Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

‘It’s not “Huge”, man, it’s “Eug”. E-U-G. For Eugene. How’s your mind?’

*

Wessels had crept closer to eavesdrop on my discussion with Bogey. I could practically hear his ears flapping.

‘Apartheid is yesterday,’ Bogey was saying. ‘But things of apartheid is today. Many things, rememborabilia … benches, papers, houses.’

He pressed a business card into my hand. Dan Boguslavić. Apartheid memorabilia. Import/export. The postal address was in Rndbrg. He made me look at his catalogue, eight glossy pages smelling of fresh ink. Ostrich eggs with paintings on them: Sharpeville Massacre. District Six, Forced Removals. Student Uprising, 1976. Stephen Bantu Biko. I thought ‘Bantu’ was outré? It didn’t end with eggs, either. There were all sorts of things for sale. Benches, whites only. Easy to assemble. Blankets, prison, grey. Books, reference.

‘People will hardly be interested in this old junk.’

‘Wakey-wakey, Aubrey. Is same in Germany now. Uniforms and hats is coming very strong.’

‘It’ll be Yugoslavia next.’

‘Bingo. Is exactly so. Major turnover is rubble.’

As if I couldn’t see the fresh produce sprouting from his pockets.

‘What’s with the veggies?’ Wessels said, sotto voce , the voice of the sot, canny as ever.

‘Is help for keep mout’ busy. I am give up smoking an’ stress like mad.’

In the pool room, Raylene was dabbing the end of her cue with a block of chalk. She must have felt my eyes upon her, because she glanced up and showed me the blue-smudged tip of her finger. Quite friendly, despite the muscles. There was Errol, bent over the table, with his bottom lip almost touching the cue. Full of himself, slopping over, dripping from that fleshy spout. And there was the improvable girl, drinking beer again and blowing smoke through her nose as awkwardly as a child who has stolen a cigarette from her mother’s handbag.

‘Quite a jôl, hey Aubs? And you said it would be a damp squid.’

Empty Wessels, the echo chamber, my incontinent, uncontinental china. He should be in Bogey’s catalogue amongst the novelty items.

‘You’ve certainly invited a crowd.’

The place was filling up. People who’d never set foot in the Café Europa before, by the look of them. You’d have thought it was a free-for-all. I’d half expected this to happen: chaos had been let loose everywhere and it was even worse during the festive season. Why should tonight be any different? And yet I’d hoped against hope for something fitting.

‘Maybe they coming for the cham- poing -ships.’

‘Buzz off, you jamjar. You urn.’

‘Come, Mr Tearle,’ said Hunky. ‘You mustn’t let him push your buttons.’

*

‘What you call this spot again?’

‘Alibia.’

‘Isn’t that where old Gadaffi hangs out?’

‘You’re thinking of Libya, Floyd. This is A-libia.’

‘Pull the other one, Mr T. I can check it’s only Cape Town.’

‘What an absurd idea.’

‘Look. Here’s Khayelitsha.’

*

Elements, quinary. The digits: thumb and fingers (fore, middle, ring and little). Away with pinkie! To the market with him! To the nursery! The excrescences: occipital (three o’clock, eight o’clock, nine) and cranial (half past five and twelve on the dot). The vowels: a, e, i, o and u. The violences: train, bus, taxi, car and pedestrian.

From the balcony, we watched people gathering in the streets, clustering and parting, drinking from bottles and whooping like Red Indians, rushing this way and that as firecrackers went off at their feet. Some of the fireworks were as loud as bombs. ‘Thunderflashes,’ Wessels said. ‘Used them on manoeuvres at the Battle School in Luhatla.’

A beer bottle exploded on the tar. One of the tribe of Merope had lobbed it from a window in the High Point Centre.

‘This is nothing,’ Floyd said. ‘Just wait till tomorrow night, then you’ll see sports. Last Old Year’s, someone chucked a fridge from the top of Ponte. It was cool. It landed on a minibus.’

The most dangerous missile that had been launched inside the Café Europa so far was a Cheese Snack.

The taxis: PNK497T To Gether As One … NGV275T The White Eagle … HJS046T Step by Step … MNN391T My Business Is My Parent … LTT843T The Young and the Restless.

A window shattered high above in the darkness and guillotines of glass sheared down. Some of the rabble-rousers swaggered around in the dangerous air, others dashed for the shelter of the verandahs. More and more of them came up the escalator. Errol didn’t seem to be taking his duties as commissionaire too seriously.

‘Who are all these people?’ Wessels kept asking. ‘It’s only half past nine.’

‘You should know. You invited them.’

A horde of Olé ’Enries stampeded in. Mimicking the unsporting frenzy of exultation into which their heroes, the football players, would fly whenever one of them scored a goal, they hurled themselves to the floor between the tables and slid along on their bellies like toboggans, clearly as impervious to carpet as to grass burns. There must be new varieties of both, quite unlike those I knew in my youth.

The ‘Open Door Policy’ always gives me a chill — you can feel the draught blowing through. I’m for ‘Right of Admission Reserved’.

I should have stayed at home.

*

‘Don’t get me wrong, Hunky. I dig your sound. Reminds me of old Felonious Monk, the musical Rasputin. But take it from me, you would be more of a hit , you would be further in , if you had a daft hairstyle. Say a bun like the Bonsma. And you must write your name on the side of the big bass drum.’

‘Ja, but I don’t have a drum. I told you, my drummer left me.’

‘I’m sorry, I clean forgot.’

His drummer left him. Can you imagine anything more pathetic?

The brushcut, the moptop, and now these besoms and feather dusters. It’s no wonder they can’t find jobs.

*

‘He had his moments. I remember once he tried to persuade us that the word “robot” was pronounced “ reau-beau ”. Said it was from the French.’

‘Don’t go spreading lies about me among the rowdies. I know exactly where the word comes from. It was invented by a Czechoslovakian called Capek. Pronounced ’

It should have been easy to turn the tables on them. But even as I was speaking, I could hear that I sounded ridiculous.

Spilkin said: ‘Tsk tsk tsk. Pronounced cha-cha-cha.’

Hoots of laughter.

Next thing, he’d be introducing them to Conrad Mandela.

*

‘You’re on my spot,’ Mevrouw Bonsma said. ‘My piano used to stand right here, believe it or not.’

For old times’ sake, Hunky surrendered the keyboard to her. It could produce a sound reminiscent of the piano, had she wished to perform one of her old standards, but she plunged instead into a new repertoire. He adjusted the keyboard so that it twanged like a banjo, and she played one of the less maudlin Cape coloured folk songs — ‘Daar Kom die Ali Baba.’ Darlene put her up to it. The two of them were getting along like a shack on fire. Then it was some ‘soul’ music, which indeed made one want to give up the ghost, and a Croatian ballad left behind by the Bogeymen. Musical mayhem.

I was disappointed in Mevrouw Bonsma. She was cultivated in her own way, and what she lacked in sophistication she had always made good with a certain rustic charm. But this was uncalled for. Had my first impressions of her promiscuous excess been right after all? What did she hope to achieve by making a spectacle of herself? Some spurious popularity among hoi polloi? Did she miss the applause so much?