Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  Come again, he said. It was a Great Trek back under the English yoke. Only now the yoke had a drill-bit and its name was Anglo. But Pop and Mol told him he must shuddup, they wanted to listen.

  How they listen, if anything gets said about the Great Trek, the Promised Land, Everyone-Together-Through-Thick-And-Thin. How they listen!

  Whether that place is full of milk and honey or full of petrol and oil and bricks and mine dumps, it makes no difference. And if, on top of it all, the voice promising everything sounds like a preacher, then they’re all ears. Fired up. Ready for take-off.

  That’s why Mol thinks that Niehaus chappy from the ANC with his bedroom eyes is such a together little boykie. She says he reminds her a lot of Malan. In that case, he tells her, she should vote for the ANC, but she says not a damn will she vote for the kaffirs. Then he asks her, but what about Niehaus, he’s a white oke? In that case, she says, maybe she will vote for the ANC after all, ’cause Niehaus looks to her like the kind of leader you can follow with complete trust to the bitter end. What’s more, he looks like a man who’d follow his own leaders to the bitter end, come hell or high water, and that’s enough for her. Then it feels like the National Party.

  Ja, the poor fools, it feels like. He wonders if the leaders of that party feel like anything to themselves, never mind National. When he tries to imagine what they feel like, he detects the stirrings of a bowel movement. And that’s a fucken compliment, ’cause they’re not even worth a good shit. Liars and thieves with their hands on their hearts. The plural lying party, here a coup, there a coup, meanwhile they’re cooped up with their own kind all the time, grabbing each other’s balls. State ball. A dance for this one and a dance for that one. Here a gun, there a prayer. Excuse me while I waltz all the way to the Nobel Prize.

  Now it’s supposed to be ‘New’ National Party. New be damned. Turning their own ‘foreign’ partners back into internal affairs, digging out the bombs they planted themselves, firing their own big shots, and then state enemy number one becomes the state’s redeeming partner. Teach the Bushmen aerobics, give the Koevoets cabbages to plant. And they call it new! It’s not new, it’s the same old rubbish recycled under a new name. But the rubbish itself is a brandless substance. Nameless horror in sackcloth of hair, if you ask him.

  That’s why he egged Lambert on to start throwing stones at those two new NPs the other day. They thought they could come here again with their crap in the middle of the day. Lambert was digging his petrol cellar, so he had lots of ammunition to hand. Old Sof’town’s bricks for stoning the new NPs. He hopes that was now a permanent removal. Those boy scouts couldn’t get away from here fast enough, ducking all the way. It’s a good thing they weren’t NPs from the old school, ’cause they would’ve stood their ground and took it like men. Good old times. Now they duck for a living. He’s seen on TV how things are going in the townships. That’s where they’ve learnt to become such experts in the art of ducking. Think they can barge in wherever they like. And now they scheme they’re suddenly good enough for the red-carpet treatment. Long live the Ducking Party. And so the pendulum swings. If FW learns the art of ducking in Meadowlands, then you can be sure old Meddlebones is coming back to Triomf to reminisce. It’s taken a long time, but now he, Treppie, has finally clicked this mathematics of history.

