Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

What do I mean by ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh.

*

Wessels was waiting for me as usual in the Café Europa. Properly: Martinus Theodosius Wessels — but I’m afraid I think of him as Empty. Empty Wessels make the most noise. Or in this case, makes the most noise. Appropriately, it grates the grammatical nerve-endings. Errors of number are Wessels’s speciality.

‘Yes yes, Mr Tearle,’ he said through a jet of smoke. ‘Hullo-ss.’ Perhaps the sibilant centre of his own surname created this propensity for letting off steam. Before I could even sit down, he was rootling in my shopping-bag, trying to put me off my food. ‘Salamis, hey. Sweating like a pig in there.’

Salamis? Rang a bell. I made a note to look it up.

‘You’ll never guess what I just saw.’

‘Me first,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a major something to tell you.’

‘So long as it’s not a joke.’

‘Uh-uh. Sit down, you making me nervous.’

‘Take your foot off my chair.’ The foot in question was encased in plaster of Paris. I’d known Wessels for several years, but I’d only recently made the acquaintance of this grisly extremity. The toes were squashed together like foetuses in a bottle, and there were lumps of plaster stuck to the hairs curling out of them. He made a performance of moving crutch and limb and dusting the plastic seat cover with a serviette.

Moçes appeared at my shoulder. Properly: Moses Someone-or-Other. I’d added the hammer and sickle because he was from Moçambique. A little joke between myself and my inner eye, entirely lost on the flapping ear.

‘Have a dop,’ said Wessels. He ordered himself a brandy.

I ordered my usual tea and specified separate bills. Wessels was obsessed with getting me drunk. Ditto himself, with more success. When he’d broken his ankle, falling down somewhere in a stupor, I asked him, ‘Did it leak when you broke it?’ But he didn’t get it. He had the most fantastic excuse, though: said he’d hurt himself trying to effect a citizen’s arrest on a cutpurse outside the Mini Cine.

(What sort of a name is that for a cinema? They might as well call it the Silly Billy. I won’t be surprised if it goes out of business.)

‘So what’s the story?’

‘The Café Europa,’ waving his crutch recklessly, ‘is closing down.’

‘You’re joking.’ But I could see that for once he wasn’t.

‘At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error.’

He mispronounces things deliberately to get under my skin. The last day of 1993 was less than a month away.

‘Shame man,’ Wessels went on. ‘Tony told me this morning. I wished you was here to hear it with your own ears. Because you our main man and everythink.’

‘God forbid.’

So the New Management was throwing in the towel. Properly: Anthony, pronounced ænθәni: for a reason I could never fathom. Popularly: Tony. But tony he wasn’t, so I preferred to think of him as the New Management, which he was.

I called Moçes back. I said I would have a whiskey after all, with an ‘e’ please, deciding to indulge. Time was when you couldn’t get anything stronger at the Café Europa than a double espresso. On high days and holidays, when grandchildren were born or horses came in, Mrs Mavrokordatos — the Old Management, although we never thought of her that way — might slip you an ouzo under the counter, in a thimble of a glass with a bunch of grapes and a twist of vine etched on it. That was before her own standards slipped in the direction of the shebeen.

‘Did he say why?’

‘Didn’t have to. No customers, no profits. This kind of place isn’t in any more.’

‘What about Errol and Co? I thought the New Management was catering for them. Specifically.’

‘Get real. They don’t spend their bucks here. They shoot pool, they sit outside in the sun, they have a couple of pots. Half the time they don’t even pay for those − it’s cheaper to bring your own. I see them topping up their glasses with nips from the girls’ bags. They think they clever, but I got experience in covert operations.’

‘My eye.’ He can hear a cork pop at fifty paces.

‘I saw it coming. Three years ago already I told Mrs Mav changing with the times won’t save us. We’ve had our chips.’

Wessels had taken to echoing me in the most infuriating manner. Still does. He swirls my sentiments around in his cavernous interior until they’re completely out of shape and mixed up with his own, and then he booms them back at me, made discordant and disagreeable, and reeking of the ashtray. I was the one who said: Changing with the times is not for us. Staying the same is our forte. He never gave the matter a thought; he was too busy feeding his face and ogling the coloured girls, most of them young enough to be his daughters. To tell the truth, I was hardly surprised that the Café was closing down. I’d been predicting it for years.

‘Our days are numbered.’

I’d said that too! And in my mind’s eye, the numbered days were perfect spheres, like pool balls.

The pool room was through an archway. It was always dark in there, because the blinds were never opened, and when the fluorescent tubes over the tables glowed, the surrounding darkness thickened. Now Errol came suddenly into focus in the smoke-marbled light. He took a cloth from his pocket and drew his cue tenderly through it. The thing was his pride and joy. He’d tried to impress me once with the name of the manufacturer, but it meant nothing to me. He carried it in two parts, in a case lined with velvet, and would screw them together with the practised efficiency of an assassin.

Moçes brought my whiskey, John Jameson’s on the rocks. Don’t suppose that this semi-literate peasant appreciated the distinction between Scotch and the real thing: ‘with an “e”’ was shorthand, drummed into him with difficulty.

‘To us!’ said Wessels.

‘Absent friends!’ I regretted that afterwards, because it set his cogs whirring.

The whiskey made me sentimental. I don’t like sentiment − it’s one of the reasons I seldom indulge − but Wessels was waffling on about the good old days and I found myself looking around me with new eyes. Now that the existence of the place was threatened, I saw it in a new light. I would have to look at everything properly, preserve the details that the years had somehow failed to imprint on my mind.

Décor. Tables and chairs — travesties of their former selves since the reupholstering, but still affectingly receptive to the contours of the familiar human body. The espresso machine on the counter. Even the new fixtures I had despised so much — the venetian blinds where I would have preferred to see the old brocade, the fake stained glass of the chapel where the one-armed bandits resided, the posters of football teams — all suddenly felt fragile. But not the television sets. There was a limit to everything.

The impending loss that grieved me most was Alibia, the painted city that covered an entire wall of the Café. I imagined workmen in overalls slapping polyvinyl acetate over our capital without a second thought. It should be moved to a new location, I decided: sawn up into blocks, numbered and packed, transported to safety, and reassembled. The Yanks were all for that sort of thing, carving up the world and recycling it as atmosphere. I don’t know why I was thinking this way. After all, it was no Florentine fresco, it was of no historical significance, nothing important had ever happened in this room. There was no point in preserving any of it. It was merely − that phrase so beloved of the Lost and Found columns came into my head — ‘of great sentimental value’.

‘If these walls could speak, hey,’ Wessels said as if he’d read my thoughts.