Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

*

From that day forward, I vowed to adopt a more relaxed approach towards social intercourse and to take the whole idea of fun more seriously. And I sustained that effort, through thick and thin, in one way or another, until the curtain — and everything else — fell on the Goodbye Bash.

I initiated several games along the lines of ‘Wellington in plimsolls’. I tracked down cryptic clues for Spilkin in the papers and made up some of my own, most memorably the classics ‘Sautéd poet’ (8) and ‘female cannibal’ (3–5). Anecdotes of the more tasteful kind, which were occasionally to be found on the wireless, I transcribed into my notebook and brought out at opportune moments. I tried to be lighter, moister and less crusty, like a good soufflé. Once or twice, I ventured to clap along with Mevrouw Bonsma’s cheerier medleys.

In those golden days of the Café Europa, which were then beginning, I might have gone too far. My imagination was awakening from a long slumber, like some Rip van Winkel, and was bound to overreach as it stretched its limbs in a new world. (The comparison is unsuited in some ways, as my sleeping habits have always been perfectly normal, and I’ve never been married, much less henpecked, but it can stand.) Looking back, I would say that the handclapping was certainly a mistake. I also delivered a few witticisms that might have been better suppressed, although it was never my intention to wound, as some would claim afterwards. But my most immoderate indiscretion was a practical joke, a form of wit I had always considered the lowest, fathoms below sarcasm (which strikes me as perfectly acceptable in a red-blooded fray).

All four of us were at the table one afternoon when Spilkin started the crossword. He was milling around, struggling to find the first indispensable ‘spilkin’, as even the most proficient puzzlers sometimes do, and Merle said, ‘Need a hand there?’

‘It’s a tricky one. I’ll get it going in a minute.’

‘It can’t be that hard.’ Merle was not a crossword puzzler herself — she said the people who compiled them had all the fun — and she was just pulling his leg. But her teasing prodded some sense of fun in me, or perhaps it was a cunning streak that I mistook for that etiolated sense.

I said, ‘He exaggerates how difficult it is, to make you admire him. The Star’ s crossword is laughably simple. The cryptic clues would pass for straight clues in any normally endowed society. Intellectually speaking.’

‘Bosh,’ said Spilkin, ‘it takes you hours.’

‘Because I stretch it out to prolong the pleasure. I could do it in ten minutes flat if I wanted to — but what’s the point of rushing?’

‘I’d like to see you get it out faster than me.’

‘Sounds like a challenge, Aubrey.’

‘Name your weapons.’

He waggled the Waterman. Perfect. Eveready brought my copy of the newspaper from behind the counter. I extracted the Tonight! section, turned to the puzzle and folded the straight clues under. Sharpened my pencil and poised it. Nodded to Merle to start the clock.

‘One across,’ I said. ‘Poetry serves badly.’ And paused for a finely judged second. ‘Verses.’ I spoke it out loud and wrote it in. Spilkin followed suit. ‘Two across: Safely wired near the dangerous part.’ One thousand and one, one thousand and two. ‘Earthed.’ Wrote that in. ‘One down: Muddled reports etc looking back. Retrospect.’

Now that I had the attention of the table I fell silent, except for making popping sounds with my lips and palatal clicks with the tip of my tongue. It was an extraordinary performance, even if I say so myself, for someone to whom the very notion of putting on a show was anathema. The timing was masterly. I let as much as twenty seconds slip by between certain clues and then, just when they thought I had stalled, rattled off three in as much time again. I had the whole thing out in six and a half minutes, including a magnanimous minute of grace allowing Spilkin — who had given up his own efforts to gaze at me, envious and amazed — a shot at the last clue.

I felt sorry for him, eventually, and nearly revealed the deception: I had just done the puzzle for the second time that day. My first effort, discarded in the waiting room at the General Hospital, where I’d gone for my blood pressure pills — and my Valia, for the nerves − had taken the better part of an hour.

In the years that followed, I sometimes surprised Spilkin watching me as I did the crossword at my usual pace, gazing out of the window between clues, sipping my tea. The expression on his face was slightly hurt and exasperated, as if I was patronizing him. I nearly confessed more than once. Now I’m pleased I didn’t.

As for the appropriate balance between gravity and levity in my dealings with the world, I am happy to say that it was restored in due course, when my acquaintances of those far-off days were scattered to the winds. Composure is everything. In the end, I was not so much a Rip van Winkel, who was immoderate and foolish after all, but a Derrick van Bummel. You remember, the schoolmaster in the same tale — dapper, learned, undaunted by ‘the most gigantic word in the dictionary’. One can even forgive him his drawling aloud from the newspaper, seeing that his companions were unqualified to do it for themselves.

*

If I had had my way (or a better start in life, if you’d rather), I would have been a proofreader of dictionaries. Lexicographical proofreading is the ultimate test of skill, application and nerve.

A proofreader worth his salt grieves over an error, no matter how small, in a printed work of any kind, from a chewing-gum wrapper (‘Did you know that the jodphur originated in India?’ — Ripley’s Believe It Or Not) to a Bible (‘Printers have persecuted me without a cause’ — Psalm 119, verse 161). Every error matters, not least because admitting even one into respectable company opens the door to countless others. Everyone welcome! the cry goes up, and the portals are flung wide. Only by striving constantly for perfection, and regretting every failure to achieve it, can the hordes be kept at bay.

However, errors once made should be acknowledged and understood, and their implications distinguished from one another. The repercussions of an error are nearly always bounded by the context in which it occurs. In certain exceptional spheres, such as pharmaceutical packaging, apparently minor errors may have fatal consequences. In the more mundane healthy climate, most errors on the part of the proofreader, committed in a spirit of honest endeavour rather than laxity and laissez-faire, are like ripples on a pond: disturbing but contained, and eventually finite. An error in the pages of a novel, for instance, may be compounded by reproduction, sometimes tens of thousands of times. Yet despite this wasteful abundance, the error itself seldom transcends the covers between which it is caught like a slow-moving insect, unless through the agency of an ill-tutored student, or a civilian foolish enough to seek instruction in these quarters. The good proofreader, the craftsman in pursuit of perfection, seeking to uphold standards but failing honestly, acknowledges the flaw, the place where the eye blinked and the hand slipped, and accords it its proper, proportionate place. Then he turns his attention to the work at hand.

Some say that an error of the right kind in the right place, something not too ugly, something truly devious, an error that demonstrates by its elusiveness how easily we might all slip into error ourselves, might have a purpose, perhaps even a beauty, of its own. One beggar at the banquet, they contend, cleverly disguised as a righteous burgher, discovered looting the cheeseboard and unmasked, will make the rest of the company savour their fine liqueurs more appreciatively. I myself find this conceit specious — as if a fly in the ointment improved it — although I grant that it might have some validity in a certain kind of publication, say, a coffee-table book or a hand-printed caprice. An error in that neck of the woods is hardly the end of the world.