Tandia (68 page)

As suddenly as the hate for the creature had grown in him it was gone and in the calm it left, Doc's voice came clearly to Peekay.
Ja that's good, Peekay, now you have seen what is hate. Hate is something that is coming from fear. This snake, it cannot hate, but you can hate because you can fear. Think, Peekay, think what you know about this snake? It is a reptile, it is cold-blooded, all night it is lying under a rock where it is cold. It must be hungry, a snake, a big snake like so, it must warm itself in the sun before it likes to move. But it is hungry and comes early to find the bats in the cave. This snake cannot move so fast, because its metabolism is slowed down. Think also this, you have milked already the venom, see how it runs over your right hand. This snake is' empty, the last drops of poison, they are already out of the sacks behind the fangs and in your right hand. These are the facts, ja? Now you must weigh your courage. If you show no fear, if you conquer your fear and you bend slowly to the ground and put the head of the snake on the ground near the opening of the cave and you take your hand away from behind the head…

The voice changed, it was no longer Doc's, but the high whine of Inkosi-Inkosikazi.
The head, bring the head down slowly to the ground, release your left hand, take away his eyes, the poison is all in your right hand!
The', old wizard gave a maniacal chuckle at the clever way he'd paraphrased Doe's instructions.
See now if the great devil iNyoka will enter the cave to the bats. Or will it turn and strike you, white boy? Maybe there is still some poison in its fangs?

Doe's steady, reassuring voice broke in.
Ah, Peekay, when you know this then you will be the champion of the world, absoloodle!

Peekay bent from the waist, releasing the pressure of his left thumb very gradually as he placed his right hand on the stone at his feet while pointing the snake's head to the end of the shelf and in the direction of the cave opening. To his surprise the snake didn't seem to sense the release of pressure on the back of its head. Peekay rubbed the ball of his thumb down the smooth hard head, gently massaging it as he loosened his grip around the snake's neck.

Slowly the snake disengaged its jaws from the plaster and its head slid over the inert hand, its enormous black body unwinding slowly from around Peekay's legs, sliding after it. The head of the great snake reached the end of the ledge before the last of its body slid over Peekay's motionless hand. Ten feet away from where Peekay now crouched its head rose six or eight inches from the rock surface, its neck swaying slightly in the air over the ledge, tongue flicking incessantly, faster than a human can blink, as though it had a life of its own, a small, black electric creature which lived in the reptile's mouth. Then its neck arched and its head lowered again and dipped below the ledge, moving onto a narrow shelf of rock that led to the concealed entrance of the crystal cave of Africa. Peekay's heart began to pound furiously, robbing him of breath as he watched the body of the deadly reptile follow until the last of its tail disappeared over the end of the limestone shelf. The adrenalin was surging through him again and it took every ounce of his remaining willpower to sit still instead of trying to climb down the cliff face with his broken right hand and his weakened left arm. He would need to remain on the cliff face until his strength returned. Peekay made several attempts to leave the ledge, but his knees would begin to shake and his legs seemed too weak to support him. The snake would feed on the bats in the outer chamber of the great crystal cave and then two possibilities for it existed. It would return the way it had come, passing back over the ledge and down the cliff face to find a warm rock below on which to sleep, or it would come to wait on the ledge until the sun struck the face of the cliff, where it would remain sleeping all morning and deep into the afternoon until the cliff was once more in shadow, when it would return down the cliff face to conceal itself under a warm rock at its base.

The day was not turning out the way Peekay had planned it. He had thought to take himself down into the night country and, as he had done many times before, jump the ten stones across the river, where he hoped his trance might take him into the crystal cave of Africa where he could talk with Doc. Instead, as he jumped the final stone across the roaring moonlit gorge in his transcendental consciousness, the snake had come to him in slow motion, ripping away the veiled fabric of his imagination and hurling him back into conscious presence. He was not sure now whether it was Doc or the great medicine man Inkosi-Inkosikazi who had come to him. The voice had been Doe's but the sequence, the liaison between his subconscious and conscious minds, had been typically the work of the old witchdoctor.

