Treppie’s got a whole pile of newspaper clippings where important people hold funny things in their hands — pumpkins, sheep, sucking-pigs, sculptures of presidents’ heads, mielies, the works. He says it’s incredible what people in this country are prepared to pose with. The Benades have never posed for any newspaper and maybe they’re a bunch of poor white has-beens, but as sure as God’s in heaven, he doesn’t see the slightest difference between them and the top brass.
Now they’re showing FW. He’s standing on a red carpet at an airport with his hand on his heart. It’s in Chile. The Chileans march past with guns and helmets. Next to FW stands his wife, Marike. She’s wearing a little hat with netting on, and she holds her handbag in both hands in front of her. They saw this piece on the news when it happened. She remembers feeling so sorry for that poor Marike. She looked so miserable standing there, with her eyebrows all screwed up and a deep furrow in the middle of her forehead. She looked like she wanted to cry, standing there on a mat at that windy airport in Chile, with the aeroplanes far away in the distance and her floppy blue dress flapping round her legs. If she went on like this, Mol said at the time, then that face-lift of hers would come right down again, within a year. That’s ’cause a frown is something you have to unlearn. It doesn’t help to cut it out, it’ll just frown itself back on again. But how do you unlearn something like that, in times like these?
Then, to top it all, Treppie began mocking Marike. He went and stood in front of the TV with two little knocked-together ladies’ knees, and he held his hands in front of his crotch, putting on a smile just like the one Gerty used to wear when she did a number two. To tell the truth, that was the closest thing she’s ever seen to the expression on Marike’s face that day in Chile.
Then Treppie sang in a high little voice:
‘I wonder what’s bothering mee-ee
There’s trouble in my heart
A tim’rous little butterflee-ee
Forever from the garden barred.’
Pop says Treppie missed his calling in life. He should’ve been an actor. He says it bothers him terribly that such a talent should be wasted, without anyone even lifting a finger to do anything about it. He’ll go so far, he says, as to say Treppie deserves a subsidy.
SECOND OF SEPTEMBER 
She must say, the Benades have their moments. Like the other day, just a few months ago. It was still spring, and then they walked smack-bang into peace.
Treppie saw an advert in the smalls for an office furniture sale in Braamfontein, so they decided to go. Treppie said you sometimes found a handy piece of plank or something at the most unlikely places, for next to nothing. The trip was actually for Lambert. He was struggling to get his work bench nice and smooth for his girl, and he was starting to look dangerous again. He said he wanted to mix the cocktails on his work bench. And he needed it to put out the peanuts and the dips and the chips. The bench had to be nice and neat and smooth. That rough old railway sleeper standing on prefab slabs wasn’t good enough, he said.
Well, in the end they didn’t get anywhere near that furniture sale, ’cause when they turned into Jorissen Street it was suddenly just kaffirs wherever you looked. White people too, but mostly kaffirs. They filled the whole street, holding hands and singing and dancing, and they pushed Molletjie all over the place, until she jammed against the kerb. And there they sat. All the other cars also sat like that, stuck in the crowds of people with their lights on.
‘Here comes big shit!’ said Treppie. They couldn’t see what was going on. At first they thought Mandela was there, or Mandela was dead, or maybe FW. Another huge bladdy funeral party.
The kaffirs kept pointing to Molletjie’s front and back number-plates. They slammed their hands on the roof, looking at their watches and telling the Benades that they must get out of the car now.
‘MDM!’ they shouted.
‘MDM!’ they carried on shouting, pointing and shouting with open mouths.
‘Right, people,’ Treppie said, ‘what’s happening here is what I predicted a long time ago with these number-plates of ours. It was a big mistake. Now all of you better just act like you’re the Mass Democratic Movement!’
She remembers, they waited a terribly long time to get those numberplates after Pop lost the papers. And when they went to fetch them, Treppie said it was a chance in a million. Of all the cars in Jo’burg, theirs had to be the one with MDM on its number-plate. Treppie said he foresaw a problem of mistaken identity, ’cause MDM stood for Maximum Democratic Merrymakers. That was a nice little mistake, she said. She wouldn’t complain about an identity like that. Treppie thought it was very funny, but he told her she shouldn’t push her luck too far. Well, she didn’t have to push anything, ’cause in the end that day turned out very nicely, even if it did feel like touch and go at the time.
Pop sat dead still. He pulled the keys very slowly out of the ignition and put them into his pocket. The next thing, people were pulling them right out of their seats.
Lambert’s eyes went wild from not knowing what was going on, and he shouted: ‘Stay together! Just stay together!’ She remembers feeling in her housecoat pocket for a peg.
But they quickly got mixed up in the crowd. Treppie on this side, Pop on that side, Lambert on the far side, and her right on the other side. So many strange people around her. Then a black girl with a Chicken Licken cap on her head came over and said: ‘Peace be with you, Ma,’ and she smiled at Mol and pinned a light blue ribbon, with two doves on a bright blue pin, one white and the other light blue, on to her housecoat. Only then did she see what was going on — everyone was wearing ribbons and doves and holding hands. So that was the story! And all this time the young girl kept squeezing her hand and smiling at her with shining eyes. She smelt like Chicken Licken and her hand was a bit greasy, but then Mol squeezed the hand back, even though she’d never touched a black hand before, clean or dirty. On her other side was an old man with only one leg, leaning on crutches. He stuck one of his crutches under his arm and then he shook her hand. That hand was cold and the skin was loose. And the bones felt like they had come apart. But he held her hand nice and tight.
She saw the old man had no blue on, so she worked her hands loose to give him her own ribbon. He motioned to her: here, she must please put it on for him. And so she stuck it on for him, right there on his lapel where he showed her. That old man’s jacket was completely worn through, but the blue pin made it look nice and new again. And then she smiled at him, and she saw the young girl smile as well, and then all three of them were smiling much better, and they all took each other’s hands again.
She looked around and caught sight of Pop and Treppie and Lambert, all of them with ribbons on their shirts. All of them holding strangers’ hands. But they weren’t smiling. Only Pop had a slight smile on his face. He looked a bit panicky.
Suddenly everything went so quiet you could hear a pin drop. All around her people began to cry. The old man dropped his chin on to his chest and closed his eyes and then tears started rolling down his cheeks. Next to her, the black girl was sniffing. The next thing, that girl picked up her hand, with Mol’s hand still in it, and she used it to wipe her nose. Mol thought, ja, it’s hard to believe, but if that girl had rubbed her snot off on the back of Mol’s own hand, she would really not have minded. There was such a nice feeling in the air that she almost started crying herself. But then the silence was over and all of a sudden it was just hooters and bells and singing and people in taxis throwing peace signs. A young man in a striped tie grabbed her and they did a little two-step like she last saw in the days of Fordsburg’s garment workers’ dances. Eventually, she pushed her way through to Pop and said to him, with a smile on her face, ‘Peace to you, Pop,’ but she saw Pop was crying, too. Ai, Pop, he’s got such a soft heart, truly.