Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

  I tell them that I made it up as I went along.

  Did you have a plan? Did you gather the objects together first? (You mean the offerings? I ask.) Or did you build the box (Casket, I correct them) first and choose the objects (Offerings!) afterwards. Did you use a hammer?

  This is becoming complicated, but terminology is all-important, sad to say.

  Once and for all, this is what I did, in chronological order, as far as I remember:

  I looked around for a casket, or at least for a waking equivalent. There was a tomato-box in the pantry, but juice-stained, pustulated with spilt seeds from split fruit, splintery, spatulate (I could go on like this, as you know) and in any event, I did not feel like complicated joinery. There must be a shoebox somewhere? I found one in the bottom of my wardrobe. Grasshoppers.

  Then I sat down in the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee and a sharpened pencil to remember, if I could, the objects on the dream-list.

  I called back five of the miner-monk’s identifications – fires, swords, library, behemoth, mountain – and one of my own – river. Two others – the first and fourth on the list – were on the tip of my pencil, but remained unwritten. And of course I had never identified Number 9. But hadn’t I? What about the razor-blade? No, that couldn’t possibly belong in the casket, it was too ordinary. Razorblades and swords?

  And so I fumbled for the key that opened the Omniscope: substitution. A razor-blade would go into my shoebox instead of swords. I went up to the bathroom, removed from my so-called safety razor the very same blade with which I had nicked my smile, descended once again to the kitchen and placed the bloody item in the box. It was a Wilkinson Sword Contact II. The first triple-coated twin-blade with reinforced edges to resist blade edge breakdown and stay comfortable. So comfortable it’s like a new blade every day.

  I looked at the list. Fire. Fire was easy: I found a box of Lion matches in the kitchen dresser, in the drawer with the clothes-pegs and the disposable chopsticks. Library: easy. Behemoth: tricky. I didn’t have a behemoth, of course, although I had a small dog. But even a small dog will not fit in a shoebox comfortably, so I went a step further and chose one of the beast’s biscuits instead, a bone-shaped one the colour of mincemeat.

  I don’t want to bore you with the details. In the end (which was reached some ten minutes later) I placed in the box instead of fires, a matchbox; instead of swords, a razor-blade; instead of a library, a postage stamp; instead of a behemoth, a dog-biscuit; instead of a mountain, a thimble; instead of a river, a rubber washer; instead of the unwritten enigmas, a teaspoon and a nutmeg seed. And finally, for good measure, a pot-scourer and a magnet disguised as a watermelon slice.

  Why ten items instead of nine? Blame the waking world.

  Why such a preponderance of kitchenware? Ditto.

  I put the lid on the box and sealed it with masking tape. Then I punched a hole in one corner with the kitchen scissors and pushed through it a cardboard tube from a roll of aluminium foil. One glance told me that I had erred: I could see too much. The tube was 35 mm in diameter and no sooner had I pressed my eye to one end of it than I observed the postage stamp at the other, in its entirety, and identified it instantaneously.

  I patched the hole and replaced the cardboard tube with a drinking-straw. Better, except that it was so dark inside the box I couldn’t see a thing. (It was a laborious process, as you can see, the whole thing did not come to me in a flash.) I put a bicycle torch inside the box and resealed the lid. And finally, there it was: the first Omniscope, rough and ready, but fully functional.

  It took me twenty-eight minutes to identify all ten of the objects positively. In my opinion that was too fast, and therefore too easy, even allowing for the fact that a stranger unfamiliar with the contents might take, say, three times as long. What are eighty-four minutes on the great heap of time? Accordingly, my primitive prototype was the simplest Omniscope ever built. When I went into full-scale production, which was later that day as a matter of fact, I enlarged the casket (as I preferred to call the “box”) and included no fewer than twenty-five offerings (as I called the “objects”).

  Omniscope I…“Omniscope” is good enough; “I” is flat, to say the least, but I had to come up with something on the spur of the moment when I was filling out the form for the patent. “Hauptfleischoscope” crossed my mind, but even I could see that it would not do. I toyed briefly with “Pandorascope,” which had the advantage of being entirely Greek in origin, but it was too clever by half. And then I hit on that bastard “Omniscope.”

