Ivan Vladislavić: The Folly

“I must be going now. Mrs will be wondering what’s become of me.”

Nieuwenhuizen raised his shoulders in a resigned shrug and said, “You must drop in again, and bring the Mrs with you. I must say I’ve enjoyed exchanging words with you. It passed the time very pleasantly.”

Mr Malgas pushed back his stone. He felt compelled to say: “If you need anything — bricks, cement, timber, you name it — just yell. Mr Hardware, Helpmekaar Centre. I’m in the Yellow Pages.”

“That’s kind of you, thanks. Good night then, Malgas.”

“Good night. . Father.”

Mr Malgas walked purposefully away. “Fancy me calling him ‘Father’,” he thought, “he’s my age if he’s a day.”

Mr Hardware, Nieuwenhuizen thought as Malgas disappeared from sight. Blow me down.

Through a crack in the curtains Mrs watched Mr tiptoeing towards the camp, as if he was afraid of making a sound, and bowing into the light. He sat awkwardly on a stone, like a scolded child. His behaviour embarrassed her and she blushed, alone as she was, and turned away.

Quickly, in order of appearance: Doily. Dust-cover. Double boiler. Decanter. Doom. Découpage. Dicky-bird.

The incantation failed: she could not keep her distance. She returned to the window and was just in time to watch Mr bowing out of the light and blundering back the way he had come, or rather, the way he had gone, looking fearfully around him as if he was afraid of the dark.

In alphabetical order then, slowly: Decanter. Découpage. Dicky-bird. Hum.“If you ask me, he’s in real estate,” Mr said. “Property development, renovations, restorations, upgrading, that sort of thing.”

”I ask you,” Mrs said archly and crooked one tatty eyebrow into a question mark.

“A jack of all trades, but retired now and living off the proceeds. He didn’t say it in so many words, mind, I’m making deductions, so don’t quote me.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. What does he want?”

“He doesn’t want anything. He’s building a house.”

“A house?”

“A new one. Probably a double-storey.”

“A double-storey? Bang goes our privacy!”

“Never mind that. In this day and age it’s security that counts. You can’t afford to have an empty plot on your doorstep. Ask anyone. It attracts the wrong elements.”

“Building operations, I can just see it, noise and nuisance, generators, compressors, pneumatic hammers, concrete-mixers going day and night, strange men — builders. Dust all over my ornaments. It’s terrible. I’ll complain.”

“It’ll all be worth it in the end. He’s going to put up a mansion here, if I know him, a magnificent place. Raise the tone of the neighbourhood, not to mention the property values. There may even be a bit of business in it for us.”

“Count me out. You can deal with him all on your own.”

Mrs turned up the volume. The minimum and maximum temperatures forecast for the following day by the Weather Bureau scrolled solemnly upwards against a backdrop of violins and autumn leaves. Mrs inhaled noisily through her teeth, drew her cardigan around her shoulders and turned the sound down again.

“I never should have bricked up the fireplace,” Mr said. “It would be homely to sit around the hearth with one’s feet propped on the fender.”

“And then where would we put the TV?”

They both looked at the set, which stood on a trolley on the old hearthstone. A man spoke silently to them, they could tell he was speaking by the movement of his moustache. Then the economic indicators appeared against a backdrop of trumpets (which they could not hear) and paper money.

“So what was he doing with himself? I don’t suppose he was watching television, like a normal human being.”

“He was cooking his dinner, actually, in one of those two-legged pots.”

“Come again.”

“In one of those pots with legs, you know the ones I mean.”

“I heard that. You know as well as I do those pots have three legs.”

“I know,” said Mr with feeling, “but this one looked for all the world as if it had two.”

“Are you nuts?”

“The third was obscured, no doubt.”

“Of course it was. How could a pot stand up on two legs?” “True.”

“So what was in this pot?”

“God knows. He offered me some, he was very hospitable, but with dinner waiting for me here at home, I naturally declined.”

“I’d give my right arm to know what was in that pot. .”

“It was some sort of stew. It didn’t smell too bad either, out in the open, under the stars. Fresh air always gives me an appetite.”

“Probably some poor domestic animal.”

They both watched an advertisement for life insurance, which they knew by heart even without the sound. It was about facing up to death.

“I wasn’t going to mention it, it’s not important, but he asked me the strangest question, with a straight face too. You know the wall? You know the wagon-wheels?” Mrs prepared a triumphant expression but Mr cut her short with, “Well, not them. You know the suns?. . He wanted to know whether they were rising or setting.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” said Mrs. “Any fool can see that they’re setting.”

Nieuwenhuizen emptied the remains of his stew into a gourd, sealed its neck with a wad of masticated wax-paper, slipped it into a cradle made from a wire coat-hanger and hung it on a branch of the tree beyond the claws of nocturnal scavengers. He scraped the burnt rind from the inside of the pot into the coals, where it produced a lot of acrid smoke, filled the pot with water and left it to soak. Then he unpacked a leather bandoleer and a tin of dubbin from the portmanteau and set to work.“Mrs!. . I said, Mrs!” “Ja.”

There was whittling to be done, there was twisting, there was hammering, and of course there was drowsing. When he was not pottering on his property, learning the lie of the land, Nieuwenhuizen sat under his tree, keeping his hands busy and nodding off.

Mrs Malgas observed all his doings, secretly at first, and then more openly as it became apparent that her presence made no impression on him. She took to perching on a stool behind the net curtain in the lounge, knitting, flipping through a magazine, turning questions about his motives over in her mind as if they were cards. She didn’t like him. Specifically, she didn’t like the way he jiggled his head and the way he hitched up his pants with his thumbs, which he stuck into his pockets, fanning out his fingers as if he didn’t want to dirty the cloth. She didn’t like his jaunty gait and his drifting off and staring into space. More generally, she didn’t like to think that he had come for no other purpose than to upset her and turn things upside-down. She didn’t like to think about him at all.

So she distracted herself by making inventories of her knickknacks: copper ashtray, Weltevreden coat of arms (wildebeest rampant). Wicker basket, yellow, a-tisket. Figurines, viz. cobbler, gypsy, ballerina, plumber, horologist, Smurf. Paperweight, guineafowl feather. Paperweight, rose. Paperweight, Merry Pebbles Holiday Chalets. Cake-lifter, Continental China, coronation centenary crockery, crenate, crumbs. However. Spatula. Just as things were starting to become interesting. Mug. As day followed day. Doll. As day follows night. Puppy-dog. As night follows day, sure enough, she found herself drawn back to the window.

Nieuwenhuizen’s wanderings over the veld, as much as they annoyed her, reassured her too by their aimlessness. They made him seem indecisive, ineffectual and itinerant. But when he settled down under the tree to hammer beer tins into soup-plates, to tinker with fragments of pottery and polystyrene, to plait ribbons of plastic into ropes, to carve and whittle and twist, to hammer holes through and bind together, it seemed that he was practising for something bigger, it became conceivable that he really would build a house next door, a house in the contemporary style made entirely of recycled material, a disposable, three-bedroomed family home held together by the dowels of his own ramshackle purpose, and that he would occupy it, permanently — and this prospect made her feel utterly despondent.