Malgas went sadly on his way.
Nieuwenhuizen set upon the vegetation with a vengeance, flattening stems with his boots and hacking at roots with his spade. In a minute he was immersed in a cloud of dust and scented sap, which he gulped down in dry, foaming draughts. The brew was intoxicating.
Mr Malgas watched the slaughter from his lounge, and then from his kitchen, and finally, as the dust thickened, from the side of his house through the garden wall. He found Nieuwenhuizen’s methods outlandish. The man wielded the spade with authority despite his off-beat sense of rhythm, and he had stamina, you had to admit. There was power in his thin arms too, for with one blow he was capable of shearing a small shrub clean off at the root, leaving nothing but a cross-section of stem like a peppermint spat out in the dust.
But his technique … What could one say? It was flawed. He spent an inordinate amount of energy on purely decorative effects. Between blows he liked to hum a bar or two from a march and lay about him with the spade, inscribing fleeting arabesques and curlicues on the moted air. He also enjoyed twirling it like a baton, whirling it like an umbrella and tossing it up like a drum-major’s mace. In a different context these affectations might have served to demonstrate his dexterity, but strange to say here they had the opposite effect: the implement, moving gracefully through space, acquired a life of its own. Rather than guiding it, Nieuwenhuizen seemed to trip after it like a clumsy dancing partner, flinging his limbs in many directions.
“The worst thing about all this tomfoolery,” Mr Malgas thought, “is the amount of precious time it wastes.”
Nieuwenhuizen was unstoppable. When a tap-root resisted his assault he hopped up on the spade with his boots on either side of the handle and swayed backwards and forwards like a jockey, driving the blade underground. Then he threw his weight upon the handle and popped a sod as big as his head out of the earth.
Day after day, block by labelled block, the deforestation went on. The call for Mr Malgas never came. But he was not one to stand on ceremony: every evening after work he went next door uninvited, bearing some little excuse for a visit filched from the store. On Monday, for example, it was a brand-new spade with a pillar-box red ferrule to match Nieuwenhuizen’s tent; on Tuesday, again, it was a pitchfork to match the spade and a five-litre keg of fuel for the hurricane-lamp.
Nieuwenhuizen humoured him.
Wednesday’s defoliation brought Nieuwenhuizen something out of the ordinary. At noon he was cutting a wide swath through a thicket of kakiebos when he came across his anthill. This scenic attraction had been missing without trace for several days and it gave him quite a turn to bump into it in the middle of nowhere. He composed himself by stropping his new blade unnecessarily on the Malgases’ wall.
Nieuwenhuizen had always assumed, without giving the matter much thought, that the anthill was full of ants. (By “always,” of course, he meant since his arrival on the plot.) He imagined the demolition of the hill: his blade would find lubricated grooves in the air to slot into, it would swoop with a whistle and cleave through the crown with a corky pop. Then wave upon wave of hot red ants would boil down the slopes.
But when he tried to breach the surface his blade rebounded with a hand-numbing clang. It took hours of patient chipping with the sharp point of the blade to break through the shell, and then he exposed nothing but an elaborate system of empty corridors. He hacked a thick chunk of the stuff from the core, which was softer than the shell and riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese, and examined it more closely: no sign of life.
It was too much for him. He went to bed.
When Mr Malgas arrived that evening he found Nieuwenhuizen shut up in his tent, fast asleep. The stillness of the camp was unnerving. The visitor made his offerings – a Cadac gas-bottle which he had filled with his own hands and a Mr Hardware T-shirt, XL – and went back home.
Mrs had the full story. She wanted to re-enact it too, with her fish-knife and a heap of creamed cauliflower, but Mr wouldn’t hear of it.
“He trimmed the grass all round neatly,” she insisted. “It reminded me of when you had that mole removed and Dr Dinnerstein —”
“Mr Dinnerstein,” Mr corrected her. “Now stop playing with your food and eat up.”
Not everyone is cut out to retail Hardware. In a day’s work a hardware man might have to arrive at creative solutions to a dozen all-important little problems. Mr Malgas, who was ideally suited to the vocation, was upset to find that he couldn’t concentrate. He dispensed tacks instead of panel-pins and insecticide instead of whitewash.