  So when Mol let out a yelp one day last November, and called them to come see, Mandela was driving down the road in an open car, but he’d turned white overnight and he was wearing a black dress, he, Treppie, knew exactly who it was. And there stood the old dog-collar, in a black limousine, with a whole bunch of other Roman doggos in red and purple dresses in the cars behind him. They were smiling so much you saw nothing but teeth. He recognised him by his hair, still shaved close like in the old days when he used to run around here trying to save what there was to be saved. But now he was very old. He looked like a little powdered peach and he was smiling all the way down memory lane. Pointing here, pointing there with his shaky little hand, like he was sprinkling holy water, with everyone looking where he was pointing. And right at the end of the procession, on an open lorry, rode His Holiness Huddlestone’s private band. They were playing full tilt, jolly jiving music on saxophones and penny-whistles and things like that. The whole band was full of old-timers with hanging dewlaps from all the blowing, but they followed their lead player, who was blowing like mad on his little trumpet. AFRICAN JAZZ PIONEERS, it said in stencilled letters on the lorry. That lorry was swaying on its wheels from the way they were pulling and pushing those shiny, long arms on the trombones. ‘Viva Kofifi!’ one old bloke was shouting. ‘You are the captain!’ another one called. And then everyone sang a song for that papier mâché captain, standing there in front, pointing over the roofs of Triomf as if they were a tempest-tossed ocean. Was he imagining things, or did he even start liking him? He had the gift of the gab, and if there’s one thing you need to survive with a dress and a collar round your neck in this country, then it’s being able to talk yourself in or out of anything.

  He’s still got the man’s speech from the newspaper. That was now truly a priceless piece. About the way Sophiatown used to look in the old days, how it was a place you could ‘look up to’, with its ‘grey-blue haze’ of fire smoke ‘against a saffron sky’. And the little red-roofed houses on top of each other, how it always made him think of Italy, and the ‘shapely blue gum trees’ all over the place. There you have it! But the closing line was the best, about the Church of Christ the King on the hill, its steeple visible from afar, north-south-east-west, ‘riding like a great ship’. Now there’s a tapestry for you. Stitched together with lovely words.

  That’s his fucken end, this endless fucking with words. In this country everything’s got a name which is actually something else’s name. Pik Botha, Vleis Visagie, Slang van Zyl, Brood van Heerden. And just look at their own names. Pop’s truly never had any pop in him. And Mol can try as much as she likes, she’ll never push up a molehill. And if one considers that her real name is Martha, one could dub her Martha Street’s presently serving Martha. But that’s an altogether different kind of service and a different kind of Martha from the story in the Bible that the Jehovahs always want to read. Of all of them, only Lambert’s name sounds like something. Lambertus Benade. It sounds like an ambassador or someone like that, with a carnation in his buttonhole. But anyone can see that’s more than a misnomer, it’s a fucken miscarriage. His own name is a total fuck-up. Nothing left of Martinus, and according to Mol he should rather have been named Judas Iscariot. That’s also okay. Where would her soul have been without Judas, he asks her.

  That’s not even to mention their dogs, who end up being named after streets. Toby and Gerty. He read somewhere that the streets here in Triomf were named after the children of the man who used to own the farm on which Sophiatown was built. Bertha and Toby and Gerty and Edith. And Sophia was supposed to have been the man’s wife. Then, just for the hell of it, he checked in the Britannica, and it said something about Holy Sophia being the name of a church in Turkey with a dome that looked like heaven.

  For shitting through an icing tube, where will it all end? The whole world is just names and nothing is what it is and everything’s what it’s not, it’s all in the mind! And the mind’s a bottomless pit.

  Legion as the Gadarene swine are the names of things, and then they all fall down in droves into that steep place, one on top of the other. A loose scrum in the depths. Not worth the breath it takes to utter them, never mind the paper they’re written on.

  Treppie kicks the newspapers away. He throws them around a few at a time. Papers fly all over the bathroom. Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul!

  He’s fed up with the whole business, fed up, sick and tired of it all. Words swim before his eyes. Names whirl around in his head.

  He folds the newspapers double and throws them up against the ceiling. ‘Kaboof! Kaboof!’

  The Freedom Front’s got lead in its head. Hells bells in the house of Shell. And G
oldstone’s teeth are but few. See how the train rides, how the train rides, all aboard the gravy train. Civil Co-operaton Chowder. Consensus-Atlantis-hortus-conclusus. The apple of his father’s eye, his mother’s darling, Sophia-Maria-Maryna, pretty girls in a row.

  Noises start coming from his body. Hark the mighty roars. They hold much promise.

