Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  Further down, the writing gets smaller and more crammed, as if there wasn’t enough space left to fit in the whole story:

  With love from Pop to you all, my flesh and blood, in memory of a big moment in the history of our volk. Given for safekeeping to Treppie (Martinus), the apple of my eye, so he’ll never forget from whence he comes.

  Lambert feels dizzy. He fumbles behind him for somewhere to sit down. He’s trying to sit, but he’s already sitting. It feels like he’s sitting on a bag full of sharp things. God, no! It can’t be true. Then Pop, not Treppie, is the biggest liar of them all. Then it was Pop who used the truth to lie when he asked Community Development for a house. It was the truth, all along! He’s no fucken distant Benade. He’s fucken dirt-close! They’re all the fucken same, the whole lot of them! Treppie and Pop and his mother!

  Lambert rubs his eyes. It feels like he can’t get enough air. He wants to get up, out of the chair. Christ, no. He feels like something that’s already dead, here among all these sheets. He gropes in the air in front of him as he tries to get up. His feet keep catching on Pop’s shoes under the chair, like he’s tripping over them. He feels like he’s fucking out from the inside. Things that have been said, pieces of stories, falling inwards inside his head.

  Treppie! That’s him standing there with the pinched mouth! One Old Pop, two sons!

  Suddenly light streams into the lounge. It’s dead quiet. The workers are taking the screens off the windows.

  Lambert gets up. He stands in front of the sideboard. His eyes feel rigid. Jesus, now some sense must come into all this crap.

  He supports himself with his knuckles on the sideboard. He feels like he wants to burst out of his seams as the truth plunges down into him. About his people, their house, their dog, in their street, here in Triomf.

  He shakes his head. It feels like there’s loose stuff inside his head.

  When he’s in a bad mood his mother sometimes looks at him in a funny way, and then she says, God help her, she wonders whose child he really is.

  And he always thought it was just her way of talking. Like when she says he’s full of the devil or something. He always knew he was Pop’s child and that the story of his being illegitimate was a lie for Community Development. But if he is his mother’s child, and if his mother says her one brother’s a devil, and the other’s an angel, and he, Lambert, takes after the devil, then Treppie could be … Then his mother doesn’t know which one … then … then …

  He turns around. His ears are zinging from the sudden silence. The sun shines sharply through the window. All the curtains are down. All he sees is white, white, white. Outside on the lawn they’re folding up the covers.

  His birth certificate, that’s what he must find! He turns back to the sideboard. Now he’s going to scratch till he finds the thing.

  If Pop’s his mother’s brother and he can sleep with her, and if Treppie’s also his mother’s brother, then … who the fuck’s his father, then? Whose fucken child is he?

  He shuts his eyes. There’s too much white in the room. It makes him see black spots. He digs through the black spots in the drawer. Too many papers here and not enough time. He hears them taking down the sheets in the back room and shifting things back up against the walls.

  He finds a piece of paper that’s brown around the edges and worn from being handled a lot. His eyes catch at the words:

  … can’t carry on any longer … make an end … failed you and the children … Dear God … forgive …

  Then his eyes stick on Treppie’s real name:

  The business about Martinus not wanting to talk to me any more is breaking my heart. Make peace with him for my sake, I beg you, Mol. I did it because I love him more than I could ever say and because I want him to grow up decently.

  Lambert quickly reads further: … dog’s life, he reads, kaffirwork … and about the Railways that will look after them. Widows’ fund and not much of an estate. He glosses over the next few lines until he comes to the last paragraph:

  I know you’re sick in your lungs, Mol. Look after yourself. Don’t let the kaffirs take over your job. Be careful, the Jew Communists will undermine you. They’re heathens, the whole lot of them. A person has only one life and one soul but mine is finished.

  He reads about the hope of a reunion with them all one day between the walls of jasper, in the streets of gold.

  Underneath is written: Your loving husband, Johannes Lambertus Benade. (Pop.)

