Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Within a week of his transfer to the Special Branch coming through, Geldenhuis found himself reporting to Pretoria for duty.

  It was curious how Geldenhuis, with his dreamy blue eyes and his hard, blank face, had an uncomfortable effect on people. It was as though they sensed he was trouble and elected to be on his side, rather than to oppose him. Geldenhuis seemed to elicit co-operation from witnesses and prisoners alike in less time even than many of the most experienced officers.

  He exemplified the new kind of intelligent, hard-nosed, dedicated police officer who was entirely without compassion. It was almost as though he enjoyed the process of being hated and took pride in the little energy it took to bring most of his prisoner opponents to their knees.

  Sarah, the nearest thing Mama Tequila could manage to a blond whore, pinpointed the characteristic in Geldenhuis which, no matter how sophisticated his technique became, he never lost. 'He makes you feel like you a piece of dog shit,' was how Sarah had described his demeanour at one of Mama Tequila's Sunday morning chew-the-fat chats.

  At the mention of Geldenhuis's name, Mama Tequila turned from the Aga where she was preparing scrambled eggs for her girls, folding tiny squares of bacon into the fluffy mixture. 'No more, you hear! That name is said no more in this house. Anybody say it, even once, their future is finish and klaar! No more poems about him, Sarah, no nothing. We never seen such a person at Bluey Jay, never you hear!'

  'Yes, Mama Tequila!' they'd all chorussed. As far as the working girls were concerned, that was it; the policeman's name was expunged from their memories and, they all privately hoped, from any future experience which might involve him.

  But for Tandia, a day never passed when she didn't feel the fear, the cold fist squeezing her heart at the spectre of Geldenhuis. His presence in Durban still dominated her mind. When, some months after his accident, news came that he'd been sent back to the Transvaal it was as though a great weight had lifted from her. Not just a mental thing, a physical one as well.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo, driving her to university the following day, could sense the change in her. 'For why you happy, Miss Tandy?'

  'Ag, man, Juicey Fruit, a badness has lifted from my heart!' Juicey Fruit Mambo seemed to understand that Tandia didn't want to explain any further.

  In fact, Tandia wanted to explain further, to tell him the good news, for he shared her hatred for Geldenhuis. But her fear of Mama Tequila prevented her from mentioning Geldenhuis's name even to Juicey Fruit Mambo. She knew that, sooner or later, he would find out in his own way and they would share the joy of knowing that Geldenhuis had gone out of their lives.

  Geldenhuis resumed boxing after almost a year of convalescence and in the ensuing months met a number of opponents, both local and overseas, defending his South African welterweight title successfully on two occasions, though not against Gideon Mandoma. He was now being trained by Colonel Klaasens who assumed both the role of trainer and manager in his life.

  Klaasens was delighted with Geldenhuis. He was learning to know him on two fronts: as a policeman and as a boxer. He soon learned that both came together on the subject of the rooinek boxer Peekay.

  Not long after Geldenhuis had moved to Pretoria and Colonel Klaasens had taken him under his charge, Geldenhuis had made a request. 'Colonel, I must fight Peekay, whatever it takes.'

  'Jannie, that may not be so easy, man. They're calling the fight in New York one of the greatest welterweight contests ever fought, perhaps even the greatest. Most foreign reports say Peekay won and every South African report insists he did. In any other place in the world than New York Peekay would have got the verdict. If he wins here in Johannesburg he could make you fight ten, maybe more contenders before he lets you have a go. He may not even be around as champion by then.'

  'Colonel, you don't understand. Of course I want it to be for the world title, but even if it isn't for the title, maybe only for the South African title, I want the fight, anywhere, any place, any time!'

  Klaasens shook his head. 'You're asking a lot, man. Peekay has beaten you five times as an amateur; the last time he knocked you out. If I persuade the South African Boxing Board to apply for the fight, you know the rules.' Peekay can chose to fight you or Mandoma, who is the black champion. Most likely he'll agree to fight the winner of an elimination fight.'

  'Ja, okay, if I have to fight Mandoma again, but it's only for the right to fight Peekay.'

  Klaasens looked at his boxer. 'If you get to fight the rooinek it's good you feel like this about him, it's good you hate him, but why, man? Boers hate rooineks, but not like you hate Peekay. Why?'

