Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Nomsa was going round in circles. Nail her other foot to the floor. Showed me her back. Not to mention her backside. Bang! Bang! Allowed me to escape to the table. I wasn’t even sure if this was No. 2, now that all the furniture had been jumbled together, but quite by chance I found my old chair. Ah! In its supportive grasp, I regained my definition.

Four glasses of chocolate-brown liquor were lined up in front of Floyd. He shoved one of them at me. ‘Blowjob?’

Now what.

With a sly grin, he picked up a straw and drew its paper wrapper down to one end, crumpling it up tightly. He put this worm down on the table. Then he raised a small quantity of liquor up in the straw and spilled it out over the worm’s tail. At once, the thing stirred into life and began to stretch itself out on the table top. While I watched this phenomenon, frankly amazed, Floyd burst out laughing. The cartoon characters on his clothing winked with their human eyes and jerked their waggish hindquarters in time to the music.

I drank the brown stuff. Mocha.

*

‘Why you so black?’ Wessels said to the girl with the silver boater in an effort to charm her, trying to press his ear to her chest. ‘Are you sick?’

*

‘Eugene. Got a minute? l thought you’d want to know that you’re in the Concise under your proper name. At Jeep. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy to hand, but I do have a citation in my notebook here. “Eugene the Jeep. An animal in a comic strip.” Shall I write it down for you? No, that won’t do. Never smoked myself, but you’re bound to throw it away. Pass me that serviette.’

‘What’s this about a animal?’ Raylene sidled closer. ‘You better come right, before I tell Huge to bliksem you.’ To strike, as with a bolt of lightning.

‘You’re in questionable company, son. Slovo’s in there somewhere, at Slovene… and Smuts at blight… and Tutu plain and simple. Interested in sport? Here’s Borg, the tennis player, at borrow… Senna, the racing driver, unkindly defined as a laxative … Roux, a mixture of fat and flour used in making sauces …

‘On the back of your hand? I suppose so, if someone has a pen.’

*

‘Punt up the Volga!’ Don’t ask me. The music was so loud, one had to shout to make oneself heard. Without my lip-reading, I shouldn’t have followed a word anyone said.

For the umpteenth time that night I headed for the Gentlemen’s room, to relieve myself of nothing more than unwelcome company. But Mevrouw Bonsma spotted me, returned the keyboard to its owner, and dragged me back onto the dance floor. I was powerless to resist. Her hand on my arm was like a manacle, although her mobile surface was soft and moist. She kept bumping against me like a deflating weather balloon, leaving powdery smudges on my blazer. She was listing from foot to foot, rocking from tiptoe to heel, punching holes in the floor with her stilettos. A dotted line appeared in the puff pastry underfoot, and the floor gave beneath me. I saw myself plunging through into the kitchen of the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant down below, sprawled among the cabbage rolls.

After strenuous bouts of proofreading, the pages would cloud into negative, and I would see the solid space around the empty printed word, as if hot lead had been put down on the paper, burnt its way through, and plummeted into the void on the other side. The blocks of type drifted downwards in slow motion, with undeserved majesty, like commodities in television advertisements, like spacecraft or bombs.

Without warning, Mevrouw Bonsma pinned me in her arms and started gnawing at my ear. No amount of squirming could free me. The baked goods of my head. Plunge in the skewer. Something wet dripped onto my hand. Had the toothy tiara drawn blood? Or was the hairdo melting around her ears like a mousse? Then I felt her chest heaving, thrusting into mine.

‘I beg your pardon, Tearle,’ she sobbed, ‘in this instance, I am emotional.’

‘So are we all, Mevrouw.’

‘I am reminded that I made beautiful music once upon a time. Now I must type to make ends meet.’ She held one of her hands up for inspection, a clump of red knuckles and fingertips bruised with carbon-copy blue. ‘The minutes of meetings. The essays of students. The application for a licence.’

Pressing against me and swaying from side to side, in a swirl of noise, light and fumes, she went on brokenly about the Dorchester and the rotation of the dinner menus and God knows what else.

‘Poor old Merle,’ I said when the machines paused for breath. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

But she just clung to me more tightly, with long tears and face powder turning to batter on her cheeks, until the music went on again, and then she squeezed me into a new shape and dragged me after it.

Over her shoulder, I caught sight of the improvable girl. Why should improvement be a dirty word? Or was Spilkin joking? Her chest said: Get funky. I didn’t mean to stare, but there was no way round it if one wished to read the message. Funkily. Funkiness. Whenever I’d seen her before, her hair had been caught up in a faggot on the crown of her head. Now that she had let it down, it proved to be in braids, as thick as monkey-tails and as spiky as cacti. They reminded me of some species of fern whose name I have forgotten. She was tossing them wildly as she danced. ‘Corybantic’ was the word that leapt to mind. Her gyrations drew my eyes to her belly — a musk-melon slice of bared flesh — and her navel. It was a proofreader’s mark: . Delete and close up. Stick to and part from (6). Cleave.

Steffi Graf went waltzing by with Max Bygraves in her arms. Stepping on his toes in her tennis shoes. The bulge on her hip, under the grass-green sheath of the evening gown, showed where a ball was tucked into the band of her knickers.

‘Umpteen.’ It belongs in the nursery vocabulary. Is there no mature alternative?

*

With a deft twist of my torso, I broke free of Mevrouw Bonsma’s pruinose embrace and made for the balcony. There were a couple of questions I meant to ask Spilkin before I excised him from my life entirely, like a swollen appendix.

‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ Wessels shouted after me.

There were crowds outside as well. I pushed my way through to the railing. In the grisly shadow of Patronymić, Spilkin and Bogey were leaning. Spilkin’s hair was standing on end like a clown’s, Bogey had a carrot jutting from his mouth like a cigar. Gifts and Novelties. He gave me an apple and suggested I throw it into the street. I looked over the railing at the people milling down below. How big a fool did he think I was? The missile was bound to enrage someone. I gave the apple to Errol, whom I found at my shoulder, and he let fly. Meanwhile, I took out a pencil and sharpener.

Bogey licked the end of the carrot and dipped it in Patronymić’s pocket. It came out sugar-coated. Crystalline ash.

‘Old Aubs-ss is quite a literati, when you get to know him,’ said Wessels at my side.

‘Literatus, you burr. Not that there’s a grain of truth in the accusation.’

‘He’s been working on that exam of his again. The other day he was telling me how you guys helped him with the papers and so on.’

‘Now that really takes me back,’ Spilkin mused. ‘“The Proofreader’s Derby.” I’ll never forget it. An utterly mad scheme. That’s when I thought: he’s a crank. Aubrey, I can’t tell you how pleased I was when you got that bee out of your bonnet.’

He had become a splinter in my flesh. What was it Wessels had once called him? … A chip off the old shoulder. To steady my nerves, I turned the pencil in the sharpener and watched the shavings carried away on the breeze.