Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

Malgas gambolled in the light and gulped it down in greedy mouthfuls. The light foamed in his blood, and spangled it, and his veins were filled with sparkling music. Then the sweetness curdled as the house began to crack open and drift apart. Malgas called out to the parts that were precious to him, and grasped them lightly by their names, cradled them on his tongue for a moment and rolled them over his taste-buds for old times’ sake, before they slipped from his lips, losing their colours, fading into forgetfulness.

The house was full of holes and the night poured in. The rafters turned to charcoal, the roof crashed down onto the observation deck, and that crashed down onto the floor below. Flocks of nails flew up into the sky. Storey after storey, amid clouds of dust and laughter, the house fell in on itself. The walls flared up and faded, and died down, now flaring up again — guttering –

The world drained out of Malgas. On an empty screen a single nail revolved into an exquisitely formed full stop.

Malgas was struck dumb. He fell down in a stupor, and the new house fell down with him, at last. Crash.Mrs Malgas spent the night at the window.

The arrival of the removers annoyed her (she felt left out, of course) and she considered phoning the police. But watching the four of them stumbling around, breaking things and tripping over one another, and listening to their chorus of thuds and curses, had a surprising effect on her: she began to find them amusing. It’s not funny, she told herself, and stifled a giggle. Just then Nieuwenhuizen dropped a barbell on his foot, and although he laughed it off and said he felt no pain, Mr started whimpering on his behalf. The removers tittered behind their caps. It’s laughable, Mrs corrected herself, and laughed out loud. She laughed and laughed; she hadn’t laughed so much in years.

Later, when the removers sat on the pavement warming themselves at a brazier and drinking, while Mr rose and fell in a delirium of terror and remorse, she tasted bubbles of laughter in the back of her throat again. But when cars began to coast up with their headlights off, and figures were gathering themselves into groups, their voices coming and going, their eyes turning in, the lenses of their glasses flashing secret messages through the grainy air, her throat dried up.

People are beginning to stare, she thought, and waited grimly for morning.

The puckered eaves of the Malgases’ house lent an inquisitive expression to its normally bored face. This slight transformation irked Nieuwenhuizen, who was preparing to retire and looking forward to an uneventful sleep.

He thought he saw Mrs backing away from the lounge window looking over her shoulder, but it seemed to him that she was no more than a mote in a blind eye. He saw Mr too, closer to home, and found him for the moment incomprehensible, like a joke without a punch line.

Under the malignant influence of these thoughts Nieuwenhuizen concluded with a world-weary sonority that got on his own nerves: “We are condemned to renounce and repeat, the head and the tail, the one barking and the other wagging, with the body of the same old dog between them.”And fell fast asleep.

Mr Malgas lay like a victim of the ongoing violence in a shallow grave. Words trickled through him and seeped away into the sand. The night held a hand on the nape of his neck, and whenever he was buoyed up by a familiar intonation or an inspiring turn of phrase, that hand pressed him down again.

Conspiracy. Consanguinity. Contrariety. Confundity. Conundrumbrage.

He thought he felt boots treading the small of his back and the tops of his thighs, embossing him with algebra and etymology. Footsteps thundered in his chest cavity. Later, fingers of light brushed over him and he rose to the surface and knocked against the earth’s meniscus. As he floated there a voice began to call him insistently, Malgas, Malgas, caught its sibilant hooks in the fabric of his skin, and reeled him, thrashing, upwards. His head, which was bloated with stuffy air and numbed by the echoes of his name, cracked through the crust. He looked at the foreign landscape under his nose.

Daybreak. His head rolled over. A cruet-stand came into view — salt and pepper tom-toms and a mustard-pot in the shape of a mud hut. Behind the hut the legs of a lectern rose like three slender tree trunks; and behind the trees, dwarfing them, the mirrored face of a wardrobe as tall as a skyscraper. Behind the tower block, against the grey sky, far-away mountains assumed the shape of his house. In that instant of recognition, his whole body solidified in a rush of blood and he crashed into the air.

He rolled over onto his back. Flopping his head from side to side, he took in the wreckage: furniture, clothing, bric-à-brac, kitchen-ware, toiletries. What was that sound? Water running. A broken pipe. . no, never. “I imagined it all,” he told himself firmly. “None of it was real. Except for this jumble of junk and cheap packaging. I wonder what became of the removers? Not to mention Otto.”

Mr Malgas sat up, and the people gathered in the street on the edge of the plot burbled their approval. He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and focused on them. They were making a noise, babbling like water over stones, empty shells clacking together in the backwash.

When they felt the light touch of his attention upon them, the members of the crowd asserted their individual personalities and shapes by passing comments and thrusting out their chests to show the colourful labels and pithy slogans on their clothing, but they spoilt the effect by all speaking at the same time and pressing together in a mass, shoulder to shoulder and belly to back.

Malgas squinted. No doubt about it. There were hundreds of them, people, held back by festoons of candy-striped ribbon and paperchains of policemen. Bright lights on tall tripods looked over their shoulders, and beyond them other lights winked on the roofs of cars and trucks, and glinted on scaffolds and catwalks.

Mr Malgas stared at the people. The people fell silent, in dribs and drabs, and stared back.

There were faces he knew, scattered among the popping flash bulbs, partly obscured by cameras. Mrs Dworkin, a couple of waitresses, one of the grillers, and Van As, the storeman. Bob and Alison Parker, also of the Helpmekaar — they had the stationery shop next to the escalators. Dinnerstein. The Greek from the corner café. Some relatives of Mrs from the coast. Venter, her gluttonous second cousin. There were friends and neighbours — Long time no see! — some stalwarts of the Civil Defence League, the Treasurer of the Ratepayers’ Association, what was his name?. . De Lange. There were customers and clients, Benny Buys in his Mr Hardware T-shirt, children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and sales representatives. The postman. The removers, surrounded by photographers (news and fashion). Doctors and nurses, lawyers, electrical engineers, interior decorators, miners, market gardeners, cashiers, taxi-drivers and supermarket packers (to name just a few). There were dozens of nodding acquaintances, they were smiling and nodding their heads, but their names escaped him. There were countless others, who were bound to be strangers. There were thousands lost to sight and millions — no, billions entirely absent! And beyond them all, the vast and silent majority of the dead and the yet to be conceived.

For some reason this speculative train of thought reassured Mr Malgas and, for reasons that were easier to grasp, reminded him of Nieuwenhuizen. He got to his feet. The crowd cheered his effort generously. He was aching from head to toe, and he winced and grumbled to himself as he picked his way through the debris to the camp. The cameras captured the tiniest twinge and magnified it; the microphones mopped up the softest groan and amplified it.