The Restless Supermarket (23 page)

*

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The menu was always out of date.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.

‘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.