Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Donald said, ‘If you’re willing to wait for your first six months’ rent, Mr Blitz, I’ll rent it from you. If I can find Adam Hoovstraten again, he and me could work this place well.’

  ‘You mean you want to stay?’

  Donald gave a wide, ugly grin. ‘I think it’s time I stopped all this travelling, Mr Blitz. Travelling makes the soul restless. And I’ve got some good sisters in Oranjerivier.’

  ‘Make sure they don’t have jealous husbands.’

  Donald turned around. ‘I’ve laid Mr Monsaraz to rest in back of the kraal, Mr Blitz. You want to say a prayer?’

  Barney shook his head. ‘Just go bring that drawerful of paper money out of the drawing-room, carry it out here.’

  Donald glanced at Mooi Klip. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blitz.’

  Together, Barney and Mooi Klip walked slowly around to Monsaraz’s grave – a narrow mound of dry earth, with neither cross nor marker to show that the son of Sgr and Sgra Monsaraz had been laid to rest here after a life of fear and misery and drink. Barney took off his hat and stood beside it, while Mooi Klip murmured a short mission-school prayer.

  At last, Donald came out with the desk drawer. Five-pound notes fluttered in the wind, and some of them were tumbled away across the farmyard. He set it down at the head of the grave, and then stood back.

  Barney knelt down, took out his matches, and struck one. The thin paper money caught alight straight away, and in a few moments the whole drawerful was blazing. One by one, the five-pound notes curled up and charred, and their fiery ashes were carried away on the breeze.

  ‘Let’s hope he rests now,’ said Barney quietly; and without waiting for Mooi Klip, he walked slowly back to the surrey.

  Barney still had the £212 which Harold Feinberg had given him for his diamonds, however, and that money he kept. When he and Mooi Klip arrived back in Kimberley, he spent almost all of it on a two-bedroom wooden shack not far away from the mine, on the eastern side of main street, and on picks and shovels and winching gear, which he bought from the Kimberley Mining Equipment Company. He had seen how deep some of the claims had already been dug, and he reckoned that within four or five weeks, he and Joel were going to have to wind the yellow soil out of their diggings with a rope and a bucket.

  He employed six new kaffir labourers, and guaranteed to pay them bonuses for every diamond they found over five karats. They were an odd collection, the kaffirs. One of them had only one hand, but he could flick the handle of his shovel with his stump of a wrist so that each load of dirt landed precisely in his barrow, ten feet away. Another sang all day, in an octave of only five barely distinguishable tones, and on hot afternoons the sound of his droning voice drove Barney almost mad. The leader of the kaffir working-party was the smallest of all of them – a smiling, energetic imp whom Joel called his shmeck tabac, his little pinch of snuff.

  Harold Feinberg came out to Claim 172 a week after Barney and Joel had started digging together. He sat on an upturned wheel barrow and gave himself a thorough mopping with a white handkerchief.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Harold asked, loudly, above the monotonous singing of the kaffir.

  Barney, dressed in a loose sweat-stained shirt, baggy trousers and a broad-brimmed panama hat, stood up straight and held the small of his back. He had only been digging for a few days, but he felt as if he had already worked his way halfway through a life-sentence of hard labour.

  ‘You’ve forgiven me, have you, Harold?’ he asked.

  ‘I should forgive you?’

  ‘You made sure you turned the other way whenever I tried to catch your eye during Joel’s appeal.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Harold, replacing his hat. ‘That was when you were a Gentile. Nowadays, I hear that you’ve behaving like one of our own again, we should be so fortunate.’

  ‘He’s in love,’ called Joel, from the other side of the claim, where he was directing his shmeck tabac’s efforts to pull down an overhang of crumbling rock.

  ‘Ah, yes, I heard about that, too,’ said Harold. ‘I met Edward Nork two or three days ago, and he told me you’d set up house with that pretty young Griqua girl.’

  ‘She’s just housekeeping for us, that’s all,’ said Barney.

  ‘I should doubt it?’ asked Harold.

  ‘You should hok nit kain tchynik,’ said Joel, making his way across the claim in long, scrambling strides, and wiping his hands on a rag.

