The Restless Supermarket

by Ivan Vladislavic

  ‘What’s to become of us?’ he was still dictating, mocking my accent. ‘We part of the furniture around here.’

  Speak for yourself. The whole of his person appears to be covered with the same stiff horsehair that sprouts from his ears. The way it sticks out of him, you could believe that he was stuffed with it. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a shiny spring burst out of the fabric stretched over his belly.

  ‘Those were the days. Yours faithfully.’

  He has all the finesse of an ottoman, I thought. He had stopped speaking at last and was gazing at me over the spatulate ends of his fingers. You piece of wood. You wing-eared lounger. You stool. And then by anatomical association: You clot. You thrombus. ‘Those were the days?’ You have no idea what the days were. By the time you arrived on the scene, the days were no longer what they were supposed to be. That it should come to this. That I should end up with Wessels, of all people, up the creek in a leaky kayak. It was a bitter irony. I had often consoled myself that things were not as bad as they might have been, but now it came home to me that they were actually worse.

  The same canoe coming and going (5): kayak.

  Wessels called Moçes to turn up the volume on the television set. News from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. For some time now, Wessels had been making a show of interest in national affairs. Oddly enough, I had a feeling he was trying to impress the waiters. CODESA this and CODESA that. The country was disappearing behind a cloud of acronyms. As for the décor at the ‘World Trade Centre’ – how could one expect proper political decisions to be made in those dreadful surroundings? The place looked like a brothel.

  I excused myself.

  Alcohol does not agree with me. It argues, it presents opposing viewpoints − like that Freek Robinson on the television. In the Gentlemen’s room I scrutinized, as I always did, the peculiar geometrical pattern in the frosted glass of the window. In the beginning, it had reminded me of those abstract designs in nails and string that were thought so modern when I was starting out at Posts and Telecommunications. But then I’d begun to think of it as a hide stretched between stakes, the skin of some animal kept under glass.

  I turned to the wall above the washbasin where the mirror was meant to be (I had seen it there myself as recently as the day before): four small holes and a faint outline of grime showed where it had been secured to the tiles. Someone had unscrewed it and carried it off. I couldn’t believe it was gone. In the shiny tiles, my image wavered. I wet my fingers under the tap and ran them over what was left of my hair, then dried the bumpy top of my head with a wad of paper towels, staring down the pale ghost. I took off my spectacles, huffed on them, dried them on my tie. Without my eye-glasses, the ghost in the wall disappeared entirely.

  Alcohol spoke in the archaic, extravagant language it uses during our arguments. It said: This is your lucky day, spindleshanks. Nature has done you a favour by dimming your sight. And some petty thief, working hand in hand with natural forces, a marvellous example of symbiosis, has performed a greater service by carrying off the mirror, in which you might otherwise see yourself as you really are: not the distinguished figure you think you cut, not the debonair sea-captain, but a shabby deckhand, a figure of fun, a fogram. You and Wessels make a perfect pair, Wessels with his sprouty ears, you with your raisiny cranium and your fish-eyes.

  When I got back to the table, Wessels was just leaving. He said he had to get home to feed the cat. That was rich. He wanted to get to the off-sales at the Senator before closing time.

  That reminded me. ‘I saw something amazing at the Jumbo Liquor Market when I was on my way over here. You know that mascot thing of theirs that they put out on the pavement, the elephant—’

  ‘Dumbo.’

  ‘Jumbo,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Dumbo, from the comics, the heffalump who could fly.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t read his books?’

  ‘It didn’t occur to me that he might be an author.’

  ‘Sorry, Aubs-ss, got to run. We’ll speak later.’

  I had to call him back for his bill, which he was conveniently forgetting under the pot of sugar sachets. He paid up and hobbled out. Someone had written a message on the plaster cast and drawn an anatomical diagram. Obscene graffiti, I suppose.

