that.’
‘Cut it out, Solly, can’t you see Peekay’s hurting,’ Hymie cut in.
‘Not as much as the swartzer, my boy,’ Solly said.
When we got to the shower block I sat down and started to cry. It was as though I saw the years ahead. The pain in my body had somehow sharpened the focus of my mind. I saw South Africa. I saw what would come. Something had happened to me; Hymie was talking but it was as though his voice were in an echo chamber. No, not an echo chamber; in the crystal cave of Africa. His voice echoed across the tops of the rainforest, down the valley just as the barking baboons had done. ‘I’ve found it, Doc. I’ve found the power of one!’ Hymie’s voice was saying. The cave about me was shining crystal, the crystal became my pain and the pain sharpened as the light grew more intense. My concentration focused down to a pinpoint. The sadness I felt was overwhelming; sadness for the great Southland. In the whiteness, in the light, was a sound, as if the light and the sound were one. It was the great drum and voices of the people. They came together as an echo.’ Mayibuye Afrika! Afrika! Afrika!’ Come back, Africa! Africa! Africa! My life, whatever it was to become, was bound to this thing; there was no escaping it, I was a part of the crystal cave of Africa. And in the pain and confusion I wept, I could see only destruction and confusion and the drum beat; boom, boom, boom, and the light began to fade and Doc entered the cave, his hair white as snow, tall as ever, ‘You must try, Peekay. You must try. Absoloodle!’
Hymie put his arm around me. ‘There’s more to this Onoshobishobi Ingelosi than I know about, isn’t there, Peekay?’
‘Christ, I dunno. I just don’t know,’ I sobbed.
‘Don’t worry, Peekay, no one can hurt you. No bastard can hurt you while I’m alive!’
‘Doc’s dead!’ I heard my voice saying as though it were totally divorced from my body.
That evening when we returned to Hymie’s place in Pretoria there was a message to call Mrs Boxall.
‘Peekay, we have sad news, the professor has disappeared! Gert, and all the warders not on duty, and half the men in town are in the hills looking for him, but he’s been gone two days. Now they say there’s little chance of finding him alive!’ Her voice faltered and then broke as she began to sob. The line from Barberton was crackling, fading in and out and Mrs Boxall’s sobs grew and receded. ‘Please come home, Peekay, please come quickly, you’re sure to find him, you went so many places together,’ she wept.
Hymie forced me to sleep. ‘We’ll wake you at two a.m. and a chauffeur can drive you the two hundred miles to Barberton, you’ll arrive by sun-up.’
I knew where to find Doc. I knew that somehow he had done the impossible and had reached the crystal cave of Africa. Doc would be lying on the platform, his arms across his chest. In one hundred thousand years people would find the cave again and would climb up to the magic platform and they’d say, ‘What a strange coincidence, that looks just like the shape of a man made of crystal. A very tall, thin man.’ And then I cried myself to sleep.
TWENTY-TWO
No one, not even I, knew Doc’s religion, but after a week where I had visited all our old haunts (except one) with various teams of men, it was decided that a church ceremony should take place. Marie came forward and claimed that Doc had found Christ while he was in hospital with pneumonia and my mother was ecstatic. Pastor Mulvery claimed the right to hold a burial service sans Doc’s mortal remains. I didn’t protest. Marie had convinced herself that Doc had said yes to Jesus and she had notched him up as one of her most important salvations. I don’t think Doc would have minded too much, besides, his love for the great Southland was complete in the most beautiful eternity he could conceive of, not dust and ashes but a wonderful pagan burial that would make him a living part of his beloved Africa. His spirit would dwell in the crystal cave of Africa looking out across the rainforest down the misty valley and over distant mountains which smudged blue as a child’s crayon drawing.
