Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

She said she’d rather stay right here where she was. The rest of them could go if they wanted.

But wait, she’d better go back now. It must be time for the Queen of England.

ALSO JUST HUMAN

It’s a grey day and the Queen has to pose for a portrait. She’s dressed up in tassels and fur and she’s wearing her crown. She sits dead still. At first, the artist paints only her head. The Queen’s favourite little doggy sits at her feet, his eyes shining and his ears pricked. He’s looking to see what his lady’s doing.

The camera shows the lobes of her ear, the pearls and the soft flesh on her neck, and then, one by one, the precious gems in her crown.

Mol sees her cheeks and her nose and the wrinkles under her eyes. The Queen is powdered and painted for her sitting, but Mol is not fooled by her tight little smile.

Now they’re showing how much of her the artist has already painted. Her face and a trimming of white fur around her neck. The likeness is good and the fur also looks genuine.

But the Queen keeps turning the tassels around and around in her lap. And she’s rubbing her thumb over the thick, bushy ends. They say she’s sad about Windsor burning down. The damage was huge and now the treasures are fewer. They show a picture of the fire.

The Queen looks out of the window. It’s raining outside. Further down, far away, the Royal Guard marches around the fountains. The soldiers are small and red, like ants, with stripes down their trousers. They stamp their feet and then they put down their guns. Each one’s got a cord on his sleeve and a high, black cap, as if he’s in mourning.

‘It looks like a rainy day,’ says the Queen, and: ‘How did this session go?’

But the camera shows she’s thinking about something else. About how she went and looked at Windsor, walking in the rain through the rubble. In a yellow plastic hat, black rubber boots and a thin old overcoat. A fireman with a helmet helped her step over the beams. Shame, she’s also just human.

‘Oh, what a shame. My, what a pity. Alas, history reduced to mere ashes.’

‘And now, Molletjie, why you crying?’

It’s Pop. He’s just woken up.

‘I’m crying about the Queen of England and her palace that burnt down.’

‘Never mind,’ says Pop, ‘she’s only a queen, and she’s got many more.’

To shit is a fine skill, that’s for fucken sure. And, if anything, a turd is a work of art. So help him God. Some are water paintings of Sahara sunsets, and others are statues in the park. But a masterpiece of a crap is one that works its way down from your guts in one piece like a tapestry, evenly textured and solidly braided, not too light but also not too dark. With all the colours blending but not so much that it gets boring. Delicate, bright flowers shining against the grass and the white horse resting his horn meekly on the Madonna’s lap.

Treppie sits and pages through an old calendar he found among the dykes’ newspapers yesterday. There’s a broken guitar painted by one Braque, and a rough-looking oke with a bandage around his head. It’s a Van Gogh, by Van Gogh, who cut off his own ear, it says at the bottom.

Well bric-à-braque and all a-gogh. The stranger the name the stranger the dog.

He’ll take the holy virgin, any time, with her poor old horse and its single horn. All of it in invisible stitching. At least it looks like something. And he doesn’t mind the fact that they don’t know so nicely any more exactly who made it. If you asked him, a whole swarm of nuns must’ve sat working on those little flowers till their tongues started hanging out from tiredness and they got completely cross-eyed from concentrating on all the tiny stitches. So that after a while they began to see visions, and that was when they started stitching in the Mother of God in her blue dress, and her weird little horse, on top of the flowery lawn. Mystics can’t be choosers. And neither can the constipated. It’s a cross and it’s a calling. To look at what doesn’t exist, and to sit without results — both are ways of escaping the fine-grinder.

And it gives rise to shithouses full of art. God be his witness.

And the world is evidence thereof.

That’s why he buggered off from the lounge to come sit here with his newspapers. He doesn’t feel he’s got the slightest chance of producing a turd today, never mind art, but what the hell. To sit quietly on the toilet is a million times better than listening to those horny Jehovahs preaching to that fucked-up family of his, who sit there like obedient little dogs.

It’s not even March and the Jehovahs are into Exodus again. Every year they make the same mistake. They try to get through the whole Bible, piece by piece. But their timing’s way out. They start too quickly, and then at the end of the year they have to read Revelation twice in a row, verse for verse, ’cause they hit the end too soon. Many’s the time he’s told them, spare us the Revelation, dears, we’ve heard it all before. But before you can say Jack Robinson, the sun’s become black as sackcloth of hair and the moon’s become as blood, for the umpteenth time.

What they’re reading today he already knows off by heart. About how He led them from the land of the Egyptians and took them to a good, wide land, a country flowing with milk and honey, where the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites lived. Then Mol goes ‘ites-ites-ites’ with that flabby mouth of hers as she tries to say all those names. She thinks it’s funny, the old bitch.

The only thing that’s different about this year’s Exodus is the musical accompaniment. Lambert’s sitting there on his crate and playing ‘tingtong, ting-tong’ on that thumb-piano of his. As they get to the pests and the plagues, he plays it quicker and quicker. What works on Lambert’s tits the most are the frogs that jump from the rivers into everyone’s beds. And the tabernacle puts him clean on to a high, about Aaron’s robe, with its bells of pure gold and pomegranates on the hem so he’ll tinkle and stay alive when he goes before God. Lambert’s got a horse-high hard-on for that woman again. Ja, shame, the poor bugger, he must be playing on that thing to stop himself from getting another fit. He looks quite worn out from all the fits he’s been having lately. Fits for fuck-all nowadays. Three, four times in January alone. And he won’t take his pills either; he says he needs to have all his wits about him so he can fix everything he’s still got to fix. He’s working himself into a bigger and bigger state as it gets closer to his birthday. But everything he touches, he breaks. This Benade is no Midas, that’s for sure.

Like the other day, when he found out the bathroom mirror was too big. A ghost of a millimetre, but still too big. Then of course Lambert tried to cut the mirror himself. Broke the thing to pieces. He told Lambert those pieces were still quite okay for pasting on to the hardboard, but of course he went and lost it again. He took a hammer and smashed those pieces one by one until there was nothing left but grit. So now he sits there and plays a tune without end, for the sake of his fits, for the pillar of cloud and the Red Sea and the bitter waters of Marah. ‘Pe-ting, pe-teng, pe-tong.’

So he can’t bear the sight of Lambert either.

Not to mention Pop. He sits there with his fly gaping ’cause the buttons that Mol sewed on have all come off again and Pop keeps losing his safety pin. The trouble started early this morning when Pop was shoving his shirt and vest into his pants so he could cover his shame, as he puts it. Mol kept pointing there with her finger. Then he, Treppie, asked them if they thought they’d just been kicked out of paradise or something, and if they reckoned their shame sticking out all the time was likely to bother anyone.