Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

  On the eighth evening the Prime Minister’s wife suddenly appeared in perfect proportion. In the middle of a car chase the screen went blank, a voice said, “We interrupt this transmission for a special news report” and there she was. She was floating in a cloud of peach chiffon and she was weeping. In the distance behind her a flag was flying at half-mast. There was one small problem: standing next to her, with one hand on her elbow and a grim expression on his face, was a man in a military uniform. He was wearing a peaked cap, and there was a bright row of medals on his tunic.

  “Now!” cried the Prime Minister, jumping to his feet.

  “Don’t,” said Mary.

  The Prime Minister’s wife dabbed at her eyes; the Minister of Defence opened his mouth to speak. And at that moment Quentin plunged his arm in up to the elbow and scooped.

  A broken flagpole, trailing gravel and sparks, a whirl of peach chiffon and a blur of khaki exploded into the room.

  The Prime Minister’s wife landed on a fern in one corner of the room, and that broke her fall. The Minister of Defence struck Quentin in the chest, rebounded and, borne down by the weight of his medals, dropped headfirst towards the floor. Quentin dived from the stool and caught him just before he hit the carpet.

  The Prime Minister shouted “Gys!” in a voice so loud it could have belonged to a fully grown man.

  The Minister of Defence scrambled out of Quentin’s grasp and ran several paces, then threw himself on the carpet, rolled over, and rose up on one knee with a revolver in his hand. He pulled the trigger and Quentin felt a sharp sting on his cheek. Quentin swatted the Minister with the back of his hand and was surprised to see him fly across the room, smash into the wall and drop in a heap onto the carpet.

  Mary turned the body over. The head was caved in like an eggshell and leaking. She began to drop large tears onto the corpse. The Prime Minister had meanwhile slid down the leg of the stool and retrieved his wife from the pot plant. The chiffon was a little bruised, but otherwise she seemed to be in good health. After a brief embrace they went over to the body; and now the Prime Minister’s wife began to wail, and her wails rose up to meet Mary’s large sobs.

  * * *

  —

  Quentin stormed out in pursuit of a drink.

  Mary recovered the body from the rubbish bin and did her best to straighten it out. She wiped the blood off its face and pulled up the knot of its tie. She put the cap on its head and rearranged the medals. Then she fetched a spade from under the kitchen sink and buried it, with due ceremony, in the bottom of the garden.

  The Prime Minister and his wife stood solemnly at the graveside. The Prime Minister made a short speech in which he praised the deceased’s devotion to duty. The Prime Minister’s wife sang a plaintive hymn, which almost started Mary crying again.

  * * *

  —

  The following night, just before the epilogue, Quentin took the managing director of a supermarket chain. Mary gave him blankets and food and took him through to the spare room. She introduced him to the Prime Minister and his wife, and left them to make one another’s acquaintance.

  Quentin was lying in bed with his hands behind his head. Mary sat down on the edge of the bed next to him. “We need to talk about this thing,” she said.

  “I agree,” Quentin said, sitting up. “It can’t go on like this.”

  “I’m glad you also think so,” she said.

  “So far it’s been far too random,” he went on. “One here, one there. What we need’s a strategy. Maybe a list.” He scratched around on the bedside table for a pen and paper.

  “That’s not what I had in mind. I don’t think you should be doing this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said, “but I think it will become clearer as we go along. Right. Who’s next?” He opened a notebook and poised a pen over the page.

  “I don’t want to play this game,” Mary said.

  “It’s not a game. It’s serious stuff.”

  “Let’s forget it. I don’t like you like this.”

  “Well, I’ve given you a chance,” Quentin said. “If you don’t want to take it, fine. Who’s that woman with the face – you know, the TV personality, the one you said looked like a basset?”

  * * *

  —

  The next evening Quentin took a continuity announcer whose vivacious insincerity particularly annoyed him. Mary carried the hysterical woman through to the bathroom to calm her down, and while she was in there Quentin took the captain of the Northern Transvaal squash team and a country and western duo. When Mary came out of the spare room, having handed the continuity announcer into the capable hands of the Prime Minister’s wife, she heard a tiny rendition of “Oh, lonesome me” coming from the lounge, and she locked herself in the bedroom and cried herself to sleep. Quentin slept on the sofa.

  * * *

  —

  In the week that followed, Quentin concentrated on priests, aiming for a representative selection of denominations. The week after that, he told Mary over supper, it would be professors.

  “We can’t have a stupid republic developing here,” he said.

  Mary gave all the new people blankets and put them in the spare room. In the mornings she put in a large bowl of ProNutro; in the evenings she dished up a third plate of food and put that in the room. Every two or three days she went in with a broom and swept out the rubbish and the bodies.

