Flashback Hotel

by Ivan Vladislavic

  It listed aliases.

  It described what I was wearing when I disappeared.

  It requested information about my present whereabouts.

  It offered a reward for information leading to my arrest.

  * * *

  —

  The dining-room walls were mirrored. Fat people were fattening themselves at little tables whose legs curved under the weight of plates and paunches. Waiters dressed in rags and clotted furs distributed roughage. Their wounds were bound with dishcloths. There were fatty spots on the bandages where the pus had seeped.

  Embroidery of Johnnie Walker, Sealy Posturepedic, Toyota Corolla, Eno, Southern Suns.

  I ran through the dining-room (I had to go badly) but kept banging into mirrors.

  My nose began to bleed and one of the waiters (Nedbank) offered me an ice bucket.

  * * *

  —

  Night.

  I went to the Stadium. I was alone on the bus. In the Stadium I was a crowd of one. I climbed up to the highest tier and found myself a seat. A spotlight like a snooker cue slid down from the darkness above me. It rested on the centre spot. In the light was my father dressed in a white suit.

  * * *

  —

  There had been

  BOMB BLAST IN CITY HOTEL

  (★TYYY)

  There was a crater in the foyer filled up with water from burst pipes and with pieces of piano. Some dead waiters had been piled in the hole like stepping-stones so that guests could cross over safely.

  I went into the Ladies Bar. The television set was repeating itself: action replays of the explosion with subtitles in many languages.

  The Manager was laid out on a bed of ice on the counter. The edges of his suit were frosted.

  The Assistant Manager was consulting with the Chief of Police at a table in a corner. They were sipping Blanc de Noir and staring into one another’s eyes across a candle flame.

  The sound of ice splintering. The Manager raised his head and, without opening his eyes, told me to leave.

  * * *

  —

  They sent the City Late up to my room on a silver salver, and sauce in a plastic tomato and a crêpe bandage folded into a carnation.

  The pages smelt of lemon juice and new ink.

  A note on Flashback Hotel stationery told me to turn to the Hatches, Matches and Dispatches.

  I turned.

  I saw that I had been born, married and buried.

  I was a bonny baby.

  I was married to Bride of the Month for January (at the Temple David, Morningside).

  My ashes had been scattered outside Fontana.

  I had also been seen at Rugantino’s with Toyota Corolla Salesman of the Year celebrating my birthday. All sorts of celebrities had attended. There was a group photograph. Because it was my birthday they let me hold the pizza – a battleground just two centimetres in diameter.

  I went back to the front page.

  There was an identikit photograph of me. This man was seen hurrying away from the scene of today’s atrocity.

  I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. There were splinters of glass in my hair.

  Then I shaved my moustache.

  * * *

  —

  A large crowd had gathered outside, trying to see the bodies.

  I mingled. I pretended to be a reporter so that I could gauge public opinion. Sardonically, with a wry smile.

  It seemed that most of them had come for the raffling of the maitre d’s eyewitness account.

  A fat man in a school uniform cornered me and tried to sell me a brown-leather satchel with a peace sign on it. He had a flick-knife. I took the satchel. Just then a policeman carrying a stack of raffle forms appeared.

  Hello hello hello. Wat maak julle daar?

  I ran back into the hotel.

  The fat man said to the policeman: If he’s innocent why’s he running away?

  I was ticking like a bomb.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I saw that I had my father’s mouth. Immediate recognition. Gruesome. I drew the curtains. There was shattered glass all over the show.

  In the satchel I found the passport of a man who was almost familiar, some make-up and a chauffeur’s uniform, including a splendid peaked cap with gold braid.

  I made up my face. I painted the Passport Man’s moustache on my lip. I memorized his name and address. I put on the uniform.

  I put my own clothes into a suitcase. The suitcase didn’t weigh enough. I practised walking with it over the broken glass, but it wouldn’t do. I filled it up with ashtrays, directories, the Yellow Pages, a collection of Tonight! and Today!

  Better.

  I went down to the foyer.

  The stepping-stones had been submerged. I had to take the back way out, through the kitchen. The Assistant Manager was frying an egg. The waiters were stringing paper decorations in the alley. They wanted me to blow up balloons but I shrugged as if I didn’t understand.

  * * *

  —

  A long tiled corridor called WHITES led to the urinals.

  There was a sign that said 4U2P.

  While I was P-ing, I remembered that it was my birthday and wished that I could throw a party.

  My epaulettes looked good. I could easily pass for a general or a traffic cop or a train driver.

  * * *

  —

  The Station was closed for repairs. I wanted to check my suitcase into a locker but there was no attendant. I went down to the platforms. Perhaps I could go for a joyride, or send my suitcase on a journey. On the steps the suitcase vomited its contents but I stuffed everything back in. I put the suitcase onto a trolley and pushed it along the platform. No trains. The place smelt of people. I left the suitcase next to a bench and walked away as if I would just be a minute.

  Instead I went to the cafeteria, helped myself to a pie and gravy, watched the action replays as I ate.

  They showed the explosion in slow motion and reverse.

