The Power of One (42 page)

“Hello, Peekay, come in,” she said as I knocked on the door. She was seated at her table, reading a book.

“Good afternoon, miss,” I said, entering a little fearfully. She looked up and smiled, and my head began to zing as though I'd been clocked a straight right between the eyes by Snotnose. Miss Bornstein was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She had long black hair and the biggest green eyes ever seen and a large mouth that shone with red lipstick. Her skin was lightly tanned and without a single blemish. At ten you are not supposed to be sexually attracted, but every nerve in my body cried out to be a closer part of this beautiful woman. She was dazzling, and when she smiled her teeth were even and perfectly white. Except for the fact that she was not as willowy as the C to C cigarette lady painted on the clock face in the railway cafe in Tzaneen, she could have been the living version.

“They tell me you're rather clever, Peekay.”

“No, miss,” I said without false modesty. Despite the fact that I was accepted as the brightest child in the school, both Doc and Mrs. Boxall had been careful to disabuse me of such a notion. “Cleverness is a false presumption,” Doc had explained. “It is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water, frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance.”

Miss Bornstein tried me on Latin vocabulary and then on my Latin verbs. It was pretty simple stuff, but as Latin was taught only in high school in South Africa, she seemed impressed. She then made me sit at a desk and handed me the book she had been reading. “Do as many of these as you can in ten minutes,” she instructed.

The book had thirty pages and was full of little drawings and sentences with missing words and trick questions where you had to pick the answer from several choices. It was like old home week for me. This was Doc's personal territory, and he had a great many books on logic and thinking, as he would call it, out of the square. Miss Bornstein's book was for beginners, and I finished the whole thing in under five minutes.

I had to wait while she marked the answers. After the first page she looked up and chewed on the end of her pencil and then tapped it against her beautiful white teeth, her long, polished red nails holding the pencil lightly so that it bounced, making a rat-tat-tat-tat sound. Then, using it to point at me, she said, “I wouldn't say you were stupid, Peekay.” She turned to the last page and marked it, I guess because the book was supposed to go from easy to hard. She looked up again. “No, I wouldn't say that at all.”

After that she made me read a book out loud and do a writing test, and then she opened her suitcase, brought out a chessboard and set it up. “You open,” she said. I used one of Doc's favorite openings, and she whistled through her teeth as she studied it. After an hour I conceded the game. Doc said it was the thing to do when you were going to stalemate anyway. It made your opponent less wary and therefore gave you an advantage the next time. “But only do this in a friendly match,” he had cautioned. “Chess is war, and in war nothing can be predicted except death.”

Miss Bornstein looked up at me, a flicker of annoyance crossing her face. “Don't ever do that again!” she said. “When I play chess I'm your opponent and not to be patronized like some silly woman!”

I blushed furiously. “I'm sorry, miss,” I said, mortified and wondering what the word meant.

“Miss Bornstein, please, Peekay. ‘Miss' sounds just like any other kid who doesn't know any better. Samantha Bornstein. You may call me Sam in private, if you like. I think you and I are going to see quite a lot of each other.”

The idea of calling this beautiful creature by her Christian name was unthinkable. And by a boy's name, a common boy's name like Sam, plainly impossible.

Miss Bornstein thanked me for coming and said that on Monday I was to report to her class. “Though I can't for the life of me think what we're going to do with you, but at least you'll make a worthy chess opponent,” she said, with a throatiness that made my chest feel tight.

I told Doc about the whole incident on Monday morning, and at the end he asked two questions. “Tell me, Peekay, how bad in love are you?”

I told him that I didn't know much about love, but it was like being hit in the head with a really good punch.

“I think maybe you in love bad, Peekay. About women I don't know so much, but I know this, I think it is not so smart to tell

Madame Boxall. I will think about this. Maybe Geel Piet can help also?” We left it at that for the time being.

“Next question, please! Madame Bornstein, she plays chess maybe better than Madame Boxall?”

I told Doc that Miss Bornstein was a good chess player and had I not used one of his sneakiest openings she would most likely have beaten me. “She's much more cunning than Mrs. Boxall,” I concluded.

“Hurrumph! Cunning? This is goot,” he grunted and opened the book at my music lesson. At the end of the practice he handed me a hastily scrawled note. “Please, with my compliments, to give this to your Madame Bornstein and tomorrow you bring the reply if you please.” I knew better than to open the note.

“Please, Doc, don't tell her I'm in love with her,” I pleaded.

Doc looked askance. “This I would never do, Peekay. Absoloodle. To be in love is a very private business.”

With Lieutenant Smit's promotion to captain, Sergeant Borman became the new lieutenant. This was not a popular promotion, though it was not unexpected. Borman had been sucking up to the kommandant ever since he'd come down from Pretoria. He let it be known that his wife's asthma had curtailed a promising career at Pretoria Central, where to survive a warder had to be tougher and smarter than the hard-case rapists, grievous bodily harms, thugs, thieves, and con merchants. A sergeant under these conditions, he hinted, was easily the equivalent of lieutenant in a small-time prison such as Barberton. He demonstrated at every opportunity that he was tougher and harder than any of the other warders. A glance as he passed was sufficient to get him going.

“Who you looking at, kaffir? You trying to be cheeky, hey?”

“No,
baas,
no,
inkosi,
I not cheeky, I not look.”

“Don't tell me you not cheeky. I know what you thinking, kaffir! On the outside you all gentle Jesus and on the inside you a black devil, you hear?”

“No,
inkosi.
Inside same like outside.”

“That will be the blery day, kaffir. Come here. Come!” The prisoner would hasten toward Borman and stand head bowed to ragged attention. “Look me straight in the eyes, kaffir.”

“No,
baas.
I not look you.”

