Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

The outer lines are green. They’re almost completely faded out now. Koki pens are like that. The little red peaks for the Cape mountains and the Drakensberg are bigger and you can see them better. Molehills, molehills, molehills. And the Orange River and the Vaal River and the Fish River and all the other big rivers are there too, in blue. The best was when he drew big thick arrows in black to show how the kaffirs swooped down on the country from above. And he drew big yellow arrows for the Voortrekkers, who occupied the country outwards from the Cape.

When he began to draw that day, it was just after twelve. Like now. Just after he got up. By the time he was finished it was pitch dark outside. That’s how the time flew.

The more things you’ve already painted, the easier it is to carry on. Until you’ve got too many beginnings. Then it gets hard again. Much harder than it was when there was still nothing. When he had nothing but the outline, it was easy to carry on. And he had to carry on, too, ’cause South Africa alone was too boring and empty. At first he couldn’t think beyond rivers and mountains. He just painted more rivers, more mountains.

Then one day he decided to paint the house. On top of everything. And across the whole of South Africa. That was a brainwave. And when the moles began to push up their little hills on the lawn that night, the Drakensberg mountains were already there. Molehills, molehills, molehills. Things like that happen sometimes. It’s just luck. But the black and yellow arrows didn’t want to work for the lawn.

‘What’s this?’ Treppie asked when he saw the painting.

‘That’s our house, 127 Martha Street,’ he said, scratching 127 on the postbox in the painting with a black ball-point, just to make sure.

But that’s not what Treppie wanted to know. He wanted to know what those arrows were. And when he told Treppie they were the kaffirs and the Afrikaners and history, Treppie said it looked more like piss-pipes and shit-pipes under the ground. Shit from this side and piss from that side. Then Treppie said same difference. Where you get people you get shit and crap going down the pipes, and he wished he was a dog, ’cause dogs were the only ones who got any love at 127 Martha Street.

Treppie’s plans for when the shit starts flying are also in the painting.

Just under Molletjie’s belly there’s a thick, red, broken line, with a figure eight going out of the driveway to show how she turns into the street. She goes right over the lawn, the shit-pipes and the piss-pipes, heading north. But the further north she goes, the more of Africa he has to add to the drawing. He made South Africa too big to start with, so there was only a small space left for the rest of Africa. Then he had to start drawing everything smaller and smaller to make it fit on the wall.

When Treppie saw this, he said Lambert shouldn’t make matters so difficult for himself, couldn’t he see he had the whole fucken ceiling for Africa? But by then it was too late, all the countries in Africa had already been squashed flat to fit under the ceiling. There was still enough space on both sides for the horn and the shoulder of Africa, except they were too big for the body. And when his mother came to see she said it didn’t look anything like Africa. Nothing he painted ever looked like anything, she said. Then he said, okay, in that case he was going to add titles, in capital letters. TENNIS BALL, CLOUD, HOUSE, DOG, MOLEHILL, SHIT-PIPE, PUMP, ROSE, DICK, CUNT, BEE NEST, HOUSECOAT, PLASTER CRACK, RUST, EVAPORATOR. Now all she needed to do was open her eyes and read what it said there.

Lambert looks at his painting. It’s ’cause things kept happening and he started painting new stuff over the old stuff. Once he gets going he hasn’t got the time for blanking things out. And now his mother’s standing there with a pink Day-Glo tennis ball in her mouth. He couldn’t help it. She was already there when he wanted to paint a ball for the DOG.

Gerty looks like she’s been tied to the lawn-mower, ’cause two black shit-pipes run between her and the mower like reins. The mower itself has WINGS, ’cause the WITNESS is just behind it. All you can see are her shoulders with the wings, and then her legs. The lawn-mower runs over her belly. She’s got JEHOVA on her forehead but it doesn’t all fit. The JE and VA fall down on both sides. They make her look like she’s wearing earphones. The EVENING STAR is in the sky above the house, its five points painted in silver hubcap-paint. HEAVEN begins just above the CAPRIVI STRIP. In that case, says Treppie, the Evening Star should be in Angola, not in Heaven, but then he says it doesn’t make any difference, ’cause for that matter 127 Martha Street could be hell itself, down here at the bottom of Africa. That’s Treppie for you. Everything has to be double upside-down before he’s happy.

The sun’s in Zaire. It first had rays, but now it’s got little red points like the National Party’s new sun. He’s written SUNSHINE D inside the sun.

His mother’s housecoat hangs from the horn of Africa, on the one side. It doesn’t look like a housecoat. It looks more like a piece of slaughtered human skin. That’s why he wrote HOUSECOAT there. Then, in brackets, he added (MOLE-SKIN).

CAPE POINT can still be seen at the bottom of the driveway. Then there’s TABLE MOUNTAIN as well. The postbox is planted on top of it. On the one side of the postbox, next to Table Mountain, he’s written HARRY THE STRANDLOPER. That’s also from his history book. On the other side of Table Mountain you can see JAN VAN RIEBEECK with a ribbon across his chest that says MAN ABOUT TOWN. He’s holding a bottle of KLIPDRIFT in his hand. Harry the Strandloper holds a bottle of COKE.

Jan van Riebeeck’s got a pink feather in his hat. Same as the tennis ball. That was a nice pink. He can’t find it in the hardware shops any more. It was Flossie’s first undercoat. He had just enough left over to paint a pink DICK and a pink CUNT and to colour in the Witness’s petticoat.

The last bit of pink was for Tsafendas’s WORM. But the pink ran out halfway down the worm. Now the worm’s half-pink, half-green. He cut out the picture of Tsafendas from Your Family and You . Still in jail over Verwoerd. Very old now, but he’s still got the worm. He hung his Republic Day medal on Tsafendas’s chest, on to a nail going right through his HEART. He’d drawn the heart on to the picture himself. Treppie came and asked if that was the Lord Jesus there with his bleeding heart. Then he asked Treppie if he was mad or something, Jesus didn’t have a worm. ’Cause the worm starts in the heart and goes all the way to the guts, until you can’t make out any more what’s guts and what’s worm. He painted the guts at the bottom of the picture too. Tsafendas is pasted up against the prefab wall, a little man with a gold medal and lots of guts that are full of worm.

You can also see Treppie’s guts.

Treppie’s lying cut open across the shoulder of Africa, but he doesn’t know it’s him. His insides are hanging out. To the one side, in the little waves of the ATLANTIC OCEAN, there’s a huge, naked kaffir with a whopper of a black cock reaching right down into the water. He’s eating Treppie’s liver. ‘PATYDEFWAGRAS,’ the kaffir says. He’s got a silver bangle around his cock.

Pop’s head only just sticks out above a cloud, over the same ocean. POP’S HEAD ON THUNDER CLOUD is what he wrote there, ’cause you can’t see very much of Pop. He first started to draw Pop rising up to heaven but then he painted the clouds over Pop, ’cause Pop suddenly began to look so lonely up there in the sky. You can at least see Pop’s feet. They’ve been burnt to little pitch-black sticks, ’cause Pop’s standing on a white flash of lightning that strikes from under the cloud’s belly.