  Omniscope I was made of pine, the three dimensions of the casket were 300 mm × 400 mm × 150 mm, the scope was 175 mm long and 15 mm in diameter with an optically correct lens at each end (depth again), and the whole device retailed at R19.95.

  I built a round dozen of this model over a period of two years and sold them all at flea markets. Most of them were bought as toys for children, which is not surprising when you consider that they were painted all over with luminous stars, moons and balloons, like lucky-packet kaleidoscopes, and contained the following assortment of generous offerings:

  the Aberdeen Angus, the never-never,

  the butter-ball, the one and only,

  the candy-cane, the pudding and pie,

  the Dr Doolittle, the quack-quack,

  the eighty-eight, the Roy of the Rovers,

  the forty-four, the sticks and stones,

  the Gitche Gumee, the tip-truck,

  the hobby-horse, the unicorn,

  the invisible ink, the Vauxhall Viva,

  the Jet Jungle, the water-wings,

  the kamikaze, the yo-yo,

  the loop-da-loop, the zigzag.

  the Mickey Mouse,

  Golly.

  The kaleidoscope was invented by Sir David Brewster in 1817, and patented too. The device enjoyed a popularity never seen before, and not seen again until our own crazed century. Every person who could buy or make one had a kaleidoscope. Men, women and children, rich and poor, in houses, or walking in the streets, in carriages or coaches, were to be seen looking into the wonder-working tube, admiring the beautiful patterns it produced, and the magical changes which the least movement of the instrument occasioned. (Acknowledgements to follow.)

  Buy or make! It was so easy to dismantle a kaleidoscope, and so easy to understand the principles on which it was based, that the patent was not worth the paper it was printed on. Poor old Brewster never made a bean.

  Brewster discovered these principles while doing experiments on the polarization of light. Brewster’s Law states that light reflected from a solid surface is plane polarized, with maximum polarization occurring when the tangent of the angle of incidence is equal to the refractive index. Deep. But his purpose in building the device, he claimed, was to exhibit and create beautiful forms and patterns, of great use in all the ornamental arts. Kaleidoscope, for your information, from the Greek kalos, beautiful, eidos, form, and skopeo, look at, naturalized as -scope, an instrument looked at or through, a viewer, hence a device for looking at beautiful forms. To look at the beautiful forms! To lay bare the infinite possibilities generated by the narrowest principles; endless variety and inevitable repetition; the symmetries of chaos. A noble enough purpose. But the invention was taken up by children and adults alike as no more than an amusing toy. Damn the day a sticky little hand first closed around a homemade Brewsterscope!

  Ditto for the Omniscope.

  Omniscope II arose from my conviction that seriousness of purpose is best served by duplicity. You won’t be interested in the technical innovations (stabilizers, black beadings, adjustable scopes with multiple lenses, false bottoms, deadlocks) but you will want to know that each of the new models contained potato peelin
gs; flowers of speech; physical explanations of miracles; bare facts, walls; cartload of bricks; memorials of remote ages; mantelpiece crowded with ornaments; gifts from Providence; a quantity of baskets; an inexhaustible supply of fish; the floating population; examples of unconscious humour; a table spread with every luxury; cakes and buns; biscuits of several sorts; types so various as to defy classification; a half-cooked potato; asparagus served with butter; the six pips of the time-signal; three clear days; 20 measures of wheat; fresh herrings, butter, meat, fruit; a peacock proper; paperbacks with lurid covers; impressions from the outside; Milton’s prose works; quotations from the Fathers; rampant theorists, violence; academic, experimental, material; nominal and essential distinctions; villainous weather; instruments of torture; river alive with boats; some soda-water; two litres or thereabouts; potatoes of our own growing; a name brand; fish, flesh and fowl; a literal flood of pamphlets; the prose of existence; vowel and consonant sounds; a simple form of pump; the bottom of a well; the problem of ventilation; kettle steaming on the hob; hole to permit escape of steam; calamities in rapid sequence; landscape framed in an archway; the rare atmosphere of the mountain tops; hills folded in mist; the tip of the iceberg; the icy summits of the Alps; expert evidence, expert witness; a long roll of heroes; sons of toil, freedom, darkness; a very human person; the waste periods of history; diplomats seeking a formula; calculus of probabilities, variations; bunches of flowers, grapes, keys; articles of clothing; clothing, fencing, sacking, scaffolding; writing over the signature “Disgusted”; broken heads; two-handed and single-handed swords; mechanism for revolving the turntable; dated fashions; the peasant look in knitwear; coat with the woolly side in; the great attraction; a face lined with pain; a blue tie with pink spots; a regulation sword, cap; an old book, suit, teapot; the one with a broken handle; white robe splashed with red; a small quantity of blood; sketch in the manner of Rembrandt; a picture by the same hand; a signed masterpiece of Turner’s; several transcripts from the same original; the big book and the little one; an odd volume of “Punch”; novel by Scott, play by Shaw; a book, an essay, on grammar; pages 7 to 26 inclusive; a wealth of illustration, wit, fruit; facts locked up in hieroglyphics; a critical edition of Ibsen; a string of beads, onions, symbols; unread books gathering dust; a very representative selection, collection; all the refinements of reasoning, torture; a once-famous doctrine; an old party with spectacles; the science of optics, ethics, philology; harmonic series; 99 as against 102 yesterday; few words, only a few words.

