Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

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.