The Power of One

devote most of her column, ‘Clippings from a Cultured Garden by Fiona Boxall’, to my performance. For days after it appeared my mother was in a state of dazed euphoria and I was conscripted to deliver a bunch of roses to the library twice a week for a month.

In the process of keeping faith with my mother, Doc instilled in me an abiding love for music. What my clumsy hands could never play I could hear quite clearly in my head. A love of music was, among his many gifts to me, perhaps the most important of them all, and he continued to teach me even after his calm and gentle life was thrown into turmoil, and the joy of being alone with him on the high cliffs and kranses was stolen from my childhood.

TEN

I had been enrolled at the local school when the new term began at the end of January. Six was the starting age for Grade One, but after a few days it was clear that my year spent in a mixed-age class at boarding school had put me well ahead of the rest of the kids. I was pushed up to Grade Three where I easily held my own against kids two years older than me. Doing the Judge’s arithmetic, my early grounding in reading, a comprehensive understanding of Afrikaans in a classroom of English-speaking kids coming without enthusiasm to the language for the first time, and Doc’s demand from our first day that I write up my field notes all gave me a hugely unfair advantage. I might possibly have been elevated even further but for the embarrassment it would have caused.

I quickly earned a reputation, rather unjustly, for being clever. Doc had persuaded me to drop my camouflage and not to play dumb. ‘To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin. Absoloodle!’ I had needed little encouragement. Under his direction my mind was constantly hungry, and I soon found the school work tedious and simplistic. Doc became my real teacher and school was simply time spent between eight and one o’clock when I would rush from the classroom to his cottage hidden in the cactus garden.

His thorny garden was a never-ending source of delight. It was half an acre on the more or less flat top of a small hill which overlooked the town and valley. A ten-minute climb to solitude, up a little dirt and rock road that led nowhere else. His cactus garden may well have been the best private collection of cacti and succulents in the world. I, who grew to be an expert on cacti, have never seen a better one.

Doc’s cottage had three rooms and a lean-to kitchen. The three rooms were called the music room, the book room and the whisky room. Each having its specified purpose: music, study and drinking himself to sleep. For in all things, even in drunkenness, Doc had a tidy mind.

In the first year we spent together I never once witnessed him drunk, though when I arrived just after dawn for my music lesson I often had to wake him, whereupon he would stumble outside to retch and cough. Then he would come to sit beside the Steinway, his blue eyes red-rimmed and dulled from the previous night’s whisky, his long fingers wrapped around the enamel mug of bitter black coffee I had made him on the Primus. Doc never talked about drinking. All he would sometimes say as I set my music out on the big Steinway was, ‘Pianissimo, Peekay, the wolves were howling in my head last night.’ I would look through my music for something soft and easy on the nerves. Perhaps this is why, as I grew older and more proficient, I seemed more attracted to playing Chopin. There is a great deal less fortissimo in a Chopin etude than in Liszt or Brahms and Doc’s early morning hangovers may, over that first year, have somehow inclined me to softer music.

It was the cactus garden which testified to ‘his problem with Doctor Bottle’, as my mother would call any person who ever held strong drink to their lips. Bordering both sides of the path for a hundred yards through the cactus garden were embedded Johnnie Walker bottles, their square bases shining in the sun like parallel silver snakes winding around the cactus and aloe and blazing orange and pink portulaca. Each bottle represented an attempt to obviate some private torture. Doc made no apology for his drinking. He seldom even mentioned it and when he did it was always blamed quietly and politely on the wolves, which I imagined slavering away, great red tongues lolling, gnashing teeth chomping up Doc’s brains.

