Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

I looked to Spilkin to see if he was still the same man, to see whether his grey hairs had turned black overnight. And there lay the key to the episode. Spilkin was the spilkin, as it should be. He looked back at me with an expression so lacking in sympathy it made me shudder, as if he had never clapped eyes on me before. And then one by one, the other gazes trembled and fell away from the screen.

I must have looked a fright, with my nose pressed to the glass and my spectacles misted over.

Spilkin jiggled an eyebrow and Eveready came to open up. It was he who had tossed the drunkard out and locked the door behind him. He was quite proud of the fact.

‘He thinks it is a shebeen,’ he said.

An Irish term, naturalized.

*

Vocabulary, milksop: iffy … butty … whiffy … naff … dishy … dinky … fab …

*

‘It was like Little Hans and the dyke,’ Spilkin laughed, ‘with Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma in the leading roles.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come, come,’ he said with a salacious gesture. ‘Must I draw you a picture?’

‘I don’t believe you, that’s all. Mevrouw hasn’t said a word. And there are sanctions against forcing yourself on a lady.’

‘No force required. Go ahead and ask her.’

I suspected that it was all a tasteless joke; the ‘solitary sailor’ tone rang a distant bell. Nevertheless, I said I would take the matter up with Eveready; if there was an ounce of truth in it, he would find himself endorsed out, or whatever the expression was.

Then Spilkin admitted that he was just pulling my leg.

*

One of the benefits of television, Mrs Mavrokordatos said, was that it was educational. It brought you news. Personally, I didn’t see the connection. New information, fresh events reported, streamed from the set at specified times each day, gathering and subsiding in the official channels to a rhythm as pacific as an ocean roar. Just now and then, like a bottle on the tide, something out of the ordinary came bobbing along, and then one could pay attention if one chose.

One evening, I was working on ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, fine-tuning a fascicle about Fluxman’s encounter with a ‘mugger’, when a hush fell over the Café Europa and all eyes turned to the screens. Our State President appeared there, looking gloomy, and announced his retirement.

I felt sorry for him. He assured us that he was in perfect health, but I know high blood pressure when I see it.

‘Poor old sod’s losing his faculties,’ Spilkin quipped.

‘Just like the University of the Witwatersrand.’ I’d read in that day’s Star that the Russian Department was closing down.

‘What’s the P.W. stand for?’ asked an Eddy, recently arrived from Birmingham.

Merle enlightened him: Pieter Willem. But Wessels had other ideas. He said it stood for Poor William.

When I got up to leave a little later, this same Wessels stumbled after me. He wanted to walk me home.

‘Forget it. It’s miles out of your way.’

‘Ah, come on Aubs, man, I need the exercise. It’ll get the circulation going.’

I had the impression he was mimicking me. Perhaps he’d heard me extolling the virtues of an active lifestyle? Shirty blighter. Stamping his feet and beating his chest with his hands as if he was on fire. He should have been wearing a coat instead of this leaf-green suit, with lapels like the fronds of some tropical plant and a flap in the back of the jacket wide enough to admit a cat. The last thing I needed was for him to find out where I lived. I went in the opposite direction to throw him off the scent.

All the way down Twist Street, he railed against the world in terms I would rather not repeat. He kept calling me ‘Aubs’, as if he was seeing double — but I suppose it was better than ‘Churl’, which was how he rendered my surname. I had to nudge him every few paces like a tugboat to keep him on the pavement, or I dare say he might have met his death under the wheels of a bus.

On the corner of Esselen Street, he stopped and stared across the intersection. He was trying to decipher the placard tied to a pole there. It was perfectly clear to me: WHY PW QUIT. Shrugging off my restraining hand, he went lumbering across the street, souvenir hunting, I thought. Just as he gained the opposite kerb, a man who had lain hidden in the shadows of a nearby bus shelter suddenly sat up on the bench. One of our growing army of indigents, muffled in greatcoat and balaclava.

Wessels stopped dead and gazed at this apparition. Then he cried out: ‘Peewee! What’s the problem, my old china?’

He made such a racket that concerned faces appeared between the gingham curtains in the windows of the Porterhouse. The Porterhouse! As if a pot of porter had ever been drawn in that dump. As if one in a hundred of their penny-pinching patrons even knew what porter was! I had a good mind to go in and give the manager a blast, but Wessels had fallen on his knees and was trying to kiss the hem of the vagrant’s coat. The other gazed back through bleary eyes.

‘Speak to me, Peewee,’ Wessels implored. ‘Or have the kaffertjies got your tongue?’

I ought to have left him there to degrade himself, but sheer irritation drove me to his rescue. The vagrant was white, or had been before liquor and the elements savaged his complexion. Not that it made a blind bit of difference. Summoning reserves of strength I scarcely knew I possessed, I dragged Wessels away.

‘Don’t worry, Aubs,’ he reassured me. ‘I’ll stand by you, man, even though I’m farming backwards.’

Duty done, I left him on the corner of Wolmarans Street, clinging to a traffic light, with his tie folded over his shoulder and his trousers falling down, garishly enamelled in red and amber and green like a cheap china ornament for the bar counter.

*

Spilkin took a shine to Wessels. I never could account for it, despite everything.

Just what Wessels had done with his life before then was anybody’s guess. He claimed to have been an ‘agent’, a game ranger, a member of the armed forces, a lid . Although this last was merely the Afrikaans for ‘member’, it struck me as apposite: he was stopperish, corky, a brother of the bung. He had a photograph of himself in uniform, but anyone could see by the toggle and braid that it was strictly fancy dress. A chauffeur or a commissionaire.

The photograph went around the circle a couple of times, and it had a surprising effect on Spilkin. ‘Take a look,’ he confided quietly, ‘this really gets to me: the way the cap presses down the tops of his ears. Pathetic, in its way, but endearing too.’

‘Must have been going to a party.’

‘He says he was on active service. He has stories about Magnus Malan and Constand Viljoen. He says he has “contacts” in high places.’

‘I’m amazed you’re taken in by him. That nonsense about being the General’s batman. Generals don’t even have batmen, except in those comic-books he reads about the War, where the Germans go around shouting “Achtung!” all the time. He must have been a driver … an ambulance driver! The St John’s Brigade. It’s as plain as the nose on my face.’

To tell the truth, I myself had felt an unwelcome pang of sympathy for Wessels, with his ears sticking out like the tips of a wing collar.

But he soon put paid to such feelings. He simply did not understand the rules of conduct in force at the Café Europa. Despite the new blood, we still observed certain proprieties. There was an unwritten law, for example, that we did not tolerate hawkers and other itinerants. Encourage them now, we used to say, and in next to no time, the streets will be crawling with beggars. But Wessels was above the law. First it was peaches from a snotty-nosed little Asiatic, then a painted wooden budgerigar, a good cockatoo from a dope fiend — he was in a clammy sweat and running a fever — and a wrought-iron pot-plant stand from a poor white. When he bought a rose in cellophane from a débutante, ridiculously overpriced, and fobbed it off on Merle, I thought it was time to speak out.