In Harare, he reads, the main telephone exchange is so full of cockroaches no one can get through any more. In India, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s going bankrupt ’cause the coolies’ chickens are so thin the Colonel’s secret chicken batter won’t take on those oriental budgies. Never mind the mudslide in the mining town of Harmony. This time he just hopes they’ll give that place its rightful name – No-Leg-to-Stand-On or Slip-’n-’Slide or something like that.
So, all in all, the Benades haven’t got too much to complain about. That’s just the way things go in this world. In-out, on-off, here-there, dirty-clean, dog-dog. Two of each kind in the ark. One continuous two-stroke activity. And so everyone buggers along, living it up, killing time. From the days of the Israelites already.
Take the piece the Jehovah woman was reading just now about the tabernacle’s candlestick. God knows, those desert wankers had lots of free time on their hands! That candlestick thing was so full of bowls and knobs and flowers, totally excessive if you remember a candlestick is actually meant for putting candles in, for light. Six arms, three on each side, and three bowls made like unto almonds on the one arm, plus a bud and a flower. And on the other arm three bowls, plus a bud and a flower. Etfuckencetera. And under each arm as well, and on the candlestick, four bowls made like unto almonds, with their knobs and their flowers. All of it one ‘beaten work’ of ‘pure gold’. And then there were still all those curtains and things, too. Just loops and tassels wherever you look. It’s as if the poor fuckers thought decorations and embroidery could save your soul.
He’ll put his head on a block that redemption is granted to the idle. To those who do completely fuck-all, with an open mind about the comings and the goings. But that’s high-powered stuff. You have to have your wits about you for that. Who’s he anyway to try going big on bugger-all? So he chooses the lesser of the two evils, and that boils down to shit-stirring. Not that his little bit of shit amounts to ‘beaten work’ of ‘pure gold’, but it’s better than nothing. Now and again it’s Quality Street shit and that’s the best he can hope for. For an oke like him, sitting in a place like Triomf, it’s quite good enough. ’Cause to tell the honest truth, Triomf doesn’t even have the redeeming features of a desert. It’s just a dump. Like the rest of Jo’burg, mind you.
But it feels to him like he’s the only one of them who actually clicks this little fact. One by one they trot like sheep after the fire in the cloud. And this fucken sheep-attitude comes a long way in his family.
Like that time all the wagons came through Fordsburg. That was in ’38. His mother still made little bonnets for herself and Molletjie just for the occasion. Genuine Voortrekker bonnets with big flaps in front. Tight around the neck.
That Solly-Jew who did the organising for them at the clothing factories also told them they were mothers of the nation. He told them they were made of the same steel as their descendants who’d trekked over the Drakensberg on bare feet. Clever fucken Jew, that. But of course he had his own Communist plans for them. He just used the regular story that they all knew. Everyone always has plans for them, some or other story. They’ve always been in some fucken person’s plan or story or horizon or background or adventure. Without ever wanting to be in it, or at least without him ever wanting to be in it.
Pop, for example, was completely into that ’38 story. But he was soft in the head even then. They recruited him in the yard at their house in Vrededorp. Made him buy a little waistcoat with a silly white scarf to put around his neck for when the wagons came by. And a hat with the brim turned up on one side. Old Mol still had to go and buy it from the coolies. Pop really fancied himself in those clothes. He spent hours posing in front of the mirror. After a while he even had chicken feathers in the hatband. But he, Treppie, wanted nothing to do with it, even though he was only ten. That was after Old Pop had beaten him to a pulp in the train that time and he didn’t speak to anyone for years on end. Soon afterwards, Old Pop hanged himself. Then he started talking again, but he still didn’t want to sing along when they sang ‘God of Jacob’ and ‘Afrikaners, children of the soil’, which they had to sing all the time in school in those days. Not his scene, that. If ever there was wallpaper, if ever you wanted interior decoration, that was it.
And there they walked down Fordsburg’s Main Street, cracking their whips! Whips with leather knots on the ends that echoed ‘ka-thack!’ among the houses. For crying in a bucket! And the Afrikaner bulls were shitting non-stop – Fordsburg’s Main Street was strewn with shit and the dogs were going berserk from all the strange smells and the commotion. One of those dogs got between the legs of the oxen. He was kicked to death on the spot. Not a good day for a dog. And no one even bothered to pick up the poor thing. He just lay there in the road. Everyone hypnotised by the wagons. High on the Great Trek.
