Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘See, that’s nice, you modest as well. I can tell from these papers, man. One of them is signed by a general. Jesus, what more do you want?’

  ‘Major general,’ I corrected, not explaining that he’d only been a colonel during the war.

  He shrugged. ‘No diff, he’s high up. Besides, the other two medics, they don’t want to do it, even though it’s a promotion. I’ve already spent four days on the telephone to our head office in Jo’burg to send us a new senior medic urgently. I just got off the phone now.’ He shrugged. ‘But they say they don’t have anyone on their books. Have to advertise. But hey, man, now you here!’ He tapped Nick’s papers. ‘And with experience in combat conditions. I can’t hardly believe it.’

  Then, seeing my expression, he added, ‘Agh, man, don’t worry. The boss boy on the night shift team has been here three years already; the other three kaffirs, more than one year. Then there’s Matron Hamilton at the cottage hospital. She can be very useful, but of course she can’t go underground and she’s only on day shift. But she can give you medical advice any time you need. Just go and see her. I’ll let her know you maybe call around, hey?’

  Senior medic on night shift, the dangerous shift. It wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear. I’d never conned anyone in my life, I’d always let the keyboard speak for me, perhaps not always with eloquence, but, I hoped, with honesty. Now I was being put on the front line, in charge, under who knew what conditions. I simply didn’t believe myself sufficiently in practice after so long out of the army. I’d read Gray’s Anatomy and the first-aid books from Foyles at least twice until I thought I knew every bone in the human body, and just about every industrial accident that could occur and how to treat it. As a general rule I trusted my memory, but it isn’t the same when someone’s brains are spilling onto your lap or a leg has been severed; my imagination was suddenly running riot. ‘But, but, Mr Coetzee – I mean, Jannie – I’ve never been underground; I simply have no idea of the conditions, or what it’s like working in the dark . . .’

  He laughed. ‘Agh, don’t worry, Jack, you wear a hard hat with a light on it, and a wound is a wound, above or below ground, what’s the diff, hey? It’s mostly only natives – you’ll soon learn, man. If a kaffir dies, he dies. We don’t do post mortems or make any official enquiries with black mineworkers.’ He paused. ‘You have to understand, they’re not like us.’

  There it was again. They’re not like us.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘They don’t cost so much to train. Pick and shovel, crowbar, jackhammer, easy stuff.’

  Of course, I should have called it quits right then and there. There would be times in the future when I dearly wished I had. In fact, I should probably have quit during the interview in New York when Mr Leslie made similar comments about black folks’ lives being expendable. I’d been trying to save my own ass from the Chicago Mob rather than stick to my convictions. And here it was all over again, ‘They’re not like us.’ It occurred to me that I should use Fenet’s letter of introduction to her family, which she’d given to me on board the Roybank. Push on across the centre of the continent, find a ship sailing up the east coast to the Horn of Africa. But instead, all I did was say, ‘That’s not how I see it, Mr Coetzee. Every life counts.’ It was a pathetic rejoinder.

  He looked at me as if he vaguely understood. ‘You Canadians don’t have many black people, so I appreciate what you saying, man, but you’ll find out.’ He leaned back slightly in his chair. ‘So, Jack, will you give it a go?’

  Suddenly I felt weary. Where else was I to go if I knocked back this job?

  ‘As a senior medic on the grizzly shift, you also get a bigger copper bonus.’

  I didn’t care about the money, but I agreed to take the job. I guess it was about as far away as I could run from the Chicago Mob. Joe, Hector, Chef Napoleon Nelson, Mr Joel, Sue, Pastor Moses and his wife, Booker T., Jay-Jay Bullnose, the kitchen staff and the women who cleaned the GAWP Bar at the Firebird, The Resurrection Brothers Band, the immortal Art Tatum, all the coloured folk who had been good to me in the past, can you forgive me? I know I should have told the personnel manager to stick his job up his ass but, alas, I didn’t.

