1 June
7.15 a.m.
I have made my arrangements; I have pen and paper, I have a chair in front of the window. I set it all up last night. This morning I was up at six. Showered, shaved, put on my work clothes. Now I am waiting for us to begin.
8.30 a.m.
Here he comes. He is wearing the blue check and the trousers. He pauses on the top step of the verandah, looks out over his kingdom. Ah, if he knew that I was watching he wouldn’t stretch in that bone-cracking way. He goes to the garage. He looks quite energetic, although a shadow of sleep drags across the lawn behind him. He opens the garage door, goes into the twilight. Comes out pushing the wheelbarrow loaded with a bag of cement, a spade, a box of tools. Goes to the beginning of the trench. Drags the piece of corrugated iron over, shovels sand onto it.
Let me leave him to mix while I describe briefly the sky behind him: It is a flat sky, like faded blue canvas. It could be dangling from the top of my window frame. At the bottom the canvas is notched raggedly by the roofs of the houses. A slight breeze comes up and the canvas sways: a black edge opens up between it and the houses, closes again as the breeze drops.
He has mixed the cement. He leaves it to set, pushes the barrow to the pile of bricks. He slits the plastic with one long, sure pass of the pocket-knife. There are beads of moisture on the plastic and they run to rivers as he peels it back from the wound. His hand goes in. Comes out with a brick. He weighs it in his hand, turns it to look at it from all angles, puts it in the wheelbarrow. Reaches for another. If I had binoculars per-haps I would be able to tell, even at this distance, which brick is mine.
* * *
—
The wheelbarrow is full. He pushes it to the beginning of the trench. He takes a ball of string from the toolbox, stretches a length between the first fence post and the second, checks it with a spirit level. When he stands the string cuts him just below the knee. Surely that is too low? He kneads the cement with the back of the spade. He takes up his trowel. He goes down on his knees in the trench. He reaches for a brick. Weighs it. His hands go down into the earth. Damn! I can’t see what he’s doing. I’ve missed the laying of the first brick!
10.30 a.m.
He works incredibly slowly. As if there were only one place in the whole bloody wall where any particular brick will fit.
He has laid three courses so far, and has just started the fourth. This is the first course I can see clearly. He weighs each brick in his hand. Then he settles it on its dollop of cement, shuffles it in, taps it with the handle of the trowel, slices off the oozing cement, taps it again. Sometimes he starts over, scraping the surface clean, putting the brick aside and choosing another. I cannot see why. They look the same to me.
I wonder where she is? I expected her to be there for the first brick.
I should go over and speak to him. It would be simple. Perhaps he would welcome some discussion. I would suggest, for example, that he make the wall slightly higher: what good is a wall if one can see over it? I would also advise him to wear a hat – I could offer to lend him one of mine. He’s not used to the sun.
I could tell him how interested I am in his project. That would surprise him. If I told him about my own plan to document the whole process and showed him the work I have done so far, perhaps he would let me bring a chair over and sit right there, where I could record smells, noises; perhaps he would answer a few questions about his motivations, and even listen to some constructive criticism.
On the other hand my interest could affect him badly. Perhaps I should let him carry on unhindered for a while, until we have a clearer picture of the road ahead.
12.30 p.m.
I am pleased to note that he has moved the string to shoulder height. But now he is going inside, probably for lunch.
2.45 p.m.
I don’t know whether I will be able to keep this up. He loves this wall, every brick of it, but he loves it so passionlessly, with a love so methodical and disciplined, that it might as well be loathing.
He has loved his wall up to shoulder height, brick by careful brick, and now he fetches a step-ladder and the wall goes higher. He checks each course with the spirit level, and then stands back to look at his work.
It is very boring to watch.
5.00 p.m.
He has finished work for the day. The wall is about two metres high. He has filled in the panel between the first two fence posts. Unless he speeds up considerably, I estimate that it will be several months before the wall is completed.
They are sitting now on the verandah. She came out a few minutes ago and put two beers on the table. Came down to inspect the wall. I couldn’t see her response, because she looked at it from the inside, as if that was the more important side. But she seemed to say something to him, because he spoke and listened and then smiled. Then she went back to the verandah and sat in the other chair. They raised their glasses to one another and I raised mine too and clinked it against the window-pane.
2 June
It is Sunday evening. He has finished another panel. This morning he uprooted the second fence post and strung the marker between the wall and the third post.
I think that I have caught up with him only to become bored.
He is a machine. His hands repeat themselves – brick after brick after brick they open and shut like pliers. His flabby muscles contract and relax in a predictable rhythm.
I think I dislike him. Why must he weigh each brick and toss it over in his hand? Why must he tap each brick with the handle of the trowel, twice on one side, three times on the other, and once solidly in the middle, before he is satisfied? The man has no imagination. I can see already that his wall will be just another wall. An ordinary coincidence of bricks and mortar, presentably imperfect. It won’t fall down, but then it won’t fly either. He’ll probably put plaster over his careful bricks and paint it green and people will think it was bought in a shop.
