They started at the back, pushing each room’s things into a heap in the middle and covering everything with those white sheets from the trolley. Hell, all their old stuff looked so little, covered like that in the middle of each room. But he must say, the Wonder Wall people showed respect for their belongings. They took the brick out from under the sideboard and clamped a length of iron there before moving it away from the wall. And they first re-glued the loose joints before moving his chair, tapping the little pegs back into the arm-rests with a silver hammer. Now his chair’s sitting nicely again. Now it’ll be good for a while again.
Maybe this is a good time to take a nap. The workers are taking everything off the wall. They’re even wearing gloves to do the job — the calendar picture of Jo’burg, the answers to Treppie’s multiple choice, the advert for Cochrane’s security fencing, Treppie’s poem about peace and the portrait of the three of them with roses. The works. The wall looks bare. White squares where the stuff used to be. As it comes down, gloved hands place the items one by one into a big, white, double-carton, as if they’re fragile antiques or crumbling old masterpieces.
And here comes a soft, white bag made of felt. He hears a dull rustle as the china cat from Shoprite is carefully lowered into the bag. The distributor cap with the old and the new NP flag goes in too, plus a few of Flossie’s ball-bearings in a saucer. What else? The moon and the stars and the sun that must shine on everyone who remain behind. Three more panfuls of loose floor-blocks from the dark passage. Everything into the bag to make sure that nothing will be lost. Not him either. Now they’re throwing sheets over everything. All is white. White for the crossing over.
High above the roofs of Triomf, the roads and the towers and the flat, yellow mine dumps. The chimneys that smoke and blow fire to one side, as if in a salute, beyond the earthly city’s limits. Higher and higher, a seed in a white husk. Cries and psalms from other windborne souls.
And then again, from far off, the ground approaching at long last, rocking to and fro, the horizons tilting from side to side. To one side, a small, white house, its doors and windows tightly shut, where he can finally come to rest against the clean, sun-warmed walls, nothing but the whisperings inside as if his ear were pressed to a shell, throughout the bright and endless winter.
FAMILY SECRETS 
Lambert stands in the lounge, watching the painters. They’re busy on ladders all over the house, as if they’re not even aware of him standing there. They dip their big, fluffy rollers into wide, flat pans, painting the walls in brilliant white with quick strokes. Where they haven’t painted yet it looks dirty. Their mouths move as they talk but he can’t hear them. He can hardly hear himself thinking. It feels like a silent movie inside his head. The house shudders from the sandblasting. He can make out a fine hissing sound as wet paint-flecks splatter against the aluminium screens. Inbetween he hears the dull thuds of people working on the roof.
He’s alone. When those big machines began zooming and revving through their cycles, from warm-up to stand-by and ready to blast, his mother took Toby in her arms and shouted to Treppie she was going to wait outside in the car until it was all over. By then Treppie had been on the toilet for a long time already. He saw him go in there with a stack of newspapers, enough for a week’s reading. Even before the noise started, Treppie had begun swearing and growling. Now, he said, he was officially withdrawing from Operation Whitewash. And he wouldn’t mind if the bathroom didn’t get painted either, ’cause then at least there’d be one place left in the house he could still call home.
Fuck, the noise is so bad now it’s hurting his ears. And the paint fumes make him want to choke. But he has a very good reason for being here. When they were throwing sheets over the wardrobe in Treppie’s room just now, three little keys fell on to the floor. The workers brought the keys to him; he was the only one they could still find in the house. The key to the trunk, the key to the cupboard and the key to the sideboard, which his mother had wanted from Treppie just two days ago so she could take out the stag bowls. That key also opens the top drawer — forbidden territory for as long as he can remember. The only time he’s ever seen it slide open has been when Treppie decides that he wants to open the drawer. And Treppie hides that key in a different place every time, to make sure ‘curiosity won’t kill the cat’. The only thing he’s ever seen coming out of that drawer is Old Pop’s mouth organ. Each time, Treppie asks Pop to play a song ‘from days gone by’.
But there’s more than just a mouth organ in that drawer. Without a doubt.
Whenever he’s begged Treppie to look in there, Treppie just says: What the eye doesn’t see, the heart can’t grieve for.
It’s a double bind, he always says, ’cause what lies in that drawer is the key to his, Lambert’s, existence. But he’s convinced that if he, Lambert, were to see what’s inside there, he’d fit himself to death on the spot. So what’s the use? It’s not the kind of information that a dead fit can put to any good use, neither for himself nor for anyone else. That’s always been Treppie’s last word on the topic, and after that all he would do was give a whole long string of devil’s winks.
But it hasn’t been Treppie alone who’s stopped him from breaking open that drawer, many times over. What really stopped him, in the past, was Pop’s face when he put that old mouth organ to his mouth, cupping his hands around its sides as if he were trying to suck some sweetness out of a thing with a red peel, although what he got wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. It was almost as if he wanted to taste something different, something beyond bread and polony, beyond their house and their car, beyond the whole of Triomf. Ambrosia, as Treppie would put it. It’s as if Pop wants to say: I’ll taste what I want to taste, it’s not of this world and I don’t give a damn about the aftertaste.
Whatever it is inside that drawer, it’s always felt like the part the Witnesses read about the stuff inside the Ark of the Covenant. You never know what it is. All you know about are the cloths and the rings and the sockets and so on. And the girdles outside and the candlesticks with seven arms and all the carrying across the desert.
That’s why he’s kept a distance from the drawer all these years. If he ever finds out what’s inside there, he’s always schemed, then he’ll have to carry it through the back-streets. On his shoulders in Triomf, for the rest of his life.
But today he couldn’t give a shit. Not after his birthday. Not after that whole fuck-up.
So when the man in the white overalls held out the keys to him, and said, ‘These fell from somewhere,’ he replied, ‘Hey, thanks, man, they fell from heaven, I’ve been looking for them all my life.’ And when the man asked, ‘So, can I leave them in your safekeeping?’, he answered, ‘But of course, they are the keys to our family treasures, I’m in the shit if I lose them again.’
Then that man laughed a strange little laugh which he very quickly swallowed again. He must’ve seen it was no fucken joke to be holding the key to your existence in your own two hands.