The Exploded View Read online

  Copyright © Ivan Vladislavić, 2004

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published by Random House (Pty) Ltd., 2004

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Exploded View / Ivan Vladislavić.

  LCCN 2016036829 | ISBN 9780914671688 (paperback)

  Ebook ISBN 9780914671695

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  The publication of The Exploded View was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  v4.1

  a

  For Joachim Schönfeldt

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Villa Toscana

  Afritude Sauce

  Curiouser

  Crocodile Lodge

  VILLA TOSCANA

  Villa Toscana lies on a sloping ridge beside the freeway, a little prefabricated Italy in the veld, resting on a firebreak of red earth like a toy town on a picnic blanket. It makes everything around – the corrugated-iron roofs of the old farmhouses on the neighbouring plots, the doddering windmills, the bluegums – look out of place.

  Passing by on the N3, Budlender fancied that he could see Iris at one of the windows in Villa Toscana, watching for him. This was his fifth trip to Tuscany. It turned out to be the last, and so brief it was not even filed away under its own name.

  He took the Marlboro Road off-ramp. As he waited at the robot, a vendor thrust a bird into the car, some sort of sock puppet with a stiff comb and a scarlet tongue flickering in its throat. Through the stretchy fabric he saw the man’s fist flexing to make the tongue pop. Perhaps it was a snake? He wound up the window and glared at the curio-sellers and their wares, ranged on the verges and traffic islands: a herd of wooden giraffes as tall as men, drums and masks, beaded lapel badges promoting Aids awareness and the national flag, fruitbowls and tie-racks and candelabra made of twisted wire. Arts and crafts. Junk. Every street corner in Johannesburg was turning into a flea market. Informal sector employment (as a percentage of the total): 30 per cent. More?

  A man holding a hand-lettered sign asking for money or food came closer between the two lanes of cars, moving from window to window and tapdancing for each driver in turn. The smile on his face flared and faded. He was like a toy you could switch off with a shake of your head. At the bottom of the sign was a message: Please drive carefully.

  Budlender tilted his head so that the crack in his windscreen, a sunburst of the kind made by a bullet, centred on the vendor’s body and broke him into pieces.

  Was he a Nigerian? It was time to learn the signs. A friend of his at the Bank had given him a crash course in ethnography one evening after work, over a pint at the Baron and Farrier on the Old Joburg Road. He and Warren had sat in a booth, speaking softly, as if the topic were shameful, and then laughing raucously when they realized what they were doing. ‘Small ears?’ ‘That’s what I said. Little ears, flat against the skull and delicate, like a hamster.’ And the point of the exercise? Since he had been made aware of the characteristics – a particular curl to the hair or shade to the skin, the angle of a cheekbone or jawline, the ridge of a lip, the slant of an eye, the size of an ear – it seemed to him that there were Nigerians everywhere. He had started to see Mozambicans too, and Somalis. It was the opposite of the old stereotype: they all looked different to him. Foreigners on every side. Could the aliens have outstripped the indigenes? Was it possible? There were no reliable statistics.

  At this point in his career, Budlender had been obliged to combine a passion for statistics, if one could call it that, with a professional interest in immigration. Seconded from the Development Bank by Statistical Services, he was helping to redraft the questionnaires for the national census – those used in the census of 1996, the first non-racial headcount in the country’s history, had flummoxed half the population. To make sure that the new versions spoke to everyone, as the brief put it, the drafters had engaged a group of respondents, people with diverse backgrounds (they tried to avoid the old categories of ‘race’ and ‘population group’) and in every income bracket (they steered clear, too, of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’). For months now, he had been shuttling between the Documents Committee and his share of the sample, finetuning questions, ferrying revised drafts to and fro. Driving, always driving.

  It was the questionnaire that had brought him to Tuscany in the first place.

  The boundaries of Johannesburg are drifting away, sliding over pristine ridges and valleys, lodging in tenuous places, slipping again. At its edges, where the city fades momentarily into the veld, unimaginable new atmospheres evolve. A strange sensation had come over him when he first drew up at the gates of Villa Toscana, a dreamlike blend of familiarity and displacement.

  Villa Toscana.

  Everything would be filed later. For now, he was like a man in a film who has lost his memory and returns by chance to a well-loved place. Some significant fact, dropped like a matchstick in the back of his mind, kept sputtering, threatening to ignite.

  The architect had given the entrance the medieval treatment. Railway sleepers beneath the wheels of the car made the driveway rumble like a drawbridge, the wooden gates were heavy and dark, and studded with bolts and hinges, there were iron grilles in drystone walls. A security man gazed at him through an embrasure in a fortified guardhouse, and then, satisfied that he posed no immediate threat, stepped out with a clipboard.

  Budlender opened his diary on the passenger seat to check the name of the respondent.

  ‘What number is Miss Iris du Plooy?’

  ‘Unit 24.’

  There was a pen tied to the clipboard with a length of string, and on the end of it was a little graven image. He twirled the pen to examine it from all sides. A three-headed animal with a shock of orange hair on the crown of its head, six floppy ears and three pink noses. Canine. The noses were erasers.