The names of those wagons took the biscuit. Each one more ‘symbolic’ than the next. That was the day he learnt you can make any fucken thing you like ‘symbolic’, from a pisspot to a postbox. It just depends whether you’ve got enough power. Then you can even win an election with a symbolic pisspot. Or a hosepipe or a wheelbarrow or a monkey wrench. It’s all in the mind, anyway.
One wagon was called The Concentration-Camp Nurse. It had a tent pitched on top with its flap thrown open so you could see inside, and there, in the tent, sat the nurse, wearing a black dress buttoned up to the neck, her hair pulled into a tight bun. Her face was powdered completely white, with black rings painted under her eyes and rows of wrinkles drawn on her forehead. On her lap lay a child pretending to be sick unto death. He was made up all purple and yellow so he’d look ghastly and mortally ill. Next to them was an enamel basin for the fake water, and every now and again, when people looked into the tent, the nurse would dip a rag into that fake water and wipe that child acting half-dead on his powdered forehead. Except she couldn’t really wipe his forehead ’cause then she’d wipe off the make-up and the whole scene about the terrible suffering of women and children in the camps would go to glory. So she just dabbed at the air above the child’s forehead.
Now if that’s symbolic then it’s really very silly. That’s what he thought then, and that’s what he still thinks now. People mustn’t try pulling that kind of crap on him. About Jopie Fourie and Racheltjie de Beer and Johanna van der Merwe.
Johanna was also there, with her twenty-one assegai wounds, which you could count, one by one. Big red spots painted all over her body. All she needed next to those ‘wounds’ were some numbers, one to twenty-one in koki pen.
He remembers how that Johanna winked at Pop, with her twenty-one polka dots and all. She’d been placed on a bier, and she lay on her back, with her bonnet and her Voortrekker-dress lying under the wagon’s hood. The flap was left open so you could see her nicely. The heroine, resting at peace after the battle.
And then, just as Pop ducked under the wagon to smear some grease on his scarf – that was the big thing for the little boys that day, getting fake Voortrekker grease on their clothes – just as he did that, she winked and asked him if he didn’t want to take a ride to keep her company. It was so boring lying there on her back in state, under that canopy.
Pop told that story for years afterwards, over and over again. To this day he still tells it. He says he’ll never forget how he rode with Johanna and her assegai wounds in the wagon. He didn’t ask her what her real name was, but he rode along all the way to Braamfontein. When they saw people looking into the tent, Pop made as if he was a young Voortrekker grieving over his beloved, with his head on her chest. That was something he did with great pleasure, he said, ’cause she was ‘a beautiful woman in the prime of her life’. That’s how Pop always tells the story. And what a fluke shot it was that the kaffirs didn’t stab her in her lovely face. That’s also what Pop used to say.
If you ask him, Pop’s a sucker for wallpaper. Nowadays it’s on TV instead of wagons, but nothing has changed about the way Pop sees life. Or how he wants to see life. Ever since the day Pop gave the baked bea
ns a talking to, he’s been getting more and more difficult. The other day he even went and bought Mol a rose bush. Just imagine it – a rose bush with two yellow roses. He drove specially to the nursery just to get it, to the larnies’ nursery in Jan Smuts Avenue. He saw they had cheap roses there on special. Keith Kirsten’s nursery. Going to a place like that was quite a business, he said, but he didn’t mind how far he had to drive as long as it made Mol happy.
He, Treppie, didn’t go. He was at the Chinese. Pop took Lambert with him, and Lambert told them afterwards that people were staring at them so much there among the plants, like they were from Mars or something, that he just went and sat in the car. Pop stayed away for a long time. He was looking for a Whisky Mac. He said he wouldn’t come back before he’d found one. When he did get back, he had a rose bush in his arms and he was smiling from ear to ear. Got that rose completely for nothing, he said. It wasn’t a Whisky Mac. Keithy Boy had never in his life heard of such a thing. But it didn’t matter. The colour was right.
The people at the nursery wanted him out of there, he said, so they said here, take it and leave. And then of course it was a whole palaver again, ’cause Mol started crying when she saw that rose bush. It was 17 January, her birthday. Pop had remembered it for the first time in ten years.
