Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

‘With a red nose,’ says Lambert. His voice sounds a bit better now.

‘Yes,’ says Pop, ‘a clown who laughs and cries at the same thing, so people can never make up their minds. And that’s a good thing, ’cause the last thing this world needs are people who keep making up their minds about bugger-all. You have to be patient and take each thing as it comes, good or bad. And, Treppie, my brother—’

She gives him a little kick under the chair. Pop’s brain is soft. He does it more and more these days. He forgets his perspective. He mustn’t go and lose his perspective now.

‘And, Treppie, my man …’ Pop says. He acts like it was nothing. But she saw Lambert’s eyes shifting uneasily when Pop said ‘my brother’. It’s her end, the idea that Lambert still hasn’t realised anything.

‘… let me just tell you one thing, and this is a piece of wisdom I picked up from you. You taught me this, and it’s not the kind of thing a person usually picks up from fridge mechanics.’

Pop’s looking at Treppie so hard that Treppie doesn’t say a word. There’s a sort of shy smile on his face. If you want Treppie in your pocket, just praise him. Ai, old Pop, he’s so smart tonight. In his own way.

‘It’s never too late,’ Pop says, ‘to recognise the talent you missed and to do something about it.’

Treppie gets up, with his shy smile and all. He tiptoes to his room, holding up his finger to show they must be quiet and wait a bit, he’s coming now. As soon as he’s closed his door, Pop tells Lambert to sit down. Now she can go and make him a nice mug of sweet coffee and a sandwich, ’cause a person can’t do exams on an empty stomach. She says nothing. The air’s full of surprises tonight, never mind history.

Mol sits on the stoep in front. She looks at the sparrows pecking the car’s hubcaps. They think it’s other sparrows, but it’s just themselves they see there. They go on and on, peck, peck, peck. After a while they’re just about falling over, but still they carry on. Then she says to Toby: ‘Fetch!’ and he chases the birds away. But they come back again.

There’s peace and quiet in the house now that Treppie’s helping Lambert with his fridges. It’s been more than a week already, thank God. Even Pop’s like a new man. He gets up with her in the mornings and they make sandwiches together in the kitchen. Pop takes Lambert and Treppie’s sandwiches through to the den, and then he comes and sits quietly here on the stoep with her. They drink coffee and look at the sparrows. And then they laugh all over again about the exam that Treppie gave Lambert.

Not that it was all fun and games. There was almost trouble, quite a few times, but in the end it all went off very well. It’s ’cause she and Pop kept their heads. Especially Pop. Pop was really on top form that night. Lambert too. Shame, she’s never seen him try so hard.

Lambert had hardly finished his sandwich that evening when Treppie came out of the room in one of Pop’s floppy old hats, striped pyjama pants, a vest full of cigarette holes, and red socks that were so old his toes and heels stuck out. He’d smeared his face white with Brylcreem, except for a wide space around his crooked mouth, which made it look much bigger than usual. On his nose was a plastic bubble they’d got for nothing at the Shell garage after Red Nose Day, when there were too many noses and not enough people with money for charity.

Treppie stood next to that box of red noses and said he wanted to take one for just in case, a person never knew. Charity was a house with many mansions.

He was right, too, ’cause here was that nose again, finding its day and its place. The place of Treppie’s lost talents. And the moment of truth for poor old Lambert, if you ask her.

‘Circus, circus!’ she and Pop called when Treppie came out, walking like a clown and sticking out his neck like a rooster.

‘No, no, no, there won’t be any circus tricks around here,’ he said, snorting through his nose.

‘Examination. Fridge exam. Fridge trial. So that the knowledge of the fathers may be passed on to the children. Triomf trials. And such occasions, as my brother, er, excuse me, er, my brother-in-law rightly said, such occasions deserve a special kind of approach.’ She looked at Pop, but Pop didn’t look worried. Pop always knows when things are okay.

At the word ‘approach’, Treppie smacked Lambert a hard shot on the back as he sat there on his crate. Lambert flashed him an angry look, as if to ask if that was really blarrywell necessary. But Treppie hiccuped like it was him who’d gotten the blow and he fell over. And then he just lay there on his back in the passage.

That was when she saw Lambert click that his exam wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Lambert was right. Everyone relaxed and they all felt relieved. She even took her hand out of her housecoat where she’d been feeling for a peg, ’cause in her mind’s eye she’d seen Lambert having another one of his terrible fits. From doing exams at his age.

But he didn’t look so old that night. You can’t be old in a circus. All you can do is jolly it up and play along. Fall down and stand up, take smacks and dish them out again, roll your eyes and stick out your tongue. Get kicks in your backside and have your arm twisted. Let out farts and eat your hat. Until you’re completely buggered.

That’s exactly what Treppie did with Lambert. When he saw Lambert was losing heart or getting tired, he let him have the red nose for a while so he could also play the fool.

And that’s how they got through the whole business. It was jolly and full of fun, and even she learnt something. She’d thought parables were only in the Bible, like the sower and the seed and the wasted talents, but then Treppie asked Lambert to tell everyone the parable of how fridges worked. It was a good story, too, about the canoe that leaked. And Lambert told it so nicely.

About how the heat inside a fridge was like water that kept leaking into a canoe, and how the heat was soaked up by the fridge’s gas — just like you sucked up water from a leaking canoe into a sponge, and then squeezed it out over the side, back into the ocean. That’s why a fridge was always warm at the back. It was where the heat came out, from the inside, allowing the fridge to stay cool. And that’s why the sea was always full of water, Lambert suddenly said. It was from the leaking canoes that people were sponging dry all the time. Treppie said, no, that was enough now, he was taking the parable too far. He should remember a parable was a truth with a short shelf-life. There was nothing in the world that was exactly the same as anything else. Then Treppie said a funny thing. He said that’s why he wouldn’t mind if he didn’t go to heaven one day, ’cause heaven was a place where everything was exactly the same as everything else, so they didn’t need parables over there. It was just pure, undiluted, eternal truth, without words. That, he said, sounded terribly boring to him, in fact it sounded like hell itself.

Pop said Treppie mustn’t start losing his thread, but Treppie said he’d already lost it, there was nothing to be done about it, and if heaven was like hell, then hell had to be like heaven, and he reckoned that was a place where everyone sat around and told weird parables all the time and no one ever ran out of things to say. It was a place where the truth kept flashing behind your eyeballs all the time, like multi-coloured fireworks on Guy Fawkes.

Horries, that’s what she said, just horries.

Circus, Treppie said, just circus. And he took Lambert further through his exam. What did it mean if there was too much ice in the ice-box and the pump had stopped and the on-off-on-off cycle got mixed up? It all meant the fridge was too warm, Lambert said. Full marks! And why did a fridge get too warm? He must please list the reasons. Then Lambert listed them on the tips of his fingers: blocked condenser pipe, broken seals, too little gas, old oil, broken thermostat. Full marks again! She and Pop clapped.