  Only three copies of this model were ever built, and I happen to know the unhappy fate of each one of them. The first, which I sold to a Mrs Bernstein, at that time a Public Relations Officer, was afterwards carried abroad in a container ship and sold to a collector of modern art. The second was bought by a Soweto businessman and given in turn as a birthday present to one of his many aunts, a soothsayer, who uses it to predict the outcome of sports events. I could wish my wonderful Omniscope smashed to kindling. The third, the most painful to talk about, a member of my own family donated to the Medical Museum of the University of the Witwatersrand.

  But enough of this. Mere background. I am the one who invented the Omniscope, I am the very same Hauptfleisch. Omniscope. It fits after a fashion, like a second-hand suit or a bargain-basement ball-gown. You understand the derivation, I’m sure – omni is everywhere, and I hardly need to go over -scope again.

  I embarked upon the construction of the Omniscope (Pat. pending) on the 4th of March last year. I was going to call it Mark III, but the grandeur of the conception shamed me into silence. I planned to put in 1 000 offerings – yes, 1 000! – to start with. Or 999. Or 1 001. But why stop at 999 or 1 000 or 1 001? Piffling, when you think about it, a lightweight trinket. I could already see it laughed out of town or commandeered by one of the crackpot systems of belief with which the waking world is riddled. Idolaters! An ever-present danger, even now. It was just as well to remove my name from the thing. Let me be almost an anonym, gone and just about forgotten, like Brewster, my champion, my charger!

  I can’t say precisely what now.

  But I can say that I’ve built the casket, canister, caddy, caster, snuffbox, matchbox, mud box, metal box, black box, pepper box, pillbox, pick-a-box, pyx, reliquary, nest of boxes, and so far I’ve put in some matter, some brute matter, some stuff, a patch of plenum, a bit of hyle, a lump of prime matter, mass, material, a body, a frame, a structure, a spot of substance, a cup of corpus, oodles of organic matter, flesh, flesh and blood, the real world, Nature, an object, a tangible object, a bird in the hand, enough, two birds in the bush, cont. Roget’s Thesaurus (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979 (first pub. 1852, revised by Hauptfleisch 1993)), pp. 127 ff.

  The Book Lover

  I first came across Helena at the Black Sash Fête. Of all the second-hand book sales in Johannesburg, this one has the finest catchment area – good, educated, moneyed, liberal homes. Thanks to the brain drain and death itself there is always a large and varied selection. The venue is a suburban garden and, weather permitting, the books are displayed outdoors, gift-wrapped in leafy shade. They have already been sorted into labelled cardboard boxes – Biography, Fiction, Classics, Industrial Psychology, Judaica, to name a few – and the boxes are on trestle-tables with generous spaces in between. These arrangements are a godsend: one does not have to endure the crush of human bodies one associates with jumble sales or, worse, the intimidating configurations of book-lined walls in the second-hand dealers.

