Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

  After the truck had gone he went straight back into the house. I was surprised. I expected him to examine the bricks again. But apparently he was satisfied.

  I returned to the television set. The game was over. I watched for a while, hoping to get the final score. But I was restless. The news came on. It was Michael de Morgan. He told us there was unrest in the townships again. He showed us a funeral crowd being dispersed with tear gas. A bus burned in the background. Then a camera in a moving car tracking along the naked faces of houses, and children peeling away from the vehicle like buck in the game reserve. A cloud of black smoke from a supermarket. Soldiers. Some people hurling bricks into the burning bus.

  The following scenes may upset some viewers, Michael de Morgan said gently.

  I switched off the set. I was upset enough.

  I went back to the window. It was almost dark outside, the house across the road a blue shadow. But the front door was open, and in the glow from the lounge I could see him reclining in an easy chair on the verandah, with his feet up on a table, drinking a beer.

  The pile of bricks was another dark shape in the twilight. From the way in which he was sitting, with his legs swung to one side, I would say that he was watching over them. He looked as if he was going to stay there all night. Or perhaps he was trying to decide what to build. Or had already decided and could see the final product, with each brick in place.

  * * *

  —

  I was restless that evening, and upset and depressed. I drank too much. The room wanted to spin. That impulse came to me through the bedsprings, just a gentle tremor at first, but the walls of the house held fast. I put one foot on the floor, trying to weigh it down. Then it came again, the room trying to twist itself free from the rest of the house, rip up its tap-root and ascend into the sky. Plaster powder rained down on me as cracks chased through the walls and ran themselves into corners. Then the rafters cracked like ribs and the room began to turn. The whole place rattled and groaned, spun faster and faster, and then rose slowly like an ancient flying-machine, ripping roof-tiles like fingernails, tearing the sinews of electrical wiring, bursting the veins of waterpipes, up into the night sky.

  I went to look through the bedroom window. The city was spread out below me like a map, but I couldn’t get my bearings. There was my house, with its gaping wound. I felt a wind on my neck, and when I looked up I saw the ceiling drift away. The night, effervescent with stars, poured in.

  I sat down on the end of my bed. The bricks began to peel away from the walls in squadrons and they flew down to my neighbour’s house and assembled themselves into barbecues and watchtowers and gazebos and rondawels and bomb shelters. When all the walls had unravelled completely I was left floating on the raft of the floor, dragged by the currents of the sky this way and that, until the boards all rotted away below me and I sank down into my bathroom and got sick.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up very late on Sunday morning, feeling terrible. It was several hours before I could bring myself to get up and take a shower. The room had fitted itself back into the house imperfectly, with the doors and windows in the wrong places, and the floors were awash with books, broken glass, clockwork, clothing, kindling. I decided to put off tidying up until after breakfast – which was lunch, actually.

  While I was eating I suddenly remembered my neighbour’s bricks, and rushed to the lounge window. I was surprised and hurt to discover that he had already started work without me. He was digging a trench along the boundary of his property, where the fence used to be. The fence posts were still there, but the wire itself lay in a huge buckled roll on the front lawn. A wall! Of course.

  After some minutes of watching him I hit on a plan for getting a closer view of the building operations. I strolled to the shop, bought the Sunday paper, and then took a slightly longer route which would take me past his house on my way home. It worked perfectly. I stopped to tie my shoelaces, which I had cunningly loosened before I rounded the corner, so that I could get a good look at the trench and, indeed, at him. Fortunately, he was working with his back to me.

  The trench seemed to me inordinately deep – although I must say that I have never actually built a wall myself – eighteen inches or more. And at least two feet across. It was possible that he was planning to build an extremely thick, high wall of the kind that is fairly common in our suburb, in which case the foundations would have to be secure. But I was more inclined to think that he was simply an amateur. He didn’t look as if he had built a wall before either.

  Frankly, he was a disappointment to me. It was the first time I had really seen him from close range. Indeed, until the day before it would be true to say that I had never seen him. He was simply the driver of a car or the pusher of a lawnmower. My first real glimpse of him, swinging up onto the truck, had convinced me that he was strong, seasoned, capable. Now I saw how wrong I was. He had taken off his shirt (it hung limply on one of the fence posts) and his back was pale and flabby. His neck was burnt slightly red. He was wearing long pants, which looked clean and ironed, not at all like work pants. What bothered me most was the way in which he swung the pick; there was no conviction in it at all. I wished that I could get a look at his hands.

  Of course, I probably didn’t think all this in the time it takes to tie a shoelace: it is more likely that I simply observed and then thought about it all later, as I read my newspaper in a deckchair in the front garden.

  I spent the better part of the afternoon watching him from behind the paper. He never looked my way once. He worked very slowly, but steadily, and by five o’clock, when it had become quite cool and almost time for me to go in, he had finished the trench. He put on his shirt and fetched her out of the house to review the day’s achievements. He seemed very pleased with himself: he even sprang into the hole and did a little jig for her, and that made me like him more. And she put her arm around his shoulders when they went back in, and that made me proud of her too.