  The postscript is underlined:

  Give Treppie my mouth organ. Lambertus plays better but Treppie needs it more. Try to keep them off each other’s bodies, Mol, in God’s name send them away to different places if you can. So an end can come to you know what. Only a monster will be born from this sort of thing. I’ve heard from the others, more and more such cases are happening among us Railways people.

  Slowly he folds up the letter again. He looks at his hands. Skew, full of knobs. He looks down at his legs and his feet. He wishes he’d kept on his white pants that he wore to the voting this morning, if only for this one moment. He wishes he hadn’t felt so hot and got back into his shorts so soon. Now he sees his large knees, his hollow shins, his knobbly, swollen, monster-ankles, his skew, monster-feet, and his monster-toes. Ten of them! All different shapes and sizes. Dog-toenails! He feels his face. A monster. A devil-monster. No wonder! No fucken wonder he’s such a fuck-up. No wonder he can’t even fuck a Hotnot bitch! No wonder only his mother’s good enough for him! It’s all in the family! The plague!

  With one rip he pulls the drawer right out of its casing.

  ‘Family secrets!’ he roars.

  His eyes feel like they’re spinning wildly in their sockets. He feels himself breaking the drawer with a cracking shot over the chair’s covered back-rest. He sees a man in white overalls looking at him with big eyes. Then he hears himself shouting at the man to fuck off. The man runs out the front door with a bundle of sheets in his arms. He hears the man shout at another worker trying to come inside: ‘Take cover, the nutcase has lost it!’

  He storms down the passage.

  ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ he roars at a white overall here in front of him. ‘Take cover!’ He rams the man out of his way. With one kick, he knocks the bathroom door off its hinges. Then he grabs the door and throws it into the bath.

  In front of him, Treppie sits with his pants around his ankles. He’s holding an open newspaper in his hands. Treppie’s smiling at him. The shit!

  ‘You!’ That’s all that comes out of him.

  ‘Tut-tut. Showing me the door, are you?’

  As if it was all just a fucken little accident.

  GUY FAWKES

  Mol stands on the little stoep in front. She’s listening to the crackers as they go off, one here, one there, close by and then far away again. Not so many before, in other years.

  Shame, last year she and Pop still shot off some crackers together, right here, in their hands. It was quite jolly. And then they bathed together. Shame, Pop was so gentle with her that night.

  She feels Toby rubbing against her leg.

  ‘Yes, old Toby, so it goes, hey?’

  She bends over and scratches him between the ears.

  Ever since Pop went, they’ve never really managed to be jolly again.

  It was all ’cause the house was supposed to be painted white. Inside and outside. Everything covered with sheets. That’s where the trouble started. She said all along it was going to cost them dearly. Dearly, and how!

  The account wasn’t even the worst of it. They found the account in the postbox when they got back from the hospital, that night after the painting. It was for twenty-five thousand rand less the discount of three thousand rand, so it came to twenty-two thousand rand. That ‘prize’ was never a prize, after all. It was a discount.

  From then on they got a letter every month with a red sticker saying they must pay, otherwise lawyers would sue them. Treppie tore up the letters every time. Then one day the she
riff came to see which of their things he could take away to sell, but he left almost immediately when he saw none of their stuff was worth anything. He still said something about people like them thinking the New South Africa meant they didn’t have to pay their debts to the Old South Africa. Next, they got a letter from Wonder Wall saying they could pay the account off. Thirty rand a month plus a terrible amount of interest. Now Lambert and Treppie are paying it off, half and half, every month. Treppie says this is now what you call Triomf-debt – by the time they finish paying it off, their matt-white will have cost them ninety thousand rand.

  But the account wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was that no one kept an eye on Lambert that day. So he took his chance and scratched around in the sideboard drawer. Lambert doesn’t know what’s good for him. But it was bound to happen some time or another. Then he went and broke the drawer in half over poor old Pop’s head, right there where Pop was sitting under the sheet. Dead quiet, without bothering anyone. Where she said they must leave him so he could sleep where he always slept.

