Mol goes and sits on the edge of the stoep. She takes the cigarettes out of her housecoat pocket and lights up. ‘First sit a little,’ she says, blowing out smoke.
Treppie looks at Mol, who first wants to sit. The sky above Triomf is blowtorch blue. He looks at the half-cut grass. Then he kicks at a fresh molehill, and remembers how, all those years ago, they came to the city as children with Old Pop and Old Mol. All the way from Bloemhof, on a Railways bus. He was very small then, five or six. All their possessions were squeezed into trunks behind them, on the lorry’s trailer.
He was still on Old Mol’s hip the day she let the screen door slam closed for the last time. She closed the outside latch and said: ‘Farewell, Klipfontein.’
Klipfontein was his grandma and grandpa’s farm in the Western Transvaal. The depression stripped them bare. There was no water, anyway. Just stones. That’s how his father explained things to him.
Then his father decided to write a letter to the Railways. He’d never been a Hertzog man, but he always said Hertzog’s Railways plan for poor whites was the best thing an Afrikaner had ever thought up.
He can still see his father sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, chewing the top end of his pencil. Labouring over that letter. His mother rewrote it carefully in ink when it was finally done. A fucken movie, then already.
After a month they got word: they must come, the Railways were only too happy to help their people.
His mother caught all forty of her geese. She stripped them bare so she could sell the feathers and the down to the Jew trader. Then she slaughtered the raw and featherless pink geese, together with the chickens and the turkeys. She cleaned them and then she took them to town for selling. The cows and sheep and their few pigs had long since been auctioned off.
Those days he still cried for the poultry. He remembers the scene with his turkey, a big old bugger who could go ‘bifff! bifff!’ with puffed-out wings and shake his red wattles, making a ‘cooloo-cooloo-cooloo!’ sound when he felt horny. He watched through the kitchen window as his mother cut off the turkey’s head. It slipped off the block and out of his mother’s hands. Then, with blood spewing from its neck, it began to throw high jinks in the dust, right under his nose. He couldn’t eat for four days after that, not until they were in the city and their father bought them doughnuts at a coolie-shop. Grandpa put the turnploughs, forks and spades together in bundles, and a man from town came to write it all up. Then he loaded the equipment on to his co-operative van and took it away. The house’s movable goods were also on the van. Spot and Buster had to go live with Grandpa and Grandma on another farm in the district, with one of Grandpa’s brothers. Then, already, an inbred lot. He remembers how his Ouma, the first Mol, walked in slow circles around the house with a long-nosed watering can that she’d kept behind. She was spraying the last water from the rain-tank onto her stinkafrikaners. Her African marigolds. ‘Shame, she’s becoming a child again, leave her alone,’ his mother said, and his father wiped his eyes with his arm. ‘So, now the old people are becoming bywoners. Labourers on other people’s land. And the new generation are trekking to Gomorrah,’ he said.
That night, their last on the farm, they all sat around the oil-lamp on the wooden planks of the kitchen floor. By then the chairs were gone, too. In the middle, on a plank, stood a little bucket of milk porridge with cinnamon, and a pot-bread sent over by the woman on the next farm.
Treppie starts. What’s that noise across the road now? It’s that dykemobile with its loose bearings. When those two moved in here, the neighbours also came over bearing trays full of ‘tuisgebak’ for them. A Boer will be a Boer, dyke or no dyke. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His father said he, Treppie, could have his mouth organ, only if he’d eat some of the milk porridge. But he didn’t want to. Later he got the mouth organ in any case. Actually, he inherited it after his father’s death. But he swore he’d never play it. It’s bad luck to play on the instrument of a suicide case. That’s what he said to Old Mol when she kept on so about it.
He actually meant murderer, ’cause Old Pop had beat the life right out of him, to say nothing of the little music that was left in him. So then he said Little Pop could have the mouth organ. Little Pop was musical, he had a good ear and he had the beat. But even though Little Pop learnt fast, playing the songs of old Hendrik Susan’s band, and the Briels and Chris Blignaut and all of them, and even though he once did a solo at the Garment Workers’ Union, he never played anywhere near as well as Old Pop.
