Triomf Read online

  The other Witness is a man. He clears his throat, preparing to take over the reading. His cheeks look like they’ve been planed down, and his hair’s oiled. Smooth, like Elvis. He’s wearing a brown suit with a pale blue sheen. He smells of mothballs and peppermints and shaving cream.

  The smell makes Lambert feel sick to his stomach. It’s a strange feeling, the heat and the hardness all at the same time. He tries to look out of the window, just past the little carport where the Volla’s standing. He wants to see if his postbox that he welded on to the gate yesterday is still there. But all he sees are molehills. The heads of the two Witnesses are in his way. The tips of the sun-filter curtains hang down behind their heads and shoulders. From the front, it looks like wings are growing out of them: sloppy, faded old wings full of holes. Growing and growing, like dusty old cloths that keep stringing out and rising up into the warm air, up, up from their innermost insides.

  Pink Dress looks at Elvis. She’s reading the last sentence of her turn.

  ‘“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”’

  Lambert grabs his knees in front and squeezes his buttocks together. He must just hold it now, hold it tight, just think of his postbox that he made all on his own. From pieces of plate his father fetched for him at Roodepoort Steel’s scrapyard. That was after the fridge business went bankrupt. After Guy Fawkes. Pop went to fetch the steel on the day before Guy Fawkes, ’cause his mother had said: ‘Pop, you’d better do something to keep Lambert busy. He’ll be the end of me yet.’ He’d been out of school for two years by then. Eighteen years old.

  A house looks better with a postbox in front in any case. It says: People live here and they’ve got an address. This is where you’ll find them if you want them. It helps, ’cause the houses in Triomf all look much the same, anyway.

  So he took the steel plates, cut them to size and welded them together. He made a little silver house with a V-roof and a slot for letters and a round hole in front. He made it nicely, with a double row of welding spots all round the edges, and with their number, 127, in front. Nice and black in lead so you could see it from the street. Then he put it up on a nail against the prefab wall, just inside the gate so the postman-kaffir could lean over and put in the letters, ’cause they always lock the gate in front. But since then, every time Treppie turns Molletjie into the gate at the end of the month, he knocks that postbox right off the wall again. Molletjie’s been panelbeaten and spray-painted to death from driving into that postbox. So in the end he just took the thing and chucked it into his den. It was always full of junk anyway. Adverts and pamphlets and the Western Telegraph. That kind of thing doesn’t need a postbox. You just pick it up off the lawn. There’s nothing to read in that paper in any case, except the flying squad’s emergency numbers and all the new stuff in the by-laws. About making a racket, ‘noise pollution’, as Treppie calls it.

  The postbox stayed in his den until yesterday, when he suddenly clicked: nowadays a person needs a decent postbox here in Triomf. Easily visible, and within reach of the pavement, so you can get the pamphlets, so you can keep up with what’s going on, so you can keep ahead, so you don’t wake up one morning to find that the kaffirs have already taken over, right under your nose. So they can be ready – Molletjie’s points grinded just right, and her front boot and roof-rack loaded with bags of petrol, for the great road to the North.

  ‘No, shit, I’m going to weld that postbox on to the gate now. It’s now or never,’ he said. That was yesterday.

  ‘But the rain’s coming, Lambert,’ his mother said.

  ‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’ he said, making them run around under the blue lightning to bring his tools: the welding box, his helmet, his hammers, his pliers and his level. Rain or no rain, when a thing’s got to be done, it’s got to be done. Otherwise there’s always a fuck-around. When he, Lambert, wants a thing to work, then it must work. Come hell or high water.

  But his mother was slow on the uptake, as usual. She gets like that sometimes, her head all haywire. He had to send her back to his den three times to get the level. First she came out with a monkey wrench, then the crowbar, till he finally told her it was the fucken plank with the fucken bubble in it!

  He swears, she’s driving him nuts.

