Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  She wants to be cremated. Ash is light. It stays above ground. If you’re ash you get blown away with the first wind. You won’t sink into the depths.

  She turns towards Pop. She can move her limbs now. The lame feeling has gone. Some light comes into the room, but it’s still grey outside. Pop lies on his back with his mouth slightly open. His nose is very sharp and white, and his eyelids are flickering. His hands make little shivering movements on his chest. He’s dreaming. She watches Pop as he dreams. She can see he’s watching his dream from the way his eyeballs move to and fro under his eyelids. She’d love to be able to peep through a hole in the back of Pop’s head so she could watch with him. He smiles a little smile. Must be a nice dream. She’s glad, ’cause sometimes Pop wakes up looking like he’s seen a ghost. That’s when he has a white nightmare. It’s the same dream, he says. Over and over again. In the dream, he’s surrounded by white. White in front and white all around him. It’s so bad he can’t see anything but white. It makes him feel suffocated. When he’s inside the white he can still hear, but he can’t see anything and he can’t get out again. And when he tries to break out, all he sees is more white. White what? she asks, but he doesn’t know. Wool? Clouds? Sand? Soap-suds? Teeth? Walls? Milk? He must know what it is, if it’s so white. But he doesn’t know. It’s just white, he says. White nothing. Pop says the dream makes him feel scared and lonely. He says he wouldn’t mind any other colour, even black. Or red-green-yellow-blue. Just not white. On days when Pop dreams white he’s even quieter than usual. Then he just sits and looks at the world. But right now she can see he’s not dreaming white. ‘Oooh,’ he says in his sleep, like someone getting a big surprise.

  Surprises come in colours. Yellow roses. Yellow dresses.

  Yellow’s her favourite colour. She wouldn’t mind dreaming about yellow every night of her life. But not yellow nothing – she wants to dream about yellow things. Roses and dresses and things that move, things that smell nice. All in yellow. When Pop dreams white, she’s sure he doesn’t move like he’s moving now. Then he lies dead still. But in that case, how will she know he’s dreaming?

  Gerty also seems to be dreaming white nowadays. She doesn’t move when she sleeps. In the old days she used to dream she was chasing cats and playing ball. Then her ears, eyebrows and feet used to twitch, and she used to growl and carry on in her sleep. But not any more.

  Mol suddenly sits bolt upright. It’s Gerty! That’s what feels wrong. Where’s Gerty? She wants to get up, she wants to go look. Now, immediately. She begins to move, but she feels completely paralysed. She’s been awake for a long while now, so this is a different kind of heaviness from that other feeling. Now she’s sitting upright, wide awake – and lame.

  No, not Gerty! She hears ‘click-click’. It’s Toby. Toby never comes to her before she’s properly awake. But Gerty’s always with her, even before she starts waking up. At the foot of the bed, next to the mattress, or somewhere else in the room. Here comes Toby now. But he’s not coming from Pop’s chair in front, where he usually sleeps. And he’s not walking his usual path, either. He’s coming from the bathroom. He takes just two little steps into the room and then he stands at the door with his ears pricked. He looks at her and wags his tail once or twice. Then he looks back to the bathroom and back to her again as she sits there, upright, unable to move. ‘Ee-ee-ee,’ he says softly. He remains standing, right there, and she sits as though she’s stuck to the bed. No, God, please, no.

  ‘Aaah-aaah,’ Pop yawns, here next to her. ‘Aaah-aaah,’ he yawns again. ‘Such a nice dream, Mol, so nice. What you looking at like that?’ Pop lifts himself up on to his elbows and looks where she’s looking.

  ‘Morning, old Toby,’ he says.

  Toby waves his tail once, and then again, looking over his shoulder to the bathroom. ‘Ee-ee,’ he says.

  ‘Ee-ee-ee yourself,’ says Pop, yawning again. He lies down on his back, puts his hands behind his head, and smiles. To think that Pop should smile on a morning like this. It’s not something she sees very often. Most of the time he just swings his legs off the mattress. Then he sits there resting his head on his knees. For a long time he sits like that. After a while it looks like he doesn’t ever want to let himself go again. She always has to say to him: come now, Pop, stand up, put some clothes on so we can go to Shoprite, or something like that. Pop says he’s got no strength left for anything any more. But now he’s lying there with his hands behind his head and he’s smiling. And she doesn’t know how to say it to him.

