The following day I returned to the grave, having loaded all Rasputin’s wooden balls into the back of a borrowed utility. With a long-handled lasher’s shovel I flattened the mound and buried the shotgun next to him; then I built a pyramid over the grave using all the wooden balls. When I was finished it stood five foot tall. Taking careful measurements I had the welding shop at number nine shaft make me a pyramid-shaped containing frame with small bars running parallel every four inches across the sides, so that the balls, while being clearly seen, could not be removed. The metal frame was completed in two days and together with the help of Zoran the Yugo I rigged a hoist over Rasputin’s grave and dropped it neatly over the wooden balls, seating the corners into a cement footing.
It made a very impressive tombstone and when his headstone arrived Rasputin’s grave would be the pride of the tiny cemetery.
Together with Zoran, who could speak a little Russian, we went through Rasputin’s papers. There wasn’t very much to tell of his past; Norwegian seaman’s papers bearing his name, a Russian passport and his discharge papers from the Russian navy which indicated he’d been a stoker. Finally we found a sheet of paper on which a woman’s name, similar to the one in his passport, was written. It was followed by an address in Russia. Zoran had said that a slight difference in surname was common in Russia and I gathered he meant that this was a feminine version of the male surname. Rasputin’s bank account came to nearly seven thousand pounds and I arranged to send this to the name on the slip of paper, after taking Zoran with me and convincing the district magistrate that this was Rasputin’s closest kin. A wife, a sister or a mother? But at least someone, somewhere, other than me, who would remember him for the good fortune he had brought them.
I had been visited in hospital by Fats Greer, the part-time insurance agent. He pushed a piece of paper in front of me. ‘Sign here, Peekay,’ he said, his pudgy finger indicating a blank line on the sheet of paper. I signed. ‘I need two cheques for twenty pounds each, don’t date them.’ To my surprise he produced my cheque book. ‘Elijah, your number one boy, delivered your chorla bag to the mine captain after your accident. I took the liberty of using the keys in it.’ I nodded still a bit dazed and not really knowing what was happening; as far as I knew he had refused to cover me for the last two months on grizzlies. I signed the cheques and asked him what it was all about. ‘I’ll tell you when you feel a little better.’ He grinned, ‘The crazy Ruski gave you more than his life, son.’ A week later I was to learn that Rasputin had a long-standing insurance policy with Fats Greer for a thousand pounds and had made me the benefactor. Fats also handed me a cheque for five hundred pounds, ‘What’s this for?’
‘Your accident compo,’ he replied. ‘Check your cheque butts, you never missed a premium.’ He walked away whistling to himself.
It meant that I had no need to return to the mines for a further three months. As Solly Goldman would have put it, ‘You’re home and hosed, my son!’ With the money I had saved and Rasputin’s legacy I had sufficient funds for three years at Oxford. I also had enough left over to travel to London once a week for training by the famous Dutch Holland. Holland didn’t usually take amateurs but Hymie had sweet talked him into allowing me to show my stuff. If he liked what he saw, he’d take me into the professional ranks under his care.
I had three weeks’ sick leave after coming out of hospital and I knew that the best way to get rid of my bruises was to work my body. I put in a lot of road. I also rigged an extra heavy homemade canvas punchbag the mine sailmaker had made for me, hanging it from a rafter Zoran had reinforced on the verandah of my rondavel. Beside it hung the speedball and the lighter punching bag I had brought from South Africa and on which I had worked out every day I had been at the mines.
Speed was something I couldn’t afford to lose and while the work in the mines had built up my body so that I was by now almost a welterweight, I didn’t want to forgo speed for the extra power I had gained. The year away from boxing had been good for me. While I hadn’t talked about it to anyone even in the letters I wrote, the flame that lit my ambition to be welterweight champion of the world burned as fiercely as ever and had never left me for even one single moment of any one day.
In fact, when I regained consciousness in the hospital I thought that I had been fighting for the world championship and that I had been knocked out. The disappointment I felt was enormous, and when I was fully conscious and aware of what had happened I comforted myself with the knowledge that I now knew what it felt like to lose the world championship, it now only remained for me to experience winning it.
I sweated out the aches and pains over three hard training sessions a day. Within a fortnight the scabs were beginning to flake off, leaving large blotches of new pink skin all over my body which made me look a little like an albino who’d been passed backwards through a meatgrinder. My head had also been shaved to get at a cut on my skull which had turned out to be pretty superficial and had only required five stitches. As Solly Goldman would say, I looked a proper Charlie. The mine required that I complete a final shift, though not on a grizzly, so that I could sign all my papers and be passed as completely fit again. This was so that I couldn’t sue them at some later date for some real or imagined after effect.
I spent the last week of my sick leave writing home, to Miss Bornstein and Mrs Boxall and of course to Hymie who had written to me weekly from Oxford. I also wrote to Gert and to Gideon Mandoma who was already beginning to write quite well himself. Finally I wrote to Singe ’n Burn whose retirement from the Prince of Wales School coincided almost exactly with my own from the mines. They had all written regularly with Miss Bornstein and Mrs Boxall keeping up with Hymie and Singe ’n Burn, to my constant surprise, wrote every six weeks or so. After his initial disappointment over my refusal to take a scholarship to a South African university he had become imbued with the idea that I should make it to Oxford under my own steam and had arranged for me to be accepted at Magdalen College with Hymie. I knew this final letter telling them all that I’d made it would be a big event for them. I was back on track and all would be forgiven. The prodigal son had returned. I even wondered if old Mr Bornstein might let me win another game of chess.