‘I have the young lady’s telephone number here in my notebook.’
But Fräulein Schrenke was blunt. ‘It is a Fata Morgana,’ she said. ‘My business is going downstream. Black people are eating porridge more than potatoes. I cannot spend money on nonsenses.’
The Fräulein’s assistant, a youngster with shell-shock and eczema, banged a polystyrene casket down on the counter. ‘Need some tools?’
I gathered he meant a knife and fork.
I have always liked the Germans. I admire their discipline. Which made the collapse of order in their fatherland all the more shocking. I was passing a lot of time with Herr Toppelmann in those days. As I’ve mentioned, I was in the Wurstbude, eating a Bratwurst off my personalized crockery, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
‘It is well,’ Herr Toppelmann said, ‘now Europe is again one.’ And he made a pretzel of index and middle fingers to demonstrate the union.
I supposed he was right. I was as glad as anyone to see the Iron Curtain fall. But hadn’t the East always been a source of conflict and corruption in Europe? Wasn’t there a crooked line between that infamous Bosnian Gavrilo Princip and the Slobodan Boguslavićes of the world? A line drawn in blood and therefore indelible. One hoped this German business didn’t lead to a licentious collapsing of borders everywhere. There was never a shortage of volunteers to wield the sledgehammer. People were so delighted to see things fall down, to see the boundaries effaced and the monuments toppled, and to greet every fall with wild jubilation. In our own towns and cities, in every little Jericho on the veld, the mobs were on the march, exercising their God-given right to go in procession through the streets. When you scrutinized it properly, it was more like prancing. Lifting up their knees like a bunch of Mother Browns. ‘Long leave! Long leave!’ Nothing must continue, everything must change. Great gouts of change came sluicing out of the television set, to make up for the petty trickle from the one-armed bandits. Mevrouw Bonsma breathed deeply and played on, but she sank nonetheless beneath the polluted airwaves.
What did I think of all this? Herr Toppelmann wanted to know.
Frankly?
But of course.
Frankly, I found it struthious. That’s S-T-R-U-T-H-I-O-U-S. Of or like an ostrich, of the ostrich tribe. From the Latin struthio. From the Greek strouthos, sparrow. Out of proportion, but there you are.
The dust had hardly settled in Germany before the rubble of the Berlin Wall was up for sale. One of Bogey’s country cousins arrived with a piece of it in his luggage, a bit of brick and a layer of paint-smeared plaster. Muggins had paid fifteen marks for it, according to the cardboard container, which also had a picture purporting to show that the paint was a scrap of the garish babble with which the entire wall had been coated. The Western side, that is. It reminded me of the old scouting trick: you could always find your bearings by determining which side of the tree trunk had gathered moss.
Bogey was all for launching the product on the ‘domestic market’. He had picked up the phrase at the Small Business Development Corporation (which he had begun to frequent almost as religiously as Benjamin Goldberg’s), and he said he would find his ‘capital’ there too. When I pointed out that shipping rubble from Europe could prove costly, he said he wasn’t that stupid. Half of Johannesburg was in ruins. He would scavenge his merchandise at the Civic Theatre.
Half a city (6): Berlin? Beirut? Joburg.
*
One day, as I was passing along Kotze Street, three palm trees hove in sight, proceeding sedately through the lunch-hour traffic. Nothing surprised me any more, and I strolled on for a closer look as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Each tree had a lorry to itself. They were imposing specimens, fully grown, their roots bound up in hessian like enormous potted ferns. I deduced that they were en route to the Civic Theatre, which was then being renovated; although the construction work was far from complete, the landscape gardeners were already at it, and I had been monitoring their progress during my daily constitutionals. I followed the convoy to the construction site.
Today the place depressed me. This endless cycle of building and demolition, this ceaseless production of rubble. Was this the end of civilization? While the trees were being unloaded, I went to view the shattered masonry that Bogey had threatened to market. And it was then that I remembered the flagstones. Near the grand entrance, Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre had boasted a little memorial terrace, modelled on the famous original outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Here, visiting stars of stage and screen and local celebrities alike had left impressions of their hands and feet (and other parts of the anatomy when these were famous) in squares of wet cement. Second-rate buffoons mostly, worthless even before they washed up on these shores, but with a few old troupers among them, like Danny Kaye and Sidney James. What had become of their memorials? The place where they should have been was covered with rubble and rusted scaffolding.