  Geldenhuis coloured, but was forced to laugh. 'Ja, that of course, I got to admit. The first time we fought I was thirteen, he was younger. We were kids, you know our first year in high school? The posh rooinek school he went to never won, man. Rooineks can't box.'

  Klaasens grinned. 'One of them can!'

  'Ja, he won. It was the first time I was beaten. He beat me four more times in the next five years. Him and the Jew. I've had one hundred and twenty-seven fights altogether, amateur and pro. I've lost five times, all of them to the same guy.'

  The police colonel shrugged. 'Sometimes it's like that. You know the fight game. Some guys are just wrong for you; you beat the guys who beat them, but you can't beat them. They got a style, a way of fighting that you can't manage.'

  'No that's bullshit, Colonel. It's something different. Even the first time, when we were just kids, it was Boer against rooinek. With most rooinek kids, when an Afrikaner kid comes up to him and wants to fight, the rooinek runs away. You know yourself that's true. But even that first time I knew this was a rooinek who wouldn't run.'

  'Ag man, that's just kid's stuff, you've got to allow for the one rooinek who isn't scared.'

  'No, you wrong again. Him and the Jew, they had a plan. When you get in a boxing ring there's no more place to hide. It's you and it's your opponent, nothing else matters. But with Peekay and the Jew, it was more. I could feel I was fighting for the Afrikaner people.'

  'You must have felt bad lOSing, Jannie. I can understand how you feel.'

  'It's not nice, it eats at your guts, you think about nothing else. Now he's lost himself, he'll know how it feels. I'm glad. But it will be worse when I beat him. Because he'll know, he'll know why. He'll know he was beaten by the truth, by a people who fear God and who have kept their blood pure.' Geldenhuis looked at Klaasens, suddenly furious. 'Colonel, they're scum! Him and the fat Jew, they're the scum of the earth. They're Communists and they are determined to destroy the Afrikaner people, the Afrikaner way of life.'

  'And you have evidence of this?'

  'Enough. I got enough! Peekay and the Jew, Hymie Levy, they're always together. The Jew wants to destroy South Africa. It was the Jews that caused the Boer War, who sucked out our blood and stole our money. They're still doing it, man! De Beers, they own all the diamonds, it all belongs to a Jew. Anglo-American, the biggest gold and copper consortium in the world, it's run by the Jews.'

  'Magtig, Jannie, I also hate the Jews but there've been some good ones. A guy like Harry Oppenheimer, he does a lot of good around the place, also Solomon Levy - just the other day he gave a whole hospital!'

  'Shit, man, you make me laugh! He gave a kaffir hospital. A kaffir hospital that looks after children. Children's diseases and a maternity wing for black women who breed like flies! Can't you fucking see? He wants more and more blacks, so in the end they'll swarm all over us! It's part of the international Communist conspiracy to destroy the Afrikaner people.'

  'Ja, I suppose you're right, I never thought of it like that.' Klaasens was still not entirely convinced. 'But Peekay? He's not a Jew and it said in the paper he comes from poor people. Just a little dorp in the low veld.'

  'Ja, and now he's just finished at Oxford. Do you know about Oxford?' Geldenhuis asked. 'Ja, it's a university in England.'

>   'Peekay got a scholarship to Stellenbosch, to Witwatersrand to Natal University. Why did he have to go to Oxford? Not only that, here in South Africa it was for free. At Oxford he had to pay. Tell me that, why, man?'

  'I don't know, maybe he just wanted to go overseas?'

  'You just said he was a poor boy who comes from a small dorp? Whose mother is a dressmaker. You don't thinK he paid do you? The Jew paid! I mean no disrespect, Colonel, but that's bullshit about the mines in Rhodesia. You know why Peekay went there? To start a Communist party! You know what happened the year after he left? A strike in the Copperbelt, led by the Communist party. I know a guy, a good Boer who worked up there in the mines. He says they didn't know there was a Communist party in the mines before that! It was not even one year after Peekay left. Now the black bastards up there are demanding independence. This guy I know says the kaffirs go underground the first time and you show them a mirror. They see their face in a mirror and they scream. Now they want independence!'

  I got to admit, Jannie, you've done your homework, man. That's the sign of a good policeman. We did the right thing bringing you into the Special Branch.'

  '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 bel
l 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.