Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

“There’s someone there, tending it,” he answered, “A man, I think.”

At once a tall figure passed in front of the fire, casting a gigantic shadow over their house.

“Shall I call the cops?” she asked wistfully.

At that instant the fire vanished. Nieuwenhuizen, who was about to retire for the night, had turned his drum over the flames to snuff them.

Mr and Mrs Malgas looked into the night with the disquieting feeling that they had imagined something.

Nieuwenhuizen lay on his back, resting his head on a corner of the portmanteau and his feet on the drum, which radiated the deep inner warmth of the coals. He gazed up through the branches of his tree, and saw a wrinkled moon skewered on a thorn.

The ground shifted. He spread his arms, he unfurled the fingers of each hand and crooked them, he rootled them into the grass, massaging, until his fingertips touched the subsoil and, by the gentlest of pressures, steadied the lurching surface.

Then he allowed his head to topple so that his eyes fell once again on the house beyond the wagon-wheel wall. In a frosted oval, on curly vines of burglarproofing, two bruised, abashed faces hung ready to fall.Burning rubber!

Mr lay covered up like a dead pedestrian. Mrs traced the outlines of his sharp hip-bone, his rounded shoulder and his blunt skull under the blankets. She switched out the light, fumbled for the fading image of the bed and slipped into it with a shudder.

At least the body was warm. She attached herself to his flannelled back and kicked his heels to make room on the hot-water bottle. The warm air trapped under the bedclothes smelt of lemon-scented towelling, surgical gloves and Vicks Vaporub. She reached over his hip, slipped her hand under his pyjama jacket and pressed it into the unctuous, aromatic flesh of his belly.“Hands off!” he commanded, sucking in his paunch and shivering. She clenched her fists obediently.

Nieuwenhuizen arose at dawn, shrugging off sheets of newspaper and blankets of grass. He scummed the ashes from his fire and scooped a hollow in the warm coals at its core. From the portmanteau he retrieved an aluminium-foil parcel containing his breakfast, and embedded it in the coals.

Only then did he lift his eyes to survey his new dominion. He liked it. Its contours and dimensions were just right, and so too were its colour schemes and co-ordinates, not to mention its vistas and vantage-points. The sheer cliffs of the hedge towering at his back, dappled with gold and amber, tapering into the far-off haze on either side; the vast and empty sky, baby-blue on the horizon, and sky-blue in the middle distance, and navy-blue in the dome above; the veld rolling away before him in a long blond swell, reefed by the shadows of the hedge and stirred by a breath of wind, swirling now through thickets of shrubs and weeds, spilling now over rocks, boiling into heathery foam, spending itself at last against the wagon-wheel wall in the distance — all these things pleased him enormously.

The house behind the wall pleased him less. It was of a pasty, pockmarked complexion, and there were rashes of pink shale around the windows, which were too close together and overhung by beetlebrowed eaves. What thoughts were rattling in these unhappy headquarters?

In the cold light of day it was clear to Mr and Mrs Malgas that they had not been seeing things. The man they had glimpsed the night before was still there, as large as life — a little bit larger, in fact, as Mr Malgas remarked.

Mr was woken soon after dawn by the beating of drums. He lay still, listening fearfully to this wild music and the wilder counterpoint of his heartbeat. The drumming grew louder, closer, more frenzied — and then revealed itself to be hammering. He knew at once where it was coming from. He spilled out of bed and put on his dressing-gown.

Mrs watched through lowered lids as he punched his arms through the sleeves of his gown and crept noisily from the room. When he was gone she reached for the clock and brought its expressionless face close to her own. Then she pressed in the knob that switched off the alarm and pulled the blankets over her head. She was engulfed at once by the saline backwash of Mr’s sleep and tumbled headlong into dream-land.

Meanwhile, Mr stole in his socks through the grey light, over a springy pasture of carpet, past the velvety humps of armchairs asleep on their feet, to a window that offered a good view of the terrain.

The stranger was pitching a tent made of bright-red canvas in the corner under the tree. Mr was struck by his pitching method, which was unusual, to say the least. Unusual? Why, it was probably without precedent. Briefly: he pounded the tent-pegs into the ground with a stone, according to the dictates of a worksong that he piped out in a reedy voice, wheezing and clouding the air with his breath. Between each blow he paused in an attitude of intense expectation, with the stone held high above his head, waiting for a signal from his singsong melody. Then he allowed the stone to fall, so that his hand, rather than propelling it, seemed to be dragged down by it. The impact of the stone on the head of the peg caused him to fly into the air like a marionette, with all his limbs jangling.

Between pegs Nieuwenhuizen stood up to stretch his back and to watch out of the corner of his eye, and the impression Mr had gained the night before that he was unusually tall and thin was confirmed: it had not been a trick of the firelight. He was wearing a khaki safari suit a few sizes too big for him and a pair of home-made boots with tyre treads, which accentuated how long and stringy his legs were.

When Mrs resurfaced it was light in the room. She glanced at the clock and saw that she had been sleeping for an hour and ten minutes. The house was silent. She rose and went to fetch her gown from its hook behind the door. Through the doorway she saw Mr as a dark stain on the bright gauze of the lounge window.

Nieuwenhuizen ambled along in the shadow of the hedge. His boots smashed down frost-brittled forests of grass and branded crosses and arrows on the tender skin of the soil. He counted the paces under his breath. At the same time he wondered what kind of hedge this was. It was shedding its leaves: what good was that? He paused to look at a dimpled berry resting in the fork of a branch. He had never seen anything like it. Perhaps this plant was a member of the berry family rather than the hedgerow as such? He pincered the berry between horny nails and stepped off again. Stopped. He’d lost count. He shook a branch of the hedge petulantly, scattering a flock of feathery leaves, plucked one out of the air as it settled, crushed it to snuff between thumb and forefinger, and snorted it gingerly. Ah!

“I’ve pitched a few tents in my time,” Mr said to Mrs over breakfast a little later. “I’m the adventurous type as you know, I’ve been in some out-of-the-way places — but I’ve never seen anything like this. Totally unorthodox. Come away from that window.”

Mrs didn’t budge. She watched the stranger browsing, lifting his big feet and putting them down deliberately, staring at the ground. His long limbs and knobbly joints fascinated her. Clip-clop. He had the gait of a buck, lazy, double-jointed. “What kind of a tent did you say it was?” she asked.“A two-man tent.”

“Exactly. That’s what’s bothering me. There’s only one of him. What does he want with a tent for two men?”

“He’s quite tall.”

“Go on, defend him. But mark my words: He’s bad news. I can smell it a mile off.” She tossed back the lank ear-flaps of her hair and turned up her nose, displaying to good effect two well-formed, flared nostrils, like inverted commas.

“Perhaps he likes to have a bit of space around him. Some people are like that.”