The junior official dozing in the prefabricated hut marked ‘Site Manager’ did not have the faintest idea what I was talking about, and left me to hunt about alone under boards and buttresses. After a while, a curious labourer approached. I was able to convey the object of my quest to him by pressing my palms into a bank of muddy earth and scratching my name on it with a nail. He kindly fetched me an ill-named ‘hard hat’ from somewhere, and with that bit of protection rattling against my skull, I was guided into the half-built interior of the theatre. In a corner smelling of wet cement, under a sheet of blue plastic, I rediscovered the missing evidence, stacked up in blocks. My guide heaved one of them into the light for me. It was Max Bygraves. A personal favourite. I put my hands into the impressions of his and, strangely enough, they were a perfect fit.
Perhaps our first language was a dialogue with the earth in prints of hoof and paw? It is always affecting when a part of one’s own body becomes a measure of the world. The inch assumes its proper importance in the length of a thumb joint. The measures that matter most are not metres or yards, but hands and feet. Not to mention heads (thinking of my head and the hill).
Merle, who was rather well travelled, had been to Grauman’s. Her most vivid recollection of the place, she once said, was that all the stars had the daintiest extremities imaginable. The stilettos had left behind breathless little exclamation marks, as if the earth was surprised to find such sublime beings abroad upon her surface. The tourists went about trying to force their walking shoes into the tracks left by their idols – but none of them fitted. Ugly sisters! Clodhoppers!
Just then a terrible racket started up outside. Glancing out through a ragged hole in the wall, I saw palm trees gesticulating on the horizon, and imagined for a bizarre moment that I had been transformed, with horrible injustice, into a tourist in America. But it was just our newly transplanted windbreak attracting attention. Vegetable décor, animate atmosphere. The workers were tamping down the earth around the boles with pneumatic hammers. Strips of instant lawn were piled up like rolled carpets, ready to be laid. In a week or two, the ill-informed would swear that the palms had grown to maturity on this very spot.
*
Into the crumbling order of the Café Europa, Spilkin introduced a lady friend. Darlene. I took her for one of the escorts, as they apparently preferred to be known, an increasingly brazen coterie of whores who drummed up custom under our roof. Even when she joined our table, I assumed that she was just another hanger-on and that Spilkin’s interest in her, like my own, was sociological. But at the end of the evening, when I rose to leave, I suddenly noticed his hand on her thigh. It was a shock, believe me. Like spotting an error on the final proofs – a comma, say, where there should have been a full stop – just as the printer’s devil stuffed them into his satchel. It gave me such a turn, I nearly regurgitated my dinner.
I had the good sense to keep my objections to the liaison, such as they were, to myself. Times were changing and one never knew what would happen next. But in the days to come, I made a point of appraising this
Darlene with my old eye for detail: I marked the chipped nail polish, the bruised eyeshadow, the great buckles as trusty as a steeplejack’s on the straps of her brassière, the bent pins holding together the frames of her sunglasses. None of it up to scratch. I didn’t like her colour either. One isn’t supposed to say so, but I’m past caring. Coffee finds favour in some quarters, but this was insipid. Less melanin in it than a cup of Milo. Great-grandfather on the mother’s side came from Madras, I discovered later, and it showed in her features. A touch of the tarboosh, I said to Merle, but she wasn’t amused.
Naturally, there was more to it than her colour. She was coarse, in a raw state, unrefined. She was one of those people who consider it amusing to sneak up behind you and clap their hands over your eyes – never mind the greasy fingerprints they leave all over your lenses – and you’re supposed to guess who the culprit is. I would not play the game, even though I recognized her at once by her smell: sweat, perfume and cigarette smoke. Always an unsettling combination.
