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, supported by timber.
Doc taught me the names of plants. The sugarbush with its splashy white blossoms. A patch of brilliant orange-red 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 aromatic smell. I recognized the pale yellow blossoms of wild gardenia. 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 ecosystems of bush and kloof and high mountain.
“Everything fits, Peekay. Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. 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 meters, 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 know you had an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.” He looked at me and continued, “The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking; most people you encounter will be vines. When you are a young plant they are very dangerous.” His piercing blue eyes looked into mine. “Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you will grow stronger. If you are right you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.”
Doc would show me how a small lick of water trickling from a rock face would, drop by drop, gather round its wet apron fern and then scrub and later trees and vines until the kloof became an interdependent network of plant, insect, bird and animal life. “Always you should go to the source, to the face of the rock, to the beginning. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny. Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body. This has made him greater than the creatures around him. Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”
Doc never talked down. Much of what he said would take me years to understand, but I soaked it up nevertheless. He taught me to read for meaning and information, to make margin notes and to follow these up with trips to the Barberton library, where Mrs. Boxall, the librarian, would give a great sigh when the two of us walked in. “Here come the messpots!” She claimed she had to spend hours erasing the penciled margin notes in the books we borrowed.
But I don’t think Mrs. Boxall really minded. The books on birds and insects and plants were seldom borrowed by anyone else and besides, as most of the books in the natural history section had once belonged to him, Doc adopted a proprietorial attitude toward the library. Over the years his tiny cottage had become too small to contain them, so they had been bequeathed to the library.
We climbed the high kranses and the crags in search of cactus and succulents. Toward the end of summer, on the side of a mountain scarred by loose gray shale and tufts of coarse brown grass, I stumbled on Aloe breviflora, a tiny thorny aloe.
Doc was overjoyed. “Gold! Absolute gold!” The triumph of the rare find showed in his excited eyes: “Brevifolia in these parts, so high, impossible! You are a genius, Peekay. Absoloodle!”
It was the find of the summer and, to Doc, worth all the weary hours spent on the hills and in the mountains. We recorded the find with the camera and removed six of the tiny plants.
Like me, Doc was an early riser, so just after dawn all that summer he gave me piano lessons. “In one year we will tell, but it is not so important. To love music is everything. First I will teach you to love music, after this slowly we shall learn to play.”
I was anxious to please Doc and worked hard, but I suspect he knew almost from the outset that I wouldn’t prove an especially gifted musician. My progress, while superior to that of the small girls he was obliged to teach for a living, indicated a very modest talent. In the years that followed, it was enough to fool my mother and all the big-bosomed matriarchs who ruled the town’s important families. At concerts they would applaud me loudly.
These occasions, which occurred in the spring and autumn, made my mother very proud, though they also represented a compromise with the Lord. Concerts were just the sort of thing that, like moneylending, the Lord condemned. She justified my participation and her attendance by pointing out that many of the great classical musicians wrote music for the church.
The Lord’s will was equally explicit on drinking and smoking and dancing, except ballet. Ballet was another of the items cherished by the lavender-scented ladies from the town’s upper-echelon families, and my piano recital—Chopin—was usually followed by Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Swans” by gramophone record, danced to by six-year-olds in white tutus and duckbilled headdresses made of papier-mâché.
We were the cultural meat in a popular sandwich otherwise filled with amateur vaudeville acts, solo songs of an Irish nature, and piano accordion and guitar renditions of well-known Afrikaans folk songs usually performed by the Afrikaner warders from the prison.
The concert would always end with the All Saints Anglican church choir singing the patriotic wartime song “White Cliffs of Dover” with the audience joining in. To show the Rooinek majority where their unspoken loyalty lay, the warders and their families would leave the town hall prior to the mass rendition of “White Cliffs.” This would be accompanied by booing and catcalls from less well-bred members of the remaining audience.
Germany had covertly helped the Boers during the Boer War. To the Boers, Germany was an old and trusted friend in a country where a contract was a handshake and declared friendship a bond that continued beyond the grave. The concept of the superiority of some races over others was never for one moment in doubt. In this context, to many Boers Adolf Hitler was only doing his job and, to some minds, doing it well.
After the warders and other Nazi sympathizers had walked out the remainder of the audience would stand up, lock arms and sing “White Cliffs of Dover” at least twice to confirm their love for a Britain facing her darkest hour. To bring the concert to a close the concert party, with warders and other Afrikaners missing, would gather on the stage, each of us holding a long-stemmed rose delivered earlier by me. We stood to rigid attention while a scratchy 78 rpm rendered “God Save the King.” Whereupon the cast hurled the roses into the audience.
My granpa, my mother and I then walked home, having politely refused the mayor’s invitation to the traditional postconcert party for the cast at the Phoenix Hotel. Worldly parties were pretty high up on the Lord’s banned list.
The next issue of the Goldfields News would report the concert with the warder walkout splashed across the front page. Tongues wagged for days. Important people suggested the military be brought in to wipe out this nest of Nazi vipers or that the prison be moved to Nelspruit, an Afrikaans town forty miles away, where most of the prisoners probably came from in the first place.
My granpa, with his experience in fighting the Boers, had once been canvassed for his opinion by Mr. Hankin, the editor of the Goldfields News. But they didn’t print what he said. What he said was: “I spent most of the Boer War shitting my breeches as a stretcher bearer. The only thing those buggers do better than music is shoot. Without them the concert wouldn’t be worth a cardboard boot.”
Mrs. Boxall, who was the newspaper’s correspondent on mat
ters cultural, could always be relied on to 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.
