Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

* * *

  —

  8 Granny says Tsafendas’s Diary is kept in the Police Museum in Pretoria. She won’t tell me why. But she takes from her wooden basket a rambling, lopsided blanket. It is a breeding-colony of tassels, pom-poms, fringes and frills.

  “What on earth is it?” I ask.

  “It is a map of the Police Museum,” Granny says. “When you set out to find Tsafendas’s Diary you shall take it with you.”

  * * *

  —

  9 My dreams continue to improve.

  Granny and I set out on the motorized rocking-chair. We are going to Pretoria to recover Tsafendas’s Diary. Granny drives. I sit on her lap. On the Ben Schoeman highway, snug under the meat-blanket which Granny has thoughtfully provided, with my thinking-cap pulled right down to my chin, I am happy, I think. We narrowly avoid a collision with a Mercedes Benz. We arrive in Pretoria.

  Granny pulls over in front of the prison.

  “He’s there,” Granny says, pointing with her crochet-hook. “He’s been there all these years. Sitting on his secrets, hatching them out, feeding them from his filthy mouth, caring for them until they are dark and ugly enough to be sent out into the world. He’s there all right. I can smell him.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “You haven’t learned a thing,” she says, pinching me. “It goes in one ear and out the other.”

  * * *

  —

  10 Granny is knitting a long black ribbon. Its fanged head is buried in the fleshy folds of her hands. The throat curves to the floor, where the blade of the rocker pins it, lets it go, pins it, lets it go. The body is fat and bloated, heaped coil upon coil. The narrow tail flicks in a corner of the room.

  “What is it?”

  Her fingers twist, easing the ribbon from her skin.

  “What do you think it is, child?”

  * * *

  —

  11 I see the killer. He crosses the pale-grey carpet and comes to a door. I smell the fearful sweat on his palm as he reaches for the doorknob. He opens the door. He looks from side to side. He goes out into the street.

  He goes out into the street!

  I wake up choking. The thinking-cap has fallen down over my face, my mouth is full of warm fur, my nose is full of its stench. Meat stew.

  I pull the cap off and throw it in a corner. Still I can smell it. I retrieve it and bury it at the bottom of the laundry basket.

  In the morning, Granny: “Where’s your thinking-cap?”

  * * *

  —

  12 Granny is angry with me. It’s back to the hole. I pile the scraps up on the rim. Granny sits on her rocker. I bring her the hose-pipe and she soaks the stew down.

  “Dig it in. The earth is hungry.”

  I climb into the hole. I sink into the stew, up to my knees, it is hot down there, the steam rises, I think my feet are cooking.

  * * *

  —

  13 Granny parks the rocking-chair in the street outside the Police Museum. She sets me down on the kerb, takes off my thinking-cap.

  “The time for thinking is over,” she says. “It’s time to act. Go in and get it. Do not be afraid: no one will suspect a child. Remember, we are its rightful owners.”

  She hands me the map. I go up the stairs, between the tall, fluted columns, into a tiled lobby.

  Behind me I hear the rocker squeaking. Granny is a pendulum. She keeps time.

  A pom-pom marks the spot where Tsafendas’s Diary should be. I make my way there (past Dangerous Weapons, Forgery, Terrorism and Ritual Murders). I find myself in an empty room.

  * * *

  —

  14 “Have you got it, child?” Granny asks, looking at my empty hands.

  I shake my head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Perhaps I already have it. Perhaps I’ve had it all along.” She taps the lid of her wooden basket with fingernails like beaks.

  * * *

  —

  15 In a dark corner of the Police Museum, behind musty black curtains, in a glass cabinet, lies a miniature landscape. In the west a hill, in the east a suburb, between the two an expanse of open veld. It is midnight, but lights still burn in a few of the houses.

  A man stands on the hill. He points a rifle at the sky, his finger has just squeezed the trigger. In one of the houses, in a bed, a child has just stopped breathing, but her blood still runs, slowly, her hair and her fingernails are growing.

  Between the barrel of the rifle and the roof of the house stretches a perfect fluorescent arc. It is violet, it hums in the stale air. It indicates the path the bullet took between the barrel of the rifle and the brain of the child.