  When he had gone, I summoned Moçes to turn the sound down on the television. I was the only person watching, if you can call the idle apperception of an image on a screen ‘watching’: men in suits voicing opinions. Talking heads. Strictly, heads and shoulders. Moçes tapped the volume button with the end of a warped pool cue. Old Eveready used to make do with his forefinger, but these days people need ‘equipment’ for the simplest tasks. The set in the opposite corner went on murmuring. There was a different image on that screen: a football match. Alarmingly green lawn, cunningly mown into the MacLaren tartan. Arsenal 2, Urinal 1. A punchline, if I’m not mistaken. Half a dozen men (the Olé ’Enries, between you and me) were lounging in a semicircle of chairs below the set. The baize of an empty pool table, glimpsed through the archway, was the same acid green as the lighter squares on the football pitch. Errol and Co must have moved to another table, out of sight. I could hear the balls clicking together, like the building cracking its knuckles.

  Why would a company that sold alcoholic beverages have a pink elephant as its mascot? It was supposedly a sign of extreme intoxication, even of delirium tremens. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (the incomparable fourth edition, revised and reprinted with corrections in 1957, henceforth referred to as ‘the Pocket’), which I happened to have stored in the place it was made for, was mum on the derivation, and I’d had no first-hand experience of such things, but the connotations were hardly attractive. Was it black humour? Or mere ignorance? Why not purple snakes? Could the elephant’s name really be Dumbo? Lately, Wessels was always trying to trick me.

  He would stow his nightcap under his pillow and hurry back for company. I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to be gone before he arrived.

  Usually when I left the Café, I took a turn around Hillbrow, my daily constitutional, sometimes as far as the Fort, or even the Civic Theatre to watch the sun sink over Braamfontein. Our highveld sunsets are spectacularly garish, thanks to the quantities of mine dust and chemicals in the air. But this evening, I was drawn straight back to the opposite end of Kotze Street.

  The one-eared elephant was behind bars, between the two cash desks, with his silver chain and padlock coiled like a serpent at his feet. He was looking out between the burglar bars with the same ecstatic expression frozen on his face. Dumbo? It was possible.

  Sausages for a Greek island (7): Salamis. Ruled by Ajax, the king of detergents.

  *

  I was an old hand at the Café Europa, their most venerable patron, an incorrigible ‘European’. Not a member though, never mind what Wessels said. We were never a club.

  I am a proofreader by profession. When I retired half a dozen years ago, I came to live in a flat in Prospect Road on the edge of Hillbrow. Though my vocation had been a solitary one and I was used to my own company (never been married), I felt cooped up at home. The place was spacious enough and light, but my view of the skyline was all nickel and paste by night and factory roofs and television aerials by day. So I ventured out.

  The public spaces in my neighbourhood were uninviting. The parks provided no seating arrangements. Where once there had been benches for whites only, now there were no benches at all to discourage loitering. The loiterers were quite happy to lie on the grass, but, needless to say, I was not. The park in Beatrice Street had a bench; but then it also had a reniform paddling pool that attracted the wrong sort of toddler. The public library was a morgue for dead romances. A series of children’s drawings, hideous without exception, had been stuck on the walls in a misguided attempt to brighten the place up. There were no pavement cafés à la française. The weather was suitable, but not the social climate: the city fathers quite rightly did
not want people baring their fangs in broad daylight, cluttering the thoroughfares, and giving the have-nots mistaken ideas about wealth and leisure.

  After a week of fruitless wandering around the streets of Hillbrow, the happy day arrived when an escalator carried me up into the Café Europa on the first floor of Meissner’s Building in Pretoria Street.

  The ambience appealed at once. There was a hush in the din of traffic, a lull in the beat of the sunlight, with a melody tinkling through it like a brook. At the grand piano was a woman in a red evening dress, with a swirl of hair on a lacquered skewer. Even seated, she was tall and imposing. She was playing ‘I Love Paris’, which suited the establishment, if not the city and the season, down to a semiquaver. French doors gave onto a balcony, a sort of elevated pavement café with wrought-iron tables and chairs of bottle-green, shaded by striped umbrellas in the Cinzano livery, delicious monsters and rubber plants in pots. It was tempting to sit out of doors. On the other hand, it was so cool and quiet inside, with comfortable armchairs and sconces for reading by. At half a dozen tables, men of my generation, more or less, were playing backgammon or chess on inlaid boards, or reading newspapers with their folds pinched in wooden staves. Good idea: gave the news a bit of backbone. Another clutch of papers hung from hooks on a pillar, chafing their wings in the moted air.