  The professor week didn’t work out too well. After an argument with a professor of divinity Quentin changed his mind, and started taking handfuls of spectators at sports events. “Ordinary people, that’s what we need,” he said to Mary, who was standing by with a picnic basket to ferry the new arrivals through.

  * * *

  —

  Mary was awakened one night by a rumbling of voices. It was a small noise, far away and muted, and not altogether unpleasant. She lay listening to the sound as it rose and fell in the room next door.

  “Are you awake?” Quentin said.

  “Yes,” she answered, turning on her side to face him.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” he said. “The spare room’s starting to smell. Maybe it would be better if you cleaned it every day.”

  * * *

  —

  The evening after Mary left, Quentin misjudged his timing and took the torso of an opera singer. He watched the thing thumping its stumps on the carpet. Then he took a mouth out of a toothpaste ad and propped it up on a coffee table. It smiled at him. He smiled back. He speared the torso on the end of a fork and brushed it against the teeth. The lips slobbered open and the teeth began to gnash. For the hell of it he took the leg of a statue, half a building, and a cubic metre of Indian Ocean. Then he gathered it all up and went through to the spare room.

  Movements

  I

  He slams the door hard on the sound of his name and it rumbles back down the passage at her. Now, at the bottom of the steps with the echo still lurching he wants to turn around but cannot, because she is still standing in the lounge with the image of his back and the slam of the door in her eyes and her hands.

  The Italian neighbour under buttery verandah light raises his helmet-haired head from the dominoes, and watches.

  * * *

  —

  He lights a cigarette at the gate, waiting for the anger to leave his stride. Converts this departure into a stroll to the shop, where he has to buy something to bring back as evidence. He buys a Coke, and feels uneasy: the man behind the counter begrudges small purchases and hates his clientele for refusing to make him rich.

  * * *

  —

  She comes into the room, does not look at him lying on the bed with his face up to the ceiling, pretending to listen to the music while the Coke goes flat on the table. His music, and it spreads
itself out on the walls to colour them his colours.

  I’m going out.

  She finds her key, some money, a jersey. Goes out. And in the passage, with the door clamping shut behind her, she hears him scream and something smashes deliberately.

  So she goes down the stairs.

  The Italian neighbour packs up the dominoes and goes inside.

  * * *

  —

  When he comes out of the gate he sees her sitting at the bus-shelter, he sees their loneliness made public. But turns purposefully right. Hears her call his name. Twice. Three times. Turns around on the third because she may not call again.

  * * *

  —

  She sits on the bus-stop bench like a little girl, in the middle, with her feet dangling. She refuses to be angry.

  Let’s go home. Come home. The buses aren’t running.

  I don’t want to. I don’t feel like being in that house.

  Please.

  Silence, as she watches her foot swinging. Her silence folds its arms, dares him to be angry.

  I’ll go back. I’ll pack my things. I don’t have to stay.

  Silence answers him so he turns and goes back slowly across the street, replaying the script in his head, convincing himself. Stops at the gate, suddenly afraid. That she will allow it to happen. Make him label things with yours and mine although the smell of her is in everything. That she will wait till he has shaken her out of things and folded them and packed them, before she comes to stop him.

  * * *

  —

  He goes back to her more slowly, defeated. Stops close to her, wants to sit down, but her silence occupies everything. Reaches out to her profile softly with her name.

  Don’t make me.

  You always win.

  You make me say things.

  * * *

  —

  She turns over the tape and her music laps at the corners. He lets her draw him onto the bed, take the shard from his fingers.

  It’s all right. It’s all right.

  But I didn’t want to break it. I thought you’d come back if I broke it.

  It’s all right.

  The walls are changing colour.

  He lets her pull his head down to cry into her shirt, lets her cover him with her shadow.

  II

  He cries for the first time, in black and white.

  This is during a confession, in a parked car. The radio provides a soundtrack. The sky co-operates with rain. The windscreen mists over. A streetlight tosses in some lighting. He puts the car into reverse so that the gear-lever won’t get in the way of the embrace.

  She thinks his weeping is beautiful, sensitive, almost brave.

  She says she has not been able to cry for years. “Once I held my hand over the spout of a steaming kettle, to make myself cry, but it didn’t work.”

  He doesn’t tell her how long it is since he was able to cry. He puts the car in neutral, starts the engine, puts on the wipers, and drives home.

  * * *

  —

  He cries as often as he can, not just during confessions.

  Once he cries because he is happy.

  He cries – clearly, articulately, he thinks – as metaphor for his sensitivity, his courage. He cries because he is different from other men.