  ‘Toby,’ she says. Her voice feels like it’s coming from a strange place. She tries to clear her throat, but it sounds funny.

  ‘Maybe he just wants to pee,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll do it now-now. Just listen to my dream first. Ai, ai, ai, such a nice dream, Mol. If only I could dream like that every night.

  ‘I was dreaming,’ says Pop, ‘that we were all in heaven. Me and you and Treppie and Lambert. But we were dogs. Dogs with wings. We weren’t walking, we were flying, and we could talk. Dog-angels, that’s what we were. And the people-angels looked after us, but we didn’t eat dog food from tins, we ate at the Spur. Every day. We ate T-bones with knives and forks and we all wore the jerseys you knitted for us, Molletjie, just nicer, jerseys like rainbows, and that’s why we had serviettes stuck into them, so we didn’t mess on the nice jerseys. Every now and again the people-angels came to ask if there wasn’t anything we wanted, and you said you didn’t want a T-bone, Mol, you wanted honey on toast with white bread and lots of butter, and then you began to break off small pieces and you fed them to me, but my mouth was full of T-bone, and you said it didn’t matter, sweet is nice. Do you have any idea how delicious T-bone and honey-bread taste, Mol? Mol, are you listening to me? Isn’t it wonderful? I really tasted it in my dream, honey and T-bone and toast. And I could taste much better than usual. I wonder if dogs really taste everything so nicely. That dream has made me hungry, man.’

  ‘Pop, Toby …’ she says.

  Pop waves his arm. It’s nothing. ‘Hey, Mol, wasn’t that a lovely dream? And it’s not all, you know. When we finished eating at the Spur, we flew out the windows – forget walking up and down stairs! We didn’t have to pay a cent in that Spur in heaven. The people-angels flew with us and then we played magic balls in heaven. They throw the balls and we fly after them, high, high above heaven’s green lawns, right to the sun and the moon, and then we fly and catch the balls in our mouths and bring them back for the angels, and we put them down at their feet. Magic balls that look like little suns and moons. They make little sparks in your mouth like that sherbet stuff Lambert used to like so much when he was small. What was that stuff called again? Spacedust! Then we went to bed. We all slept in hammocks strung up from the stars. And all you could see were our ears and our tails as we lay there in our hammocks among the stars. The stars all have points in a circle, but actually they’re postboxes with a mouth so you can post letters to your loved ones on earth. In fact, they’re two-way postboxes with doors at the back that you can open, and every day you get mail from your people on earth. Every day we get letters from people we don’t know, but they say they’re family of ours. Then we read them to each other. Dogs can read too in heaven, you know. The letters are full of nice news from the world below.’

  Pop rubs his eyes.

  ‘Then Lambert tipped the big Coke bottle for us. A giant Coke bottle on a hinge that pours out into a dam, “ghloob-ghloob-ghloob”, a dam with ducks like the Westdene Dam, and we drank Coke from the dam with our little pink tongues. But it tasted different. Nicer than ordinary Coke – like champagne-Coke. And the ducks were talking to us. Everything in heaven talks to everything else, duck language, dog language, people language, and everyone understands everyone else in their own language. The ducks are also angels – duck-angels. They’ve got their usual wings but they’ve also got two extra rainbow-wings above their backs that vibrate, like butterfly wings. But we don’t ever chase them ’cause they’re our friends. Everyone’s f
riendly with us in heaven. We’re not alone. Everyone’s happy and our hearts feel light and the air we breathe tastes sweet. So sweet.

  ‘Treppie’s also a dog, but he’s musical. He plays on Old Pop’s mouth organ. The mouth organ’s in two pieces. Treppie’s got the low notes and I’ve got the high notes, and then we play all those old songs from Vrededorp and we keep in tune without missing a single note. And everyone dances round the dam and up in the air and the ants also dance. Even the moles come out into the sun and they dance with their eyes open.

  ‘Ai, Mol, I wish I could dream like that all day long. What you think, Mol? I forgot, there’s a wool shop in heaven, like the one where you always buy wool for Gerty’s jerseys, but there’s more wool there, it looks like a whole shed full of wool, with coolie-angels flying all over the place, carrying balls of wool in their arms, and—’

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ she shouts. Suddenly her voice is back, but it sounds hoarse.