“Look, you black bastard! When I tell you to look, you look, you hear?” The prisoner would lift terror-stricken eyes to meet those of the sergeant.
“Ja,
it's true, man, inside is filth.” He would hit the African with a hard punch into the gut, doubling him over. “Stand up, you black bastard, we got to get the filth out, we-got-to-get-it-out!” He would hit the prisoner again and again in the same spot. “Vomit out the filth, make clean inside!”

Most Africans from the lowveld have weak stomachs from having been infected with bilharzia. A tiny snail found in river water enters the system through the penis canal and eventually attacks the liver and the kidneys. Three or four hard punches in the gut will generally cause severe vomiting and great pain.

Borman would look at the vomit on the floor and over the prisoner's hands as the man tried physically to hold back the contents of his gut.
“Ag, sis!
Look what you done now! Why did you make dirty on the nice clean floor?” The donkey prick would come down hard across the prisoner's neck. “Because you a fucking animal, that's why.” He would continue to hit the prisoner until the prisoner collapsed.

Making an unnecessary mess was a major prison offense and entitled a warder to use the donkey prick in an official capacity. Borman took great pride in the fact that he could legitimize an interrogation within three or four minutes from the time he started to taunt a prisoner. The English equivalent of the name the prisoners gave him was “Shit for Brains.” When he was anywhere near you would hear the chant go out, “Move away, move away, here comes Shit for Brains. Here comes he whose mother threw away her child, kept the placenta, and called it Shit for Brains.”

Lieutenant Borman was too old to belong to the boxing squad, but he often talked big about the fighter he had once been. Gert said that a man who talks about how tough he is is probably yellow. But while the warders didn't like Borman, they respected him for being a professional. He spoke Fanagalo pretty well, and since most prisoners learn to speak this African lingua franca, he used the African way of frightening the soul with word pictures. It was not uncommon for a prisoner to be reduced by him to a state of abject terror without physical torture. If there was any trouble in the prison, the kommandant soon learned to put Sergeant Borman in charge. It was this facility of terrorizing the prisoners, both physically and mentally, that had made him the kommandant's choice to take over when Lieutenant Smit was promoted.

Lieutenant Borman deeply resented the freedom Geel Piet had achieved in the gymnasium under Captain Smit. “Give a lag a blery pinkie and before you know it, they eaten your whole hand off your shoulder,” he would insist. Geel Piet was careful to keep out of his way. When Borman entered the gym, unless he was in the ring actually coaching one of the kids, Geel Piet would quietly slip away. Lieutenant Borman's eyes would follow him as he crept out. “He will get me. One day, for sure, he will get me. All I can say is, I hope I come out the other side alive,” the battered little colored man confided in me.

Captain Smit would watch Geel Piet leave the gymnasium when Borman entered, but he remained silent. Borman was not overly impressed with Doc or myself. He saw the unholy alliance of Doc, Geel Piet, and myself as a basic breakdown of the system. Because he was a professional, he was quick to realize that such a break in the normal discipline of the prison could lead to other things. As a sergeant his influence did not carry to the kommandant. But as a lieutenant his power increased enormously.

Had it not been for the kommandant's desire to keep Doc sweet for the biennial visit of the inspector of prisons, Lieutenant Borman would almost certainly have had his way and our freedom within the prison would have been severely curtailed.

The kommandant was a man who saw things in simple terms. Doc at his Steinway was the cultural component of the Inspector's visit; a
braaivleis
and
tiekiedraai,
the fun; a boxing and shooting match, the physical; showing the kommandant as a man of culture who was nevertheless a fun-loving disciplinarian. He had no intention of allowing Lieutenant Borman to disrupt this careful plan. Nevertheless, it was apparent to us that Borman was patient and relentless, determined to find something that would lead to our destruction.

The war in Europe was rapidly drawing to a close. The Allies had crossed the Rhine and were moving toward Berlin. Doc was terribly excited. After four years' incarceration he had a deep need for the soft green hills, the windswept mountains, and the wooded
kloofs
. We would talk about walking all the way to Saddleback Mountain on the border of Swaziland, and tears would come into his eyes. It was as though, now that the prison years were almost over, he dared to think for the first time of freedom. He would look over the prison walls to the green hills beyond, and his voice would tremble. “The years of hate are nearly over. It is soon time to love again, time to climb high with the sun on the back until a person can reach up and touch nearly the sky.”

Doc's second book on the cacti of Southern Africa had been written while he was in prison. This one was in English, each page edited by Mrs. Boxall, who in the end had come to confess that there was more to the jolly old cactus than she could possibly have imagined. Doc now talked of making the photographic plates, and Mrs. Boxall went to see Jimmy Winter at the chemist's to get him to put aside one spool of precious rationed film each month until she had three dozen waiting for Doc on his release. Jimmy Winter was an artist who, when he wasn't running his chemist shop, loved to paint the hills. Before Doc went to prison we would sometimes come across him in some lonely spot high up on a mountain top painting away.

By the time the Allies had crossed the Rhine, precious few music lessons were taking place. We spent most of the hour discussing our plans for Doc's release. He made me describe the cactus garden and the rate of growth of each plant, and he talked happily about the extensions he would need to accommodate the stuff we would find waiting for us in the hills. Also, all the photos we needed for his book.

Like me, Miss Bornstein had never managed to beat Doc at chess. So she introduced her grandfather, Mr. Isaac Bornstein, who was referred to as Mr. Isaac. Mr. Isaac turned out to be a match for Doc, and the two of them were having a mighty go at each other, with Doc clucking and shaking his head as he read Mr. Isaac's latest move. “Such a German, but very clever,
ja,
this move is goot.” He would move over to the board, which rested on top of the upright piano, make Mr. Isaac's move, think for a while, and then make his own. “. . . but not so clever as me, Mr. Schmarty-Pants Isaac!”