Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  A fire burned low outside his hut and he placed a couple of pieces of wood onto it adding a few twigs to make the embers flare. Peekay stood hunched over the fire, rubbing his hands above the flames. He was grateful for the padded anorak he wore. It was an old one he'd bought for Pike's Peak when they'd trained in the US for the first title fight and he'd often used it in the mountains at home and when he'd first returned. Now he was glad to have it on, a familiar garment to cloak his terror and his awe.

  He'd returned to his hut the evening before hoping he might receive news of Gideon, though he wasn't sure that after his confrontation with the ancient witchdoctor he could go through the emotional reunion of a meeting with his friend. Now, standing in the dawn light in the mist-shrouded mountain village, he wondered to himself what the day might bring.

  The woman who had brought him the basin and jug the previous day now brought him a mug of dark tea sweetened with honey…'Ngiya bonga, Mama, I thank you, mother.' Peekay said, taking the steaming mug from her in both hands. The woman left quietly, melting into the mist.

  Peekay looked up from his cup to see a man wrapped tightly in a blanket approaching him in the mist. It was only when Gideon was within twenty feet of the fire that Peekay recognized him and, dropping the cup so that the tea spluttered furiously in the hot coal, he rushed to embrace his friend. Gideon brought his blanket around both of them and hugged him, the village echoing with their laughter.

  'I see you, Gideon,' Peekay replied; then he glanced quickly at the black man beside him, though he could hardly see him through his sudden tears. 'I have missed you, with my heart, but in my head I wish you hadn't returned.'

  'I am a soldier now, Peekay. I have no choice, comrade,' Gideon said softly, his voice also showing his emotion.

  Peekay sniffed then laughed. 'Comrade? That's a habit you'd better get out of bloody fast, kaffir. Just the word itself could get you twenty years!' As he'd expected Gideon was dressed in old clothes, dirty and heavily patched, and on his head he wore an ancient grease-stained felt hat, misshapen and tattered, which he'd pulled almost over his eyes so he had to raise his chin to see Peekay. While the clothes he wore were perfect for the anonymity he needed on the road, Peekay said, 'Jesus, Gideon. You smell like a gorilla's armpit. How long have you been travelling rough?' Gideon chuckled. 'Not long, my brother. I exchanged them for my suit when I got off the boat. The old man who wore them thought I had gone mad. But it is good for me to feel like this, it will do me no harm; it is like wearing the skin of my countrymen again. Algeria and Europe spoiled me; I was beginning to think I was a somebody.'

  Welcome home then, and take off that bloody hat. You're talking to a white man you understand!'

  Gideon pulled the tattered felt hat off his head. 'Shit, I'd forgotten, it's too easy to die where we are going.'

  I thought you went to Algeria to learn how to survive in a war zone?'

  'They taught me twenty ways to kill a man, but nothing about surviving amongst killers. It's not going to be easy being a kaffir again. I can't even be Gideon Mandoma, Welterweight Champion of the World. I'm just a kaffir like I was when I was lashing coal for the furnace.'

  'That's good, that way you may stay alive; your anonymity is everything now. I have brought you clothes, old clothes for the mountains, but clean at least.' Peekay looked down at Gideon's feet. Gideon wore a pair of tackies, the sandshoes well scuffed but still durable. 'Your tackies will last going over Saddleback. We really ought to make an early start. We'll stay the night in the old farmhouse outside Barberton, the place Magistrate Coetzee left Tandia. Then tomorrow morning you will drive as my chauffeur to Johannesburg. If I cannot do it right now, I warn you that on the mountains and at Eendrag I will try to persuade you to go back, Gideon. I have money and a plane ticket out of Lourenco Marques to London with me.'

  'Haya, haya, Peekay, Gideon said, shaking his head sadly, 'we cannot go back. It is too late to turn back now. I have come to fight, there is no other way the amaBhunu can be made to understand.'

