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Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

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Ivan Vladislavić The Folly

The Folly: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with "a plan." Fashioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas's help in clearing the land and planning his mansion. Slowly but inevitably, the stranger's charm and the novel's richly inventive language draws Malgas into "the plan" and he sees, feels and moves into the new building. Then, just as remorselessly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air.

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Mrs Malgas’s entry onto the plot was a model of dignity and restraint: she walked cautiously but purposefully, with her head held high and her shoulders thrust back. Her sequinned gown rippled like sunlit water. Mr Malgas got to his feet and looked at her in amazement. She went on steadily, bringing to bear on her trembling limbs every precept of self-defence in dangerous neighbourhoods. Yet all the human dignity she could muster mattered not a jot to the crowd, who took her long-overdue appearance as a signal that the forbidden territory was no longer out of bounds. They rose up in a foment of curiosity and acquisitiveness, and surged forward, carrying the barriers and the policemen along with them.

Mrs looked over her shoulder and froze in an attitude of disbelief as the crowd swept down upon her. Mr himself stood rooted to the spot, with Nieuwenhuizen’s last words drumming in his ears. Nieuwenhuizen, on the other hand, got calmly to his feet in the face of the flood, as if he had done it all before, seized his portmanteau and executed a death-defying leap into the branches of the tree. He forked his limbs, spread his fingers, and in the twinkling of an eye was lost to sight.

The onrushing crowd fell upon the scene and carried off what they could. Mrs was knocked flat. At the last moment Mr came to life. He began scooping up gadgets, with a half-formed notion in his mind that they were of historical significance. Unfortunately this ill-considered action drew attention to these objects, which might otherwise have escaped notice, and endowed them with a special importance, and the crowd set upon him to rob him of his loot.

When it was all over, when the camp had been stripped of everything of value and a lot of rubbish besides, the crowd receded, bearing away its own wounded, and leaving behind a little wreckage, rags and kindling. Mr too remained behind, marooned, under a scrap of canvas fluttering from a wooden post.

Mrs found him there. “I’ve saved some of the doodads,” she said, to cheer him up.


“No, no,” he said, taking her basket from her and emptying the dead birds out on the ground. “He’s lost everything, but he’s resigned to it, and so am I.”


She took the flag from him and laid it aside. She took his soft, ungiving hand in her own and led him home, and bathed him, and dried him and powdered him, and put him to bed like a baby.


“It’s good to lie in my own bed again.” He touched her salty cheek and dropped off.···

Mr sniffed. Wood-smoke? He went to the window. Nieuwenhuizen was picking through the jetsam and tossing things into the fire. Mr willed him to look up, and wave, but he would not.

“Come away from the window,” said Mrs, spooning two eggs into a pot of boiling water and inverting the egg-timer.


Mr sat down at the table and sighed heavily. “I’m sorry Mrs. There, I’ve said it.”


“There’s no need to apologize. I’m just grateful you’ve come to your senses while we’ve still got a roof over our heads and food on the table. Thank heavens everything’s back to normal.”


“We’re back where we started. . but let’s not pretend that things are the same.”


“Words, words, words,” said Mrs, misunderstanding him. “Let’s not pretend at all. It doesn’t suit us. Let’s just get on with our lives.”


“Fine by me.”


“Shame. You’ll get over it. One day we’ll look back on all this and discover that we can laugh about it.”


“I can laugh about it already.” He produced a hollow belly-laugh as proof.


“Me too. Now eat your egg before it gets cold.”

“He was walking up and down all day like a vacuum cleaner,” Mrs told Mr that evening when he came in from work. “First he picked up all his bits and pieces, and he put some of them into his suitcase and he put the rest on a pile. Then he broke the big bits he didn’t want into smaller bits and burned them. The smell! He dug a big hole with that spade you lent him, which he never had the decency to return, and he buried all the bits that wouldn’t burn. Everything fitted. But he tamped it down anyway with a wooden post, and then he threw the post over the hedge. He filled in the hole with the ashes and the sand he’d dug out to begin with. He beat the sand down, so that it was flat and smooth. He sprinkled more sand and small stones. Then he walked backwards, from one end to the other, brushing the earth with a branch and sowing handfuls of twigs no larger than ladyfingers. When he was finished there was no sign of him left.”“He’s still there,” said Mr, wiping a porthole in the misted glass. “No he’s not. He left long ago.”

Mr and Mrs thought there would be something about him on the news, but they were mistaken.


“It’s too early.”


“It’s too late.”


The sun sank. Nieuwenhuizen looked at the wall and at the house. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but even as the sun dropped behind the Malgases’ roof, the suns in their wall sent out a host of lack-lustre rays, which got longer and longer, so that they appeared to be rising.


Nieuwenhuizen picked up the portmanteau and found his way to the edge of the plot. He sat on the verge, in the fallen darkness, holding up one finger, looking down the street.

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