  ‘These Blitz brothers,’ Harold complained, with an expression of mock-despair. ‘But tell me, how’s business?’

  Barney reached into the pocket of his work shirt and produced a handful of small rough diamonds. Harold Feinberg took them carefully into the sweaty folds of his palm, and then lifted the magnifying loupe around his neck so that he could examine them.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Joel.

  ‘Well … they’re not bad,’ said Harold. ‘They won’t earn you much of a fortune, but they’re not bad.’

  Barney pointed around to the sides of the claim, which was already dug down to twenty feet. ‘I reckon Joel was unlucky here. The upper debris had collapsed over the edge of the yellow soil, so that the first ten feet he dug didn’t contain any diamonds at all. But now we’re getting into the real business.’

  ‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Harold. He grimaced at the sound of the kaffirs, singing as they dug. ‘You and your klezmer both.’

  Later that same afternoon, when the shadows from the rim of the mine had already filled their claim with darkness, Joel’s impish kaffir came up with a stone of nearly ten karats. He dropped it into Joel’s palm as calmly as if it were a large berry he had picked from a tree. Joel prodded it, scratched it with his thumbnail, and then said to Barney in a hoarse voice, ‘Look at this, Barney. Come take a look at this.’

  Barney laid down his pick. He held the diamond between his finger and his thumb, and he could not help grinning. ‘Joel,’ he said, ‘I do believe the Blitz Brothers Diamond Company is going to show a profit today.’

  Every day, they dug at their claim from the first reddish hints of dawn until it was too dark for them to see what they were doing. In August, it rained solidly for a week, and claim after claim collapsed in a series of mudslides, bringing sandbags and shovels and mule-carts down from one level to the next. Three Australians were buried alive, and a German digger was so badly crushed that his partner shot him to put him out of his agony. Some of the early diggers, satisfied with the few thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds they had been able to dig out of the yellow ground, gave up, and sold their claims to the highest and most enthusiastic bidder.

  By spring, most of the claims had been excavated so deep that the intervening roadways had collapsed, and the yellow soil had to be winched out to the rim of the mine in a series of hide buckets, suspended from never-ending steel cables. Each of these cables was wound around a series of pulleys, which was fixed to one of scores of rickety and elaborate wooden towers, clustering around the mine like pagan fortifications. The soil was offloaded at the towers, and then shovelled on to mule and ox-carts, to be taken away and sorted.

  Mooi Klip became an expert at sorting diamonds. She spent most of her days in a makeshift shelter not far from the edge of the mine, and there she supervised the kaffirs who tipped the broken ground into a heap in front of her, and pounded it with their shovels until it was broken down into manageable pieces. She watched them as they turned the soil in a rotary sieve called a trommel, which was Dutch for ‘drum’, and then banged away at the finer pieces which were left, before sieving them in fine-mesh hand sieves. Finally, she sat over the sorting table, picking through the stones with her delicate fingers. She wore small wire-rimmed spectacles for this close work, and Barney loved to surprise her as she sat working, because he thought she looked so pretty and vulnerable in eyeglasses.

  At night, Barney and Joel and Mooi Klip returned to their shack, which they had now extended to include a large parlour and a verandah, and they would eat a supper of beef and beans before s
itting around the fireplace, drinking rum and cocoa, and feeling the tension and pains of the day gradually leaving their muscles. Over the fireplace was a melodramatic lithograph of the wreck of the steamship San Francisco, which Joel considered ‘sobering’. He said it would always remind him of how nearly his own fortunes had foundered, and how close he had been to death.

  But although Joel seemed more cheerful than he had when Barney had first rescued him, he was still visited from time to time by terrible doubts about what he was doing, and by nagging spells of furious dissatisfaction with himself, and with his surroundings, and especially with Barney.

  ‘We should be living in a palace, the money we’re making,’ he said one evening in September. Barney was bent over the table, examining a heap of rough diamonds under the bright light of a pressure-lamp. Mooi Klip, her curly hair fresh-washed and brushed, was sitting by the fireplace hemming a red flowery dress. Because of the intense white light, the inside of the room looked like a stage-setting for amateur theatricals.

