Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Someone called for a duet and Mevrouw Bonsma promptly assented. She played ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’ while Hunky twiddled the knobs to make the oscillator hum. She stood on her toes and swayed like a moored blimp. He waggled his head from side to side like a dog with a bone in its jaws. The machinery barked and bayed. I hardly wanted to think about the havoc this discord must be invoking in the spirits of the listeners. I myself was feeling strangely disconnected.

‘Anything from the bar?’

‘Whiskey please.’

‘With an e. As in Tearle.’

‘I’ll have a Flight of the Fish Eagle and Tab.’

‘Are you watching your cholesterol?’

Fish Eagle, Famous Grouse, Cold Duck. Birds of a feather. The Bluebird of Happiness alighted upon the ‘national anthem’. Everyone sang along and beat time on the furniture. Not that I cared. It was all bound for the auctioneers anyway.

‘We’re like the United Nations,’ Darlene said.

‘Amen.’ And then Spilkin’s distasteful joke about Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma, which I had not thought about for years, came into my mind.

‘What a face,’ Nomsa said, jiggling on Wessels’s knee. ‘You’re so straight.’

‘I refute that. I’m as cryptic as the next man.’

‘He’s not straight at all,’ Wessels put in, ‘he’s completely bent.’

Spilkin came back with the drinks.

Bouncing up and down on the furniture had given Nomsa the idea for musical chairs. In a moment, a space had been cleared and some chairs arranged in ranks (I clung to mine like a leech). It was all just an excuse to be loud and reckless, to laugh like striped hyenas, to bump their bodies together. Wessels loved every minute of it; he always managed to fling himself down so that one of the girls would sit on him. The chairs would soon have been reduced to matchwood, had the New Management not pulled the plug. They gave Mevrouw Bonsma a special hand. Scattered applause, like chapters closing. Hunky Dory announced that he would be taking a slightly longer break than usual to eat his dinner. Once fortified, he promised, he would ‘rock on’ into the small hours. I saw no reason why the machines should not keep themselves occupied in his absence, but it was a welcome respite.

With that, the New Management unveiled the eats.

*

‘Five-finger exercises, that’s what the doctor ordered, digital gymnastics.’ I was working my way round to the lexical version.

‘Hip hop like sucks.’

‘English please, Dory.’

‘Later, man. I’m trying to chow, if you don’t mind.’

So I was unable to discuss the etymologies of ‘woofer’ and ‘tweeter’, which his performance had revealed to me.

Chow. For now. In the scramble at the buffet table, I bumped into Herr Toppelmann, another gatecrasher. He had brought a barrel of dill pickles as a donation, and urged me to try them. But by the time I got to the front, there was nothing left but buffalo wings and tinker toys. Blocks of Gouda, cross-sections of red-skinned wiener sausages and green cocktail onions, skewered on toothpicks like little models of traffic lights. Reau-beaus .

*

Chairs had been dragged to tables and a few ragged circles constituted. The old faces and old bodies jumbled up with Errol and Co, higgledy-piggledy. ‘In utter confusion.’ Probably with reference to the irregular herding together of pigs, from the Latin porcus . With their snouts in their paper plates. I’d expected someone to turn on the telly, so that the silence might be filled up with chatter, but they were all too busy stuffing themselves. For a while you could hear nothing in the Café but an oceanic murmur of snorting and snuffling, in which the sounds from the street — hooters, curses, catcalls, explosions, drunken choruses — were presently submerged.

I looked in on Alibia, where it was still broad daylight, where this evening had not yet begun, and made straight for St Cloud’s Square to buy a buttonhole for the long-awaited dinner. Perhaps I should splash out on a bottle of champagne, I was thinking, and pop the question along with the cork? My old friend Munnery hailed me from the other side of the canal: ‘Big night tonight, Tearle. Don’t forget the chestnuts.’

Should I present ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ now? As a prelude to my announcement, I cleaned my spectacles. When I put them back on again, I noticed the plastic No. 2 still standing to attention beside the sugar pot, and it brought a lump to my throat. I am generally a tough customer. As if to remind me of this fact, a girl with a silver boater on the back of her head took one of the sugar sachets from the pot, opened it with her teeth, and poured the contents into the pocket of Patronymić’s jacket.

The gobbling rose, and fell, and ebbed away. As the plates emptied, and the realization that they were still hungry began to creep up on the grazers, the mood of disappointment grew. They were still hungry . It made them bloody-minded.

‘Just like old times, hey?’ Wessels smirked.

‘Not exactly. We were a quieter lot.’

‘You wouldn’t shut up for a minute,’ Darlene said.

I addressed Spilkin over her head. ‘We got on splendidly in the beginning, before all this other nonsense started.’

‘What nonsense would that be, Aubrey? Bad table manners? Talking with your mouth full?’

‘This perpetual discord.’

‘I think it’s quite peaceful around here, all things considered.’

‘Even you and I had our differences. But we always patched them up, because we had so much in common to start with.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. We shared a couple of interests, but we were worlds apart as people.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘You’re totally verkramp , for one thing,’ Darlene put in her five cents’ worth.

I’d heard the Afrikanerism before. There was silence for a moment, a true silence, round and hollow, as her words sank in, and then the grunting and grinding rose up in it like backwash in a blowhole. Greasy lips, crumbs of food in the corners of mouths, flies and fever blisters, morsels spilled on the tables, gristle, grubs.

‘Some misguided people find me unbending, but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It serves my purposes. My one aim has been to raise standards of conduct and thought, not just between these four walls, but in the world beyond. I’ve always tried to set an example.’

‘That’s the bloody problem,’ said Spilkin. ‘You think people need correcting. Your obsession with raising us up to your level shows exactly how little you think of us. It’s the measure of your disdain.’

Then an ’Enry said I was a misanthrope, and Wessels said I hated him, and Darlene said I hated her even more. No matter what I said in reply, they just shouted me down with mock arguments about which of them I disliked the most. They were ganging up on me. I saw it now. At the eleventh hour, they had resolved to drive me out. The drumsticks rose and fell, beating a tattoo on the paper plates, the jaws went on grinding. Darlene drew a wishbone through the gaps in her teeth, first one branch and then the other. ‘Make a wish, Tearle.’ She held the bone out to me.

My little finger twinged, but refused to pronate.

‘You see. He won’t even pull with me.’

‘He might get a bit of your gob on his precious pinkie.’

‘He thinks his arse is parsley.’

Another round of gibing about my hypocrisy, my stand-offishness, I was high and mighty, that was the word, I did not want to mix. Someone claimed that I used to lie about my address so that no one would visit me. I made a spirited defence of the virtue of keeping one’s private life private, of maintaining the proper balance between the private and the public — it was a European art, I said, by way of explanation. That caused an outcry.