The Restless Supermarket

by Ivan Vladislavic

  It wasn’t long before the television sets were being left on even while Mevrouw Bonsma played. At five to five every day, as she settled herself at the piano, Eveready climbed up on a chair and turned the volume down, so that those with the urge could follow the silent sequence of events that flickered there.

  One evening, a brief part of one evening, stands out in my mind now as a turning point. Not the turning point, not the spilkin that unlocks the whole puzzle, but a key nevertheless, as significant as the discovery of a Merope in High Point.

  I had been detained that day at the General Hospital, queuing interminably for my pills, and darkness was falling by the time I alighted from my bus in Edith Cavell Street. Meissner’s Building rode at anchor in the traffic like an ocean-going liner. I remember glancing up at the windows of the Europa, aglow between the columns of brocade, and feeling a comforting sense of anticipation. It was winter and I was looking forward to the heaters and, dare I say it, the warmth of human fellowship.

  But as I stepped onto the escalator, there was a commotion on the first floor. A drunkard, a young black man in a shiny suit, appeared at the top of the escalator, and with an unprintable curse, hurled himself down it. The stairs were going in the other direction, bearing him back ceaselessly to the top, where they should soon have deposited him in the mechanical course of events. But he applied himself to the task of plunging downwards with such maniacal energy that he managed to make headway and bore slowly down upon me.

  He seemed oblivious of me. As if I was invisible. There was nothing I could do, a man of my age, not exactly frail but necessarily careful, what with the blood pressure and the spastic colon (which pains me all the more acutely, thanks to my vocation); I could hardly be expected to flee. I did take a few precautionary steps backwards down the moving stairs, to no avail. I rose relentlessly.

  A nightmare. Imagine: me, Aubrey Tearle, stepping calmly backwards, while rising swiftly and effortlessly into the air; and him, the nameless ruffian, panting and crying out in a fury of exertion, while sinking by painful degrees. Herr Toppelmann once had a clock whose hands sped backwards, trying in vain to erase the motto printed across its face: Manchmal geht alles verkehrt – which Toppelmann did into English as ‘On several occasions, everything is going wrong’ – and it alarmed me in quite the same way. Could there be a more disquieting concept, one more filled with dreadful fascination, than ‘anticlockwise’.

  We converged, and despite the fact that he was the one doing the foolish thing, the machinery cast me as the aggressor. I gripped the moving handrails, jutted out my jaw in the shape of a cowcatcher, braced myself, and we collided with a thump and were swept up to the landing, all his efforts cancelled out in a headlong moment. I found myself immersed in his smell, which I recognized as an adulterated version of my own: Shield for Sportsmen. Improbably, for I had expected us to end up in a heap, with bruises and broken bones, he stumbled backwards and sprawled supine on the floor, and I took two steps along the length of his body, just as if he had been a log across a stream, stepping once on his belly and once on his chest, and then found solid ground beyond him. It was just as well for him, I thought, that I was wearing my Hush Puppies rather than my brogues.

  He scrambled to his feet. I expected him to set upon me, but my expectations were disappointed. His face was contorted with laughter. ‘Be cool, my bra!’ he sang out, and launched himself again, neither onto the up escalator nor the down, but onto the narrow metal ledge between the two, and plunged shrieking downwards to the street. This ledge was very much like a slide in a children’s playground, except that it was studded with sharp little projections put there expressly to deter such pranks.

  Against my better judgement, I found myself sinking again, even as my blood pressure rose, expecting to find him gushing vital fluids at the bottom, exsanguinating himself through lacerated arteries of calf and thigh. He had indeed ripped one leg of his trousers from turn-up to waistband, but otherwise he was completely unscathed. This miraculous escape seemed to tickle him. Waggling an exposed buttock, cursing good-naturedly, he went away down Pretoria Street.

  For the second time in a minute I escalated, like death on the roads, like train violence. A tatter of tartan underpants fluttered on a spike. What was it he had called me? His bra? How odd. It was the first time I had come across that bit of argot – but it would not be the last.

  The excitement was not yet over: the doors of the Café Europa were locked against me! A pang, an actual physical pain, not in my heart, which would have been worrying enough, but in my side, shot through me. It was probably a stitch brought on by all the exertion, but at the time, it felt like a stab of betrayal. Abandoned. I remembered how the Europa had opened its arms to me when first I came here. Now this cold shoulder.

