‘Please, Doc, don’t tell her I’m in love with her,’ I pleaded.
Doc looked askance. ‘This I would never do, Peekay. Absoloodle. To be in love is a very private business.’
With Lieutenant Smit’s promotion to captain, Sergeant Borman became the new lieutenant. This was not a popular promotion, though it was not unexpected. Borman had been sucking up to the Kommandant ever since he’d come down from Pretoria. He let it be known that his wife’s asthma had curtailed a promising career at Pretoria Central, where to survive a warder had to be tougher and smarter than the hard case rapists, grievous bodily harms, thugs, thieves and con merchants. A sergeant under these conditions, he hinted, was easily the equivalent of lieutenant in a small-time prison such as Barberton. He demonstrated at every opportunity that he was tougher and harder than any of the other warders. A glance as he passed was sufficient to get him going.
‘Who you looking at, Kaffir? You trying to be cheeky, hey?’
‘No baas, no inkosi, I not cheeky, I not look.’
‘Don’t tell me you not cheeky. I know what you thinking, Kaffir! On the outside you all gentle Jesus and on the inside you a black devil, you hear.’
‘No, inkosi. Inside same like outside.’
‘That will be the blerrie day, Kaffir. Come here. Come!’ The prisoner would hasten towards Borman and stand head bowed to ragged attention. ‘Look me straight in the eyes, Kaffir.’
‘No, baas. I not look you.’
‘Look, you black bastard! When I tell you to look, you look, you hear?’ The prisoner would lift terror-stricken eyes to meet those of the sergeant. ‘Ja, it’s true, man, inside is filth.’ He would hit the African with a hard punch into the gut, doubling him over. ‘Stand up, you black bastard, we got to get the filth out, we-got-to-get-it-out!’ He would hit the prisoner again and again in the same spot. ‘Vomit out the filth, make clean inside!’
Most Africans from the lowveld have weak stomachs from having been infected with Bilharzia. The larvae, found in river water, enter the system through the skin and eventually attack the liver and the kidneys. Three or four hard punches in the gut will generally cause severe vomiting and great pain.
Borman would look at the vomit on the floor and over the prisoner’s hands as the man tried physically to hold back the contents of his gut. ‘Ag sis! Now look what you done! Why did you make dirty on the nice clean floor?’ The donkey prick would come down hard across the prisoner’s neck. ‘Because you a fucking animal, that’s why.’ He would continue to hit the prisoner until the prisoner collapsed.
Making an unnecessary mess was a major prison offence and entitled a warder to use the donkey prick in an official capacity. Borman took great pride in the fact that he could legitimise an interrogation within three or four minutes from the time he started to taunt a prisoner. The English equivalent of the name the prisoners gave him was, ‘Shit for Brains’. When he was anywhere near you would hear the chant go out, ‘Move away, move away, here comes Shit for Brains. Here comes he whose mother threw away her child, kept the placenta, and called it Shit for Brains.’
Lieutenant Borman was too old to belong to the boxing squad, but he often talked big about the fighter he had once been. Gert said that a man who talks about how tough he is is probably yellow. But, while the warders didn’t like Borman, they respected him for being a professional. He spoke Fanagalo pretty well and since most prisoners learn to speak this African lingua franca, he used the African way of frightening the soul with word pictures. It was not uncommon for a prisoner to be reduced by him to a state of abject terror without physical torture. If there was any trouble in the prison, the Kommandant soon learned to put Sergeant Borman in charge. It was this facility to terrorise the prisoners, both physically and mentally, that had made him the Kommandant’s choice to take over when Lieutenant Smit was promoted.
Lieutenant Borman deeply resented the freedom Geel Piet had achieved in the gymnasium under Captain Smit. ‘Give a lag a blerrie pinkie and before you know it they eaten your whole hand off up your shoulder,’ he would insist. Geel Piet was careful to keep out of his way. When Borman entered the gym, unless he was in the ring actually coaching one of the kids, Geel Piet would quietly slip away. Lieutenant Borman’s eyes would follow his as he crept out. ‘He will get me. One day, for sure, he will get me. All I can say is I hope I come out the other side alive,’ the battered little coloured man confided in me.
