Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

I lifted my eyes to Alibia. I expected a blank wall, a black wall, I thought the city would have been knocked down and carted away piece by piece. But it was still there, with its lights winking gaily in the dark. O happy Alibians, blessed citizens of elsewhere! In your bright rooms, before your clear mirrors, dressing for the Goodbye Bash. The big wheels are turning, the coloured lights are dancing on the esplanade, the band members are tuning their instruments in the park. On the football field behind the church, the warden keeps guard over the fireworks to make sure the schoolboys don’t steal them or let them off early. The nut-roasters on Opera House Square greet me cheerily as I go down the steps to the river to hail a punt. The champagne is on ice. I will have a long hot bath, and shave at the window, looking out on the lights.

The Café Europa had been trashed. That was the word for it. We picked our way through the debris of paper cups, monkey vines of coloured streamers and tinsel and toilet paper, tattered dollars, carrot tops, bottles of every shape and size, the jewelled shards of the stained glass. And Cheese Snacks everywhere, crunched into powder, like shed gilt. The newspapers lay scattered on the carpet, with their pages curling from the wooden spines, like moths that had flown too close to the chandeliers. I was tempted to take one of the staves as a keepsake — but that would reduce me to the level of the vandals. I would take nothing more than what was mine.

They had used the base of the floating trophy as an ashtray. Filthy, stinking habit. I emptied the ash out in a potted palm. Were those Wessels’s tatty butts? Mevrouw Bonsma’s red-lipped little gaspers? Errol’s marijuana ‘zols’? The cup was full of slops. Cold duck and cold turkey. But at least no one had bled into it. I emptied the slops into the palm too. It really didn’t matter any more. Everything once mantled dismantled had been. My trophy had only one ear. The missing one lay on the carpet like an italicized question mark. I put it in my pocket.

Now to retrieve my copies of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. I went into the Gentlemen’s room and opened the window. A scrap of plastic fluttered from the pipe: the rest of the bag was gone. I climbed up on the washbasin and tried to stick my head out of the window so that I could see whether they had fallen into the well below, but it was impossible. My neck gave a warning twinge. Could someone have stolen them? Or had an ill wind scattered them to the four corners of the city?

Into the cubicle to look for the Concise . That was also gone. Someone must have needed it to prop up a table leg or weigh down a roof. To some people, a dictionary is no different to a breeze-block or a pumpkin. Perhaps it was just as well, with my neck acting up. No burden was too great, if one had bearers to do the donkey work; then one might carry all twenty volumes of the Oxford off to a desert island. But when you were responsible for the haulage yourself, it was a different story. My whole body had begun to ache.

Do you remember the one about Speedy Gonzales and his chum Pedro, who were lost in the desert? I used to have it down pat, but now it’s gone like the rest, and all that comes back is the punchline: ‘Pull yourself together, Pedro.’

I must have looked shaken when I returned to the Café, because Shirlaine said: ‘I can’t believe you’re so upset this joint is closing down. It’s not the end of civilization, you know. There are new places for whites opening up in Rosebank.’

It dawned on me that it really was over. Somehow I had imagined that Wessels and I would be sitting here for ever, while the world ran down around us like an immense grandfather clock.

*

‘Do you want this?’

It was a little book with a floral binding, which she had picked up on the balcony. A rhyme had been inscribed on the flyleaf:

If this book should chance to roam,

Box its ears and send it home,

to Darlene Spilkin

33 3rd Avenue, Fez Valley

The first page was blank. The second and third pages contained a drawing of a wall, topped by the legend: ‘Be a brick. Help me to build a wall of friendship.’ There were a dozen bricks in the wall already — everyone from Hunky Dory to Henry the Eighth.

‘You keep it.’

*

I kept a lookout for the Queen of Sheba, but the throne was vacant. Dumbo was in his cage, dumbfounded as ever, saucer-eyed. You’d think he’d been slurping the canned maroela beer. I addressed him fondly, exhorting him to revolt, to smash down the bars. Given half a chance, I would have taken up Quim’s quirt, with its beaded handle, hanging against the wall by the refrigerators, and thrashed that dumb beast to the point of rage. I had a vision of him on the rampage in Kotze Street, gathering his comrades about him, a herd of pink elephants, trampling down pedestrians, tossing urchins around like straws.

But he didn’t seem to recognize me.

Hypermeat was flogging half a dead sheep @ R16.95 a kilogram. On the tiled window-sill, behind the burglar-proofing, leaned a blackboard that read: Nice meat — Lekker vleis — Inyama enhle. Just a sample of the official languages, of which there were now dozens.

That @, which I had always regarded as the very omphalos of consumerism, reminded me of Shirlaine. I had expected some awkwardness when we said goodbye. She would try to give me a peck on the cheek, I would pat her shoulder and do my best not to wound her with my spectacles. But she had disappeared as if I didn’t exist.

*

The delete mark is the most individual of marks, as distinctive, some say, as a fingerprint or a signature. I worked with a Dixit whose delete mark was a floating balloon, filled to bursting with nullity; a Figg who had a sharp-tongued scythe for cutting a swathe through verbiage; a Walker who strung up a hangman’s noose; a Diallo who had a frying pan; a Munnery with a magnifying glass.

And I knew a Rosenbaum once (he was never a colleague), whose delete mark silhouetted his own Semitic nose, complete with a connoisseur’s nostril for sniffing out error — although you had to turn the page upside down to see it.

As for me, when I started out at Posts and Telecommunications, I modelled my mark on a monocle; somewhat old-fashioned but elegant and unwavering. I regarded that lens as the echo of my proofreader’s eye. But as I grew older, it began to change. A gap opened up, an unpardonable gap, where the lens was attached to its handle. It was probably my weakening eyesight. Yet it wasn’t until the Café Europa’s days had been numbered that it began to remind me of an unravelling bond, a broken circle with a loose end dangling from it.

A chap named Niblo, who tasted copy for the Government Printer, once argued that the mark, my ‘fanciful’ derivations notwithstanding, was neither more nor less than a delta. Short for ‘delete’. But I see no reason to believe him.

*

Gideon the watchman stared at me as if I’d risen from the dead. When I scrutinized myself in the mirror, under the full force of the neon light, I saw why. My face was a deathly grey, and edged all round in black, like a telegram full of bad news.

Merle. I went to the stack of unread Stars on the corner of my desk. I saw that she had died on the second. The notices were in the newspapers of the third and fourth. The same wording in each of the three messages: Passed away after an illness. Lovingly remembered and always missed by Jason, Kim, Liam and Jessie. By her daughter Kerry, son-in-law Fred, and granddaughters Bianca and Katherine. And by her cousin Louella. An entire family conjured up. By some miracle, there was not a single corrigendum. But it was a pity about that repeated refrain, which revealed that they hadn’t bothered to compose their own messages. Perhaps originality meant little in these circumstances. It had always struck me as ridiculous to apostrophize the departed, as if they took in a daily in the hereafter. What would I have said?