  I put my hand to the glass, and brought my face close, as if I was gazing into the promised land.

  It was a busy night and nearly every table was occupied. Here and there a few dissenters were chatting or reading, but the overwhelming majority were watching the television sets. Half of them were staring in one direction and half in the other, and although I knew that they might be focused on the same image, to me they epitomized the idea of divided attention. They were so intent, I almost saw the trajectory of each gaze, solid as a beam; and yet together they made a confused thatch, like a jumble of immense pick-up sticks criss-crossing the room, piled to the ceiling.

  Bogey and a pal were at the gaming machines, recently installed in a little cubicle separated from the rest of us by glass panes. I had warned Mrs Mavrokordatos about the one-armed bandits too: they’ll bring in the able-bodied variety. And the vice squad. But she just scoffed at the idea. It wasn’t even gambling, she said, they were playing for free games, with tokens. Did she think I was blind? That I wouldn’t see her passing Bogey a cheque under the counter? What was the isolation ward for?

  Then my eye wandered over to Table 2. There was Merle, scratching around in the bottomless bag. Spilkin. A Harry and a Willy – the Spaniards, I called them, in spite of their nationality, because of their penchant for singing Olé Olé Olé during football matches. Arsenal fanatics they were. A woman I did not know. Wessels asprawl. All looking at the screen above Mevrouw Bonsma’s head.

  I looked too.

  The screen was stuffed with little television sets, a whole brood of miniatures, as if the thing had spawned. I was not much of a ‘viewer’, but I recognized the programme. Tellyfun Quiz. It was a favourite in the Café and, I gathered, in the country at large, and so I had been subjected to it several times. Telly. The word turned my stomach. Loo, brolly, iffy, butty, bumf. A degenerate vocabulary descended from the nursery. Words without spines, the flabby offspring of a population of milksops. ‘Telly’ was bad enough on its own, but squatting on ‘fun’ like a slug on a cowpat, it was repulsive.

  The rules of the game had always eluded me. The contestants were made to clamber about on staircases and guess what was inside the television sets scattered on the landings. The hosts, as they were known, asked them questions, while the screens flashed Booby! Booby! Booby! There were two hosts, a gnome with the haunted eyes of a morphine addict and a body like a jam doughnut, so rotund he needed braces for his trousers; and a slender young woman, strictly speaking a hostess, with a bob of blonde hair. She was much the more presentable of the two, the very image of Merle in her younger days, I imagined. If only she would keep her mouth shut. Instead, she was nagging the contestants to switch on their television sets. Here it came now, in a wit-curdling simper … Turn on the telly!

  Lip-reading is a useful skill to acquire, especially in these days of shoddy enunciation, but it can be a burden too. Although I looked away from the screen, I could not help seeing half a dozen patrons mouthing the catchphrase. How irritating it must be for Mevrouw Bonsma. Her beehive stuck up from behind the piano, her glistening eyes, which should have been staring wistfully into her own heart, were staring instead at – the other television set! She was tinkling away, as
if she were accompanying a silent film, tellytinkling. Fortepiano! Back in time! Anticlockwise!

  I looked to Spilkin to see if he was still the same man, to see whether his grey hairs had turned black overnight. And there lay the key to the episode. Spilkin was the spilkin, as it should be. He looked back at me with an expression so lacking in sympathy it made me shudder, as if he had never clapped eyes on me before. And then one by one, the other gazes trembled and fell away from the screen.

  I must have looked a fright, with my nose pressed to the glass and my spectacles misted over.

  Spilkin jiggled an eyebrow and Eveready came to open up. It was he who had tossed the drunkard out and locked the door behind him. He was quite proud of the fact.

  ‘He thinks it is a shebeen,’ he said.

  An Irish term, naturalized.

  *

  Vocabulary, milksop: iffy … butty … whiffy … naff … dishy … dinky … fab …

  *

  ‘It was like Little Hans and the dyke,’ Spilkin laughed, ‘with Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma in the leading roles.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come, come,’ he said with a salacious gesture. ‘Must I draw you a picture?’

  ‘I don’t believe you, that’s all. Mevrouw hasn’t said a word. And there are sanctions against forcing yourself on a lady.’