Captain Smit would watch Geel Piet leave the gymnasium when Borman entered, but he remained silent. Borman was not overly impressed with Doc or myself. He saw the unholy alliance of Doc, Geel Piet and myself as a basic breakdown of the system. Because he was a professional, he was quick to realise that such a break in the normal discipline of the prison could lead to other things. As a sergeant his influence did not carry to the Kommandant. But as a lieutenant his power increased enormously.
Had it not been for the Kommandant’s desire to keep Doc sweet for the bi-annual visit of the inspector of prisons, Lieutenant Borman would almost certainly have had his way and our freedom within the prison would have been severely curtailed.
The Kommandant was a man who saw things in simple terms. Doc at his Steinway was the cultural component of the Inspector’s visit. A braaivleis and tiekiedraai, the fun; a boxing and shooting match, the physical; showing the Kommandant as a man of culture who was nevertheless a fun-loving disciplinarian. He had no intention of allowing Lieutenant Borman to disrupt his careful plan. Nevertheless, it was apparent to us that Borman was patient and relentless, determined to find something which would lead to our destruction.
The war in Europe was rapidly drawing to a close. The Allies had crossed the Rhine and were moving towards Berlin. Doc was terribly excited. After four years’ incarceration he had a deep need for the soft green hills, the wind-swept mountains and the wooded kloofs. We would talk about walking all the way to saddle back mountain on the border of Swaziland and tears would come into his eyes. It was as though, now that the prisoner years were almost over, he dared to think for the first time of freedom. He would look over the prison walls to the green hills beyond and his voice would tremble. ‘The years of hate are nearly over, it is soon time to love again, time to climb high with the sun on the back until a person can reach up and touch nearly the sky.’
Doc’s second book on the cacti of Southern Africa had been written while he was in prison. This one was in English, each page edited by Mrs Boxall who in the end had come to confess that there was more to the jolly old cactus than she could possibly have imagined. Doc now talked of making the photographic plates and Mrs Boxall went to see Jimmy Winter at the chemist to get him to put aside one spool of precious rationed film each month until she had three dozen waiting for Doc on his release. Jimmy Winter was an artist who, when he wasn’t running his chemist shop, loved to paint the hills. Before Doc went to prison he would sometimes come across him in some lonely spot high up on a mountain top painting away.
By the time the Allies had crossed the Rhine, precious few music lessons were taking place. We spent most of the hour discussing our plans for Doc’s release. He made me describe the cactus garden and the rate of growth of each plant and he talked happily about the extensions he would need to accommodate the stuff we would find waiting for us in the hills. Also, all the photos we needed for his book.
Like me, Miss Bornstein had never managed to beat Doc at chess. So she introduced her grandfather, Mr Isaac Bornstein, who was referred to as Old Mr Bornstein. Old Mr Bornstein turned out to be a match for Doc and the two of them were having a mighty go at each other, with Doc clucking and shaking his head as he read Old Mr Bornstein’s latest move. ‘Such a German, but very clever, ja this move is goot.’ He would move over to the board which rested on top of the upright piano, make Old Mr Bornstein’s move and think for a while and then make his own. ‘… But not so clever as me, Mr Schmarty Pantz Isaac!’
To Doc’s surprise Mrs Boxall had accepted Miss Bornstein quite happily and the two of them were really making a go of the Sandwich Fund, which was sending out weekly bundles to prisoners’ families, as well as food parcels. They discussed the time when, with the war over, it would be necessary to come clean, but decided the end of the war wouldn’t bring about the end of human need and they’d find some excuse to continue.
Doc, Geel Piet and I had discussed the matter of my love for Miss Bornstein and, I must say, neither of them was a lot of help. Between the three of us we knew very little about women. Geel Piet never had a mother, or at least he could never remember having one. His aunty, the one with asthma who couldn’t climb up steps, had taken him in with her nine kids and then when she got sick and couldn’t manage he had gone to an orphanage and at the age of ten had been thrown onto the streets.
Doc had been a bachelor, though evidently not a very promiscuous one. He spoke with horror of the big- bosomed Frauleins who demanded to see him after concerts and came to the conservatorium with invitations to dinner or afternoon tea. Sometimes, when they were very persistent and he could no longer politely refuse, he went, only to find his hostess, with a very revealing
