Ivan Vladislavić - The Folly

Nieuwenhuizen could not have been more astounded if Malgas himself had burst into flames. He pointed weakly at the stone next to him. Malgas lowered his bulk onto it and the two of them gaped in speechless wonder at the burning mountain.

At last the flames died down, the mountain began to collapse onto itself, squirting sparks into the insurgent darkness, and Nieuwenhuizen found his tongue.

“Pull your stone a bit closer and I’ll tell you a story.”

“Which reminds me,” said Malgas. He reached casually into the shadows and brought forth the beers. They were still icy. Nieuwenhuizen punched Malgas’s arm and chose a Castle, Malgas followed suit, and they popped them open.

“Cheers!”

They drank.

Malgas wiped the froth from his lips lavishly with the back of his hand. “Tell me about the old place,” he prompted. “What made you tear up your roots and come all this way to start over?

Do you have a dream? Tell me everything, don’t leave out a single detail, I’m an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Also, I need facts, to win over the doubting Mrs.”

These lines struck Malgas as among the finest he had ever uttered; there was no question that they were the most inspired he had addressed to Nieuwenhuizen so far. Nieuwenhuizen appreciated the speech too, and there was a touch of admiration in his expression as he tilted back his head, creating an oblique play of shadows across his features, stared into the fire, where a mass of twisted tongues were wagging, and murmured, “The Mrs.”

“My wife.”

“I remember.” Pause. “Where to begin. . Yes.” He scuffed a burnt rib from the ashy edge of the fire with the toe of his boot. “Take this rib here, Malgas.”

Malgas spat on his fingers and picked up the bone.

At that moment lights blazed in Malgas’s lounge, a window burst open explosively, and Mrs Malgas was heard to shout, “Put out that fire at once! This is a smokeless zone! Give Him hell, Cooks!”

“She’s gone too far this time,” Malgas muttered, leapt to his feet and plunged into the darkness. As he fumed across the stubbled field, pressing his beer tin to his sunburnt neck, a broth of angry phrases seethed up in his throat, but the mere sight of his wife’s trembling silhouette was enough to make him swallow it down. All he could manage as he hurried up to the wall was, “Put out that light! You’re spoiling the fire.”

“He’s getting soot all over everything,” she whined, and flustered like a paper cut-out against the window-pane. “The pool’s turned black as ink. Look at your clothes! What have you been doing?”

“Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?”

“This is a residential area.” But the hurt note in his voice had disarmed her, and she rustled away and put out the light.

“He’s coming out of his shell,” Mr whispered urgently to the open window, “but one more insensitive intrusion could drive him back in again for good. Is that what you want? By the way — are there any biscuits in the house?”

There was no answer.

“Marshmallows?”

Silence. She had deserted her post.

For want of something better to do, he meandered back to the camp. In the distance the crooked figure of Nieuwenhuizen lay like a black branch beside a mound of flickering embers.

Mrs turned the TV set on and sat down in Mr’s La-Z-Boy. The chair smelt of aftershave. It embraced her and made her feel small. The violet light from the screen, on which two men were swilling Richelieu brandy while they discussed money matters, lent the room the atmosphere of a butchery at night, glimpsed from a moving car. Pleased to meet you. She studied her thin forearms: her flesh looked bloodless and cold. “The pallor of death,” was the phrase that came to mind, and it occurred to her to shout it out of the window.

“She sends her apologies, it won’t happen again,” said Malgas, seating himself on his stone and holding up the rib. “You were saying. .”

“I was saying—”

“The pallor of death!”

“Then He danced around on the top, as if He was trying to trample the juice out of it, and He doused it with petrol, as if it was a tipsy-tart.” ”For crying in a bucket, will you please stop telling me what he did! I was there, you know.”

“Of course you were. I just thought you’d like a fresh perspective on events.”

“I wouldn’t. I’d like to forget the whole thing. . I’ve never been so ashamed.”

“You’re still cross with me.”

“We were getting on famously. He was opening up!” Whether or not Mrs was to blame, Nieuwenhuizen lost his sense of purpose once again and went back to mooching on the plot.

His indolence did not bother Mr at all. “He’s taking a well-earned break. He’s in training for Phase Two: the actual building of the new house.”

Mrs scoffed. “Break my eye. He’s turned the environment into a wasteland, and now He’s beating it senseless, pacing up and down in His clodhoppers. You may think that nothing’s happening, but I tell you, He’s busy. Nothing will ever grow there again.”

“Unless we want it to.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Even so, her allegations came back to him the next evening when he saw the huge heap of ashes left over from the bonfire and the flat earth signposted everywhere with crosses and arrows by Nieuwenhuizen’s soles.

Every night Malgas joined Nieuwenhuizen at his modest new fireplace on the edge of the ash-heap; he no longer found it necessary to manufacture excuses for his visits, but he sometimes brought a small gift — a bracket or a hinge, a packet of screws or a brass lug, a plastic grommet or a fibreglass flange — as a token of his desire for constructive effort. Nieuwenhuizen stowed each one away with a smile.

Whenever Malgas inquired about the building operations, which was often, Nieuwenhuizen would chide him for his impatience. “All of this has been surveyed and subdued,” he said, flinging out his arms to encompass his territory. “That in itself is no small thing. I’m not as young as I used to be. I need time to regain my strength.”

“For Phase Two?”

“Of course.”

It was after one of these routine exchanges that Nieuwenhuizen decided the time was ripe.

They were waiting for the pot to boil when Nieuwenhuizen went into action. He raked a red-hot nail as long as a pencil from the coals, elevated it with a pair of wire tongs, dunked it in his water drum, waved it to disperse the steam, inspected it meticulously, approved of it, and held it up by its sharp point. “Do you stock these?”

A tremor of foreboding ran through Malgas. He knew at once that a critical moment had been reached and he rose to the occasion like a fish to the bait. He narrowed his eyes professionally, took the nail, weighed it in one palm and then the other, tapped it on his thumbnail and held it up to his ear, sniffed its grooved shank and pressed its flat head to the tip of his tongue. “Unusual. I could requisition them for you. . but surely you won’t be needing such giants? If you were laying down railway lines or building an ark I could see the point of it, but for laths and joists and stuff like that something half this size would be twice as good.”

“Don’t give me a thousand words,” Nieuwenhuizen said with a flicker of irritation. “I want three hundred of these, and so help me if they’re not exactly like this one I’ll send them back.”

“I’ll do it, relax. We have a saying at Mr Hardware: ‘The Customer is always right.’ But don’t blame me—”

Just then the pot boiled, Nieuwenhuizen jumped up to wrest it from the coals, and Malgas swallowed the meat of his sentence, which was “—when your place doesn’t have the professional finish, because the horns of these monsters are sticking out all over the show.”···