Ja, the poor fools, it feels like. He wonders if the leaders of that party feel like anything to themselves, never mind National. When he tries to imagine what they feel like, he detects the stirrings of a bowel movement. And that’s a fucken compliment, ’cause they’re not even worth a good shit. Liars and thieves with their hands on their hearts. The plural lying party, here a coup, there a coup, meanwhile they’re cooped up with their own kind all the time, grabbing each other’s balls. State ball. A dance for this one and a dance for that one. Here a gun, there a prayer. Excuse me while I waltz all the way to the Nobel Prize.
Now it’s supposed to be ‘New’ National Party. New be damned. Turning their own ‘foreign’ partners back into internal affairs, digging out the bombs they planted themselves, firing their own big shots, and then state enemy number one becomes the state’s redeeming partner. Teach the Bushmen aerobics, give the Koevoets cabbages to plant. And they call it new! It’s not new, it’s the same old rubbish recycled under a new name. But the rubbish itself is a brandless substance. Nameless horror in sackcloth of hair, if you ask him.
That’s why he egged Lambert on to start throwing stones at those two new NPs the other day. They thought they could come here again with their crap in the middle of the day. Lambert was digging his petrol cellar, so he had lots of ammunition to hand. Old Sof’town’s bricks for stoning the new NPs. He hopes that was now a permanent removal. Those boy scouts couldn’t get away from here fast enough, ducking all the way. It’s a good thing they weren’t NPs from the old school, ’cause they would’ve stood their ground and took it like men. Good old times. Now they duck for a living. He’s seen on TV how things are going in the townships. That’s where they’ve learnt to become such experts in the art of ducking. Think they can barge in wherever they like. And now they scheme they’re suddenly good enough for the red-carpet treatment. Long live the Ducking Party. And so the pendulum swings. If FW learns the art of ducking in Meadowlands, then you can be sure old Meddlebones is coming back to Triomf to reminisce. It’s taken a long time, but now he, Treppie, has finally clicked this mathematics of history.
So when Mol let out a yelp one day last November, and called them to come see, Mandela was driving down the road in an open car, but he’d turned white overnight and he was wearing a black dress, he, Treppie, knew exactly who it was. And there stood the old dog-collar, in a black limousine, with a whole bunch of other Roman doggos in red and purple dresses in the cars behind him. They were smiling so much you saw nothing but teeth. He recognised him by his hair, still shaved close like in the old days when he used to run around here trying to save what there was to be saved. But now he was very old. He looked like a little powdered peach and he was smiling all the way down memory lane. Pointing here, pointing there with his shaky little hand, like he was sprinkling holy water, with everyone looking where he was pointing. And right at the end of the procession, on an open lorry, rode His Holiness Huddlestone’s private band. They were playing full tilt, jolly jiving music on saxophones and penny-whistles and things like that. The whole band was full of old-timers with hanging dewlaps from all the blowing, but they followed their lead player, who was blowing like mad on his little trumpet. AFRICAN JAZZ PIONEERS, it said in stencilled letters on the lorry. That lorry was swaying on its wheels from the way they were pulling and pushing those shiny, long arms on the trombones. ‘Viva Kofifi!’ one old bloke was shouting. ‘You are the captain!’ another one called. And then everyone sang a song for that papier mâché captain, standing there in front, pointing over the roofs of Triomf as if they were a tempest-tossed ocean. Was he imagining things, or did he even start liking him? He had the gift of the gab, and if there’s one thing you need to survive with a dress and a collar round your neck in this country, then it’s being able to talk yourself in or out of anything.
He’s still got the man’s speech from the newspaper. That was now truly a priceless piece. About the way Sophiatown used to look in the old days, how it was a place you could ‘look up to’, with its ‘grey-blue haze’ of fire smoke ‘against a saffron sky’. And the little red-roofed houses on top of each other, how it always made him think of Italy, and the ‘shapely blue gum trees’ all over the place. There you have it! But the closing line was the best, about the Church of Christ the King on the hill, its steeple visible from afar, north-south-east-west, ‘riding like a great ship’. Now there’s a tapestry for you. Stitched together with lovely words.
That’s his fucken end, this endless fucking with words. In this country everything’s got a name which is actually something else’s name. Pik Botha, Vleis Visagie, Slang van Zyl, Brood van Heerden. And just look at their own names. Pop’s truly never had any pop in him. And Mol can try as much as she likes, she’ll never push up a molehill. And if one considers that her real name is Martha, one could dub her Martha Street’s presently serving Martha. But that’s an altogether different kind of service and a different kind of Martha from the story in the Bible that the Jehovahs always want to read. Of all of them, only Lambert’s name sounds like something. Lambertus Benade. It sounds like an ambassador or someone like that, with a carnation in his buttonhole. But anyone can see that’s more than a misnomer, it’s a fucken miscarriage. His own name is a total fuck-up. Nothing left of Martinus, and according to Mol he should rather have been named Judas Iscariot. That’s also okay. Where would her soul have been without Judas, he asks her.
That’s not even to mention their dogs, who end up being named after streets. Toby and Gerty. He read somewhere that the streets here in Triomf were named after the children of the man who used to own the farm on which Sophiatown was built. Bertha and Toby and Gerty and Edith. And Sophia was supposed to have been the man’s wife. Then, just for the hell of it, he checked in the Britannica, and it said something about Holy Sophia being the name of a church in Turkey with a dome that looked like heaven.
For shitting through an icing tube, where will it all end? The whole world is just names and nothing is what it is and everything’s what it’s not, it’s all in the mind! And the mind’s a bottomless pit.
Legion as the Gadarene swine are the names of things, and then they all fall down in droves into that steep place, one on top of the other. A loose scrum in the depths. Not worth the breath it takes to utter them, never mind the paper they’re written on.
Treppie kicks the newspapers away. He throws them around a few at a time. Papers fly all over the bathroom. Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul!
He’s fed up with the whole business, fed up, sick and tired of it all. Words swim before his eyes. Names whirl around in his head.
He folds the newspapers double and throws them up against the ceiling. ‘Kaboof! Kaboof!’
The Freedom Front’s got lead in its head. Hells bells in the house of Shell. And Goldstone’s teeth are but few. See how the train rides, how the train rides, all aboard the gravy train. Civil Co-operaton Chowder. Consensus-Atlantis-hortus-conclusus. The apple of his father’s eye, his mother’s darling, Sophia-Maria-Maryna, pretty girls in a row.
Noises start coming from his body. Hark the mighty roars. They hold much promise.
He feels his guts moving. Swing low, sweet chariot. Blessed is the stool’s motion, happy in its peals, its psalms to the end of all meals. He tears the newspaper into small pieces. He’s making confetti. Triomf, Triomf, here comes the bride, big, fat and wide.