The Restless Supermarket (19 page)

Take the influx of Moodleys and Naidoos into Mayfair. I had been a proofreader of telephone directories long enough to have observed the steady relocation of these very surnames from Fordsburg and Pageview to Lenasia (or from Frdsbrg and Pgvw to Lns, as the crude abbreviations foisted upon us had it). The fact that they were flowing back into the city fascinated me. There were more of them every year. And it soon became clear, to this latterday Canute, that the tide would not be turned. An historic migration was afoot, comparable to the great scattering of the tribes before Chaka, the King of the Zulus.

In the years after my retirement, I kept up with the life of the Book, although my interest became rather more sociological than philological. There were some remarkable developments, notably the growing number of Hi’s, Ho’s and Fats in the Bedfordview area, an influx of -ićs and -wiczs and -ovas into all areas, including my own, and an inexplicable outbreak of MacGillicuddies in Orchards. But the most striking of all seemed less of a trend than an aberration. I was browsing one evening when I came across a Merope with a Hillbrow address. ‘M’ was then the fastest-growing section, thanks to the burgeoning numbers of African subscribers, but naturally one expected all these Mamabolas and Mathebulas and Masemolas to be in Mdwlnds and Mbpne and other far-flung places. This one was in Hillbrow. The 642- prefix corroborated it. I went at once to my desk and dialled the number. A child answered, a daughter of Africa, and while the little one was summoning her daddy, I put the receiver
down.

The next morning found me loitering in the lobby at the High Point Centre, where Mr Merope apparently made his home. At first, the office-bound traffic was all white, as one would have expected. But by mid-morning, I had seen emerge from the lifts not one or two but half a dozen men who might have been he, black men wearing business suits and toting briefcases, trying and failing to look like chauffeurs or watchmen, and half as many black women besides, trying more successfully to pass as domestic servants.

Silently, while we slept, the tide was darkening. When I said so to Merle at the Café later that same day, she pointed out that Merope was one of the Pleiades, ‘somewhat dimmer than the rest’ from having married a mortal, and made light of my story. ‘Must be a Greek,’ she said. ‘What was the initial?’

‘V.’

‘Vasilas. That seals
it.’

I didn’t mention the telephone call, for fear of seeming duplicitous.

It was not my imagination: there were more and more people of colour in Hillbrow. And it was obvious to me that they were living in our midst. Were the authorities turning a blind eye? When I raised the question with our caretaker Mrs Manashewitz, I discovered that the law was being circumvented by the registration of residential contracts for these outsiders in the names of white proxies. It took years before this situation became public knowledge, and letters about the ‘greying’ of Hillbrow began to appear in the newspapers
–
grey was misleading; the effect might be grey only from a great distance, as in a photograph taken from a satellite, whereas from close up it was more like salt and pepper
–
but by then, it was too late. Having diagnosed the cause of the problems of overcrowding and littering and so on when they were just beginning, I did nothing to alert the authorities. These were the golden days, as I’ve said, and my mind was occupied with other matters. Then, too, the law-abiding tenants of Lenmar Mansions were fortunate that Mrs Manashewitz, who like myself would have been a great champion of freedom of movement in an ideal world, was disinclined to break the
law.

It was just a matter of time before these people felt free to wander about outside, and then to poke their noses into every doorway. Why should the Café Europa be spared?

One evening, a woman rose from a table in one of the shadowier corners and went towards the Ladies’ room. As she passed under the chandelier, I saw a gleam of crimson lipstick and a glimmer of ebony skin (not that I’m especially familiar, to tell the truth, with that heavy hard dark wood used for furniture). No one else seemed to notice. Merle was playing patience, Spilkin had his eyes shut and was tapping out the rhythm of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ on the arm of his chair (Mevrouw Bonsma’s inimitable version). I went to fetch
The Times
from its hook, and scuffed my feet between the tables until she emerged from the Ladies with her lips newly glossed and her hair fluffed up. Indigenous, no doubt about it. I was quite shaken. She returned to her table, where another shadowy figure was waiting. A casual circuit of the room, as if I was just stretching my legs, took me past the two of them and revealed the unsurprising fact that the companion was a man, a bit of a bruiser, possibly an Italian.