  I waited for a few minutes, thinking that they would perhaps come out onto the verandah for sundowners, but the door remained closed, and eventually I also had to go in.

  * * *

  —

  Nothing happened for a week. I had hoped that he would not do any more building while I was away at work. I noted with relief that he was waiting for the following weekend. The week dragged.

  Once or twice during the week I saw him inspecting the trench after work, probably checking for subsidence; and once or twice when my evening strolls took me past the trench I too was able to make a quick examination. It seemed to be holding up well. On those occasions I also managed to get a closer look at the bricks. He seemed to have forgotten about them. I admired that in him – his patience, his faith. It is possible, of course, that he inspected the bricks late at night after I had gone to sleep, but I doubt it.

  Their habits seemed to be fairly steady. He usually came in at about five thirty and put the car straight in the garage. They didn’t go out much. They would watch television every night until about ten thirty and then retire to bed. The television was on from about six, and so I presumed that either they ate as soon as he came in from work or they took their meals in front of the set.

  I speculated about the programmes they watched. Did the news upset them? I for one was finding the news depressing – full of death and destruction. Who would build amid these ruins? I used to stand behind my curtain and look across at their lounge window, flickering blue as a screen. What on earth were they shoring up?

  * * *

  —

  On the following Saturday (this would have been the 18th of May) I was up early, early enough to see the building sand delivered. Would that I had been ready with pen and paper to describe how that mountain of fine white sand slid from the back of the tip-truck, and the great cloud of dust that boiled up and hung over the houses.

  I knew when I saw that per
fect dune, white as flour, spilling over the kerb and the pavement, that the foundations would be laid that day. He materialized out of the dust-storm, wearing a blue T-shirt this time but the same pants (fortunately starting to look a little grubby and crumpled) and carrying a spade and a bucket of water. He stood for a while staring into the dust as if waiting for instructions. Then he set to, separating a pile of the sand and shovelling it onto a sheet of corrugated iron. He seemed a little more lively this morning. I was pleased. There was quite a spring in his step as he went off to the garage.

  The combined haze of the dust-cloud and the net curtain behind which I was standing was making it very difficult for me to see what was going on. By this time a sense was growing in me that it was very important to catch every detail, although I was still blind to the fact that I should have been writing it all down as it happened.

  There he was returning with a bag of cement on his shoulder. I could see him quite clearly for a while but then he was back in the haze.

  I paced my lounge, searching for an excuse to get closer to him. The one I finally found was a little obvious perhaps, but he generally seemed to take no notice of me, so I decided to chance it. I pulled my car out of the garage, fetched a bucket of water, and started to wash the windscreen. By now the dust had settled somewhat, and I was surprised to see her coming into view. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, and wearing a pale-pink dressing-gown. She was holding a book, and at first I thought she was reading. Then it seemed to me that she was reading out instructions. As I watched he measured out a quantity of cement in a tin and sprinkled it over the sand. He looked at her. She spoke again. He mixed the sand and the cement with the spade and shaped it into a dam.

  Jesus! I said to myself, they’re following a recipe.

  Then I realized with a start that I was staring. I quickly dipped my sponge in the water and sloshed it over the roof of the car. Schooled my arm to keep rubbing as I watched.

  When he had finished the mixing he put the cement in a wheelbarrow and carried it to the beginning of the trench. She walked with him, reading all the way, and watched over him as he tipped the cement into the trench and smoothed it with a length of wood.

  And so it went. After the third trip she went inside – presumably he had memorized the procedure – and I did not see her again that day. When he broke for lunch so did I. When I heard the spade clattering on the corrugated iron again a half-hour later I went back to washing the car.

  He worked as doggedly laying the foundations as he had done digging the trench, and I found my admiration for him growing. After a whole day of washing my car I was exhausted; he neither slackened nor speeded up as he approached the end of the trench, just worked on at the same relentlessly steady pace. He seemed to me to be a remarkable example of soldiering on. I needed to take a leaf out of his book. I thanked him silently as he set to cleaning the wheelbarrow and the spade with meticulous care.

  I resolved to try and follow his example in the week ahead. It would be at least a week before the building proper could begin; the foundations would have to settle. He would be patient, and so would I.

  * * *

  —

  On the Monday evening after he had laid the foundations I saw him come home from work. After he had put the car in the garage and closed the door I expected him to walk down to the building-site for some kind of inspection. But he went straight inside. It made me feel a little foolish, as if I was letting the side down. I put the whole thing out of my mind. Yet I was waiting for the weekend with a growing sense of anticipation.

  So I was immediately uneasy when he parked the car in the driveway on Friday evening, instead of putting it in the garage as usual. He hurried inside. Surely they weren’t planning to go out? I had specifically decided to get an early night so that I would be fresh for the next day’s building, and I expected him to do the same.

