The Restless Supermarket

by Ivan Vladislavic

  A shadow, which matched the hill in every particular, although it was marginally smaller, lay upon the painted surface; and turning slightly, I saw that it was the shadow of my own head. At one special angle – if I gazed into the corner where Mrs Mavrokordatos sat behind her till, keeping watch over the dainties and a growing array of bottles – the silhouettes were identical. Why had I never noticed it before? The source of the shadow was a spotlight above Mevrouw Bonsma’s piano, recently installed in place of the bluebell lamp to make her more visible, even as she became less audible. Perhaps it had been adjusted lately, perhaps I had never sat in exactly this spot before, and a unique combination of variables had produced a unique optical effect. Spilkin would be in a position to explain the physics of it; but he was absent without leave. I waggled my head, so that the shadow elongated and contracted, again and again, returning always to the point at which its shape echoed the hill’s perfectly.

  Eveready at my elbow, plucking the sleeve of my blazer to get my attention. I had ‘wandered off’, as they say, which was not like me. Tea, to calm the nerves.

  ‘As I was saying,’ Wessels was saying, although he had not been speaking at all, ‘you don’t wanna get dirty. Wear a jean or overalls.’

  The discomfort welled up again.

  ‘And don’t forget your torches.’

  I feigned indifference. But later on, I contrived to leave the Café at the same time as Merle and, concealing my bad temper, quizzed her about the mystery.

  ‘Tinus is planning a little outing for next Saturday,’ she said.

  ‘Who? Oh, him. Where to?’

  ‘The zoo.’

  ‘Of all the hare-brained—’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Aubrey. We’re going to see the animals. People do it all the time. It’ll be great fun.’

  She knew as well as I did that we frowned on extramural socializing. One had to protect one’s privacy. This Wessels character, for whom everyone felt sorry, seemed determined to turn everything upside down. Perhaps he was trying to push me out of the polygon?

  ‘Who else is going?’

  ‘Just Tinus and Bogey and me so far. There’s place for one more. We were going to ask you.’

  ‘What about Spilkin?’

  ‘He’s busy, bad luck for him. We’re trying out Bogey’s car.’

  ‘His car!’

  ‘He’s bought himself a Mazda.’

  ‘I thought he was broke.’

  ‘He has business interests that bring in a little.’

  ‘Can he drive? They drive on the right over there.’

  ‘He’s got his learner’s.’

  ‘I should have been kept abreast.’

  That made her giggle like a schoolgirl. I was reminded of Wessels and his childish rhymes. And then I became aware of Merle’s bosom, which had never impressed itself upon me so insistently before, and of my embarrassing head. This playground atmosphere was becoming intolerable.

  In the weeks that followed, I worried that someone else would notice the resemblance between my head and the hill, and make me the butt of a joke. I thought about changing seats. I thought about withdrawing from the Café entirely. But more than ever, I began to see Alibia as my territory, which it was up to me to defend. Afterwards, when one of the others cast a shadow on my head-shaped hill, my capital, it was as if they were inside my head. My head was in the city, a part of it, as solid as the earth beneath my feet. And Wessels and the others were in my head, flitting through it like migrant workers without the proper papers, as insubstantial as shadows.

  *

  The Zoological Gardens were even more trying than I’d anticipated.

  We went at night. The authorities had instituted special night tours to allow for the viewing of nocturnal animals. Learn more about hyenas, bats, civets and owls, the pamphlet said. Bring your own torch. Prying into the lairs of innocent creatures? It did not strike me as edifying, and I thought of staying away. But then I imagined Merle surrounded by animals like Wessels and Bogey.

  Predictably, the Mazda was a jalopy. On the rear bumper was a sticker that read: Don’t look at my tits. I had come across this bit of smut before, emblazoned across the front of a harlot’s T-shirt. Distasteful as it was, one saw the logic: it gave lechers like Wessels an excuse to gaze at the breasts in question. But its import in relation to a motor car was obscure.