  I found the dignity with which the glass and the furniture and the victims pulled themselves together again very moving.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the hotel the crowds had dispersed. The crater had been pumped dry. They were pouring cement over the bodies.

  In the foyer I met the Manager. His suit was still damp where the frosting had melted.

  He greeted me like a long-lost friend. He patted my back. He said he was really sorry I had missed all the action. I could stay as long as I liked.

  I went up to my room to fix my face.

  * * *

  —

  That night there was a fancy-dress party in the alley behind the kitchen. I went as a missing person.

  Sightseeing

  The Crack of Dawn

  Here comes a man with equipment for violence: suitcase, tent, walking stick, boots, camera, pen. The means to cover vast distances and inflict metaphor and defend himself.

  This man is in league with coincidence. He has only come to see the sights but he is capable of turning the sea into an exercise in Royal Jelly or Cold Water Omo.

  He comes carrying his hard suitcase with exaggerated ease and wearing his blisters like badges. He comes along a jeep-track through a plantation, noting that here tiny pine-trees spangle the verges and there a mushroom sprouts out of a turd. He feels grateful for the mist that forces his attention to the finer details. He stops from time to time, where a cairn marks a look-out spot, to catch his breath and observe the mist where the scenery should be. Comes on again.

  He discovers that he is not alone. On a slope below the track a group of labourers in oilskins huddle with axes and saws, waiting for the day’s work to begin. They watch him pass, puzzled by his safety suitcase (
with fluorescent chevrons and a combination lock) and his limp and his sense of purpose. He consults his maps and hurries behind the mist to eat his breakfast: an energy bar and a boiled egg. As he crunches he hears the chainsaw, and the first tree falls.

  In the Bundu

  Or rather in a rain forest of trunks, torsos, severed limbs, he is finally alone. He slips and skids in his skidproof boots along a path between building-block rocks, greened and damped, noodle vines, Chinese puzzles, fern-furry insect legs of roots.

  In the green light near a waterfall he sits, rests his suitcase on his knees, and takes notes for metaphors as follows:

  * * *

  —

  Fern leaves’ soft swooped symmetry of pagodas, head-dresses – stalks balance leaves horizontal, ever-steadying, swirled by my passing – the way waiters balance trays – noodle vines, Chinese puzzles, pretzels of root and creeper – nervous hands of fern – mottled rock under suds – trees wrung like clothes by jungle hands – vines koeksister towards a spearmint vault –

  * * *

  —

  He goes on in this manner for several pages. Then for a long time he looks at his plastic pen.

  The Ambulance

  The Mobile Clinic, its red light revolving, is parked under a tree next to the village store. The store is closed. A group of men unload sacks of flour and mealie-meal and tins of meat and fish from a truck and carry them in through a back entrance.

  The sightseer sits on his suitcase in the shade of a hedge. Everyone watches him. No one speaks.

  The women of the village pass their babies to the ambulance driver who weighs them in a canvas sling suspended from a branch of the tree. Then he passes them to the nurse who sits in the driver’s seat of the ambulance. She makes notes on white cards which she rests on the steering-wheel. Perhaps she examines the babies in the rearview mirror. The accelerator pedal amplifies a whooping cough. Her hand is on baby’s forehead and her eye on the temperature gauge. The red light revolves. Next baby.

  The sightseer, pen fingers itching, but ashamed of literacy and clean white curiosity, takes mental notes:

  Underdevelopment in the Rural Areas

  (1) The ambulance driver weighs the babies in a canvas sling, like fish.

  (2) One of the babies has a sore poured like hot porridge over its back.

  and so on.

  After an hour the sightseer realizes that the store is not going to open, and goes away hungry. From the footpath down to the beach he hears the ambulance howling.

  Beggars and Thieves

  The sightseer sees a goatherd climbing down the cliff and has to run knees-up out of the surf to secure his camera and his pen. Theft is a problem. The natives are not bought off with beads and copper wire. Foreigners come here in and out of season, hauling themselves over mountains to work up a sweat and flinging themselves into the sea to wash it off. The local children go barefoot over rock and dive for crayfish, which they sell at the standard rates. When no one buys they beg for precise amounts of money and food.

  “I am travelling light,” the sightseer says to them. “I mean that I have paper money and travellers’ cheques, an airmail pad and one rand’s worth of five-cent stamps. I also have things like soya beans and ProNutro, but just enough.”

  A pregnant girl holds her belly in her hands, presents the hungry foetus to him as evidence.

  In the bottom of his suitcase, under his skants and socks, the sightseer carries a kilogram of powdered milk like a Conscience.

  In remote places he comes to litter like his own and knows that he is not a voortrekker.

  Two Englishmen

  He buries his suitcase under pine-needles and creeps up close.

  A Combi emits two Englishmen with one beard between them and bacon and eggs for a party of eight hot off the Cadac.

  Snap! and edging closer, disguised as a tree, the sightseer turns breakfast into Colonialism. Under cover of leaf rustling he laughs at fold-up Morris chairs, unbreakable mugs, telescopic table, 75 litres of spring-loaded water, all coming with the Combi at fifteen rand a day and unlimited mileage.

