Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Spilkin had Mevrouw Bonsma play the theme from The Longest Day in my honour.

*

The ‘spilkin’: a crucial spillikin, in a game of that name, the retrieval of which renders a whole nest of others more immediately accessible.

By analogy: the key word in a crossword puzzle, whose vowels and consonants provide the newels and rails for whole flights of solutions.

And hence: a crucial aspect of any problem.

*

Passing down Kotze Street on my way to the Café, I found Dumbo at the end of his tether again, still minus an ear. I’d have thought Management would be anxious to restore their corpulent corporate image to its proper state. Surely it would be bad for business having this elephantine amputee loitering on the doorstep? I almost went in to put my case, but that Rosa was on duty, moustachioed and prickly, and no doubt itching to cross my palm with another bottle of plonk.

Hypermeat had a special on half a lambkin. Heads or tails? Baa or Baa? A black sheep of the two-legged variety pressed a handbill on me: Hillbrow Hyperpawn was buying old coins, jewellery, watches. Any old iron? Endless irony. The shop was in Kapteijn Street, with piles of cheap loot in its dusty window. I had made a few purchases there myself, years back, when it was still Bernstein’s Second Time Lucky. Slightly shop-soiled goods and antiques, direct from the factory to the public.

Another new butchery: Hack’s Meat Superette. Something new every week. Men’s outfitters folding up and chicken grillers hatching. Why this obsession with poultry? Was it a tribal thing? A cook in a tissue-paper toque and a grease-proof inquisitor’s gown flicked a cigarette butt into my path, and rows of skewered carcases, cranked round by a machine behind fat-spattered glass, applauded with flippery wings. And what were these? Charred bits and pieces, cartilaginous lumps, new species of offal. There were new varieties of dirt on the pavements too. Sticky black scabs on the cement flags, blotches, bumps, nodules that cleaved to the soles of my brogues. More of them all the time, like some skin disease. What is this stuff? Where on earth is it coming from? You never saw it falling from the sky or spilt by a human hand. It seemed to be striking through from beneath, like some subcutaneous festering. A less fastidious man than myself, a man more accustomed to taking specimens, an indigent geologist, say, a botanist, a pathologist, might have made a study of it to determine its origins. Animal or vegetable? Outside the Pink Cadillac, which only opened its doors after dark, a heap of children, messily corked, theatrically ragged, like urchin extras from a production of Oliver , slept in black and white. A photograph from the archive of atrocities: a heap of corpses, with their big feet jutting out of blackened clothing, filthy as chimney sweeps. Perhaps they were pavement sweeps, responsible for spreading the dirt under the pretext of mopping it up.

Two portraits of Steffi Graf, the ladies’ tennis champion, ringed round by garlands of last year’s Weinacht tinsel (or was it this year’s tinsel, ahead of its time?), presided over the Wurstbude. In the first, she was preparing to serve. She was improbably, impeccably muscled, undoubtedly well-fed, a living tribute to scientific nutrition. The fake coals in the grilling machine cast a healthy pink glow over her wintergreened calves. In the second picture, she was holding up a trophy, a silver platter ideal for a sucking-pig, on the centre court at Wimbledon.

Herr Toppelmann, Kurt, the proprietor, put my Bratwurst and two rolls on a plate, tonged out a goose-pimpled dill pickle, dabbed mustard and patted butter. Everyone else got a cardboard tray, but I had argued for the plate on medical grounds — my dysfunctional duodenum (entirely spurious, I might add) — and he’d conceded. I also got my sausage whole, rather than lopped into segments by the ingenious stainless-steel, counter-top guillotine, as the advertising to the trade might have put it. Most of the regulars went for the Currywurst, which meant that their sausage segments were smothered in tomato sauce and dusted with curry powder. They speared up the segments with two toothpicks, dispensed from a little drum like a schoolroom pencil sharpener. It could be done with one toothpick, to tell the truth, but those in the know found that two afforded a certain Germanic stability. I would have none of it. I told Herr Toppelmann I wanted a Bratwurst, whole, on a plate, and a knife and fork to eat it with, I don’t need my food cut up for me like a child. I had to drag in the duodenum again, and the high blood pressure, when in truth I have the constitution of a man half my age, because there were principles involved, of linguistics and cuisine. Currywurst? It was ersatz, a jerry-built portmanteau if ever I heard one. I had denounced it the very first time I came in here, this having been the express purpose of my visit, but he refused to remove it from the menu. I vowed never to eat one. For the same principled reason, I avoided the pickle-barrel tables on the pavement outside: they were tacky, in the senses popular on both sides of the Atlantic, they smacked of fast food, grubby little hands that might tug at one’s flannels and spoil one’s appetite. I stood at the counter instead, where I could listen to Herr Toppelmann conversing in German with regulars of that persuasion, or, when the place was empty, hold a brief conversation with him myself in English and watch the sausages squirming.

This afternoon the place was empty, so I told him the news: the Café Europa was closing down. He took it very well.

‘Also I,’ he said in his charming English, ‘am closing down.’

‘No.’

‘Ja. I go home to Germany.’

Typical. But I sympathized, too. ‘I can’t say I blame you. Who would want to live under a black government?’

‘No, no, that is most unfair, you do not understand. I go home because my father in Frankfurt is sick. In the kidney.’

‘Ah. A Frankfurter. I might have guessed.’

‘I am most happy to be governed by the black man. Black persons and I are coming along strongly together.’

Indeed. The scarlet women of the Quirinale Hotel. Ever willing to put a crease in the Senf, if not quite to cut it. I was in here, eating a sausage, when the Berlin Wall came down. What was it Herr Toppelmann had said then? Communism is kaput in Germany, but here is just starting, it will come very bad. (His English had improved over the years.) The forcemeat philosopher. A rush of irritation, as quick and queasying as a spurt of saliva in the mouth, as he jabbed my Bratwurst with a fork and it spewed grease onto the grille. Bloody Germans. From Germany out und so weiter . Hungarians, Italians, Scots. Immigrants. Foul-weather friends. Slobodan would be hurrying back to where he came from too, no doubt, Wessels would search for him in vain … although he was so much at home here, living off the fat of the land. I felt fat too, schmaltzy and bloated. Stuffed with change, like a piggy bank or a parking meter. The mustard got into my cold sore and burned. I left half the Bratwurst on the plate and crossed the street. The wurst is still to come, I thought, in my Toppelmann twang. Nein, nein, the wurst is behind us. The opposite pavement was crowded with curio-sellers and their wares, wooden animals and idols shamelessly displaying their private parts. I was tempted to march through these hordes like some maddened Gulliver, trampling them underfoot. I escalated, like tensions in the Middle East, like the incidence of armed robbery on the Reef, and issued into the Café where, for the first time in many a long month, my eye was caught by the silver trophy gathering dust among the bottles. I’d been meaning to take it down and give it a good going over with Brasso. The brave little figure, tiptoe on the summit, clad in nothing but a wisp of lacy tarnishing, brought a lump to my throat. The proofreader’s cup, the floating trophy for ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.