  He filled in the details. Name: Iris du Plooy. These pebbly syllables felt familiar in his mouth, smooth and salty against his palate. Unit: 24. Why did they call them ‘units’? Name of company? He wrote Nitpickers. Reason for visit: Nits to pick. A little game he played with the security industry. How outrageous would you have to be before someone called your bluff?

  The guard took the clipboard and went around to the back of the car to check the numberplate. In the rearview mirror, Budlender saw him scratching the side of his head with the many-headed dog and writing laboriously. Perhaps he had noticed the joke. He hitched up his trousers and came back to the window.

  ‘Sorry sir, you’ve got the wrong number.’ As if they were speaking on the telephone.

  Damn. The number had been changed to the new provincial system when the car was licensed a few weeks back. Gauteng Province. Without thinking, he had filled in the old number with its concluding T, claiming allegiance to the vanished Transvaal.

  ‘I forgot. I changed to GP plates just last week.’

  ‘It is a wrong number.’

  Was he expected to recite the new one? For a moment, he couldn’t remember what it was. Then he saw that the guard had already written it down in the column on the right, under the heading ‘Incidents’.

  Perilous times we’re living in, he thought. A
little accident, a slip of the pen, can turn into an incident before you know it. Or is it the other way round? Isn’t it true that 42 per cent of all road fatalities are pedestrians? That 67 per cent of all household accidents occur in the kitchen? That 83 per cent of all infant mortalities could be prevented if the mothers would follow the basic rules of hygiene?

  ‘You cannot come in.’

  The guard seemed almost rueful. Yet there was clearly no point in arguing.

  ‘Could you call Miss du Plooy for me?’

  ‘Yes sir.’ He withdrew into the hut.

  Repelled at the ramparts. ‘Villa Toscana’ was printed on a salmon-coloured wall to the left. Below each wrought-iron letter was a streak of rust like dried blood, as if a host of housebreakers had impaled themselves on the name. Would the defenders of this city-state pour down boiling oil if he ventured too close? He got out of the car and leaned against the fender. The fortress-like atmosphere of the place dissipated. The tones and textures were passable, clumpy wooden beams, pastel plaster, flaking artfully, yellow stone. Prince Valiant on the Continent. But the scales were all wrong. Things were either too big or too small. In the door of the guardhouse was a keyhole so enormous he could have put his fist through it, and just below it the brass disc of a conventional and presumably functional Yale lock. He wondered whether the beams jutting from the stone really extended through the walls. They had probably been screwed on afterwards. There was probably mortar in the ‘drystone’ walls.

  Absent-mindedly, he took a calculator out of his pocket, turned it over in his fingers, put it away again.

  When Iris du Plooy finally appeared, magically, through an entrance concealed by an angle of the wall, he deduced from her damp hair that she had been in the shower. They spoke briefly. There was not much to discuss, as she had already been informed by mail what was required of her. He handed her the envelope containing the draft questionnaire and left.

  Afterwards, when it came to ordering the facts of this experience under the heading Villa Toscana, he tried to remember his first impressions of her. They were not features so much as sensations or moods, drifting through him lightly, like steam. Contradictory qualities, softness and angularity, dark italic curls on her temples, the shadowed edge of a wall, her coming and going through the bright bars of sunlight cast down by a pergola that a scrawny bougainvillea had yet to cover. And, as he drove away, the chemical scent of her shampoo.

  He had been drawn to a woman before by the way she took hold of the world, the way she lifted things and put them down again, a telephone receiver or a magazine, the way she turned a key in a lock or clicked the nib of a ballpoint in and out. Iris had strange hands, too large and bony to be beautiful, he would have thought, but he was shaken by them. He felt them taking hold of him, brushing his surfaces roughly, picking him up, dropping him.

  His second visit to Tuscany was labelled: Hands.

  He had come to discuss her responses to the census questionnaire. This time the guard let him in at once. To his surprise, the huge wooden gates did not open inwards; instead the gate – for it proved to be in one piece – rumbled away into a slot in the stone, hinges and all, at the press of a button. Signposts of ceramic tile pointed the way to Unit 24. He went along the Via Veneto, he crossed a traffic circle called the Piazza de Siena, he passed the turnoff to Monte Aperto. Unit 17, Unit 21, Unit 24. She was waiting for him outside at the foot of a steep and narrow staircase, and when he had parked the car he followed her up the steps to her apartment. There were arches to either side with signs pointing to Units 23 and 25, there were lanterns made of black iron and blistered yellow glass, and frivolous crowds of poppies in the window boxes. In the glass of the kitchen window he saw a stained-glass motif of a sunflower, and behind it on the sill above the kitchen sink, like an improbably bright and solid echo, another sunflower, which might be real or made of silk or paper, in a blue vase.

  She seated him in the lounge and went to make coffee. The rooms in Villa Toscana were small, square and white. The furniture, sparse and spindly though it was, seemed too large. He had the unsettling impression that he had strayed onto a page in a book, one of those picture books that were more interesting to adults than the children they had apparently been written for. He had lost all sense of proportion. He stood up, half expecting that he would have to stoop, and raised his hand above his head, measuring the distance between his outstretched fingertips and the ceiling. At least a metre. Probably, there were municipal regulations. Why did it seem so low?