  The single quarters were just as Noel White had described them. Nobody was officially in charge; everyone had an identical rondavel with a polished red cement floor, containing a washbasin, cupboard, chest of drawers, small writing table and upright wooden chair beside a basic iron bed with bare mattress and pillow. It seemed the workers supplied their own linen. All the furniture except the mattress and cushion was pretty scuffed or battered. The round hut also featured a small verandah that stretched halfway around its circumference on either side of the reinforced steel door. The previous occupant had left a couple of battered wicker easy chairs behind.

  It didn’t take long for one of the Krauts, as Noel had termed them, to visit. In fact, an hour after the personnel department had allocated me a rondavel in the single quarters, there was a knock on the steel door. I opened it to see a guy standing outside whom I guessed to be in his mid-twenties. ‘You are Jack,’ he declared, stabbing a blunt finger at me.

  Hearing his accent I was immediately on my guard. ‘Yeah, that’s me. Who wants to know?’

  ‘Meine name is Hans, Hans Meyerhof. Ve have some rules I must explain, rules you must obey.’

  ‘Oh? The personnel manager explained some of —’

  He didn’t allow me to finish. ‘Ja, that is mine rules. Here is single quarters’ rules. Here ve must have some rules also, so everybody can understand.’

  ‘Understand what, Mr Meyerhof?’

  He looked momentarily confused. ‘Of course – the rules.’

  ‘And who makes these rules everybody has to understand?’ I asked, a tad churlishly.

  ‘The rules ve make by the committee.’

  ‘Oh, I see! It’s a committee elected by the guys who live in the single quarters?’

  ‘Already I think maybe you ask too much question, Jack,’ he said, looking directly at me and shaking his head; then, with a cluck of his tongue, he added, ‘Ve have rules you must obey. That is all you must know now.’

  It was clear our discussion had come to an end. ‘And these rules are . . .?’

  He looked a little less stern. ‘Ja, the rules, so now I must tell you. No voomen, but also ve can supply every month one, twenty pounds short time. No schwartze . . . kaffir women verboten! You vant man, you see Holz at the cimbusu, ze shower block, he can arrange. You want to drink something, beer, whisky, schnapps maybe? You buy from ze recreation hut. We got there gut bar. Shower block, for hot shower one time, one shilling; cold shower, you don’t pay. When you are drunk, you go your rondavel, ve lock you in; morning again, ve come and open. You vant your hut cleaning? Ja, ve get you cleaning boy. You pay us two pounds for za month and we pay zat boy also.’

  ‘That’s okay, I prefer to do my own cleaning, thanks.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not permitted.’

  It was just as Noel White had said. ‘I see. Hans, you guys control everything, is that it?’

  ‘Ja, it is better so.’ He suddenly switched subjects. ‘Vhat job you do in ze mine, Jack? You go underground? Learn mining, take blasting licence, then go work grizzly?’

  ‘No, I’m the new night-shift medic.’

  His attitude seemed to change and his eyes widened. ‘Ja? That is gut, maybe sometime you can help us. Maybe zere is some fighting, somebody drunk, maybe zey are hurt?’

  ‘I’m on night shift. I don’t suppose too many guys get drunk during the day and fight.’

  He laughed. ‘Ja, it is true, but night shift begin late, and before zat, lots of time for guys, they getting drunk, ja? If you say you can help, you don’t pay cimbusu, you don’t pay shower block.’

  ‘What? The shilling for a hot shower, or the other, with whatshisname?’ I was getting annoyed. ‘By the way, is a shit free?’

  He didn’t laugh. ‘Ja, is free. Hot shower also, if you help
somebody hurt, so ve don’t go Frau Hamilton . . . Mrs Hamilton.’

  ‘What’s wrong with them going to the cottage hospital?’

  ‘Mrs Hamilton, she makes always trouble. She don’t like za committee; ven somebody get hurt, she vant to know always what happen, everything.’ Hans looked at me. ‘We must have discipline! Ja, it is necessary always.’

  Observing my doubtful expression he changed tack once again, pointing to the bare mattress and pillow. ‘You vant to buy sheet, blanket for bed? Ve have gut one, second-hand, but also clean. One blanket, two sheet . . . but you must have four, also two pillow cover, for vashing, one pound ten shilling. The cleaning boy vash them, two sheets, pillow cover, every veek. You must be clean.’

