Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Pledges, he thought, but what had they actually pledged? They won some paint with the right number under the gold stamp. That was all. Why would you want to pledge anything if you’d won something? Unless it was your faith in Wonder Wall. He could swear there was a fucken snag of sorts somewhere.

To tell the truth, that wasn’t the worst of it. What made him feel really sad were all those thousands of metres the man clocked up on his little wheel. All of it painted white, pure white, without a trace of their comings or goings.

He looks at the bathroom. The man measured in here too. It would make for a bit of an unsociable shit if paint was the only thing you could smell around here. He knows every little mark and crack in this room. In fact, if there’s one room in this house he can call his own, it’s the toilet. This is where he catches his breath, and this is where he figures out what’s what and who’s next. It’s the place where he scratches the monkey for fleas, as Pop always says when he stays inside for so long. Well, whether or not it’s fleas he doesn’t know, all he knows is that it’s a necessity.

Treppie looks around in the bathroom. There’s the soft rubber tube they use for siphoning petrol on a nail behind the door. Their toothbrushes, warped and lopsided, in the little blue plastic glass on the shelf. His and Pop’s and Lambert’s razors, on the window ledge. And Mol’s hairbrush, so full of caked, grey hair you almost can’t see the brush any more. Three bent-open hairpins. Two buttons.

In the same way, you’ll find their personal effects all over the house. Their spit and their blood and their breath. And paw marks, all over the walls.

Yellow afternoon light shines through the bathroom’s frosted window, making a dull spot of light on the wall. Just there, someone’s oily hand touched the wall. Must’ve been Lambert. King Kong was here.

What the hell, what will be, will be. From high-gloss to matt-finish in the space of a single lifetime. Maybe it’s also not such a bad thing, after all. With every face-lift you lose something, but what have they got to lose in any case? Not exactly what you’d call museum pieces. Just the collected works of wear and tear. The little bits of baggage from the Benades’ Great Trek, full of dirty marks. Burnt black, caked up, flopped out, moth-eaten, unstitched, sticky and rusted, with dog-hair on everything too.

Not quite wallpaper, this. And by no means a tabernacle. Just the blues of 127 Martha Street. The fine print of fuck-all. The dregs of Triomf!

Would you believe it! And he’s sober as a judge. His guts must be full of gas. At least it’s a case of self-generated intoxication. Not like the hot air and the fine-tuning that gives Pop his kicks.

Take for example how Pop and Mol fell, hook, line and sinker, for Malan’s story in ’48. Another Great Trek story. This time it was on the wireless. Old Mol was no longer with them. Just the three of them sitting around the kitchen table in Vrededorp. He still remembers saying blah-blah-blah when that flat-mouthed old toad in a hat began croaking about the election. About how his party, the ‘Purified’ National Party, was depending on everyone to bring the Great Trek to its logical ‘conclusion’. Pure, undiluted shit! How his party would lead them through this new Great Trek, through all its ditches and drifts and its risks and dangers. And how his party would fend off every threat, how it would destroy the enemies at the Blood River of the labour market, fighting to the bitter end. Because this time it wasn’t a Great Trek upcountry to escape the English, he said, this time it was the rural Afrikaner’s Great Trek to the cities, and for those who were already there, the poor and the reviled, it was the Great Trek to the higher professions and big capital.

Come again, he said. It was a Great Trek back under the English yoke. Only now the yoke had a drill-bit and its name was Anglo. But Pop and Mol told him he must shuddup, they wanted to listen.

How they listen, if anything gets said about the Great Trek, the Promised Land, Everyone-Together-Through-Thick-And-Thin. How they listen!

Whether that place is full of milk and honey or full of petrol and oil and bricks and mine dumps, it makes no difference. And if, on top of it all, the voice promising everything sounds like a preacher, then they’re all ears. Fired up. Ready for take-off.