Insects. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. Mrs was right: there had been a remarkable increase in their numbers recently.
On Thursday evening he had three excuses for visiting Nieuwenhuizen: a carton of mosquito coils, a stick of insect repellent and a length of fly-paper that he insisted on tying to a branch of the thorn-tree. On Friday, by contrast, he took a newfangled contraption which allowed one to balance a three-legged pot on top of a gas-bottle and so eliminated the bother of building a fire.
Nieuwenhuizen accepted these gifts with equanimity. He took each one in both hands, looked at it from different sides and said, “Thank you, it’s just what I need.” Then he found a place to stow it and looked at his benefactor expectantly.
Malgas would have appreciated a more enthusiastic response, especially to the gas-bottle gizmo, which he thought would suit Nieuwenhuizen down to the ground. But he was satisfied all the same. Each evening he was able to inspect the building site. He was pleased to see that progress was being made, even though the grid system escaped him and he felt a pang when he saw the footpaths vanishing under swaths of cut grass and topsoil.
As he made his rounds he arranged the practical considerations of building a new house into ear-catching pairs, the easier to enumerate their pros and cons – bricks and mortar, nuts and bolts, ups and downs (in relation to pipes, this was), rands and cents, days and weeks. Nieuwenhuizen, hunkering down at the fire to stir some simmering brew or reclining before the tent gazing up at the heavens, chuckled inwardly but would not be drawn. Undeterred, Malgas always found the opportunity to say something like, “Remember now, when you get round to the actual construction as such, I’m right here on your doorstep. I’m handy. Make a note of it. Here, tie this around your finger.”
Malgas was demonstrating the versatility of the new cooking gizmo on Friday night when Nieuwenhuizen butted in to take up his offer of assistance. “Why don’t you come over first thing tomorrow and give me a hand to get rid of this compost.”
At that moment Malgas heard a metallic click in the air between Nieuwenhuizen and himself. More than likely it was the gizmo slotting into place on the gas-bottle. But Malgas came to believe that it was his relationship with Nieuwenhuizen shifting gear from co-operation to collaboration.
At dawn on the appointed day Malgas shouldered a brand-new rake (the price-tag was still wrapped around one of its colour-co-ordinated teeth) and marched next door.
“Malgas.”
“Father.”
“How goes?”
“Well. Yourself?”
“Raring to go.”
“Same here.”
“Good.”
They went on in this way, exhaling small talk in fussily pinked clouds of condensation, while Nieuwenhuizen decanted two mugs of coffee from the three-legged pot. Malgas was so caught up in the drama of the situation that he didn’t think to ask after the gas-bottle gizmo. He found himself copying Nieuwenhuizen’s clipped sentences. The restraint of the exchange marked it as a prelude to constructive effort and Malgas was proud to keep up his end.
“Sugar?”
“One.”
“Honey …”
“Better.”
They sipped the scalding coffee. “It’s got a muddy aftertaste,” Malgas thought. “And what’s this afloat in it? Fish-scales?” But he didn’t care, it was strong and stimulating. The ear of the mug still would not admit his finger, but that didn’t matt
er either, because he preferred to curl his hands around the hot tin bowl, the way his host did.
Nieuwenhuizen put forward a plan of action, starting with the grid – big letters down this side and Roman numbers down that – and explaining tersely how one might approach the intersections as appropriate points at which to heap up the dead vegetation. Then he posed an important question: At a later stage, when the ground had been cleared in an economical fashion, might one not convey each of these small provisional heaps to a depot in the vicinity of the camp, on the spot now occupied by the fireplace, and amalgamate them into one mountain to facilitate the incineration? No?
Malgas listened with mounting excitement. The grid system was a revelation. As for the words hovering in bubbles around Nieuwenhuizen’s head, moored to his lips by filaments of saliva – “economical,” “provisional,” “accumulation,” “depot,” “vicinity,” “incineration” – they left him in no doubt that a great deal of intelligent forethought had gone into the plan, and he felt a thrill of vindication. With a full heart he set out for the work-station allocated to him on the wagon-wheel frontier. Nieuwenhuizen stayed behind at the tent, tinkering with one of his gadgets.
