Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Although it was early, many businesses had closed their doors, and the streets were filling with people on their way home from work, clerks and secretaries stepping warily from the lobbies of office buildings, blinking into the light like people after a matinée at the cinema. The gondolas were packed with more than the usual quota of tourists and touts, the carriages of the funiculars were bursting. Everywhere he saw the same bewildered expressions, the same pursed lips, which might be suppressing laughter or tears, the same downcast eyes, as if people were hunting for fallen change in the cracks of the pavements. They hurried by or stood whispering furtively on street corners, avoiding one another’s eyes, clutching handfuls of their own clothing. Fluxman moved among them, wide-eyed, gazing at bare flesh between yawning lapels, coats held together with paper clips, safety-pinned cuffs and stapled shirt-fronts. On a corner near the station, a businessman was plucking the rubber-banded toggles of his duffel coat, and Fluxman, stooping to gather more samples, listened to that elastic adagio as if he had never heard music before.

Arriving home in the early hours, he let his answering machine stammer out its messages. Please to call Figg. Enough is enough: a meeting of the Society is in order. Then the worried voice of Munnery: Figg suggests a meeting. What do you think? Then Levitas, who hated speaking on the telephone. Munnery had called him too, and Wiederkehr, and Banes. Then Figg again, sounding drunk. The whole Society was in an uproar.

*

It became clear at last to the most faithful Members of the Society, standing by with their bundles of pencils, that the call for help from the City Fathers would never come. It was a bitter pill, but it had to be swallowed.

An extraordinary meeting of the Society was convened at short notice on the night after the great unfastening. They gathered at the Café Europa as usual, and although some semblance of calm had returned to the city after the disturbances of the previous day, each had a story to tell about the hazards he had faced just making his way through the streets to their rendezvous.

Wiederkehr had almost plunged into a crevasse that had opened up in the cobbles at his feet as he crossed St Cloud’s Square.

‘It may have been an unguarded excavation,’ Fluxman ventured to say. ‘You know how the procurers are always stealing the red lanterns.’

‘It was a dry dock,’ Wiederkehr said tetchily. ‘It gaped as suddenly as speaking. One moment there was solid earth beneath my bluchers, the next a black hole as big as ten swimming baths, with a catamaran lying in the deep end.’

‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I nearly broke my neck too,’ said Munnery. ‘Fell over a tombstone in the High Street. I transposed it at once with a mossy bench from the boneyard, but the damage had already been done.’ He showed them the torn knees of his suit.

Fluxman noticed, as he examined his friend’s frayed tweed, that his trousers were tied up with a length of typewriter ribbon, but he said nothing. Munnery had brought a bulging portfolio of maps with him, and while they spoke, he was readjusting the highways and byways with his blue pencil, and keeping an eye on the more irresponsible rezonings.

‘If the Fathers will not come to us, we must go to them,’ Fluxman said when it was his turn to speak. ‘We must do our duty for Alibia.’

‘About time,’ said Figg. ‘What shall we say?’

‘The simple truth: stop putting the cart before the horse. Take care of the paperwork, and the world will take care of itself.’

‘But who will believe it?’ said Banes.

As if to support his point, the first municipal reupholstery squad burst in through the batwing doors, clutching lumpy pouches full of leather-covered buttons, and waving bodkins as long as pencils. They fell to with a vengeance. Most of the patrons fled. But the Members would not budge, on principle, and boldly continued with their meeting. For their pains, Munnery got the sleeve of his jacket stitched to the arm of his chair, and might have spent the night there, had Wiederkehr not slashed him loose with a swift pass of his 2B.

*

Naturally, it fell to Fluxman to lead the delegation that went to discuss the problem of declining standards with the City Fathers.

A special audience was held in the oak-panelled council chamber. Fluxman presented their case. He showed how the seeds of decline had been sown in mischief and trivialities. He pointed to instances of looming chaos, like the great unfastening, and cited statistics on damage to property, loss of life and limb, and low levels of investor confidence. He painted a gloomy picture of a future in which everything was out of order, and nothing ran smoothly to a creditable conclusion.

‘If appropriate measures to secure law and order are not taken soon,’ he concluded, ‘it will be too late. Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured.’

The last echoes of Fluxman’s baritone clattered away in the rafters. There was a pause, and then, not the ‘Bravos’ and ‘Hear hears’ that would have done justice to his oration, not the grateful applause and relieved chatter, but catcalls and whistles from the peanut gallery. The City Fathers, perched like children on the bloated leather seats of the dock, with the toes of their shoes scraping the floorboards, looked down unperturbed.

‘We have teams at work this minute repairing the damage that has been reported, all of it slight,’ said Councillor Lumley, the father figure of refrigerator services. ‘Routine maintenance goes on apace. Everything is under control.’

In the back benches, a team of upholsterers clad in their characteristic leatherette dungarees and cotton T-shirts were reattaching buttons. Hearing themselves mentioned from the platform, they raised a ragged cheer.

‘All the maintenance in the world will be of no use,’ said Fluxman. ‘We need to look to our records.’

‘Nonsense! What good would that do?’

Distasteful as it was, smacking as it did of the party trick, Munnery called for a seating plan, which the Speaker duly produced, and demonstrated the point the Society was trying to make by transposing a few desks, councillors and all. Levitas realigned the chandeliers and shifted a rose window in the west wall to admit the setting sun. But rather than impressing upon the Fathers the seriousness of the situation, this made them think it was all just a game. They wanted Munnery to alley-oop them, like so many children, they wanted their desks rearranged so that they could be closer to the cafeteria or the cloakroom.

When Levitas dumped Lumley unceremoniously in the lap of a secretary whose name had been romantically connected with his own, the mood turned nasty. Security was summoned, and before they could even gather up their files, the Proofreaders found themselves manhandled from the chamber, with cries of ‘Fools!’ and ‘Traitors!’ flying about their ears.

*

Having resisted the Fathers the longest, it was Fluxman who took their rejection most to heart. That night, on his return from the Café Europa, where he and the others had drowned their sorrows, he went to his study. He opened the telephone directory and paged to the L’s. There were three Lumleys. Which was which? Never mind, he would dispense with them all. He took up his weapon of choice. He chewed the pink rubber, savouring its familiar tang, and gazed at the columns of names and numbers. They were restless, squirming and writhing, jostling one another. A riotous assembly. Setting his jaw, he drew three neat lines through the Lumleys and inscribed a curly bracket and a single delete mark in the margin.