Tandia (61 page)

'Thank you, Colonel,' Geldenhuis said absently. He wanted to continue with his proof. 'Oxford is where all the Jews go to train to be Communists, to be traitors,' he continued. 'Why do you think they want Peekay, hey? Except that he's a rooinek, he's the perfect South African. He speaks Afrikaans as well as you and me. He can speak three African languages. He's got brains, lots of brains and maybe he'll be the world champion soon. Peekay is the perfect front for international Communism. Jews always work like that. They don't dirty their own hands.' He paused, looking at Klaasens. 'Now they're back. Peekay and the Jew, and I'm telling you something for nothing, they're the two most dangerous people in South Africa. More dangerous than the ANC or all the kaffir organizations put together!' Geldenhuis paused again, still holding the police colonel's eyes. 'You know what they play at his fights don't you?'

'No, what do you mean, music?'

They don't play
Die Stem,
no man, the South African national anthem isn't good enough. They play a kaffir song, a song about all the tribes, the only people that isn't in it is the white man!'

'Wragtig? They don't play
Die Stem?
Colonel Klaasens was genuinely surprised.

'You saw it, on the film of the fight? When all those Jews from Oxford stood up and sang that song with the lesbian woman in the evening suit.'

'Ja I heard that, it was beautiful, I nearly cried. Lots of people in the bioscope cried, you could hear them all over the place. Everybody clapped also. But, Jesus, I didn't know they didn't play
Die Stem!
I thought maybe they just cut it out or something, you know, off the film. The Americans, they do that.' He shook his head.' Jesus, if I'd only known what that song was about!' Klaasens looked down and shook his head a second time, dismayed and angry with himself.

'Colonel, I want only two things, you hear? I want you to get me a fight with Peekay and I want you to let me control the Special Branch file on him and the Jew. From now on let me be personally responsible for their files. Please, Colonel, these are the two things I can do for my country, for my people, the Afrikaner people. I
can
beat him, I know it. The next time we meet in the ring I
will
beat him. God is on my side, I
will
win. Then afterwards, him and the Jew, I will destroy them before they destroy us!' Geldenhuis's voice was suddenly quiet. 'I swear it on my life.'

Klaasens looked at the young police lieutenant. 'You got the hate to do it, Jannie. I can see that. That's good, you hear? Magtig! That's very, very good, very encouraging.' Jannie Geldenhuis was amazed he'd told Colonel Klaasens everything. He'd never spoken his thoughts out aloud before. It felt good, but he wouldn't make a habit of it. He felt sure he'd judged correctly, that he could trust Klaasens, whom he thought of as a little stupid but a fanatical Afrikaner. You don't make someone head of the Special Branch in the Transvaal if you can't trust him to keep his mouth shut. He was also a very powerful man. If anyone knew how to get the South African Boxing Board off their arse, he did. Telling Klaasens how he felt would do him no harm with the
Broederbond
either.

Geldenhuis had long since decided that Peekay's personal humiliation would begin in the ring. No matter how good Peekay was, he would be beaten. Now a black man had beaten him. This was a sign from God that it was his sacred duty to eliminate Peekay. God was in his gloves. God would be in his punches. He, Geldenhuis, would reap vengeance on Peekay. God's vengeance on traitors! He'd stalk him and destroy him.

A week later Colonel Klaasens drew him aside. 'You've been given your first assignment by the
Broederbond,
Jannie,' he said; then added, 'It's a great honour. Some people wait years, most never get a chance to serve their country directly. Cogsweel wants to see us tonight.'

He was given the assignment by the
Broederbond
to 'investigate' the black Christmas party Solomon Levy held in the grounds of his palatial home. 'It is not in the interests of our people for an event like this to take place,' was how Cogsweel put it. 'Take your time, not this year, maybe not even next, it could be in ten years' time, but you will know yourself when the time is right. Then call me.' Geldenhuis was delighted; it was God's will that he should destroy not only Peekay and the Jew, but Solomon Levy, the money pot itself.