‘What’s biting you?’ Merle asked, when I had resumed my seat. And then tried to soften the expression by turning it into a lesson in colloquial speech for Bogey.

I pointed out the clandestine liaison.

‘Perhaps Mrs Mav has applied for international status?’

I couldn’t remember exactly what that was, or whether it might still be applicable in these lawless times, whatever it was, something about foreign Africans and the number of lavatories, but I could hardly concentrate with Merle slapping my knee and telling me to stop staring. Later, I recalled that assignations across the colour bar were no longer illegal, strictly speaking. What people did behind closed doors was probably no business of mine. But when they made a public spectacle of themselves, did I have to look the other
way?

As it turned out, averting the eyes, if not turning a blind one, was the order of the day. See no evil, etcetera. Other black women appeared in the Café. Always women, in the beginning, on the arms of sallow-skinned men wearing gold jewellery and open-neck shirts. Continentals and Slavs, men with overstuffed wallets and easy habits, consumers of espressos from tiny cups which they held in their signet-ringed fingers like the crockery from doll’s houses.

Mrs Mavrokordatos had her nose in her books and her eye on the bottom
line.

‘You’re starting to attract a different sort of clientele,’ I said to her one
day.

‘You mean blacks?’

‘They’re ladies of the night, in case you haven’t noticed.’

‘And what if they are? The men have money and like to spend it, and I want them to spend it in here. Don’t pull such big eyes, Mr Tearle. I need the business. You have to change with the times or you get left behind.’

Big eyes? Was it just a way of speaking, or a dig at my bifocals? All the better to scrutinize you with, I should have
said.

I went back to my chair and surveyed the clusters at the tables with new eyes. The men were leaning in, they had clumps of hair at their necks where the shirt collars gaped, they had small buttons on the vamps of their shoes and thickly jointed watch-straps like astronauts. The dark women had fleshy shoulders, upholstery puckers of skin in their armpits, and glaringly red lips, which made their mouths seem even larger than they were. So large that the rest of their features looked somehow devoured. Black women. There would be black men too, one of these days, sleek and tufty, here and there.

You have to change with the times or you get left behind. And if you’re left behind, is that such a bad thing? Is the past such a terrible place to
be?

*

Bogey did not go away. He came back as often as he pleased
–
to practise his English, he said. Merle took a schoolmistressy interest in his progress. To give him his due, he was a fast learner. His head proved to be stuffed with odds and ends of American, scraps of motion pictures and hits and commercials just waiting to be used. He fitted his ‘balonies’ and ‘gee-whizzes’ and ‘gimme-a-breaks’ into conversation like a child trying to master an educational toy intended for a more advanced age group. Once, he referred to Mevrouw Bonsma as a ‘broad’. You would think a Sauer Street nib-licker had emptied the Balaam Basket down his throat.

Predictably, it did not end with Bogey either. He had opened up a crack in our society with his chocklike person, and other strangers squeezed through it and made themselves at home. We welcomed them with open arms, we were so accommodating. We were no longer a foursome but a circle, and it is in the nature of a circle to widen irreversibly, like a ripple, while pretending to remain itself. But I knew better, I saw precisely what we were becoming, and I charted the evolutionary decline stage by stage. We were a sextet, and then briefly a septet, and then, God help us, an ogdoad. Ugly words for unpretty polygons and battered circles; each mutation heralded by the shuffling of chairs, as if we were dogs in search of new places to settle. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that necks were craned from other quarters. The lesser patrons patronizing
us!

Many of these newcomers were men like Bogey. They had ridiculous names, like Grog and Bleb, which I vowed never to utter. Just as I vowed never to answer to their flatulent ‘Aubreys’. They were argumentative and obstinate. They sat at our table crackling their yellow newspapers like stage lightning and thundering among the crockery with their fists. They were obsessed with communism, both its demise in the old countries and its apparent resurrection in the new. Whenever Eveready came near, they tried to draw him into discussion about the Congress of South African Trade Unions, to call a spade a spade. Their great love was ‘talking politics’. Our ways did not cut much ice with
them.