It was at sunset on a Saturday afternoon late in January 1941, a little more than a year after Doc and I had first met on the hill behind the rose garden. We’d spent the day in the hills and had almost arrived back at Doc’s cottage. We’d found a patch of Senecio serpens high up in a dry kloof, growing over the tailings of an old digging. It was a nice find although blue chalksticks, as they are commonly called, are not too rare unless they flower in an unusual colour. We had decided to plant them in the cactus garden and wait until they flowered again. That was the magic of the cactus garden, some succulents can play dumb; a common blue chalkstick can turn from a Cinderella into a princess in front of your very eyes. I was the first to notice the army van with the white-stencilled Military Police on its hood. The van was parked directly in front of the whisky bottle path which led to the cottage, hidden from view amongst the tall cactus. Two men leaned against the front mudguard smoking, their red-banded khaki caps resting on the hood of the van which had been turned to face down the hill. Doc was explaining the differences between the genus Senecio serpens and the lighter- coloured Glottiphyllym uncatum, banging his long hiking stick into the ground as he walked and getting generally excited as he did when his mind was absorbed in esoteric botanical detail.

The two men saw us approach, and dropping their cigarettes ground them underfoot. Clearing their throats almost simultaneously, they reached for their caps, carefully placed them back on their heads the way men do when they are about to undertake an unpleasant duty. Both wore khaki bush shirts, shorts, brown boots, puttees and khaki stockings, though one of them wore the polished Sam Browne belt of an officer while the other, a sergeant, wore a white webbing one. The officer stepped right in front of Doc who stopped and looked up in surprise. Doc was taller than the officer by at least a foot, so the military man was obliged to look up at him. He had a thin black pencil moustache just like Pik Botha, and although he was not standing to attention his body seemed permanently rigid. From the top pocket of his tunic he removed a piece of paper which he held up.

‘Good afternoon, sir. You are Karl Von Vollensteen, Professor Karl Von Vollensteen?’ he asked in a sententious voice.

‘Ja, this is me,’ Doc said, surprised that anyone would question so obvious a fact.

The officer cleared his throat and proceeded to read from the paper he held in front of him. ‘Under the Aliens Act of 1939 and by the authority vested in me by the Provost Marshal of the South African Armed Forces, I arrest you. You are charged with conspiracy to undermine the security of a nation at war.’ He handed the paper to Doc. ‘You will have to come with me, sir. The civilian police, under the direction of military security, will search your premises and you will be detained at Barberton prison until your case can be heard.’

To my surprise Doc made no protest. His face was sad as he looked down at the officer and handed him back the piece of paper without even glancing at it. He raised his head to look over the officer and past where the sergeant was standing next to the van, his gaze following the line of the cactus garden. He turned slowly, his eyes filled with pain, taking in the hills, the marvellous aloe-dotted hills, his garden of Eden for twenty years in the Africa he so savagely loved. Finally he turned to look over the town, across the valley to the sun beginning to dip behind the escarpment.

‘The stupidity. Already the stupidity begins again,’ he said softly, then turning to me he patted my shoulder. ‘You must plant the Senecio serpens to get the morning sun, they like that.’ He removed his bush hat and absent-mindedly put it on the roof of the van. He got his red bandanna from his overalls and slowly wiped his face and sniffed into it and pushed his nose around before returning it to the pocket of his overalls. Then he lifted his bush hat from the roof of the van and put it on my head. I looked up at him in surprise, Doc didn’t play that sort of childish game. But his eyes were sad and his voice soft, barely above a whisper. ‘So, now you are the boss of the cactus garden, Peekay.’ I wanted to cry and I think Doc wanted to as well. But we didn’t. We both knew enough not to show our feelings in front of the military.

Turning to the officer, Doc said, ‘You will please allow me first to shave and change my clothes. A man must go to prison in his best clothes.’

The officer rolled his eyes heavenwards. From the number of cigarette butts on the ground they had been waiting for some time and he obviously wanted to get going. ‘Orright, professor, but make it snappy.’ Turning to the sergeant in an official manner he rapped, ‘Sergeant! Escort the prisoner to his house for kit change and ablutions.’

We walked slowly down the whisky bottle path and Doc dropped his canvas shoulder bag on the open verandah. I followed him into the dark little cottage. ‘Do not light the lamps, Peekay, the light is soft and we will