'Cogsweel, is he, you know, the top man in the
Broederbond?'
Geldenhuis asked, as they left after dining in the private room of a restaurant in Pretoria. 'I mean, he's a rooinek isn't he?'

'Irish. His grandfather fought in the Boer War on our side.

No, he's not anything very high up. But he's high enough, don't you worry, man.' He punched Geldenhuis on the arm.
'Jy is in die oog!
That's all you have to worry about; the
Broederbond
looks after is own.'

In early November 1955 Peekay and Hymie returned to Johannesburg directly from New York. Despite Peekay's loss, he returned a hero. The documentary, 'The Making of a Champion' with a quick title change to 'Fight for Your Life!' had preceded them; cut into a two-hour documentary, it had been released in every cinema in South Africa as a main attraction, and drew record crowds in both the black and white cinemas.

While Peekay held himself together in public, his camouflage intact, his defeat by Jake 'Spoonbill' Jackson was devastating for him. It ran so deep that he couldn't talk about it even to Hymie. The unthinkable had happened; he'd climbed the mountain, measured his spirit, allotting each step he took to the right amount of energy, never allowing himself to enjoy a win or even to savour a sense of triumph over an opponent. Only one thing mattered: getting to the top of the mountain, reaching the point where only the sky stretched away above him. Now he found that he'd been unsighted, that beyond the top stretched another peak; and he was completely spent.

For Peekay, welterweight champion of the world wasn't a title, it was the meaning of his life, the very principle on which he'd based his entire personality. He was too intelligent not to know it wasn't the end of the world, but his emotional grief over-ruled his logic. From the age of six, when he'd felt the huge boxing gloves slip over his small hands, he had committed himself to the single principle that the individual can move the mountain; that small can beat big; that hope and determination and singular purpose were the three powerful allies against all the odds. And now he felt betrayed. He needed something else to win and he didn't know what it was.

He'd been told a thousand times by well-meaning, sincere friends that in any other arena anywhere in the world he would have won the fight; and each time he heard this, he felt further defeated. To win by a disputed decision would have been worse for Peekay than losing. He hadn't dedicated his life to the vagary of a single judge's opinion, to luck. Winning or losing on a margin so frail that in a single pause, the time it took to take another breath, he might have come out the winner was not why he'd travelled this journey. He must win so that the thousand and the ten thousand and the million voices heard. Most of all he had to win so that
he
heard it clearly, cleanly, a clarion bell ringing in his mind. Small could beat big, good could triumph over evil.

And now he was defeated. But in Peekay's mind it wasn't Jackson who was evil. The black American boxer had simply been the peak on the mountain. When the mountain is conquered it is what it does to the climber that counts; the mountain itself doesn't change. Peekay was fighting the good and the evil in himself.

Suddenly he longed to die. To climb up into the high mountains, over Saddleback and higher still to the crystal cave of Africa, to lie beside Doc, his body held safely in the heart of the great mountain. Had his life been forfeited by his defeat he would have accepted it willingly. The effort required to get back off his knees was so great. It was a fear well beyond any he had ever experienced, for it was the first time in his life he'd reached down and come back with nothing. He had spent it all, there wasn't anything more. When he stepped into the ring with Jackson the second time he'd simply be blown away.

For the first time in years the loneliness birds returned, the great pterodactyl-like creatures with their greasy feathered wings and long, chipping beaks, their sharp eyes the colour of anthracite. He could hear their membraned wings flapping inside him, like canvas in a high wind, flapping as they squatted, laying their huge stone eggs, then fracturing them into shards of flint that began to fill up every corner of his being.