That’s why Mol thinks that Niehaus chappy from the ANC with his bedroom eyes is such a together little boykie. She says he reminds her a lot of Malan. In that case, he tells her, she should vote for the ANC, but she says not a damn will she vote for the kaffirs. Then he asks her, but what about Niehaus, he’s a white oke? In that case, she says, maybe she will vote for the ANC after all, ’cause Niehaus looks to her like the kind of leader you can follow with complete trust to the bitter end. What’s more, he looks like a man who’d follow his own leaders to the bitter end, come hell or high water, and that’s enough for her. Then it feels like the National Party.

Ja, the poor fools, it feels like. He wonders if the leaders of that party feel like anything to themselves, never mind National. When he tries to imagine what they feel like, he detects the stirrings of a bowel movement. And that’s a fucken compliment, ’cause they’re not even worth a good shit. Liars and thieves with their hands on their hearts. The plural lying party, here a coup, there a coup, meanwhile they’re cooped up with their own kind all the time, grabbing each other’s balls. State ball. A dance for this one and a dance for that one. Here a gun, there a prayer. Excuse me while I waltz all the way to the Nobel Prize.

Now it’s supposed to be ‘New’ National Party. New be damned. Turning their own ‘foreign’ partners back into internal affairs, digging out the bombs they planted themselves, firing their own big shots, and then state enemy number one becomes the state’s redeeming partner. Teach the Bushmen aerobics, give the Koevoets cabbages to plant. And they call it new! It’s not new, it’s the same old rubbish recycled under a new name. But the rubbish itself is a brandless substance. Nameless horror in sackcloth of hair, if you ask him.

That’s why he egged Lambert on to start throwing stones at those two new NPs the other day. They thought they could come here again with their crap in the middle of the day. Lambert was digging his petrol cellar, so he had lots of ammunition to hand. Old Sof’town’s bricks for stoning the new NPs. He hopes that was now a permanent removal. Those boy scouts couldn’t get away from here fast enough, ducking all the way. It’s a good thing they weren’t NPs from the old school, ’cause they would’ve stood their ground and took it like men. Good old times. Now they duck for a living. He’s seen on TV how things are going in the townships. That’s where they’ve learnt to become such experts in the art of ducking. Think they can barge in wherever they like. And now they scheme they’re suddenly good enough for the red-carpet treatment. Long live the Ducking Party. And so the pendulum swings. If FW learns the art of ducking in Meadowlands, then you can be sure old Meddlebones is coming back to Triomf to reminisce. It’s taken a long time, but now he, Treppie, has finally clicked this mathematics of history.

So when Mol let out a yelp one day last November, and called them to come see, Mandela was driving down the road in an open car, but he’d turned white overnight and he was wearing a black dress, he, Treppie, knew exactly who it was. And there stood the old dog-collar, in a black limousine, with a whole bunch of other Roman doggos in red and purple dresses in the cars behind him. They were smiling so much you saw nothing but teeth. He recognised him by his hair, still shaved close like in the old days when he used to run around here trying to save what there was to be saved. But now he was very old. He looked like a little powdered peach and he was smiling all the way down memory lane. Pointing here, pointing there with his shaky little hand, like he was sprinkling holy water, with everyone looking where he was pointing. And right at the end of the procession, on an open lorry, rode His Holiness Huddlestone’s private band. They were playing full tilt, jolly jiving music on saxophones and penny-whistles and things like that. The whole band was full of old-timers with hanging dewlaps from all the blowing, but they followed their lead player, who was blowing like mad on his little trumpet. AFRICAN JAZZ PIONEERS, it said in stencilled letters on the lorry. That lorry was swaying on its wheels from the way they were pulling and pushing those shiny, long arms on the trombones. ‘ Viva Kofifi! ’ one old bloke was shouting. ‘You are the captain!’ another one called. And then everyone sang a song for that papier mâché captain, standing there in front, pointing over the roofs of Triomf as if they were a tempest-tossed ocean. Was he imagining things, or did he even start liking him? He had the gift of the gab, and if there’s one thing you need to survive with a dress and a collar round your neck in this country, then it’s being able to talk yourself in or out of anything.