Old Pop was a genius on the mouth organ. He remembers how Old Pop could keep a whole farmhouse hop-dancing with nothing but his mouth organ. Later, in Fordsburg, they didn’t have a farmhouse any more and there weren’t any people who wanted to dance with them anyway. But every now and again Old Pop still played. Most of the time he played sad songs or Salvation Army tunes. He used to play Old Mol into tears.
Old Pop played full-mouthed notes, with all kinds of trills and frills inbetween: majors on the out-breaths and minors on the in-breaths, the long notes stretched out on trills and then half smothered as he made a bowl-shape with his two hands, vibrating them on either side of the mouth organ.
Old Pop played all the way to Jo’burg. He played jolly songs. To give them courage for the City of Gold, he said. But Old Mol was already crying. A long day’s journey into night, if you ask him.
The bus took them to the Railways boarding house in Vrededorp, for poor white arrivals. And there they stood, with all their trunks and things, on the front stoep. Before Old Pop could even knock, a fat woman with a cigarette in her mouth opened the door.
‘You must be Mister Benade,’ she said in English, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth. She ignored Old Pop’s outstretched hand. She looked them up and down as they stood there and then she said: ‘Ah, thank God, no small babies. We have enough of them here.’
She took a little bottle from her apron pocket and held it out to Old Mol. ‘Before you do anything else, I want you to take a bath. Use five drops of this,’ she said, pushing the little bottle into Old Mol’s face. ‘I don’t want any vermin in my lodgings.’
Old Pop then said to the woman: ‘We may be poor, but at least we are clean, madam.’ But she said to him: ‘Do as you’re told. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
They did as they were told. First Old Pop and Old Mol shared the bath water, the three children going next. Old Pop was grinding his teeth so hard his cheeks began puffing up. When he put the three of them into the bath, he said: ‘Now we’re being dipped like raw kaffirs.’
They stuck out the boarding house for just three days. Screaming babies kept Pop out of sleep, and the stench of old floor polish and cooked cabbage made Treppie and Mol and Pop so sick they couldn’t eat.
After his third day of looking for a house, Old Pop came home with bright eyes. Oh yes, he’d found them a semi. The people who lived there were moving out in a week’s time ’cause the old woman, a garment worker, was blind, and the man had lost a leg on the Railways. They couldn’t afford the rent any more. The Benades could come straight away and help with the last week’s rent – they could certainly do with a bit of help.
‘What’s a semi?’ Old Mol asked, and his father said it was half a house. Then his mother asked, wouldn’t there be too many of them, living with other people in half a house? But his father said it was temporary – after a week they’d have the whole semi to themselves. Two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.
‘Are you sure?’ Old Mol still asked. She didn’t trust this business at all.
In the end they spent more than three full years sharing half a house with the Beyleveldts. And it wasn’t even a proper half-house. There was a passage linking it to the other half, where three more families lived. All with strapping big children who were so famished they stripped the Benades’ food cupboard bare. So in the end everyone was hungry, and they all stole each other’s food.
Old Pop worked long hours. He was a st
oker on the Railways. Mrs Beyleveldt took Old Mol to the clothing factory and presented her there as a replacement for herself. So at least there was some money in the house, even if it was altogether too little to plug the gaps. Old Mol had to take on piece-work: shirts that she repaired until late at night on Mrs Beyleveldt’s old Singer.
They all lived in one room. The children saw everything the grown-ups did. And they heard every word the grown-ups said.
Old Pop and Old Mol fought bitterly. Mostly they fought over the Beyleveldts. Old Mol used to say the offer of the half-house had just been a trick to pick them clean.
They had to pay all the rent on their own, buy all the food and do all the housework, ’cause the blind woman and the one-legged man were incapable of doing anything for themselves. And Old Mol wasn’t allowed to use the sewing machine ‘for nothing’, she had to ‘hire’ it at a ‘per-day tariff’, even though she could use it only at night.