Doc’s death left me completely numb. I went through the motions but it was as though I had lost my centre of gravity. Everything seemed topsy-turvy, people would speak to me but I wouldn’t hear them. Their mouths opened like goldfish in a bowl, but nothing came out. Their movements seemed exaggerated as though by walking up to me they were growing bigger from the same spot, their feet not moving but their bodies just elasticising cartoon-like to where I stood. The pain was all inside, deep and dull and I knew it was this that made me feel numb. I felt I would never be quite the same again, that I could never love as much again. I kept telling myself that I knew Doc was going to die, that Doc had been telling me himself for months, but I knew nothing about this sort of death. Death was violent and ugly like Granpa Chook and Geel Piet, or even macabre like Big Hettie. Death, as I had come to know it in Africa had no gently slipping awayness about it, no dignity. And so I felt Doc had cheated, he’d just gone, he disappeared, he had made death happen rather than have it happen. I felt cheated, even angry. Why hadn’t he waited for me? Why hadn’t he told me so that I could have taken him to the crystal cave? But secretly I knew that I couldn’t have done it, I would have clung to the last thread of life in him. I also knew that he would have known this. But it didn’t help the numbness. It didn’t take away the need, the dull permanent ache under my heart on the exact spot where you work on another boxer till he runs out of steam. That was it precisely: the bell had gone but I couldn’t find the strength and the will to come out for the next round on my own.
Pastor Mulvery said a lot of things about it being the end of Doc’s travail and his vale of tears. He had called Doc a great piano player and gardener. ‘The Lord Jesus has given our beloved professor a garden in heaven filled with the fragrance of pansies and sweet peas where he can play his music for a choir of angels.’
The regulars in the congregation must have thought it was one of his better descriptions of the born again hereafter and they peppered Pastor Mulvery’s eulogy with ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Blessed be His glorious name’. I heard it all, but it didn’t make any sense, it had nothing to do with Doc. Absoloodle not.
‘Oh, dear, oh goodness, dearie me. Our dear, dear professor would most certainly have chosen eternal hellfire in preference to an eternity spent in a bed of pansies and sweet peas, playing for a choir of angels,’ said Mrs Boxall, having been exposed to Pastor Mulvery and the workings of the Apostolic Faith Mission for the first time.
The aloe was in bloom on the hillside above the rose garden and early on the day of the service I had climbed to our rock and cried for a while until the sun came up over the valley. On the way down I gathered several candelabra of aloe blossom which I put in a large copper vase I found in the back room of the church. When I entered the church later to attend the funeral it had been removed and an arrangement of pink and orange gladioli had been put in its place.
Even old Mr Bornstein, wearing a hat throughout, attended the service with Miss Bornstein. Miss Bornstein’s shiny lipstick and long red nails looked strangely out of place in a church which taught that make-up of any sort, except for face powder, was a sin. I once heard long painted nails described by a lady witnessing for the Lord as the devil’s talons dripping with the blood of sinners. Miss Bornstein looked beautiful among the scrubbed, plain-faced women, with their greying hair pulled back and held by cheap celluloid clips, their hats stuck with sprigs of linen flowers, some small attempt at adornment. I could see them stealing glances at her, at her perfect complexion, magnificent shining, almost purple black hair, green eyes and brilliant sinful lips and nails. They would spit it all back in righteous vituperation when next they gaggled around a cup of tea to tell each other they had seen sin in the flesh, the devil himself sitting among them.
Outside the church after the service, as there was no Doc in a coffin to look solemn about, the regulars were able to congratulate Marie for her spectacular conversion. Even my mother got a bit of gratuitous praise for her original foresight in bringing Doc into focus as a potential candidate for salvation.
All the warders who knew Doc, including Captain Smit and the Kommandant came to pay their respects. Afterwards Captain Smit invited me back to the prison where the boxing team was having a wake. This turned out to be a jolly affair, more like a braaivleis and singsong and I tried hard to be cheerful, for I suspect it was held as a gesture and as a bit of a cheer-up for me. Doc would have approved much more of this than of the sanctimonious burial service.
Gert took me to one side. When I’d arrived back to help in the search for Doc, I’d taken over from him. He had barely slept for three days and had been exhausted. ‘Tell me, man, how come we never found him? You know every place he went.’
‘Ja, it’s funny that, but you know Doc, Gert. He probably had a place in an old mine shaft that only he knew about, someplace he found years ago before he met me.’