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 kranses was stolen from my childhood.
NINE
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.
A comprehensive understanding of Afrikaans in a classroom of English-speaking kids coming to the language for the first time, and Doc’s demand that I write up my field notes, gave me a hugely unfair advantage. I quickly earned a reputation, rather unjustly, for being clever. Doc 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 schoolwork tedious and simplistic. Doc became my real teacher.
His cactus garden was a never-ending source of delight. It was half an acre on the flat top of a small hill that overlooked the town and valley. A ten-minute climb up a dirt road that led nowhere else. His may well have been the best private collection of cacti and succulents in the world. I, who grew up 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 had its specified purpose—music, study and drinking himself to sleep.
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. 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. 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.
It was the cactus garden that testified to “his problem with Doctor Bottle,” as my mother would say about any person who ever held strong drink to their lips. Bordering both sides of the path 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. Doc made no apology for his drinking. It was always blamed quietly and politely on the wolves, which I imagined slavering away, great red tongues lolling.
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 color. 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-stenciled Military Police on its hood. The van was parked directly in front of the whisky bottle path that led to the cottage. Two men leaned against the front mudguard smoking, their red-banded khaki caps resting on the hood of the van.
The two men saw us approach and, dropping their cigarettes, ground them underfoot. They reached for their caps and 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 in surprise. Doc was taller than the officer, so the military man was obliged to look up at him. He had a thin black pencil mustache just like Pik Botha. 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?”
“Ja, this is me,” Doc said.
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, his gaze following the line of the cactus garden. He turned slowly, his eyes filled with pain, taking in the hills, the marvelous aloe-dotted hills, his garden of Eden for twenty years in the Africa he so savagely loved.
“The stupidity. Already the stupidity begins again,” he said softly; then he patted my shoulder. “You must plant the Senecio serpens to get the morning sun, they like that.” He removed his bush hat and got his red bandanna from his overalls and slowly wiped his face. Then he put his bush hat 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.”
Turning to the officer, Doc said, “You will please allow me first to shave and change my clothes.”
The officer rolled his eyes heavenward. From the number of cigarette butts on the ground they had been waiting for some time. “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 bag on the verandah. I followed him into the dark little cottage to the lean-to kitchen, where he placed an enamel basin on the hard earth floor and poured water into it from a jug. He washed himself from head to toe, then wiped himself briskly with an almost threadbare towel. He was brown all over and his thin body was hard and sinewy.
The sergeant had grown impatient and had wandered into the music room, where he was playing “Chopsticks” on the Steinway. Doc seemed not to hear as he shaved carefully, stropping his cutthroat razor until it was perfect. Then he dressed in his white linen suit and black boots. Finally he placed a spare shirt and his shaving things in a sugar bag and, walking through to the book room, he selected a large book from the top shelf of one of the bookcases. “Put it also in the bag, Peekay.” I took the large leather-bound volume from him. Its binding was scuffed and mottled. The title on the spine was hard to read: Cactaceae. Afrika und Amerika. K. J. Von Vollensteen. I opened the heavy book to find that it was written in German. I wiped the dust from the cover and put it in the bag. On the packing case dresser next to the bed was half a bottle of Johnnie Walker and this too I put in the bag. Then, heaving it over my shoulder, I joined Doc at the front door. He removed his panama hat from a hook on the wall and picked up his silver-handled walking stick. “We are ready, sir,” he said, turning slowly to the sergeant.
The sergeant rose from the piano stool. “That’s a
blerrie good peeano you got there, professor. Once I saw this fillim star dance on the top of a peeano just like this one, only it was all white. Okay, man, let’s go.” He took the sugar bag from my shoulder, and looked into it. “Hey, what’s this? You can’t take whisky where you going.” He grinned. “If you like we can have a quick spot now, oubas?” he said to Doc. He gave him a conspiratorial wink and uncapped the bottle. Raising it to his lips, he took a long drag of whisky, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and the top of the bottle with his palm. “Lekker, man, that’s blerrie good whisky!” He handed the bottle to Doc, who raised his hand in refusal. The sergeant shrugged. “Suit yourself, man, all the more for me.” He took another long swig and walked over to the piano. “In this fillim this man was playing the peeano like at a funeral; then a drunk tipped some whisky on it and suddenly it was playing like mad.” He tipped the remaining whisky over the keys of the Steinway. Doc, who had been standing passively waiting, seemed to come alive. He raised his stick and rushed at the sergeant.
“Schweinehund! Do not defile the instrument of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Liszt!” He brought his cane down hard onto the sergeant’s wrist and the bottle fell from his hand to smash on the cement floor. Gripping his wrist, the sergeant danced in agony among the broken glass. Doc, using the sleeve of his linen jacket, ran his arms across the keys in an attempt to wipe them and sent the piano into a glissando. Then he turned and walked toward the front door.
“You Nazi bastard!” the sergeant yelled. I hurried after Doc and he caught up with us on the path outside the cottage. “I’ll show you!” He was trying to remove a pair of handcuffs from his belt as he ran. “Stop! You’re under military arrest!” But Doc, his head held high, simply continued toward the van. The sergeant grabbed Doc’s arm and clicked a handcuff around his wrist. Doc just kept walking, obliging the sergeant to hang on to the other handcuff as though he were being dragged along like a prisoner. He took a swinging kick at Doc, knocking his legs from under him and bringing the old man to his knees on the path. In his fury he aimed a second kick just as, screaming, I flung myself at his legs. The army boot intended for Doc’s ribs caught me under the chin, knocking me unconscious.
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