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  In December the Solomon Levy Carpet Emporium held its annual Christmas party and Solomon Levy gave the entire first three weeks of the month over to the preparations for it. Hymie called Peekay early one morning in the second week of December. 'Have you read the papers, old son?' he asked. Peekay had been out early for a run and confessed he was only just out of the shower and hadn't.

  'Simon Fitzharding, you know, the BBC producer guy I told you about who's doing the thing on the old man's Christmas party, said something dumb on a radio programme yesterday and it's on the front pages of all the morning papers.'

  'Dumb? What did he say?'

  The stupid prick announced over the air that the Solomon Levy Christmas party was the only true example of Christianity and the true spirit of Christmas to be found in South Africa.'

  Peekay laughed. 'He's probably right.'

  'Well the shit's hit the fan! That bloody Christmas party! It's too high profile anyway. Did you see the stuff in the Outspan and Die Huisgenoot?'

  'Ja, Tandia showed me in the office, it was pretty spectacular. But, so what's new? It's the same very year, your old man has a natural instinct for getting publicity. Have you called him about Fitzharding's gaff?'

  'Ja, before you. He thinks it's the greatest publicity ever. He's besotted with the idea of this BBC documentary. He spends most of the day in that ridiculous little engine going around the garden blowing its steam whistle and shouting "Camera, action!'"

  Peekay laughed. 'Sorry Hymie, I know it isn't funny, but there's something very bizarre about the BBC choosing to show a Christmas bash by one of South Africa's foremost Jews in order to demonstrate to the world that the African Christ has been put back into Christmas.'

  Over the years Solomon Levy's Christmas party for the employees of the Levy carpet empire had become an annual media event and, because of the BBC documentary, this Christmas party of 1966 promised to be a bigger and more extravagant affair than ever. In the mid-November issue of the Outspan, South Africa's traditional English household magazine, there appeared an article which among other things catalogued the gifts the children would receive at his Christmas party. It also included a special article on the design of the now-famous black dolls which were created by the London doll firm of Rubens and Brown.

  Doris with the wonderful tits had married Togger Brown and they'd gone into partnership with Mr Rubens to establish a doll factory. The traditional Shirley Temple doll had been replaced by a beautiful new doll with a magnificent bisque head, which was rapidly earning a worldwide reputation in the toy department of better department stores. It was referred to in the toy trade as a 'Rubens-Kellerman' doll.

  The Outspan article told how the beautiful dolls had been patterned on the world-famous Hans Kellerman German doll and how each was dressed in one of ten outfits designed by Carmen Brown's haute couture shop for children in Paris.

  The six-page article, in colour, also showed a picture, taken the previous year, of two five-year-old girls at the Solomon Levy Christmas party, one black and the other white, standing on tiptoe on either side of the dividing fence exchanging their dolls. Under the picture ran the caption, Two little. dolls cross the colour barrier on tiptoe.

  The following week Die Huisgenoot, a slightly more politically inclined Afrikaans equivalent of the Outspan, featured the same picture of the little girls in a leading article, but this time the headline read.' Prominent Pretoria Jew defies apartheid policy! The following week's issue of the same magazine contained several letters from readers vowing never to purchase a carpet from a Solomon Levy Carpet Emporium ever again.

  When these letters were translated to him, Solomon Levy immediately wrote a letter of his own.

  Dear Customers,

  It hurts me to think only last week some of my very good Afrikaner friends are writing in this magazine about 'Again'. They say they will NEV
ER buy carpet from me AGAIN.

  I beg your pardon! A Solomon Levy Carpet Emporium broadloom (a nice Christmas special, 35% off!) is NOT an 'Again' carpet!

  To those people who are writing to insult the quality of my best broadloom with this 'Again' talk, I only have this to say - you should all go to that place where it's so hot they got only asbestos carpet on the floor!

  Yours in pile, shag and broadloom, believe me, only the best! Also, Happy Christmas, God Bless!