  He feels his guts moving. Swing low, sweet chariot. Blessed is the stool’s motion, happy in its peals, its psalms to the end of all meals. He tears the newspaper into small pieces. He’s making confetti. Triomf, Triomf, here comes the bride, big, fat and wide.

  He wipes his arse. Truly, when this happens, it feels like the seventh day, the day of rest. Emptied and unburdened. Everything well. Peace on earth.

  18

  TRIOMF TRIALS

  FAMILY BIBLE

  Mol sits in her chair, sewing the middle button back on to her housecoat. The old button got lost, so she’s using one of Pop’s shirt-buttons that she found in the bathroom cabinet. It’s smaller, which means she’ll have to close up the buttonhole on the one side. But she doesn’t mind, it keeps her busy. When she’s not busy, she worries too much.

  Lambert hasn’t set foot out of his den for three days now. Only a few minutes ago she went and took a peek at him. They told her she mustn’t bother him.

  He’s sitting there with clean hands in front of his work bench, on a straight-backed chair that he fixed himself. He’s studying the refrigeration book. From first page to last. With a pencil in his hand and a Croxley exercise book. The two mugs of Frisco that Pop put down next to him look like they’re cold, and the ants are eating his polony sandwich.

  ‘He still hasn’t eaten or drunk a thing,’ says Pop, coming back from the den and sitting down in his chair next to her.

  It’s Treppie’s book, which he lent Lambert after Pop begged him, on his hands and knees, in God’s name, to please help out a bit with Lambert.

  If Lambert didn’t get those two fridges in his den up and running before his birthday, Pop said, then Treppie would still live to see the most terrible butchery with long knives ever seen in the long history of the Benades.

  At first, Treppie was completely bloody minded.

  Lambert would never use a sharp object, he said. Pop’s knowledge of human nature was failing him. Lambert was the kind of person who would definitely use a blunt instrument.

  And sometimes, he said, as in the case of seals who bred too much, maybe that was the best thing for an environment’s balance.

  How a thing like the environment could have trouble with its balance, like a tightrope walker, is beyond her. When she asked Treppie, he said balance wasn’t just a circus trick, it was the trick of life itself, except the Benades had never yet got the hang of it. But it was never too late to learn.

  In fact, he said, Lambert should consider a general culling of the Triomf population while he was at it with his blunt instrument. The blunter the better, he said, like a pestle in a mortar, to stamp some national blood into the soil. A little blood would do the soil in Triomf no end of good, ’cause nothing exhausted a place like old bricks.

  Pop begged and pleaded. It was so bad he even called up the memory of Old Pop after a while. Right here in the lounge. Pop went down on his knees, spreading out his arms with a bottle of Klipdrift in one hand. Right in front of the TV, like he wanted to embrace the Big One.

  Was it Old Pop’s lost and homeless spirit tormenting them like this, year in and year out? he asked. Was it because Treppie had never forgiven Old Pop for that terrible hiding? Well, no one’s ever told her how you’re supposed to talk to a ghost, but Pop sounded like he knew how, ’cause he came out with some terribly high-flown language.

  Oh troubled spirit, Pop said, his eyes rolling in his head, wilt thou not have mercy on us, thou who lurkest in the dark corners of empty coal trucks. And as thou holdest thy hand on thy neck, where death lashed thee, wilt thou not, we beseech thee, if a sacrifice is brought in the year of Our Lord, 1994, soften thy heart towards us? A sacrifice by the same child who since his eighth year hath refused to speak to thee and given thee no place in his heart whatsoever.

  It was never too late, Pop said, for a living person to reconcile himself with a spirit who couldn’t come to rest because he was upset about that person.

  Well, after that Treppie’s mouth dried up completely and he went and sat in his room behind a closed door for days on end.

