Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

I wished I might cry, but my eyes were dry as newsprint. A lifetime of poring over galleys had done my tear-ducts no good. Just as damaging as breaking limestone, if not so dramatic. And now this boot polish on top of everything. Perhaps I would need an operation, like The Madiba, to restore my sense of sorrow.

Better assess the other damages. No broken bones, thank God, but my pencils reduced to tinder. I pulled the knife out of my chest. One perfectly good blazer ruined. As for the Pocket , the blade had gone right through the alphabet. There was a course to be plotted from A to Z in wounded words, but the exercise struck me as merely technical, a forensic parody of lexical gymnastics.

With the knife in my hand, I became fully aware of how narrowly I had escaped. A salto mortale , a double tearle with a twist, unfolded in my brain. Here was the double tearle: jot(small amount, whit) and iota(atom, jot), both from the Greek iota , which is the letter ‘i’ without the dot. A jot is an iota. And here was the twist: tittle(small written or printed stroke or dot). Ergo: an iota is a jot missing a tittle or a tittle missing a jot. By distinctions as fine as these, I had cheated death.

*

The Café looked like a battlefield. I picked my way between broken-backed chairs, over the shattered kaleidoscope that was all that remained of the chapel, to the boneyard of the buffet. I was famished — it is common in the aftermath of combat — but there was not so much as a crust left. Mrs Hay passed like a ghost behind the blinds. In the doorway, Floyd lay clutching a bag of ice from the Hebcoolers, with a knot of people around him. Spilkin had the bloodied head in his lap, Darlene the stockinged feet. She glanced up accusingly as I approached. ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘By no means.’

‘You’ve got a lot to answer for.’

I’d expected a chorus of mockery, but the levity of the early evening had been replaced by a sombre calm. All these faces masked in black. Even Darlene, the mustafina, was as black as night. It was no longer amusing to anyone.

Mbongeni had surrendered the tea cosy as a makeshift tampon and let his hair down. Cotton-waste wads as long as my arm, the kind of thing that would come in useful at the printing works for wiping down the presses. I showed him the skewered Pocket . The word quickly spread that I hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest after all. It dispersed some of my mystique.

‘You an incredibly lucky somebody.’

‘You could of died.’

‘But Floyd saved your life.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

‘Ja, they would of come back to finish you off if it wasn’t for Floyd.’

It made no sense to me that he should have leapt to my defence after what had happened. But it seemed crystal clear to them. Errol, dusting a confetti of shiny glass from his padded shoulders, said: ‘You a puss, Churl — but you one of our boys. Leave it or lump it.’

Hunky Dory reappeared. ‘I called 911 and wah-wah-wah ,’ he declared, which was his way of saying that he’d summoned an ambulance.

*

The ambulance men put Floyd on a breadboard, for the spine, they said, and wrapped him in aluminium foil like a garlic loaf, for the shock. He looked smaller than usual. They carried him out through the glass doors. Incongruously, I thought of Merle. I saw her packaged by the undertakers, stuffed into a fluffy brown bag with a zipper up the front, like an oversized slipper. The idea was suffocating.

There was a muddle on the landing outside as they bundled the stretcher onto the escalator. In the midst of it all stood Wessels, with the silver boater on his head, swinging his crutch imperatively and bawling out instructions. His face had been rather inexpertly polished, except for the chin, which was as shiny as a toecap. The sight of me seemed to enrage him.

‘It won’t help to have a long white face,’ he said. ‘If you truly sorry for what you done, you can make yourself useful. Go with to the hospital.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I say it might help to have a white face along.’

What relevance this had, seeing that I myself was as black as the ace of spades, was beyond me. In any event, I had no wish to go about in public looking like a greasepainted minstrel. I turned away and watched the ambulance men descend towards the pavement with their burden. The ghouls had gathered, crowding around the open doors of the ambulance, trying to catch a glimpse of Floyd.

Then Wessels stuck the crutch in the small of my back and thrust me bodily onto the escalator.

In my younger days I might have vaulted clear, like that daredevil in the tartan underpants; but when a man of my age finds himself upon a ‘moving staircase’, he moves with it, willy-nilly. I descended. A distracting consideration echoed in my mind: could one be carried downwards by an escalator? Strictly speaking. The very normality of the distraction reassured me that I had come to my senses. De-escalation. The sort of ugly back-formation that would be in the book on top of the cistern. Along with the sayings of sailors and whores. Anything goes.

I had every intention of returning to the fray. It was not as if I could be ‘bounced’ from the Café Europa, especially not by Wessels. I would go straight up again, I would take hold of his foliose lapels and shake him until his epiglottis rattled. Didymus. Skeuomorph. Jughead. Imagine quaffing the contents of that bonce — that watery pap! Point made, I would track down Moçes, the hero of the moment, and thank him for his help. A small reward might be in order. And then I would retrieve ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ and leave the whole lot of them to the mess they were in. That ersatz eighth edition could stay where it was, at the mouth of the sewer. I had every intention … But on the pavement, I bumped into the improvable girl, clambering into the ambulance. The child looked quite lost against a backdrop of cheerful onlookers. Evidently, the sight of a broken crown tickled them.

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘I’m going with Floyd to Casualty.’

‘Where’s his girlfriend?’

‘She won’t come. She says he’s just being pathetic and he’s not going to spoil her bash with his nonsense.’

My heart went out to her. She must have sensed it, because she began to plead with me to accompany her. I felt my resolve weaken. I should do the decent thing. Who else could be relied upon? Dimly, I couldn’t help wondering whether I had played some part in this fiasco. Floyd’s bloody head rolled over on the pallet. The wound was like the flesh of an olive peeled away from the pip. The doctors might give him a talking-to while they were stitching him up. Perhaps it would all work out for the best.

An ambulance man nearly saved my bacon by holding up a bloodstained rubber glove. ‘You can’t come with. Only the wife in the ambliance.’

But the girl said, ‘He’s my father-in-law’ — as if that were within the bounds of possibility — grabbed me by the arm, and before I knew it, they had hauled me aboard and slammed the door behind me. The sirens broke into a Hunky-Doryish melody.

‘I’ve never been in an ambulance,’ she said.

‘Neither have I. Strong as an ox.’

She smelt of watermelons. It reminded me of the watermelon feasts of my youth.

And then Floyd groaned: ‘You gotta stand by me, Mr T. Don’t let me die, man. Don’t let me die.’

*

I had a funny turn on the way to the hospital.

It started with my crooked reflection looking back at me from the shiny surface of some piece of equipment. Crank. An eccentric person, especially one obsessed by a particular theory. See cranky. Perhaps from obsolete crank , rogue feigning sickness. I was sick. I belonged in an ambliance. I should lie down on the other stretcher. Flawless backflip with a double twist to crank, part of an axle or shaft bent at right angles. From crincan , related to cringan , fall in battle, originally ‘curl up’. I was bent. Twisted in the wrong place. Crinkum-crankum. I needed straightening out. Ortho — as in orthopaedic, orthographic — from the Greek orthos , straight. ‘You’re so straight.’ I moved myself backwards and forwards, watching my shape deform around the elbow in a silver tube. My head distended into a soggy melon, elongated impossibly, like a blob of molasses on the end of a spoon, until it suddenly flowed around the bend and stretched my neck into a long thin string. Just as my head was about to detach itself entirely and plummet, I moved slightly, causing my shoulders to swell up and flow after it in a rush. An abrupt constriction in the chest. My recent past, unsavoury to the last morsel, churned in my stomach and threatened to revisit the outside world.