  Bogey was scarcely competent behind the wheel. To make matters worse, he’d brought one of the Bogeymen along, a slab of gristle called Zbignieuw. Merle had to sit in front, next to the driver, who perched himself on a copy of the Reader’s Digest Book of the Car. That left Wessels, Zbignieuw and me to cram into the back, which was already cluttered with empty bottles and dirty laundry. I refused to ride bodkin. I’d be squashed to a pulp. In the end, Zbignieuw piled in first and Wessels and I had to squeeze into the unoccupied margins. Just my luck to be on the driver’s side, where I could smell the back of Bogey’s head, wafted to me on the breeze like the aroma of a Sunday roast. As I’d feared, he was wearing the leather jacket. It was bound to incense the beasts.

  The start of the tour was tiresome but innocuous. We ranged ourselves upon trailers, along with the other paying guests – two dozen of us all told, mainly mommies, daddies and little ones – and a tractor dragged us about from cage to cage. Those who had heeded the advice to bring their torches were able to rouse the nocturnals from their slumbers (evidently they were prone to unnatural behaviour) by shining the beams in their faces, while our guide, a nasal young woman dressed for a safari, provided us with useful information about their habits and habitats. I busied myself proofreading the little notices appended to each cage and maintaining an appearance of enjoying myself. I wouldn’t have them calling me a stick in the mud.

  When we had finished eyeballing the owls, an encounter that should have signalled the end of our tour, our guide announced that there was a treat in store for us. Whispering excitedly, we were conveyed to a cage concealed in a grove of trees in a distant corner of the gardens, and encouraged to winkle out the creature contained therein. Something vicious, to judge by the thickness of the bars, and the moat and railings that kept us at a distance.

  Fingers of light probed between the bars. What was that? A table and chairs! A premonitory shiver passed through our party. A television set? A painting suspended in thin air. A kettle. The torch-beams slipped from object to object, settled on a bed in one corner of the cage, where something lay sleeping under blankets. After a while, the blankets were tossed back and a face appeared. Everyone twittered.

  I turned my attention to the signpost: ‘Homo Sapiens. Mammal. Typical male (1.75 m, 76 kg). Omnivorous, omnipotent, omnipresent. Hunts profligately, including its own kind. Considered the most dangerous and destructive of all species …’ Profligately. That was good.

  The man in the cage sat up on the edge of his bed and gazed back at us with an expression compounded of suspicion, belligerence and boredom. I recognized the look: it was the same one we had seen on the faces of a dozen other animals in the past hour or two. Very cleverly captured. He must be an actor.

  Abruptly, he lost all interest in us and stood up. Underpants, thank heavens. The members of our party, Merle not excepted, were engrossed, nudging one another and leering, like schoolchildren studying the reproductive system, as he crossed to the other side of the cage and opened the door of a refrigerator. An eerie, artificial light fell upon his body. Our guide seemed to be training the beam of her torch upon his loins.

  The human animal – the term the guide urged us to use when we addressed our questions to her – removed a bottle from the refrigerator, slammed the door shut and went to sit in a chair. He switched on a lamp, took up a remote-control device and pressed a button. The television set started to life in the other corner of the cage. He stared at the screen and drank from the bottle.

  While the others asked jokey questions – what does it eat? where does it relieve itself? does it talk? – I had time to examine my own feelings. I
felt – what would capture it – threatened? No, that was too reminiscent of ‘endangered’. Certainly not merely affronted. I felt – I had to stop myself from quaking – that we were in mortal danger. We were on the verge of extinction, I realized, and the fact seemed chillingly explicit. But what did I really mean? Who were ‘we’? The human race? People of good sense and common decency? The ragtag remnants of the Café Europa? Was it a royal ‘we’?

