Tandia (43 page)

The Power of One,' Hymie repeated. He had his audience eating out of his hand. Peekay was witnessing the style which was to make Hymie famous in the courtroom, the ability to lift a jury, even one composed essentially of white bigots.

'The power of one determination! The power never to compromise your beliefs or your art or your science, to believe that you are capable of anything if you listen to the small voice, to the single truth. If you have the fortitude…the guts! If you have the stamina for the long haul. The power to triumph over the odds you will have to face!'

Hymie's rhetoric was effortless. 'And there will be odds!' he continued. 'Politicians and powermongers will want to buy you and direct you. They will bend and twist the universal truths and they will try to swaddle your conscience with hyperbole and rationalisation!'

As Peekay looked about the room he could see that the members' eyes were almost glazed. Talk about politicians and powermongers! Hymie was going a bit far, manipulating them, doing to them precisely what he was warning them against. What a rotten, conniving shit! But it was going down a treat.

'…Only a sustained and invincible belief in yourself will allow you to maintain your integrity and achieve the goals you have set for yourself. You must be utterly determined to believe in your ability to prevail no matter what!' Hymie paused to catch his breath and the room suddenly erupted. It was powerful stuff all right. It was Hymie focussing precisely, getting to the parts of them which lauded the reason why they were different.

Christ, he's getting a bit didactic, Peekay thought. He's said enough, perhaps too much…the last bit, the sustained and invincible belief in yourself and the importance of your own integrity, were the things in which Peekay believed implicitly. but he'd always seen them as beliefs which owned a private voice. These were quiet, determined, essential things a man might confide to a friend, a philosophical direction you have to find for yourself; they were not cheap tricks performed in public so that. they might achieve gratuitous emotional rewards from an audience. Please, Hymie, stop! You've said enough! Peekay begged silently.

'You may well ask what the hell the world welterweight championship for an Oxford man has to do with all of this?' Hymie asked, dropping his voice. 'At the age of five Peekay was sent to a boarding school. He was the youngest child and the only English-speaking boy in this small, viciously racist backwoods Afrikaans school. The Boer children beat him every day and bullied him mercilessly.'

Peekay closed his eyes and winced. None of this had been a part of what they'd discussed. He had never expected to witness his beloved friend being so blatantly opportunist. 'Peekay was befriended by a train conductor, who convinced the little boy that if he could learn to box, that big could beat small, that he would never again be beaten up, that he could even become the welterweight champion of the world if he believed hard enough, if he never gave up!' Peekay had had enough.

'I say, Hymie, that's not quite fair!' He was pale with anger and his voice, though low, carried around the room. Hymie looked at Peekay surprised. The power of his anger was palpable. His voice had been a growl, the sound of a wounded animal. Hymie's heart missed a beat. Jesus! He'd gone too far! Peekay was the most fiercely proud person he'd ever known and he'd used him. He'd done this to the person he loved the most in the world.

The room grew strangely quiet. They too had been brought up with a jolt, the spell of Hymie's rhetoric broken.

Some of them looked at Peekay, their eyes showing sympathy, whether for the story they'd just heard or for the invasion of his privacy was impossible to say. These were mostly young men who knew what it was like to be a loner, to be the odd man out at school, to be the swot, the sap, the drip and the school misfit. Either way they could identify. They knew what it was like to dream privately, never daring to reveal your dream lest you be ridiculed by your peers.

The first to stand up was a smallish man with big hornrimmed glasses named Elmer Milstein, an American from New York. He was simply known as Milstein; at Oxford, people even refused to use a name as silly as Elmer.

Milstein spoke directly to Peekay. 'Say! This thing is…well, it's between the two of you.' He looked around the room. 'Whaddaya say, you guys? We retire to the saloon bar until they've sorted it out?'

There was a scraping of chairs as the members of the newly formed Odd Bodleian Society rose and silently left the room, taking their half-downed pints with them.

