Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

It was all quiet and calm. The only other people there were on the other side, having a braai.

‘Must be policemen,’ said Pop.

‘Maybe they work night shift. Shame, they must also crave a bit of sun,’ she said.

So they unpacked their food and ate in silence there on the grass. Every now and again someone said something. Like: Look at the ducks. Or: Look where Toby’s running now. Or: I wonder what kind of bird that is?

Except for Treppie, who didn’t say a word. He just sat there, writing on his cigarette box. He’d write something, scratch it out again and then write something on the other side. After a while he was even writing on the macaroons’ paper bag.

‘What you writing there, Treppie?’ Lambert asked after a while, and then she and Pop also asked. But Treppie just bit the back of his ball-point pen and scratched his head. He didn’t say a word.

Then, after a long time, when they were passing around the Coke bottle for last sips and smoking their second cigarette, Treppie asked if they were ready to pay attention now, ’cause he’d written something special, for a special day. It was called ‘This is not wallpaper’ and this was how it went.

He stood up and smoothed down his clothes, and then he recited his little verse. So all that time he was sitting there writing a little verse, on his John Rolfes box, and on the macaroons’ paper bag.

He put on his stage voice, gestured across the water, and read from the paper. It’s the same piece of paper she can see now, pasted under the aerial photo of Jo’burg:

2 September 1993

THIS IS NOT WALLPAPER

The African coot creases the water

And the Egyptian geese shout wha! to the sky

And the hadida, that old bachelor

sits there on the fronds of a willow.

He shakes his feathers and stretches his leathers

and shouts ha! to his friends on the bridge,

ja-ha! They must look,

this is not wallpaper

not this time, no, not this time,

it’s spring, yes it’s spring

at the old Westdene Dam—

and, not least,

at last there is peace.

Treppie’s little poem left them speechless. For a long while all you could hear were the birds. Toby began to cry, ’cause Treppie kept standing there in that funny way with his one hand up in the air and the other still holding the macaroons’ paper bag. So Lambert started clapping and they all joined in. Pop put his fingers in his mouth like he used to when he was young and he whistled a whistle with a wild twist at the end. And then of course Toby started barking and jumping around in circles.

They all wanted to hear the verse over and over again. Treppie had to recite his poem four times, and each time it sounded better, and different.

‘A poet and you don’t know it, hey?’ Lambert said to Treppie as they walked back to the car.

But Pop said: ‘He knows it, all right, he knows it,’ and he put his hand around Treppie’s shoulder.

When Pop took the turn into Martha Street, past the prefab wagonwheels, Lambert said: ‘“This is not wallpaper, not this time, no, not this time”,’ and when they got to the house and she climbed out to open the gate, Lambert shouted: ‘“And the Egyptian geese shout wha! to the sky”.’ And when they walked in through the front door, Pop said: ‘“And, not least, at last there is peace.”’

That’s when she said to Treppie he must give her that paper bag, she wanted to paste it up nicely on the wall under the aerial photo, next to Mister Cochrane’s security fencing. He looked at her hard and then she smiled back at him. She couldn’t stop herself. She said: ‘So we make no mistake about where it is we come from.’ Then he also smiled and winked at her, giving her a little hug around the shoulders. Ja, can you believe it, a decent, brotherly hug.

It just shows you.

What a day like this can do to a person.

Now she hears Lambert wants Treppie to write a rhyme for his girl, before even meeting her. In English, too. But she’s not so sure about this business, ’cause by that time there won’t be any peace left. Then it’ll be elections.

CHRISTMAS

Hell, but it’s a long wait for the Queen of England tonight. Still another quarter of an hour. It had better be worth the wait.

Maybe she should start throwing away the Christmas cards on the sideboard — if they’re still there by New Year she can just see the trouble it’ll cause again. Not that she meant anything by putting them there in the first place, one at a time, as she found them in the postbox. She stood them upright with their pictures showing to the outside, all of them with houses, houses, houses, except the one with a path to heaven and a little sun. She stood them there so Christmas would at least look like something, for a change. Most of the time their Christmases are just miserable bugger-ups.

But this year they were lucky. Christmas turned out much better than for a long time. They got together in threes and gave presents to the fourth one. Lambert carried on and on about wanting to have a braai with T-bones and watermelon, so they could all learn to be nice and sociable. He said that was something the rest of them were going to have to learn fast in the New Year, once he and his birthday-girl started going steady. They’d have to learn how to treat visitors nicely, and they’d have to start eating some decent food, too. They also needed to learn the meaning of hospitality. And no, she wasn’t allowed to fry those T-bones in the pan, on top of the Primus. They had to be done on a proper wood fire, in the backyard. Lambert actually went and bought five silver balls at Shoprite, and then on Christmas Eve he hung them up on the fig tree in the yard. He told them they must all come outside now, he wanted to practise making a jolly fire. He said he knew how to make big fires, but a braaivleis fire was a different story altogether. For a braaivleis fire you needed an audience.

He bought three bags of firewood, one and a half for practising and one and a half for the real thing.

Then he wanted old newspapers to put under the wood, but Treppie said, uh-uh, he wasn’t finished reading them yet and Lambert should’ve thought about this when he burnt all his old Watchtower s. The next thing, Lambert tells her she must go fetch those stupid Christmas cards from Seeff and Johan Bekker and Nico Niemand and De Huizemark and Aribal whatshisname so he can use them to make his fire. She said no way, Christmas wasn’t over yet and his Christmas fire would die for sure if he went and sent the season’s greetings up in flames. Then he said season’s foot, they didn’t mean it, it was just estate agents’ sales gimmicks. Gimmick himself, she said. What about the NP’s little Christmas card, did he want to burn that one too? No, he said, she must leave that one. The NPs had been in their house so many times they were almost family by now, and in any case the NP was safer than houses.

Then of course Treppie couldn’t keep his mouth shut again. He told Lambert if he went into the election believing those two snotnoses from the NP were any better than estate agents looking for a commission, then he’d learnt nothing in all his forty years.

Treppie said Lambert must ask himself this: if the DP paid its workers one rand for every black vote they could get, and the ANC was willing to pay as much as fifteen thousand rand for just one bankrupt white cop with a drinking problem who’d seen the light, then how much more wouldn’t the NP pay for all the Ampies of the nineties who still lived in Triomf? Hadn’t he noticed the smart car that nosepicking Groenewald drove around in, and did he perhaps think the NP got money like that from selling doughnuts at church bazaars? He could assure Lambert now, without a doubt: money like that came from one place and one place only — the taxpayer’s pocket. It was a fucken shame.