  Alles van die beste,

  Solomon Levy

  President, Solomon Levy Carpet Emporiums —Solomon's carpet is a wise decision.

  The big party as usual was to take place on the last Saturday before Christmas and the preparations for it started at daybreak on the first of December when an army of workmen moved in. For the next three weeks there would be a great deal of coming and going. The tracks for the miniature railway had to be laid, the fence which divided the black from the white needed to be built, braaivleis pits prepared and the huge spits where several whole oxen would be roasted set up. In the final week two identical carnivals with flying swings, a big dipper, dodgem cars and all the usual side shows would be erected.

  To Solomon Levy the toy train was the most important of all, and the tracks for the miniature railway were the very first thing to be done on the estate. These followed around the complete perimeter of the gardens except for a detour through his prize-winning dahlia garden on the black side and famous rose garden on the white.

  The old man was determined to make the Christmas of 1966 the best ever. The BBC had selected his party for the Africa segment of its Christmas day programme, 'Christmas with Children Around the World'. He was tremendously excited about this, and imagined at once that the Queen of England would be watching the programme on Christmas day, seated on her throne with Axminster on the floor, and there he would be, driving the train in his new lightweight Father Christmas outfit.

  Simon Fitzharding, a rather pompous Englishman who was known at the BBC as an awful hack, had been the only director available to cover the Africa segment of the documentary and he couldn't believe his luck. Solomon had insisted he move from his second-rate, BBC-budget hotel, and take over an entire wing of the large house, where he found himself treated like royalty.

  After this splendid reception he simply hadn't the heart to tell the excited Solomon Levy that Africa had been allotted exactly five minutes of the one-hour programme and that, furthermore, because Africa started with an 'A' it would appear at the opening of the documentary - a nice compliment in one way, but also the scene over which the title and opening credits would appear.

  Simon Fitzharding also had a BBC budget which gave him very few options. He'd settled on the Solomon Levy Carpet Emporium Party almost immediately because it was a single location - a splendid one at that - it was multiracial, it cut down on expenses, it offered unstinting co-operation and, in fact, it had everything he needed to succeed.

  He made the decision to put most of his efforts into one grand opening sequence. The opening shot, he decided, would be Solomon in all his glory as the Father Christmas engine driver coming towards camera in the little engine with all its carriages loaded with toys. The sequence would culminate in Father Christmas Solomon Levy drawing his engine into the station where all the children waited for their presents. The final shot would show two little girls, a black and a white, holding their appropriate dolls and looking wide-eyed into the future.

  Simon Fitzharding, though perhaps not a very inspired film maker, was nevertheless a perfectionist and with Solomon Levy he had a willing actor on his hands. Over the final week they'd practised the action at least fifty times until the timing was perfect.

  Jannie Geldenhuis was in his office in John Vorster Square at his usual time of half past seven when he read about the proposed BBC documentary of the Jews annual party in the morning papers. He'd also read the recent Die Huisgenoot article with rising apprehension. It was seven years since he'd been sworn into the Broederbond and had vowed to fix the fat Jew's Christmas party. Now it had finally got out of hand and, he knew, in the eyes of the Broederbond, that this could be seen as partially or even entirely his fault. The matter of the Jew's kaffir Christmas party should have been settled years ago.

  In the intervening years Solomon Levy had become one of South Africa's leading philanthropists. He gave equally to both English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking charities, as well as many African and coloured ones, though notably never to the Indian community whom he regarded as deadly competitors in the carpet business. In short, Solomon Levy had become an extremely difficult target.

  Geldenhuis picked up the phone and dialed a number in Pretoria. Finally, after the phone had rung more than a dozen times a voice at the other end simply said, 'Ja?'

  'Jakkals.' Geldenhuis replied.

  'Your number?' The voice demanded in Afrikaans.

  'Een en tagtig.'

  'Jou moeder se voorname?'

  'Anna, Sophie.' Geldenhuis replied, giving his mother's christian names.