  She found him still sitting there. She took the sheet off to tell him he must please come and do something, Lambert had kicked Treppie right out of the house and now Treppie had no pants on and the NPs had arrived to see if they’d voted right.

  Yes, when she looked again, there was Treppie lying starkers on the lawn with Lambert stomping on his fingers. He broke them all, one by one. ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ she heard as those little bones in Treppie’s hands broke. Such bony little birdy-hands, too.

  And those two from across the road stood there with their mouths open, staring at them. That was their day for moving out. Going to live somewhere else. The same day. No wonder.

  It never rains but it pours, Treppie still said when they got back from the voting. They saw, across the road there, a few crock lorries and some lazy, slackarse-movers with red noses trying to move the dykes’ stuff. She must say, she looked at them and thought the lorries in front of their own house looked a damn sight better, just for a change. And their painters looked like angels from heaven compared with those wash-outs on the opposite side.

  Anyhow, then Treppie said he hoped they knew what they were doing. Those movers looked like a bunch of cheapskate rehabs to him. Must have been all the dykes could find on voting day, as if they really had to go and move on a day like that.

  All they seemed to be loading on to the trucks were plants.

  One table, two chairs, one bed, and for the rest, just plants, plants and more plants. After a while it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon on wheels.

  That’s what Treppie said.

  He said some people painted their walls white and others moved to greener pastures, but in the end everyone, without exception, just looked north and fucked forth, as if their lives depended on it. Delicious monsters.

  Well, yes.

  Sometimes there’s truth in Treppie’s jokes.

  But that wasn’t even the beginning, that day of the 27th. Lambert was so wild after he’d finished with Treppie, he came for her next. She was walking around, shouting, ‘Pop’s dead! Pop’s dead!’, when he came and stabbed her in the side with Treppie’s pocket-knife. Just like that. In front of all those people. That’s when the painters dropped their sheets and ran for their lives.

  Toby thought it was fun and games again. He tried to bite Lambert’s backside as Lambert ran amok there on the grass. With the knife still open, like he wanted to slaughter a pig or something.

  Lambert turned around to give Toby a kick under the arse, but Toby wasn’t there any more and Lambert kicked the prefab wall instead. Broke his leg. A bad break, right at the ankle. And there he lay, roaring on the green, green grass of home, as Treppie said later. She stood around, holding on to her side where the blood was pouring out. And Treppie just lay there, crying from laughing so much. Broken fingers and all.

  ‘One dead, three injured!’ he shouted. ‘One down, three to go!

  ‘Aid us, aid us, afflictions abrade us!’ he shouted for all to hear.

  Abrade.

  On the very day Treppie appears before the heavenly gates he’ll still think of an impossible word to say. He’s always called himself an occasional speaker. Shame, and Pop used to say he shouldn’t waste his talents so, he was capable of doing so much more. And then Treppie would say he couldn’t help it, that’s what the people, meaning them, wanted from him. A story for every occasion, and who was he to say they must listen, he could also tell classic stories. In any case, that would be casting pearls before swine.

  Classic.

  Treppie says a piece that’s classic, whether it’s a piece of music or a piece of furniture or just a piece of house, is something that lasts forever, something everyone will like. The rest are just May-flies.

  Well, if you ask her they’re not even May-flies, let alone classics. May-flies are complete in themselves and they fill the whole world, even if it’s just for one day. But the Benades were crocks from the moment they first saw the light of day. Pieced together and panelbeaten, not to mention screwed together, from scrap. Throw-away pieces, left-over rags, waste wool, old wives’ tales, hearsay, a passing likeness from the front and a glimpse from behind. That’s how they found themselves here on this earth. Things that get thrown away. Good for nothing. Write-offs.

  She’s getting morbid now out here on the stoep. It’s not really so very bad, after all. She just thinks like this so she won’t have to think about Pop, but actually she does want to think about Pop. She wants to remember Pop. That’s what she wants to do. She wants to honour his memory on this Guy Fawkes night.