  I came away from the fête last year with a satisfying haul. Perhaps my favourite among the half-dozen was a battered little Quattro Novelle by Pirandello, in Harrap’s Bilingual Series, published in 1943, with a dun cardboard cover and grey paper that more than warranted the declaration on the copyright page: Book Production War Economy Standard. This ugly child was crying out for love in Italian. There were English-speakers too: The Culture of the Abdomen by F.A. Hornibrook, with a personal recommendation from Arnold Bennett, who claimed it had relieved him of his dyspepsia and thirty pounds avoirdupois. And Non-Sporting Dogs: Their Points and Management by Frank Townend Barton M.R.C.V.S., with a dedication to the author’s mother.

  A couple of South African works I had been hunting, Huddleston’s Naught for your Comfort and Millin’s The Burning Man, also gave themselves up. I hesitate to call these publications Africana – they are still too plentiful and too reasonably priced – but I was pleased to have them.

  I should mention in passing that I also netted a jar of pickled onions entitled STRONG on a gummed label of the kind made for school exercise books; and a peace-in-the-home in a terracotta pot from the plant stall. Beat them both down to give-away prices.

  I hurried home to breakfast and the pleasure of going through my finds more thoroughly. The Pirandello parallel text is endearing. Recto: “And Teresina slipped away into the dining-room, a rustle of silk.” Verso: “E Teresina scappò via in sala, tutta frusciante.” I can’t speak a word of Italian, but that did not stop me from declaiming a paragraph or two in rich tones, through a mouthful of Fruitful Bran. (The manufacturers, the Kellogg Company of New Era, Springs, call it “fruitful,” but I’m sure they mean “fruity.”)

  Naught for your Comfort was worth buying for the dust-jacket alone. Father Huddleston reaches out from the front cover with both hands. He is making a telling criticism of apartheid, no doubt, but the gesture puts me in mind of a fisherman showing the size of the one that got away. Perhaps it’s the background the portrait is floating on – wavy lines of clerical purple, a cartoon Galilee.

  There was a signature on the flyleaf of Millin’s book: Helena Shein, Johannesburg, 1956. I’d seen that light and airy hand somewhere before, with its buoyant loops and windswept ascenders. I turned to my other acquisitions. To my surprise I discovered that The Burning Man, Naught for your Comfort, the Quattro Novelle and The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air, fully two-thirds of my haul, pulled from their scattered pools o
n the Black Sash trestles, had all once belonged to Helena Shein. The coincidence banged a window open in my mind and the present billowed out like a lace curtain in a sudden breeze. Through a gap edged with geranium leaves I glimpsed a vanished world: a cool room with a high pressed-steel ceiling and a picture rail, a pile of books on the arm of a chair, their ghostly echo in the varnished wood, gleaming copper fire-irons, a springbok-skin pouffe, a ripple of piano music on the sepia air.

  What held these books together, I wondered, apart from paste and thread and the name written with a fountain-pen in ink now faded to sky-blue?

  The blurb of Naught for your Comfort said that Trevor Huddleston first became interested in missionary work during “Oxford vacations, spent with the hop-pickers in Kent.” After his ordination he became curate at St. Mark’s, Swindon. “I met, and immensely liked, the railwaymen of England,” Father Huddleston said. In 1939 he joined the Community of the Resurrection and took the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Later he came to be Priest-in-Charge of the Anglican Mission in Sophiatown, where he became a legend, “a legend that will endure long after his departure and perhaps intensify.” Black people christened him “Makhalipile,” the Dauntless One. “Those who have seen Fr Huddleston in action say he owes his success among the Africans to his great sense of humour and to his joyous nature, which are such strong characteristics of the African.”

  The book had been bought at Vanguard Booksellers (Pty) Ltd, of 23 Joubert Street, Johannesburg. Harry Bloom’s Episode, due for publication in April 1956, was advertised on the inside flap of the dustjacket. There was a quote from Alan Paton, who must have read the book in manuscript. “It is the location itself (that part of every South African town set aside for the African people) which is the real character of the novel,” Paton said, “and Mr Bloom portrays it with a fidelity and a skill that command my admiration. His story never happened, yet every word of it is true.”