  ‘No force required. Go ahead and ask her.’

  I suspected that it was all a tasteless joke; the ‘solitary sailor’ tone rang a distant bell. Nevertheless, I said I would take the matter up with Eveready; if there was an ounce of truth in it, he would find himself endorsed out, or whatever the expression was.

  Then Spilkin admitted that he was just pulling my leg.

  *

  One of the benefits of television, Mrs Mavrokordatos said, was that it was educational. It brought you news. Personally, I didn’t see the connection. New information, fresh events reported, streamed from the set at specified times each day, gathering and subsiding in the official channels to a rhythm as pacific as an ocean roar. Just now and then, like a bottle on the tide, something out of the ordinary came bobbing along, and then one could pay attention if one chose.

  One evening, I was working on ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, fine-tuning a fascicle about Fluxman’s encounter with a ‘mugger’, when a hush fell over the Café Europa and all eyes turned to the screens. Our State President appeared there, looking gloomy, and announced his retirement.

  I felt sorry for him. He assured us that he was in perfect health, but I know high blood pressure when I see it.

  ‘Poor old sod’s losing his faculties,’ Spilkin quipped.

  ‘Just like the University of the Witwatersrand.’ I’d read in that day’s Star that the Russian Department was closing down.

  ‘What’s the P.W. stand for?’ asked an Eddy, recently arrived from Birmingham.

  Merle enlightened him: Pieter Willem. But Wessels had other ideas. He said it stood for Poor William.

  When I got up to leave a little later, this same Wessels stumbled after me. He wanted to walk me home.

  ‘Forget it. It’s miles out of your way.’

  ‘Ah, come on Aubs, man, I need the exercise. It’ll get the circulation going.’

  I had the impression he was mimicking me. Perhaps he’d heard me extolling the virtues of an active lifestyle? Shirty blighter. Stamping his feet and beating his chest with his hands as if he was on fire. He should have been wearing a coat instead of this leaf-green suit, with lapels like the fronds of some tropical plant and a flap in the back of the jacket wide enough to admit a cat. The last thing I needed was for him to find out where I lived. I went in the opposite direction to throw him off the scent.

  All the way down Twist Street, he railed against the world in terms I would rather not repeat. He kept calling me ‘Aubs’, as if he was seeing double – but I suppose it was better than ‘Churl’, which was how he rendered my surname. I had to nudge him every few paces like a tugboat to keep him on the pavement, or I dare say he might have met his death under the wheels of a bus.

  On the corner of Esselen Street, he stopped and stared across the intersection. He was trying to decipher the placard tied to a pole there. It was perfectly clear to me: WHY PW QUIT. Shrugging off my restraining hand, he went lumbering across the street, souvenir hunting, I thought. Just as he gained the opposite kerb, a man who had lain hidden in the shadows of a nearby bus shelter suddenly sat up on the bench. One of our growing army of indigents, muffled in greatcoat and balaclava.

  Wessels stopped dead and gazed at this apparition. Then he cried out: ‘Peewee! What’s the problem, my old china?’

  He made such a racket that concerned faces appeared between the gingham curtains in the windows of the Porterhouse. The Porterhouse! As if a pot of porter had ever been drawn in that dump. As if one in a hundred of their penny-pinching patrons even knew what porter was! I had a good mind to go in and give the manager a blast, but Wessels had fallen on his knees and was trying to kiss the hem of the vagrant’s coat. The other gazed back through bleary eyes.

  ‘Speak to me, Peewee,’ Wessels implored. ‘Or have the kaffertjies got your tongue?’

  I ought to have left him there to degrade himself, but sheer irritation drove me to his rescue. The vagrant was white, or had been before liquor and the elements savaged his complexion. Not that it made a blind bit of difference. Summoning reserves of strength I scarcely knew I possessed, I dragged Wessels away.

  ‘Don’t worry, Aubs,’ he reassured me. ‘I’ll stand by you, man, even though I’m farming backwards.’

  Duty done, I left him on the corner of Wolmarans Street, clinging to a traffic light, with his tie folded over his shoulder and his trousers falling down, garishly enamelled in red and amber and green like a cheap china ornament for the bar counter.

  *

  Spilkin took a shine to Wessels. I never could account for it, despite everything.

