Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

I looked in disbelief at the wider circle. Then I pushed the spectacles up on my forehead with a numb index finger and let the lenses fall in front of my eyes again like guillotine blades. Mustering my spent energies, I put each face to the proof. There was Huge, as black as pitch. Nomsa with her wig on sideways, a few shades lighter, but black nevertheless. McAllister, an ’Enry, and a brace of Eddies. And they were black too.

I touched my own face and looked at my fingers.

Black.

*

I scrutinized without blinking. The Café was barely recognizable. They had turned it upside down. Nothing but black faces on every side. Who were the invaders? The newcomers? The old regulars? One couldn’t work out who was who any more. I felt abandoned by friend and foe alike.

The sea was spilling over the breakwater in the Bay of Alibia. The other walls were streaming too. What was this liquid? Some frightful solvent in which all things would float and dissolve, gradually losing their shape and running into one another. A solution of error. It was striking up through the carpet, I was soaking it up like blotting paper. Sharp little objects pierced through my soles, and my shoes filled with a prickly sludge of delenda.

I bloated and swelled. The trembling in my innards, which I had taken for fear, revealed itself as rage. A rage to disgorge this superabundance of error, to get rid of it once and for all, to blow my stack.

I erupted. I gave them a mouthful, the Amadoda and Abafazi, the shithouses (excuse my Anglo-Saxon) of the holey city of Joburg, the Rotary Anns, the Pump-action Bradleys, Mr Frosty and Mrs Sauce, the Bushbuck Rangers and the Crystal Brains, the bobbers, the peddlers, the stinkers. I poured it out upon them, the printer’s pie, the liquid lunch, the hasty pudding, the swill of tittles and jots, the gaudy Gouda, the Infamous Grouse, the Jiffywrap, the Oatso Easy, the Buddywipes, the Wunderbuddels. Items, one-eared: Vincent van Gogh … John Paul Getty III … Dumbo … innumerable teacups and coffee mugs. I was not in the habit of speaking in this fashion, of seeing, of saying disorder, of chaos, of coarseness, but I had lost my tone. Where were my cadences, my measures? My pages were out of order. To be Papenfus or not to be Papenfus? What do you call a man under a shroud? Paul. Names for dogs, should I ever acquire one: Riley … Puccini … Houdini. Down ~ down ~ down ~ down. The beast would outlive me. It was past my bedtime.

They fell silent. Ashamed of themselves. Mevrouw Bonsma stopped playing. Then there was nothing but the sound of my own voice. It made no sense to me, it was nothing but a long, fluent spewing, it made no more sense than water gushing from a hose. I watched the stream of sound, I saw bubbles breaking underwater. I looked harder. Words were floating to the surface, and I rose with them into the familiar air, and found my place. My ears popped and I could hear properly again. Could hear a new voice, which was really my old voice, replete with authority.

I put my hand in my breast pocket and grasped ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, my logical conclusion. But prudence caught my wrist. What if they thought I was fetching out a weapon? Nowadays, every second person was carrying a firearm. So I reached instead for Errol’s pool cue, which was leaning against the wall beside me. How was I to know they use these things to beat one another?

*

I reached, as I said, for Errol’s pool cue, his Helmstetter. An object lesson. It was my intention to screw it apart, to present them with Helm and Stetter, to screw it together again. Not with the arrogant ease of its owner, but with authority.

Errol tugged at my sleeve like a child.

‘Keep your cretaceous little fingers off my blazer.’ I jerked my arm free. The moment had given me unnatural physical strength. Errol stumbled back as if I had punched him, and banged into one of the marauders, a brute with boot polish on his hands, wearing his jacket inside out. They grappled and clinched.

Was that all it took, one act of will, one assertion, to rouse them from their torpor? They claimed afterwards that I made to attack them with the pool cue. Can you credit it?

And then pandemonium. Errol rose up in the air with his loose-limbed body rattling, as if an almighty hand had pulled his strings, and flew backwards through the stained-glass windows. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt. He can thank the Jewish Benevolent for giving him that tuxedo. Chaos all around, a full-scale bar-room brawl. They were trying to get at me, to tear me limb from limb. And in their midst Spilkin, the lord of misrule, stirring them up against me. Against himself! He was pummelling his own face, as if he meant to blacken it further, inciting them to do their worst. Why should he side with the mob? Why should he tar himself with the same brush? Was it a sign of how low he had sunk, or had he always been this way, and I as blind to his faults as he to Darlene’s? She was there too, egging them on.

Then the bootboy, the one who had thrown Errol aside like a rag, stood in front of me. In his paw, the knife looked like a bodkin of the kind the compositors once used to winkle out type. He fell upon me. The blade struck my chest with a thud and went in. The force of the blow hurled me to the floor. I looked down and saw the hilt jutting from my rib cage. Pierced to the pith. I waited for the gush of bloody words. I felt no pain, but that was normal. I saw a crush of legs and enormous shoes with treads like teeth, and the plastered foot of Wessels, the toes squirming vermicularly, like the party snacks come to life. Then, in the thicket of combat boots and gymnasium shoes, I recognized a pair of winkle-pickers, with golden chains and black buttons. Moçes. He seized me under the arms and dragged me backwards into a corner.

Black and white and red all over.

‘You mustn’t pull it out,’ someone said. ‘That’s what they say at the St John’s.’

The fighting raged all around us.

I lay there, floating between life and death, waiting for the red river to carry me off into oblivion. It was a pleasant feeling, I wished it might endure. Then I opened my eyes and the spell was broken. I could not bear to look at the knife, lodged so improbably in my being, but I had an overwhelming urge to discover the extent of my injuries, to explore the split flesh, the intimate gore, while my life ebbed away. I reached my hand inside my jacket. And that was when I discovered that the blade had gone straight into the heart of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary .

*

I am not prone to theatrical gestures, but I made the most of this one. When they saw me walking calmly among them with the knife sticking out of my chest, the more superstitious invaders ran away, with Errol and Co in pursuit.

It was during this final skirmish that Floyd stabbed himself in the head. ‘They stuck the old tawpy,’ he said afterwards (meaning me), ‘so I schemed I’d stick them back. But I stuck my own self by mistake.’ I heard Floyd bellowing like a fatted calf and saw him fall by the glass doors. The others set upon him and began tearing at him greedily, like children opening presents under the Christmas tree. Were they ripping off his labels? No, it was worse, they were like scavengers at a carcase. A foot flew loose and landed near me. Not a foot, don’t be ridiculous, only a shoe, one of the oversized bootees. The tearing noises came from Velcro fasteners — the buckles were all false.

The knife was a comfort to me. It made me feel young and healthy, invincible and immortal. I did a circuit of the room, enjoying the feeling. Not to mention the holy terror in the eyes of all who beheld me.

Then I strolled onwards to the Gentlemen’s room to see what I looked like in extremis .

*

The mirror had been stolen, of course, and all I could see in the tiles was a swarthy smudge. I went into the cubicle for some paper to clean the muck off my face. And there in the corner stood the floating trophy. I sat on the toilet seat and rested the trophy on my knees. I looked at my image in its tarnished surface.