  These were hardly the circumstances in which to consider such questions; in any event, while I was musing, scientific enquiry had turned, as it invariably does when the wrong minds engage in it, to mockery. There was something about the human animal’s disdain for us, the lack of a reciprocal interest to compensate for our own morbid curiosity, that was extremely provocative. Predictably, Wessels, who had never shown much self-control, was among the first provoked – although Merle assured me afterwards that he was not entirely to blame for what followed. She said a child had tossed a pebble at the animal to attract his attention. He ignored us. A little fusillade of twigs and sucking sweets rained down on him. A coin struck him on the shoulder, but still he gazed blankly ahead.

  It was Wessels who flicked a cigarette end through the bars. The reaction was explosive. The man leapt up, brandishing a club that had been hidden behind the chair, and hurled himself at us. He struck the bars a mighty blow, so violently that we started back in fright. A single metallic note resounded into the night. I wish Mevrouw Bonsma had been there to capture that sound precisely. All I can say is that it was deep, sonorous, and filled with rage.

  The note subsided, calando, into a stunned silence.

  Then a cackling and cawing arose in the cages all around and rippled outwards. At the same time, one of the children in our party, perhaps the one who had started it all, began to cry, which made the adults laugh. Merle giggled, the Bogeymen chattered like apes. I hesitate to say it, but only I fell back in shame, while the cacophony of grunts and cries rolled out over the treetops, and the man in the cage, switching off the television set and then the lamp, went back to bed.

  ‘Good Lord, Aubrey,’ Merle said, when we were enduring the campfire coffee and buttermilk rusks that concluded the tour and came with the price of the ticket, ‘you look like you’ve seen a ghost. You mustn’t overdo it.’

  ‘I’m not much of a night owl,’ I might have said.

  ‘You know what would hit the spot?’ Wessels said. ‘A slice of Mrs Mav’s balaclava.’

  It was my fault, teaching him ‘baclava’. To stop him calling it shredded wheat.

  Merle insisted that Zbignieuw sit in front on the way home. In the car she touched my hand, and declared it as rough as sandpaper. ‘You’re so dry, I could write on you.’

  ‘Dermatographic, you mean?’ Always wanted to drop that into a conversation.

  ‘You need moisturizing,’ she said, and produced from her bag a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care.

  *

  12 October 1989

  Dear Sir,

  Allow me to respond to your article of 10 October entitled ‘Beastly nature on public display’, in which you applaud the exhibition of a ‘human animal’ in a cage at the Zoological Gardens.

  This spectacle, well intentioned though it may be, does nothing but harm.

  It upsets the true animals. On the night of our visit, we found the nocturnals sleeping, while the diurnals paced their enclosures in insomniac despair or tossed about on their pallets counting sheep.

  It degrades the visitor. What message are we sending to our young people? That they are no better than apes? Whereas this ‘human habitat’ was equipped with all the modern conveniences, such as a refrigerator and a television set, there was no sign of a book. It might have been an idea to include some reading matter as part of the ‘natural world’.

  It augments the tide of exhibitionism, which is one of the evils of our day.

  It damages race relations. Was it wise to choose a black man? Apart from the question of just what sort of man might be regarded as ‘typical’ of the species, this display provides easy ammunition for South Africa’s extremist critics abroad.

  Sincerely, etcetera

  *

  It was around this time that Mrs Mavrokordatos got the idea of staying open all night. A 24-hour service! You’d think we were the Restless Supermarket, I told her, or the Zoological Gardens. And I warned her of the consequences. Indigents will be coming in to find shelter, dozing off in our chairs and slobbering on the upholstery.

  Eveready can go round waking them up, she said.

  The new regimen threw everything out of kilter. Proper dining hours went by the board. In place of square meals such as breakfast and lunch came bastardized forms of dining, like the so-called brunch, which was neither fish nor fowl, and the buffet, named after the battering the well-mannered could expect to receive in the scrummage for unequal portions.

