The Power of One

huge hands raw and bleeding, clasping his knees. Once he threw up, and once he removed his torn shirt and miner’s vest and tearing strips from the shirt, bound his bloody hands. But always as the bucket lowered he was ready to start loading again. Several of the men had offered to replace him but he’d simply shaken his head. ‘Nyet, nyet!’ he gasped. Soon the flinted edges of the broken rock he was lifting cut into his chest and stomach. His dirt-covered torso, caught in the light from the single electric bulb burning directly above him, glistened with blood and raw exposed flesh, his stomach muscles pumping red. The men above watched fascinated, waiting for the moment when the giant would collapse.

‘He’s done for, I’m tellin’ you now, half a ton more and he’s history,’ Mickey whispered, even though there was no chance of the Russian hearing him or even understanding his heavy brogue. What they were witnessing was a great feat of strength and they told each other they would one day tell their grandchildren of this night.

It must have been about this time when Rasputin heard me groan, though how he would have done so over his rasping breath was a miracle. He gave a sharp agonised cry and threw himself at the rock in the area from which the sound had come. No longer bothering about the basket he tore the rock aside, frantically stacking it behind him. He worked, ‘possessed by the devil himself’, Mickey later claimed. Rasputin was finding strength to continue from beyond the realm of normal human consciousness, his breath coming in short animal snorts, like a pig sniffing for truffles. The blood streamed from his chest and stomach, soaking the top of his pants down to the knees while the ragged bandages were ripped from hands reduced to raw slabs of meat.

When he finally reached me, wedged miraculously under the narrow though protective ledge, my body was soaked in blood, as it turned out, from large sections of skin which had been removed in the fall. Rasputin lifted my unconscious body to his chest and placed his ear to my heart.

‘Peekay he live!’ he wailed. Slowly he sunk to the ground, his legs no longer able to hold him.

We sat in a nest of rock like the one the loneliness bird laid deep inside me, my head resting in the giant’s blood-soaked lap. He’d severed his index finger at the first knuckle and as he tenderly stroked my forehead the blood from the stump ran down my brow and filled the cups made by my closed eyes. The hollows soon filled, then ran from the overflowing bowl down my cheeks. Rasputin tried to stop the flow, wiping at it with the stump of his severed finger, unaware of the real source of the blood. ‘Peekay! Rasputin find Peekay, Rasputin make rabbit stew,’ he sobbed.

Later Mickey Spillane would claim that when they got to us there were tears of real blood coming from the giant’s eyes, but by that time he was already dead. ?

I spent a week in hospital, most of it being treated for shock. The skin had been scraped from a large part of my body and I was badly bruised, but not a single bone was broken. When I regained consciousness and heard of Rasputin’s death I wept and then begged that they delay the burial until I could attend his funeral. In a hot climate in a town without a mortuary it wasn’t possible and the huge Georgian had been buried for three days when they released me from the cottage hospital. While I looked a mess with both eyes blackened and the skin on each side of my face purple with scab, I was in excellent shape. My first task was to go to the general store in Luanshya and order a tombstone for Rasputin, a black granite slab which would have to come from Bulawayo more than six hundred miles to the south and would take several weeks. On it would be written simply RASPUTIN, maker of excellent rabbit stew, who gave his life for his friend. I then went to the small cemetery where he lay under a mound of red clay. On top of the clay was a single wreath of battered gladioli. We were almost at the beginning of the rainy reason and it had rained a little the previous night and the heavy drops of tropical rain had kicked up the red clay so that the pink and orange petals, opaque from being wet, were stained with mud. Rasputin loved wild flowers as Doc had loved aloe: why is it that the ubiquitous gladioli always crowds everything else out? I dropped painfully to my haunches as the scab on the side of my leg stretched, and read the mud-splashed card on the wreath. RIP. The management, Rhoan Antelope Mine. That was all. I had taken Rasputin’s old shotgun with me and now I rose, and lifting the old gun to my shoulder I fired both barrels over his grave. It was a pointless gesture, I guess, and the kick of the gun into my bruised shoulder made me hop around in pain. But it was just the sort of thing which could happen in a Wednesday matinee Western and of which I could see Rasputin thoroughly approving.