Hymie looked up at his friend. There was nothing he could say. He had seated himself on the edge of a table and now he shrugged his shoulders. The look in Peekay's eyes was unbearable. 'Jesus! What a fuck-up,' he said helplessly. 'Why? Why, Hymie?' Peekay asked.

'Peekay, I swear to God, I'm sorry. You're right, it was vainglorious and contemptible.' Tears welled in Hymie's eyes.

'It's not that easy, Hymie. Your apology, even your tears are not enough. You were contemptuous of the people in this room. You betrayed the trust between us!' Peekay was still angry but his voice had become very calm.

Hymie looked slowly up at Peekay. His friend's eyes were cold. He could think of nothing to do but to attack. When he spoke his voice was bitter. 'It's because I'm a Jew, isn't it? Secretly you despise me. A fucking Judas! That's it, isn't it, Peekay?' The tears in Hymie's eyes brimmed, but he held his gaze steady. 'You're the only one who's allowed to lead. You with your blue eyes and the glorious two-fisted attack of the master fucking race!'

Peekay remained silent. He loved Hymie more than anyone in the world. He loved his quick mind, his generosity and even his cynicism. He knew Hymie loved him and he hated the thing he now saw in him, the fear, insecurity and guilt which made him say what he'd just said. Peekay could identify with it all and he knew how it could corrupt the soul.

They were both refugees but he was the stronger of the two. He had already been corrupted. He knew how the war had turned out. At the age of five he'd been beaten and tortured, even made to eat shit.

Hymie had never stood to fight, stood with his back to the wall. He'd always run. His fear was for the unknown and his guilt was for all the Jews who'd stayed behind to be rounded up and forced into the cattle trucks. It was time Hymie stopped running.

'Listen to me, you contemptible little bastard!' said Peekay. 'I'm going to go into that saloon bar and I'm going to call all those guys back in. Then you're going to tell them how we designed this seam. How we intended to ingratiate ourselves with the long-term plan to exploit their friendship. To use them!'

Hymie looked up alarmed. 'I couldn't do that. You can't make me do that!'

'No, that's true, I can't. You're going to have to do it for yourself!'

Hymie sniffed then reached for his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, then blew his nose. 'That's easy then, I
can't
do it.' He looked up at Peekay. 'Okay, I admit it, I'm a moral coward.' He looked down again, between his legs at the floor. 'It's all right for you, all I am is smart. I can't settle things with a pair of boxing gloves. I can't even remain silent the way you can. My silence means nothing. A silent Jew? What's that? That's an anachronism. It doesn't make me smart. It doesn't make me wise.' He looked up again, the pain showing in his eyes. 'It makes me nothing! I exist because of my fucking mouth and my head and my wit. Now you want to take the only defence I've got away from me. I'm sorry, you're asking too much, Peekay, I can't, I simply can't do it!'

Peekay shook his head. 'Hymie, none of the things you've just said about yourself are true. I wish to Christ you didn't have to carry around all this fucking emotional baggage. But if you can't face the mob, you'd better leave.' Hymie rose. 'What are you going to do?'

'Apologise.'

Hymie grinned weakly. 'Well that's different! I can do that with you.'

Peekay sighed. 'No way, Hymie, it's on your own or not at an.'

'Fuck you, Peekay!' Hymie grabbed up his duffel coat and student's gown which lay on a chair. Crossing the room, he unlatched the doorway leading to the lane and stormed out. Peekay sat very quietly, not even noticing the tears which ran down his cheeks. Christ, it wasn't such a bad thing. No worse than many of their scams at school. Hymie probably didn't even mean it. It had simply seemed like a good idea at the time!

But Peekay knew that somehow they'd come to a crossroads. They'd soon be returning to a country where the blacks were beginning to despair, one in which the dung beetle was demanding too much and returning too little to the worker ants. They were going to be severely tested, their integrity constantly challenged by both sides. Moral cowardice was the easiest way there was to destroy themselves.

