He’s alone. When those big machines began zooming and revving through their cycles, from warm-up to stand-by and ready to blast, his mother took Toby in her arms and shouted to Treppie she was going to wait outside in the car until it was all over. By then Treppie had been on the toilet for a long time already. He saw him go in there with a stack of newspapers, enough for a week’s reading. Even before the noise started, Treppie had begun swearing and growling. Now, he said, he was officially withdrawing from Operation Whitewash. And he wouldn’t mind if the bathroom didn’t get painted either, ’cause then at least there’d be one place left in the house he could still call home.
Fuck, the noise is so bad now it’s hurting his ears. And the paint fumes make him want to choke. But he has a very good reason for being here. When they were throwing sheets over the wardrobe in Treppie’s room just now, three little keys fell on to the floor. The workers brought the keys to him; he was the only one they could still find in the house. The key to the trunk, the key to the cupboard and the key to the sideboard, which his mother had wanted from Treppie just two days ago so she could take out the stag bowls. That key also opens the top drawer – forbidden territory for as long as he can remember. The only time he’s ever seen it slide open has been when Treppie decides that he wants to open the drawer. And Treppie hides that key in a different place every time, to make sure ‘curiosity won’t kill the cat’. The only thing he’s ever seen coming out of that drawer is Old Pop’s mouth organ. Each time, Treppie asks Pop to play a song ‘from days gone by’.
But there’s more than just a mouth organ in that drawer. Without a doubt.
Whenever he’s begged Treppie to look in there, Treppie just says: What the eye doesn’t see, the heart can’t grieve for.
It’s a double bind, he always says, ’cause what lies in that drawer is the key to his, Lambert’s, existence. But he’s convinced that if he, Lambert, were to see what’s inside there, he’d fit himself to death on the spot. So what’s the use? It’s not the kind of information that a dead fit can put to any good use, neither for himself nor for anyone else. That’s always been Treppie’s last word on the topic, and after that all he would do was give a whole long string of devil’s winks.
But it hasn’t been Treppie alone who’s stopped him from breaking open that drawer, many times over. What really stopped him, in the past, was Pop’s face when he put that old mouth organ to his mouth, cupping his hands around its sides as if he were trying to suck some sweetness out of a thing with a red peel, although what he got wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. It was almost as if he wanted to taste something different, something beyond bread and polony, beyond their house and their car, beyond the whole of Triomf. Ambrosia, as Treppie would put it. It’s as if Pop wants to say: I’ll taste what I want to taste, it’s not of this world and I don’t give a damn about the aftertaste.
Whatever it is inside that drawer, it’s always felt like the part the Witnesses read about the stuff inside the Ark of the Covenant. You never know what it is. All you know about are the cloths and the rings and the sockets and so on. And the girdles outside and the candlesticks with seven arms and all the carrying across the desert.
That’s why he’s kept a distance from the drawer all these years. If he ever finds out what’s inside there, he’s always schemed, then he’ll have to carry it through the back-streets. On his shoulders in Triomf, for the rest of his life.
But today he couldn’t give a shit. Not after his birthday. Not after that whole fuck-up.
So when the man in the white overalls held out the keys to him, and said, ‘These fell from somewhere,’ he replied, ‘Hey, thanks, man, they fell from heaven, I’ve been looking for them all my life.’ And when the man asked, ‘So, can I leave them in your safekeeping?’, he answered, ‘But of course, they are the keys to our family treasures, I’m in the shit if I lose them again.’
Then that man laughed a strange little laugh which he very quickly swallowed again. He must’ve seen it was no fucken joke to be holding the key to your existence in your own two hands.
So, today’s the day he’s going to unlock this drawer. All around him the painters are busy on their second coat. Wonder Wall’s paint is ‘quickdrying’, the papers said, ‘matt-white’ and ‘quick-drying’. Like pistons in white sleeves the arms of the painters go up and down as they paint. He looks at the things under the sheets in the middle of the room. He knows them by their shapes: Treppie’s crate, his crate, Pop’s chair, his mother’s chair, the TV, the toolbox. And then there’s the sideboard, with its riffled edge in front.