  I crossed the carpet, an autumnal layer as soft and yielding underfoot as oak leaves, past a glass counter where dainties were displayed in rows, like miniatures of the pianist’s hairdo, and chose a little square table against the wall near the French doors, where I could have the best of both worlds: from inside, the ceiling fans circulated a muted hubbub of conversation in foreign tongues, piano music, the clack of dominoes, the smell of cigar smoke and ground coffee; while a breeze from outside carried in the hum of traffic and the scent of the Levant, thanks to the lamb on the rotisserie at the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant down below. The doors were set into a wall of plate glass, segmented by brocade curtains drawn into Corinthian columns, allowing a panoramic view of the buildings opposite. Between two of them, against a postcard of bright blue sky, the top of the Hillbrow Tower stuck up like an attachment for a vacuum cleaner. I had never been fond of it. But then I had never seen it from this perspective – gazing skywards is next to impossible with my bad neck – and I thought it made a touching contrast to the cast-iron Tours d’Eiffel in the balcony railing.

  I sat down and opened my paper. I was accustomed to working in silence, and so the piano was unsettling at first, but I would discover in time that the right sort of background music supplies a very productive rhythm for browsing through telephone directories or hunting for literals in the classifieds. A fugue, well played, will facilitate the identification of anagrams, for example, while a march will ginger up a letter to the editor.

  The waiter, an affable and fairly efficient old boy who introduced himself as Eveready, brought my tea in a civilized cup and saucer; the cup was spoilt somewhat by a picture of a coffee bean in a sombrero dancing the cachucha, but in these days of polystyrene, the lapse might be forgiven. The serviette was folded into an episcopal mitre. The sugar was in a pot (later one would find it in nasty little sachets, which were supposed to promote economy, and instead encouraged pilfering) and the pot was equipped with a genuine spoon (rather than a plastic spatula). An unobtrusive perspex sign, which now came to my attention, informed me that I was table No. 1, and this pleased me inordinately.

  A European ambience. Prima. The least one would expect from an establishment that called itself the Café Europa. Importantly, it was ambience rather than atmosphere. You may find ‘atmosphere’ in fast-food restaurants, thick enough to cut with a plastic knife and obedient to the strictest laws, being the necessary by-product of gingham curtains and sepia-tinted photographs, tables shaped like kegs and lithographs of the Three Little Pigs. Atmosphere is an American commodity. And that is why the citizens of the Golden City covet it. They want to breathe deep-fried oxygen, they want to be part of the Space Age. Europeans prefer ambience, which cannot be pumped in overnight or sprayed on with an aerosol, but has to accrue over time.

  *

  My first impressions came back to me the day after I heard that the Café was closing. By noon, I found myself walking down to the Europa. I wanted to have the place to myself, before Wessels arrived sloshing over with inanities. I had been dwelling on everything that had happened to me there, on the old days and the old faces, as we think of them, when we mean the younger ones. I was surprised at how indistinct some of those faces had become, ghosts of their former selves. Platitudinously, your memories are a precious possession; they can’t take them away from you, as Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, used to insist. I always wondered what she meant. Who were these robbers? And why should they want one’s memories? They would want something of material value, surely, wristwatches, wallets, shoes …

  I came to the Café more concerned than ever to get it clear in my head. I brought my notebook along for a change, in case I wished to make a few sketches or diagrams. I pictured the establishment as a set about to be struck. If only I could arrange it all in my mind, like a diligent stage manager, with every prop in place, perhaps the characters would troop on from the wings of memory and take a bow.

  I was tempted to sit at No. 1, where I’d spent my very first hours at the Europa. But as I’ve already indicated, sentimentality irks me, especially the American variety, which is descended from the Irish. I sat instead at my usual place, the round table where Spilkin and I first shared our thoughts on the crossword puzzle, which had been the great love of his life until grosser affections supplanted it, and ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, which was and always will be mine. This table was No. 2. A signpost, a relic saved through my intervention, declared the fact (all the others had long since been filched, for reasons one can only guess at).

