Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

But nothing would come to me.

I emptied my pockets. The No. 2. The ear of the trophy. Pencil tinder. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary . When I tried to page to the back, the leaves wouldn’t part. Still wedged together. In the depths of X, Y and Z, among the endpapers, I found the tip of the stranger’s knife, snapped off in the board. I prised it out with my staple remover: a little curved triangle of steel like a shark’s fin. I dropped it into the trophy, along with the plastic sign and the question mark.

I put the trophy on the window-sill and propped the original of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ against it. It was a comfort to me, small, but comfort nevertheless, that I had been prevented — that I had prevented myself — from exposing this unfortunate construct to the public. But what had become of the photostatic copies? A dozen of them, riddled with corrigenda, had been let loose in the world. Things to be corrected; things corrected. Two sides of one coin. The urgency of preparing a corrected version pressed in on me. But the world was so full of error as it was. Surely it could wait for one night?

Then I collapsed on my bed and slept the sleep of the dead.

*

I awoke in the dark with a word sounding in my ears. Avogadro! Avogadro! I couldn’t place it. Avogadro! Then my ears popped and I realized it was a dog barking. I’m beginning to think there’s a wire loose in my brain — not a screw, mind you — but some short circuit, some faulty connection. With all the upsets of the past weeks, starting with that damned bakery van, it would hardly be surprising if something had been shaken loose. Or perhaps it’s not the wiring so much as the plumbing; a small leak through a cracked wall, spreading insidiously, making everything damp. The barking was somewhere in the building. I made a note to tell Mrs Manashewitz. The contract was clear: No pets allowed.

What had become of Il Puce? Was she pining away in an empty room? Greyfriars Benny.

My watch showed nine o’clock. Post meridiem! I’d slept the day away.

The previous day and night came back to me.

I went through to the lounge and switched on the light. My dictionaries sprang to attention on the shelves. Who will marshal them when I’m gone? The floating trophy was on the window-sill, with its one ear cocked for the sound of gunshots in the street outside. ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ lay face down on the carpet. On the curved lid of the trophy, the gymnast was pirouetting against a square of night, poised as ever, perfectly balanced.

All these trifles would endure, when their names, nestled now in the folds of my brain, were dead and gone.

I must get on with the correction. There’s no rest for the wicked.

A fire rocket rose in the distance and burst in a rattle of explosions.

I crossed to the window and looked south, for want of another option. What was it Merle advised me to do? To look on the bright side … The lights of motor town lay before me, the highways coiled like cables on the matt black of the mining wasteland, and beyond them the southern suburbs, the buffer zones, filling up with informal settlements, and the townships. Movements were afoot in those dark spaces that would never be reflected in the telephone directories. Languages were spoken there that I would never put to the proof. As if they were aware of it themselves, the lights were not twinkling, as lights are supposed to do, they were squirming and wriggling and writhing, like maggots battening on the foul proof of the world.

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Ivan Vladislavićis the author of several collections of stories and four acclaimed novels including The Restless Supermarket and Double Negative (And Other Stories, 2013). The latter began life as a project with the photographer David Goldblatt. Vladislavić has written extensively about Johannesburg, where he lives. Portrait with Keys is a sequence of documentary texts about the city. His work has won many awards, including the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.