The Restless Supermarket (18 page)

I shall lift up mine eyes. At least the Hillbrow Tower was still there, the real thing I mean, ugly as it is. It was a shame one couldn’t go up there any more. Dinner dancing, and so on. Cheek to cheek, with the world at one’s feet. Or if not the world, at least the most densely populated residential area in the southern hemisphere. And there was Wessels, leaning on the Eiffels of the balcony railing and smoking a Peter Stuyvesant, moored, I should say, like a blimp in a cloud of blue smoke above that echoing Parisian scene, looking
down
on me, with me at
his
feet. I fancied I could see his crooked teeth glinting. That I should have ended up with Empty Wessels, whom I had never even liked. It was a bitter irony. How could I have foreseen such an outcome, in the gold-flecked afternoons of my past, how imagined that I would become a stranger in my home away from home, beset on all sides by change and dissolution? Or imagined: a pink elephant with its ear on backwards standing on a street corner, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a dead body lying in an empty plot on a Sunday morning, burnt beyond recognition, a man of advanced years bearing what is left of his life in two paper shopping-bags. Then, as now, the television was full of experts, little people standing on tiptoe, touting their ‘scenarios’ of the future. As if tomorrow could be scripted. As if one might have expected to see the hammer and sickle trampled underfoot on Red Square and hoisted on the steps of the Union Buildings. The inconceivable times of our lives!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

*

Bogey came to us in a cement-grey suit of communistic cut. It was single-breasted and ill-proportioned for his squat frame: too broad in the shoulder, too wide in the lapel, too long in the drop. The jacket pockets were shaped like shovels and the legs of the trousers were thick and round as traffic bollards. What material it was made of I couldn’t say, something Victorian, approaching sackcloth. A black patent-leather hat. In this case, the material was plain, but the shape was puzzling. Not enough altitude to be alpine. More like a trilby that had had the spirit knocked out of
it.

‘Trilby O’Ferrall,’ Merle said in answer to my question. ‘Miss.’

‘Slobodan Boguslavić,’ said the concrete-clad one underneath the hat, conjuring a fleshy hand from the end of his sleeve. He sounded as if his mouth was full of olives. ‘Dan for short.’

‘Why not Slob?’ said Spilkin, shaking the
hand.

‘Or Zog,’ I put in nimbly. ‘There’s a name I always fancied.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Bogey. And with that, he more or less exhausted his conversational English. We discovered later that his words of introduction had been taught to him by a Swissair hostess on the flight from Zürich.

After he had shaken hands with Merle and me, and pressed his lips to Mevrouw Bonsma’s knuckles, with an elaborate pantomime of applause and gestures towards the piano, he reached for a chair at an adjoining table and drew it up between Spilkin and Mevrouw Bonsma. There was a moment of resistance, in which they both held their positions, while the arm of Bogey’s chair nudged insistently against Spilkin’s. I glowered at him, and saw nothing but the crown of his hat, deeply creased and puckered like a toothless mouth. It reminded me of a whelp mumbling for the teat. More and more in those days, as ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ continued to disturb my mental equilibrium, I was seeing things, thinking oddities, making morbid associations that would once have seemed quite mad to me. Nudge, nudge. Then Mevrouw Bonsma moved anticlockwise and bumped into me, and Spilkin moved clockwise and bumped into Merle, and then Merle and I, like elements in a physics experiment, with no option despite our specific gravity but to transmit the momentum, both moved and bumped into one another, and moved back and bumped into the others, and so on, until in this convulsive fashion, clutching our cushions to our backsides, moving furniture and fundament together, the five of us finally came to rest with equal spaces between our chairs.

‘There,’ said Spilkin, ‘order has been restored.’

Choosing to ignore the fact, of which he must have been keenly aware, that what had been restored was an entirely different order. In a minute of unseemly shuffling and pardon-begging, a quaternion of equals had been transformed irrevocably into a circle. What was it Spilkin had said about the pentagon? How I regretted then my failure to insist upon a wiser seating arrangement at the outset. A square table, at which each person had a side, clearly demarcated, would have exposed how undesirable this shapeless new arrangement was. Might have deterred it altogether. But a round table was so accommodating, made it seem so matter-of-course. A stranger walking into the Café at that moment might have thought that the five of us had been sitting there all our lives.

When he had made himself comfortable, Bogey unbuttoned the jacket of his suit, revealing a comical pot belly and a candy-striped shirt with an immense collar. He transferred his hat from his head to his left knee. His hair was thickly pomaded and swept back from the forehead; an indentation like a plimsoll line encircled his head where the hat had pressed. The extraordinary thing about the pomade, from an etymological point of view, was that it smelt of apples. I caught a whiff and it turned my stomach. As for the skull, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach would have loved it. For the moment, he produced his passport and showed us the syllables of his name, thickly sliced, like one of the sausages I had recently discovered at the Wurstbude in the course of researching the cuisines of the world.

The rest of the evening was a sequence of absurd charades about the newcomer and his history, with a Magyar soundtrack courtesy of Mevrouw Bonsma.
Istanbul was Constantinople, now it’s Istanbul
… Trust Merle to proffer an atlas, on which he was able to point out his island of origin in the Adriatic, a place devoid of vowels, and then to describe in a dotted line of greasy fingerprints left floating in his wake like oil slicks on the surface of the paper, his passage to our shores, while Spilkin said, ‘Ja, ja,’ as if he had confessed to being a German. Bogey seemed extraordinarily interested in the keys to the maps, the tuffets for prairies, the puffs of green popcorn for rainforests, the sutures for railway lines. In the middle of this performance, he changed seats with Spilkin, so that he and Merle could look at the new world from the same vantage point. Then they pored over the tidal charts at the front of her diary, as a month of crescent moons waxed and waned under his fingernails, and fumbled their way through lists of public holidays and the months of the year. I would have gone home then, had she not taken his rude forefinger and used it as a pointer to pick out the syllables: January. February. March.

