Flashback Hotel. Early Stories, by Ivan Vladislavic

Flashback Hotel. Early Stories, by Ivan Vladislavic. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2010. ISBN 9781415201077 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0107-7

From Flashback Hotel, Early Stories by Ivan Vladislavic, this is an excerpt from The Day They Killed the Prime Minister.

Ivan Vladislavić  

They killed the Prime Minister during the winter. I was ten years old. That year my parents and I moved to a house in a new suburb. Granny moved with us. Grandfather said he was too old to move, so he stayed behind in the old house. He gave us a post box and two plastic numbers for the gate, and wished us everything of the best in our new home. It was an ordinary place. Three bedrooms, a lounge, a dining-room. No gnomes. No crazy paving. A reasonable path of solid cement from the front gate to the verandah steps. Laying the path was the first major task my father and I undertook. When we moved in, the house still smelt of raw wood, fresh paint, putty. There was much to be done: the floors would have to be sealed, the fingerprints cleaned off the window-panes, splatters of paint scraped off the tiles in the bathroom and the kitchen. The garden was veld. The builders had simply fenced off a rectangle and cleared a patch big enough to put the house down on. The way to get the grass out is to attack the roots. You can't skoffel with a spade, it grows back. You have to work a fork in around each tuft, loosen the earth, stick a hose-pipe in among the roots, turn it on full-blast, blow the soil away. Then you pull on the grass until it comes out, roots and all, like a plug. Knock out the remaining soil against the ground, pile all the grass in the wheelbarrow, push it around to the compost heap at the back. That's what my father and I were doing on the day they killed the Prime Minister. I was loosening the soil and my father was pulling the grass out. He was wearing his old army uniform, as he always did when we waged war against the garden. Granny was in her rocker on the front verandah, crocheting one of an endless pile of woollen squares which would eventually be herded together into a lopsided blanket. She was listening to the radio, silently, through a small earphone. I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of grass around to the back. As I passed Granny, the rocker lost momentum, stopped. A brightly coloured square dropped to the floor. She hefted her large body out of the chair and stood swaying solemnly, still joined to the radio by the coil of flex. Then she bellowed: The Prime Minister is dead! Some madman chopped him up with a panga!' I carried that thought with me, like a peach pip in my cheek, as I pushed the wheelbarrow round to the back and tipped the grass into the hole my father and I had dug the weekend before. I see now that the death of a Prime Minister has many consequences. When my grandfather died he left us a suitcase. There was something in it for each of us. My father got a suit that was too big for him, and a pair of pruning-shears. My mother got some newspaper clippings and some photographs, old and cracked like leather. I got a pair of lucky nail-clippers given to my grandfather by an Italian prisoner of war. When the Prime Minister died he left us a compost heap, on which practically anything would grow. [...]

This is an excerpt from Flashback Hotel. Early Stories, by Ivan Vladislavic.

Title: Flashback Hotel
Subtitle: Early Stories
Author: Ivan Vladislavic
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2010
ISBN 9781415201077 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0107-7
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 285 pages