  And then those fuckers from next door peeped at them over the prefab wall, as they stood there, struggling with that damn postbox ’cause it kept fucking off the pole. Till at last he figured he must actually just weld a flat plate on to the pole, and then fix the postbox on to the top of the plate. Then it worked. He, Lambert, can tell you all about never giving up. In the end, he gets everything fixed. Postboxes, lawn-mowers, taps, overflow pipes, geysers, you name it. Fridges and washing machines too. And Molletjie. He services her all the time. Drains her oil, greases her, grinds her points, the works.

  It’s just his mother that he can’t get fixed up. You can still fool Pop. And Treppie needs the occasional smack on the head, then he’s okay again. But his mother is his fucken end.

  Treppie’s his mother’s brother, but even he’s given up on her. No matter how much he carries on with her, she just takes it lying down, like a scared little dog. Never backchats. And the day she does open her mouth, then it’s to say the same thing he’s just said to her. Like a blarry echo machine.

  Treppie says she’s their ‘valley of echoes’. And when he really lets her have it, your ears start burning, ’cause Treppie can say mean, bad things.

  Like the day they went to buy the car. They first wanted to trade Flossie in, but the man there said no, she’s too far gone, they must rather keep her for spares. Then Treppie winked, with those slit-eyes of his. That devil’s wink of his, when you know he’s up to something.

  Treppie said to Pop, right in his face, right there next to that garage man, they should name the new Volla after his brother-in-law’s ‘dear little wife’.

  Mol, he said, should be the little car’s name, and then he started pushing Pop around. What for, Lambert still doesn’t know.

  ‘Old, but game!’ Treppie said, and Pop pointed his finger at him. He must go slowly now, but Treppie just fucked along.

  ‘For a man to come with, to the place where he needs to come!’

  Still it wasn’t enough; Treppie went and fetched his mother from where she was standing among the scrapheaps and the write-offs, and he put his arm around her in an off kind of way, half-soft, half-hard, and then he said, still in front of the garage man, she wouldn’t mind, of course, ’cause all three of them rode her in any case.

  Well, he can’t see how Treppie knows about him and his mother’s business, ’cause he spends just about the whole day at the Chinese, week in and week out. He says he does odd jobs. But he can swear Treppie’s got a thing going there. He always flattens his hair with Brylcreem before he goes to work, the whole car stinks of Brylcreem when they take him to the bus stop. And Pop sleeps day in and day out, so he knows nothing … and in any case, that just makes two, that is, if Pop still can, which he doubts … for the rest, Treppie and his mother are brother and sister, so they can’t.

  But: ‘Three in one!’ Treppie said, talking at the top of his voice. ‘Services them all! Father, Son and Holy Ghost, into their glory!’

  ‘Three in one,’ his mother said.

  Well, that garage man’s laugh dried up right there, and when he looks back at it now, that must have been what Treppie wanted with all his dirty talk. ’Cause in the middle of all his sales talk, that dealer had a fat we-love-Jesus grin on his mug, and he’d stuck fishes on to the bumpers of all the cars in his yard. Fishes, fishes, fishes wherever you looked, big fishes and small fishes, it looked like the blarry Sea of Galilee there under those awnings. That’s what Treppie said and what his mother also said, afterwards. And before he and Pop went to pay the deposit, Treppie told that salesman, who was now looking down in the mouth, that if there’s one thing that gave him a maj
or pain in the arse, it was a second-hand car dealer who tried to tell him religion ran on ninety-three and fishes stepped out in Firestones.

  ‘Firestones,’ his mother said.

  But all the time that Treppie and his ‘echo machine’ were busy working off that goody two-shoes’ smile, Pop just stood there and stared out into the distance. Only Treppie was laughing, and then Lambert saw how Pop took his mother’s hand and gave it a little squeeze, as if to say, don’t worry, and he knew she was just playing along for the sake of peace.

  Then Treppie came with a new angle. He started singing a classical kind of tune in another language, something ‘-line’, something ‘-line’ and something else ‘-line’; he still doesn’t know what all those lines meant. And then the garage man asked Treppie what he was singing now, and Treppie said he thought he was singing a famous German SS hallelujah song, from something called ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, and it meant blood was thicker than water. All the way down the line.

