for Doc’s entry to the cave the first time, I found it still strong. He would not have had a great deal of difficulty getting into the narrow entrance. It took me only a few minutes to work the steel hook out of the tunnel wall and to remove the rope.
I returned to the cliff shelf and removed the second spike and put the two spikes and the rope into my rucksack. In a very few years the small holes the spikes had made would be eroded from the rock face, leaving no trace of man. Only the baboons or an occasional leopard would visit the outer cave, but neither would enter the dark, damp inner crystal cave of Africa. Doc would be safe for the hundred thousand years it would take to turn him into crystal, forever a part of Africa.
I was home again just as the moon was rising over the valley. The pain, the deep dull pain under my heart had lifted. Sadness remained, but I was now proud that Doc had achieved what he wanted to do. And we would always be bound together, he was very much a part of me. He had found a small, frightened and confused little boy and had given him confidence and music and learning and a love for Africa and taught me not to fear things. Now I didn’t know where the boy began and Doc ended. I had been given all the gifts he had. Now that Doc was resting right I knew we could never be separated from each other.
The coffee pot left at four the next day to connect with the all-night sleeper from Kaapmuiden to Johannesburg.
That last morning at home I walked into the front room and opened the Steinway and started to practise Doc’s music, which I’d earlier transcribed onto three sheets of music manuscript. After I picked at the notes for an hour, the melody began to form. It was a nocturne with a recurring musical phrase running through it. Very beautiful, it was unmistakably African, with a sadness and yearning for something that seems to be in the music of all of the people. The musical phrasing and the recurring melody were somehow familiar, like something I’d heard in a dream or the dreamtime or which simply races unknown through your blood. And then I realised what it was. It was the chant to the Tadpole Angel.
I stopped bewildered. Doc had never heard the chant which had started only after I had gone to boarding school. I played the music again; it was no coincidence, the chant was clearly a part of the music, it ran through the nocturne repeating itself in a dozen variations but always there: clear, unmistakable, wild, beautiful. Onoshobishobi Ingelosi… shobi… shobi… Ingelosi, the piano notes enunciated as clearly as if the people themselves were singing it.
It was getting late and it was time to say my goodbyes to Mrs Boxall, old Mr Bornstein and Miss Bornstein. Gert had promised to pick me up and run us down to the station in the prison’s new Chevy which meant my mother and my granpa didn’t have to rely on Pastor Mulvery, whose anxious-to-escape front teeth and unctuous presence I found increasingly depressing, and I was glad that he wouldn’t add to the awkwardness I always felt at departures.
I put Doc’s music between the pages of a slim volume of poetry by Wilfred Owen which Mrs Boxall had given me. ‘Not as soppy as Rupert Brooke, but a better war poet I feel sure,’ she had said.
Leaving home with the knowledge that when I returned it would be to a place which no longer meant Doc made this parting almost unbearably sad for me. My mother tried to chat brightly, but she wasn’t much of a bright chatterer and my granpa just tapped and tamped and puffed and turned and looked up at the mountains and said, ‘The cumulus nimbus is building up, could be a storm tonight, just as the Frensman are in loose bud.’ Frensman was a deep red long-stemmed rose and unless the petals were still in tight bud the storm would damage them. Gert, who at the best of times didn’t have too much small talk, added to my sense of foreboding and made the waiting for the coffee pot to pull out almost unbearably long. I put my hand into the pocket of a new pair of grey flannel slacks, made for me by old Mr Bornstein, and took out Doc’s hunter. I was about to click it open when I was conscious of my stupidity and quickly slipped the beautiful old watch back into my pocket. My haste in doing so immediately pointed to my guilt. I thought I might have escaped detection but after a couple of minutes, when my mother had turned to talk to my granpa, Gert whispered, ‘So you found him, hey? I’m blerrie glad, Peekay.’ I ignored his remark, pretending not to hear him, and I knew Gert would remain silent.
A whistle warned of our departure and the small crowd on the platform became animated, as happens when an over-extended farewell is suddenly terminated. It occurred in our group too, each of us secretly glad that the waiting was over. ‘Look after yourself, son boy,’ my mother said, offering the side of her powdered cheek.