  In a separate glass cabinet is a piece of corrugated iron with a hole in it and a bullet dangling on a length of string.

  * * *

  —

  16 Tsafendas’s Diary comes to me in my sleep, word by word, drifting down from the dim ceiling of my head.

  In the morning, before breakfast, a fried egg leaking like a sunrise on my white plate, I am composing Tsafendas’s Diary, dredging it up from my dreams, bringing it back in a bottle. I line the words up one behind the other.

  Tsafendas’s Diary has a grey cover, like weathered wood, and more than enough pages on which to carve the relentless passing of the days and nights.

  * * *

  —

  17 My thinking-cap outdoes itself.

  I find myself in a forest of fluorescent arcs. They burn violet and green and electric blue in the pale air, and each one has a beginning and an end.

  One arc has its roots in the sweaty palm of Tsafendas’s right hand. It passes through seven doors of stainless-steel, it sings in the burnished sky over the capital, it comes home to the earth, it sinks through granite, loam and lead, it shafts the Prime Minister’s brittle skull, and bursts into bloom.

  Another arc begins in an empty socket of that same skull, loops through the tangled canopy overhead and skewers Granny to her rocking-chair.

  I move among the stems.

  Everything goes dark. I hear the rhythmic squeaking of Granny’s chair. Then a blister bursts in the darkness and a needle of light, red as blood, springs from Granny’s forefinger. It scribbles on the air, it hums like a mosquito around Granny’s head, it ricochets off the walls – the room grows hot and bright – it knits and purls the air into a thick, bristling blanket, and then it comes for me. I am its end.

  * * *

  —

  18 I give Granny Tsafendas’s Diary, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.

  “What is it, child?” she says, turning on me her pale eyes. Her fingernails peck at the wrapping.

  I look down at my feet, and the tail of the thinking-cap hangs over my face.

  Granny slits the package with her crochet-hook. She pulls out the Diary and rests it on her knees. Her hands circle over the copperplate script on the grey cover. Then the beaks rattle on the pages, the hands begin to fly, past calendars, a map of the world, a map of South Africa, lists of public holidays, members of parliament, embassies, the capitals of the world, the currencies, timetables for buses and trains, the hands come to 1 January and settle.

  Granny reads in silence. The hands lie panting on the open page.

  I am suddenly ashamed. I pull the thinking-cap down to my chin. I cannot look up, not even when the leaves begin to fall around me one by one, blown into drifts around my ankles by a furious wind from the rocker.

  Granny plucks the thinking-cap from my head and stuffs it up her sleeve. She rummages in the wooden basket. “Here it is,” she says. She draws out the long black ribbon. “I’ve had it all along. Why are your eyes so wide, you useless child. It cannot harm us any more.”

  Rocking, rocking.

  Her hands peck at the threads. The ribbon unravels. A pile of crinkled wo
ol grows next to the chair, larger and larger, looms over Granny, ingests her. From the writhing heap her voice, muffled, shrinking: “Here it is. Here it is. Here it is…”

  * * *

  —

  19 I am lost without my thinking-cap. All day I carry my naked head from room to room, but cannot find a thought large enough to fill it.

  When I get into bed I find my thinking-cap under my pillow. Granny has added a large D in silver sequins.

  * * *

  —

  20 I dream I am Death in my thinking-cap with the spangled D, I dream I am Death, coming with my crochet-hook and my wooden basket, which is dusted with talcum powder, which smells of death, lined with brass, which tastes of death, I am coming with my fluorescent thread and my iron hook to knot the world into my blanket.

  * * *

  —

  21 Granny, her body swathed in the meat-blanket, her feet sticking out like boiled hams, rocking, rocking, to the mouth of the grave. She comes and goes on the precipice. She rocks herself over the edge.

  I hear her cooking, bubbling and squeaking, in the meaty broth at the centre of the earth.

  * * *

  —

  22 I’m digging it in. I have to feed the insatiable earth. I put in bones, leaf-mulch from the gutters, vegetable peelings, blankets, papers. I soak it all down. The ink begins to run. I take up my spade and I dig it in.

