Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

He’s still got the man’s speech from the newspaper. That was now truly a priceless piece. About the way Sophiatown used to look in the old days, how it was a place you could ‘look up to’, with its ‘grey-blue haze’ of fire smoke ‘against a saffron sky’. And the little red-roofed houses on top of each other, how it always made him think of Italy, and the ‘shapely blue gum trees’ all over the place. There you have it! But the closing line was the best, about the Church of Christ the King on the hill, its steeple visible from afar, north-south-east-west, ‘riding like a great ship’. Now there’s a tapestry for you. Stitched together with lovely words.

That’s his fucken end, this endless fucking with words. In this country everything’s got a name which is actually something else’s name. Pik Botha, Vleis Visagie, Slang van Zyl, Brood van Heerden. And just look at their own names. Pop’s truly never had any pop in him. And Mol can try as much as she likes, she’ll never push up a molehill. And if one considers that her real name is Martha, one could dub her Martha Street’s presently serving Martha. But that’s an altogether different kind of service and a different kind of Martha from the story in the Bible that the Jehovahs always want to read. Of all of them, only Lambert’s name sounds like something. Lambertus Benade. It sounds like an ambassador or someone like that, with a carnation in his buttonhole. But anyone can see that’s more than a misnomer, it’s a fucken miscarriage. His own name is a total fuck-up. Nothing left of Martinus, and according to Mol he should rather have been named Judas Iscariot. That’s also okay. Where would her soul have been without Judas, he asks her.

That’s not even to mention their dogs, who end up being named after streets. Toby and Gerty. He read somewhere that the streets here in Triomf were named after the children of the man who used to own the farm on which Sophiatown was built. Bertha and Toby and Gerty and Edith. And Sophia was supposed to have been the man’s wife. Then, just for the hell of it, he checked in the Britannica , and it said something about Holy Sophia being the name of a church in Turkey with a dome that looked like heaven.

For shitting through an icing tube, where will it all end? The whole world is just names and nothing is what it is and everything’s what it’s not, it’s all in the mind! And the mind’s a bottomless pit.

Legion as the Gadarene swine are the names of things, and then they all fall down in droves into that steep place, one on top of the other. A loose scrum in the depths. Not worth the breath it takes to utter them, never mind the paper they’re written on.

Treppie kicks the newspapers away. He throws them around a few at a time. Papers fly all over the bathroom. Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul!

He’s fed up with the whole business, fed up, sick and tired of it all. Words swim before his eyes. Names whirl around in his head.

He folds the newspapers double and throws them up against the ceiling. ‘Kaboof! Kaboof!’

The Freedom Front’s got lead in its head. Hells bells in the house of Shell. And Goldstone’s teeth are but few. See how the train rides, how the train rides, all aboard the gravy train. Civil Co-operaton Chowder. Consensus-Atlantis-hortus-conclusus. The apple of his father’s eye, his mother’s darling, Sophia-Maria-Maryna, pretty girls in a row.

Noises start coming from his body. Hark the mighty roars. They hold much promise.

He feels his guts moving. Swing low, sweet chariot. Blessed is the stool’s motion, happy in its peals, its psalms to the end of all meals. He tears the newspaper into small pieces. He’s making confetti. Triomf, Triomf, here comes the bride, big, fat and wide.

He wipes his arse. Truly, when this happens, it feels like the seventh day, the day of rest. Emptied and unburdened. Everything well. Peace on earth.

FAMILY BIBLE

Mol sits in her chair, sewing the middle button back on to her housecoat. The old button got lost, so she’s using one of Pop’s shirt-buttons that she found in the bathroom cabinet. It’s smaller, which means she’ll have to close up the buttonhole on the one side. But she doesn’t mind, it keeps her busy. When she’s not busy, she worries too much.

Lambert hasn’t set foot out of his den for three days now. Only a few minutes ago she went and took a peek at him. They told her she mustn’t bother him.

He’s sitting there with clean hands in front of his work bench, on a straight-backed chair that he fixed himself. He’s studying the refrigeration book. From first page to last. With a pencil in his hand and a Croxley exercise book. The two mugs of Frisco that Pop put down next to him look like they’re cold, and the ants are eating his polony sandwich.

‘He still hasn’t eaten or drunk a thing,’ says Pop, coming back from the den and sitting down in his chair next to her.

It’s Treppie’s book, which he lent Lambert after Pop begged him, on his hands and knees, in God’s name, to please help out a bit with Lambert.

If Lambert didn’t get those two fridges in his den up and running before his birthday, Pop said, then Treppie would still live to see the most terrible butchery with long knives ever seen in the long history of the Benades.

At first, Treppie was completely bloody minded.

Lambert would never use a sharp object, he said. Pop’s knowledge of human nature was failing him. Lambert was the kind of person who would definitely use a blunt instrument.

And sometimes, he said, as in the case of seals who bred too much, maybe that was the best thing for an environment’s balance.

How a thing like the environment could have trouble with its balance, like a tightrope walker, is beyond her. When she asked Treppie, he said balance wasn’t just a circus trick, it was the trick of life itself, except the Benades had never yet got the hang of it. But it was never too late to learn.

In fact, he said, Lambert should consider a general culling of the Triomf population while he was at it with his blunt instrument. The blunter the better, he said, like a pestle in a mortar, to stamp some national blood into the soil. A little blood would do the soil in Triomf no end of good, ’cause nothing exhausted a place like old bricks.

Pop begged and pleaded. It was so bad he even called up the memory of Old Pop after a while. Right here in the lounge. Pop went down on his knees, spreading out his arms with a bottle of Klipdrift in one hand. Right in front of the TV, like he wanted to embrace the Big One.

Was it Old Pop’s lost and homeless spirit tormenting them like this, year in and year out? he asked. Was it because Treppie had never forgiven Old Pop for that terrible hiding? Well, no one’s ever told her how you’re supposed to talk to a ghost, but Pop sounded like he knew how, ’cause he came out with some terribly high-flown language.

Oh troubled spirit, Pop said, his eyes rolling in his head, wilt thou not have mercy on us, thou who lurkest in the dark corners of empty coal trucks. And as thou holdest thy hand on thy neck, where death lashed thee, wilt thou not, we beseech thee, if a sacrifice is brought in the year of Our Lord, 1994, soften thy heart towards us? A sacrifice by the same child who since his eighth year hath refused to speak to thee and given thee no place in his heart whatsoever.

It was never too late, Pop said, for a living person to reconcile himself with a spirit who couldn’t come to rest because he was upset about that person.

Well, after that Treppie’s mouth dried up completely and he went and sat in his room behind a closed door for days on end.