“You shouldn’t hate him,” he said, “and there’s no need to be afraid of him. Even if it turns out that he’s not who he says he is, and I’m not saying it will, he means no harm. Look at him, out there in the cold, while we’re here in our cosy home. I almost feel sorry for him — although that’s unnecessary, as he’d be quick to point out. He’s very resourceful. He’s got a tea-set made out of tins and everything.”
She shrugged her shoulders under his heavy arm. “It can only bring trouble. . and insects,” she whispered. After a pause, during which Mr listened intently to the silence of the house but could discern no sign of life, she said firmly, “Go ahead and be his friend. You’ll do as you please anyway, I know. But don’t come crying to me when he lets you down. And don’t expect me to call him ‘Nieuwenhuizen’. It’s even worse than ‘Father’. If I have to refer to him at all, I’ll just say ‘Him’, and you’ll know why.”···
What is it with this Malgas? Nieuwenhuizen asked himself. He seems eager to serve. But he’s full of questions, and so hard to convince. Nieuwenhuizen! he’d exclaimed. Really? Are you serious?
For Pete’s sake.
The more persuasively Nieuwenhuizen laid claim to the word that was his name, the more detached he felt from it. It was a distressing experience, watching his personal noun drift away on the air.
But people will get used to almost anything.
By a circuitous process of reasoning, during which he walked round and round his fire until he was quite dizzy, Nieuwenhuizen reattached his name and decided that Malgas should be kept guessing.
The left foot of Mrs, which was daintily arched and pigeon-toed, stepped out of the bath, dripping soapy water, and stretched down to the floor, where it met with something cold and slimy. A plastic bath mat. She knew at once whose hideous creation it was.
Although she was loath to touch this gewgaw, she wanted to know more about it, as if that would teach her something important about Him.
She lifted the mat with the end of Mr’s toothbrush. Chkrs. It was woven, no, one really couldn’t call it weaving. It was knitted, knotted, out of plastic shopping bags. She identified three major supermarket chains by the predominance of certain colours and fragments of lettering. Pick n Pay. There seemed to be a Mr Hardware packet in there somewhere, sandy lettering on a muddy ground, but she couldn’t be sure. The words were warped into the fabric of the thing and could not be unravelled.
She dropped the mat in the bin under the hand-wash basin and sat on the toilet seat, wrapped in her towel, trying to figure out when Mr had smuggled it into her house. He was becoming more devious by the day.
The next morning Nieuwenhuizen hailed Mr Malgas as he went out to buy the Sunday newspapers and hurried over to meet him on the verge. “Phase One is upon us, Malgas,” he said earnestly. “Last night, after our little man to man, I got to thinking about the future. I asked myself the question: ‘Is it time?’ And the answer came back, loud and clear, in a tell-tale itching of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet: ‘You can bet your boots it is.’”
“To do what?”
“I was coming to that: To ‘clear the land’!” He threw his hands up in two V signs and scored quotation marks around the words with his fingernails. “May I borrow a spade?”
“Only with pleasure!”
Malgas was delighted that the action was about to begin at last. He was also secretly touched that Nieuwenhuizen had said “upon us” rather than “upon me.” He fetched a spade from his garage and gave expert instructions about its use. Then he rushed off to the café, promising to return in two ticks.
Nieuwenhuizen ran a finger over the blade. It was blunt. He began sharpening it on a kerbstone. Before long he heard Malgas huffing and puffing back, and he quickly retired to the inner reaches of the plot (block IVF) and threw himself into his task.
Malgas was not so easily put off. He craned his neck. “Need a hand there Father?”
“Thanks but no thanks,” Nieuwenhuizen responded without looking up. “I’ll give you a call when I need you. You go home and catch up on the news.”
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 offbeat 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 hilclass="underline" 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.