Peekay realized suddenly that both had played a part in what had happened, that contained in him was an ambivalence: part Doc with his precise, reasoning European mind, and part the ancient black man of Africa with his powerful wizardry. He was the mind-child of both. It was this strange dichotomy which the people saw and responded to when they called him the Tadpole Angel. Both beings had reached out with their different wisdom to answer the urgent questions on his mind, both men were
his shadows,
destined to watch over him.

What was it Doc had said?
You can hate because you can fear.
Peekay knew he could fear, had feared, still feared; he'd been running since he was a child. If he could conquer the fear, would that be stronger than hate? Was that what Inkosi-Inkosikazi meant when he challenged him to lay the snake's head down?
See now if the great devil iNyoko. will enter the cave of bats. Or will he turn and strike you?
Then Doc's quiet reassuring voice:
Ah, Peekay, when you know this you will be the champion of the world, absoloodle!

And then it came to Peekay. He must confront his fear, and when he had done so he must confront the hate that was brought against him; but not with the head as he had taught himself to do, as Oxford had taught him to do, but with his heart. He must fight fear and hate with his heart. And to do so he must learn to feel hate so that he could destroy it, know it for what it was. That was the power, the power of one. He began to feel that he could fight again, that he could come back.

By the end of January Peekay was fit and well, his body mended. He'd spent a lot of time in the mountains and he was physically hard and superbly conditioned. The time spent outside the boxing ring had been good for him. As a professional he'd been fighting without a break for three years and, in the constant effort to shorten the time to the title, there had been no easy bouts of the kind trainers seek to spell their fighters, with the result that his body had taken a great deal of punishment.

After his visit to the crystal cave of Africa Peekay began to work on his fear, starting at the most obvious point, its physical aspects. He took to the mountains for days on end, sleeping rough and seeking the most difficult kranse to scale, often without rope or crampons, testing his courage on the sheer rock face, his hand now out of plaster, the tips of his groping fingers often his only anchor against certain death.

Captain Smit had tried on several occasions to broach the subject of Peekay's need to hate, his need to acquire 'the power', but he was not an articulate man and he lacked the skill to put it in such a way that it didn't seem like mystical nonsense, the pathetic superstition of an ignorant dirt farmer's son. When Peekay had asked him if he'd seen anything in the fight which might help him to defeat Jackson, he'd grunted, 'Ja, there is something, but I'm still thinking it out, jong.'

In fact he'd spoken about it at length to Gert, who'd immediately understood. Gert was also from the North Western Transvaal, the fiery core of the Afrikaner hate for the English. He was fifteen years younger than Captain Smit and had grown up when times had been somewhat better economically, though essentially his background was similar to Smit's. Although Gert didn't share the pathological hate for the rooinek to anything like the extent of his superior, he understood it well enough and recognized 'the power' as the factor which had most enabled the Afrikaners to persist and to overcome so that they were now beginning to be back on top again.

'Kaptein, it's useless, man. You can't make a guy like Peekay feel "the power". It's not just that he's a rooinek, lots of rooineks know how to hate. It's…it's, well, he doesn't think like us; the old musician taught him different. He even loves kaffirs. I'm telling you man, you know those two kaffir girls, those twins who are the servants at his place, he loves them. I don't mean, you know, physically or anything, I mean he loves them like you love a brother or a sister, even more. Geel Piet too, Peekay loved that old bastard.'

Captain Smit nodded, then added, 'He was a blerrie good boxing coach for Peekay, he taught him well.'

'Ja, well, Peekay still loves him for it.'

'Ja, but kids they like that. They don't see the colour sometimes 'till quite late. That's why you got to teach them early.'

'No, Kaptein, not loved,
loves!
The other day he asked me if he could go to The Stones. I didn't tell him about the tombstone that mad
Hotnot
woman brought down from Johannesburg,
"vir die geel man".
He found it and just stood and said nothing, stood there among all the kaffir graves next to this big black marble tombstone biting his lip and looking up into the hills, and the tears were rolling down his cheeks. Jesus! He was blubbing for Geel Piet! A yellow man who wasn't worth a pinch of baboon shit! How you going to teach someone like that to hate a kaffir in time for the big fight?'

