Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

Mrs Malgas, who had been standing thinly behind a lamp in her lounge for more than an hour, transfixed by the stranger’s peculiar mode of hammering, was astonished when his legs suddenly shot out rigidly in front of him. His kneecaps bounced up and down as if they were mounted on springs and his head bobbed as if it belonged to a doll. He looked for the entire world like a dummy manipulated by an amateur ventriloquist. Abruptly he slumped against the tree trunk and appeared to fall asleep. But then he jumped again, causing his heels to thud together with such force that one of his boots flew off.

Now he turned his eyes on her so intently that she was sure he had discovered her presence. She fled to her bedroom and lay down until she felt herself again. She switched on the radio. A familiar voice promised to tell her how to remove bloodstains from fine linen, stay tuned, and reminded her that the devil finds work for idle hands. In response she took one of Mr’s socks from her sewing-basket, a brick-red woollen sock thick as a blanket, stretched it over a fused light-bulb that served as a darning-egg so that the hole in its heel yawned, matched a length of wool to the colour and threaded a needle.

Do NOT soak b-s item in water, neither h nor c — will set stn. Sqz juice 1 lemon in tmblr & stir well. Fold in white 1 L. egg & 1 Tsp Bicarb. Sprnkl.

When she had finished darning the sock she put everything away in the basket and lay looking up at the ceiling and dozing. The radio hinted and tipped. Time passed. A time-check. Time to start the supper. She spilled a cup of rice on the Formica top of the kitchen table and picked through it. Then she swept the broken and discoloured grains into the palm of her hand and carried them to the bin. She stood on the pedal to open the lid, and at the same time pushed open the window and scattered the grains into the bed of gazanias below. The stranger was nowhere to be seen, although his tent was glowing like a lantern in the dusk.

Nieuwenhuizen turned his hands over in the rosy air and watched the play of light on his thick veins. Through the fretwork of his fingers he saw the unaccustomed lightning of thorny branches against the canvas. The walls swayed as he breathed, in and out, and despite himself he began to drift off. He turned his big head heavily on his pillow, which was nothing more than a plastic bag stuffed with straw, and it crackled. He threw himself over on his stomach, pressed his face into the din, and spread his arms and legs until each of his extremities was wedged firmly in one of the four corners of the tent.

”All day, he was pacing up and down like a lunatic in a cage,” said Mrs, “stepping on his shadow and picking up junk. Like so.” She gave a demonstration of Nieuwenhuizen’s rickety stride. “And then he was hammering, bof-bof-bof, for three hours on end. I nearly went up the wall.” She demonstrated the hammering too, rattling her hands and nodding her head. “And then, to crown it all, he went like this — twice!” She sat down in a Gomma Gomma armchair and gave two startling imitations of Nieuwenhuizen’s spasms.

Mr was perplexed. He stared at his wife’s shaggy slippers, sitting up like dogs on the ends of her stiff legs, and couldn’t think of anything to say.“You might have phoned, just to see if I was coping.”

While Mrs was dishing up the supper, Mr kept watch in the darkened lounge. The camp, alone on the moon-bleached veld, with the hedge bearing down on it like a wave about to break, appeared to him as an island of light and warmth. The stranger crouched over his cooking-fire. A hurricane-lamp suspended from a branch overhead buttered his shoulders lightly, and the coals splashed blood on his down-turned face. A screen of smoke drifted over the landscape and softened all its edges.

He eased a window open, put his face to the burglar-bars and sniffed the meaty breeze. Scrumptious. He was still standing there with his hands in a knot behind his back and his nose quivering when she carried in their plates, drew the curtains in front of his eyes and switched on the TV.

“The rice is dry,’ she said. ‘I can’t concentrate with all this going on.” “I’ve been studying our friend and his camp,” said Mr as they ate. “It looks quite jolly.” He was thinking, too, that it looked almost — what?. . Brave. But the contemptuous dimple in one corner of her mouth warned him against voicing that observation and he remarked instead, “We should have a braai one of these days.”“In this weather?”

They both chewed and stared into the TV set, where they saw the same collapsing shanty they had seen the night before, now captioned ARCHIVE MATERIAL. Mrs shivered and put her hand in Mr’s. His fingers remained open, like an unsprung trap. She put her fork down and curled his fingers over one by one with her free hand.

Mr reappraised the iron roof, which fell interminably in slow motion. He picked up his fork in his left hand and said, “This is delicious. Fit for a king. Never mind a king — an emperor.”

Nieuwenhuizen lifted a chop from a polystyrene tray on the end of a piece of wire, carried it up to his nose and sniffed it. Full of goodness. He dropped it on the grille. He sprinkled the blood from the tray over the chop and suspended his hungry face in the smoke. Then he sat down with a sigh on one of his hard chairs.

He looked at the windows of the house behind the wall and tried to imagine what the occupants were doing. He saw Mrs at a wooden sideboard lighting a candle in a stainless-steel candlestick. He saw Mr, in slippers and gown, glass in hand, pipe in mouth, darkening a doorway. She fluttered at the wick. He stepped out of the door-frame into the warm embrace of the candle-light. He took two steps towards her, and paused. She looked over her shoulder, and smiled. He put one hand on the back of a chair and raised the other towards her hair. He stopped. He would go no further.

Nieuwenhuizen lanced the chop with his wire and flipped it over. He looked at the windows of the house and tried again.

Mr stepped out of the frame and took two steps towards Mrs. The ruby liquid in his glass glinted. She looked over her shoulder, which was sheathed in crimson taffeta, padded within and sequinned without, brought the match up to her mouth and blew out the flame. A puff of smoke drifted into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, put one hand on the back of the chair and raised the other towards her lips, which still held the softly rounded shape of her breath. His hand hung in the air, O! He would go no further.

Nieuwenhuizen ran the chop through and put it down on a ledge. He levered the grille off the fireplace with his foot. He spat on his fingers, picked up the chop, chewed the fat off it and stared into the coals.

An ornate citadel, in which were many golden chambers, with corridors and staircases of copper and brass, and silver and lead, and bronze and pewter and aluminium foil, and other metals too numerous to mention, took shape in the heart of the fire, endured, and crumbled away.

The pockets of Mr’s trousers yielded up a screw, a one-cent piece, a receipt from the Buccaneer Steakhouse (1 × Dagwood, 1 × Chps, 1 × Gngr Beer), a soiled serviette, a fatty deposit slip from the United Building Society, a shirt button, a length of twine and a toothpick chewed at one end. Mrs stuffed the trousers into the washing-machine, jabbed a button to start the cycle and carried her finds to the lounge, where she arranged them on the coffee-table. She examined each of them in turn, as if each had a story to tell.

This exercise gave her an appetite for conversation. She went to her prize knick-knack cabinet and surveyed the exhibits. Budgie. Paper nautilus. Plastic troll. Worry-beads. Dinner-bell.In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guineafowl feather aflutter in its heart that spoke to her.