  Just what Wessels had done with his life before then was anybody’s guess. He claimed to have been an ‘agent’, a game ranger, a member of the armed forces, a lid. Although this last was merely the Afrikaans for ‘member’, it struck me as apposite: he was stopperish, corky, a brother of the bung. He had a photograph of himself in uniform, but anyone could see by the toggle and braid that it was strictly fancy dress. A chauffeur or a commissionaire.

  The photograph went around the circle a couple of times, and it had a surprising effect on Spilkin. ‘Take a look,’ he confided quietly, ‘this really gets to me: the way the cap presses down the tops of his ears. Pathetic, in its way, but endearing too.’

  ‘Must have been going to a party.’

  ‘He says he was on active service. He has stories about Magnus Malan and Constand Viljoen. He says he has “contacts” in high places.’

  ‘I’m amazed you’re taken in by him. That nonsense about being the General’s batman. Generals don’t even have batmen, except in those comic-books he reads about the War, where the Germans go around shouting “Achtung!” all the time. He must have been a driver … an ambulance driver! The St John’s Brigade. It’s as plain as the nose on my face.’

  To tell the truth, I myself had felt an unwelcome pang of sympathy for Wessels, with his ears sticking out like the tips of a wing collar.

  But he soon put paid to such feelings. He simply did not understand the rules of conduct in force at the Café Europa. Despite the new blood, we still observed certain proprieties. There was an unwritten law, for example, that we did not tolerate hawkers and other itinerants. Encourage them now, we used to say, and in next to no time, the streets will be crawling with beggars. But Wessels was above the law. First it was peaches from a snotty-nosed little Asiatic, then a painted wooden budgerigar, a good cockatoo from a dope fiend – he was in a clammy sweat and running a fever – and a wrought-iron pot-plant stand from a poor white. When he bought a rose in cellophane from a débutante, ridiculously overpriced, and fobbed it off on Merle, I thought it was time to speak
out.

  He twisted everything around. He said my ‘outburst’, which was really no more than a mild reprimand, was ‘petty jealousy’. He began to tease me.

  ‘Got the hots for old Merlé?’ Smirking in the shadow of his lascivious quiff, as if he was talking about a beast in heat, a leghorn or an Aberdeen Angus. And this while Merle was at the table! The way he pronounced her name only made it worse; I had set him right several times, but he insisted that it rhymed with Perlé. As in Paarl Perlé.

  ‘Mer-lay! Ter-lay!’ he began to chant. The rhyme (properly pronounced) had occurred to me too, but I would never have expressed it. It was like something out of a rhyming dictionary.

  ‘What are we up to now, Martinus?’ Merle said in her sweet way, and smiled to conceal her embarrassment.

  ‘Mer-lay! Ter-lay!’ It still resounds in my head, across the years.

  I was prepared to cast a positive light on the Eddie-Come-Latelies and their crude ways, and especially on the faults of ignorance. Bogey had started out saying ‘Merlie’, but then he was a foreigner and he only needed correcting once. Wessels was incorrigible. If anything, being amended only spurred him on. That Wessels should cleave to me, like a limpet to a bass, like a leech to a calf … stick to rather than part from (6).

  In the end, those two arch-offenders, Empty and Bogey, the guileful and the gauche, drew Merle into their mischief. I came upon them one afternoon, conspiring together. I saw in a flash that they were up to no good.

  It was on this very day that I first noticed the hill in the mural, the one shaped like my head, Arthur’s Seat or the Mount of Olives, depending on your nationality. Possibly even one of the hills of Rome – although Rome, as Wessels once informed me, was not built on a Sunday (we were arguing about restrictions on the trading hours of bottlestores). I’ve already confessed that the oddest ideas were popping into my head as ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ took its toll on my mental health. I tried to find the connections afterwards; they had their heads together, whispering, and they sprang apart as I approached. I had a startling impression of Wessels’s hair, sleekly crouched over his brutal thoughts like some marsh-dweller on its eggs. I sat down, in an awkward silence. My eyes turned to the streets of Alibia, roaming from quays lapped by a dirty vinaigrette of engine-oil and brine, along cobbled ways past factories and boarding houses, to the staircases of the hills, and to one hill in particular, thrusting up through a greasy thundercloud (the residue of Bogey’s hairdo, which he would rest against the wall, although Mrs Mavrokordatos had asked him not to).