Lambert works his way in amongst all the stuff. The little key sweats in his hand. It’s the flat one with a round head and a little hole in the middle. He opens his hand and sniffs it. The iron smell is still there, right through the paint fumes. The other two keys he’s put in his shorts pocket. Treppie must just keep shitting for all he’s worth now. But if he does come out, then he’ll see him right, just like that. He’s not scared of Treppie any more. After forty there’s nothing Treppie can say to make him feel small any more. Treppie’s tools and Treppie’s book and Treppie’s keys are all his now. Treppie’s a dead duck.
It’s only Pop. He can feel Pop’s eyes on him somehow, but Pop’s not here. He must be outside, sitting with Mol in the car. Pop’s become very touchy lately. Must’ve found the noise in here too much. At the voting this morning, when the man took Pop’s right hand and pulled it across the table so he could spray his invisible ink, Pop’s arm came out of his sleeve in such a strange way – like the hand was coming right off his arm. Nothing but skin and bone. The point of his nose was white and he was shaking, too. His mother said Pop took so long to vote she started thinking he’d given up the ghost right there in his little booth. Treppie said she was worried for nothing. The whole Transitional Executive Council had Pop by the short and curlies. He knew he had to vote for volk and vaderland.
He lifts the sheet covering the sideboard. Chairs and things stick into his back, but he doesn’t want to shift too much furniture around now. He just gives Pop’s old boots a bit of a shove. They’re sticking out from under the sheet. Jesus, but they’re heavy.
He unlocks the drawer. The little fitting around the keyhole came off a long time ago and where it used to be the wood’s discoloured. He notices he’s short of breath. He rubs behind his neck. What ghost is breathing down his neck now? No, he mustn’t think about that kind of thing.
The mouth organ is lying right in the front of the drawer. He knows it well. It was his grandfather’s mouth organ. Old Pop, they call him.
He remembers, once, how Pop sat and played ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, but then Treppie came and messed around with him again. He said Pop mustn’t sit there like that and tell lies with a straight face. And he mustn’t start imagining all kinds of things about his family tree, either. Pop’s family tree, he said, was a tree full of hillbillies without any music in their bones. He said Pop might be the musical one in the family, but that was only ’cause Pop’s father hadn’t hit him the way Treppie’s father had hit him. And if Pop didn’t believe it, he should ask Mol – she still remembered how their father had disciplined him, out of the love of his heart, so he’d at least achieve more in life than to sit and play ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ over and over again.
Well, now he’s going to find out what goes for what in this house, and whose father is whose father and what’s a hillbilly in a tree with music in his bones.
’Cause if there’s one thing that has to come to an end now, then it’s Treppie’s fucken bullshit-stories. He says he lies for the sake of truth, the shit. He says it’s a paradox. He once heard Pop say to Treppie that whatever it was, para-this or para-that, if you couldn’t convey the truth with a pure heart, then it didn’t count for the truth, anyway. Then of course all hell broke loose. Treppie said Pop was mixing up truth with goodness, and if there were two things under the sun that were further apart than chalk and cheese, it was those two, and did he
, Pop, want Treppie to start telling lies now, just to spare people their pain and sorrow? Pop said if he wanted to put it that way, then his answer was yes, and he, Treppie, would be terribly dirtied and infected by sin if his own answer was no.
‘Infected! Infected!’ Treppie shouted. Was Pop trying to tell him God was a bath full of Dettol-water for washing off the germ of being human?
When those two start on God and stuff, it doesn’t take long before Treppie goes completely berserk. He starts swearing and performing up and down the passage. But it’s not just for show, like when you can’t get the lawn-mower started or the postbox won’t stay on its pole any more.
Then it’s for real.
He’s already seen how Toby, and Gerty too, when she was still alive, used to hide behind the bathroom door with their ears flat against their heads. And his mother would sink on to her knees, right there where she was standing on the loose blocks in the lounge, or on the lino in the kitchen.
