Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

‘How ya doin’?’ said Tone.

‘How am I doing? If I was the frivolous sort, my managerial friend, I should affix a sign asking that question to the seat of my pants. And a telephone number.’ Then, resorting to sign language, tapping my larynx with the edge of my hand, ‘I’m up to here.’ Perhaps it wasn’t a lump after all, but a bolus of change, half-digested, sour, swimming in bile, bumping against my epiglottis. My little tongue.

‘I know what you mean,’ said Tone. ‘I’m also gatvol. But you’ve got to take the punch. Have a drink, man, it’ll make you feel better.’

Everything will stay the same. Everything will change. A football match was on one screen, and Joseph Slovo, the communist kingpin, on the other. Day or night, rain or shine, in some corner of a foreign field, someone was playing football. While in Kempton Park, at the World Trade Centre, they were levelling the playing fields and shifting the goalposts. As if the negoti-haters, as you-know-who used to call them, were nothing but glorified groundsmen.

My mouth was still burning, but my throat was dry. Perhaps I needed a drop of the damp after all. Moçes was lurking behind a potted palm, its fronds stirring gently in a breeze off the Bay of Alibia, dallying with some young woman, didn’t look like kitchen staff, too dolled up, lips as red as paint. Helen of Troyeville, or some Carmen from the Quirinale, the sort Herr Toppelmann came along with. Moçes was so enamoured of her, I practically had to stand on my chair to attract his attention. I started the lecture on service, abridged, but I really didn’t have the energy, and he looked so down in the mouth, I felt it necessary to be conciliatory.

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘She’s my nephew.’

‘Ha! You mean she’s your niece.’ Needs the talk on customer relations.

‘No, sir. She’s my nephew.’

‘Is she your brother’s daughter? Yes? Then she’s your niece .’

Looks baffled. Then deliberately: ‘She’s my nephew.’

For crying in a bucket. Whiskey, pronto. The nephew stilted out in her high heels.

Errol, on his way to the Gentlemen’s room in a hurry: ‘Hoezit bra. Checking out the chocolates?’

I wouldn’t eat what Tone calls a pastry if he gave them away. As for ‘bra’, I had voiced my objection to the term repeatedly, which only made them use it more.

I took out my files, but before I could set to work, Wessels wobbled in and started waving Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak under my nose. ‘I’ve nearly got everyone,’ he smirked, as if the party were no more than a confidence trick, and ran a smoke-stained forefinger down a row of ticks. ‘Even Merlé, see? Still dossing out in Illovo with her daughter, who might be able to bring her. No promises at this stage. Mevrou Bonsma’s still at the Dorchester, but it’s becoming a bit rough. She’s got a school now. Only ones I can’t find is Everistus, who’s gone off to his rondavel in the hills for a week or so. Someone died. But I left a message. You know he’s grafting at Bradlows. And Spilkin and Pardner, natch, who’s back in Joeys but lying low.’

Lying low? Like Apaches. Apache here, Apache there (punchlines, Wessels). Something to do with beards.

‘What you got there? Looks familiar.’

I closed the file on his finger. He knew exactly what it was, but he was the last person I felt like discussing it with. It was a selection from the fardel of notes and jottings and clippings and scribbled-upon typescripts that represented the raw material of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. This unfinished business had chafed at my peace of mind for too long. I had made a bargain with myself: if I finished ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before the end of the month, I would take it with me to the Goodbye Bash and present it to the sceptics — I might even make photostatic copies, one for each to bear away as a souvenir. If not, I would stay home, and a plague on all their townhouses!

*

13 December 1993

Dear Sir,

An able-bodied man might wear a T-shirt, though why he would choose to, when proper shirts with buttons and collars are freely available, is a mystery to me.

But what manner of monster would fit into a ‘t-shirt’ of the style advertised in your newspaper on 11 December (Hyperama Festive Season Bonanza)? A one-armed bandit, I suppose, some twisted wreck of a human being, the sort who would live in an a-frame house made entirely of i-beams …

Would the sub-editors care to explain?

Yours faithfully, etcetera

*

In the first weeks of my acquaintance with Spilkin, I always arrived at the Café Europa to find him already there, seated at one of the little tables against the wall. And I always sat down at the other, with the big round one in between, as if each encounter was the first between people who had never met before. We seemed to be participating in the primary activity that the café as a social institution made possible: being on one’s own in the company of congenial strangers. Another stranger, looking on, might have thought that our conversation had a cultured quality about it as well, carried on at intervals from a seemly distance while we each went about our own business, revolving around niceties of expression and quibbles of logic, anagrammatical teasers, aqueous humours, questions of craft, specifications of lenses and lemmata, headwords, grades of graphite, presbyopia and strabismus, occasionally politics — this was before change beset us and made the subject so tiresome. I say, Tearle, you don’t happen to have a pen-wiper handy? Why not use a serviette, Spilkin? Capital idea. Spilkin this and Tearle that. It all helped to cultivate a sort of formal bonhomie between us, the polite and companionable ease that someone who had never been in an officers’ mess might expect to enjoy there.

But happening to arrive one day at the same time, we fell into conversation on the escalator, and happy as I was with our arrangement, it seemed absurd to part and sit at separate tables. We should sit at the round table, obviously, we should meet one another halfway; but we both hesitated, with our hands on the backs of our chairs.

‘Alfresco, perhaps?’ Spilkin said, nodding towards the balcony.

‘“Fresco” is a relative term, Spilkin.’ He brought out a slightly haughty tone in me, which I was rather pleased about. ‘Sit out there and you’ll be breathing exhaust fumes in the rush hour, which is about to start. Every twenty minutes or so, the upper deck of the Braamfontein bus will slide into view and the passengers will gaze at you through the railings as if you’re a beast in a cage. Say a chimpanzee from Sierra Leone in the Jardin des Plantes.’ This flourish was prompted by the little Eiffels (I have never been abroad).

I could see he was impressed, but he continued to gaze around the room as if a better option might suggest itself. I had other bolts in my quiver — the wind will scatter my papers to the four corners of the block, the sun will blister my pate, the occupants of the flats above will drop the ash of their cigarettes upon me — but I aimed at a more subtle target in the gloomier depths of the room: ‘Over there?’

He voiced the obvious objection: ‘Too close to the W[ater] C[loset].’

The spot where we already found ourselves now became defined as a reasonable compromise between two unsuitable extremes, and by common consent, we sat down at the round table (it was No. 2) facing one another, with Alibia to my right and his left. A sudden chill shook me, as if a seaward breeze had lifted a handful of pins and needles off the white beach in front of the casino and flung them in my face. He opened the Tonight! section to the crossword and folded it in half with a casual flick, which I had to interpret as a gesture of gratitude. I opened my briefcase — only a fool or a drug dealer would carry a briefcase through the streets of Hillbrow today, but it was a common enough occurrence then — and unpacked my equipment, laying each piece in its position, which was as rigidly preordained as a place-setting: notebook, pencil (Faber-Castell 2B), sharpener, eraser, dictionary ( Concise Oxford , fourth edition, opere citato , under the worthy editorship of Henry and Frank Fowler, faithfully revised by a certain McIntosh, proofreaders inexplicably unacknowledged, as usual), lever-arch research file, punch, scissors, Sellotape, index cards.