photographer and gave to Geel Piet privately. He kept it in the piano stool and looked at it every day when he collected the prisoners’ mail.
Some weeks later Lieutenant Smit was promoted to captain and some people even started to talk about him as the next Kommandant. He called me aside after training session one morning and asked if I would return the second photo and get Doc’s copy back as well. I had no option but to obey, and Gert did the same. Lieutenant Smit tore them up but forgot about the extra copy. He obtained the plate from the prison photographer and destroyed this also. A man cannot be careful enough about his career and the second photograph had been aberrant to his normal behaviour. He had no intention of living to regret it.
Between Doc and Mrs Boxall, my education was in fairly safe hands. Mrs Boxall consulted with Doc by note and they decided on my serious reading. She was the expert on English literature and he on the sciences, music and Latin. The Barberton library, apart from containing Doc’s own botanical collection, had also been the recipient of two surprisingly good private collections and Mrs Boxall said it was choked with intellectual goodies for a growing mind. Both Doc and Mrs Boxall were natural teachers and enthusiasts who never lost patience when my young mind couldn’t keep up. Doc set exams and Mrs Boxall conducted them in the library. I had an exam on Tuesday and Friday every week and I grew to love this time spent with Mrs Boxall, who often violently disagreed with a conclusion reached by Doc. I was the carrier of debate notes and some of the intellectual arguments went on for weeks at a time. I was never excluded and I learned the value of debate and of having a point of view I was prepared to defend.
The three of us had been playing chess for some time. Doc and Mrs Boxall each had a board and Gert had made one more, turning the chess figures on the lathe in the prison workshop and doing the wood inlay for the board by hand. It was not as good as Doc’s ivory set but Doc said it was very well made and original. The two boards were set up, one with my game and the other with Mrs Boxall’s. Every morning I gave Doc Mrs Boxall’s move and he positioned it on the board and made his reply which I took back to her. We set ten minutes aside at the end of the lesson to play. At first that was enough for Doc to beat me but as the months and years went by, a game would often last a week.
I had never beaten Doc in four years and in two years Mrs Boxall only managed it once. It was the game the Russian Lenchinakov played when he beat the American Arnold Green in 1931 and she had studied it for three weeks. Even so she was lucky to pull it off. On her eighth move Doc realised she wasn’t playing her usual game. ‘Ask Madame Boxall who is playing for her this game?’ he instructed me. But it was already too late, he had walked into an audacious trap set so early in the game that he had not suspected she was capable of such a move.
When I brought her the news that Doc had conceded the game she jumped up from behind her desk and rubbed her hands gleefully together, a huge grin on her face. ‘By golly, it feels dashed good to beat the pompous old Teuton,’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell him not to be a bad sport, all’s fair in love and war!’
Two of me were emerging, a small boy approaching eleven who climbed trees, used a catapult, drove a billycart and led an eager gang in kleilat and other games against the Afrikaner kids, and a somewhat precocious child who often left the teachers at school in despair, unable to cope with my answers or even tolerate the fact that I was already well in advance of anything they had to teach. They simply awarded me first place in class every term and got on with the business of teaching the other kids.
In my tenth year a new teacher, Miss Bornstein, arrived at the school. She taught the senior class, getting them ready for the emotional leap into high school and while I was still two classes below the seniors she had summoned me to her classroom after school one Friday afternoon.
‘Hello, Peekay, come in,’ she said as I knocked on the door. She was seated at her table reading a book.
‘Good afternoon, miss,’ I said, entering a little fearfully. She looked up and smiled and my head began to zing as though I’d been clocked a straight right between the eyes by Snotnose. Miss Bornstein was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She had long black hair and the biggest green eyes you’ve ever seen and a large mouth that shone with red lipstick. Her skin was lightly tanned and without a single blemish. At ten you are not supposed to be sexually attracted, but every nerve in my body cried out to be a closer part of this beautiful woman. She was dazzling and when she smiled her teeth were even and perfectly white. Except for the fact that she was not as willowy as the C to C cigarette lady painted on the clockface of the railway cafe in Tzaneen, she could have been the living version.
‘They tell me you’re rather clever, Peekay.’
‘No, miss,’ I said without false modesty. Despite the fact that I was accepted as the brightest child in the school, both Doc and Mrs Boxall had been careful to disabuse me of such a notion. ‘Cleverness is a false presumption,’ Doc had explained. ‘It is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.’
Miss Bornstein tried me on Latin vocabulary and then on my Latin verbs. It was pretty simple stuff but as Latin was only taught in high school in South Africa she seemed impressed. She then made me sit at a desk and handed me the book she had been reading. ‘Do as many of these as you can in ten minutes,’ she instructed.
The book had thirty pages and was full of little drawings and sentences with missing words and trick questions where you had to pick the answer from several choices. It was like old home work for me. This was Doc’s personal territory and he had a great many books on logic and thinking, as he would call it, out of the square. Miss Bornstein’s book was for beginners and I finished the whole thing in under five minutes.
I had to wait while she marked the answers. After the first page she looked up and chewed on the end of her pencil and then tapped it against her beautiful white teeth, her long, polished red nails holding the pencil lightly so that it bounced making a rat-tat-tat-tat sound. Then, using it to point at me, she said, ‘I wouldn’t say you were stupid, Peekay.’ She turned to the last page and marked it, I guess because the book was supposed to go from easy to hard. She looked up again. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that at all.’
After that she made me read a book out loud and do a writing test and then she opened her suitcase, brought out a chess board and set it up. ‘You open,’ she said. I used one of Doc’s favourite openings and she whistled through her teeth as she studied it. After an hour I conceded the game. Doc said it was the thing to do when you were going to stalemate anyway. It made your opponent less wary and therefore gave you an advantage next time. ‘But only do this in a friendly match,’ he cautioned. ‘Chess is war and in war nothing can be predicted except death.’
Miss Bornstein looked up at me, a flicker of annoyance crossing her face. ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ she said. ‘When I play chess I’m your opponent and not to be patronised like some silly woman!’
I blushed furiously. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ I said, mortified and wondering what the word meant.
‘Miss Bornstein please, Peekay. “Miss” sounds just like any other kid who doesn’t know any better. Samantha Bornstein. You may call me Sam in private, if you like. I think you and I are going to see quite a lot of each other.’
The idea of calling this beautiful creature by her Christian name was unthinkable. And by a boy’s name, a common boy’s name like Sam, plainly impossible.
Miss Bornstein thanked me for coming and said that on Monday I was to report to her class. ‘Though I can’t for the life of me think what we’re going to do with you, but at least you’ll make a worthy chess opponent,’ she said, with a throatiness in her voice that made my chest feel tight.
I told Doc about the whole incident on Monday morning and at the end he asked two questions. ‘Tell me, Peekay, how bad in love are you?’
I told him that I didn’t know much about love but it was like being hit in the head with a really good punch.
‘I think maybe you in love bad, Peekay. About women I don’t know so much, but I know this, I think it is not so smart to tell Madame Boxall. I will think about this. Maybe Geel Piet can help also?’ We left it at that for the time being.
‘Next question, please! Madame Bornstein, she plays chess maybe better than Madam Boxall?’
I told Doc that Miss Bornstein was a good chess player and had I not used one of his sneakiest openings she would most likely have beaten me. ‘She’s much more cunning than Mrs Boxall,’ I concluded.
‘Hurrumph! Cunning? This is goot,’ he grunted and opened the book at my music lesson. At the end of the practice he handed me a hastily scrawled note. ‘Please, with my compliments, to give this to your Madame Bornstein and tomorrow you bring the reply if you please.’ I knew better than to open the note.