Pray, Treppie would shout at her, conceited fucken old cunt, who did she think she was? Did she think she could talk to someone and he’d listen? That almighty tinpot of a God sitting up there welding time together all by himself? Hearing deaf, that’s what he was! ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ There he sat, slamming the moon and the sun like pot lids over our heads. Did she think he had a beard and saucer ears like Father Christmas or someone? Forget it, Mother Superior, forget it! She should listen to the way her heart beats in her chest. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ Buggered by Lucky Strikes! That’s what He sounded like! Just look what God’s Providence had wrought over time, creasing the wattles on her throat, weighing down her old gut and cracking the soles of her old feet – being one of the chosen had worn her out good and proper! The whole lot of them in this house, first they were young with God and now they were old with God. God-infested to the back of their teeth! Meanwhile, up there He just kept running down like a king-size bobbin, back and forth like a shunting train. Like the ants, up and down, up and down. If you stepped on him he’d stink like a Parktown Prawn. All he could do was kick up heaps with his back paws. Molehills! Molehills! Molehills!
One day, when things were going like this and Treppie was shouting and screaming, Pop took a swing and connected him a shot just under the chin. Treppie went down like a bag of cement. Out like a candle on the flat of his back, in the passage.
That was the only time he’s ever seen Pop cry. Pop’s tears come very easily, and he’s always got that drop hanging from his nose. The essence of life, Treppie calls it. But that day, when Pop took hold of Treppie under the arms and dragged him away to his room, Pop was folded over double from crying. His tears were dripping on to Treppie’s face, so it looked like Treppie was also crying as he lay there, lights-out.
Pop had tears for Africa, his mother said. Then she looked at him and said he, Lambert, was born in tears and received in tears, never mind sin, and maybe one day she’d tell him what was what, otherwise he’d never understand why they were the way they were in this house.
Well, she waited too long. Now it’s tickets with ‘one day’. One day is today. Today he’ll know what’s what.
The paint machines suddenly sound louder outside. Something falls ‘bam!’ on the roof.
He puts the mouth organ down on top of the sideboard, on the folds of the white sheet. His legs have gone to sleep from sitting in front of the drawer. He gets up. It’s hot. Must be all the closed windows. He pulls the drawer further out. Something sticks. He gives it a hard pull. The thing comes out, with a dent on the one side. It looks like a pair of goggles made from a thin piece of tin with a little arm in front. Here’s a little handle sliding on a groove in the arm. He can shift the handle. He shifts it up and down. What the fuck? He reads the letters on the goggles. Viewmaster.
Where’s he heard that before? He’s heard his mother say it: Viewmaster. But she’s like that, she says funny stuff at odd moments. Light blue, my beloved, she said to the postbox one day. Or was that Pop? Soft in the head, both of them. When she sees a moth she says TB butterfly. Must be thinking of the J&B butterfly on the whisky advert. She can’t tell TV apart from real life any more. He’s told her so, but Treppie says it’s a highly justified attitude, that, ’cause what else is the world if not one huge sitcom? Then Treppie tells one of his stories about corpses. Like when the Germans put dead babies into their BMWs so they could crash-test them to see if they were sufficiently roadworthy and people-friendly. Some things never change, Treppie says, but after the BMW story, ‘post-mortem’ is a completely new concept to him. Then he kills himself laughing and his mother says she really doesn’t see what’s so funny.
Lambert sees how the painters all around him are starting to climb down from their ladders. He’ll have to start hurrying up now. But then he sees them tying hankies over their mouths with little strings, like doctors before they do operations. Each one clamps a big spray-can on to his back. They climb back up their ladders and start spraying a fine, white mist on to the walls. That must be the matt of the matt-white. In the drawer he sees a pack of pictures held together with an elastic band. Old and faded black-and-white pictures. Underneath each one it says Viewmaster and something else that’s too small to read.
