Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

‘Nothing wrong with us.’

‘Not that her hands are clean. But in any case, we don’t know where she is. We don’t know where anyone is.’

‘Tone’s got Mrs Mav’s number.’

So the New Management had finally turned into a monosyllable. He’d be an initial next and then he’d vanish altogether. ‘What does Tone say about your plan?’

‘He thinks it’s a great idea to go out with a bang. You’ll see. It’ll be a jôl. I’ll organize everything. You don’t have to lift a finger, you can just pull in.’

A (from the Old Norse jól , a heathen festival) is a rowdy sort of Afrikaner party, accompanied by heavy drinking and smoking of marijuana. And ‘pulling in’ is one of the more popular vehicular metaphors for arriving unannounced.

‘If it’s all the same, I think I have a prior arrangement. Or will have any minute.’

I didn’t like going out on New Year’s Eve anyway. It had become far too dangerous, with flat-dwellers of colour using the occasion to heave unwanted furniture from their windows into the streets below. In fact, the entire ‘festive season’ had degenerated into a drunken street fight, and the wise lay low until it was all over.

‘Anyway, you’re invited. Now give us a page of your notebook.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be so snoop man.’

(Snoop? Put it on the list after ‘tawty’.)

‘I can’t.’ I showed him why: I number all the pages in advance, in the top right-hand corner, in ink, precisely to deter filchers. A tactic I learnt from Erasmus, whom I’ve mentioned before, my colleague at the Department of Posts and Telecommunications in the days of pen and paper.

*

During the course of my constitutional, I found the elephant’s ear in the gutter at the top of Nugget Hill. The Queen of Sheba must have dropped it there; when the weather was good, the Pullinger Kop park served as her country seat. In the rosy light of sunset, the ear looked for all the world like a gigantic petal fallen from some impossible bloom. Closer inspection revealed treadmarks from tyres and shoes, gooey fingerprints, splashes of what might have been royal blood. Perhaps Her Majesty’s minions had used the ear to stretcher her hither? Understandably, I was reluctant to touch this repulsive, disease-ridden thing, but I meant to drop in at the Jumbo Liquor Market the next morning to clear up the Dumbo question, and so I sacrificed a few pages from the classified section of my Star to wrap it in and bore it along with me.

As I was crossing Abel Road with my unsought trophy, a little preoccupied it’s true, but as mindful of the traffic regulations as ever, a baker’s delivery van, adorned with a painting of Atlas shouldering a crisply browned Planet Earth still steaming from the oven, careered around the corner and very nearly knocked me down. I am in good shape for a man of my age, pate excepted, and I was able to leap to safety. I had the presence of mind, even as I overbalanced on the kerb and plummeted to the pavement, to glance at the rear of the vehicle to note the registration number. And there on the bumper I saw, to my annoyance, a sign that read: ‘How am I driving?’

Some bystanders came to my assistance, but I fended them off with elbows and epithets, equally sharp. They try to pick your pockets under cover of kindness. My fall had loosened the newspaper covering the ear, and people were staring. I rewrapped it as best I could, picked myself up, and hurried away. The mishap had disorientated me and I found myself going down Catherine Street, the way I had come. This was all too much. Unable to turn back without losing face, unwilling to stray from my accustomed path, I took refuge in the lounge at the Chelsea Hotel, and ordered a whisky to steady my nerves. They didn’t have whiskey at all — which I should have taken as forewarning that the place had gone to the dogs.

No sooner had my drink arrived than a woman sidled into the chair opposite and commanded me to buy her one too. My astonished expression produced a gust of tittering from her friends at the next table. Ladies of the night, I would say. They all seemed to be wearing foundation garments on top of their daywear. I took out my notebook and jotted down a few points about the Atlas Bakery van while the episode was still fresh in my memory. The harlot did not go away. Instead, she started picking at the newspaper in which the ear was swaddled. I had to gulp my drink and leave. She made a crack in isiSotho or whatever, and the streetwalkers tee-heed in the same lingo.

It was growing dark. As I approached Abel Road for the second time that evening, the full horror of my narrow escape overwhelmed me and I broke out in a sweat. I shouldn’t be surprised if the bolted drink also played a part. To think that I might have been lying in the roadway here right now, awaiting the ambulance or, God forbid, the mortuary van. Strangers rifling through my clothing, making a show of ascertaining my identity while lifting my small change, reading my notebook, leafing through my Pocket with their greasy fingers, scattering my bookmarks to the wind … farceur … feather … fiat … fleck … flint … I saw my life ebbing away. I saw my death, touch wood, as a precipitate efflux of vocabulary and idiom, the hoarded treasures of a lifetime spent in a minute, one immaculate vintage running into another, and the whole adulterated brew spilt on the dirty macadam of an unmemorable corner of a lawless conurbation. Flow: glide along as a stream; gush out, spring; (of blood) be spilt; (of wine) be poured out without stint (f. OE flōwan , unconnected with L fluere : flux). Unconnected. This city had a short memory. How many deaths might have occurred on this very spot and left no memorial? How many forgotten Abels had bled out their spirits at these crossroads, how many smooth-cheeked Cains were going about scot-free. And what would I have left behind, apart from these shop-soiled mortal remains? Invisible work. A pile of manuals and documents, obscure gazettes, directories and yearbooks, most of them out of print, which I had proofread well, and on which I had therefore left no visible trace. A negative achievement. ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, through which I had hoped to make a little mark, something of lasting value to which my name might be attached, lay incomplete in my desk drawer. Some second-hand furniture dealer would tip it into the rubbish skip in the alley behind his shop, along with my notes and cards and clippings, and the skip would be emptied into a landfill site and covered over with sand, and in the fullness of time another housing development would arise on the spot and bury it for ever. Hit and run! I saw myself lying there, sprawled across the elephant’s ear, newsprint fluttering around me like the Prospect Road corpse, and some ambulance man, or paramedic as they style themselves nowadays, smelling the alcohol on my breath and making the obvious wisecrack. But could a corpse be said to have something on its breath? The whisky was anachronistic anyway. If the bakery van had delivered me into the hands of the Great Compositor, I should never have stopped at the Chelsea to wet my whistle. I would have come up smelling not exactly of roses, but of Wilson’s XXX mints. My generally impeccable sense of chronology had been quite disordered. And it was all Wessels’s fault, talking about old faces and cartoon characters. He really was the bane of my life.

I didn’t want to take the ear up in the lift with me; what if I bumped into that nosey Mrs Manashewitz? That’s all I needed, to get half of Lenmar Mansions talking. So I left it in the care of Gideon, the nightwatchman, and he put it in the coal room in the parking garage overnight. Now that the thing had nearly cost me my life, I had more reason than ever to barter it for some useful information at the Jumbo Liquor Market.