  Barney said, ‘I’m more interested in investing our money in another claim. By the end of the month, we should be able to put in a bid for Stuart’s patch. Harold told me that Stuart was grumbling about the climate, and that he was planning on selling up and going back to Capetown.’

  ‘You want another claim?’ Joel demanded. ‘Don’t you think we have enough work to do with one?’

  ‘We can employ more kaffirs.’

  ‘Oh, sure. More kaffirs! But more kaffirs are going to mean more management, and more management is going to mean even harder work. Aren’t you ever satisfied?’

  Barney laid down his tweezers. ‘What’s the point of getting involved in any business of any kind if you don’t expand? Right now, the Diggers’ Committee only allow two claims per man – but that restriction can’t last long. And then what do you think is going to happen here at Kimberley? The big companies will gradually swallow up the individual diggers, one by one; and in a year or two, you mark my words, there won’t be any one-man outfits left. It won’t be economic to dig one claim only. It won’t be worth the effort of shoring up the sides, or of moving the soil to the edge of the mine, or of sorting out the gems. The big companies will undercut us, just because they’re operating in bulk.’

  ‘So what are we struggling for?’ asked Joel. ‘Why don’t we sell up while the price is still good, and move out of this godforsaken place before we die out of boredom, or frustration, or some unheard-of disease?’

  ‘Joel, we’re just beginning. If we can buy up another claim then we can start to build up a big company of our own. The quicker we do it, the better. For God’s sake – instead of being swallowed we could do some swallowing ourselves. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you and I together could own the whole of that mine out there? The Blitz Brothers?’

  ‘You’re crazy. The heat’s got to your brain.’

  Barney tilted his chair back and looked at Joel steadily. ‘Joel,’ he said, ‘if we don’t work in the diamond business, then what business are we going to work in? You want to go back to tailoring? Or farming? You want to go back to sea?’

  Joel snapped, ‘Don’t be so damned patronising.’

  ‘I’m not being patronising. I’m simply trying to find out what you want out of life.’

  ‘What the hell for? You’re not my father, are you? You’re my younger brother, my little Barnabas, my litlte son of consolation. Well, aren’t you? And who followed whom out to South Africa? Who bought this claim in the first place? So don’t sit there raking through my diamonds and try to tell me what I should be doing with my life.’

  ‘Joel, peace,’ said Barney, alarmed by his brother’s outburst. But Joel was not in the mood for reconciliation. He stood up, came over to the table, and seized a whole handful of rough, glittering diamonds.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me, you never would have laid your hands on one of these stones. Not one! Now you sit there sorting them out like you’re the diamond king of Kimberley. And all your plans! Your big dreams about buying more claims! We could own the whole goddamned mine, could we? Just remember who bought this claim in the first place!’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to give me a share,’ said Barney, trying to curb his temper. ‘Now, will you please put those diamonds down. I’m half way through sorting them.’

  ‘Sorting them, shit!’ Joel snarled, and threw the diamonds in a sparkling spray all over the room. ‘You’ve dug yourself into my life pretty good, haven’t you? Made me a laughing-stock in front of the whole town – the poor stupid kike who couldn’t even save himself from being pegged out on the ground. Then you took half of my diamonds. Now I’m living like a lodger in my own home, and working like a kaffir in my own diamond mine, while you spend your time sorting gems and planning your high-faluting plans and fornicating with that schwartzeh like some ass-jerking dog.’

  Barney punched Joel very hard in the mouth. The crack of Joel’s front tooth breaking was so loud that Barney thought for a moment that he had broken his own knuckle. Joel staggered backwards, collided with a wheelback chair, stumbled, and then fell heavily on to the floor. He crouched there, spitting blood, and shaking his head.

  Mooi Klip, without a word, quickly put down her sewing and knelt down among the scattered diamonds to hold Joel’s head, and offer him her handkerchief for his bleeding lips. Barney felt as if he were bursting with some uncontrollable effervescence, a shaken-up bottle of beer, and he stood with both fists clenched, trembling, trying to hold back his anger, trying to tell himself that Joel was still sick, and still suffering the after-effects of his trial and his appeal, and that he should not have hit him.

  Mooi Klip turned to Barney and said, ‘Water. His tooth is broken.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have said that,’ said Barney. ‘I don’t care what he feels about me, and I don’t care what he says. We’re brothers, after all. But he should never have said that about you.’

