Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Theory, he said, was one thing. It was book-learning. A vexation to the spirit, as Ecclesiastes said.

Ecclesiastes, hmph, this Treppie can really lay it on thick.

But practice, he continued, was something quite different, full of its own pitfalls, which you never saw until you were up to your neck. But not without rewards, which you also didn’t see until they hit you full in the face. Like a rainbow, one minute everything was grey, and the next there it was, filling up the whole sky.

‘Ahem!’ Pop cleared his throat. Treppie must please get to the point now.

But Treppie was already at the point. With Treppie, there’s never just one, clear point. You first have to set the scene, as he always says. The setting itself is half the point.

It was dead quiet there in the lounge. She could almost hear her own heart beating. They all watched Treppie as he opened the trunk’s lock.

Then, with a wide sweep, he lifted the lid and opened it out. It was a broad, deep lid. Took her breath clean away.

Neat little rows of tools were hanging there, each one sparkling in its own leather clasp. All the tools of refrigeration work. An expert’s toolbox.

‘Heaven,’ said Treppie. ‘This is heaven.’

Even Toby stuck his nose into the box to smell the strange new smells in there.

‘Well, I never,’ said Pop, lighting up a cigarette.

Lambert’s eyes glittered. He rubbed his big hands round and round in the hollows of each palm. She’d never seen him look at anything in that way before.

Treppie’s tools. His pride and joy. Ever since that terrible fire when the fridge business burnt down, he’d never used them in public again. Before the fire, when he did use them, he used to bring them out one at a time, and no one was allowed to touch them. Then at night he’d take them back into his room again. And she could see from the condition they were in that he’d been cleaning them all these years, shining them with a petrol rag every night, taking them out one by one and putting them back carefully in their places, in the trunk’s lid.

‘Now, take note: the first commandment of the practice,’ Treppie told Lambert, and she saw he was keeping a straight face, but he was starting to play Tickey again. ‘Order, hygiene, discipline. You can work with these tools, all of them, but if this trunk doesn’t look like this every night when you’re finished, then I’ll take the whole lot back and keep it behind lock and key. Then I’ll withdraw completely from you and your fridges and you can see how far you get on your own.’

When he’s in a setting, he always comes up with grand words.

But when he began to tell Lambert all the names of the tools, and what each one was used for, he was back on solid ground again. Lambert played his part nicely. Every now and again he chipped in and told Treppie what that tool’s name was, and what it did, ’cause he was ‘theoretically qualified’ now, as Treppie himself had said.

And each time they said a thing’s name, she said it after them, so everyone could see her head was still firing nicely. When it comes to the names of things, she knows she’d better pay attention, otherwise she’ll be gaga before her time.

They worked through all the spanners. From the nut spanner and the pipe spanner to the flarenut fittings and the other sockets and spanners, the six-point to the twelve-point box spanners. And then the punches, the centre punch and the starter punch, and the pliers, the cutting pliers and the squeezing pliers, the clipping pliers and the slipjoint pliers, and then of course the smallest and the finest, the needlenose pliers, which Lambert showed her with a little laugh. Pop squeezed her leg to tell her she must just smile now, ’cause this was a whole new beginning with pliers.

And the screwdrivers with their many different bits for different screws, the Keystone, the Cabinet, the Philips, the Frearson, the Clutchhead, the Allen and the Bristol. Treppie took them out, one by one, showing them to Lambert. And Lambert said their names, with her repeating them afterwards. It was like catechism, just nicer.

Then there was the iron saw, with a thin little packet full of brand-new shining blades. The flaring tool, the tube-cutter and the tube-clamp, the different hammers with thick and thin heads, and, right at the end, the mechanic’s stethoscope, which you use to listen to the rattles and the hums of a fridge, as Treppie put it. What about the ‘cheeree-cheeree’ and the ‘click-click’? she asked him, but Treppie said those were noises you could hear with a naked ear. If you wanted to hear the music of the spheres, you needed a stethoscope.

Treppie put the stethoscope’s plugs in Lambert’s ears and said he should hold the probe to Pop’s chest so he could hear what music was playing in there.

Lambert listened and said: ‘Silence is golden,’ and he laughed ‘ha! ha!’ at his own joke. But there was nothing funny about that joke.

Pop said, no, maybe the little amplifier wasn’t working.

Treppie said everything in his trunk worked. He switched on the amplifier so Lambert could listen again.

‘Looba-doop-doop, looba-doop-doop, looba-doop-doop,’ Lambert mimicked Pop’s heart.

‘That’s a reggae beat you’ve got there, Pop!’ Lambert said.

She wanted to know what reggae was. All they could come up with was an argument about kaffir music. Treppie said it was music from the kaffir-paradise north of the equator, but Lambert said it was what Lucky Dube played in Soweto and, as far as he knew, that was on the western side.

North or west, that toolbox session didn’t pass before everyone listened to everyone else’s heart, and they all laughed about the strange beats and the blowings and suckings of valves in each other’s insides.

She was the only one who didn’t think it was so funny, even though she pretended to laugh along for the occasion. After a while she told them a person would swear they were a bunch of fridges standing in a circle. They shouldn’t make fun of sickness.

But who was so sick, then? Treppie wanted to know, and she said no one in particular, sickness was always looking for a place to slip in.

Treppie said she mustn’t be silly, sickness wasn’t something that floated around in the air, it was something that bred under people’s skin and in their marrow. Only lunatic germs survived in pure air and came in through people’s ears, like earwigs. Then Pop said everything was going so nicely this morning, Treppie shouldn’t start multiplying germs now, and she shouldn’t worry about what was in the air, or about his heart, and Lambert was hearing wrong, it wasn’t a reggae beat, most of the time his heart beat like a hesitation waltz, otherwise it went like a slow foxtrot.

That sounded like a hectic medley, Treppie said, but fortunately he stopped poking fun at sickness.

When he was finished with the things in the trunk, all the regular joints and fittings, the gaskets, rolls of soldering wire, flux, files, iron brushes, gum in bottles, the aluminium that you melt to fix ice-boxes, and right at the bottom, a heavy, black thing, the high-vacuum pump, Treppie opened up his army bag.

He began to take out long-necked things on stands, with heads that made the lounge look like it was full of spacemen. Cylinders for fridge-gas and service cylinders, and the multiple gauge with its black pipes rolled up like centipedes. The hand pump and the special cylinders for welding, one with oxygen and the other for welding-gas.

‘Oxy-a-ce-ty-lene,’ Lambert said slowly, blowing ‘tssss!’ through his teeth and making slow figure eights in the air as if he were welding. Treppie passed him the goggles so he could see if the rubber band fitted his head.

‘Watch out for that thing, hey,’ he said.