Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Gerty’s coughing, too. She’s coughing ’cause the Jehovahs are getting hot for sex. It makes Gerty feel like she’s suffocating. Him too. It fucken makes him feel like he wants to pop. He’s not stupid, and the dogs are also not stupid. They know when people are horny and they know when they’re kaffirs. Gerty and Toby get just as worked up when they’re around kaffirs, like that old woman with her cart: ‘Potatoes, potatoes, missus, potatoes and pumpkin’, up and down in the street here in front. Treppie says that old woman used to live here a long time ago, and now she’s just checking to see if they’re still looking after her place nicely.

Treppie can talk so much shit. But he always stops Toby and Gerty when they try to bite the kaffirs. No matter how full of shit they get.

Like that Nelson-kaffir with his brooms and dusters. Green brooms and pink dusters. He pumps them up and down in the air like he’s cleaning walls that only he can see are dirty. ‘Brooms, madam, brooms! Sweep your yard and dust your walls and prick up your ears when Nelson calls.’

Then Treppie says to his mother she’d better buy a broom, ’cause this is the New South Africa. But they never buy. They just go out and look when that kaffir starts shouting and whistling in the street. Then everyone comes out to look and all the dogs start barking and there’s just brooms all over the place.

Pains shoot through his tail-end. He shifts on his crate. The grid cuts into his backside. He clears his throat. The air’s thick. The fan blows the thick air around the room. Suddenly a bee flies in through the window. Must have lost its way from that nest under the house. The fan’s air confuses the bee. When it gets caught inside the stream, it suddenly starts flying all over the show. But the Witnesses don’t even notice. They’re getting more and more worked up. The pink petticoat shows dark spots under the Witness’s arms. She wipes her upper lip with her hand. Elvis passes her his hanky. He holds her hand for a while. She’s getting hot. Too hot for any fucken fan or hanky. She holds her right hand up in the air with the hanky in it.

‘“And he had in his right hand seven stars”,’ she reads.

Her eyelids flicker. She looks like someone who should be bathed in red light. For seeing things, for wanting to fuck, for feeling pressed, for wanting to make or break, wanting out, anywhere.

When Lambert starts painting, he puts his red bulb in. Not straight away, but after he’s made a start, when he gets into it with his spray-cans. Into the never-ending painting. Then the red bulb has to go in. And when he digs his pit under the den to store petrol, he keeps the red light on, day and night, all the time, as that heap of kaffir rubbish gets higher and higher: bricks, bottles, window frames, drainpipes. The stuff even shines in the red light.

He feels the pain behind his eyeballs. It’s coming. He knows it’s coming. He tries to stop it. He focuses on the floor behind Treppie. On the line of ants. Some of them march this way, others that way. But they stay in one line, except the ones who smell rain.

The Witness is reading about a sharp two-edged sword that comes out of His mouth. About His countenance that was as the sun shineth in His strength.

Poor Son of Man.

Sounds more like a fuck-up to him.

Toby begins to growl softly. He stands up between Pop’s feet. His eyebrows twitch as he checks what’s happening. Lambert feels the sweat in the palms of his hands. His mother just keeps looking at him. The scar where he stabbed her with a knife when she threw his spanner in the grass has gone white. She’s got that funny look on her face, like she thinks he’s a fucken devil from hell. He’s not holding it together any more. He begins to shudder, down there in his tail-end where it always starts.

‘Fuck!’ says Treppie. He stands up quickly and walks straight out the front door. Treppie also knows when it’s coming. First Toby and then Treppie. Treppie walks to the carport and rips open Molletjie’s door. Then he starts her up and revs her until she screams like a pig. Lambert sees all this as the foam in his mouth goes hot and cold. He tries to hold it back. He feels his back arching into a hollow, and then he slides slowly off his seat. There’s a burn-out in his head.

It’s the beginning of October on the calendar. In less than six months he’ll be forty, at the end of April. On the calendar. And then it’s the election, the very next day. On the calendar. ‘A test for Triomf,’ as the girly from RAU says. When the sun’s going to shine on everyone, like time, like a flame of fire, like the sound of many waters. As he sinks to the floor, he sees Treppie reversing Molletjie into the gate. The postbox falls down. He hears it roll over once, twice, into the street. But he can’t see too well, the fan’s blowing the ends of the curtain up and down in front of his eyes. It looks like the curtains are growing out of the Witnesses’ backs, and the pelmet out of the curtains, the ceiling out of the pelmet, and the spot on the ceiling where the overflow leaks. The whole lounge looks like things running into each other, like each other’s insides, the insides of the Witnesses, the china cat with a rose for a head, the Chinese’s fan, the wall with Toby and Gerty’s rub-marks at knee-height, the sideboard, the floor-blocks that keep lifting up, the front door with the hole that he kicked in last week, the lawn cut to the quick, the little carport roof, the gate, the gate-pole with the postbox lying on its side in the road. Pop and his mother slowly rising from their seats. Treppie standing outside and looking at Molletjie’s dented backside. Everything a slow mashing of insides. The insides of the Witnesses running out of their spines and rising up like the ashes of paper above a fire. The insides of Triomf. Pink insides. His eyeballs are burning inside.

‘Happy birthday, honey,’ he hears her voice, on a megaphone, and it echoes away. ‘Happy birthday, honey, honey, honey.’

The floor’s hard under his head. He sees the Witness from underneath. Her shoulders are high. Her mouth’s the wrong way around. Her lips open and shut as she reads: ‘“the first and the last he that liveth”.’ Like a horse drinking water. She stretches her one hand out over him, as though she wants to pull something up from out of him: his insides, his brain. She hangs from wings in the warm air. She flies without moving, like a vampire. But he’s gone, disconnected. She speeds away into space, floundering among stars, a little Satan-bitch in Star Wars . The darkness rips open, white noise rushes into his ears, seven stars in his hand.

Mol sits on her chair in the lounge. The house is quiet — Pop and Treppie have gone to town and Lambert’s sleeping. He sleeps like this when he’s had a fit, for days on end. She’s doing the stitches for the back of Gerty’s new jersey. That’s the easiest part. She always has to reduce the stitches on the tummy, so it’ll fit tight, even when it stretches. Otherwise it drags on the floor. Gerty gets a new jersey every winter. She’s hard on jerseys, but that’s not her fault. It’s Toby. He gets jealous and then he chews up her jersey. By the end of winter it’s chewed to pieces. Then it hangs in tatters.

The truth is she knits so she can think. This is the earliest she’s ever begun knitting Gerty’s jersey, but it doesn’t matter. She needs to think.

The most difficult thing about thinking is where to start.

When she knits she can start over and over again — too many times to count. Not while she’s doing stitches, though; then she has to concentrate. But once the stitches are done and she gets going, she starts thinking so much that she can’t keep up with herself any more. Then she knits like someone possessed, trying to catch up with her thoughts all the time. She goes so fast the stitches fall in bunches, and before she realises it she sees she’s gone and made a couple of bad ladders.