‘Now you listen to me, Martinus Lambertus Benade,’ his mother always said. ‘I didn’t come to Johannesburg to be a charity worker. In Klipfontein I could at least spend some time in my own house, with my own family. I could slaughter a decent chicken for the pot and keep us alive by selling down and soap.’
Then Old Pop used to slam down his lunch-tin and tell her she must stop complaining. She still had both her eyes. He still had both his legs. They should count their blessings. They had each other. They had a roof over their heads. Ja, the story of their lives. Then his mother would ask his father to name all the things they were supposed to have. All she could name were the things they no longer had. Many times she complained how she’d baked two loaves of bread and cooked a big pot of soup, just yesterday. Enough for the whole family as well as the Beyleveldts. Soup that she made from the cheapest soup bones and barley, and from vegetables she found in the dustbins. It took her hours to sort the vegetables and cut out the good pieces. She’d worked until late at night with her own two hands, which were full of holes from the Singer’s needles. And then, when she went to the kitchen the next morning, the pot was empty and both loaves of bread were gone.
Those days Old Mol used to knead the bread. For the first rise, she covered it with an old greycoat that someone on the Railways had given Old Pop.
But no one could live on bread alone, she used to say. When she started like this, nothing could stop her. She used to name all the things they would soon be needing but didn’t have. New shoes. Warm clothes for winter. A pair of glasses for her ’cause her eyes couldn’t take the poor light at the factory, and the light in their room, which was even worse. Doctors’ fees and medicine for Little Mol and Little Pop. Their chests were closing up again. How was she supposed to know what was wrong with them?
Then his father would tell her to shut her mouth this very second, he couldn’t bear it any longer. Wasn’t he, a white man, doing work that no white man should ever have to do? But his mother wouldn’t shut up. She said she wished they were kaffirs. Then at least she’d be able to give them porridge every day, with no salt or milk or sugar. Then they could dress in rags and no one would even know the difference.
At this point, Old Pop would thump her on the chest and tell her in that case she should go find herself a kaffir husband. So she could bring forth bastards, if that’s how little she felt for her volk.
His mother always said: ‘Not in front of the children, Lambertus.’
Later, Old Mol took to making their food on a Primus in the room. She locked the bread in a shoe cupboard. And she put up a sheet between the children and the grown-ups. But they still saw and heard everything. They watched the shadows on the sheet when Old Pop climbed on top of Old Mol and began riding her wildly, until she started crying and calling out the Lord’s name.
When their mother and father were out working, the children stayed behind on their own until he, Treppie, was old enough to go to school. In the beginning, they all used to get up together, dress for school, and then eat the bread and jam their mother had made for them. Then his father used to say to his brother: ‘Look after your sister nicely, Little Pop.’ And his mother used to say to his sister: ‘Look after Treppie nicely, Molletjie, remember he’s the smallest.’
‘All we have in the world is each other. Us Benades must stand together,’ his father sometimes said with a crack in his voice. When his father said that, his mother’s head jerked slightly, just like it jerked when old One-Leg Beyleveldt used to say to them: You must do this, or, You must do that. Then Old Pop asked Mr Beyleveldt how many Us there were in his alphabet. They were trying to look after their own. He must please just leave them in peace.
Old Mol was also getting nice and mixed up. She knew ‘each other’ was too little to live by, but what else could they do? Everything was starting to fuck out, even then.
And so that’s how they learnt to look after ‘each other’. How he and Little Mol and Little Pop learnt to take care of ‘each other’.
‘Look after’ was supposed to mean they were valuable. More valuable than other people. Most other people couldn’t look after themselves properly. That was Old Mol’s opinion in those days. She clung to that belief, even though she knew there was something wrong with it. What’s more, it also meant that if they wanted to fight or look for trouble, they had to do it with each other and not with other people. A ‘well-looked-after’ person was someone who stayed the way he was, a person who kept to himself, to his own kind.