  I finally agreed I’d lend a hand if someone got hurt in a fight in the single quarters, then handed over the money for the second-hand bedding and the wage – with, no doubt, a percentage taken out by the committee – for the cleaner. I would later learn that I’d made the correct decision and that any newly arrived guy who hadn’t had the benefit of a Noel White to advise him and so objected to the rules found himself dealt with by the committee in a cruel way.

  The Nazi thugs would wait until he was under the shower, then grab him and hold him down while he was raped by one of their homosexual prostitutes. It was a way of warning the victim without leaving any outward signs of his ordeal. They also knew that he’d be too ashamed to go to mine management to complain.

  With so many young guys locked up together without an outlet for their energy, drink was the usual form of relaxation and brawls were frequent. The committee possessed all the latest first-aid gear, to keep patients away from the redoubtable Matron Hamilton, and I would usually stitch up or bandage at least half a dozen young guys every few nights.

  By agreeing to be the single-quarters medic, I’d once again taken the easy way out but, as a consequence, I was treated with respect by the greedy Nazi thugs and bullies I loathed. I guess the Las Vegas habit of not asking too many questions and keeping a low profile was hard to break.

  For the first three weeks I attended the morning shift at the underground School of Mines under the direction of a tough-as-teak Welsh miner named Russell Howell – or Mr Howell, as he insisted on being called. He was a stern and uncompromising instructor, and I was glad I was only there as an observer to familiarise myself with the various underground activities in the mine. For some of the young foreign guys who didn’t speak English all that well, his Welsh accent made it pretty tough going. However, I could see that after this ordeal they’d either leave or be sent packing, or they’d sit for their international blasting licence and then be thoroughly capable of running a grizzly, a job so dangerous that never a week went by there wasn’t an accident or even a fatality. These guys, usually no older than twenty-three, couldn’t wait to get onto a grizzly with a box of gelignite, a roll of cortex and a box of fuses and start making money. Next to the true professionals, the diamond drillers, engineers and shift bosses, working a grizzly was the highest-paid job in the mine and a young guy could earn some serious money.

  I hadn’t been with Mr Howell long when he approached me and said, ‘Boyo, I’ve watched you and you’re a good lad. Let me train you to be a grizzly man. You’ll make three times the money.’

  Grizzly men were paid a nominal salary and then a copper bonus on the amount of rock they emptied out of the stope and through their grizzly; the ultimate achievement for a grizzly man being to leave his diamond driller’s stope empty after the night shift. This meant both he and the diamond driller got the maximum copper bonus for the shift. The South African diamond drillers would refer to their grizzly men as either ‘eerste klaas [first class]’ or ‘kakhuis [shithouse]’, cherishing the ‘good’ grizzly men and often seeing to it that the ‘bad’ ones were ‘relocated’.

  A grizzly man always worked the same grizzly, because each set of tungsten steel bars was said to have its own peculiarities; you learned to ‘read your grizzly’ and understand its personality. The men also believed they had to become attuned to the ‘groan’ of the surrounding rock, the particular sounds it made, which could be a matter of life or death. Unfortunately, a good grizzly man was often a young guy who would take chances and break the rules, and a bad one was someone inclined to be more cautious.

  Like most young men, the so-called ‘good’ grizzly men believed they were bullet-proof. The war – especially the aborted landing at Dieppe where I’d lost my earlobe – had cured me of any such foolish notion, and every morning as I looked in the shaving mirror I was reminded that if the bullet had been an inch or two to the left, I’d have been dead as a dormouse, or worse, brain damaged or quadriplegic, with a face not even my stepfather could have reconstructed. My maimed hand, courtesy of Sammy Schischka, was another reminder of how easily you could lose what you valued most. But as a medic I’d seen plenty of bravado and foolish heroism, and often had to patch up the results.

  I thanked Russell Howell for the compliment and then politely refused his offer to train me as a grizzly man. The Mafia murders of my old buddies Lenny and Johnny Diamond – the main reason I was in the middle of nowhere, buried deep underground – gave me more reasons to cherish the idea of remaining alive.

