Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Mol stretches the piece of knitting to see if it’ll fit. Maybe she should knit Pop a cap or something for winter. He says nowadays the part of his head that sticks out when he sits in his chair, right on top in the middle, gets the coldest. Ice-cold, as if there’s a draught on top of his head. Poor old Pop. He has to put up with so much. And when he’s done complaining about his head, Treppie says, jeez, he always thought death rose from the feet.

THIS ONE’S FOR YOU

Pop’s sleeping again. When he comes to sit here in front of the TV he falls asleep almost straight away, no matter what they’re watching. Now and then she wakes him up so he can watch his favourite adverts. Both she and Pop have their favourites. What she likes about adverts is that they’re short, and then you can play them over and over again in your head. Like the one about the three beds. Big double beds with a woman sleeping alone and waking up quietly, on three different mornings. In three different places.

She would also feel nice if she could wake up like that, all on her own. And so peacefully. Alone on a beach with dolphins jumping out of the waves in front of her. In a field of flowers full of cooing doves. Next to a waterfall with ferns and rabbits. On such a nice big bed, with such soft, warm bedding. In three different nighties, too. Sometimes, when Lambert gets so wild with her, she closes her eyes and goes to sleep on those beds, one by one. On the beach. In the veld. Next to the waterfall. Over and over again. She sees the dolphins. She catches the doves. And she stares into the face of a rabbit, with his soft, shiny eyes, until Lambert’s finished. That helps.

But it doesn’t work when he also wants to hear stories. Then it has to be stories from his videos. Then she has to concentrate on the story, which means she can’t think about her advert, about all those mattresses with springs. Their own mattresses are sponge. Her and Pop’s mattress lies on the floor. Lambert took the base for himself. He says he refuses to sleep on the floor like a kaffir. She doesn’t know where he gets his information about the way kaffirs sleep. She’s told him, he must look at the way they drink beer in the adverts — in suits, together with white people. If you ask her, they look like they all sleep in nice soft beds with legs. And would you believe it, the other day she saw her favourite advert again, but this time a brand-new kaffir was sleeping in one of the beds. Never saw him before. Must be a New South Africa kaffir, that one.

Pop’s favourite is the squirrel who wants to save his acorn at the bank. He says he likes to see the way every animal has its own little place. The round-eyed owl has a crack in the rocks. The ringed cobra’s got a hole. The jackal with his pointy nose has a hollow. That’s where they belong and everyone knows it, and they keep out of each other’s way. When the squirrel gives his acorn to the Trust Bank man, Pop whistles the song again, and then he says: ‘Go back to your tree, old curlytail! Trust Bank’s just for your acorn, not for you!’

Treppie says she and Pop are suckers for adverts. He says he doesn’t like adverts himself, but if he must choose, then the one he fancies is the elephant taking a crap on a shining white lavatory. He says he wishes he could also make a noise like that when he’s done. That sounds like a really good statement, he says. When she asked him one day what he meant by a really good statement, he put his hands behind his ears and flapped them like an elephant’s. Then he held his hands in front of his mouth, like an elephant’s trunk, and he shouted so loud, right into her ears, that her heart almost stopped: ‘I, Martinus Benade, have just shat out, at half past nine, what I ate at seven o’clock, and from now on for the rest of my days I’m going to eat, shit, eat, shit, over and over again, until one fine day I fall down and die. Praise the Lord with joyful fumes for all eternity. Amen!’

Treppie has a terrible time trying to shit. He spends hours on the toilet. Sometimes he sits there so long he reads a whole pile of newspapers, from top to bottom, all afternoon long. That must be what he does, ’cause he tells so many stories from newspapers, word for word, she can swear he learns them off by heart when he’s on the toilet. Treppie’s too clever for his own good.

Mind you, she also thinks he makes up some of the stories he says he reads in the papers. He thinks them up on days when he has to crap and there aren’t any papers to read. She knows. She wasn’t born yesterday.

Like the story about the mortuary assistant who screwed the dead woman. She’d been stone dead for three days, says Treppie. It was in Yugoslavia. She’d even begun to stink a little, ’cause they haven’t got fridges for corpses there in Yugoslavia. But she was unbelievably beautiful. Just a little blue around the lips. Treppie says that’s ’cause she died from blood that was too cold for one so young. Her heart stopped.

When that assistant sponged her down, there on the cold cement block, and he began drying her off, he suddenly got a big hard-on. From drying her long legs and her breasts that were lovely like marble, with dark, pink nipples. He got so horny he no longer smelt anything bad. But he held back and he held back, ’cause Yugoslavia’s a Catholic country and Catholics have to hold back until they meet the woman of their dreams. That mortuary assistant had already been married for thirty years. He’d fathered seven children. And then the poor man had to make her up for the funeral as well. When he put the red lipstick on to her lovely mouth, and the rouge on her pale cheeks, he just couldn’t take it any longer. So he ran off and locked the door of the mortuary, ’cause in Yugoslavia they cut your dick off right there and then, balls and all, if they catch you screwing a corpse. He climbed on to that corpse, there on the cold cement slab, and he rubbed some balm on, out of respect for the dead, and he made love to it, softly and carefully, with the fear of God so heavy in his heart that the tears were streaming down his face. Afterwards, he was so overcome he lay on top of her for a while, and then he kissed her mouth. ‘Smothered her with kisses,’ is how Treppie put it. ‘He smothered her fair countenance with kisses.’ Will you ever!

Treppie sometimes comes out with this kind of language. Then she knows he didn’t read it in any newspaper.

That man was still lying there, feeling his chest getting colder and colder from the corpse. Then it suddenly began to feel warmer, lower down. So he decided he’d better pull out now. He didn’t want to cause his soul any more damage. But when he pulled out, still on his knees there between her legs, she opened those made-up blue eyes of hers and she sat bolt upright. Right there on that block of cement. Like Sleeping Beauty, said Treppie, except he didn’t think it was the kisses that did the trick.

Then there was a major run-around, one thing upon the next. The doctor who wrote the death certificate in the first place came to examine the woman. When he found fresh blood on the mortuary slab, he immediately smelt a rat. He examined her carefully down there, and he saw that the young woman’s virgin had only just been broken.

Yes, said the woman’s mother, when she died she was still pure. Untouched. Let me just get my hands on the fucker who raped my daughter, the father said, laying a charge of rape against the assistant before he did anything else. By then, that poor tormented man had been with the priest for days already, crossing himself over and over out of sheer panic. It was the priest who eventually saw the point, ’cause for Catholics there’s always a point, Treppie says. The priest said the father and mother and daughter should actually praise the Lord for letting that God-fearing assistant get such a good hard-on. If he hadn’t broken the young woman’s virgin, then she’d still be a dead, cold corpse. Six feet under, where the worms would have violated her soft places anyway. Was life not more valuable, he asked, than a virginal membrane and a teaspoonful of blood?