“Wish me luck, Father.”
“Good luck, Malgas.”
The sun was rising as usual behind the hedge when Malgas tramped across the devastated plot. Grass and weeds mown down, fractured stems and lacerated leaves, flayed boles and bulbs, dismembered trunks and dislocated roots told a moving tale of cruelty and kindness in the name of progress. The carpet underfoot was steeped in dew and its own spilt fluids, and it offered up a savoury aroma as he passed over. The sun brushed the back of his neck with tepid fingers and made him shiver with anticipation. His eyes in turn caressed the bruised skin of the horizon, and then snagged on the protruding tip of his own rooftop. It was stained, he noticed, with the blood of the dawn. He went on bravely. The house thrust itself up through the horizon with every step he took, until it squatted clean and complete in the early morning air. The walls were as white as paper, the windows in them were blinding mirrors. The wagon-wheels began to plash through the sunshine: soon he would be bathed in the full splendour of a new working day.
Malgas arrived at the wall and took his stand. He squinted back the way he had come. For a split second he lost sight of the purpose of his journey – but before this seed of doubt could germinate, his eye fell on Nieuwenhuizen in the distance, in the lee of the hedge, with his fork pointing dramatically into the air. As if they had rehearsed this moment carefully beforehand, Malgas raised the rake in a reciprocal gesture. There was a symmetrical pause, charged with intent. Then, as one man, they set to.
Malgas spread his feet and put his head down. The shaft of the rake slid through his fist, the teeth bit into the matted stalks and stems, he drew the bounty in. At first he felt stiff and clumsy. But at each pass the rake grew more accustomed to use, as if the wood itself had softened to the shape of his hands.
Nieuwenhuizen struck up a song, but Malgas shut his ears to it, went in search of the rhythm in his own musculature and found it without difficulty. He was a natural. He began to perspire in a healthy, deserving way. The sun rose quickly, liberating delicious scents of decomposition from the vegetation. In no more than an hour Malgas had raised three provisional heaps, each comprising four barrowloads, each at home on the exact spot the grid prescribed.
“Pssst.”
Malgas’s sense of communion with the fruits of his labour was so pronounced by now that for a moment he thought one of the heaps was addressing him in a cryptic language of gaseous vapours.
“Hey!”
There was no mistaking this human voice. He traced it to the small face of his wife, which jelled in a pie-slice of spokes and rim. He motioned the face to go away, but instead it grew larger and spoke again.
“Come here. I want to ask you something.”
“Get back in the house.”
He turned his attention to his work, but his rhythm had been broken: the rake twisted and fell on barren soil.
“What is it then? Be quick.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“I’m working.”
“You know what I mean: who’s minding the shop?”
“Van Vuuren.”
“That monkey. What he knows about Hardware’s dangerous. I can see him swilling our life’s work down the drain.”
Mr did not answer. He loosened one of his laces and tied it again in a double bow.
“Typical,” she sniffed. “You’ll give Him the shirt off your back, although you don’t know Him from Adam, while your own family goes hungry.”
“I have to help him.”
“You’re doing everything, you big baby. Look at Him. He’s messing around, pretending to be busy.”
Mr straightened his back wearily to watch his collaborator at work on the other side of the plot. Nieuwenhuizen lifted a bale of grass on his fork and shook a cloud of red dust out of it. Then he dumped the bale and thrashed around in the dust, snorting and waving the fork in front of him like a pair of horns. He had tied a bandanna with yellow polka dots over his mouth and donned a big-game hunter’s hat with a leopard-skin band and the brim turned up sharply on one side. His dirty grey hair jutted out on that side like a scorched tuft of grass.
Nieuwenhuizen waved. Mr raised his hand to wave back, and realized just then that Nieuwenhuizen was simply fanning his face. So Mr’s answering gesture had to be elided into a stretch instead and his sleeve had to mop up the sweat of his brow. This subterfuge only confused matters further, because it felt transparent and foolish. Nieuwenhuizen chuckled under his bandanna and speared another load of grass on his fork. With a flush of embarrassment darkening his tanned features, Mr went on raking. Mrs continued to speak to him, pointing out the folly of his ways, and the guile of His, but he ignored her and after a while she went away.