  She brought the coffee in white mugs with blue stripes and sat beside him on the white sofa. He was about to ask her about herself, to begin making conversation, but she said something about getting down to business and shifted her mug to the far corner of the coffee table. He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. Opening the questionnaire on the glass table-top and smoothing it flat with her palm, she pushed it towards him. The fingers of her right hand were spread to hold the paper flat. With the middle finger of her left hand – it struck him that she did not use her index finger – she traced along a printed line.

  ‘Mr Budlender…’

  ‘Please call me Les.’

  ‘Les. Most of the first page is fine. Name, address, postal code, it’s all quite clear. But this thing about the babies born before midnight and people who die after midnight?’

  Her hands were large and long, almost rawboned, her fingernails broad and flat, and slightly hooked at the ends. They should be painted, he thought. Why doesn’t she paint them? He was acutely aware of their bony substance. They reminded him of the seaside, the translucent remains of pallid creatures, as finely moulded as plastic.

  ‘Say I’m sleeping over at my sister’s place.’

  He focused on the questionnaire. ‘If you’re coming back the next morning…It says so somewhere. “Members of the household who are absent overnight” blah blah.’

  ‘It’s not very clear.’

  Her little finger, tilted inward so that its tip did not rest on the paper, seemed to be curling away from the sharp edge of the page.

  ‘This is the crucial bit. “Census records the situation as at midnight between 9 and 10 October as the reference point.” ’

  She had written in the margin in a soft, rounded hand that was at odds with her angular presence. Her knee was a hand’s breadth away from his own.

  When he left, he noticed the sunflower again through the kitchen door. He imagined a conversation, a bright exchange, in which he made a comment about the sunflower and she invited him to rub one of its petals between thumb and forefinger to prove that it was real, or perhaps false, and then they leaned against the melamine cabinets, chatting easily, laughing.

  He took the N1 towards Pretoria and went off at the Star Stop Egoli. The restaurant, where he had paused several times recently to plan his routes and kill an hour or two, made a surprisingly good cup of coffee. Unlike Iris, most of the people in his sample worked during the day and could only see him after hours. Next on the list was Johnny Constantinou of Olifantsfontein, who would only be home at five.

  The Star Stop restaurant straddled the freeway. He found a table at the window, facing south, where he could see the cars rushing towards him. He took the newspaper and the Witwatersrand Map Studio out of his briefcase and opened them on the table-top, but these were just props, a focus for the eye in case some stranger made him self-conscious by sitting opposite. After a glance at the headlines, he put the paper aside. He was in the mood for musing. He shifted his chair and looked straight into the traffic.

  It was a perch made for a statistician: he was suspended above a great demographic flow, like a boy on a bridge dangling a hook and line, waiting for the rush hour to thicken. His eye took in the stream of traffic, separated it out into its parts, dwelling on sizes and shapes and shades. Colours washed through the motor vehicle industry, changing with the seasons as surely as the leaves, and the ripples still floated on the surface of this stream. He counted black cars for a
minute, converted the sum into an hourly rate. He counted women drivers, did the conversion. Cars for men, cars for women. Rivers of drivers. He stopped counting and let his eye dance across the trends: roof racks (for luggage, bicycles, kayaks), bull bars, trailers, spoilers, roll bars, bakkies, 4×4s. Entire lifestyles, dissolved in the flow like some troubling additive, like statistical fluoride, became perceptible to his trained eye. Company cars, family cars, new cars, old cars. People were always saying: ‘You hardly ever see an old car on the roads in Joburg. Look around you at any intersection, it’s nothing but Mercs and BMs. Where do they get the money?’ Then again, people were always saying: ‘Every second car in Joburg is falling apart, and going like a bat out of hell regardless. It’s no wonder the accident rate is sky-high.’ Were the roads full of new cars or old cars? There was a lesson in this, which only a statistician seemed capable of learning: as soon as you took account of what people were saying, you lost track of what was actually happening. Just as he lost track now, wilfully, allowing the individual vehicles to dissolve back into a stream of movement, while his thoughts drifted to the last quarter’s sales in the motor industry, greenhouse emissions, following-distances, fatalities. Fully nine tenths of the cars involved in rear-end collisions were ignoring the recommended following-distance. Axiomatic: had they been heeding the distance, they would not have had the accident. What is it with people? They treat the rules of the road as suggestions whose limits are there to be tested. They gamble with their lives. Do those arrows painted on the tar make any difference? Little patches of arrows on the road surface and a sign on the verge: Always see three arrows. An experiment. Is someone monitoring the results? Sniffing out the trends? How does the accident rate with arrows compare to the accident rate without? If it works, they should be painting them in other places. Of course, if they splash too many of them around, people will grow accustomed to them, just as they grow accustomed to the speed-limit markers, and they’ll lose their efficacy. A balance must be struck.