Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

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.