  Then it was suddenly so quiet in the lounge that she sat in her chair with nothing but fear in her heart. You could say she sat for days on end, ’cause the only time she ever got up was to give her rose some water, or to put her ear to Pop’s mouth to see if he was still breathing. She’d once heard about people who sink into a state of near-death, and that’s exactly what Pop looked like. It was from getting so worked up and tired and drinking three times more Klipdrift than he was used to. When she held that old piece of mirror to his mouth she could see only the merest wisp of breath. It was the last piece, the one she hid in her housecoat pocket when she saw Lambert was about to smash the new mirror to pieces.

  Never before had there been such deathly quiet in the lounge. It felt eerie, sitting in silence like that.

  It was also very quiet at the back, but that was a different kind of silence.

  Every now and again terrible bangs or shots went off, with big chunks of quiet inbetween. Or things fell over so hard all the walls in the house started shaking.

  It was almost like a big, wild thing was busy waking up in his cage after being shot with a dart, like those darts they shoot into the backsides of rhinoceroses when they’re put to sleep.

  The problem was, she knew Lambert didn’t have a dart in his backside, and if something didn’t happen fast he was going to break out of his cage and come get them all, one by one, tearing them up piece by piece until there was nothing left.

  So, under the circumstances, it was like mercy from above when Treppie came out of his room with his thick refrigeration book in both hands, looking terribly formal and serious.

  Treppie’s treated that book like the holy scripture all his life. He bought it when they first moved to Triomf, when he still had plans to get rich from fridges.

  No one was allowed to look in that book and no one except him could touch it. If Pop or Lambert or a customer wanted to know something about fridges, then Treppie would go into his room and, behind closed doors, look in his book. He’d come out a bit later and tell them exactly what the book said, on page this or page that, about this, that, or the other thing.

  There Treppie stood, with that book in his hands. He said Pop must wake up now so he could go fetch Lambert. He wanted to say what he needed to say in front of witnesses.

  It was for everyone’s sake, Treppie said, and for the sake of the spirits too.

  Pop rose out of his deathly sleep and shuffled like a sleepwalker with eyes that stood stock-still in their sockets, while sickening bangs and crashes came from Lambert’s den.

  She still thought, ja, there was Pop rising from one kind of death and walking with open eyes into the jaws of another.

  Treppie held the book to his chest and stood there with his head cocked to one side so he could hear Pop walking down the passage.

  Toby was also in a state. He went and sat in the lounge doorway with pricked ears, shifting his front paws excitedly. First he’d turn round to look at her, and then he’d look at Treppie again, his mouth opening and closing all the time. That Toby was so scared he almost began talking right here in the lounge that day.

  Pop came back and sat down in his chair.

  ‘He’s coming. Get ready.’

  She saw Treppie take the empty Klipdrift bottle by the neck. Pop felt under his chair for the small toolbox, pulling it out in front of his feet, and she took cover behind her chair, holding on to the back-rest. She told Toby he must come stand next to her. Toby came and sat down with his head turned up, as if to say, what now?

  And then Lambert entered. He was black with oil
and grease, and he had open wounds all over his body. It looked like something had burnt right through his T-shirt. His eyes were swollen and red. His one hand was trembling slightly and his feet looked like they’d been boiled. And he stank to high heaven. It was an odour like burnt hair and pee, along with that sharp, sour smell that floats over from the factories.

  ‘Compressor burn-out,’ said Treppie, walking slowly around Lambert with the bottle in one hand and the book held tightly to his chest. Shame, he looked that poor Lambert up and down the way someone would inspect a broken engine in a scrapyard.

  ‘Sour oil,’ he said, fanning his nose.

  He plucked at the sleeves of Lambert’s T-shirt. ‘Blown-out windings,’ he said.

  Then he cupped his hand behind his ear and put his head to Lambert’s stomach, as if he was listening to the sound of his insides. Lambert just stood there, dead still, with those mad eyes of his.

  ‘Rattles and hums and harmonic vibrations,’ Treppie said.

  Then Treppie knocked himself a shot on the head with the bottle and rolled his eyes. He looked very strange, like he was on stage and he wanted to start crying or something.