It had been Gert who'd finally brought up the subject with Peekay. They'd been in the prison workshop where Peekay was watching Gert making a hunting knife. The big raw-boned sergeant was good with his hands and could make almost anything from bits of scrap iron. He was cutting leather rings to form the handle of the knife which had started out life as a Dodge truck rear spring. The elegant brass escutcheon was already fitted into place at the blade end of the shaft and the end piece, designed to hold the leather rings into place and form the end of the handle, was a tiny brass death's head which Peekay had been absently tossing a few inches into the air and catching again as they spoke. Gert tried to keep his voice light, as though he was making a casual observation which Peekay could ignore if he wished. 'Kaptein Smit. He's been thinking.'

Peekay caught the brass head and spun round to face him. 'What? Tell me, Gert, what does he think?' Gert could sense the tension in his voice.

'It's not easy, jong. You know it's not easy for an Afrikaner to talk about some things.'

'Fuck, Gert, don't give me all that introspective
platteland
crap! What did he tell you?'

Gert grinned, but his voice was serious as he spoke. 'Peekay
ou maat,
it's not that easy. He wants you to learn to hate. He says it's his fault, he never taught you.'

Peekay sighed and shrugged his shoulders. 'Ja, I've been told before, in America. But I've only had the opportunity to hate one person in my life, a big Afrikaner called the Judge. And at the time I was only five and I was so shit scared of him I clean forgot to hate him. Then later, in the copper mines, I caught up with him and got even by beating the shit out of the bastard; and then I hated myself for being such a stupid prick, for thinking that beating someone senseless would do me some good. All it did was humiliate me and make me feel, you know, dirty, unworthy, a bigger shit than the guy I just smashed!'

'Revenge can be sweet, Peekay. Sometimes it's the only way to clean things out.'

'Bullshit, Gert!'

Gert laughed. 'No, it's not bullshit, Peekay. That's what you don't understand!' He hesitated. 'For an Afrikaner the need to avenge ourselves has been what's kept us going. '
N oog vir 'n oog,
an eye for an eye, that's what the Bible says. Hate keeps you sharp, it drives you, it gives you power and a direction, it's also what keeps you standing up when you should be dead. That's what Kaptein Smit is talking about, man.'

'I hear what you're saying, Gert. I just don't know how to get it. How do I develop a hate for Jackson, an American negro? If anything I admire him, he comes from a dirt-poor Southern family who've had their arse kicked by the white honkies for generations. Those white bastards in the South are as bad as we are, worse perhaps; not too many blacks these days get strung up on a tree in South Africa for looking sideways at a white woman. Jackson's illiterate and he's had a shit life where he's had to fight everything; hunger, cruelty, prejudice and the business of being a nigger boxer, which, like here, means you eat shit until you prove you can knock the shit out of everyone else. Christ, Gert, I don't hate him, I admire him!'

Gert shrugged. 'He's still a black kaffir, Peekay! The Bible says he's the son of Ham, a drunkard and a fornicator, destined to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. He's dirt, the Bible says so, it gives you permission to hate him.' Gert smiled. 'But that doesn't mean you can't also admire him. At the battle of Blood River the Zulus came in waves like wind in the grass; they'd run for thirty miles, beating their asegais against their shields and stamping their feet on the ground until the air trembled and the earth shook. Then they fought all day and all night; wave after wave of brave warriors were cut down by the Boer guns, but still they came. A man can admire that. But just think about it; if they'd broken through the laager what do you think would have happened, hey? Let me tell you? They would have raped the women and afterwards slit their throats and they would have grabbed the babies by the feet and smashed their brains out on a rock.'

Gert spat and then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. 'You can admire them as fighters, as warriors, but they still savages, kaffirs, and it is your
duty
to hate them.' Gert paused again before adding, 'Jesus, Peekay! If you can't learn to hate a blerrie kaffir, even an American kaffir, then there's something very tucking wrong with you!'

Peekay looked down at his hands, at the small brass skull which rested in his right hand. 'Christ, Gert, when is all this hate going to end? This whole country is haemorrhaging with hatred!'

'Peekay, can't you see? The kaffir hates you! Kaptein Smit saw it first! We both went back to the bioscope and saw the fight again and I saw it too. Wragtig! I'm telling you, man!

It was plain as the nose on my face. For fuck's sake, Peekay, wake up
ou maat,
you're walking around in a
dwaal.
Jackson's hate won the title for him!'

