Ivan Vladislavić - The Folly

Nieuwenhuizen’s applause rang in Malgas’s ears like the footfalls of a fleeing suspect.

With an effort, Malgas dragged his eyes over the plan yet again, frantic for meaning, urgently willing some fragment of the new house to rise from the jumble of nails and string. His eyes began to burn. He unpicked a thread, followed it around the perimeter of a lopsided square, lost it in a sheepshank. He picked up another, wove with it until it plunged into a knot the size of a child’s fist and was gone for ever. The edges of his vision unravelled. He welcomed the onset of delusion, taking it for extra-sensory perception; and when the whole shabby web seemed to drift and billow in a troubled current, he was relieved to assume that the plan was beginning to communicate its meaning to him.

Acting on this assumption, he stepped out of the square in which he had been stranded into an adjacent triangle.

Nieuwenhuizen beamed, but Malgas was oblivious. He stepped boldly over the hypotenuse of the triangle into a rhombus. Nieuwenhuizen’s face clouded over. Malgas strode across the rhombus in three long steps, gaining momentum, and jumped feet first into a rickety rectangle. The heel of his shoe caught on the dividing line and it twanged. He turned right, he stepped into a passage way segmented by countless lines of string, and hopscotched along it.

There is no telling what his next move would have been, had Nieuwenhuizen’s angry cries not brought him to a sudden halt, balanced on his left foot in a small parallelogram, his right foot suspended in mid-air, like a statue of a man hopping.

Nieuwenhuizen sprang into action. He bounded onto the plan and skipped lithely from figure to figure. He made left turns, right turns, and about turns, he marched on the spot, he ran forwards, he whirled in circles and came face to face with Malgas, he seized him by the shoulders and shouted, “Where the blazes are you man? Do you have any clue?”

“Er.” Malgas put down his right foot and looked wildly around. “IVG?” he asked hopelessly.

“Forgy?”

“IV-G.” Malgas held up four fingers. For a delirious moment he thought he had stumbled upon the correct answer. “You know, The Grid.”

“Forget about the bloody grid! We left that behind long ago. Concentrate on The Plan and tell me where you are.”

Malgas chewed his cheeks.

Nieuwenhuizen rocked him backwards and forwards, and hissed, “Open your ears and I’ll tell you. You’re on the brink of disaster! Do you read me? One more step — just one more — and you’ll plummet to a horrible end in the frog-infested moat.”

Malgas tasted blood. Tears crept out of his eyes.

“There-there,” Nieuwenhuizen relented, “there-there.” He took Malgas gently by the arm and manoeuvred him around in a circle. “There. Can you see it now? Take your time.”

“I can’t,” said Malgas in a broken voice. “We Malgases have never been good at this kind of thing.”

“What you need is the guided tour,” said Nieuwenhuizen. “It’s a pity, I had high hopes for you once, but now it can’t be helped. Wait here and keep your eyes open. And your ears.” He leapt back and waved his arms around: “Observation deck!” He pointed to the left: “Balustrade.” He pointed to the right: “Sliding door.” He stepped over a line and pointed at the ground: “Spiral staircase.” He walked downstairs and turned right: “Passage, first floor.” He took five paces down the passage and his left arm shot out: “Master bedroom.” His right arm shot out: “Armoury.” He walked on the spot and skipped across three triangles: “Ground floor, west wing.” He spun in a spiral: “Basement. Bomb shelter.”

Through all this Malgas stood rooted to the spot. But now a desperate desire to participate made him tear up one heavy foot, take a ponderous step over the nearest line and say poignantly, “Guest-room.”

Nieuwenhuizen flew into a towering rage. He ran furiously on the spot, turning left and right and left again, he flung his arms away and snatched them back, he went in circles and squares, he ran upstairs, he turned left, he ran up more stairs, turned right, sprinted across a landing, jumped, and shouted in Malgas’s ear, “You clueless monkey! How did you get in there? Can you walk through walls? Come out at once!”

Malgas fled. Nieuwenhuizen trotted after him, shoving him in the small of his back and shouting, “You’re a big waste of time, you blind buffoon. You’re a stink-bomb. You’ll never see the new house. Get off my plan! Off! Off!”

Mr Malgas ran into the street without looking left or right or left again. Nieuwenhuizen snapped the letter-box off its post and threw it after him. “You’ll have to live in here! You’re not fit to live in the new house. I don’t know why I bother, really.”

The letter-box clattered against the kerb.

Mr ran home, sobbing with hurt and frustration.

For hours afterwards, Nieuwenhuizen was pacing to and fro, upstairs and downstairs, from room to room, from feature to feature, naming them all to himself in a quavering voice: “Linen cupboard. . radiogram. . bar. . bakelite thing. . workshop. . barricade, railway sleepers. . wine-cellar. . eye-level oven. . dishwasher. . working surface. . polished polyester finish. . burglarproofing, floral motifs. . crazy paving. . outdoor living area. . moat. . rockery. . gnomes. . swimming-pool, Roman kidney. . built-in braai-spot. . halogen floodlight. . carport, double. . servants’ quarters. . revolving door. . master bedroom. . bird’s-eye maple. . Dolly Varden. . bathroom en suite. . control room. . liquor cabinet. . knobs. .”

Mr looked on distraught. Mrs, still visibly shaken by her encounter with the incontinent china shoe the night before, was scrubbing bric-à-brac in the kitchen sink. She said sharply, “It serves you right.”

“It does not.”

“He treats you like a dog and I’m not surprised, the way you run after Him with your tongue hanging out. Now stop snuffling and go to work.”

At length Nieuwenhuizen arrived at, “Entrance hall. . whatnot. . dimmer switch. . front door. . peephole. . welcome mat. .” He wiped his feet, scrambled into his tent and zipped shut the flap.

Zzzzzzz.

He would not be seen again in person for several weeks. Mr Malgas, the penitent, imagined that he had Nieuwenhuizen’s skinny legs and big boots, and he took long creaking strides with these legs and bounced on his toes. He heard Nieuwenhuizen’s dry bones grating together. He imagined that he had Nieuwenhuizen’s thorny index finger, and he squinted down it and muttered, “Gomma Gomma armchair. . La-Z-Boy. . Gomma Gomma armchair. . display cabinet. . Gomma Gomma sofa. . Antimacassar!”

When he started naming all the knick-knacks, in a tone of voice that seemed to mock her own cataloguing efforts, Mrs lost her temper and said, “For crying out loud, will you stop that. I can’t stand it any more. If I close my eyes I could swear it’s Him, right here in our midst. If you’re not going to work today, why don’t you make yourself useful around the home. The place is going to rack and ruin. Clean the pool. Mow the lawn. Do some weeding.”

So Mr Malgas creaked around in his backyard, fingering and thumbing the rusty shafts of his neglected garden implements, and the more he tried to be like Nieuwenhuizen, the more acutely he felt his absence, and had to ache with the loss.

Poor old Malgas.

There was no sign of life at the camp. It was so quiet over there, day after day, that Mr Malgas began to suspect that Nieuwenhuizen had made good his escape under cover of darkness.

Mrs was no comfort.

“What I would like to know is this:” she said. “What does He eat? Has He been salting away songbirds and lap-dogs? Is He on some sort of starvation diet? How does He dispose of His night-soil? Does it constitute a health hazard? Does He do His ablutions in Tupperware? Can you imagine how it pongs by now in that confined space? When last did you lay eyes on Him? Yesterday? The day before? How do you know He’s still in there? Does He answer when you call? What if He’s made a get-away? That’s all.”