Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

‘Well, then, gentlemen, I’ll be on my way. Goodbye, then,’ he says.

‘No, wait,’ says Du Pisanie.

‘We’re recruiting,’ says Van der Walt. ‘For the AWB’s task force on the Rand.’

Du Pisanie pats his sleeve. Only now does Lambert see the AWB badge. Red and white, with things that look like little black hooks.

‘Soldiers, chefs, cleaners, anything … medical, technical, telecommunications. Were you in the army, Lambert?’

Suddenly Du Pisanie sounds soft and friendly.

Now suddenly he’s ‘you’ and ‘Lambert’. These people want to use him, not for shooting, but for ‘anything’. No thanks, he’s no one’s skivvy. And he wasn’t in the army, either, ’cause of the fits. But that’s none of their business.

‘Sorry, gentlemen, I’m NP.’

‘Oh, my God,’ says Van der Walt, smacking himself on the forehead with a flat hand.

‘What you think the NP’s going to do for your kind, Lambert? Tell me, what?’ asks Du Pisanie.

‘They’re going to protect me, ’cause I’m a minority,’ he says.

Why do they say ‘for your kind’? What’s wrong with him? He is who he is, full-stop.

‘Some more Oros?’ offers Van der Walt.

‘No thank you.’

They’re not laughing any more.

Du Pisanie shakes his head. ‘It just goes to show,’ he says to Van der Walt. Then he turns back to Lambert. ‘We want to help you to protect yourself, Lambert. We want our people to be independent. And to look after themselves. We want our people to stand on their own two feet, in peace as much as in war.’

Now Van der Walt’s very serious. He taps the table as he stands there next to Du Pisanie. ‘Independent’, tap, ‘look after themselves’, tap, ‘stand on their own two feet’, tap.

‘Listen nicely now, Lambert,’ says Du Pisanie, ‘can you peel potatoes?’ He sounds like he means even if Lambert can do nothing but peel potatoes, he’s made for life.

‘Or wash dishes, or scrub floors?’ says Van der Walt. Van der Walt sounds like he means if Lambert can do nothing but wash dishes or scrub floors, the world is his oyster.

‘Listen to me,’ he says to Du Pisanie, ‘I’m not your kaffirgirl.’ He takes a step back. ‘I’m not your kaffir that you can order around. Peel here, scrub there!’

‘It’s for the task force, man!’ says Van der Walt. ‘Not everyone can do the shooting.’

‘Says who?’ he asks.

‘Lambert, listen to us now, man.’ It’s Du Pisanie. Now he sounds like he’s begging. He winks at Van der Walt. Van der Walt must play along nicely now. ‘Can you fix things, things that are broken, machines and things?’

‘Volkswagens,’ he answers.

‘And what else?’ asks Van der Walt.

‘Lawn-mowers, fridges, washing machines, video machines, fans, you name it,’ he says.

‘Excellent!’ says Du Pisanie.

‘There’s nothing that these two hands can’t do,’ he says. He shows them his hands. Van der Walt and Du Pisanie look at them — Lambert’s big hands with their funny, bent fingers, some of them too short, with knobs on the wrong places. Then they look at each other.

‘But we can certainly use you, old friend!’ says Van der Walt. Du Pisanie looks quickly at Van der Walt, shaking his head hard, just once.

‘He means you’ll be an asset to the AWB’s task force, sir,’ says Du Pisanie.

But no one’s going to ‘old friend’ him and then ‘sir’ him in the same breath — he heard what he heard.

‘No one uses me. I’m my own blarry boss. I don’t do kaffirwork. Take your fucken AWB and stick it up your backsides, man!’ He takes a few steps back.

‘Hey!’ says Van der Walt, taking a step closer. ‘What did you say there, hey? Come again, let’s hear you say that again, hey …’

‘Leave the rubbish alone, man,’ says Du Pisanie. ‘We’re wasting our time with him, he’s just a piece of rubbish, man.’

‘He’s worse than a kaffir, the fucker. Just look at him!’ says Van der Walt.

‘Jesus,’ he hears one of them say behind his back as he walks away, ‘I really didn’t know you still got people like that around here.’