  ‘Rosenkavalier,’ his mother said, squeezing Pop’s hand.

  In any case, from then on the car’s name was Molletjie. Sometimes, when the car won’t start so nicely, then Treppie says, come now, little sister, or he sings her the hallelujah of the SS. He says he’s just glad it’s another Volla, the same model as Flossie, ’cause, unlike the saying, it’s actually the familiar that makes the heart grow fonder.

  Now Elvis takes over the reading. His hands look all white and smooth as he sits there, holding his Bible. The woman leans back into Pop’s chair, and her petticoat pulls even tighter over her thighs. She follows Elvis’s reading in her own Bible. His voice is smooth, like his face.

  ‘“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying: I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia: unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”’

  Triomf. That’s where they’ve always lived. At least that’s how it feels to him, cause he was six or seven when they first moved here. It was a big event and he still remembers it well, with all the fridges in the trailer behind the old Austin lorry. He was born in Vrededorp, but he knows nothing about that. His mother pulls a face when she says the word ‘delivered’. Apart from that, all he hears are stories about when he was young, and now he can’t remember which are stories and which the things he actually remembers, ’cause in this house everyone tells such tall stories you’d swear their lives depended on it.

  His mother too, when she talks about his birth. She says it was a ‘rough’ delivery. He was a ‘whopper’ who refused to budge. Then they brought the forceps and they pulled him out by his head. Yes, by his head. Then she ‘tore open’, she says. ‘Never again.’ That’s what she’s fuckenwell supposed to have said after he came out and the nurses carried him away, with his lopsided, dented head. ‘From now on’ she told ‘those with ears to hear’, they ‘must stop eating the tart before they get to the jam’. He doesn’t know who ‘those’ are and what tart she was talking about. All he knows is that whenever his mother talks about his birth, Treppie always sings ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’, and then Pop looks the other way. Lambert reckons his mother’s not all there any more. She’s lost some of her marbles.

  Pop and them used to rent a house in Fietas; that was when his mother was still a garment worker at the factory in Fordsburg. But then the factory filled up with cheap Hotnot women. They were a lot cheaper than white women, so she had to leave. A little while later, they bulldozed the kaffirnests here in Sophiatown. Pop and Treppie came to see for themselves, they say. Some houses were just pushed down with everything still inside, so all you heard was glass breaking and wood cracking. Then Community Development started building here, right on top of the kaffirs’ rubbish. Decent houses for white people. Treppie used to work for the Railways in those days, and he asked for his pension money early so he could put it down for a deposit. Like this – ‘ka-thwack’ – he always demonstrates, in Pop’s hand, ‘tied with an elastic’.

  Then they started from scratch again on the fridges. Washing machines and fridges, but mostly fridges. They went and fetched them with the old Austin, stood them up in the yard at the back here, fixed them up and then took them back to their owners. And his mother took up her roses again. One thing he still remembers from Vrededorp is that he grew up around fridges and plastic buckets full of roses in the little backyard. His mother used to leave him behind, with Treppie, so she could go out and work. She says she doesn’t trust Treppie further than she can throw him, even though he is her brother, but what was she supposed to do? she always asks. She had to help bring in some money, especially when they first came to live in Triomf. Pop used to drive her up and down all night long in the Austin, to the grand hotels and bioscopes and restaurants and places. By the time they got home, it was late already, and by then Treppie was drunk as a lord. It was a real balls-up. He’s still got the marks on his backside where they say Treppie burnt him with cigarettes. ‘So he’d shuddup,’ Treppie always says about those days. Treppie says he, Lambert, was full of shit when he was small. Then he grins spitefully at his mother and Pop, and he says he wonders who Lambert really takes after. Takes after or not, he knows his worth, and he proved it by helping them out with the fridges when he got older. By the time he reached standard seven, he was head and shoulders above Pop, and he’d developed a helluva strong pair of arms. ‘Like tree trunks’ Pop used to say. He could pick up a fridge and shift it on to the back of the Austin lorry all on his own. That Austin’s long gone now. The fridges and washing machines too. That time with Guy Fawkes. The day before Guy Fawkes, when he couldn’t find his spanners in the grass. Now it’s just the old Fuchs and the old Tedelex out there in the back. Real old heavies. Treppie says they don’t make them like that any more. You can stuff a whole cow into just one of those fridges. And the washing machine from the war. The Industrial Kneff. It’s an antique, he says. When he gets pissed, he tells the story of how Hitler used to wash the Jews in the Kneffs before sending them to the camps. Whole laundries full of Kneffs, full of Jews. Clothes and all. They had to go through the whole cycle, from pre-wash to spin-dry. Treppie says Jews are dirty. Even a spotless Jew is good for one thing only, Treppie says, and that’s the gas chamber.