‘There’s a good lad,’ puff, puff, my granpa shook my hand. As I looked into his face I realised that his blue eyes had become a little rheumy and that the skin around his cheeks and mouth stretched tightly, as happens with thin men when they begin to grow old.
Gert gripped my hand in the traditional excessively firm Afrikaner manner. ‘All the best, Peekay, see you in July, man.’ He jumped into a boxing stance, it was a small physical joke to hide his awkwardness. ‘Keep your hands up, you hear.’ He grinned and leaned forward so that only I could hear, ‘No more fighting Kaffirs you hear, their heads is too hard, man.’
The coffee pot gave a blast of steam whistle, loud enough to belong to a much bigger, more important train. The people in the third-class Blacks Only carriage yelled and screamed with delight, five or six heads and a dozen arms to each carriage window waving bandannas and generally making the most of the farewell occasion, as the little train slowly left the platform. I continued to wave until the train had passed the long bend which took the platform from sight. With a conscious sigh of relief I leaned back into the green leather seat. I knew I’d have the compartment to myself until Kaapmuiden, and I cherished the idea of being on my own. It had been a long week since I had fought Gideon Mandoma.
Hymie was full of news when we got back to school. He’d worked out a formal business arrangement with Mr Nguni and now there were twenty young black boxers training at Solly’s gym, as well as three black boxing officials who would be trained in the handling of boxers and would eventually sit for their referee’s tickets.
Gideon Mandoma and three other young fighters were separated from the other blacks to do their workouts with me on Wednesday afternoons and before church on Sunday morning. Gideon soon became more than just a good sparring partner. He laughed a lot and had a quick wit which delighted me. His English wasn’t strong and at first we mostly spoke in Zulu, until after a workout some three weeks into the term he patted me on the shoulder with his glove. ‘No more Zulu, Peekay, your Zulu comes from my mother’s breast now my English must come from your fists. You must teach me English.’ He propped and slowly stroked his hair in a backward movement the way Hymie would do it, lightly touching it as though preening in front of a mirror. ‘I have one good English words from Hymie.’ He mimicked the way Hymie spat words out: ‘Cheeky bloody Kaffir!’ Gideon threw back his head and laughed happily. ‘This English I understand very good.’
It was then that I hit on the idea. ‘We’re going to start a school for Solly’s black boxers,’ I announced to Hymie on the tram back to school after training.
‘Christ, Peekay, isn’t that going a bit far? Educate the black bastards and before you know where you are they’ll want to take over the country.’
‘It’s as much theirs as it is ours. More actually,’ I said, surprised at his outburst.
‘You’re perfectly right, but can’t we let them take a little longer to find out? Keep the buggers in the dark as long as possible?’
‘Hymie, what are you saying? I thought you were a liberal thinker?’
Hymie laughed. ‘First and foremost I’m a pragmatist but there’s bound to be a quid in it somewhere, although I’m buggered if I can see where. How do you propose going about it, integrate the Prince of Wales School?’
‘C’mon, Hymie, take this seriously. If we go to Singe ’n Burn and put it to him as two Renaissance men and give him a whole line of bullshit about liberalism blah, blah, blah, I’m sure he’ll be in it. We could have the black school in one of the classrooms on a Saturday night.’
‘Already I like it! One lesson a week shouldn’t pose too much of a threat to white civilisation as we know it on the southern tip of Africa.’
‘Well, what do you reckon?’
‘Off hand I can’t think of a way to make any money out of it but as Karl Marx, or was it Christ, said: “Man does not live by bread alone”. Okay, whatever you say.’
‘Great! Because you have to open the subject with Singe ’n Burn by telling him that as a Jew you know what it’s like to be an oppressed people.’
Hymie thought for a moment. ‘Fine, nothing to it, I simply go in and ask Singe ’n Burn to open a black school in this citadel of white privilege, pointing out to him that as an expertly oppressed person for roughly nineteen hundred years …’