  ‘What’s with you all of a sudden? It was just a dream, man,’ Pop says, laughing.

  ‘It’s not!’ she says. ‘It’s not!’

  ‘It’s not what?’

  ‘It’s not just a dream. It’s Gerty.’

  ‘No, wait a minute, Mol,’ says Pop.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ she says, standing up. ‘Come.’

  ‘Ee-ee-ee-ee!’ says Toby. Toby runs around in a circle, right there where he’s standing.

  ‘Toby wants to pee,’ says Pop. ‘I’m coming now. Put him out so long.’

  ‘Are you coming?’ she asks.

  ‘My pants,’ says Pop. He reaches for his pants next to the bed.

  ‘Leave your pants. Just come!’

  ‘Hell, Molletjie, what’s eating you this morning, hey?’ Pop stands up in his shirt.

  ‘Eating.’ Her voice cracks. ‘Pop,’ she says, ‘Gerty.’

  Pop comes round the bed to her side. Can’t he see something’s wrong? She’s got the shivers.

  ‘Are you cold, Mol? What’s going on, hey?’

  She takes him by the arm. Why’s he so slow today? She points to Toby. She pulls Pop so he’s in front of her. Then she pushes him from behind, into the bathroom. Toby runs between their legs. Pop looks into the bathroom. What does he see there? She looks past his shoulder. She was right. And Pop was right too. In his dream.

  There lies Gerty, in front of the bath. On the worn old mat made of woven tyre, with a patch of blood in front of her mouth. Sticky threads of spit hang down from her mouth, into the blood. Her lips are raised and you can see her teeth. Her feet are pulled up towards her body, lying at an angle. Her eyes are closed, with white drops in the corners. Her face looks small and her ears are flat. Behind her tail there’s another patch. Blood. Or something darker.

  ‘Ee-ee-ee,’ says Toby.

  ‘See?’ she says.

  ‘Ag no. Ag no,’ says Pop. ‘Please God, no!’

  She feels like a big wave wanting to break in a closed place. She feels like the wave and she feels like the closed place, but she can’t break. The thing struggling to break hurts her chest. She bares her teeth like Gerty.

  ‘Come away there, Toby,’ says Pop. He pulls Toby by his neck, away from Gerty.

  ‘Take Toby, Mol. Put him out the back. You can go sit in the back, too. Leave this to me.’

  ‘No,’ she says. She rubs her eyes.

  ‘She was very old, Mol. And sick. It’s better this way.’

  ‘It’s not,’ she says.

  ‘Go fetch a bag,’ says Pop. ‘Two of the white ones. Those municipality bags.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not a bag.’

  She goes back to the room. Their bed’s in front of her. There she lay, just a minute ago, and she knew it, without knowing she knew it. Pop too. He also knew it, without knowing he knew it. She throws off the blanket. Worn old blanket with a hole in it. It still feels warm to her hands. The sheet too. Still warm from their bodies. She gathers up the sheet, as if she wants to gather together the warmth in there. She holds it in a bundle to her breast and walks back to the bathroom. Her feet feel high and low, all at the same time.

  Pop sits hunched in his shirt in front of Gerty. His knees stick out. His back is bent and knobby.

  ‘Here,’ she says, ‘take the sheet.’

  Pop just looks at her as she stands there. She can see he doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘She’s completely stiff,’ he says. ‘And cold. It must’ve happened early in the night.’

  ‘I heard nothing,’ she says. ‘I always hear.’

  ‘It’s better you heard nothing,’ says Pop. ‘She must’ve struggled terribly.’ He points to the blood. ‘It’s better you slept. There was nothing you could do for her.’

  ‘It was very painful,’ she says.

  ‘She must’ve started coughing again,’ Pop says.

  ‘Coughed herself to death,’ she says. ‘Like Old Mol, in the bathroom.’

  She looks at the bathroom. There’s a brown mark where the tap always drips. Then she looks at the cabinet above the basin. The little door’s open. There’s one small piece of mirror left in the bottom corner. But what’s that strange, dark shape showing in the piece of mirror?

  She looks at the white wall behind Pop’s back. And there she sees the big moth. Its red-brown wings are spread open on the wall. Dead still.

  She shows Pop. He turns around.

  ‘The TB butterfly,’ she says, losing her voice.