He had just five months to prepare for the next fight and he had nothing to give it. He was a loser and he had been living a lie. But Peekay could show none of this. People were flocking to the film. He was surrounded by the hyperbole of a nation who felt they'd been cheated and had decided to accept him as a hero anyway. The anticipation being built up for the return bout was immediately at fever pitch. South Africa wanted its revenge and Peekay was going to deliver it for them.

From the moment they arrived back, Hymie began the process of organizing the return fight. He wanted to stage it at Ellis Park, the famous rugby and cricket ground in Johannesburg. While, in principle, the city council was only too happy to oblige, a major problem existed. Hymie and Peekay insisted that there must be the same number of seats allocated for blacks as there were for whites. Ellis Park was a white sports ground, with room for only two thousand black and coloured spectators and, for their use, a single toilet block with six urinals and three toilets. With a thirty thousand capacity crowd, half of them black, the existing toilet facilities for black people plainly weren't enough. The idea of allocating fifty per cent of the available 'Whites Only' toilet facilities to the blacks was unthinkable; and, in any case, it was against the law to do so.

The sitting member for Doornfontein, who included Ellis Park in his constituency, attempted to get a special act of parliament passed in which, for one day only, half the white toilets at Ellis Park changed colour. This was immediately thwarted by the minister representing the Department of Community Development who pointed out that this would only be constitutionally possible if half the white toilets all over South Africa became black for the same period of the fight, between four o'clock and nine o'clock in the afternoon on the 26 April. The speech, quoted directly from Hansard, was reported in all of the newspapers the following day:

If this iniquitous private members' bill is allowed to pass in this house then civilization as we know it will have come to an end in South Africa. Decent white people will be confronted with a dilemma when trying to go to a public toilet on the afternoon and evening of 26 April 1956. All of a sudden, toilets which yesterday were white are now black. But not only that! Which toilets? Suddenly a black man will be able to walk into any white toilet he likes; when you apprehend him, all he will have to say is, 'Sorry MaS, I thought this white toilet had turned into a black toilet.' 'No!' you say, 'Not this one, that one.' But which one is that one? Who are you to say which white toilet has turned black and which one has stayed white? What we have here, coming all of a sudden out of a clear blue sky, is the potential for black people to use white toilets just whenever they 'like! I put it to you, how would you like your daughter to use a toilet where a black woman has just two minutes before sat? Now I hear you saying it is only for one time, a few hours, but you are wrong, man. It is a precedent! Once a black man has sat on the nice clean seat of a white toilet he will think suddenly he is all high and mighty. Next thing he will be sitting at the table with his knife and fork in his hands wanting to eat with your family! One thing is for sure, there is no telling where something like this will end. As it says in the bible; 'Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind!'

The solution, when it came, was simple. The pupils at The Voortrekker High Technical School, an Afrikaans institution in Pretoria famous for its boxing and rugby, taking the initiative, did a crowd study during the Natal versus Transvaal provincial rugby match held at Ellis Park. They discovered the ratio of urinal users to toilet users was fifty-five to one. The major problem it seemed, therefore, was the dispersal of urine for a period of some four hours. They offered to build, in return for twenty tickets to the fight and cost of materials, three zinc temporary urinals one hundred foot in length. The city council quickly passed a by-law amending the Urban Sanitary Health Act to allow for the temporary structures to be built. The second largest problem was solved. The largest remained; permission for fifteen thousand black people to congregate in one place. The decision rested with the commissioner of police for Johannesburg and the East Rand, Major General Bul Van Breeden and the Minister of Native Affairs.

Unlike Bokkie Venter, the fifty-two-year-old Van Breeden, relatively young for the senior position he held in the police force, was a man with strong convictions who took a delight at thumbing his nose at Pretoria. He was also of the old school with very little time for the 'Hitler Youth' breed of policeman, as he referred to the young officers rising to positions of seniority in the new police force. He thought of himself as a good Afrikaner and a loyal member of the Nationalist Party but he was an exception; he was not a member of the
Broederbond
and didn't allow politics to interfere with his judgement as a policeman.