  Nobody talked about it, but a grizzly was a potential killer, the most dangerous way to mine copper. But with the Korean War dragging on and a world greedy for the essential metal, it was also by far the most efficient way of extracting ore from a stope. I’d seen a diagram of the layout of a stope, with the grizzly bars at the bottom like a giant sieve, allowing only the smaller rocks to fall through to the shaft beneath, but nothing prepared me for the reality.

  The stope was a huge hole blasted out of solid rock. Diamond drillers forced their diamond-tipped drill bits up to twenty-five feet deep into the walls of the stope, then packed the holes with gelignite. The ensuing blast would enlarge the stope, and cause an avalanche of ore and rock to fall to the bottom, where it passed through or jammed in the bars of the grizzly. The ore that fell through to the shaft beneath would be transported away from the stope; the remainder had to be forced through the gaps between the bars by the grizzly man’s four black workers, using crowbars or mallets and balancing precariously on the bars. If that failed, the grizzly man had to clear the bars by blasting the rock with sticks of gelignite. After he lit the fuse he would have to scramble into a safety tunnel and hope for the best. When the shaft below the grizzly bars filled with ore, it was emptied in stages through a large steel bucket-like door that allowed through only enough ore to fill a single truck, one of fifty or so drawn behind an electric ore train, which would then shunt forward until the next truck was in position.

  When full, the ore trucks were hauled to a vertical shaft to the surface, some eleven hundred or so feet above. The ore and rock were then fed onto a conveyer belt leading to the crusher, which pounded them to the consistency of coarse gravel. This was then loaded once again into trucks and hauled by train to the copper smelter. Here, the ore within the ‘crush’ was refined into copper ingots. The entire process was dangerous, but a miner’s best chance of being killed or badly injured was working the grizzly.

  The midnight-to-dawn shift kept me as ‘busy as a blue-arsed fly’, as Noel White would say. The mine employed about four thousand African mine workers, around a thousand of whom worked on one of the various underground levels on my shift. Only a very few of them worked the grizzlies, but it was during the night shift that rock that had been blasted during the afternoon was cleared. During these shifts I would have to treat injuries of varying severity, ranging from bad lacerations, muscle sprains and tears to fractures, and there would even be an occasional death.

  The medic who had preceded me, Koos Dippenaar, had trained my medical team extremely well; there was very little they hadn’t coped with in the past and I quickly grew to trust them implicitly. But here’s the paradox: while they were perfectly capable, the white miners’ union would not allow them to perform certa
in procedures; only white medics were deemed sufficiently skilful for these duties. Sutures, inserting a needle into a vein for a transfusion, using a hypodermic needle, administering aid in any way to a white man were all forbidden. This last one was the most stupid rule of all, and I decided that, should the situation ever arise where I was unable to supply the help needed, I would instruct one of my medics to do so in my stead. However, I was not naïve enough to let this be known among the white miners, particularly the diamond drillers, who, fortunately, seldom worked underground on the night shift.

  My senior black medic was an impressive-looking man of around thirty named Daniel Mwanawasa from the local Bemba tribe, who was far more experienced and capable than I was, especially at the beginning when I had a great deal of trouble communicating with my medical team. One of my tasks at the School of Mines had been to study Cikabanga (pronounced Chi-ka-banga), a lingua franca used in the mines, consisting of words derived mainly from Zulu, with a sprinkling of English, Afrikaans, Portuguese and a few words from local tribal languages such as Chibemba. It was similar to Fanagalo, the pidgin used in mines in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. The name Fanagalo means, roughly, ‘to be or do like this’ in the Zulu language. Both have about two thousand words each.

  For novice miners to develop a reasonable working knowledge of Cikabanga usually took all of the three months in the School of Mines and then some. Young miners generally had a minimal grasp of it, sufficient to get by underground, but the paucity of the communication between them and their gangs could be dangerous, leading to confusion and sometimes accidents. The professionals – diamond drillers, engineers and shift bosses – were, for the most part, fluent. I guess I was blessed with a musician’s ear, and my ability to speak Cikabanga fairly well in just a few weeks was probably one of the reasons I impressed Russell Howell at the School of Mines.