  * * *

  —

  She cries for the first time after all these years.

  A tear slow-motions down a hazy cheek.

  She thanks him for making it possible, as if he is an onion.

  They cry together.

  * * *

  —

  She cries more often. He can’t keep up.

  She cries in technicolour, in broken English, as if it were real.

  It strikes him one day that it is real. But he is always more convinced by his own emotion than by hers.

  * * *

  —

  He cries as counter-espionage. Behind her back, smearing his own spit on his cheeks, trying a few sobs, waiting for her fingers to seek out his eyes, the proof.

  * * *

  —

  He starts to enjoy it when she cries.

  In it he finds a reason to be gentle and sad.

  * * *

  —

  He stops crying.

  She doesn’t notice.

  * * *

  —

  He begins to predict her tears. A silence precedes them, like the prophetic silence between tracks on a record, when the beginning of the next song echoes out of memory.

  * * *

  —

  One day she notices that he has stopped crying. “You don’t cry any more. Not even when you’re unhappy.”

  * * *

  —

  For a while he manages to be her: incapable of crying. He even punches the walls once, trying for tears.

  For a while she manages to be him: sensitive, beautiful, brave.

  * * *

  —

  He has broken the ashtrays. Now he is regretting it, trying to pick up pellets of ash with his fingertips.

  She puts on a tape and turns up the volume. Her colours, her dark blues. She goes away to fetch a dustpan. He hears her fill the kettle. He sits on the bed, rests his head against a greasy spot on the wall. His legs stick out at a broken angle. He has to keep his shoes off the duvet. He looks at the wall next to the window. The paint is flaking off in precise pieces, as if someone has been punching the walls, shadow-boxing. Isosceles triangles and parallelograms lie on the floor. The room is turning into an educational toy.

  She comes in with the dustpan, begins sweeping up geometry and ash.

  * * *

  —

  Freeze him, watching. He is composing a poem without capitals or punctuation.

  Freeze her. (She also has a shadow, pasted on the wall, and a thought-bubble.) He will write a poem and leave it by the kettle, because he still needs me.

  III

  She hesitates with her fingers on the door-handle, wishing that she could go out surely, that she could achieve the finality of a door, shut. But she hesitates because she wants to be comforted. It intrigues her that she would let herself be comforted if he would let himself come to her. But the doorway of his bedroom holds him like a frame. That is the safe place, after all, behind him there is light and colour, a shelf of books, an unmade bed, and he guards it with his body. But the door where she is standing is a frontier: there is nothing beyond it but the night and the street.

  Perhaps, she is thinking, with one hand on the door-handle and the other against the cold glass, he will see how small I am, imagining me in this black frame, against this empty night.

  * * *

  —

  He sees that she wants him to come to her and it drives him back. He feels safer in the doorway of his room. She has occupied the hallway. It is hers, her hands are everywhere. Her hands move in gestures that he cannot understand, and so he allows them to assume the shape of hands that are reaching for door-handles and keys. He finds himself in the doorway of his bedroom, stepping in and out of it, trying to break its hold. Then her hand does settle on the door-handle, and the night begins to open in him.

  He goes to her. Perhaps he goes too quickly. He is sure that she will be gone by the time he reaches the door. She will be gone leaving nothing but the scent of her fingers on the glass. He will be able to call after her, hopelessly. But she is still there, hesitating, and now he has to reach her and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He puts one hand on her shoulder, softly, as if not to frighten her. That hand wants to comfort her, draw her back to him.

  But the other hand argues: it presses on the small of her back, as if it wants to push her out into the night.

  * * *

  —

  She listens to the ha
nds, just the hands.

  The one on her shoulder, curled like a crook, she hears, is pushing her out through the crack of the door. The one on her back, that flat palm, is pulling her in.

  * * *

  —

  She turns herself in to him, his hands turn her in to him. She opens him like a door, it is easy, and she walks through. He sees her getting smaller and smaller down the passages to the small place where he is waiting, where he will be able to speak to her without fear.

  I am coming, she says, and soon my voice will be small enough for you to hear it above the clamouring of your busy heart.

  He looks at his grey hands.

  He hears her car start in the street below.

  He finds himself in the doorway of his room.

  He sees that she has gone out, closing the door behind her. It is light behind the frosted panes, it is morning outside, where she is.

  We Came to the Monument

  I have a few things to tell you and a lot of time.

  I stand with my back to the world, my hands in my pockets. To tell the truth I have no hands: these pockets are empty. I am only surface. There is no more to me than meets the eye.

  Except that I have a heart and a brain. And I can invent a tongue. That is all I need to make a monument as quick and fickle as a kite.