  Mooi Klip simply repeated, ‘Water.’

  Barney went to the scullery and came back with a blue enamel basin. Mooi Klip soaked her handkerchief, and gently dabbed Joel’s mouth. After a while, Joel seemed to recover from the first concussion, and he pushed Mooi Klip’s hand away.

  Barney squatted down beside Joel and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Joel, I’m sorry. Are you okay?’

  ‘Never felt better,’ mumbled Joel. He tried to pull himself up on to his feet by holding on to the overturned chair, but he lost his balance and fell forward.

  ‘I don’t need your help, thanks,’ he told Barney, fiercely, as Barney grasped his arm.

  ‘Joel, I’ve said I’m sorry. We’re partners, aren’t we? But you can’t say things like that about Mooi Klip.’

  ‘She’s not a schwartzeh, is that what you’re trying to tell me?’ said Joel, tentatively touching his mouth with his fingertips. ‘You’re not living in sin, and exhibiting that sin in front of the whole of Kimberley?’

  ‘I don’t care about the whole of Kimberley, Joel. The whole of Kimberley can go to hell. And anyway, what’s so high and mighty and moral about Kimberley? There are more whores to the acre in Kimberley than anywhere else in the world.’

  ‘So she’s a whore, too? Your schwartzeh? Is that what you think of her?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ protested Barney.

  ‘You never say anything, you hypocrite,’ said Joel, pulling himself on to his feet. ‘You just take what you feel belongs to you, and you take it by any means at your disposal. If your mama could see you now.’

  ‘She can’t see me, Joel. She’s dead. And besides, I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of. I love Mooi Klip, and I love you, and if you’d just stop picking on me so often you’d understand just how much.’

  Joel sniffed blood. ‘You sanctimonious pisher.’

  Joel went to his bedroom, and slammed the door so hard behind him that it opened again, and he had to close it more quietly and more firmly. Barney stared at the door for a moment or two, and then went down on his knees and gat
hered up the diamonds, one by one. Mooi Klip sat on the edge of her chair and watched him.

  ‘He is so angry,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not fooling. The trouble is, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Of course you know why,’ said Mooi Klip. ‘You have hurt his pride. You saved him from trouble, when he couldn’t save himself. Now you are making his business work well, when all he could do was steal. You have bought us a house to live in, and you have a woman, too. What does he have? What has he done? You make him feel like a child.’

  ‘I don’t mean to,’ said Barney, and it was true. He did not. He loved Joel and he looked up to him, too – whether Joel had made a success of his life or not. Had not Joel shown him how to make bows and arrows out of tailor’s elastic, during those hot summers on Clinton Street, when they were boys? Had not Joel shown him how to cut a lining, and how to baste a lapel? Had not Joel protected him against those Armenian bullies along Hester Street, on his way to school? And had not Joel, one night in bed, with the rain tapping on the windows, explained in whispery and reverent detail the mysterious anatomy of girls?

  But now Joel was so sour and stand-offish that Barney found it almost impossible to explain that just because he had a knack for business, and Joel had not, that did not mean that he loved Joel any the less, or that Joel was not making an equal contribution to their success and to their happiness. Barney wanted them all very much to be a family – himself and Joel and Mooi Klip – but Joel was far too jealous of Barney to play.

  Barney felt as if every time he tried to keep the Blitz family together, it fell apart in his hands, like the crumbling clay of the Kimberley mine. The family seemed to be plagued by envy, or madness, or sheer bad temper.

  He gathered up as many of the scattered diamonds as he could, and then he went back to the table. He did not say anything to Mooi Klip, but smiled at her briefly, to show her that he loved and appreciated her. He had not mentioned Agnes Knight to her again, not since that day in Oranjerivier when they had found Monsaraz dead. He had seen Agnes two weeks ago, though, in the main street in Kimberley, with her nose tilted to the sky, and her parasol twirling, and her pretty little shoes click-clicking along the dusty boardwalk. He had raised his hat to her from across the street, and said, ‘Agnes?’ in a rather discouraged voice; but she had flounced on, without looking his way, and he had not had the effrontery to follow her.