Ivan Vladislavić - The Folly

Suddenly the air was infused with the smell of meat. Mrs Malgas turned to the TV set on the hearth. A pitchfork hoisted a slab of red meat the size of a doorstep and threw it down on a grille. A familiar anthem, all sticky-fingered strings and saucy brass, came to the boil as the meat rebounded in slow motion from the grille, splashing large drops of fat and marinade. The smell of meat, basted in the surging melody, was overpowering. Mrs Malgas shut her eyes and fumbled for the flames, she felt the hot screen against her palms, a tacky button, she pressed it. She swallowed her nausea and held the cool sole of the shoe to her burning cheek.

The set was still sizzling when Mr Malgas traipsed in and switched on the light. The startled planes of the room banged into one another and fell back into their accustomed order.Mr sat down on his La-Z-Boy with his hands dangling.

Mrs looked at the damp shadows on his shirt. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

“What’s been going on now?” He looked at the blank screen.

“Nothing.”

She put the china shoe back in its place. The TV set felt warm against her belly. She said, “So.”

He cleaned one fingernail with another.

“You did ask him?”

“I did. ‘Father’ turns out to be a nickname of sorts.” She raised an eyebrow.

“As luck would have it, his real name is ‘Nieuwenhuizen’.”

The name snapped in half in the air and the two pieces dropped like twigs into the shaggy carpet. Mr hunted for them under the pretext of tying his shoelaces until her shadow fell over him.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Mr looked at her slippers. The sheepskin was the same colour as the carpet. He saw her glossy shins, sprouting from the bulbs of her feet like saplings, and his own hands burrowing in the tufted fibres as if he was trying to uproot her. The idea made him uncomfortable. He raised his eyes to her face. It was scrunched into a small, livid fruit. In the juicy pulp of the eyes the pupils glinted like pips.

“I ask you,” she said, hawking. “Nieuwenhuizen of all things.” Her tongue held the two parts of the name together precisely, as if she was waiting for the glue to dry. “Nieuwenhuizen! Obviously an alias. A stage name. Did you ask for ID?”

“Nieuwenhuizen is a common name,” he said, focusing on her mouth.

“A criminal,” the mouth said. “I knew it. A killer.”

“I was at school with one.”

“Please,” said Mrs, using an intonation she had acquired from American television programmes, as Mr walked out of the room with his laces dragging behind him like dropped reins.

“Please,” she said again, as he returned in his socks, carrying the telephone directory. He flung the directory open on the coffee-table and rummaged through it. “Here: Nieuwenhuizen, C. J. of Roosevelt Park. A midwife, it says. Nieuwenhuizen, D. L. of Malvern East, just down the road. Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Pine Park. Another Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Rndprkrf. Where’s that?”

Mrs knew, but she didn’t feel like telling.

“Never mind.” His finger cut a furrow down the page. “There must be twenty of them, thirty if you count the Nieuwhuises and the Nieuwhuyses and the Niehauses. There’s probably a Newhouse too.” He flipped. “What have we here? No. But there’s a Newburg, and a list of Newmans as long as my arm.”

“We live in the west,” she said, going over to the window, “but our name isn’t Van der Westhuizen.”

“That’s my argument exactly! We may not be called Van der Westhuizen — I’ll grant you that — but thousands of people are, at least, say, what. . five thousand?. . and many of them are to the west of something. See?” Her shoulders drooped, and he went on triumphantly, “There must be thousands of Nieuwenhuizens countrywide, and at any given moment I’ll bet a dozen of them are building new houses — or thinking about it, anyway. It’s the luck of the draw. No, that’s feeble. It’s the law of averages.”

“It’s too good to be true.”

Mr Malgas went to stand beside his wife. Nieuwenhuizen had built up the fire and was walking slowly round it, dragging his long shadow over the landscape.

After a while of looking straight through it, Mr Malgas became aware of his own face reflected in the glass. Then he saw that his whole body was there, floating in the chilly space beyond the burglar-bars, and his wife’s face too, with its body below, and their lounge and its familiar clutter, dangerously cantilevered, and Nieuwenhuizen’s fire blazing in the middle of the carpet where the coffee-table should be. Tenderly, Mr put his arm around Mrs’s shoulders and drew her to him, and watched his pale reflection in the other room mimic the gesture.

“You shouldn’t hate him,” he said, “and there’s no need to be afraid of him. Even if it turns out that he’s not who he says he is, and I’m not saying it will, he means no harm. Look at him, out there in the cold, while we’re here in our cosy home. I almost feel sorry for him — although that’s unnecessary, as he’d be quick to point out. He’s very resourceful. He’s got a tea-set made out of tins and everything.”

She shrugged her shoulders under his heavy arm. “It can only bring trouble. . and insects,” she whispered. After a pause, during which Mr listened intently to the silence of the house but could discern no sign of life, she said firmly, “Go ahead and be his friend. You’ll do as you please anyway, I know. But don’t come crying to me when he lets you down. And don’t expect me to call him ‘Nieuwenhuizen’. It’s even worse than ‘Father’. If I have to refer to him at all, I’ll just say ‘Him’, and you’ll know why.”···

What is it with this Malgas? Nieuwenhuizen asked himself. He seems eager to serve. But he’s full of questions, and so hard to convince. Nieuwenhuizen! he’d exclaimed. Really? Are you serious?

For Pete’s sake.

The more persuasively Nieuwenhuizen laid claim to the word that was his name, the more detached he felt from it. It was a distressing experience, watching his personal noun drift away on the air.

But people will get used to almost anything.

By a circuitous process of reasoning, during which he walked round and round his fire until he was quite dizzy, Nieuwenhuizen reattached his name and decided that Malgas should be kept guessing.

The left foot of Mrs, which was daintily arched and pigeon-toed, stepped out of the bath, dripping soapy water, and stretched down to the floor, where it met with something cold and slimy. A plastic bath mat. She knew at once whose hideous creation it was.

Although she was loath to touch this gewgaw, she wanted to know more about it, as if that would teach her something important about Him.

She lifted the mat with the end of Mr’s toothbrush. Chkrs. It was woven, no, one really couldn’t call it weaving. It was knitted, knotted, out of plastic shopping bags. She identified three major supermarket chains by the predominance of certain colours and fragments of lettering. Pick n Pay. There seemed to be a Mr Hardware packet in there somewhere, sandy lettering on a muddy ground, but she couldn’t be sure. The words were warped into the fabric of the thing and could not be unravelled.

She dropped the mat in the bin under the hand-wash basin and sat on the toilet seat, wrapped in her towel, trying to figure out when Mr had smuggled it into her house. He was becoming more devious by the day.

The next morning Nieuwenhuizen hailed Mr Malgas as he went out to buy the Sunday newspapers and hurried over to meet him on the verge. “Phase One is upon us, Malgas,” he said earnestly. “Last night, after our little man to man, I got to thinking about the future. I asked myself the question: ‘Is it time?’ And the answer came back, loud and clear, in a tell-tale itching of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet: ‘You can bet your boots it is.’”