  “The one with the beard (he will pass it on to his friend after breakfast so that he can do the washing up) pierces the belly of an egg and it runs sticky sunshine,”

  the sightseer notes.

  One German

  The German finds the natives here more savage, hardly civilized.

  He fetches a carving-knife, lops and spears sausage, then cucumber, then bread. Gouges mustard from a pot. He clips the sandwich from the blade with his teeth. He wipes the knife on his knee and spears seven pear halves one by one and eats them whole. Drinks the syrup in one long swig. And tells camp-fire tales of mozzies, potholes, bandits, women in St. Lucia, Port St. John’s, Hamburg, Dubrovnik, Tokyo.

  The sightseer, shrinking from the knife, ashamed of modest distances and dehydrated food, marvels at the fridge that keeps the beer cold (drinks one gratefully) and comes with the Combi at a cut-rate twelve rand a day and unlimited mileage.

  The sightseer goes to his tent early. He lies in his sleeping-bag with his head out of the flap and watches the German build a bonfire to scare away the boys who come to beg.

  Afraid again, he sleeps with his suitcase in his arms.

  Local Colour

  Here he comes, proudly unwashed (seven days now) and travel-stained, and prepared to wait for two hours for a bus.

  When at last the bus comes it admits him with indifference. His suitcase is taken from his hands and piled with sacks of pumpkins, cardboard boxes, shopping-bags, and trays of beer (cushioned by the mailbags). He gets a seat on the stairs where metal plates turn hot above the engine. A gap below the doors billows dust and hot wind over him.

  He finds that he is soapy fresh among these smells. Centuries of wood-smoke in the old men’s clothes, the women’s blankets. Old Mum for Men under young armpits. Sweat and beer. He imagines sour smells of mother’s milk, sweet red from a bulge in a child’s cheek, apple vapour. He tries to smell himself.

  Among the battered baggage his suitcase is crisp and bright. It shames him, lying there like Privilege and Leisure.

  He sees some characters demanding to be documented: a toothless old man sucking pilchards through a hole in the tin; a baby breastfed (he averts his eyes); a child whose face is full of the newsfronts of the world.

  But he takes no photographs. These people have kieries and sjamboks to use against the poacher. And his notebook is in the bottom of the suitcase.

  The Terminus

  in the marketplace, in the capital.

  He notes: the fruitsellers try to make their apples and oranges glow against the dust. Then he drags his suitcase to the tiled privacy of a Caltex Restroom to knock the dents out of the lid, dust it off and flush away his chocolate wrappers.

  There goes a man whose camera has failed him but not his eyes. Hurrying through the streets of the capital – he wants to be out of it before dark – he keeps his face like the picture in his passport. Out of the corners of his eyes he sees the faces of the people. Here is a language he understands and he knows how to reply, with distance.

  Postcards

  He is on holiday at last. He takes a shower, calls room service for a Scotch. He walks on the promenade. In a beachfront cafe he licks an ice-cream cone and turns a tower of postcards.

  He finds his memories captive and complete, in glorious colour, with captions. His sticky fingers make the tower spin.

  He stops the tower dead. Buys a view of his hotel and next to the window of his room he writes in ink

  ME

  Journal of a Wall

  31 May

  I have a feeling that I am starting this too late.

  It is hardly three weeks since he started the wall – but already he has laid the foundations. That is not too much to catch up, perhaps. But it would have been pleasantly sy
mmetrical to have begun on the same day, to have taken up my pen as he took up his trowel.

  I should have foreseen it all. I had a sense, when they delivered the bricks, that something in which I would have a part was beginning. If I had not been watching from behind the curtains in my lounge, like a spy, perhaps it would have been clear to me that I was meant to be more than an observer.

  They brought the bricks almost three weeks ago. Saturday 11 May, as I look at my calendar. I was watching the cricket on television when I heard the truck stop across the road. The engine revved for several minutes – I suppose the driver had gone in to check whether he was at the right address – and that’s why I went to investigate.

  When I looked out through the curtains he was crossing the lawn with a man wearing blue overalls. His wife was watching from the verandah.

  The bricks were packed incongruously in huge plastic bags, very strong plastic, I suppose. He went straight up to the truck, put one foot on the rear wheel and hoisted himself up. He took out a pocket-knife and cut a slit in the plastic, put his finger in to touch the bricks. He held his hand there for a minute, as if he was taking a pulse. Then he put his eye to the slit. It took a long time before he was satisfied. I had an inkling then that something important was beginning. I should have fetched a pen and started recording immediately. I would have had the details now, those all-important beginning moments. Already the memories are fading: I can’t remember when she went back inside, for instance, but I don’t think that she watched the unloading.

  He supervised that task himself. It didn’t take long. I wished that the bricks weren’t wrapped in plastic; then they could have been passed along a chain of sure hands from the back of the truck to a corner of the garden. Instead the driver of the truck operated a small crane mounted just behind the cab, and the man directed him to pile the bags of bricks one on top of the other on the pavement. I remember at least that there were nine bags. When that was over he went inside – it was probably then that I noticed she was gone – and returned with a pen to sign the delivery papers.