In my eyes, what bound them together most tellingly was their putrid spelling. I overheard one of them in the Central News Agency trying to locate the works of Bulgakov, with which I was familiar in my youth.
B-L-U-G-O-V-
They couldn’t even spell correctly in their mother tongues!

Broken English is no longer a drawback in the business world. Bogey went into import-export, commodity unspecified. He spent a great deal of money on clothes. His first and proudest purchase was a leather jacket from the Oriental Plaza. The garment was clearly some sort of Mohammedan practical joke. It was made entirely of offcuts, hundreds of patches of different colours, mainly if not exclusively imitation, and none larger than a playing card. A joker, I should say, or a knave.

‘Neat, no?’ he asked like a matinee secret agent.

‘Neat, no,’ I replied. ‘You look like something swept out of an abattoir.’ The overall impression was of a bale of bloodied hides, with one rudimentary cephalon still attached. It was the meaty colour of him too, and the Bovrilish substance he had taken to smearing on his head in place of the home country’s pomade.

What was it again in the perfume factory? Something lost. (One of Wessels’s cracks.) Pull yourself together, Pedro. (Mine.)

Bogey showed me the lining of his jacket, as enragingly red as a matador’s cape. Then the label, which was sewn on the
outside
at the back, between the shoulder blades. Leatherama. I added it to my -rama list, below Cupboard-a-rama and Veg-a-rama. Merle said I was cruel. But even she had to laugh when he appeared a few days later in a pair of sunglasses with ‘Glarebusters’ printed across the lenses. My scorn he mistook for concern that the trade name obscured his vision, and he would not be quiet until I had looked through them and confirmed, out loud for all to hear, that one could see right through the words from the other side. ‘You see, I no see,’ he kept declaiming. And then, when I had them on my nose, plunging the place into darkness, he went on in tones of childlike wonder, as if there were some witchcraft involved, ‘
You
no see,
I
see.’

This liking for things with their labels on the outside is degenerate. What sort of person willingly turns himself into an unsalaried sandwichman? A walking ‘salami on wry’ (Sonja’s Delicatessen). And pays for the privilege?

But despite my better judgement, I found myself making allowances for him. He was enchanted with being a consumer. No, it was more than that, for we are all consumers, willy-nilly, even the less materialistic of us, like myself. He, however, was a consumerist. His passion was not mere consumption, but consumerism. He regarded it with religious awe and defended it with the zeal of a convert. And coming from a country in which the opportunity to practise his faith had been so cruelly curtailed, who could blame
him?

I saw him window-shopping in Pretoria Street one evening as I left the Café, and followed at a distance. He was waddling along with his hands behind his back, pigeon-toed, short-legged, bobbing his head from side to side, sweating in the butchered jacket. The blind trilby had been driven from his head by a straw Tyrolean with a guinea-fowl feather in the band. All in all, he looked like some odd bird that had strayed off course.

He stopped outside the Ambassador and looked into the glass-fronted display cases at photographs of revellers disporting themselves in the hotel’s discotheque. Shamelessly under the weather, most of them. Went on to Exclusive Books, where the latest blockbuster by the author of
The Unhappy Millionaire
had been given a whole window to itself. Went on again past Freeman and Marks, the outfitters, High Point Lock and Key, Papoutsi (from the Greek
papoutsus
,
shoe) the shoe shop, past the Daelite (that is, Daylight) Pharmacy, past the trestle-table of knives and holsters at the top of the steps to the High Point Centre, tarried in front of Diplomat Luggage Specialists. He gazed through the iron mesh at the carry-alls and tote bags, some of them quite possibly relatives of his poor jacket. ‘Window-shopping.’ What a shabby word, concealing a rash of thwarted desire beneath a cloak of respectability. As if it were no more than a pleasant pastime. The expression on his face was curious and greedy, inquisitive and acquisitive. Avis, avid. Could there be some connection? I reached for my
Pocket
.

But he was on the move again, down the stairs past the hanging gardens of High Point, to the automatic photograph booth. He drew the curtain and I watched his feet sticking out below, facing west, and then north, and then south. He was having himself photographed, full-face and in profile, like a felon. And now east! From behind! Then I understood why: for the label. I hurried away before he should see
me.