Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Oh my! He didn’t look one bit like a Myron.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma, ‘I’d prefer to be called Mevrouw Bonsma.’ And simpered hugely, showing a smear of lipstick on a crooked tooth, like blood drawn from her own lip. There was certainly some Dutch influence in her dentition.

Merle observed her down a turned-up nose. It would be hard and dry, that nose, pressing into one’s cheek. ‘My dear, I couldn’t. You’ve been Suzanna for far too long. It’s … set.’

Eveready was hovering. She ordered hot chocolate, although she’d been invited for tea. Then she swept her eyes over the room. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding out.’

Really. I wouldn’t put it that way.

‘What’s this?’ She fluttered a hand at the mural and looked at me.

‘It’s nowhere in particular. Or rather anywhere in general. It’s a composite.’ Not Erewhon, but Erewhyna. Alibia. Did the name come to me on the spur of the moment?

‘Looks French. I would say Nice. Met a Dr Plesance there once, on the promenade. A chessplayer, rheumatic, but very good-natured and fun to be with. Back in a tick. Just want to speak to that woman about Benny.’

‘I regret to inform you that her dear little dog,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma, ‘is unable to join us.’

‘Right of admission reserved,’ said Spilkin. ‘No quadrupeds allowed.’

Merle made for the counter, and soon Mrs Mavrokordatos was frothing a porringer with warm milk from the espresso machine. A momentary lapse of taste on her part, harbinger of a general collapse still shrouded in the mists of the future. ‘If she must cater for our four-legged friends,’ I said, ‘let them have separate crockery.’

‘I knew you’d get along famously,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma. ‘She’s good with words, like the two of you. She was a schoolteacher in her younger days, before her marriage. And at various other times, a librarian in the Reference Library and an office manager. She knows the Dewey Decimal System backwards.’

There is dew on the terraced lawns of the Hotel Grande, where Merle goes walking before dinner. It is the dew that makes her kick off her shoes and it is her bare feet and the wet hem of her gown that make her the talk of Alibia. When she catches a chill, Dr Plesance has remedies, all of which he has tried out on himself while performing voluntary service during various epidemics. So the ambulance returns empty to the hospital on the hill and Merle is carried on a chaise into the doctor’s parlour.

Merle came back. ‘That woman has the most extraordinary name.’

‘Mavrokordatos,’ said Spilkin.

‘Large-hearted,’ I said. ‘From the Greek makros , long, large, and the Latin cordis , heart.’

She appraised me with a quirk of a smile around her mouth.

‘Only joking,’ I added, just to be on the safe side.

Then she opened a handbag as large and black as a doctor’s, fished out a tube of artificial sweeteners and spilled half a dozen into her mug. She put on a pair of spectacles and blinked experimentally at the room. They were cat’s-eye frames, with diamanté glittering in their canthi, and they made her look astonished. Astonishing? Both. From the depths of the bag, she produced a big flat box.

‘Anyone for Trivial Pursuit?’

*

Merle came again the next day. This time the black bag offered up, along with half a packet of ginger snaps, to which Mrs Mavrokordatos turned a blind eye, the Better Baby Book of Names for Boys . The bag was an armamentarium. In the right hands, the terms it contained, considered as tools for categorizing and classifying, might get the better of any disorder.

‘Let’s see, Aubrey … Aubrey … here we are. From the German Alberich , ruler of elves. You must be the elf then? Only joking, Myron. Famous Aubreys: John Aubrey, author of Brief Lives . Just the one, I’m afraid, it’s not very common. And even that’s a stretch, being a surname.’

I knew the meaning of my own name perfectly well, but there was no stopping her once she got going.

‘And Myron. Greek: muron . Sweet oil, perfume, hence “something delightful” — that’s in quotes. Famous Myrons — this is more like it — Myron, Greek sculptor, known for his Discobolus . Myron Cohen, Jewish-American humorist, known for his You Don’t Have to be Jewish . Of course not. And Myron the Myrmidon, cartoon character, known for his battles in intergalactic space. In order of merit, descending.’

On her next visit, Merle brought a packet of McVitie’s Jaffa cakes and a chart depicting the human skeleton. She unrolled it on the table and secured the corners with salt and pepper cellars. Then she had Mevrouw Bonsma hold out her hands, as if she was addressing an invisible piano, and tapped off on them, with a knitting needle brought solely for that purpose, the phalanges, metacarpals and carpals, and, advancing the length of one arm, the radius and ulna, the humerus, the clavicula. I was able to chime in then with an apposite onions, as the handspring of lexical gymnastics is called — clavicle and clavichord, from the Latin clavis , key — and halt the pointer’s progress to other parts of our pianist’s anatomy. Not that there was anything unseemly in the display, but people may have jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Merle and Mevrouw Bonsma were old friends. They both lived in the Dorchester, at the bottom end of Twist Street, one of those establishments that housed whole floors of widows. Grannies a gogo, as Spilkin said. The two women had met up when Merle moved to the hotel after the death of her husband Douglas, but they had known one another for years. Mevrouw Bonsma, it turned out, had worked as a typist during the lean times when she could not find work as a musician, and was once employed by an insurance house where Merle kept the company library. She was the most elegant typist Merle had ever come across; her hands on the keyboard were almost lyrical.

It was Merle who showed me that there was more to Mevrouw Bonsma than met the ear.

‘If you think she’s “leaking indiscriminately”,’ said Merle, ‘you haven’t been listening properly, that’s all. She never plays anything without good reason. She’s like a weathervane, turning with the wind; open your ears and you’ll learn something about the air you’re breathing, the cross-currents you’re borne along by. She responds to the climate in a room, and she can change it too, as easily as opening a window.’

I had noticed from the very beginning a certain affinity between the music Mevrouw Bonsma played and the activities I was engaged in — the reliable rhythms of a waltz, for instance, suited lexical gymnastics down to a T — but Merle convinced me that such congruence was more than a happy accident. There was often a subtle interplay between the room and the music, as if Mevrouw Bonsma were a medium, communicating the moods of the patrons to the keyboard, turning them into music, and channelling them back, to bolster or subvert. When there was an argument brewing, voices raised, a fist thumping a table, she would find the dissonant chords to accompany it. And just as often, by a quiet counter-argument of interlinked melodies, she would smooth the ruffled feathers and cool the heated blood, and restore the company to an even temper.

Sometimes she seemed almost clairaudient. I made a note of the occasion when she began to play the uncharacteristically rowdy theme tune from Zorba the Greek . And who should come bounding through the door not a minute later but Mrs Mavrokordatos’s brother, who went by that name — or something very like it — and answered to that character. I had only seen him in the Café once, and it afterwards transpired that he had just stepped off an aeroplane from Athens after an absence of many months. Instead of greeting his sister with a conventional embrace, he began to kick up his heels to the music in a traditional dance of homecoming. He might have broken the crockery, if it wasn’t for the wall-to-wall carpeting.