29 June
Today the wall finally passed the halfway mark. For the first time I can no longer see them as they drink their customary beer. I have resolved to speak to them before they disappear entirely.
30 June
I am writing this from the Cafe Zurich. I simply had to get out. I had to get away from them. I have delayed recording the events of yesterday evening because I needed time to calm down. I was so angry – and it will become clear that I had every reason to be – that I was sure my observations would seem spiteful and unfair.
But I think that I now have sufficient emotional distance from the incident to put it down objectively, as it happened.
During the course of yesterday afternoon, watching another panel of bricks edging up into the air, obscuring the house, I had become worried about the Groenewalds. More specifically, I had become worried about our relationship. There they were, celebrating the crossing of the halfway line, but hidden behind their wall. Here I was, celebrating the same occasion, but hidden behind my curtain. And just fifty metres or so separating us.
I began to regret my reticence. They were nice people, I knew. He was solid and reliable and purposeful. She was quiet and sweet and sensitive. They were my kind of people. If only I had broken the ice earlier. Now there was so much ground to be made up. Yet, at the same time, even though they were unaware of it, we had so much in common. The wall. They knew it from one side, I knew it from the other. I began to see it not so much as a barrier between us, but as a meeting-point. It was the thin line between pieces in a puzzle, the frontier on which both pieces become intelligible. Or perhaps it was like those optical puzzles in which you see the profile of a beautiful young woman or an old hag, but never both at the same time. I tossed these analogies around in my head, hoping to arrive at one I could share with them, an opening line I could call to them as I emerged from around the wall and took my first real steps into their lives. Eventually I decided to take a cup instead and ask for some
sugar.
They were on the verandah, as I thought, drinking beer. They looked up as I crossed the lawn, suspiciously perhaps, although I couldn’t see their expressions clearly in the blue gleam that the TV set in the lounge threw on them.
“Good evening Mr Groenewald, Mrs Groenewald,” I called, approaching them at a pace I thought they would appreciate, neither too fast nor too slow. “I wonder if you could help me?”
He rose from his chair, put the beer on the table, and took one step to the edge of the verandah. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.
I stopped just below him but I spoke to her. “I’m making a trifle and, you know how it is, I’ve run out of sugar for the custard. Could you spare me a bit, just until tomorrow?”
She rose quickly, took the cup from my hand, and went into the house. I took a few steps after her, drawn by the flickering blue of her retreating back, but he stepped towards the door, as if to block my path.
I was disappointed. I had hoped to gain access to the house, to measure their space against my imaginings. I heard the familiar fanfare announcing the six o’clock news. If only he would invite me in to watch the news with them: that would give us many opportunities to discuss the state of the country, the newest trouble spots, local and abroad, and get to know one another.
But he made no move. I realized quickly that the more important opportunity was right in my hands – to discuss the wall with its maker. She, after all, had as little to do with the wall as a trowel or a piece of string. It was just as well she had left us alone.
I turned slightly, so that my pose suggested that I was watching the wall.
“I’ve been following your progress with interest,” I said. “Perhaps you have seen me? I live right across from you.”
“No,” he said.
“It’s a fine wall,” I went on undaunted. After all, hadn’t they been invisible to me for months, even years (I couldn’t remember whether they had moved in before or after me). “A very fine wall indeed. A little high perhaps. A little forbidding.”
“I would make it higher,” he said, “but there are municipal regulations.”
I began to feel uneasy. He hadn’t invited me to sit, so I perched on the edge of the verandah.
“Have you built a wall before?” I asked.
“Many times,” he said. “More times than I care to remember.”
That threw me. I was going to say that he was doing a good job, for a first attempt. But perhaps I would never have reached that line anyway, for it struck me then, with a sense of loss, that I couldn’t see my house at all from this side. It had vanished completely. The sky above the wall was a blank, moronic space, as high as the stars. There was nothing in it that would provide comfort to a human heart, that would fill a human eye. The world beyond the wall was empty: there was not even a world there. Perhaps my house would be visible from the verandah? I stood, hoping to find a way up. But he had moved, while I was musing, to the top of the steps, and was looking back over his shoulder through the open window at the flickering television screen. The curtains were open. You could see right in. I moved towards the steps.
Just then she came out with the cup of sugar. She handed it down to me. It was very full and a few grains spilled onto my fingers. “I’ll replace it tomorrow. Thank you,” I said.
“Please don’t bother,” she replied.
I had to leave. The lawn seemed vast. I crossed towards the hard edge of the wall, behind which the world was slowly materializing again. I had an extraordinary sense as I walked, somewhat stiffly, with the sugar trickling onto my fingers, that no eyes were on me. No one was watching me. I wanted to look back, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t confirm such an obvious insult.