  I was alarmed when he came out just a few minutes later carrying a suitcase. He put it in the boot and went back inside. Could it be true? Would they go away on such an important weekend? It was inconceivable. I brought a bottle over to the window and poured myself a large Scotch. There he was, coming out again. He went to the car and started cleaning the windscreen. Then I knew it was true. I finished the drink, poured another one. Perhaps they were going to the drive-in? With a suitcase? No…He went back inside. The lights in the house went out one by one. Then they both came out of the front door. She was wearing a nightie and large pink slippers and carrying a suitcase, a smaller version of the one he had put in the boot. They left the hallway light burning. He took the case from her and they walked to the car. How could they do this to me!

  I quickly opened the curtains, switched the light on, and stood in the centre of the window, one hand holding the bottle of Scotch and the other pressed against the glass. I stared hard at them, took a long swig from the bottle. The car still hadn’t moved. Then she got out and went back inside. Going to check that the taps are off, I thought. The swines. She was back very quickly, carrying a book and something in a brown paper bag. She got in and he switched the interior light on. They both looked at the book. Now the car started, the tail-lights glowed red in the dusk, the car was reversing, they were driving away.

  The inside of the car was a warm, light bubble. I saw his profile, and beyond it her face, as soft and ripe as a fruit. She was looking at him, or perhaps at me, and I wondered what she thought of me, weeping at my post, holding my pickled tongue in one cupped palm and the bloodied bayonet in the other.

  * * *

  —

  I finished the Scotch and went for a walk. Oh, I walked all over the place, staring into the blank faces of walls, peering into the blind eyes of windows, shouting obscenities into the leafy ears of hedges. I made the dogs bark. I rattled gates and banged on doors. I put the fear of the devil into the whole suburb. Those sleeping houses, their gigantic gasping and snoring, their tossing and turning. I waded through drifts of dry leaves in the culverts. I left my footprints in flowerbeds. I beat their welcome mats against their front doors until their gardens choked on the dust of ten thousand five o’clock feet. The breeze smelt of formalin. Everything was covered in wax and powdered and pinned. I brought back a newspaper billboard that said THREE MORE DIE IN UNREST and it was easy to believe in unrest and death with the rattle of leaves in the throats of the drains, the letterboxes choked with pamphlets, the bottles of milk souring on the doorsteps.

  I forgave them.

  I went over just after midnight, in an overcoat, in a balaclava. I shone my torch along the length of the trench: it was looking good. In a few places the earth had subsided, and I cleared it with my hands, and swept up a few dry leaves.

  I brought back with me a brick.

  * * *

  —

  I put it on my desk, on an embroidered cloth, and turned the fluorescent lamp on it. It was an extraordinary brick. It looked so heavy, as if it had been hewn from solid rock in the quarries of some not yet discovered planet. It was reddish brown, with a cracked, cratered surface, and it was still warm to the touch. It looked as if it would plummet through the desk, the floor, sink down into the earth as if it were water.

  Yet the more I looked at it, the more it looked like a familiar object. After a long time of watching it, it began to look like a loaf of bread, hot from the oven, steaming, fermenting inside.

  I could hardly sleep that night with its hard presence in the house, its bubbling and hissing. But I eventually sank into the mottled depths of a dreamless sleep.

  In the morning the brick had cooled. Its surface had hardened to a stiff crust.

  I was tempted to keep it as some sort of memento. But by late afternoon I had begun to resent its stony silence, its impenetrable skin, and I resolved to return it to the pile as soon as it grew dark. I wanted to maintain some connection with it, however, so I marked each of its impassive faces with a small dot of white paint,
and put it in the oven to dry.

  * * *

  —

  When it was dark I took the brick over concealed in a folded newspaper which I carried under my arm. On the pavement I was suddenly tempted to explore the house and the back garden. The front lawn lay spread like a huge welcome mat, inviting me into the nooks and crannies of their private spaces. But I was afraid: someone could see me and mistake me for a burglar. So I returned the brick to its pile and carefully folded the plastic wrapper ‘over it.

  I was just turning back towards my own house when I spotted the letters, jutting like a tongue from the letterbox. I looked around quickly. There was no one in sight. I was bold enough to take the letters onto their verandah and skim through them in the light from behind the frosted panes of the front door. There were three letters. One was addressed to The Householder. The other two were addressed to Mr G.B. Groenewald. I returned the letters to the box and scurried home with my discovery.

  * * *

  —

  Mr and Mrs Groenewald returned from their outing on Sunday evening. I was overjoyed to see them. I wanted them to know that I had taken good care of everything in their absence, so I flashed my lounge light in a cryptic morse of welcome and affection. No answering signal came. I suspect that they were tired from their journey and went straight to bed.

  * * *

  —

  The week that followed was uneventful: we were all waiting for the weekend. Then today – yes, it is the 31st of May today – I finally realized what I had to do: I had to write it all down. I have laid my own foundations, and from now on it will be brick for word, word for brick. Tomorrow the building begins. I must have a good night’s sleep.