Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Errol’s buddies had been loafing in the shadows all morning in a state of inebriation, but his arrival was greeted by a lively uproar. Half the customers, the waiters, even Tone himself pressed through the archway to gape. So much raucous laughter and obscene banter ensued that there was simply no going on with my work.

I scrutinized and took stock. Errol and Floyd were down on the floor behind the pool tables, where the shadows were thickest, writhing in a tangle of arms and legs. The greatcoat sprawled in a pathetic attitude across the green baize, empty and abject, light blazing down on it, and the thought that it must belong to some human being the boys were now trying to overpower or violate forced its way back into my mind. Dim faces studded with shiny teeth came and went in the glare and gloom like portraits on rocking walls. Demonic laughter. I advanced to intervene. But then Floyd scampered clear and vanished, as if through a trapdoor, and Errol stood up alone behind the central table. He raised one end of the object they had been wrestling over — my relief that it was an object after all was short-lived — and rested it against his crotch. The end of a cylinder of some kind, perhaps a broken pipe … a traffic light? Surely not! He bent over and wrapped both his arms around the pipe. Then he hauled it up, swivelling his hips as he did so, and slowly, in obscene mimicry of a gigantic male member, tumescent, from the Latin tumere , swell, the Hillbrow Tower rose into the light.

My cry of protest was drowned out by drunken hooting and gleeful applause. Thrusting, lurching from step to step, Errol advanced upon Raylene, who fled shrieking in make-believe terror to the other side of the room. He turned his attention to the new girl, the youngster who still looked like a child to me, never mind the combat boots. She was too awestruck to do anything but gaze at him. He staggered towards her, phallus towering. Would no one defend her honour?

‘Where did you get that?’ My voice was indignant and authoritative. I knew perfectly well where he’d ‘found’ it: recognized it at once.

‘In his pants!’

‘It followed him home.’

‘It’s stolen property. Stolen from decent people with charity in their hearts. Not to mention your poor countrymen afflicted with tuberculosis. I’ve a good mind to call the police.’

Titters and jeers. Let them, I thought, as Errol butted the air with the broken tower. ‘You have no sense of responsibility. In fact, you have an overdeveloped sense of irresponsibility. There’s a destructive streak in you. Vandals, that’s what you are, it’s the sack of Rome all over again.’

‘A sack of what?’

‘Not that kind of sack, you blockhead, it’s from the …’ And then the derivation slipped unaccountably from my mind. The drama of it! Silence had fallen. A circle of dim faces, gazing now at me, now at the hooligan with the tower jutting from his loins. I became aware of the dictionary clasped in my right hand: I must have taken it up intuitively, like a sword. By a stroke of good fortune it was not my precious Pocket , but the eighth edition of the Concise , published in 1990, carried to the Café that morning in one of the shopping-bags. An altogether weightier tome, somewhat too replete with Yankee-Doodlisms for its own good. What a shame I hadn’t brought along the Shorter , which I could still heft like a man half my age on a good day. All the same, I must have looked like a prophet in a den of iniquity. Like Moses — the original, with the serpent rather than the sickle in his bosom — come down off the mountain, clutching his tablets. I opened the dictionary. Verses of lemmata whirled in a sortilege of sorts — rub ~ rudder ~ ruddle ~ rule … ruler ~ run ~ run ~ runcinate — and as it sometimes happens, once in a thousand consultations, it fell open at the very page I sought — saccharin ~ sacring. Perhaps in this heightened atmosphere my fingers had been guided by some extrasensory urgency, as my eyes now were, to sack 2. (Of victorious army or its commander) plunder, give over to plunder (a captured town etc.). (Of burglar etc.) carry off valuable contents of. From the French in the phrase mettre à sac , put to sack. From the Italian sacco sack 1. My eye performed a backward roll to sack 1: large usually oblong bag for storing and conveying goods, usually open at one end and made of coarse flax or hemp. A jog would bring me to hessian, strong coarse cloth of hemp or jute, of Hesse in Germany. Foreign geography: Venetian blinds. Angostura bitters. Gin. But this was neither the time nor the place for the finer points. I focused again. Put to the sack: put in the sack. It was that literal. I opened my mouth to speak into the silence — and who knows what the effects would have been? These were surely moments in which lives might have been changed. But just then Wessels burst in, hopping on his good foot and waving his crutch, and with a swashbuckling ‘Bonsai!’, brought the crutch crashing down on the tower. Errol swung away, the end of the tower (where the revolving nightclub used to be) smashed into the neon tubes of the overhead light, and the room went dark in a shower of breaking glass.

In the rush for the exit that followed, I was knocked sideways, and heaven only knows what injuries I might have sustained had not Moçes, of all people, caught me up in his arms, as he had seen it done on television, practically shielding me with his own body, and marshalled me to safety. It was just as well I was wearing a chain on my glasses. When I found myself at my table again, I felt like some storm-tossed craft back at its moorings.

In a while, a semblance of order was restored. Tony marched around with his hands on his hips, detailing the costs of fluorescent tubes and the resurfacing of pool tables, while Moçes was set to dabbing up the splinters with cotton wool dipped in cane spirits (a home remedy from Tony’s mother). Wessels sat down and stuck his grog blossom in my papers: ‘What you liaising there?’ I gave him what for. Who did he think he was, undermining my authority in front of these hooligans, and then carrying on as if nothing had happened? Sulkily, he produced the Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak pad and began to go through his invitation list, muttering names under his breath and ticking them off extravagantly.

‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ could not hold my attention. My eyes kept wandering to Alibia, and I saw myself there, in a houndstooth overcoat, bending my steps to a fogbound wynd. My coat was the very opposite of Errol’s, which looked as if it was made of flea-bitten underfelt, and gave you the urge to smother him under the nearest carpet. The heels of my brogues resounded like hammerblows on the cobbles, my breath puffed out in chubby bales of mist, my scarf waved behind me on an icy breeze, as if borne up by a cleverly concealed armature. In an even narrower close, I was drawn to a lighted window. Tucking a coat-cuff into my palm I wiped a hole in the rimed glass and peered through. I looked in on the Café Europa. At myself, in an inglenook, raising a toby jug brimming with porter to drink some congenial stranger’s health. And in a corner, sipping shrub: Merle.

Wessels interrupted this reverie to draw to my attention an article in the Star . Vandals strike at Miniland. As if I didn’t know. ‘For the second time in three months, vandals’ — my word exactly — ‘went on the rampage at Santarama Miniland, the miniature village that raises funds to fight the spread of TB, hurling entire buildings into the harbour and turning the Carlton Centre upside down.’

These days, the newspapers contained so little one might believe in. But here was an indisputable fact. The city belonged to these Goliaths now, the country belonged to them. I saw them stretched out on the runways at Jan Smuts, with their heads propped on the terminal buildings, taking a smoke break, going slow. Flagpoles and street lights were no more than toothpicks in their fists, which they were always raising. I saw them marching down into the Big Hole of Kimberley, with the cables of the bucket winches tangled about their ankles, crunching underfoot the little miners who had flocked to build the new South Africa. I saw them striding up to the Union Buildings, two terraces at a time, in their big running shoes with the tongues hanging out. Shout! said their T-shirts. No! said their trousers. Bang! Bang! Action! Noise!