Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

“Please stop!” Malgas gurgled, losing all self-respect. “I still need the plan. I won’t be able to see without it. I’ll go under.”

But Nieuwenhuizen was firm. “I’m sorry, it has to go. They’re bringing my stuff at four o’clock and I’ve got to be finished by then. I can’t keep them waiting. In any case, this place is a death-trap. Someone’s bound to trip and break something.”

“What stuff?”

“My goods.”

Malgas grovelled in his failure to understand.

“My furniture,” Nieuwenhuizen said in an exasperated, parental tone.

“You never said you had furniture. .”

“Of course I’ve got furniture! Use your head: a man of my age.”

“Well, let’s say you’ve got it, but we won’t be needing it. Why not? you interject. It’s obvious, I retort with finality: We’ve already got furniture. We don’t have space for more.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“It’s not right.” Malgas was close to tears. “I won’t let you do it, we’ve been through too much together.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Nieuwenhuizen said angrily. “The architect? The landlord?”

Malgas sniffed and looked at his hands.

“This is my house,” Nieuwenhuizen went on. “My namesake. You’re just a visitor. . not even that, some sort of janitor — a junior one, with no qualifications and precious little experience, and damned lucky to have a broom cupboard all to yourself. What were you when I discovered you and took an interest in your welfare? A DIY good-fornothing, that’s what, a tongue-tied nobody. What I say around here goes, is that clear? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Crumbs! To think that you’d turn on me like this, after all I’ve done for you. It hurts me, it really does.”

With that Nieuwenhuizen swung on his heel, bundling up nails and string in his arms, and walked through the cracked wall. He passed through an eye-level oven and a kitchen sink, upsetting a half-baked bread and butter pudding and a stack of dirty dishes in the process, and came out in the walk-in cupboard in the master bedroom. He walked out of that, he slid through two walls, he sank through a floor and stood in Malgas’s room under the stairs with his head jutting through the ceiling.

Malgas jumped up and ran after him, choking in the confetti that gusted in his wake. Malgas took the long way round; Nieuwenhuizen took the short cuts. Malgas glimpsed him at the end of corridors, through archways and serving-hatches, moving fearlessly through space. At each new breach of its integrity, the house trembled more violently.

In his hurried descent of the grand staircase Malgas nearly tripped over Nieuwenhuizen’ head, resting like an over-dressed coconut against one of the risers. He hurdled over it to the foot of the stairs and snatched open the door to his room. He found Nieuwenhuizen standing to attention on the rug, with his heels together and his toes apart. The space between his boots was an arrowhead that pointed precisely at the secret nail, nestling in the darkness below the floorboards. Flaccid lengths of string straggled from holes in the rug and led to the bundle of plan which swung nonchalantly in the hammock.

In a flash Malgas understood Nieuwenhuizen’s intention, but it was too late to stay his hand. Nieuwenhuizen reached down through the rug and seized the plan where it was secured to the secret nail. Sawdust and ash squirted up through the rents. He tugged. The nail held — but only for a moment. Then it shot out into the light with a screech that drowned out Malgas’s own cry of pain. The secret nail, secret no more, in an instant made unpardonably public, dangled in a cat’s cradle of string. It flew this way and that for no apparent reason. It was cold and grey. All the fire had gone out of it.

The house grew pale. Malgas saw right through it, from one end to the other. He saw tumblers tumbling idly in locks, he saw doors opening and closing in endless succession, he saw filaments in lightbulbs crumpling into squiggles of ash, he saw the head of a match exploding. As a result he began to cry, and he called out pathetically, “The house! The house!”

“Stop that.”

“The house. It’s falling down around our ears.”

“Oh don’t be such a cry-baby. If I’d known you’d behave like this I never would have let you in.”

“All my hard work for nothing,” Malgas sobbed. “I had it by heart, and now you’re breaking it down.”

“It’s not in the heart, you clot, it’s in the head.” Nieuwenhuizen tipped back his hat so that Malgas could see the bulge of his forehead. “This clinging to one thing is unseemly in a bread-winner. What’s in a house? There’s plenty more where this one came from.”

As he spoke he rifled a Moorish townhouse complex from his hatband, balanced it in his palm, scrunched it up, popped it into his mouth and swallowed it. He opened his mouth wide to show that it was indeed empty. This captured Malgas’s attention: he stared at the breakwater of yellow teeth and the pink tongue lapping against them. Now Nieuwenhuizen flourished his hand and one after the other half a dozen modest family homes blossomed between his fingers, rolled over his knuckles and vanished.

Malgas took a wad of cotton waste out of his sleeve and blew his nose.

“That’s better.”

To crown it all, Nieuwenhuizen plucked a mansion from behind Malgas’s ear. It was a cute miniature, complete with towers and battlements, a double garage and a carport, a flagpole and a drawbridge, a fibreglass swimming-pool with a Slasto surround and a Kreepy Krauly, a diving-board, a jungle gym and a putt-putt course. It was so much like the new house, which even then was creaking and swaying all around them, and so hopelessly out of proportion, that Malgas felt a sludge of inconsolable grief welling up in his chest. He would have burst out crying again, but Nieuwenhuizen tossed the little house up into the air, where it self-destructed with a thunderclap, and said cheerfully, “See? There’s no point in getting sentimental. Now give me a hand with this plan.”

“It’s all over,” Malgas thought. He felt tired and empty. He began to help Nieuwenhuizen with his unenviable task. Someone had to do it. Nieuwenhuizen discarded the bandoleer: he said they had lost too much time in pointless discussion to bother with salvaging the nails, so they rolled the string up nails and all. Malgas took no pleasure in this little victory.

As the plan came up, the house shivered convulsively and grew transparent; roof-tiles and chimney-pots clattered down over the gutters and plunged into the still waters of the moat; chunks of masonry cracked out of the walls and bounced across the floors like painted polystyrene.

Malgas tried not to look at the splintered boards and crumbling walls, or at Nieuwenhuizen’s clumsy boots and the crosses and arrows they were imprinting in drifts of sawdust and icing sugar. He held the familiar shapes of the rooms in his palms and tried to keep the new house whole, even though his heart was no longer in it.

At four o’clock, true to Nieuwenhuizen’s word, a delivery van bearing his goods drew up outside. The van was green, and on its side was a golden gonfalon held up by manikins in overalls, identical twins, and on the gonfalon were the words SPEEDY REMOVALS. You could tell by the hundreds of tapering brush-marks blurring their outlines what a hurry the little men were in.

Malgas was sitting on the doorstep with his head in his hands. Nieuwenhuizen perched on the edge of the stoep, resting his feet on the hobnailed lump which was all that remained of the plan. They had nothing to say to one another, although Nieuwenhuizen’s bobbing head spoke volumes. Two removers — the driver and an assistant — alighted from the cab and Nieuwenhuizen went to confer with them, shaking each one’s hand in turn and chatting away quite naturally, giving and taking counsel. Malgas was relieved to see that there were only two. There didn’t seem to be much furniture either, although what there was looked old and ugly. A lounge suite, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers; standing lamps and plants in pots; white goods. A dozen cardboard boxes. Malgas examined the boxes critically and found them wanting: second-rate materials, shoddily folded and half-heartedly sealed. The signs saying THIS SIDE UP were all upside-down.