  When My Hands Burst into Flames

  Wednesday afternoon, mid-winter, finds me at the counter in the United Building Society (Hillbrow), minding my own business, making a cash withdrawal, when my hands burst into flames.

  I react predictably: fling myself on the floor, cry out, roll around, try to beat out one flaming hand with the other. I keep this up until a man grabs hold of me and pins my shoulders to the floor with his knees. Another person sits down on my stomach. This unexpected behaviour brings me to my senses.

  The man pinning my shoulders is a security guard. He opened the door for me when I came in here and I saw my face in the plastic peak of his cap. The person sitting on my stomach is a cashier, the very same young woman who was attending to my financial needs a moment ago. As she counted out my money I noticed her fingernails, which are long, hooked, flame-red.

  The cashier’s pointed heels dig into my calves and make me squirm. She produces a spoon and performs aerobatics with it in the space above my head. She could be planning to feed me, except that the spoon is empty. The spoon zooms towards my face and I see my misshapen reflection. Her nails are like tongues of fire. Her skin smells of Lux. I am suddenly seized by the absurd fear that she is going to scoop my eyes out of their sockets.

  I screw my eyes shut and thrash about. The security guard’s knees tighten like a vice on my head. The soapy hands flap against my face.

  This reminds me of my own hands, the cause of all this bother. I stop resisting and look around. I am surrounded by a circle of old faces. It is the end of the month and the place is full of pensioners. Their mouths open and close. I speak but I cannot hear my voice. The cashier is wearing too much eye-shadow: her lids look bruised. The security guard’s cap has fallen over his eyes.

  I spot one of my hands, the left I think. By chance this hand has come to rest on the cashier’s thigh. It is burning brightly, like a heap of kindling. The cashier’s stocking melts away under my hand. A circle of glowing fibres.

  I taste metal. While I have been otherwise occupied the cashier has inserted the spoon into my mouth. A diagram from a first-aid manual pops into my head. I get it: they are seeing to it that I don’t swallow my tongue. I nod my head appreciatively and the security guard’s knees clamp again.

  I can’t hear a thing. The mouths of the old faces open and close. I think I can decipher expressions of concern and dismay, and this banishes less charitable thoughts from my mind. I have seen people behave in this way at the scene of an accident.

  My other hand, presumably the right, comes into focus. It lies burning on an island of smouldering carpet. I raise it tentatively to get a better view of it. Two comforting thoughts strike me. I feel no pain (under normal circumstances my pain threshold is rather low). And my hand is encased in a perfect glove of fire, tailored snugly at the wrist and showing no sign of spreading. I move my fingers and watch the play of the flames. This keeps me occupied for some time.

  The security guard shifts his weight off my shoulders. Although I am relieved, I do not move. I listen to the muttering of the old faces. Soon the cashier stands up and a man in a suit, a manager I would say, puts a supporting hand under her elbow and steers her away. The circle of faces closes again.

  Another diagram comes into my head. I mesh my fingers together on my stomach so that the flames form a neat camp-fire. I stare into the flames, lost in thought, camped out under the stars. In the heart of the fire I see my hands clearly, composed, intact. No crumbling charcoal and ash, which is a relief.

  The security guard rouses me from this reverie by hooking his hands under my arms and lifting me to my feet. The pensioners return to their queue between stainless-steel pillars and chains. An old woman dusts me off unnecessarily. Everyone is smiling kindly now and avoiding my eye.

  I extend my right hand towards the security guard. Without blinking he takes my hand and shakes it. I watch his hand sink into my flames. I hold his hand a little too long and he snatches it back. Too late. It is burning nicely, quite a blaze. He puts it in the pocket of his trousers. Clever blighter. A stream of smoke pours from the pocket.

  I head for the door, beating my hands against my thighs, but the cashier calls me back. She calls me by name. At first this strikes me as odd, but then I remember that she has my Help-U card. That is what she is waving like a flag. I go over to the counter. I take the card and the wad of ten-rand notes she pushes under the glass. The money bursts into flames at once.