The following day I returned to the grave, having loaded all Rasputin’s wooden balls into the back of a borrowed utility. With a long-handled lasher’s shovel I flattened the mound and buried the shotgun next to him; then I built a pyramid over the grave using all the wooden balls. When I was finished it stood five foot tall. Taking careful measurements I had the welding shop at number nine shaft make me a pyramid-shaped containing frame with small bars running parallel every four inches across the sides, so that the balls, while being clearly seen, could not be removed. The metal frame was completed in two days and together with the help of Zoran the Yugo I rigged a hoist over Rasputin’s grave and dropped it neatly over the wooden balls, seating the corners into a cement footing.

It made a very impressive tombstone and when his headstone arrived Rasputin’s grave would be the pride of the tiny cemetery.

Together with Zoran, who could speak a little Russian, we went through Rasputin’s papers. There wasn’t very much to tell of his past; Norwegian seaman’s papers bearing his name, a Russian passport and his discharge papers from the Russian navy which indicated he’d been a stoker. Finally we found a sheet of paper on which a woman’s name, similar to the one in his passport, was written. It was followed by an address in Russia. Zoran had said that a slight difference in surname was common in Russia and I gathered he meant that this was a feminine version of the male surname. Rasputin’s bank account came to nearly seven thousand pounds and I arranged to send this to the name on the slip of paper, after taking Zoran with me and convincing the district magistrate that this was Rasputin’s closest kin. A wife, a sister or a mother? But at least someone, somewhere, other than me, who would remember him for the good fortune he had brought them.

I had been visited in hospital by Fats Greer, the part-time insurance agent. He pushed a piece of paper in front of me. ‘Sign here, Peekay,’ he said, his pudgy finger indicating a blank line on the sheet of paper. I signed. ‘I need two cheques for twenty pounds each, don’t date them.’ To my surprise he produced my cheque book. ‘Elijah, your number one boy, delivered your chorla bag to the mine captain after your accident. I took the liberty of using the keys in it.’ I nodded still a bit dazed and not really knowing what was happening; as far as I knew he had refused to cover me for the last two months on grizzlies. I signed the cheques and asked him what it was all about. ‘I’ll tell you when you feel a little better.’ He grinned, ‘The crazy Ruski gave you more than his life, son.’ A week later I was to learn that Rasputin had a long-standing insurance policy with Fats Greer for a thousand pounds and had made me the benefactor. Fats also handed me a cheque for five hundred pounds, ‘What’s this for?’

‘Your accident compo,’ he replied. ‘Check your cheque butts, you never missed a premium.’ He walked away whistling to himself.

It meant that I had no need to return to the mines for a further three months. As Solly Goldman would have put it, ‘You’re home and hosed, my son!’ With the money I had saved and Rasputin’s legacy I had sufficient funds for three years at Oxford. I also had enough left over to travel to London once a week for training by the famous Dutch Holland. Holland didn’t usually take amateurs but Hymie had sweet talked him into allowing me to show my stuff. If he liked what he saw, he’d take me into the professional ranks under his care.

I had three weeks’ sick leave after coming out of hospital and I knew that the best way to get rid of my bruises was to work my body. I put in a lot of road. I also rigged an extra heavy homemade canvas punchbag the mine sailmaker had made for me, hanging it from a rafter Zoran had reinforced on the verandah of my rondavel. Beside it hung the speedball and the lighter punching bag I had brought from South Africa and on which I had worked out every day I had been at the mines.

Speed was something I couldn’t afford to lose and while the work in the mines had built up my body so that I was by now almost a welterweight, I didn’t want to forgo speed for the extra power I had gained. The year away from boxing had been good for me. While I hadn’t talked about it to anyone even in the letters I wrote, the flame that lit my ambition to be welterweight champion of the world burned as fiercely as ever and had never left me for even one single moment of any one day.

In fact, when I regained consciousness in the hospital I thought that I had been fighting for the world championship and that I had been knocked out. The disappointment I felt was enormous, and when I was fully conscious and aware of what had happened I comforted myself with the knowledge that I now knew what it felt like to lose the world championship, it now only remained for me to experience winning it.