If you ask him, Mol will say any day in January is her birthday. Their IDs have been locked away in the sideboard for so long now that none of them remembers exactly when their birthday is. They know more or less. Everyone except Lambert, who knows exactly. Twenty-sixth April. And that’s something none of them must ever forget, otherwise there’s shit to play. But they know their own birthdays only by month. His birthday is sometime in November, and Pop’s is in May. It’s a long time since they did anything about it.
Then of course that rose bush needed planting, but Pop was so tired he couldn’t lift a finger. Lambert said when he dug holes it was for petrol, not flowers. So Mol got on to his case. He, Treppie, must plant the rose bush. Pop even had a list of instructions from Keith-Buy-Now-Flower-Later about how to make holes for rose bushes. This wide, this deep, then you mix this, that and the other into the ground, with so much water and with this spray for that insect and he didn’t know what else. He told Mol this rose bush would bring her nothing but misery. And then she really started crying.
It’s almost a month now, and that rose bush still hasn’t been planted. He sees Mol watering it every morning in its black plastic. It’s getting yellow underneath. Why she doesn’t just dig the bladdy thing into the ground somewhere he doesn’t know. She’s got two hands of her own, after all. When she gets into the mood, she walks around the yard with that rose bush all day long, asking everyone where must she plant it, in heaven’s name, where?
Pop says in front, next to the postbox. Lambert says no, at the back, next to the fig tree. That’s the only other plant in the yard. He, Treppie, says nowhere. Toby pees all over the place and she should wait until Toby’s also in heaven before she starts fiddling with roses.
Then Mol just wants to start crying all over again. The older she gets, the more she cries. It makes him feel like his guts are tied up in knots. Then he spins her a lot of crap about how roses never die in heaven, especially not from dog-piss, and how the heavenly roses have different colours and fragrances, all on the same bush. The more the divine dogs pee on them, the more colours and fragrances they get. He embroiders one never-ending story for her until she shuts up and gets that silly smile on her face again. Then she puts the rose down in the shadow of the kitchen door, still in its plastic.
And that’s where it’s still standing, today, among all the stuff Lambert carries in and out of the house all the time as he tries to get through his list. So much rubbish. Next to the rose bush on the one side lies the bathroom cabinet, the one Lambert ripped right off the wall the other day when the mirror didn’t fit. And next to that, a few odd planks Lambert wants to use for a bigger and better bathroom cabinet. Always wants to be bigger and better, that’s Lambert for you. On this side of the kitchen, three used-up Dogmor tins and a crate of empties. And on the other side, three old GTX tins and a box of empty Klipdrift bottles. Also very symbolic, if you ask him, of how they struggle by the sweat of their brows to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s and get the little mirror mirroring on the wall. Then there’s Lambert’s old bed, with its imploded legs and its exploded stuffing, pushed up against the other wall. He wants to fix it, he says. And the bathroom’s burglar-bars, which didn’t want to fit so nicely after they’d used them to braai their T-bones at Christmas. Lambert says they got twisted in the heat, so now he wants to bend them straight again. Just proves his point, it’s never too late to build a tabernacle.
The latest is that he wants to paint the house. Now it looks like 127
Martha Street has to be painted snow white for the fucker’s birthday. And as the devil would have it, they found a letter in the postbox about painting houses the other day, with a golden stamp in the middle and a number under the stamp. At the bottom of the letter they found a list of numbers, including their own, which meant they could have three thousand rand worth of free paint – a little present from Wonder Wall for the New Year. That’s what Lambert read there. And then he started going on and on about the paint until Pop filled in their address and everything to say yes, please, they’d be happy to accept the free paint. Lambert posted it the same day, like the letter said he must. He, Treppie, didn’t even get to see it. He was at the Chinese. They only told him about it later, and then he asked them if they’d read the fine print. This was going to cause shit. But they didn’t even know what fine print meant. Fat lot they know! Then, just a few days later, the shit arrived in the form of a little man in a striped shirt and a tie full of flowers. He measured the house with a little wheel that he pushed around by a handle. The ceilings too. He asked for a ladder and he climbed on to the roof, measuring: ‘katarra! katarra!’ all over the corrugated sheets. Pop and Mol and Lambert were at Shoprite, and so there he sat, all alone. Him and the man and his little wheel with its little meter, measuring their house inside, outside and on top.