  The menu was always out of date. I had long since acquired a taste for Vienna schnitzel and Parma ham, but these old standards slipped from view. On any day of the week, the kitchen was liable to throw up an entirely new range of dishes, nouvelle cuisines that did not agree with me any more than I agreed with them. Savoury tarts, for instance, which the unsavoury ones demanded for the sake of their waistlines; only to change their minds the next day and insist on ‘fatcakes’ stuffed with mincemeat, and acidulous stews for macerating stiff porridges. Chicken reared its ugly head. ‘Supply must meet demand,’ Mrs Mavrokordatos said, and Mevrouw Bonsma assented.

  To keep up my strength, I turned once again to the international restaurants of Hillbrow, combining these visits when I could with public-service proofreading. I remember crossing spoons with a waiter in a so-called Pizzaghetti Factory one evening. ‘Pizzaghetti? Factory? It’s the nadir of poor taste. And “farinaceous” is stretching a point. I would say “farraginous”. From the Latin far, corn. Are you with me? You should serve this stuff in a nosebag.’

  Milksop ran for the manager.

  Never fear, I gave them both a talking-to about their macaronic menu, and especially the ‘Quattro Stagione’, which was nothing more than a ‘Four Seasons’ in plain English, the garden-variety winter, spring, summer and autumn. I wanted to know which of the seasons was represented by which of the ingredients. They didn’t have a clue. I had to tell them!

  ‘The way I see it, the ham is autumn leaves. The mushrooms, the dead wood of winter. The olives are the ripe fruits of summer. But why artichokes? Not nearly vernal enough. I would have had little budding capers. I’ve been tempted to cut a caper myself when spring comes. Never succumbed, mind you.’

  Do you suppose they understood a word I said?

  No more than Fräulein Schrenke, proprietress of the Potato Kitchen, when I pointed out that a conspicuous lack of ambience was ruining her business. ‘You need to colour these bare walls with an artwork or two. Something to warm the place up a bit.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I did not usually have such information at my fingertips, but I had spent the morning in the library doing some research, and so I was able to flourish a shortlist. ‘Perhaps the “Battle between Carnival and Lent” by Pieter Bruegel. Or Adriaan van Ostade’s “A Room with Many Figures”. Or even – the simplest ideas are often the best – “The Potato Eaters”.’

  ‘Hungarians?’

  ‘Hollanders, I suppose.’

  I put a photostatic reproduction of the work down on the counter. Made at my own expense. My pick of the three was the Van Ostade, but the Van Gogh also had something of Alibia in it. It might have been a wayside eatery on one of those Alibian country roads that bends away from the sea into the hinterland.

  ‘Die Kartoffelesser. Where should I buy such a thing, Mr Tearle?’

  ‘Who said anything about buying? You’ll employ someone to make a copy for you, faithful in all the essentials. This wall here is crying out for a fresco.’

  ‘I am not an associate of artists.’

  ‘I know just the person. A fräulein like
yourself, an art student, whom Mrs Mavrokordatos engaged to do some decorating at the Café Europa.’

  Using nothing but brushes and tubes, this person, who was much given to paint-spattered dungarees, had transformed the windows of the cubicle containing the one-armed bandits into something resembling stained glass. On closer examination, her tableaux proved to be depictions of bloody carnage and mindless vandalism. They disgusted me at first, but in time I came to appreciate their efficacy. In the door to the ‘chapel’ – a door that shut itself with the aplomb of a commissionaire, thanks to a spring-loaded elbow – was a lozenge of glass that had escaped the artist’s attentions. I could never look through that clear pane, at the men and women attached to the machines inside, the air around them aswirl with smoke, without being reminded of a gas chamber. Throw in Bogey and Zbignieuw and their ilk, and the effect was uncannily lifelike. It was better by far to gaze through the fake stained glass, to fit one’s eye to a block of blue sky above a blazing cottage or to a patch of grass beside the bloodied smock of a ravaged peasant, and view the world through a glaze of unreality.