  'Wag,' the voice said, instructing him to wait.

  He held on for ten minutes before the original voice returned, still speaking in Afrikaans. 'Are you calling about a certain kaffir Christmas party?'

  'Ja.'

  'Wag,' the voice instructed again.

  This time he didn't have to wait long before there was a new voice, which he thought he recognized, though it had been a long time since he'd been briefed. 'Jakkals?'

  ''Ja, meneer?'

  'You may proceed with maximum impact.' The phone went dead.

  Jannie Geldenhuis felt his heart pounding. 'Shit!' They wanted Solomon Levy killed! 'Jesus!' And he'd been afraid he'd get a negative response. Censured for not having undertaken the task long before. At best he thought they'd simply tell him to create a disruption and make it look like an attack from religious families or an extreme right-wing element: create enough of a disaster, kill a few kaffirs.

  Geldenhuis was delighted with his Christmas present from the Broederbond. Maybe he could work it so he got Hymie and Peekay as well; also, why not Tandia? At one stage or another they had to be standing together. A bomb in the right place, that's all it would take.

  But Jannie Geldenhuis knew he was daydreaming. He could get a couple of his men into the grounds, that wouldn't be too hard - there were carpenters and technicians everywhere, even planting a bomb with a timing device wouldn't be impossible. But on the day the place would be crawling with children, white children. His chances of getting the four people he most wanted to kill all together on the black side was negligible.

  Besides, while he didn't care particularly about killing Hymie, he wanted Peekay and Tandia alive for two reasons. He hoped they would lead him to Gideon Mandoma. The sudden increase in terrorist activity and rumours from his informers gave him reason to believe that Gideon was back in South Africa. And, most importantly, he had a personal vendetta to settle with both Peekay and the black bitch.

  He'd already broken Tandia as a teenager; what had happened then was child's play. Now she would be really something to work un, all the old fears to bring back, new ones to work on. Breaking down her beauty alone, that would be something. Now, when she was so terribly guilty, breaking her now would be a most exquisite pleasure. His brains against hers, his arrogance against her fear, his hate against her hate. The re-enactment of that day at Bluey Jay, only this time with his ending.

  But, more even than her, there was Peekay. He could taste Peekay like blood in his mouth. Geldenhuis dreamed of reducing both Peekay and Tandia down to shit, for he knew both were guilty of the most terrible crimes against his Afrikaner nation for which they must both die. He also believed in his heart that they were guilty of miscegenation, the most heinous crime of them all, that struck at the very roots of the survival of the white tribe in Africa. With Peekay there was the physical thing as well,
the man on man.

  Just as Peekay dreamed of getting Jannie Geldenhuis into court for a showdown in front of the world media, so Geldenhuis dreamed of getting Peekay into the ring. The need physically to get the better of the hated rooinek had never left him. He knew that while most weeks Peekay kept himself in reasonable shape with a couple of hard games of squash and two or three long runs in the early morning, he worked much too hard to be in the really top condition he needed to fight. Besides, he hadn't put on a glove since the night he'd lost the title to Mandoma. He was probably ten pounds over the welterweight limit and not nearly as strong or in the same sort of shape as Geldenhuis knew himself to be.

  Geldenhuis spent most of the day after his phone call to Cogsweel at the Broederbond working on how he might eliminate Solomon Levy without leaving any trace as to the identity of his assassins. And when he opened the evening paper he couldn't quite believe his luck. In the paper was a picture of the little engine. In the background, on what appeared to be a door, was the name of an engineering company, J. Poulos Pty, Ltd. Beside the photograph of the train was a plan of the Levy gardens showing the entire topography of the estate and the exact layout of the train tracks. The plan had been prepared to scale by a qualified draughtsman so that the grounds could be correctly laid out for the Christmas party and for the film crew to work from. Apparently the train had gone in for some last-minute repairs and there was some concern as to whether it would be ready in time.