  Cupping this small fire in my palms, careful not to drop any cinders, I walk out into Kotze Street. I dump the charred papers in the gutter and trample on them. My flames are pale in the afternoon sun, but the heat is intense. Apparently my hands are an inexhaustible fuel.

  Pedestrians passing by look at me curiously and I show them my hands and shrug my shoulders.

  I cross the street. Some schoolboys block my entry into Fontana. I wander this way and that, waving my hands. One of the boys points me out to the group and they laugh. There is nothing I can do. I cannot put my hands in my pockets for fear that I will ignite my trousers.

  There is a gift shop nearby, with a mirror in its window, and I go there, enduring stares and sniggers, to observe this spectacle for myself. To my consternation I see that the spoon is still sticking out of my mouth. I spit it out. Then I concentrate on the sight I have come to see: Man with burning hands. I look at myself from various angles, in profile, hands at sides, hands outstretched, hands covering face, and so on. For a moment I am filled with horror and fear. But this quickly passes.

  With my hands hanging at my sides like two forgotten torches I go along the arcade towards Pretoria Street. There is a queue of people at the Computicket kiosk, but not one of them stares at me. I retrace my steps with my hands more prominently displayed. No reaction. It seems that without the spoon I am an ordinary man. I find this irritating.

  I wander aimlessly for half an hour. I seek out the public toilet and try to douse my hands in a basin of water, but succeed only in producing a lot of steam. I think of taking some photographs in a coin-operated booth, but cannot figure out how to draw the curtain without starting a fire. Finally I enter a shoe-shop with the express intention of setting something alight.

  A cowboy boot takes my fancy. But the damn thing won’t burn. A salesman collars me but I ignore his persistent chatter and concentrate on my task. This makes him suspicious. He is about to become abusive when the boot catches. I put it back on its pedestal and hurry around to the plate-glass window to watch it burn. The salesm
an glowers at me through the glass.

  I go along the pavement to the curio-sellers and set fire to a dozen wicker baskets. They burn beautifully, all it takes is the touch of a finger. I watch a German tourist buy a conflagration and carry it away proudly. I follow her to the Chelsea Hotel, sniffing the smoke and watching the embers scatter.

  I am starting to enjoy myself. I am highly inflammable. Better, I am incendiary.

  I go into Exclusive Books and browse. When the place is going merrily I leave and watch from across the street. Customers come and go without a care in the world, strolling between the blazing shelves, turning the red pages, leafing through the ashes.

  Suppressing a host of foolish pranks, I head for home. At the corner of Harrow and Abel I buy a newspaper and page frantically while I wait for the lights to change, gathering what news I can from the curling pages. By the time I reach the other side of the street the news is ashes. I fling it aside.

  I sit on my balcony. There is nothing much to do. The coffee boils in the mug cupped in my palms. It is too hot to drink. Night falls. I go inside. I hold my hands up to photographs in frames. I brand some letters on the ceiling. I switch on the TV and watch until the set collapses in a charred heap. I keep warm.

  Later I think I will torch the park across the street. Meanwhile, I am content to play with fire.

  The Terminal Bar

  “Time, gentlemen!”

  Another night in the Terminal Bar, in the Transit Lounge. Another kick-out time, another unhappy hour. It is always closing time here in the Terminal Bar, but no one leaves. I switch off the aquarium lights and switch on the fluorescent tubes. No one takes any notice.

  I empty the ashtrays, collect the glasses, rinse them (the dregs go into a bucket for the New Year punch). I move so quietly among the drunken and disorderly that they hardly see me. I am the night watchman. I watch over broken veins, gaping pores, greasy lips, scars, age-spots, acne. My patrons. I try hard to feel sorry for them, let the sleepers sleep, leave those who are maudlin to weep, those who are nauseous to vomit. In the morning Josephine (who was abandoned here by the Weinbergs, they had to leave in a hurry, their plane was revving up at the end of the runway) Josephine can clean it up. I put up with the mess. There is a place for everyone – almost everyone – in the Terminal Bar, there is a home away from home.