Peekay was even beginning to have second thoughts about Oxford. He wasn't at all sure that the law he was being taught, the neat, concise rules laid out for the behaviour of a society was the intellectual ammunition he was going to need when he returned home. He sensed that to win in South Africa, even if it meant alienating both sides, the truth could not be compromised. It was going to require a strength and wisdom well beyond the careful intellectual paths of law taught at this venerable institution.

Oxford was giving him, and he felt sure would continue to give him, a great deal. But what it couldn't give him was what he'd come for. It couldn't teach him a set of rules which he could impose on his alienated society in the hope that it would make things better, like a suddenly discovered cure for a hitherto incurable disease. But he did know that the sort of compromise represented by the Odd-Bodleian fiasco, their scam, was just the way their ideals could be undermined and the aggression it would take to be a spiritual terrorist sapped and eventually dissipated.

The news from South Africa was bad. He'd already heard recently that Sophiatown, together with Cape Town's District Six, the two best-known examples of South Africa's many racially integrated communities, was going to be pulled down in the guise of slum clearance. District Six, which boasted more than a hundred years of mixed-race living, was to be converted into a whites-only community. The words 'terrorist' and 'treason' were increasingly being used by government spokesmen to prepare the whites for the police brutality and white supremacist legislation to come. Government propaganda, carried mainly through the Afrikaner press, was growing increasingly hysterical. The second dance had begun.

They were returning to this. The law he was learning, the sweetly practised ways of civilised men, were going to be useless. Here at Oxford he was learning to play a game, and what he needed to learn was how to wage a war. It was strawberry mousse, not the diamond-hard intellectual and spiritual training they were going to need to stay alive and help to bring about change in South Africa.

It was this last point which caused Peekay to question his motives in helping to form the Odd Bodleian Society. If Hymie and he were to establish a law practice in which they hoped to win the trust of black people, they would need absolute integrity. The way in which they had gone about planning the Odd Bodleian Society demonstrated clearly that they were not yet to be trusted; it showed that they too had been infected by the virus of contempt, the white disease which was endemic in their homeland.

Peekay wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and walked towards the saloon bar. Pausing at the door he looked for Milstein. Finally he caught the American's eye. He indicated with a jerk of his head that they should all return and then went down the passage way back to the room to await their arrival.

Peekay entered the back room to find Hymie waiting. He was wearing his duffel coat and over it, his gown. He stood slightly hunched up, small and vulnerable. His unmistakably Hebraic nose, strong features and dark, swept-back hair made him look like the Rabbi in Marc Chagall's painting. Peekay's heart went out to his friend. Hymie hadn't looked up as he entered. Peekay remained silent, walking over and standing beside his friend. He nudged Hymie in the ribs. 'Welcome back, shithead!' he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

Hymie waited until they were all seated and then indicated to Peekay that he too should sit. Peekay seated himself at a table in the front of the room opposite him. The room fell silent and Hymie, clearing this throat, began.

'I owe you an apology. I have deceived you and, I believe, used you ungraciously.' Several of the students looked at each other and shrugged, their lips pursed, faces questioning. 'Ja, I can see you don't believe me,' Hymie said quickly. 'But it's true. I haven't harmed you or your reputations. Not yet anyway.-But nevertheless you were being set up.' Hymie ventured a look at Peekay, but his friend had his eyes fixed on the table in front of him and was unaware of his glance. For once in his life Hymie didn't quite know how to continue. If he told them about their intention to open a law practice designed to fight apartheid and explained how he'd hoped to manipulate. them through the Odd Bodleian Society to establish a basis whereby they could be called upon in the name of friendship to help in the years to come it would make him look honourable. They might even conclude that the end justified the means.

If he revealed the second reason, the marvellous 'brains trust' publicity campaign he'd devised for Peekay's world-title bid, they might equally conclude that it sounded like fun and once again he'd be off the hook. Hymie knew that he could probably talk his way out of the predicament he found himself in. But that would be running. He was tired of running. He'd been halfway down the lane when the utter weariness of running from himself had overtaken him. Peekay was right. He had to come clean. He had to stop being scared of the grey shadows which haunted his life.