She was barely literate. She kept saying pri-horrity and cre-hative, negoti-hation and reconcili-hation. Some of it was almost Dickensian. ‘I’s allus paid on the werry last Vens’day arternoon of the munt,’ she’d say, and you’d swear some gin-shop red-herring vendor was standing before you rather than a bank teller. She developed a passion for pasticchio nuts. She ordered expressos and blonk da blonks as if they were going out of fashion. And she never shut up for a minute.
I began to mine her, like all the others, for misuse. Considerately, when Spilkin wasn’t around. But she would go and tell him, pleased as punch, that she was going to be in my book. He pretended to be proud of her, but that snout of his was out of joint.
Nevertheless, he chose to show me a ‘love letter’ she had written him on the back of a postcard from the Durban aquarium. Darling My, it began dyslectically. I had the foresight to reconstruct it for my notebook.
Darling My,
Having a wonderfull time here in Durbs. The family is all fine. But I can’t stop thinking about you, Sweetie. Its just a natural phenomena. C U soon.
PS please pay the phone bill, I forgot!!!
Chow for now,
Your darling Darlene
The telephone account was included. An address in Bezuidenhout Valley. I returned the card and the account to their envelope, and Spilkin put it away in a folder. He had some other papers there, which he rummaged through, and for a moment I thought he was going to inflict his reply upon me too. I could just imagine: My fuliginous darling, my sooty beauty, my dirty sweep. But he thought better of it.
Her letter was the last straw. He found it charmingly innocent and endearing, but I was mortified. It was so tasteless. Not just the fact that she was taking advantage again, but the babyish hand, the tone, the excess of exclamation marks. It changed my opinion of Spilkin irrevocably. The forgivable weaknesses, the hairline cracks that had been there all along, suddenly yawned wide to swallow my good estimation of him. But I couldn’t help thinking that her coarseness had rubbed off on him, that close association had roughened him up, and so I refused to give in.
I raised my concerns with him tactfully. Could he really afford the little wax-paper packets of nuts he was required to bring her every other day, as if she were a squirrel? Wasn’t it possible that she was using him? Couldn’t he see that they had different standards of behaviour, different systems of pronunciation, different grazing habits? (I never said a word about her colour.)
But none of it did any good. He was blind to her flaws, and my observations merely annoyed him. I knew from experience how an error that was glaringly obvious to everyone else could continue to evade the best of proofreaders. He would look past it again and again.
Spilkin and I ended up shouting at one another more than once, thanks to her sheer stupidity. Memorably when she tore half my crossword out of the newspaper on the back of a recipe for pickled fish. It reminded me, ironically, of something Spilkin used to say when we still saw eye to eye: ‘There was always a crossword between us, Tearle, but never a cross word.’
Spilkin across and Darlene down. Darlene across and Spilkin down? I still haven’t found the words.
*
Our Eveready was a waiter of the old school, trained in the beachfront hotels of Durban by a Hindu master. In his spare time, he had a church of his own, with headquarters at his kraal in Zululand, and he was the archbishop. He did not like bacon, although he would serve it up grudgingly. But he resolutely refused to tender alcohol. It was against the commandments of his church, which he himself had brought down from the top of a mine-dump on the East Rand. Seeing that the sale of alcoholic beverages made up a growing proportion of the Café’s earnings, it was not long before Eveready’s conscientious abstention proved inconvenient to Mrs Mavrokordatos.
Then there was a raid by the Hillbrow police, all the bottles on the premises were confiscated, and Eveready abruptly left Mrs Mavrokordatos’s employ. She said he had taken early retirement. But Wessels, who witnessed the sorry scene, said the poor fellow had been dismissed, protesting his innocence to the last, on suspicion of having tipped off the police about our proprietress’s liquor sales. After that, some of the policemen who had conducted the raid would pop in occasionally, and chat with Mrs Mavrokordatos in a corner, or drop a few coins in the fruit machines. Wessels recognized some of them from his days on the force, but did not let on because they were working undercover. Quote unquote.
