The names of those wagons took the biscuit. Each one more ‘symbolic’ than the next. That was the day he learnt you can make any fucken thing you like ‘symbolic’, from a pisspot to a postbox. It just depends whether you’ve got enough power. Then you can even win an election with a symbolic pisspot. Or a hosepipe or a wheelbarrow or a monkey wrench. It’s all in the mind, anyway.
One wagon was called The Concentration-Camp Nurse. It had a tent pitched on top with its flap thrown open so you could see inside, and there, in the tent, sat the nurse, wearing a black dress buttoned up to the neck, her hair pulled into a tight bun. Her face was powdered completely white, with black rings painted under her eyes and rows of wrinkles drawn on her forehead. On her lap lay a child pretending to be sick unto death. He was made up all purple and yellow so he’d look ghastly and mortally ill. Next to them was an enamel basin for the fake water, and every now and again, when people looked into the tent, the nurse would dip a rag into that fake water and wipe that child acting half-dead on his powdered forehead. Except she couldn’t really wipe his forehead ’cause then she’d wipe off the make-up and the whole scene about the terrible suffering of women and children in the camps would go to glory. So she just dabbed at the air above the child’s forehead.
Now if that’s symbolic then it’s really very silly. That’s what he thought then, and that’s what he still thinks now. People mustn’t try pulling that kind of crap on him. About Jopie Fourie and Racheltjie de Beer and Johanna van der Merwe.
Johanna was also there, with her twenty-one assegai wounds, which you could count, one by one. Big red spots painted all over her body. All she needed next to those ‘wounds’ were some numbers, one to twenty-one in koki pen.
He remembers how that Johanna winked at Pop, with her twenty-one polka dots and all. She’d been placed on a bier, and she lay on her back, with her bonnet and her Voortrekker-dress lying under the wagon’s hood. The flap was left open so you could see her nicely. The heroine, resting at peace after the battle.
And then, just as Pop ducked under the wagon to smear some grease on his scarf — that was the big thing for the little boys that day, getting fake Voortrekker grease on their clothes — just as he did that, she winked and asked him if he didn’t want to take a ride to keep her company. It was so boring lying there on her back in state, under that canopy.
Pop told that story for years afterwards, over and over again. To this day he still tells it. He says he’ll never forget how he rode with Johanna and her assegai wounds in the wagon. He didn’t ask her what her real name was, but he rode along all the way to Braamfontein. When they saw people looking into the tent, Pop made as if he was a young Voortrekker grieving over his beloved, with his head on her chest. That was something he did with great pleasure, he said, ’cause she was ‘a beautiful woman in the prime of her life’. That’s how Pop always tells the story. And what a fluke shot it was that the kaffirs didn’t stab her in her lovely face. That’s also what Pop used to say.
If you ask him, Pop’s a sucker for wallpaper. Nowadays it’s on TV instead of wagons, but nothing has changed about the way Pop sees life. Or how he wants to see life. Ever since the day Pop gave the baked beans a talking to, he’s been getting more and more difficult. The other day he even went and bought Mol a rose bush. Just imagine it — a rose bush with two yellow roses. He drove specially to the nursery just to get it, to the larnies’ nursery in Jan Smuts Avenue. He saw they had cheap roses there on special. Keith Kirsten’s nursery. Going to a place like that was quite a business, he said, but he didn’t mind how far he had to drive as long as it made Mol happy.
He, Treppie, didn’t go. He was at the Chinese. Pop took Lambert with him, and Lambert told them afterwards that people were staring at them so much there among the plants, like they were from Mars or something, that he just went and sat in the car. Pop stayed away for a long time. He was looking for a Whisky Mac. He said he wouldn’t come back before he’d found one. When he did get back, he had a rose bush in his arms and he was smiling from ear to ear. Got that rose completely for nothing, he said. It wasn’t a Whisky Mac. Keithy Boy had never in his life heard of such a thing. But it didn’t matter. The colour was right.
The people at the nursery wanted him out of there, he said, so they said here, take it and leave. And then of course it was a whole palaver again, ’cause Mol started crying when she saw that rose bush. It was 17 January, her birthday. Pop had remembered it for the first time in ten years.
If you ask him, Mol will say any day in January is her birthday. Their IDs have been locked away in the sideboard for so long now that none of them remembers exactly when their birthday is. They know more or less. Everyone except Lambert, who knows exactly. Twenty-sixth April. And that’s something none of them must ever forget, otherwise there’s shit to play. But they know their own birthdays only by month. His birthday is sometime in November, and Pop’s is in May. It’s a long time since they did anything about it.
Then of course that rose bush needed planting, but Pop was so tired he couldn’t lift a finger. Lambert said when he dug holes it was for petrol, not flowers. So Mol got on to his case. He, Treppie, must plant the rose bush. Pop even had a list of instructions from Keith-Buy-Now-Flower-Later about how to make holes for rose bushes. This wide, this deep, then you mix this, that and the other into the ground, with so much water and with this spray for that insect and he didn’t know what else. He told Mol this rose bush would bring her nothing but misery. And then she really started crying.
It’s almost a month now, and that rose bush still hasn’t been planted. He sees Mol watering it every morning in its black plastic. It’s getting yellow underneath. Why she doesn’t just dig the bladdy thing into the ground somewhere he doesn’t know. She’s got two hands of her own, after all. When she gets into the mood, she walks around the yard with that rose bush all day long, asking everyone where must she plant it, in heaven’s name, where?
Pop says in front, next to the postbox. Lambert says no, at the back, next to the fig tree. That’s the only other plant in the yard. He, Treppie, says nowhere. Toby pees all over the place and she should wait until Toby’s also in heaven before she starts fiddling with roses.
Then Mol just wants to start crying all over again. The older she gets, the more she cries. It makes him feel like his guts are tied up in knots. Then he spins her a lot of crap about how roses never die in heaven, especially not from dog-piss, and how the heavenly roses have different colours and fragrances, all on the same bush. The more the divine dogs pee on them, the more colours and fragrances they get. He embroiders one never-ending story for her until she shuts up and gets that silly smile on her face again. Then she puts the rose down in the shadow of the kitchen door, still in its plastic.
And that’s where it’s still standing, today, among all the stuff Lambert carries in and out of the house all the time as he tries to get through his list. So much rubbish. Next to the rose bush on the one side lies the bathroom cabinet, the one Lambert ripped right off the wall the other day when the mirror didn’t fit. And next to that, a few odd planks Lambert wants to use for a bigger and better bathroom cabinet. Always wants to be bigger and better, that’s Lambert for you. On this side of the kitchen, three used-up Dogmor tins and a crate of empties. And on the other side, three old GTX tins and a box of empty Klipdrift bottles. Also very symbolic, if you ask him, of how they struggle by the sweat of their brows to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s and get the little mirror mirroring on the wall. Then there’s Lambert’s old bed, with its imploded legs and its exploded stuffing, pushed up against the other wall. He wants to fix it, he says. And the bathroom’s burglar-bars, which didn’t want to fit so nicely after they’d used them to braai their T-bones at Christmas. Lambert says they got twisted in the heat, so now he wants to bend them straight again. Just proves his point, it’s never too late to build a tabernacle.