play the black man’s music is easy.’
‘Sorry, Doc, it was only a joke. I only wanted to shock you.’
‘Then to shock me you must play me bad music, not play me good music badly,’ he said softly.
I was the one who had been shocked and Doc had in the process taught me once again to do my research and my thinking before I did my judging. ‘Where’d you learn to play like that, Doc?’
Doc laughed. ‘So long ago, ja, when I write my first book on cactus in North America, I was in New Orleans. I had no money so I played fifteen minutes classical every night in a fancy cathouse, the Golden Slipper. Ja, this is the name of that place. After I play comes every night a jazz band and soon we talk and so on and so forth and they think the German professor is very funny, but not my music, the rich people who come to this cathouse, they don’t understand Mr Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms. But the black men, they understood. I teach them a little of this and a little of that and they teach me a little of that and a little of this,’ he touched the keys and played a couple of bars of blues music. ‘It was here I meet Mr W. C. Handy and later also Mr Willie Smith.’
‘You met Willie Smith!’ I yelled at him. ‘The Willie Smith?’
‘Ja, I think there is only one.’
‘Doc, please, please teach me how to play jazz piano.’
Doc laughed, and affecting his version of an American accent replied, ‘Not on your sweet-tootin’ nelly, Peekay.’
‘Please, Doc!’
He shook his head. ‘I cannot teach you what I cannot feel. Peekay, you must understand this. It is not possible for a man to touch the heart of the negro man’s music when he cannot feel it through his fingers.’
Doc had just explained to me why I would never amount to much musically. What Geel Piet knew I had as a boxer, Doc knew I lacked as a musician.
I would leave Doc at eleven o’clock and by a quarter past I had arrived at Miss Bornstein’s house. Mr Bornstein who, as I mentioned before, was a lawyer in partnership with Mr Andrews, had a big white double-storey house designed in the Cape Dutch style. A huge bougainvillea creeper cascaded purple bloom over one side of the house, its mass of purple blossom stark and beautiful against the wall so gleaming white that it hurt to look at it in the near noon sun. The next impression the eye met was of the sweeping lawns which smelt of cut grass and never seemed to lose their wet green look even in the late summer when every other lawn seemed strawed and faded from the heat. There were other things in the garden, trees and tropical shrubs and a bed of deep red canna. And of course all the usual junk like roses and things. But all I seem to remember is the dramatic splash of the deep purple bougainvillea against the blinding white of the house, the green, perfectly manicured lawns and the chit-chit-chit of the hose spitting stingy jets of water somewhere in the garden.
I’d spend the first half-hour or less, depending only on whether I could hold out that long, playing a game of chess with old Mr Bornstein. He would always checkmate me with the same words: ‘Not so shameful. Tomorrow maybe, if God spares us, you will win.’ God spared us but I never won.
A houseboy in a white starched coat would then bring me a glass of milk and two chocolate biscuits, my favourite. Then the lesson would begin. We’d work until two o’clock when the same boy brought in a jug of orange juice and a plate of polony and tomato sandwiches, also my favourite.
Miss Bornstein was determined that I should win a Rhodes scholarship and go to Oxford, and the work we did was far in excess of anything I needed to know to pass my matriculation. With her pushing me, particularly in Latin and Greek, by weekly letter and during the school holidays and with the tuition reserved for Sinjun’s People I was probably getting as fine an education as it was possible for anyone of my age to absorb.
After orange juice and sandwiches I was free. Some days I’d spend the afternoon with Mrs Boxall or help Granpa in the garden or play a little snooker down at the Impala Hotel with John Hopkins and Geoffrey Scruby and some of the other guys all of whom, like me, were going to boarding school. They’d drink a couple of beers and smoke a little and we’d all generally act a bit tough with each other, though I was always in training and neither smoked nor drank.
I was beginning to understand how intellect separates men. For common ground we would talk rugby and cricket and girls. Daily we destroyed the reputations of the girls who’d been in class with us in primary school and who were now supposedly screwing like rattlesnakes. We never quite worked out with whom, it was always supposed to be someone older than ourselves, like Paul Everingham and Bob Goodhead who were in form six at Jeepe High and both had their school colours for rugby and cricket.
