Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

‘Talk about African time. They said six-thirty for seven, and it’s just us two. Or should I say three. Where is everyone?’

As if in answer to her question, the lights went on and the room leapt into view. Those must be the eats, under a shroud. Paper chains overhead. ‘Seasons Greetings’ on the wall by the Gentlemen’s room.

Then a fuss at the door. It was Mevrouw Bonsma, in full costume, on the arm of the New Management. If Darlene was got up like a bedouin tent, Mevrouw Bonsma was a big top, extravagantly striped, sequinned and fringed. Several of her garments appeared to be inside out. On her thick coiffure lay a tinny tiara like a mislaid cookie cutter. What was happening to the women? You’d think Boswell Wilkie’s circus was in town.

‘Look who’s here!’

‘Spilkijn!’

‘Mevrouw!’

‘What a surprising development!’

Mevrouw Bonsma billowed about in the doorway. The New Management dragged her over to our table, like a hot-air balloon harnessed to a pony, and wedged her in a chair. She began to gush.

‘You don’t look a day older,’ I was able to say in all honesty (one reaches a point of decrepitude beyond which the day-to-day ravages are scarcely perceptible).

*

When the fuss had spent itself, Mevrouw Bonsma looked me over from toe to top. Her eyes came to rest on my summit. I was gazing at the confection, and so we remained for a moment in puzzled symmetry, transfixed by the tops of one another’s heads.

‘I like the new look, Tearle,’ she crackled.

I’d invented the hairstyle myself that morning, but I wasn’t sure whether to own up or not. Would it look cheap?

I’ve been cutting my own hair in my retirement. Editing the end matter, as I think of it. I last tried the professionals some years ago, around the time I met Merle. ‘Hair Affair’ was up an escalator, which gave me false hopes of privacy. The ‘hairstylist’ was an extremely garrulous woman: while I waited for her to finish off the previous customer, I established that she was a Czechoslovak, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Free Marketeer. I should have made my escape at once, but morbid fascination kept me pinned. When my turn finally came, don’t think she didn’t want to shampoo me right there in front of the windows. I’d been worrying that she might nick one of my excrescences with her scissors while she was railing against the bolshie bigwigs of the home country, but this was an entirely unexpected threat. I made myself scarce, and I’ve been doing my own barbering ever since.

Mevrouw Bonsma’s bun looked harder and shinier than before. The sight of it reminded me how Spilkin and I had behaved when we first made her acquaintance. An unholy triangle, which Merle’s arrival had restored to equilibrium. Now there were four of us again — except that Darlene was in Merle’s place. It made a mockery of quadruplicity. I couldn’t wait for Merle to arrive — even a pentagon would be better than this.

I enquired after Mevrouw Bonsma’s welfare to get the conversational ball rolling, but it trundled no further than the next sticky pause. She was doing a bit of teaching, she said, it was surprising how many of the underprivileged were interested in music. And playing a bit of bridge.

*

Punctuality is not the least of the devalued virtues. To pass the time, until the rest of the company ‘rocked up’ (Darlene), I suggested that Mevrouw Bonsma and I pay our respects to the buffet, which was lying in state under netting. We were welcome to look, but there would be no tasting until the New Management gave the signal. As he explained it, the success of the Bash hinged on the timing of the moment at which eating was introduced into the general course of drinking. Too early, and it would prevent the pot from coming to the boil; too late, and the pot might boil over and extinguish the fire. The bar was open, though. Any orders? Strictly cash. Or could he open a bottle on our behalf? Corkage waived.

What we could see of the feast through the camouflage net looked unbalanced, nutritionally speaking, and so unappetizing that safety measures hardly seemed necessary. The inevitable poultry, hacked into pieces, packets of Knick-Knacks, stacks of Sesamemates (apparently one needed to be on friendly terms with the food before one consumed it), swatches of sweat-beaded sweetmilk, jaundiced dips, lettuce.

‘And what are these?’

‘Buffalo wings.’

‘If buffaloes had wings, Mevrouw, they would certainly be a great deal bigger than this.’

‘If pigs had wings, they would taste like bacon.’

Where had she come by that? Sounded like a Wesselism. Could they have been seeing one another on the sly? He couldn’t possibly be taking piano lessons. Rummy more likely, or bumblepuppy.

I remembered fondly the spread Mrs Mavrokordatos had promised for the inaugural championships. ‘Mrs Mavrokordatos would have given us a good square meal. And if not that, then a smorgasbord.’ As it was, there was not a smorgas in sight, just these tubs of yellow margarine. Cheddar and Melrose wedges.

A rubbery nose nuzzled my hand. It proved to be Wessels, snuffling at me with the stopper on the end of his crutch. That fat nincompoop was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

‘Is everythink to taste?’ He poked the forbidden food with his finger. And then suddenly, improbably, as if she had been invisible until that moment: ‘Suzanna!’

‘Martinus!’

Such a quantity of hissing and steaming, you’d have thought they were a pair of Christmas puddings.

*

I am not easily discouraged. I returned to table No. 2. I meant to engage Spilkin in discussion this evening if it was the last thing I did. Mrs Hay had commandeered my chair, so I pulled another closer from the next table. The conversation was about salad dressings, knitting patterns, the declining fortunes of some soap-opera family or other, the ‘hit parade’ — but I could raise the tone in a moment. There was a point about dictionaries I had been harbouring, a point that illuminated the age-old tussle between forging ahead and maintaining standards, and I intended to make it, come hell or high water.

They were talking about something called ‘Magic Johnson’. A popular group, no doubt. It was all the opening I needed.

Speaking of Johnson … I was with Dr Johnson, I said, when it came to relying on dictionaries of current usage rather than the Academy for correctness. Language is changing all the time, I’m the first to admit it. But at any given moment, we must have standards of correctness. What would be the point of having dictionaries at all if that were not the case? I liken it, I said, to the act of proofreading itself, which I have often described, in which a rapid sequence of still points creates the illusion of constant motion. That got me to Horne Tooke, the philologist. ‘I was never very taken with Tooke,’ I remember saying. ‘The man was a radical. As for those closing e’s on forename and surname …’

But Spilkin would not be drawn. He kept switching the attention back to Darlene, to her sayings and doings, her comings and goings, her hemlines, her hairdos, her curry and rice.

*

Despite Spilkin’s efforts, Darlene’s dress sense was a subject soon exhausted, and the conversation turned inevitably to ‘one man, one vote’ and the coming election. A politician with the unconvincing name of Martin Sweet had showed up at the Home where Mrs Hay was now living to canvass support for his campaign, and she had divined that he would be the one to lead his people forth from bondage. He was the only candidate, she said, who would give The Madiba a run for his money. The name of his party would come to her in a minute.

I ventured the opinion that The Madiba might not be all he was cracked up to be. One shouldn’t expect too much of a man who had led such a sheltered existence. He had passed nearly thirty years of his life behind bars, and it would take more than a year or two in the outside world to catch up. What would he know of topical concerns?