Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

‘If they could speak English, you mean.’ Then I might have asked them: what is that stuff you’re covered with? Apart from the one with the mural, the walls were papered, and the pattern had always bothered me. What did it represent? Rising damp? Autumn leaves? ‘Besides, ears are common enough among walls, but mouths are rare.’

‘Now that’s above my fireplace,’ said Wessels, and looked baffled.

‘Never mind. I wonder what will open here when we’re gone?’

‘A whorehouse.’ As if he knew for a fact. ‘Or a disco.’ He made Christmas lights with his fat fingers.

‘So long as it’s not another chicken outlet,’ I said. ‘We’ve got enough of those. Though why they should be called chicken outlets, I don’t know. It sounds like the orifice through which a fowl passes an egg.’

‘I know this tone of voice,’ Wessels said, too familiarly by half. ‘It’s your letter-to-the-editor tone. We should write a letter to the Star . We haven’t done that for ages. Hey, Mo-siss.’

He ordered another round, make that doubles, and I didn’t protest. These were extraordinary circumstances.

‘Dear Editor,’ Wessels dictated, steepling his fingers and gazing up at the ceiling in what I understood to be a parody of my own attitude. ‘It have come to my attention that Europa Caffy, last outpost of symbolization in the jungly flatland that go by the name of Hillbrow, most densely populated residential hairier in the southern hemisphere …’

And growing denser by the day. More people and fewer motor vehicles. No one who could afford to drive a car wanted to come here any more.

I have never been able to hold my liquor, as they say, whereas Empty Wessels can hold a gallon (an ancient measure for liquids) in each leg without getting plastered. The walls have ears. I found myself going over the porous surface of Wessels’s face as incredulously as I had just examined the wallpaper. Another crumbling ruin. His face sat like a lump of porridge on the cracked calyx of his old-fashioned suit with its ridiculously wide lapels. A drinker’s nose, a real grog berry, with little sesamoid nodules in the wings of the nostrils. His features were all too big. You could say of him, without a hint of the figurative, that he was all ears. They were large and fleshy in the lobe and full of gristle, tufty in the middle, with tops like the curve of fat on a pork chop. It made sense to me that Empty Wessels should have these meaty handles attached to his head. Auditory meatus. To coin a false etymology.

Pitcher ~ pitchy ~ plague ~ plaguy. The whiskey beginning to talk. Then there was the hair. Also too big, obscenely thick for a man of his age, and worn in the ducktail style. The rear end of a bloody Muscovy. He dyes it black. Why does it vex me so?

‘What’s to become of us?’ he was still dictating, mocking my accent. ‘We part of the furniture around here.’

Speak for yourself. The whole of his person appears to be covered with the same stiff horsehair that sprouts from his ears. The way it sticks out of him, you could believe that he was stuffed with it. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a shiny spring burst out of the fabric stretched over his belly.

‘Those were the days. Yours faithfully.’

He has all the finesse of an ottoman, I thought. He had stopped speaking at last and was gazing at me over the spatulate ends of his fingers. You piece of wood. You wing-eared lounger. You stool. And then by anatomical association: You clot. You thrombus. ‘Those were the days?’ You have no idea what the days were. By the time you arrived on the scene, the days were no longer what they were supposed to be. That it should come to this. That I should end up with Wessels, of all people, up the creek in a leaky kayak. It was a bitter irony. I had often consoled myself that things were not as bad as they might have been, but now it came home to me that they were actually worse.

The same canoe coming and going (5): kayak.

Wessels called Moçes to turn up the volume on the television set. News from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. For some time now, Wessels had been making a show of interest in national affairs. Oddly enough, I had a feeling he was trying to impress the waiters. CODESA this and CODESA that. The country was disappearing behind a cloud of acronyms. As for the décor at the ‘World Trade Centre’ — how could one expect proper political decisions to be made in those dreadful surroundings? The place looked like a brothel.

I excused myself.

Alcohol does not agree with me. It argues, it presents opposing viewpoints − like that Freek Robinson on the television. In the Gentlemen’s room I scrutinized, as I always did, the peculiar geometrical pattern in the frosted glass of the window. In the beginning, it had reminded me of those abstract designs in nails and string that were thought so modern when I was starting out at Posts and Telecommunications. But then I’d begun to think of it as a hide stretched between stakes, the skin of some animal kept under glass.

I turned to the wall above the washbasin where the mirror was meant to be (I had seen it there myself as recently as the day before): four small holes and a faint outline of grime showed where it had been secured to the tiles. Someone had unscrewed it and carried it off. I couldn’t believe it was gone. In the shiny tiles, my image wavered. I wet my fingers under the tap and ran them over what was left of my hair, then dried the bumpy top of my head with a wad of paper towels, staring down the pale ghost. I took off my spectacles, huffed on them, dried them on my tie. Without my eye-glasses, the ghost in the wall disappeared entirely.

Alcohol spoke in the archaic, extravagant language it uses during our arguments. It said: This is your lucky day, spindleshanks. Nature has done you a favour by dimming your sight. And some petty thief, working hand in hand with natural forces, a marvellous example of symbiosis, has performed a greater service by carrying off the mirror, in which you might otherwise see yourself as you really are: not the distinguished figure you think you cut, not the debonair sea-captain, but a shabby deckhand, a figure of fun, a fogram. You and Wessels make a perfect pair, Wessels with his sprouty ears, you with your raisiny cranium and your fish-eyes.

When I got back to the table, Wessels was just leaving. He said he had to get home to feed the cat. That was rich. He wanted to get to the off-sales at the Senator before closing time.

That reminded me. ‘I saw something amazing at the Jumbo Liquor Market when I was on my way over here. You know that mascot thing of theirs that they put out on the pavement, the elephant—’

‘Dumbo.’

‘Jumbo,’ I corrected him.

‘Dumbo, from the comics, the heffalump who could fly.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You mean you haven’t read his books?’

‘It didn’t occur to me that he might be an author.’

‘Sorry, Aubs-ss, got to run. We’ll speak later.’

I had to call him back for his bill, which he was conveniently forgetting under the pot of sugar sachets. He paid up and hobbled out. Someone had written a message on the plaster cast and drawn an anatomical diagram. Obscene graffiti, I suppose.

When he had gone, I summoned Moçes to turn the sound down on the television. I was the only person watching, if you can call the idle apperception of an image on a screen ‘watching’: men in suits voicing opinions. Talking heads. Strictly, heads and shoulders. Moçes tapped the volume button with the end of a warped pool cue. Old Eveready used to make do with his forefinger, but these days people need ‘equipment’ for the simplest tasks. The set in the opposite corner went on murmuring. There was a different image on that screen: a football match. Alarmingly green lawn, cunningly mown into the MacLaren tartan. Arsenal 2, Urinal 1. A punchline, if I’m not mistaken. Half a dozen men (the Olé ’Enries, between you and me) were lounging in a semicircle of chairs below the set. The baize of an empty pool table, glimpsed through the archway, was the same acid green as the lighter squares on the football pitch. Errol and Co must have moved to another table, out of sight. I could hear the balls clicking together, like the building cracking its knuckles.