Puberty had taken a fierce and urgent grip on all of us so that the fantasy of fucking was never more than an unuttered sentence away. But my mind, when it wasn’t on sex, was different. I guess it had always been, but now the dichotomy was beginning to show. I didn’t feel superior, there was nothing to be superior about, my mind simply seemed to gaze over different intellectual landscapes. I dare say had I not been a boxer and rugby player and greatly respected for the former, the rest of the chaps in Barberton would have dismissed me as a brain and a bit of a loner.
I found Doc, Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein and old Mr Bornstein a source of stimulation, but the adult mind has lost much of its craziness, its zany quality and I missed the verbal jousting that Hymie supplied in our day-to-day relationship at school. In fact, when I got back to school after the holidays, it would take me a couple of days to get my verbal riposte sharp and my timing right again.
‘Christ, Peekay, your brain’s addled by too much deep and meaningful discussion about the weather and the crops and whether the locusts will come again this year!’ Hymie would tease. Atherton, Pissy and Cunning-Spider also shared an intelligence which would readily mix into a really good verbal over an abstract point simply for the love of argument itself.
Hymie would contend that anything, no matter how banal, could be raised to the level of intelligent debate if the minds which attended to it were good enough. He told the story of the little cobbler in a shtetl in Russia who was spreading honey on a piece of bread when the bread fell to the floor. To his amazement the bread fell right side up. ‘How can this be?’ he said, and with the slice of bread in his hand he ran to consult the rabbi and the village elders. ‘We are Jews in Russia, how can it be that I spread honey on my bread and when it fell to the floor it landed right side up? Since when did luck such as this come to a Jew?’ The rabbi and the elders pondered the point for several days, consulting the Torah frequently. Finally they called the little cobbler to the synagogue. The rabbi pronounced the verdict, ‘The answer my boy is quite clear, you honeyed your bread on the wrong side.’
We had all cawed and moaned at the story but Hymie, as usual, had made his point, good conversational debate was an end in itself and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.
That Easter holiday Doc and I had planned an overnight hike to a waterfall we knew about some twelve miles past Saddleback Pass. As waterfalls go it wasn’t a major one but it tumbled down through an area of rainforest which, in our only previous visit, we’d come across too late to explore properly. The cliffs rising above the forest looked interesting and Doc was sure we’d find succulents and several species of dwarf aloe in the rocky crags and ledges. I had been concerned when Doc had suggested the hike, it was a good twenty miles across the mountains and Doc was over eighty. Just how far over no one knew and while he was as lean as a twist of liquorice and tough as a mountain goat it was a hard day’s march by any standards, and in the notes he had made on our previous trip nearly eight years earlier, he’d noted that the hike had been an exhausting one.
He had answered my protests with typical Doc logic. ‘Peekay, if not now it will be never again. Our work here is unfinished, the topography, see I have made a drawing here in my notes, suggests limestone in the cliffs. If this is true it is rare, almost impossible, some geological freak happenings maybe?
Doc knew he’d stirred my need for adventure, and the prospect of finding something that shouldn’t be there allowed me to brush my concern aside and agree that we should undertake the trip.
Doc had managed to postpone his little girls for Friday and we set out at dawn with our blanket rolls, billy cans and enough food for two days, as well as a hurricane lamp, Doc’s eight-battery Eveready torch, rope, a small hammer and a dozen homemade metal spikes hooked at the ends to secure the rope if necessary. Gert had made these for Doc in the prison metal shop soon after he’d left prison and they’d been invaluable for scrambling up rock faces now that Doc wasn’t as young a mountain goat as he pretended to be.
By the time the sun rose over the escarpment and filled the de Kaap valley, we had climbed the foothills and were into the mountains proper. The aloe and thorn scrub were replaced by scree and tussock grass, turning to rocky crags where the wind can be cold even on a hot day. We often saw an eagle high above us seemingly drifting without purpose, carried by the currents of air. With a stop for lunch of cheese and cream crackers, washed down by a billy of sweet black tea, we crossed Saddleback Pass in the early afternoon and started the climb down the