Peekay sighed and closed his hand around the lump of brass, his fingers automatically exercising his recently damaged hand by running the death's head through them as a penitent might an amber necklace.

'Gert, I know you think I've gone crazy or something, huh? But just give me a chance, just let me explain how I feel, then maybe you can understand how difficult it is for me to go into the ring against Jackson with the same kind of hate you say he used against me. Will you let me try to do that?'

'Here, Peekay, I dunno, man. Sure, go ahead, but I dunno that I'll be able to understand it all. I'm not educated like you, I like to keep things simple in my head.'

'Okay, but promise me only one thing, whatever I say, whether you believe it or you think it's a load of bullshit, we're still friends, hey?'

Gert thought for a moment and then extended his hand. They shook hands silently but Peekay could see his friend's eyes were deeply troubled.

Peekay began slowly. 'When I went overseas, I mean to the university, I thought I'd find people, maybe even a whole nation which was free of prejudice. But, of course, I was wrong. The English were no better than the rest of us. The English working-class mother points out the runnynosed kids from the Irish family who live further down the lane and warns her children not to play with them. When her kids ask, "Why, mummy?" she replies, "They're dirty, you'lL catch something bad. Stay away from them, they're different from you!" Or if it isn't the Irish, it's the middleclass mother talking about the working-class family at the end of the street. Prejudice is a universal condition, whether it's the colour of your skin, the difference in your accent, the length of your nose, the way you dress or the food you eat.

'Here in South Africa we cut things neatly and mostly along racist lines: black, white, coloured, coolie, English, Afrikaner. All Simple, clear divisions we can focus on. But I started to realize that it doesn't begin like this, that anybody can be the target for prejudice, all you have to be is
too
something. Too short, too fat, too clever, too big, too small, too slow, too new, too different from what others think of as normal.'

Peekay paused and looked up at Gert who was still working slowly on the knife, though Peekay could feel that he was concentrating hard, trying to follow what he was saying. 'The tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices.' Gert shook his head slowly. 'Here, Peekay, I never thought of it like that. What you saying is the things we like most about ourselves are the things other people hate the most about us?'

'Well, ja, more or less, it isn't quite as black and white as that, hate isn't simply the product of differences, it's the result of fear. The differences we
fear
most; even though these fears are often totally irrational, they are the cause of our racism and our hate.

'The Afrikaner is not prepared to accept that the black man is a rational and intelligent human being no different to any other. His fear has convinced him that a black skin is the outward sign of the black man's primitive ways. The whites fear that at any moment they will all be murdered in their beds by servants they've known and trusted since childhood. Isn't that right?'

'What are you saying, Peekay? That a man who will murder his brother for sixpence will all of a sudden become an upstanding citizen?'

'Well yes, Gert, as a matter of fact, I am. That is, if we can remove the fear and remove the hate, then it won't,
can't
happen like that:

'And how are we going to do that?' Gert asked. 'Next Sunday from the pulpits of every Dutch Reformed Church shall we shout,
Allies is vergewe, julle is almal ons broeders en susters, ek sal julle lief en julle moet my terug lief?
All is forgiven, you are my black brothers and sisters and I will love you and you must love me back! Is that how it will happen?'

'Well, ja, in a manner of speaking that's about it. The only way to eliminate prejudice is to eliminate the differences which create the fear and, with the fear gone, the hatred will go too. We must integrate our society. If we don't, if we continue the way we are going with the blacks, in the end they will have no choice, in the end they will get "power".' Gert went rigid. He tried to hide the shock of Peekay's pronouncement. It was clear to him now that Peekay was mad or, at least, temporarily insane, that the fight with Jackson had somehow damaged his brain. His voice was tight as he spoke. 'And with "the power" they will win? Is that what you telling me, Peekay?'

'No, with hate nobody can win; in the end hate creates only losers, Gert.' Peekay's voice pleaded, 'Can't you see, it's just like this place. The prisoners are brutalized and so, of course, they behave as you would expect them to. When you cut hope from the heart the hole you leave is filled with the worms of hate. Hate for you, hate for the system, but even more destroying, a putrefying hate of yourself. When you hate yourself you want to destroy yourself. That is you want to destroy your own kind.'