Eveready’s replacement was a native of Soweto. Name of Vest. Waistcoat, I dubbed him. He had none of his predecessor’s antipathy to alcohol. The more people drank, he told me, the more likely they were to make mistakes with their money or drop their change. He was a bad apple all right. Standards of service went into immediate decline. The waiters were always searching under the tables for some drunkard’s pennies – when they weren’t watching television, that is.
The standards plumbed new depths (long since superseded) on the day Nelson ‘The Madiba’ Mandela was released from prison. You couldn’t get a pot of tea for love or money, because the waiters would not be dragged away from the screen. The kitchen staff, including several we had never seen before, trooped through in their aprons and shower-caps, and created quite a carnival atmosphere. The whole business went on for hours; it must have been four o’clock before he finally showed his face, and I had a feeling they’d been delaying deliberately, playing to the gallery. Now you see him, now you don’t. Some of the resident courtesans had been lifting their elbows all day, and when they finally clapped eyes on him, they began to weep, from sheer relief. Darlene, too. You never heard such a racket. Ululation and whatnot. Everyone wanted to get in on the act. Then they all stood to attention, waiters, cooks, bottle-washers, baggages, with their curled-up fists in the air, and sang the plaintive gobbledygook of their anthem. Vest had his pen in his fist and his order book under his arm. You could have waited till doomsday without attracting a waiter’s attention. In the end, Mrs Mavrokordatos had to fetch me a pot of tea herself, like a common serving girl. By which time I needed something stronger to steady my nerves.
*
First impressions? I was pleased to see that The Madiba was just another old party with spectacles, like myself, although he had rather more hair than was seemly. That aside, he was straight as a ruler, smart as a pin, not unreasonably black. The prison authorities had given him a finely tailored suit to step out in – but they might have spent the money more profitably on an eye test. Dip each frog, pour over the egg custard, and so on. He could hardly see with the spectacles he had, even after his wife had huffed on the lenses as if she meant to make a meal of them. They kept sliding down on his nose when he tried to read his speech.
‘Needs a new prescription,’ Spilkin said. ‘Myopic.’
I wrote a letter about it afterwards to the Star, starting with the etymology: from the Greek muops (muo shut + ops eye). Shut-eye. Then a little joke about needing forty winks. Presented my credentials as something of an expert on e
yewear. Thought of giving Spilkin a nod, decided against. Didn’t deserve it. Took the opportunity to comment on the lack of vision displayed by Mr Etcetera during his first speech to the masses. Behind my jocular tone was a serious point. The Madiba had been out of circulation, so to speak, for nearly thirty years. He could scarcely have a clear-sighted view of world affairs. How much more important, then, that further obstacles not be put in his way. Surely people realized that the lack of appropriate lenses might lead to serious errors of judgement; a single word misread – ‘suspicious’ for ‘auspicious’, say, or ‘congenital’ for ‘congenial’, or ‘treasonable’ for ‘reasonable’ – might plunge the country into crisis. As it was, there were several elementary grammatical errors in the speech (which I was pleased to correct for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers).
My letter came back unread: I could tell by the crispness of the folds in the paper that it had not received due consideration. That short-sighted letters editor had decided criticism was premature. It was the first sign that people like us would no longer have a say.
Why were standards falling fastest in those areas where examples should be set – in the public service, in the press, in broadcasting? It was thanks to shoddy pronunciation that I misapprehended The Madiba’s name. Spilkin had to set me right: not Conrad Mandela, but Comrade. And then he went and told the story to everyone who would listen. Darlene, who would have been well-advised to keep her trap shut, said it was amazing how the very people who thought they knew everything about the world knew nothing about their own country. ‘You whites,’ she said, and it struck me as odd, with Spilkin sitting there as large as life.
*
The most beautiful and mysterious of all the proofreader’s charms is the delete mark: .
Its origins are obscure. Debra Nitsch traces it back to the scribes and clerks, which is not inconceivable. But she is surely being whimsical when she sees in the mark the little gilded halo, complete with handle, found in engravings of medieval morality plays. And her story about the snuffer is pure conjecture.
The Restless Supermarket Page 18