He puts a picture into the groove and moves the handle up and then down again until he can see what’s what through the magnifying glass of the goggles. Now what’s this got to do with the price of eggs, he wonders. Buckingham Palace, he reads. The Changing of the Guard. He tries another one. The Queen Mother, with Windsor Castle in the Background. He looks through them quickly, till he gets to Royal Picnic at Balmoral, where the queen sits on a blanket among her dogs, holding a boiled egg in her hand. No, fuck! This is definitely not the key to his existence! He puts the Viewmaster down on the sideboard, next to the mouth organ.
He scratches deeper in the drawer. Lots of old papers and other rubbish. Their IDs fall out from a plastic bag. He saw Treppie putting them back in here after the voting this morning. That must have been when he left the little key out, and the other ones too. He was in too much of a hurry to go catch his shit! That’s what comes from being in a hurry to shit. Quickly, he pages through their IDs. Lambertus Benade, Martha Benade, Martinus Benade. That’s Treppie. Once or twice, when they all go to fetch their pensions, and him his disability, he’s asked them how come Pop’s also a Benade. And each time Pop explains that he’s from the Cape Benades and Mol and Treppie are from the Transvaal Benades. Their forefather must’ve been the same old Dutchman or Frenchman, but if they were family, then it was very distant family. And in any case, Pop said, it made things easier, like getting the house in Triomf, ’cause in those days families used to get slightly bigger houses than other people. So they lied a bit, saying they were two brothers and a sister plus her illegitimate child from she doesn’t know where any more. But that was all just a lie for the sake of a roof over their heads. He, Lambert, was really Pop and Mol’s love-child, the one she was already expecting when they got married in Vrededorp in nineteen-whenever. And then Pop always tells the story about Treppie’s speech at the wedding, when he talked about the holiness of matrimony and sowing the seed of the watermelon.
Love-child! You wouldn’t say it if you saw how they treat him! If he gets iron, it’s scrap iron. If he gets a girl, it’s a darky. If he gets meat, it’s polony.
Lambert feels his tail-end starting to jerk. He wonders if it’s his conscience that sits there, ’cause it’s not just them, it’s him too. He knows he treats them roughly sometimes. But he supposes once a Benade always a Benade, as his mother says. They’re past praying for, as his father says. Same difference.
Lambert scratches around in the drawer among all the papers. His hands touch a wooden frame somewhere at the bottom. An old family picture. It shows the outside of a house, with a wire gate and bricks at an angle lining the garden path. A man and a woman and a youngish man are standing there, and then there’s a girl and a small boy. The woman’s wearing glasses and a hood. She looks tired. The man’s
in a boiler suit. He looks fed up. The little boy’s holding a little toy whip. He looks like he’s pinching his mouth closed. The girl looks sly. She’s got black rings under her eyes and she’s wearing a bonnet, like her mother. The young man’s wearing a waistcoat and a hat with the brim turned up on the one side, with feathers in the band. And a white scarf tied into two silly points under his chin. Looks like he’s on his way to a fancy-dress party.
He taps the underside of the portrait. Then he screws up his eyes, peering through the white fog that fills up the whole lounge. What is it that looks so familiar about this picture? He looks closer. But this here is Pop! In his Voortrekker clothes, like that story he always tells when he rode with Johanna on the wagon. Johanna with her twenty-one stab wounds! When he smeared grease on his scarf, for luck!
He turns the portrait around. The paper at the back’s old and brown. There’s writing on the paper from a pen with real ink. The writing’s badly faded. He traces the letters with his fingers as he reads.
Sweat breaks out on his face. Suddenly he hears that song in his ears, right through the noise of the painting, the song that Treppie always sings when he wants people to open their eyes and pay attention:
It was written on an old sow’s ear
It was a little grey
But to everyone the news was clear
It was the monkey’s wedding day
Over and over he reads what it is he must understand now, but his head just doesn’t want to get it straight.
Vrededorp 1938, it says. And in brackets after that: (The year of the ox wagons). And then: Mum and Dad and Treppie – 10, Little Mol – 14, Lambertus Jnr, in front of our little house.
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