From her grandstand stool Mrs Malgas watched the day’s proceedings with mixed emotions.
Her husband’s part in the charade unfolding on the plot struck her as ridiculous and she very nearly laughed; yet as the day advanced and he toiled on with the same diligence, she felt obliged to take him seriously. It was as if a mantle of nobility had settled over him. She tried to brush this impression aside but it persisted, and she gazed upon him with new eyes, eyes which refused to distinguish between the man and what he was doing. She found herself becoming tearful.
There was something touching in the fact that the details of his person were familiar to her. His clothes contained him like a baggy second skin, imperfectly moulted: his overalls assumed the shape of his elbows and knees, and there were shiny bumps and ridges on his velskoene where the bones of his toes had pressed against the hide. Those were his favourite overalls, they had seen him through countless DIY projects, including the bricking up of the fireplace and the laying of the Slasto. She saw him kneeling, he looked over his shoulder and grinned. Each job had left a blemish on the cloth – a birthmark of enamel paint, a festering oil-stain, sutured cuts and tears, scabs of wood glue and Polyfilla. Just to look at them gave her pins and needles in her hands.
Now his steady exertions produced circles of sweat in his armpits, which spread out to meet a dark diamond in the small of his back, and the familiar khaki fabric changed slowly to chocolate-brown. This patient transformation flushed the hard-won scars to the surface; it also summoned up some elemental process of nature itself and brought more tears to her eyes, which she had to dab away resentfully with the hem of her skirt.
As the hours passed, Mr’s neck seemed to redden visibly, but surely, she reasoned, that had more to do with the dust than the pale sunlight. More than once she was on the point of going to his rescue with a tube of Block Out and a pitcher of iced water, but she was held back by an intuition that this would implicate her in his foolhardy coalition with Him.
What made Nieuwenhuizen’s trickery all the more despicable was that Mr was so glad to be of service, and therefore so easy to ex
ploit. It was clear to Mrs that He was avoiding Mr. He always contrived to be in some neck of the woods where Mr was not. And whereas Mr did the work of two men, He did nothing but stir and shake, and scare up clouds of dust to obscure His own idleness. Now He was down in the gutter next to the road herding dry leaves into piles; now He was galloping on the spot and hurling His trident into the blue; now He was prancing up and down along the hedge, beating it with the flat of His spade, raking it with His hands and kicking it with His feet, so that its leaves flew up in clattering flocks and whirled in circles overhead. Where would they come to roost? Where they liked. What was the purpose of it all? To make more work for Mr.
“Lunch!” Mrs Malgas called feebly at one o’clock, and again, “Lunch!” But her summons fell on deaf ears.
In the mid-afternoon, when Mr had single-handedly raked the entire plot and was driving the stragglers from the moat around the tent, Nieuwenhuizen was stalking from heap to heap stirring up a new cloud of dust, which boiled over the hedge like a thunder-cloud, bruised and bloodied by the westering sun.
Nieuwenhuizen revolted Mrs Malgas. He was a source of dirt and chaos. She sealed all the windows, but His dust continued to sprout like a five o’clock shadow on the smooth surfaces of her home.
He’s the salt of the earth, Nieuwenhuizen was thinking. A bit of a clod, but as solid as a rock for all that. And on top of it an eager beaver and a busy bee. He’ll do. But as for that flimsy Mrs of his … lurking behind the wall as if she’s invisible. She’s no more than a scrap of tissue-paper. If you hold her up to the light you can see right through her.
An astute observer on higher ground may have understood the way in which Nieuwenhuizen kept his distance from Malgas in terms of the predictable revolution of the one man around the other, for when Malgas had raised his final heap Nieuwenhuizen was standing by to shake the excess dust out of it, and they straightened their backs and lowered their implements in unison. They walked in step – although Malgas was a single pace behind – to the middle of the plot, paused on the spot above the subterranean ruins of the anthill (VIE), and surveyed the landscape. It was an affecting sight – the stubbled earth with its ordered rows of mounds like so many graves. “How many?” Malgas wondered, while Nieuwenhuizen counted them under his breath.
The Folly Page 5