His father always used to say: ‘That which belongs together, must remain together.’ That’s why he voted for Malan’s National Party in the 1948 election. Out of family instinct more than anything else. There was no other choice.
And that’s why Mol still nods her head up and down so hard when those two snotnoses from the NP come and tell them how ‘valuable’ they are to the Party, how they belong heart and soul to the big National Family, whose members are now looking after each other ‘across the boundaries of race, language and culture’. Mol doesn’t hear the last part. All she hears are Old Mol and Old Pop’s words.
To him, those two sound more like far-fetched versions of Hertzog or Smuts, like margarine that has everything to make it spread but still isn’t butter. It’s a long time since he’s seen any butter. And he doesn’t feel at all looked after by the NP and their so-called canvassers. He feels they want to use him like they’ve always used people. He knows they talk behind his back. Fuck knows what gets pumped into their heads at headquarters. He just wishes Lambert would corner that girl with the airs and give her some of his treatment, so she can also learn what ‘belongs to’ and ‘look after’ mean.
In later years, the three of them often stayed in bed together after the grown-ups had left the house. School was shit – they were made to swallow spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, so they stayed in bed instead. Little Pop’s dick could already stand up nicely by then. He showed Treppie and Mol how to rub it. They killed time on those mornings by rubbing Little Pop’s dick. It took away the hunger. They were allowed to have their morning bread only once Pop had come three times; otherwise they’d get hungry for their afternoon bread too soon. And if that got eaten, they stayed hungry all day, until their mother came home from the factory at night.
Hungry time, time that you feel in your stomach, is a terrible thing. But what’s worse is how time feels when you see the same things happening over and over again. Like things that get broken and then get fixed again. Over and over again, fucken broken and fixed again. And nothing ever gets fixed properly.
Treppie suddenly sees Mol coming round the corner. She’s dragging the ladder behind her.
‘Pick the damn thing up, woman,’ he shouts. His voice sounds too high. He mustn’t think about these things. It makes him shaky. It causes accidents.
‘It’s heavy, Treppie,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, that’s what you call the effect of gravity.’
‘Gravity,’ says Mol.
‘Yes,’ says Treppie, ‘that’s the force that holds us down here in Triomf, in
Martha Street, on our feet, in our skins, together, with a roof over our heads. Otherwise we’d all have floated away by now, one by one, and fallen to fucken pieces.’
Then, for the first time, he sees Lambert. He’s standing on the stoep with no shirt. He’s got that mad look in his eyes that he gets when he’s been lying on his bed for too long.
‘Ja,’ says Lambert. ‘That’s why stars pass out sometimes, pfft! Not enough gravity there where they are. A star,’ he says, ‘dissolves in time. In light years. In space, like an Aspro in a glass of water.’
And as he says this, he looks like someone with a sledgehammer who wants to beat something to a pulp.
8
PEST CONTROL
Dear Lord, just look at her from all the stings. But now Pop’s rubbing Prep on her sore places, and that’s nice and cool. Mol’s sitting in her chair with her legs spread out in front of her. She’s holding Gerty on her lap. Gerty breathes heavily. The poor thing had the whole swarm on top of her and now her eyes have closed up from all the swelling. Mol can’t bear even to look at Gerty. Instead, she looks down at her legs where Pop’s busy rubbing on the Prep. Her legs got the worst of it. Her arms too, plus a few stings on her neck and two on her head, right on top. Right through her hair. Pop’s already done her head and her neck. He started on top, working his way down, but now she stinks of the stuff. Pop said he would first rub Lambert, ’cause Lambert got the worst of it, then her, and then Treppie last of all. But Lambert didn’t want any of it. And Treppie said no ointment in the world could make the Benades look or feel any better.
Treppie’s acting nasty ’cause Pop’s the only one who didn’t get stung. Pop was inside, and Treppie sprained his foot. That’s why he’s feeling so sorry for himself.
Pop must get a move on with his rubbing. Any minute now the pest-control people will be here. It’s Wednesday already, which means those two from the NP will also be coming. She’s really not in the mood for them today.
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