Lambert walks away, fast. He’s limping. His ankle got sore from standing so long there under that big umbrella. He’s so spitting mad he could scream. He could chew up a car he’s so pissed off. Give him a car and he’ll bite right through the bumper! Fuck! His throat burns. Their fucken arses! Their fucken mothers’ arses too! Them with their fucken Oros! To hell with their fucken task force! They can peel their own fucken potatoes. They can go down on their own fucken knees and scrub their own fucken floors. What fucken floors, in any case? They’re the kind of people who piss on carpets. That’s what Treppie read in the papers. The AWBs pissed on the carpets at the negotiations. Just like Toby. If he sees a carpet, he pisses on it. That’s why they chucked all the carpets out at home. They stank too much from Toby’s piss. Fucken dogs! As if he’s going to wipe up their stink piss. He’s not their blarry servant-girl! And he’s not rubbish either, he’s no one’s rubbish. Just fuck them, man. Fuck them to hell and back.

And so Lambert talks to himself as he walks in the hot sun, towards the dumps. He talks out aloud. As he walks, he drags one hand along the prefab wagon-wheels on the prefab walls. He keeps his head down and looks at his feet. People mustn’t waste his fucken time like that. He’s got his own plans. He’s got a whole fucken list of things to do. And not enough time to do them in. Today it’s first things first. To the dumps. Get wine boxes. Take out the bags, so he can put petrol in when the shit hits the fan.

Treppie says petrol’s always the first thing that dries up when the shit starts flying.

He wonders what’s all this shit that’s going to fly so much.

When he asks Treppie what kind of shit he means, Treppie says shit is shit. You don’t specify shit, you duck for shit. And even when you’ve looked for it yourself, you still duck. You don’t just stand there. You’ve got a pair of eyes in your head, after all.

Treppie says that’s why there’s so much shit in the country. It’s ’cause everyone who looks for shit, stands for shit too. They think if they keep standing for shit, they’ll be heroes. But actually they’re just shits. After a while they’re so full of shit they can’t duck any more, even if they wanted to. And so everything becomes an even bigger load of shit. That’s why he thinks the Benades should just fuck off, ’cause he’s not going to stand for the shit that other people look for, and keep looking for. And it’s coming, he says, the shit’s coming, for absolutely sure it’s coming. It’s coming like lava from two sides.

When Treppie’s finished with the shit-story, he sings: ‘Tides of benediction!’

He can’t understand how shit coming from two sides like lava can be tides of benediction, but that’s Treppie for you.

And that’s how he knows Treppie. He wishes Treppie could’ve been with him today. He would have fixed those two fucken ‘task forces’, that’s for sure. Treppie doesn’t have to lay a finger on a person to fix him. He just does it through the air. He can make people feel so small it’s like they aren’t wearing pants any more, otherwise they lose their cool so badly they walk around for days in a sweat.

He turns right at the T-junction, to the dumps. It’s a Wednesday morning, so there won’t be so many people dumping today. But there’re a lot of kaffirs sitting and waiting for work. Loose kaffirs. You always find bunches of them sitting there. They sit in the shade across the road, against the rocks, and when a car comes, they all stick their fingers into the air. It means: ‘Take me, I’m a loose kaffir and I want piece-work’. The kaffirs inside the dump are fixed kaffirs — they work for the municipality. They wear overalls and they’ve got big, thick gloves. When people bring their rubbish, they throw it into big containers. They’ve got containers for bricks and containers for stones and others for grass and leaves and so on. They’ve also got containers for household rubbish. That’s now the rubbish that’s too much or too late for Tuesday. And that’s exactly where he wants to be. The kaffirs who work with those containers always open up the bags to see what’s inside. Sometimes they find old food. Then they eat that rotten food right there without even taking off their gloves. But it’s not just rotten food you find there, it’s all kinds of stuff. Radios, shoes, hairdryers, old clothes. He’s even seen whole fridges there. He once told Treppie he must come see the fridges, but Treppie says he doesn’t want to see another fucked-out fridge for the rest of his living days, let alone touch one. He says he’s done his bit for fridges. From now on he only wants to read about them in the classifieds. He doesn’t want to own them. He says it gives him great pleasure to see how far they travel, second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand. But once they’re beyond redemption he doesn’t want to see them any more. He’s had his fair share of lost fridges. That day in the yard when everything burnt down. He says there was so much fireworks going off into the sky he felt like he was in The Towering Inferno . It was bad, but it was also high drama. And a rubbish dump, he says, is not the final movie he wants in his head one day when he pops off, with fridges in the main roles, thank you very much. Treppie can talk a lot of shit. But at least he always has something to say.