* * *
—
I was mad as hell. I was in my lounge, where everything was still the same. I was mad as could be. I smashed up a chair. Still the rage wouldn’t leave me. I smashed up a table. Then I started to feel better, pacing around among the splinters with a bottle of Scotch in my hand. Who the hell did they think they were, treating me like a dog? Who the fuck were they anyway? Lunatics, blind people, fat slobs, smug shithouses.
I should have gone right into their house and smashed up a few things. That would have been perfect, with the news in the background. I would have shown them unrest and rioting and burning, in three dimensions. I would have given them wanton destruction of private property. I would have given them hell in the eye-level oven, and stonings with the bric-a-brac from the room divider. And then I would have left them uneasy calm after yesterday’s violence.
But was it all worth it?
I sat down in the surviving chair and thought about it more carefully. They were such perverse people. What were they planning to do behind that ridiculous wall? Volkspele? Nude braaivleises? Secret nocturnal rituals accessible only to people in helicopters?
Fuck them. I had to tidy up.
17 August
The wall is almost finished.
I have not been thinking about it much. Of course, since the unfortunate incident with the sugar I’ve had to avoid them, to spare us all embarrassment. I have been going to work early and coming in late – and always careful to avert my gaze. Yet, out of the corner of my eye, as it were, I’ve watched the wall edge malevolently towards the end of the trench. There is not much space left for it to cross: scarcely a metre. That will be done next weekend and the betrayal will be complete.
I am no longer interested in them. They have blurred into the background out of which they came. But, for the sake of symmetry, I have decided to record the end of it all, the laying of the final brick. It seems necessary. Then I can be done with this journal.
24 August
He is almost finished. He is building the last panel from the garden side. I have watched him slowly obliterated by his wall. Now all I can see is a pair of hands reaching up.
I imagine that she is there with him, holding a bottle of champagne. No doubt I will see the cork flying up to the stars.
But is there cause for celebration? No. Is there reason for building when things are falling down? No. Is there reason for drinking beer when people are starving? Probably not. Do two people and a bottle of champagne make sense when citizens are pitched against soldiers, when stones are thrown at tanks? Does private joy make sense in the face of public suffering?
There he begins the last course of bricks. How bored I am with the tired repetition of gesture. How bored I am with the familiar shapes of words. How bored I am with this journal. It’s just a wall. That must be clear by now. Even a child could see it. And the words that go into it like bricks are as bland and heavy and worn as the metaphor itself.
He lays the last brick. But I have the last word.
THE END
Later that same evening:
I am writing simply because I cannot sleep. And the reason I cannot sleep is that those bastards across the road are having a party. A wall-warming, I suppose. The music is too loud. And the buzzing of voices! They have strung coloured lights in the trees. Candles are burning in paper bags on top of the wall. I would phone the police, but I have already smashed the telephone.
I would gather to me, if I could, the homeless and the hungry, the persecuted, the pursued, the forgotten, those without friends and neighbours, to march around the wall. We would be blowing paper trumpets left over from office parties, and banging on cake tins, and raising up a noise to wake the dead and bring the wall tumbling down.
8 September
Today there was something new attached to the wall: a FOR SALE notice.
17 September
Today a SOLD notice.
2 November
Today they left.
I went across and stood on the pavement to watch their household effects being put into the truck. It is all as I expected: the knotty pine, the wicker, the velveteen, the china, t
he cotton print, the plastic, the glass, the stainless-steel, the beaten copper.
I stood right next to the truck with my hands on my hips. I dared them to meet my eye but they seemed not to notice me, or not to care. They put a few boxes on the back seat of the car and they followed the pantechnicon. I watched until they disappeared.
The wall looked ashamed of itself.
I went back home.
9 November
The new people have moved in. They are simply people carrying boxes and banging doors. Good.
Today the municipality pruned all the trees in our suburb. The sky has opened up. The wall turns its back on the street. It is a beautiful sunny day. I must get out.
And I must remember to take a stroll past the wall some time and see if I can spot my brick.
The Box
“There are forces in the outside world, and here within our borders,” said the Prime Minister, fixing Quentin with an accusing stare, “who seek to overthrow my government by violent means. They wish to create the impression that we are weak, that we will capitulate. They even go so far as to suggest that the country is in a state of civil war. I say to these cowards – for that is what they are – that they will have to face up to reality. And the reality is that every act of cowardly violence will harden our resolve. The reality is that my government is committed to the maintenance of law and order.”
Quentin put down the bottle of Southern Comfort and went to stand in front of the television set. “He’s out of his mind,” he said sadly. “That is the horrible truth. He’s mad as a hatter.”
The Prime Minister’s face filled the screen. It looked as soft and pliable as a lump of clay.
Flashback Hotel Page 4