  He’s never been able to figure out this business of the gas chamber. Must’ve been a helluva contraption.

  When Treppie finishes the story, he lets out a little sigh and then he says: It’s all in the mind. And sometimes he also says: We should’ve had Hitler here, he’d have known what to do with this lot. But he doesn’t sound like he believes it himself, and then he strings together a whole lot of words that he, Lambert, can’t make head or tail of. Holocaust, caustic soda, cream soda, Auschwitz.

  Treppie’s the only one who’s still got a job. At least, that’s what he says. Pop’s been on pension for ages now, and he, Lambert, gets disability, over his fingers and everything.

  Treppie goes out on jobs most of the week. His mother says what work, he just sits and boozes with the Chinese in Commissioner Street. Treppie says, bullshit, he won’t touch that rotten Chinese wine. He says he’s the only expert the Chinese can afford; they’re not the richest of people, and their fridges are old. And he doesn’t always get cash from them, either. They give him take-aways or some of their old stuff. Like the video machine, which he, Lambert, fixed from scratch. Never touched something like that in his life before, and then he actually went and fixed the damn thing. With his own two hands. He looks at his hands. Then he looks at Elvis.

  Elvis is reading about the seven candlesticks. He takes out a white hanky and wipes his forehead.

  That’s Triomf for you. People sweat around here. The houses lie in a hollow between two ridges. On days like this it smells of tar. Tar and tyres. And if there’s a breeze, then you also smell that curry smell coming from the Industri
a side. Pop says it’s not curry, it’s batteries. But it’s not nearly as bad as on Bosmont ridge, where the Hotnots live. When he goes there on Saturdays, to scratch around on the rubbish dumps for wine boxes, there’s a helluva stink. It smells of piss and rotten fish. Treppie says it’s coloured pussy that smells like that. And when he, Lambert, then tells Treppie it’s all in the mind, Treppie wants to kill himself laughing. Why, he doesn’t know. Treppie’s also got a big screw loose somewhere. But it’s a different kind of screw to the one that’s loose in his mother’s head.

  The chappy from the NP also wipes sweat from his forehead like that, with a neat little hanky he takes out of his blazer pocket. Five minutes of talk about the election, five minutes explaining the pamphlets and then he’s in a sweat. Last time he was talking about the pamphlet with the NP’s new flag on it. Treppie said it looked exactly like a lollipop in a coolie-shop. The sun shines on all God’s children, the bloke said, and Treppie said, hell, after all this time, the NP still thought it was God, with the sun shining out of its backside. God or no God, Pop said, he was going to miss oranje-blanje-blou a lot. How was a person supposed to rhyme on the new flag? But the NP-man’s girl, who always comes with him on his rounds, suddenly said, ‘The more colours, the more brothers!’, and then she quickly straightened the straps on her shoulders again. That silly little sun on the pamphlet, his mother said, looked more like the little suns on margarine and floor polish, if you ask her. Now she’d really hit the nail on the head, Treppie said. The little sun stood for grease, for greasing. The NP was full of tough cookies, and you had to grease a tough cookie well before you could stuff her, he said. And then he looked so hard at that girl’s tits that she got up right there and then, and walked out, dragging the NP chappy behind her.