  My eye was drawn to the city on the wall, to the walled city of Alibia, where I had roamed so often in my imagination.

  In the foreground was a small harbour, with a profusion of fishing boats and yachts, and a curve of beach freckled with umbrellas. The palm-lined promenade cried out for women twirling parasols and old men nodding in Bath chairs with rugs over their knees. There were wharves and warehouses too, by no means quaint but necessarily somewhat Dickensian, and silos fat with grain, and tower cranes with their skinny shins in the water. Houses were heaped on the slopes behind, around narrow streets and squares. Despite the steepness of the terrain, there were canals thronged with barges, houseboats and gondolas. On one straight stretch of canal, evidently frozen over, one expected to see skaters in woollen caps racing to the tune of a barcarole. In the squares, there were outdoor cafés and neon signs advertising nightclubs; but in the windows of the houses up above, oil-lamps were burning. The baroque steeple of St Cloud’s, intricately iced, measured itself against glazed office blocks of modest proportions, while in the east a clutch of onion domes had been harrowed from the black furrow of the horizon. A Slav would feel just as at home there as a Dutchman. It was a perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere in which the immigrant might find the landmarks he had left behind. I had seen pointed out St Peter’s and St Paul’s, the Aegean and the Baltic. A receptionist at the German Consulate had shown us a bridge over the Neckar; and once an engineer from Mostar, then painting traffic signs for Roads and Works, had pinpointed the very house in which he had been born. His poor mother still lived there, with mortar-bombs raining down all around her.

  What did Alibia mean to me? Certainly it was not ‘home’. I am a true Johannesburger, because I was born within sight of the Hillbrow Tower, our very own Bow Bells – or so Spilkin used to say. Of course, this was long before the Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom Tower (properly) was built, but he said it had retrospective effect: had it been standing at the time of my birth, I would have seen it from my crib.

  Alibia was close to my heart for a different reason, an egocentric one, I suppose: in the middle of the city, bulging above the skyline and overhung
by a dirty brown cloud, was a hill whose bumpy summit looked auspiciously like the crown of my own head. My personal Golgotha.

  I came into the world, as many do, with a healthy head of hair. In my case, it was black and enviably thick (but not a thatch, like Empty Wessels’s). As a boy, I wore it with a parting in the middle, and as a young man, brushed straight back in the fashion of the day, which is how it stayed. In my prime, I cultivated a windswept appearance, with the tousle combed in and the loose ends held in place with oil. I fancied that this hairstyle reflected my character rather well: quick-witted and sporty, tidy but not without flair. However, as my hairline receded, which it began to do during my mid-twenties, I saw coming into view a skull to make a phrenologist’s fingertips itch. It was singularly bumpy, roughly-hewn and battered-looking, with a pronounced mound right on top. The most dismaying revelation was a bluish blemish on the occipital plate, around three o’clock, which looked a bit like a raisin embedded in the sugared icing on a custard slice. My marchpane pate. Over the years, as the denuding of my head proceeded, several more of these partly submerged excrescences appeared. Another four to be precise: two more occipitals at eight and nine o’clock and a brace of cranials at twelve on the dot and half past five. But none was more disconcerting than the first. I went to see a dermatologist about it, a Dr Zinn, who was as bald as a coot himself, and he tugged on my forelock, then extant, and told me not to worry. Easier said than done. It was as surprising to me that I should be thinking inside this malformed and discoloured lump as it is to find white flesh inside a fractured coconut.

  From much massaging with various preparations in an attempt to revivify the follicles, my fingertips had memorized every square inch – as we used to say then – of my scalp. The digits have a surprisingly long memory, no less enduring than the eyes. I knew my dome’s shape exactly, and strange to say, it perfectly matched the hill that beetled over Alibia. Indeed, that hill might have been a study of my head, cast into relief against a permanent sunset, with the features below lost in a clown’s ruff of staircases, closes and wynds.