The man took out his Wonder Wall letter and showed him the signature on the dotted line. He asked if Treppie knew whose signature it was. That’s when he should’ve said, no, he didn’t. But the man looked him straight in the face and so he said, yes, it was his brother’s signature. The man said, no well, fine. If it was a close relation, then he, Treppie, could sign these other papers while his brother was out. The man pulled out a long paper with three carbon copies, all of them so full of fine print it would’ve taken three days to read. Please just sign, here, here and here, he said. It was a mere formality, just to say yes, they confirmed they wanted free paint to the value of three thousand rand. He told the man he should leave one of those carbon copies behind so his brother could go through it, but the man was already halfway out the door and he said the carbon would come when they delivered the paint. It would take a month or two, ’cause they had so many pledges they couldn’t keep up. Next thing, whoosh, he was gone in his Uno.
Pledges, he thought, but what had they actually pledged? They won some paint with the right number under the gold stamp. That was all. Why would you want to pledge anything if you’d won something? Unless it was your faith in Wonder Wall. He could swear there was a fucken snag of sorts somewhere.
To tell the truth, that wasn’t the worst of it. What made him feel really sad were all those thousands of metres the man clocked up on his little wheel. All of it painted white, pure white, without a trace of their comings or goings.
He looks at the bathroom. The man measured in here too. It would make for a bit of an unsociable shit if paint was the only thing you could smell around here. He knows every little mark and crack in this room. In fact, if there’s one room in this house he can call his own, it’s the toilet. This is where he catches his breath, and this is where he figures out what’s what and who’s next. It’s the place where he scratches the monkey
for fleas, as Pop always says when he stays inside for so long. Well, whether or not it’s fleas he doesn’t know, all he knows is that it’s a necessity.
Treppie looks around in the bathroom. There’s the soft rubber tube they use for siphoning petrol on a nail behind the door. Their toothbrushes, warped and lopsided, in the little blue plastic glass on the shelf. His and Pop’s and Lambert’s razors, on the window ledge. And Mol’s hairbrush, so full of caked, grey hair you almost can’t see the brush any more. Three bent-open hairpins. Two buttons.
In the same way, you’ll find their personal effects all over the house. Their spit and their blood and their breath. And paw marks, all over the walls.
Yellow afternoon light shines through the bathroom’s frosted window, making a dull spot of light on the wall. Just there, someone’s oily hand touched the wall. Must’ve been Lambert. King Kong was here.
What the hell, what will be, will be. From high-gloss to matt-finish in the space of a single lifetime. Maybe it’s also not such a bad thing, after all. With every face-lift you lose something, but what have they got to lose in any case? Not exactly what you’d call museum pieces. Just the collected works of wear and tear. The little bits of baggage from the Benades’ Great Trek, full of dirty marks. Burnt black, caked up, flopped out, moth-eaten, unstitched, sticky and rusted, with dog-hair on everything too.
Not quite wallpaper, this. And by no means a tabernacle. Just the blues of 127 Martha Street. The fine print of fuck-all. The dregs of Triomf!
Would you believe it! And he’s sober as a judge. His guts must be full of gas. At least it’s a case of self-generated intoxication. Not like the hot air and the fine-tuning that gives Pop his kicks.
Take for example how Pop and Mol fell, hook, line and sinker, for Malan’s story in ’48. Another Great Trek story. This time it was on the wireless. Old Mol was no longer with them. Just the three of them sitting around the kitchen table in Vrededorp. He still remembers saying blah-blah-blah when that flat-mouthed old toad in a hat began croaking about the election. About how his party, the ‘Purified’ National Party, was depending on everyone to bring the Great Trek to its logical ‘conclusion’. Pure, undiluted shit! How his party would lead them through this new Great Trek, through all its ditches and drifts and its risks and dangers. And how his party would fend off every threat, how it would destroy the enemies at the Blood River of the labour market, fighting to the bitter end. Because this time it wasn’t a Great Trek upcountry to escape the English, he said, this time it was the rural Afrikaner’s Great Trek to the cities, and for those who were already there, the poor and the reviled, it was the Great Trek to the higher professions and big capital.
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