thought it was funny.

Or Doc would show me how a small lick of water trickling from a rock face would, drop by drop, gather around its wet apron first fern and then scrub and later trees and vines until the
kloof
became an interdependent network of plant, insect, bird, and animal life. “Always you should go to the source, to the face of the rock, to the beginning. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny. Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body. This has made him greater than the creatures around him. Everything has happened before; if you know what comes before, then you know what happens now. Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”

Doc never talked down. Much of what he said would take me years to understand, but I soaked it up nevertheless, storing it in my awkward young mind where it could mature and later come back to me. He taught me to read for meaning and information, to make margin notes and to follow these up with trips to the Barberton library, where Mrs. Boxall would give a great sigh when the two of us walked in. “Here come the messpots!” She claimed she had to spend hours erasing the penciled margin notes in the books we borrowed. Doc had once insisted they made the books more valuable and Mrs. Boxall had arched an eyebrow. “Written in German and in kindergarten, Professor?”

Doc shrugged, looking up from his book and removing his gold-rimmed reading glasses.
“Kindergarten,
that also is written in German, Madame Boxall.”

But I don't think Mrs. Boxall really minded. The books on birds and insects and plants were seldom borrowed by anyone else, and besides, as most of the books in the natural history section had once belonged to him, Doc had adopted a proprietorial attitude toward the town library. Over the years his tiny cottage had become too small to contain them all and they had been bequeathed to the library, which now acted, in Doc's mind anyway, as a bibliographic outpost to his cottage. Doc also taught me Latin roots so I was no longer forced to resort to memory alone and the botanical names of plants began to make sense to me.

We climbed the high
kranse
and the crags in search of cactus and succulents. Toward the end of summer, on the side of a mountain scarred by loose gray shale and tufts of coarse brown grass, I stumbled on
Aloe brevifolia,
a tiny thorny aloe.

Doc was overjoyed. “Gold! Absolute gold!” He jumped into the air and, upon landing, missed his footing on the shaley surface and fell arse over tip down the mountain, coming to a halt just short of a two-hundred-foot drop. He climbed gingerly back, hands bleeding from clutching at the sharp shale, a sheepish grin on his weather-beaten face. But the triumph of the rare find still showed in his excited eyes. “Brevifolia in these parts, so high, impossible! You are a genius, Peekay. Absoloodle!”

It was the find of the summer and, to Doc, worth all the weary hours spent on the hills and in the mountains. We recorded the find with the camera and removed six of the tiny plants, leaving double that number clinging precariously to the inhospitable mountainside.

Like me, Doc was an early riser, so just after dawn all that summer he gave me piano lessons. “In one year we will tell, but it is not so important. To love music is everything. First I will teach you to love music, after this slowly we shall learn to play.”

I was anxious to please Doc and worked hard, but I suspect he knew almost from the outset that I wouldn't prove an especially gifted musician. My progress, while superior to that of the small girls he was obliged to teach for a living, indicated a very modest talent. In the years that followed, it was enough to fool my mother and all the big-bosomed matriarchs who ruled the town's important families. At concerts which, I hasten to add, were not in my honor, I represented the cultured element and they would applaud me deliberately and loudly.

These occasions, which occurred in the spring and autumn, made my mother very proud, though they also represented a compromise with the Lord. Concerts were the devil's work and very much against the Lord's teaching. They were just the sort of thing which, like money lending, the Lord had clearly condemned when he castigated the Pharisees and Sadducees in the temple of Jerusalem. She justified my participation and her attendance by pointing out, to herself mostly, that many of the great classical musicians had written music for the church.

The Lord's will was equally explicit on drinking and smoking, the bioscope and dancing, except ballet.

Ballet was another of the items cherished by the lavender-scented ladies from the town's upper-echelon families, and the ballet performance usually preceded my piano recital. Together they made up the cultural component of the twice-yearly concert. Chopin, by yours truly, and Tchaikovsky's “Dance of the Swans” by gramophone record, danced to by six-year-old neophytes in white tutus and duckbilled headdresses made of papier-mache.

We were the cultural meat in a popular sandwich otherwise liberally filled with amateur vaudeville acts, solo songs of an Irish nature, and single or combined concertina, piano accordion, and guitar renditions of well-known Afrikaans folk songs, usually performed by the Afrikaner warders from the prison. To redress the racial balance, a Gilbert and Sullivan male quartet would generally follow. One English comic opera song was reckoned by the concert committee to equate roughly with a dozen Afrikaans folk songs, no matter how pleasingly syncopated, harmonized, toe-tappin' and hand-clappin' they might prove to be.