Ivan Vladislavić - The Folly

They sat on their stones with their knees almost touching. Both of them were suddenly apprehensive. Nieuwenhuizen opened and shut his mouth three and a half times, as if he wasn’t sure where to begin, but at last took Malgas’s hands in his own, kneaded them into one lump of clay, and said carefully, “Do you remember the old place I was telling you about on the night we met?”

Mere mention of that historic encounter, vividly evoked by the brambly clutches of Nieuwenhuizen’s fingers, was enough to make Malgas throb with longing for days gone by, but he mastered his emotions and said matter-of-factly, “It was beyond repair. The plumbing was shot. If my memory serves me correctly, the boards under the bath were a shade of. . green.”

“Whatever. Point is: The new place will be nothing like that. In fact, it will be the absolute antithesis. Ironic. Where that place was old, for instance, this will be new. Where that was falling to pieces, this will be holding together very nicely thank you. That was rambling and draughty, this will be compact but comfortable. Spacious, mind, not poky, and double-storey. .”

“I knew it!”

“. . to raise us up above the mire of the everyday, to give us perspective, to enable surveillance of creeping dangers. Make that triplestorey, don’t want to cramp our style. Bathrooms en suite. Built-in bar. All tried and tested stuff, bricks and mortar and polished panels, the stuff of your dreams, none of this rotten canvas and scrap metal, transitional, all this, temporary, merely. Forward! Nothing tin-pot! Everything cast-iron! Bulletproof — we have to think of these things I’m afraid — with storage space for two years’ rations. And on top of that wall-to-wall carpets in a serviceable colour, maybe khaki, and skylights and Slasto in the rumpus room. Materials galore, Malgas, right up your street. Malgas?”

Malgas opened his eyes, which were unnaturally bright.

“Can you see it?”

“I can’t see it as such,” said Malgas, reshaping two hands for himself, one with the other, and packing them around the brambles, “but I can see that it will be a fantastic place! I’ve made a start. Thank you.” “That’s much better. Now what do I owe you for the nails?” “Forget it.”

“I insist.”

“I really couldn’t.”…

particoloured. Boot, camouflage, combat. Chopper, Soviet-made, collapsible. Traditional weapon: assegai, knopkierie, panga, pike, pole, stick, stone, brick, mortar-board, fountain-pen, paper-clip, rubber stamp, gavel, sickle, spade, rake, hoe, spoke, knitting-needle, crochethook, darning-egg, butter-knife, runcible spoon, pot, pan, gravy-boat, whisk

Nieuwenhuizen’s hat hung at an impudent angle in the thorn-tree and his boots stood side by side on the ground below with their tongues sticking out. Taken together hat and boots suggested nothing so much as an invisible man.

Nieuwenhuizen in person, the object of the invisible one’s scrutiny, stood at attention nearby — in the north-western corner of block IF — gazing candidly into the sunrise. Until this moment the sun had been rising irrecoverably like a child’s balloon, but now it stood still, surprisingly enough, as if a dangling string had caught in the branches of the hedge.

Although he appeared to be considering the implications of this earth-shattering improbability, Nieuwenhuizen’s thoughts were in fact on the top of his head and the soles of his feet, which were developing pins and needles. He furrowed his forehead and shimmied his eyebrows in an effort to flush some blood into his scalp. He stretched his toes. He flexed his left hand, which was in his pocket: that at least was in good condition and ready for the task that lay ahead. His right hand, by contrast, was frozen into a claw around his flint hammer, and felt numb and unwieldy. To crown it all, the bandoleer, with its freight of nails, began to hurt his shoulder.

He was on the point of conceding defeat and retreating to his tent, when the sun escaped from the grasp of the hedge and bobbed up into the sky.“Optical illusion,” he said with a sigh of relief, and sallied forth.

He stepped off with his right foot and took six stiff paces. The earth felt unusually firm and steady. When his left foot came down for the third time, in the middle of IE, he flung the hammer in his right hand forward with all his might, pivoted on his heel, toppled sideways, flew into the air, flapped after the hammer like a broken wing, went rigid as a statue in mid-air, hung motionless for a long, oblique instant, and crashed to earth with a cry of triumph. He levered himself up and located the impression of his heel on the ground; then the starch went out of him and he flopped down on all fours to get a good look at the mark. It was shaped like a comma, with a bloated head and a short, limp tail. He took a nail from the bandoleer and pressed its point into the comma. Then, swinging his right arm like a piece of broken furniture, he hammered the nail into the ground.

Sparks flew! He was satisfied.

He closed his eyes, stretched out both arms and turned in circles, clockwise, counting under his breath, “Two thousand and one, two thousand and two, two thousand and three. .” At this point he stopped, ran on the spot, fell on his knees, patted the earth with his palms, pummelled it with his fists, sniggered, jumped up again and began to turn in circles, anti-clockwise, “Two thousand and three, two thousand and two, two thousand and one. . There, that’s better.”

He fixed his eyes on the stunted appendage that passed for the chimney of Malgas’s house, extended his arms once again like a tightrope artist, and proceeded in measured paces across the plot. The hammer in his right hand disturbed his balance

and introduced an unsightly wobble into his limbs; but his head for a change was completely still. He gritted his teeth and kept going, step after step, until at last his whole frame was vibrating like a dowsingrod. With a final effort of will he threw himself into the air, cracked his heels together and struck the earth with his head. Light-bulbs flickered in his brain. He saw the firmament, tricked out with stars in pastel colours, and three scrawny birds, scavengers, flapping tiredly in a circle. Then everything went dark.

When he came to his senses his head was throbbing. He had no idea how much time had been lost, although he could have worked it out easily enough from the position of the sun. Sitting up and looking about, he was cheered to discover on the ground a perfectly legible imprint of the back of his head. Auspiciously, it was in VID. He pulled a hot, oily nail from a loop and bashed it into the ground in the middle of the depression.

The planting of this second nail left him drained and disorientated, so he paced the next three out sedately, marking the spot for each one with his elbow as if he was testing the baby’s bath-water and tapping them in as if they were made of glass. It happened that the fifth nail lay in a far-flung corner, IA, where the hedge met the Malgases’ wall, and the desolate surroundings weighed so heavily upon him that he resolved to find a resting-place for nail number six in the more hospitable neighbourhood of his own homestead.

Accordingly, he put his left foot in front of his right, bent his knees, and swept his arms up behind his back like a diver. He raised the toes of his left foot and the heel of his right. Then he swung his arms forward and brought his hands together in front of him, clutching his flint, at the same time raising the heel of his left foot and the toes of his right. Then he went back to the first position, breathed in, held it to a count of ten, returned to the second position and breathed out. Then he rocked from the second position to the first and back again five times, and once more for luck. And then he ran forward, hopped, skipped, dodged, ducked, rolled head over heels, swerved, leap-frogged over the ash-heap and bore down upon the thorn-tree as if he intended to pass straight through it.