  Shame, and there they stood at the JG Strydom hospital, at midnight of the same day. Treppie said come hell or high water, he wanted a post-mortem. A family like theirs couldn’t brave the future with a dubious cause of death in their midst. That’s now after she said Pop was blue and his nose was white and she thought it was from lack of breath that he died, sitting there and sleeping under the sheet and everything.

  Never mind what she really thought. That’s what she said. She knew Pop would’ve done the same, to preserve the peace. And now Pop wasn’t there to do it himself any more.

  And Lambert said, yes, he agreed, Pop couldn’t get enough air, ’cause apart from that sheet over his head, there were all those fumes and the spray from the Wonder Wall paint, too.

  But when Treppie saw the drawer broken in half like that, he began to smell a rat.

  Ja, and then Toby stood there and went ‘ee-ee’ next to Pop’s shoes, the ones he was still wearing. Most of the time Pop used to kick them off before he fell asleep in his chair, but now they were shoved so strangely under the chair, you’d swear they didn’t have feet in them any more. Toby’s face also looked like he had an idea or two about that pose of Pop’s there in his chair, with his knees pointed together in front like a Parktown Prawn’s.

  Anyway, she and Treppie and the painting foreman managed to get Pop into the car, and then Treppie drove them to the hospital, broken fingers and all. Lambert changed the gears for him. By now, Lambert’s foot was swollen the size of a rugby ball. She’d taken off her housecoat to wrap around her middle and she was holding on to her side where it was still bleeding so much. What else was she supposed to do?

  If she hadn’t been stabbed, she said to them as they stood around outside trying to make a plan, she would have driven the car herself. But they didn’t even hear her. Neither of them took her driving lesson seriously. Lambert didn’t even know about it. He had been sleeping that afternoon, after his shooting practice. And Treppie had such drunken blues that night, he stood there playing piano in the air. First in the air and then on the edge of the stoep, as if their whole yard was a concert audience, and he was on a stage with an entire orchestra behind him.

  Eventually they were all bandaged and plastered up and at last they stood there, next to the doctor, who had to write out the death certificate for Pop on the trolley.

  ‘Heart attack,’ the doctor
said. ‘And multiple thrombosis.’ She saw Lambert take a deep breath through his mouth as he stood there on his crutch.

  ‘Lambert,’ Treppie said, ‘shut your mouth, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  ‘Multiple skull fracture,’ the doctor said next, prodding Pop’s head with his hand so they could see the pieces of his skull moving back and forth.

  Lambert shut his mouth. And the doctor looked at each of them, one by one. Right into their faces.

  ‘We were painting,’ said Treppie. ‘The house, I mean, and I saw him clutching his chest.’

  ‘And then he took a dive off the ladder,’ said Lambert. ‘Boom! On his head.’

  ‘Took a dive?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Treppie. ‘That’s what happened. We all saw it.’

  Then she also rather said yes, Pop fell on his head.

  ‘Like a warhead,’ Treppie still said, ‘but no bang, just a puff.’

  ‘Of dust,’ said Lambert.

  ‘Of dust,’ she said.

  Were there any other relatives? the doctor asked. They said no, and the doctor said well, in that case he thought a police statement was perhaps unnecessary.

  ‘Superfluous,’ he said, and that’s what they all three said, as if they’d practised it all their lives, just for this moment.

  ‘Superfluous!’ As if in one voice.

  ‘Shame,’ said Treppie, ‘but at least he still had time to exercise his vote.’

  ‘And to see the house painted white,’ said Lambert.

  ‘Exercise in white,’ she said, and then she felt, no, her head was giving just a little more. Almost the same feeling as a piece of tooth chipping off. First the chip washes around a little in your mouth, then it gnashes between your other teeth, and then you take it out to see what it is. Oh, it’s a tooth, you think, throwing it away. Wear and tear. But now there’s another chip gone. In her head.