The Power of One

detail, even the lichen on the rock, more clearly than any I had seen before. Shafts of sunlight shining through a silver-edged cloud seemed to be directed straight at the rock on which I sat. My body, half in shadow, appeared to be as one with the rock. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an extraordinary picture. At last my mother spoke. ‘Wherever did you take this? It is so sad! Why did you take a picture of him when he was looking sad?’

Doc rubbed his chin, it was plainly not the comment he expected and he needed a moment to think about the answer. Ignoring the first question he leaned forward as he answered the second. ‘Ja, this is so. Only one great picture shows a man when he smiles. Frans Hals, Laughing Cavalier, early seventeenth century.’ He pointed at the grandfather clock. ‘Around that time they make this clock also. The smile, madame, is used by humans to hide the truth, the artist is only interested to reveal the truth.’ He leaned back, clearly satisfied with his reply.

‘Goodness, professor, all that is much too deep for simple country people like us. He’s only a very little boy, you know? I prefer him to smile.’

‘Of course! But sadness, like understanding, comes early in life for some. It is part of intelligence.’

My mother’s back stiffened. ‘You seem to know a lot about my son, professor. I can’t imagine how, he has only been home from boarding school for three days.’

Doc clapped his hands gleefully. ‘Boarding school! Ha, that explains I think everything. For a boy like this boarding school is a prison, ja?’

My mother was beginning to show her impatience, her fingers tapped steadily on the arms of the chair, a sure sign that things were not going well. ‘We had no choice in the matter, professor. I was ill. One does the best one can under the circumstances.’ She looked into her lap, her coffee untouched.

Doc suddenly seemed to realise that he had gone too far. ‘Forgive me, madame’. He leaned forward. ‘It is not said to make you angry. Your son is a gifted child. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. I only pray it is music. Today I have come to ask you, please madame, let me teach him?’ He had spoken to my mother softly and with great charm and I could feel her relax as his voice stroked her ego.

‘Humpf! I must say you seem to know more about him than his mother. I can’t see how he is any different to any other child of his age,’ she said huffily, though I could tell this was just a pretence and that she was secretly pleased by the compliment. My mother was a proud woman and didn’t expect charity from anyone. ‘It is out of the question. Piano lessons don’t grow on trees, professor.’

‘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!’

‘What ever 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 mountain top 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 over- familiar 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 its 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 equaliser almost as good as money.

I was to learn that the Apostolic Faith Mission, who 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 which encouraged the crying out in prayer or sudden spontaneous religious combustion from the floor of a charismatic church. My mother was constantly fighting the need 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.

The long summer months were spent mostly with Doc, climbing the hills around Barberton. Often we would venture into the dark kloofs where the hills formed the deep creases at the start of the true mountains. These green, moist gullies of treefern and tall old yellow wood trees, the 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, dark pits and passages supported by timber, which before it was consigned to the tunnels, may 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 recognised the pale yellow blossoms of wild gardenia and the blooms of the water alder. Monkey rope strung from tall trees draped with club moss was given names such as: traveller’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, bush, vine and lichen 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 metres, 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