Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

On an evening like this, a fairly typical evening when all is said and done, as Mrs Malgas lay alone in the clutches of the La-Z-Boy, the unrest report finally delivered up, as an item of news, the film of a woman being burnt alive.

A woman suspected of being a spy, the unrest reporter declared, was set alight today by an angry mob.

There was a warning that sensitive viewers might find the following scenes distressing, and Mrs shut her eyes responsibly. But when the screen cast its light upon her lids, it came to her that she had been waiting for nothing so much as this moment, and she felt obliged to open her eyes again, and saw the burning woman running down a road between matchbox houses.

A burning woman!

A woman suspected of being a spy.

I spy something beginning with a B. A burning.

The people who had set the woman alight, beginning with an L, the one who had struck the match and the curious others drawn to the flames, and furious others afraid of the dark, ran after the woman and breathed the smoke. She leapt into the air. One of her shoes flew off. She fell and crumpled into a ball, and her tattered red frock settled over her. The others, delirious fools, appalled arrangements of dots, gathered and by their watching fuelled, the woman curled, the woman unfurled and stood up again on two legs. A shoe.

Brth.

A woman on fire! Aflame.

The moths, ordinary people, the other poor mirrors, momentarily scattered, gathered again. Mrs found herself in the smothering circle of onlookers, scattering and gathering, gazing upon, pull yourself together, their illuminated faces, as if, as if the naming of their expressions, by the light of the human torch, by its dying, its death, were the claiming of her own.

She switched off the set, belatedly, and the image died down into two coals under her eyelids. Remembers, embers, mbrs, mrs, s.

Mrs thought about the fact that she was sensitive. Was documentary proof required? Written evidence?

Then Mrs thought about Mr and how he was embarrassing himself. He was up to maggots and losing weight — even the spare tyre. His happiness was consuming him. And Nieuwenhuizen? There were bits and pieces of Him everywhere. What was left of Him? She rose and went towards the window, but the net curtain blew like smoke into her face and she was turned back gasping into her restless household. Nieuwenhuizen and Malgas sat down to pass the time of day in their easy chairs in the rumpus room. They had spent an active morning playing a version of snap thought up by Malgas, involving fixtures and features, and they were both pleasantly tuckered out.

They mulled over a comfortable silence.

Malgas looked once again at the bandoleer and the hunter’s hat, which Nieuwenhuizen had taken to wearing day and night. Malgas had always disapproved of the bandoleer, although it may have suited the rough and ready atmosphere of the camp. But in the new house it was totally out of place. As for the hat. . did one really need protective headgear indoors? Had it come to that? He’d been meaning to say something all day, but held back for fear of spoiling the easy comradeship that had developed between them. Perhaps criticism was premature? Time had to pass, it had to be allowed to pass unmolested. Or had the right moment arrived? Did the moment have to be challenged with an unpronounceable password? He formulated a question, edited it, and was about to come out with it when Nieuwenhuizen raised his right hand to hush him, kinked his eyebrows into kappies (circumflexes) and formed a perfect o with his lips, flexed his fingers, plunged his hand like a grapnel through the floorboards, fished, and hauled up a section of the plan.

Malgas couldn’t believe his eyes. He gazed in horror at the splintered boards and the string purling from the hole like a distended vein. Nieuwenhuizen stretched the string over his knuckles and snapped it. Both ends burst into tufts of throbbing fibres. He pinned one of the loose ends under an elephant-foot pouffe; he wound the other tightly around his fist and stood up. Not a moment too soon either, for the empty chair sank to its haunches even as he rose. He backed across the room, pulling the string up through the floor as he went. It sliced through the varnished pine like a knife through buttered gingerbread.

The house shivered.

Nieuwenhuizen disappeared through a doorway into the next room, coiling the plan on his left arm between thumb and elbow. Malgas stumbled after him, croaking and gesturing at the crumbly edges of the gash. His knees were shaking, and his hands were opening and closing on the air.

There was a fireplace in this room, which was a reception room of some description, there was a fire in the grate, and Nieuwenhuizen bore down on it unerringly. He reached into the flames, smashing the hearthstone to smithereens, and jerked up a nail in a tangle of string. He extricated the nail, wiped some sticky flames off it on his thigh, puffed the heat out of it and pushed it through a loop in the bandoleer. It fitted.

Malgas found his voice, but now he couldn’t find anything to say with it. He hopped backwards and forwards over the gash and felt the house trembling as the shock set in. At last a sentence came to him — it wasn’t quite right but it would have to suffice — and he steeled himself and declaimed: “In the name of decency, stop this senseless destruction!”

Nieuwenhuizen glanced at him quizzically, snorted, picked a new thread out of the ashes in the broken hearth and walked through a wall, shattering masonry and woodwork. Malgas heard him in the next room, coughing and laughing. He made to follow him through the jagged hole, in which a storm of plaster dust and wood shavings still raged — but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d have to take the long way round. He ran out into the passage and plotted Nieuwenhuizen’s position as he went. I.

Nieuwenhuizen had come out in an unused en suite bathroom in the east wing. When Malgas caught up with him, he was standing coyly in the broken shell of the bathtub disengaging his nails from the plan, which had frothed into a clot on his left arm, and loading the bandoleer. He was powder-white and there were crumbs of brick and flakes of ceramic tile on the brim of his hat. A severed pipe gushed soapy water over his boots. He stepped out of the bath ever so daintily, flattened a screen and emerged in the bedroom. He began reeling in handfuls of string from under the bed.

Desperate measures were called for. Malgas filled his lungs with abrasive air and said, “What’s going on here Father — I mean Otto?”

“I’m getting rid of this old thing.”

“This ‘old thing’ is our beloved plan, the apple of our eye. Do I have to remind you?”

“It’s fucked.”

“What!”

“Excuse my French. It’s had it. Kaput.”

“You haven’t consulted me. We can sit down and talk it over, by all means, I don’t even mind if we stand, but I must be consulted before the fact. I think you owe me an explanation for this unaccountable behaviour.”

“I don’t owe you anything, let’s face it. But if it gets your goat — and I can see it does, don’t ask me why — I can explain. It’s simple: the plan has served its purpose. We have no more use for it. Don’t just stand there, give me a hand with it. The sooner this is all over, the better.”

Nieuwenhuizen tugged at the ball of string and a volley of nails tore through the carpet in a cloud of desiccated underfelt. The room shuddered as if someone had walked over its grave. A crack ran opportunely through a wall. Malgas braced himself in the door-case; Nieuwenhuizen, by comparison, sat down on the bed to undo a knot. The wall behind him swayed, and a picture-rail and two landscapes in ornate gilt frames broke loose from it and floated down to the floor. They smashed spectacularly, with no sound effects, and a wave of fragments cascaded into the room, sluiced off Nieuwenhuizen’s hat and shoulders, and, subsiding, poured between Malgas’s legs. Malgas fell on his knees and cupped his palms for the bobbing pieces, but they drained away into the swamp.