  Pop gets up, with the sheet still in his arms. He stands in front of her in his shirt, and then he puts his arms around her. She presses her face into the sheet. She smells all their smells. Gerty too. Gerty was with her when she fell asleep last night. She held her until she began to breathe more calmly. Gerty smelt strange. And bad. Now that smell’s in there. In the sheet. Poor Gerty.

  Suddenly her ears feel deaf.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she hears Pop say. He presses her, and the sheet, against his chest. She feels small in his arms. ‘Poor Mol,’ he says. Yes, poor her. Gerty never left her alone, never ever. Everyone else always leaves her alone when they’re finished with her. Pop too. Lots of times, although his strength’s going now. But Gerty was always there. Gerty was her dog, and she was Gerty’s person. She thinks about Pop’s dream. They were each other’s angels, she and Gerty. Now she feels Pop drop his head on to her shoulder. He also wants to cry. He shakes his head slowly on her shoulder. Lightly, he rocks the two of them. She feels herself give a little. Let them just rock a little here on their feet today. Pop lets out a big sob into her shoulder. She knows what he’s thinking, and she’s thinking the same. No sun or moon making little sparks in their mouths today. Just the salt taste of tears.

  ‘Oh my God, and what do we have here!’ It’s Treppie. He’s coming down the passage in nothing but his shirt.

  ‘Isn’t it a little early for this kind of thing? I say, poochy-smoochy! Let me pass, I have to pee!’

  Treppie pushes past them into the bathroom. ‘Shorrrr’, he pees into the open toilet. As he pees, he looks down to his left, at Gerty.

  ‘Seized up!’ he says. ‘Total systems failure! Complete black-out! So, aren’t you two even going to clean up this mess? Why you standing there like that? Mol, you should’ve put this stinking dog of yours out of her misery a long time ago. Now look what you got.’

  Treppie pushes lightly with his toe against Gerty.

  ‘Sis, yuk, fuck!’ he says, pinching his nostrils with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Please, Treppie,’ says Pop. She sees how Pop motions to Treppie with his eyes, he must stop it now. So now she knows it’s actually her who must please stop crying. She wipes her nose with her hand. Her housecoat that she slept in hangs open in front. Pop reaches out to close it for her. She takes hold of the flaps herself. Now the last button’s also off.

  Treppie makes a face, as if he suddenly understands. He pushes past them again on his way out.

  As he walks away down the passage, he lowers his voice to a deep bass, and then
he sings like Jim Reeves:

  ‘Across the bridge there’s no more sorrow.

  Across the bridge there’s no more pain.’

  Pop’s taking the lead this morning. First he sat her down on a beer crate next to the fridge and now he’s fixing bread for all of them. The water’s boiling on the Primus. Here comes Lambert.

  ‘Bread with honey,’ says Pop. ‘You want some?’

  ‘Huh? Yes, fine. What’s up?’ says Lambert, dragging a crate closer and checking them all out. ‘Huh, what’s going on here this morning?’ he says. ‘You two look like the dogs took your food or something.’

  ‘Gerty’s dead. Here’s some bread for you. Your coffee’s on the table,’ says Pop, sitting down next to her on a crate.

  ‘I see,’ says Lambert. ‘So, what now?’

  ‘Now nothing,’ says Pop. ‘Eat your bread.’

  ‘One man’s bread’s another man’s honey!’ It’s Treppie, standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Don’t I get any?’

  ‘Make your own,’ says Pop. ‘There’s the honey, there’s the knife and there, on your sides, are two arms. You’re man enough and you’ve still got many years left in you.’

  ‘Take that!’ says Lambert, slapping his leg with a flat hand.

  ‘Well, smack me with a wet fish!’ says Treppie. He lifts up his hands, looks at them, and then drops them again. ‘I must be dreaming,’ he says. ‘Come again?’ He cups his hands behind his ears and makes a face like he doesn’t believe what he just heard.

  Everyone ignores him. It’s dead quiet in the kitchen. All you hear is Lambert’s chewing and swallowing. Pop drinks little sips from his cup. Her bread and coffee stand on the floor in front of her. She’s not hungry. Toby sits next to her with his ears pricked. He looks from face to face to see what the people will do next.

  Treppie comes and crouches in front of her, holding his hands against his head, like dog-ears.