Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

A salesman buggering a pink elephant (excuse my Bulgarian). Not a sight one sees every day, even on the streets of Johannesburg — the Golden City as it were, Egoli as it are, to quote my pal Wessels, the last of the barnacles. As the century declines to a conclusion one has come to expect undignified behaviour as a matter of course, but this was an ‘all-time low’ (as the newspapers would put it). I see it before me now as if it were yesterday.

I say he was a salesman because of the pinstriped suit, the shirt-tails hanging out behind, the tie drooping on his chest like a slice of pizza. Old-fashioned associations on my part. He might just as well have been a popular star, or a lawyer with a passing interest in human rights, or the head of a syndicate for stealing motor cars. These days, the men in lounge suits are good-for-nothings more often than not, while the real businessmen are waltzing around in Bermuda shorts and espadrilles. Whoever he was, he had hold of the elephant on the pavement outside the Jumbo Liquor Market in Kotze Street, gripping its shocking pink buttocks in his paws and grinding his groin against its unyielding fibreglass tail.

I stopped to stare. A lifetime of practice has turned me into one of the world’s most shameless scrutineers.

The joker’s eyes were screwed shut in rapture, but the elephant’s were like saucers, with painted pupils as black as draughtsmen rattling in them. The beast’s pointed ears stood on end like wistful wings and its trunk curled an outraged question mark over its little gasping mouth. Its eyes met mine without blinking.

‘Hey, Arch! Check what Darryl’s doing.’ Spoken by another ill-suited entrepreneur fumbling for a wallet while the cashier rang up a carton of Camel cigarettes and a bottle of Red Heart rum.

The Jumbo Liquor Market, as its name suggests, is a ‘convenience store’ in the American mould. Sliding glass doors open directly onto the pavement so that the passing trade can totter in and out with a minimum of effort. From till to gutter in three easy steps. Arch came out to see what Darryl was up to. Arch, Darryl and the Third Man. A little triumvirate, unholy and unwise, but citizens nevertheless of the conurbation in which I find myself.

Bump and grind from the rear.

Arch said, ‘Ag, stop it man Darr. You making your name tawty.’ (Just who or what ‘tawty’ is, I cannot say: it’s in none of the reference works and no one will enlighten me. Perhaps a South African counterpart of that scoundrel Mudd?)

Darr slumped down on the elephant’s back and spoke passionately into one outflung ear: ‘Suffer, baby, suffer.’

Snorts of laughter from Arch and the Third Man. What would his name be? Some monosyllabic chunk no doubt, some unfeeling stump like Gav or Ern or Gord. People were starting to gather. Shoppers from the supermarket on the next corner, drinkers from the verandah of the Chelsea Hotel across the way, the twilight children, drawn out in broad daylight by the spectacle, a couple of continental gentlemen in open-neck shirts. As representative a cross-section of conurbanites as you could wish to find.

Suffer, baby, suffer. It was the punchline of a Wessels joke, I’m sure, entertained reluctantly like all the rest. I never forget a punchline — but I’m damned if I can remember a joke. Except for that one about Rubber Dinghy Sithole. ‘What’s black and goes with the stream?’ I’ve spoilt the effect by putting it back to front. It must be all of fifteen years since Erasmus at Posts and Telecommunications told it to me, around the time Rhodesia attained its majority, and for some reason it stuck. The pink elephant, I noticed, was chained to a parking meter, expired.

Right on cue, the Queen of Sheba staggered out of the alley between the Jumbo and Hypermeat. She had a throne there, a sponge-rubber armchair the colour of urine, upon which she sometimes reclined wearing a paper crown from a Christmas cracker and a robe of threadbare carpeting. She was drawn to Darr at once. As she gazed at him, she stuck a hand through the armhole of her dress and absent-mindedly rearranged her breasts. He huffed and puffed and oohed and aahed, and opened one eye to gauge the response of his growing audience.

Hypermeat was flogging half a dead sheep @ R12.95 a kilogram, and sirlion steaks @ R6.95 a cut. Doing a roaring trade, I suppose. ‘Nice meat’ said a blackboard, also chained to a parking meter, with ten minutes on the dial.

The Queen staggered closer. She smelt like the bottom of the barrel. Seeing that the rear end of the elephant was already occupied, she approached the front and tried to clamber up like a mahout. Darr kept thumping away. An ‘ugly situation’ all right, and bound to get uglier. Arch saw it coming. He took Darr by the arm and tried to drag him away, but was shrugged off. The Third Man, hurrying to Arch’s assistance, dropped his wallet, and coins scattered across the pavement. The children swooped. I put my foot down on a one-rand coin and examined the little ones to see if there was a deserving case among them.

The Queen got a leg over the elephant’s neck and sprang up, overbalanced, grabbed at an ear, which snapped off in her hands, and plunged over the other side. Her head struck the fender of the [Henry] Ford parked at the kerb. The car began to shriek; the Queen, God save her, was silent. Darryl came to a shuddering halt. A tiny peep, the sound a crib toy might make if you squeezed it, issued from the elephant’s trunk.

‘Meesta Ferreira! Meesta Ferreira! Pleece comb tew da frount!’ the cashier said urgently into a microphone. Mr Ferreira’s face appeared in a diamond of glass in the door at the back of the shop.

Enough. I kicked the coin down a stormwater drain and hurried on to the Café Europa. I had seen enough to know what would inevitably follow: skop, skiet and donner , and their corollaries, snot and trane . (These are Wesselisms for trouble and tears, and the fact that I stoop to them is a sign that better words have failed me.) Mr Ferreira arrives on the scene, thrusting out the managerial bulges of his pink blazer. Arch and Darr wrestle. The Queen bleeds unconsciously. Voices and fists are raised. The Queen comes round and begins to wail. Her courtiers creep out of their holes and try to console her by falling over her and tugging at her clothing. Speaking in indigenous tongues, roaring and cursing, laying on of hands and feet. Mr Ferreira enters into the spirit by taking out his revolver. The Third Man trots across the street, opens the door of a black sedan (one of those ubiquitous abbreviations that issue in an unbroken line from the Bayerische Motoren Werke) and reaches for something under the driver’s seat. The owner of the stricken Ford comes running with a serviette tucked into his pullover, and examines the dented fender as if it is a wound in his own flesh. Multilingual sobbing. Four-letter words fly, the whole dashed alphabet. The air goes dark with obscenity, the leading players are obscured by it, the bystanders grow restless, Darryl is still darrylling away in the gloom, Arch is arching, the manager managing. And then warning shots, Your Honour, falling down.

In a word: chaos.

One Sunday morning not too long ago, on an overgrown plot in Prospect Road, I saw a body in the weeds, under a shroud of pages from the Sunday Times . I saw it from the window of my own flat, where I stood with a carton of long-life milk in my hand, and I could almost smell the pungent scent of the kakiebos crushed by its fall. It lay among the rusted pipes, blackened bricks and outcrops of old foundations that mark every bit of empty land in this city, as if a reef of disorder lay just below the surface, or a civilization had gone to ruin here before we ever arrived.