‘April, May … June, July,’ Spilkin hummed. A folk
song.

Regretfully, there was no ‘Slobodan’ in the
Better Baby
onomasticon.

I waited until well past my bedtime for him to take his leave, so that I might speak plainly, but he did not go. It was more consideration than he deserved, seeing that he didn’t understand a word we were saying. Finally I said to Merle: ‘You’ve done your good turn. But don’t encourage him too much. We don’t want this to become a habit.’

‘Why do you say that?’ She sounded genuinely surprised.

‘It won’t be comfortable with him around. He’s uncouth. And not much of a conversationalist.’

‘Well of course not, he doesn’t speak the language.’

‘Exactly. He won’t be able to keep up his end. Our discussions will be lopsided. You’ll have to get it across to him that he’s not welcome here.’

‘I’ll do no such thing.’

‘I don’t mind him coming to the Café, you know, he’s a welcome new splash against our famous cosmopolitan background. But I’d rather not have him at my table. He could join us again one day when he’s picked up a few words of English.’

‘Aubrey, how could you! He’s just a stranger in a strange city, looking for a bit of company. And he seems like a nice person.’

‘Nice?’ I looked to Spilkin for support, but he pulled a mouth. ‘Alliaceous is more like
it.’

‘Who?’

‘Oniony-garlicky. From the Latin
allium
.
I feel like I’m downwind of a saveloy, something full of hickory smoke and paprika. Look at his hands. He’s altogether too sausagey, of finger and breath.’ He smelt of change, to tell the truth, but I did not say
so.

‘Of all the unkind things,’ said Merle.

‘I regret that you have now taken the cake,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma.

Whereupon the four-flushing topic of conversation, who had been gazing from one of us to the other with an eager smile on his face, doffed the shiny hat from his knee. The kneecap was like a skull embedded in cement.

We could have called him Boguslavić, by analogy with Tearle and Spilkin. It was not that difficult to master, especially when you saw it written down. I made a spirited defence of the principle, but to no avail. He himself badly wanted to be ‘Dan’, but an English label would not stick to such greasy goods. In the end, we called him Bogey. He would tell people
–
once he’d acquired the language − that it was because of his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. When he leant on the piano, he said, with the brim of his hat aslant and the ceiling fan flicking shadows over his stubble, you would swear you were in Casablanca.

I would tell people to look it up in the
Oxford
.
Bogey, noun, ‘an awkward thing or circumstance’. Or even, forgive the vulgarity, ‘
slang
,
a piece of dried nasal mucus’.

*

The winds of change smelt, thanks to Bogey, like an osso bucco
–
a shin of veal containing marrowbones stewed in wine with vegetables. But the fact is, I needed no olfactory clues to the way the winds were blowing. The eye, sharp as ever, had it before the
nose.

An era was ending. And without sounding my own cornetto, I think I can say that I saw it coming before anyone else in the Café Europa, and possibly in the whole of Hillbrow (although I wouldn’t lay claim to more territory than that).

A large part of my working life had been devoted to the proofreading of telephone directories, and specifically the Johannesburg Book. Quite apart from the technical challenges of the task, which I’ve already described, although they’re probably beyond the layman, there were unique insights to be gained into the city and the ways of its inhabitants. Initially, in my apprenticeship, I was struck by the obvious oddities: the Cook who lived in Baker Street, the Towers of Brixton, the Blairs of Blairgowrie, the Blacks of Blackheath. The Heaths, too. No Gowries, mind you, praise be. I compiled a few amusing lists along these lines, passing fancies. But as my eye matured, I began to notice subtler things, submerged reefs beneath the placid surface, patterns that only came into focus when one had squinted until one’s eyes watered. I noticed, for example, a preponderance of Baums and Blooms in Cyrildene; and likewise of Pintos and Pinheiros in Rosettenville; and of Le Roux in Linmeyer. Fully eleven per cent of the Van Rensburgs in the Book of 1973 had settled in Florida, whereas eight per cent of the Smiths, of whom there were more than four hundred, were in Kensington. By contrast, there were only three Schlapoberskys, and they were all in Oaklands. A small mercy, some might say. Don’t suppose that I was obsessed with ethnic groups
–
the concentration of medical men in Hurlingham, for instance, struck me with equal force
–
but it is in the nature of surnames to conceal age, status and sex, and reveal
race.

With experience, my perceptions sharpened further, and I began to notice not just the patterns within directories, but the changes from one directory to the next, the slight shifts in emphasis and secret movements that only a comparison over time would uncover. I could tell that business was booming in Cleveland and dying out in Jeppestown, thanks to the new motorway. Without ever setting foot in Jules Street, I saw that it was becoming the used-car centre of the city.
I saw that the head offices of the big businesses
–
the manufacturers, the insurance houses, the retailers, and their touts in the advertising agencies
–
were moving from the city centre to Rosebank and Sandton. I saw new suburbs rise from the veld
–
Lonehill, Mondeor, Amoroso
–
and old ones fall into decay
–
Doornfontein, Bertrams, Vrededorp
–
and then rise again, occasionally, in a flurry of restaurants and antique shops. Sometimes I saw the tracks of vast processes, generations on the march from poverty to wealth,
Völkerwanderungs
,
exoduses, archaeological flows
–
and then I wished that I had turned my attention to directories as a younger man and kept comprehensive records.

In the twilight of my career, some intriguing trends became apparent in the Book, signs of the momentous changes that lay in store for the city and the country, glimmering between the lines, if one had eyes to see them, even before they became visible in the world.