Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

He handed me the plastic basket and began sniffing out purchases with the end of his crutch. Mainstay. Klipdrift. Störtebeker Apfelschnaps. Little plastic sachets of whisky and gin. Count Pushkin. Lord Nelson. Coffin varnish. I thought he would want Paarl Perlé just to wound me, but instead it was Fifth Avenue Cold Duck.

‘Champagne,’ he said.

‘In inverted commas.’

*

I was up all night, typing out the fair foul copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

When I sat down to work, there spilled from one of the files an index card, on which I had written, all those years ago: National Proofreading Champion. And in smaller letters: Floating Trophy presented by A. Tearle. The words I had meant to have engraved on the trophy. I propped the good intention against the glass of the window and it kept me going in the wee hours.

Somewhere near dawn, I was gazing through the window at the lights of the south spread out to the horizon, when I became aware of my reflection in the glass, my cheeks stubbled, my nose throbbing, my excrescences, occipital and cranial, pulsating, my hair crying out to be cut, rampant, quaquaversal, awry.

I laboured on. Then at last, as the sun cast its bloodshot eye over the penultimate day of the year, I was done. For the first time in years, I felt at peace with myself and the world.

Fluxman was lying awake in his bed, leafing through the coming day’s work in his mind, when water began to run beyond his window. It was not the patter of a garden sprinkler on a lawn or the spurt of a hose in a bucket, the usual suburban backdrop to his Saturday mornings. It was a river rushing in a gorge, breakers rolling against a shore. But it began as abruptly as if an enormous tap had been opened wide. He clenched his fists beneath the blankets and held his breath, listening, expecting the worst. He thought he heard people crying out, footsteps pounding on his stoep, the rasping of rushes against the hull of a wicker basket.

After a while, he stuck out his head and looked around. Everything in place. Slippers in alphabetical order on the carpet, papers drawn up in open file on the desk, curtains closed tight. Then his eyes widened to admit the watery play of light behind the brocade. He sat up in bed and tried to decipher this wash of colour and sound. Gingerly, he dipped a foot in the shallow pile of the carpet. Wall-to-wall had been known to hover, trembling over the abyss, long after the earth below had fallen away. Seemed solid enough. He stuffed his feet into the sheepskin slippers and went over to the window. He could sense the fluid pressure of water on the other side, and he paused, with his fingers brushing the edges of the two curtains where they met, afraid for the drowned world he might find beyond the glass. Then he took a deep breath and flung the curtains open.

My gardening days are over, he thought.

Where his front lawn had been — just last night, as he shut the window before bed, he’d reminded himself that it needed mowing — lay a vast reach of mud-brown water, fringed to the left by bulrushes and the right by palms, and dammed up in the distance ahead by a sheer cement quay topped by a metal railing. There were several small islands scattered around, mounds of foliage trimmed with beach sand. The scene was idyllic, if somewhat contrived, and oddly familiar. Fluxman was sure he had seen it before somewhere on his travels, but for the life of him, he could not say where. He scrutinized it carefully from front to back. The water was lapping at his house: beneath the window-sill, small waves spilled over onto the slasto paving of his stoep. In the shallows, his letter box stuck out above the surface, with the newspaper wedged in its throat; further out, the roof of the carport showed where his driveway had been. Beyond that, where the water deepened, the curved brackets of the street lights mimicked the necks of the wading birds he saw stilting among the rushes.

People appeared on the quay, rushing up and down, shouting noiselessly and pointing with agitated gestures into the water below. The object of their attention came into sight, floating out from behind an island: a young girl, bedraggled and half-drowned, clinging to a spar of wood and paddling weakly against the dirty current.

Fluxman had resolved long ago not to busy himself with the affairs of the world, especially not through sleight of hand — but this was an emergency, and he reached instinctively for his blue pencil.

Before he could wield it, however, there was a commotion in the rushes. A small head with a glazed eye peered over the horizon, as if an enormous seabird had poked its head out of its nest to look around, and floated closer, revealing the sleek curve of a neck, the ominous fork of a wishbone. Then the rushes yielded before the thrusting breast, and a duck-billed pedalboat came crashing through the greenery and surged into open water. Although it was shaped like a Muscovy, it reminded Fluxman of a letter from the Greek alphabet: a plump, inflatable delta.

There were two men in the boat, a middle-aged one in a straw hat and a younger one who might have been his son, both pedalling away furiously. Head held high, parting the waves with its fibreglass sternum, the duck made quickly for the girl. The watchers on the quay clustered at the railing, waving with their caps, urging the rescuers on. The waves in the wake unrolled like scrolls of beaten metal.

Now Fluxman remembered where he had seen all this before: it was the Wetland Ramble from the Zoological Gardens. He had wandered there once, with Ms Georgina Hole.

The duck bore down on the girl, then slewed to a halt and settled in the water. The younger man scrambled into the prow, where he might reach a helping hand down over an upswept wing. His companion, pedalling gently to hold the boat steady against the current, took up a canary-yellow camera and began to film the operation. A copybook rescue, Fluxman thought. He could imagine the gratitude in the girl’s eyes. Would she weep as her saviour hauled her aboard, streaming fresh water and wreathed with hyacinth? Would she cling to him as if she would never let him go? Would she fall in love with him, would she make him fall in love with her, fulfilling their destiny in the happy ending? Or would she overdo it, playing to the camera and weeping on cue, making him lose sympathy with her?

The hand of the rescuer closed around the girl’s wrist. A close-up was called for. Any cameraman worth his salt would capture it. Let his strong fingers slip on her goose-pimpled skin, let the grasp be almost broken, the girl be almost lost, before he drew her safely in …

At that moment, the duck lurched forward in the water.

Here we go again, Fluxman said to himself. Will nothing ever run smoothly again? Can nothing go on steadily to its conclusion? Must it always be one crude disruption after another?

The man kneeling in the prow teetered. The one with the camera stuck resolutely to his task. The duck twitched again, as if it had flexed its wings to fly only to find them useless, and both men went tumbling. Then something immense bore up from below, ramming into the bird, tilting its tail feathers up into the air and driving its head below the water. A buckled undercarriage of rods and paddles churned the sky to froth. A mouth opened, the mouth of a hippopotamus, with weeds and splintered fibreglass between its teeth; the black rock of its back shuddered and sluiced water, sank again below the surface. A momentary calm. Then the rock rose irresistibly for a second time and threw the bird over on its side. The men fell into the water. The wounded duck subsided and began to circle around the compass point of its own broken neck, while the watchers clawed up the stones beneath their feet and hurled them over the edge to drive off the monster. Once the water had settled, the older of the two rescuers could be seen clinging to a broken wing, with the straw hat jammed down over his eyes. There was no sign of the other. The girl was gone as well.