The Restless Supermarket E-Book

Ivan Vladislavić

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 528

Beschreibung

It is 1993, and Aubrey Tearle's world is shutting down. He has recently retired from a lifetime of proofreading telephone directories. His favourite neighbourhood haunt in Johannesburg, the Café Europa, is about to close its doors; the familiar old South Africa has almost vanished. Standards, he grumbles, are in decline, so bad-tempered, conservative Tearle embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow citizens. The results are disastrous, hilarious and poignant. A classic novel about the post-apartheid era, brimming with riotous imagery, urban satire and outrageous wordplay. This tour de force from Ivan Vladislavic was awarded the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

Leseprobe

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First published in southern Africa in 2001 by David Philip Publishers

New edition in southern Africa published in 2012 by Umuzi, an imprint of Random House Struik

First published this edition in 2014 by And Other Stories London – New York www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Ivan Vladislavić 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Ivan Vladislavić to be identified as Author ofThe Restless Supermarket has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Print ISBN 9781908276322 eBook ISBN 9781908276339

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

The Café EuropaThe Proofreader’s DerbyThe Goodbye Bash

for Luc de Graeve

Where can we always find happiness? In the dictionary.

– Aubrey Tearle

‌The Café Europa

Part One

He reads the world, like a favourite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently slipt in.

–William Hazlitt

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A salesman buggering a pink elephant (excuse my Bulgarian). Not a sight one sees every day, even on the streets of Johannesburg – the Golden City as it were, Egoli as it are, to quote my pal Wessels, the last of the barnacles. As the century declines to a conclusion one has come to expect undignified behaviour as a matter of course, but this was an ‘all-time low’ (as the newspapers would put it). I see it before me now as if it were yesterday.

I say he was a salesman because of the pinstriped suit, the shirt-tails hanging out behind, the tie drooping on his chest like a slice of pizza. Old-fashioned associations on my part. He might just as well have been a popular star, or a lawyer with a passing interest in human rights, or the head of a syndicate for stealing motor cars. These days, the men in lounge suits are good-for-nothings more often than not, while the real businessmen are waltzing around in Bermuda shorts and espadrilles. Whoever he was, he had hold of the elephant on the pavement outside the Jumbo Liquor Market in Kotze Street, gripping its shocking pink buttocks in his paws and grinding his groin against its unyielding fibreglass tail.

I stopped to stare. A lifetime of practice has turned me into one of the world’s most shameless scrutineers.

The joker’s eyes were screwed shut in rapture, but the elephant’s were like saucers, with painted pupils as black as draughtsmen rattling in them. The beast’s pointed ears stood on end like wistful wings and its trunk curled an outraged question mark over its little gasping mouth. Its eyes met mine without blinking.

‘Hey, Arch! Check what Darryl’s doing.’ Spoken by another ill-suited entrepreneur fumbling for a wallet while the cashier rang up a carton of Camel cigarettes and a bottle of Red Heart rum.

The Jumbo Liquor Market, as its name suggests, is a ‘convenience store’ in the American mould. Sliding glass doors open directly onto the pavement so that the passing trade can totter in and out with a minimum of effort. From till to gutter in three easy steps. Arch came out to see what Darryl was up to. Arch, Darryl and the Third Man. A little triumvirate, unholy and unwise, but citizens nevertheless of the conurbation in which I find myself.

Bump and grind from the rear.

Arch said, ‘Ag, stop it man Darr. You making your name tawty.’ (Just who or what ‘tawty’ is, I cannot say: it’s in none of the reference works and no one will enlighten me. Perhaps a South African counterpart of that scoundrel Mudd?)

Darr slumped down on the elephant’s back and spoke passionately into one outflung ear: ‘Suffer, baby, suffer.’

Snorts of laughter from Arch and the Third Man. What would his name be? Some monosyllabic chunk no doubt, some unfeeling stump like Gav or Ern or Gord. People were starting to gather. Shoppers from the supermarket on the next corner, drinkers from the verandah of the Chelsea Hotel across the way, the twilight children, drawn out in broad daylight by the spectacle, a couple of continental gentlemen in open-neck shirts. As representative a cross-section of conurbanites as you could wish to find.

Suffer, baby, suffer. It was the punchline of a Wessels joke, I’m sure, entertained reluctantly like all the rest. I never forget a punchline – but I’m damned if I can remember a joke. Except for that one about Rubber Dinghy Sithole. ‘What’s black and goes with the stream?’ I’ve spoilt the effect by putting it back to front. It must be all of fifteen years since Erasmus at Posts and Telecommunications told it to me, around the time Rhodesia attained its majority, and for some reason it stuck. The pink elephant, I noticed, was chained to a parking meter, expired.

Right on cue, the Queen of Sheba staggered out of the alley between the Jumbo and Hypermeat. She had a throne there, a sponge-rubber armchair the colour of urine, upon which she sometimes reclined wearing a paper crown from a Christmas cracker and a robe of threadbare carpeting. She was drawn to Darr at once. As she gazed at him, she stuck a hand through the armhole of her dress and absent-mindedly rearranged her breasts. He huffed and puffed and oohed and aahed, and opened one eye to gauge the response of his growing audience.

Hypermeat was flogging half a dead sheep @ R12.95 a kilogram, and sirlion steaks @ R6.95 a cut. Doing a roaring trade, I suppose. ‘Nice meat’ said a blackboard, also chained to a parking meter, with ten minutes on the dial.

The Queen staggered closer. She smelt like the bottom of the barrel. Seeing that the rear end of the elephant was already occupied, she approached the front and tried to clamber up like a mahout. Darr kept thumping away. An ‘ugly situation’ all right, and bound to get uglier. Arch saw it coming. He took Darr by the arm and tried to drag him away, but was shrugged off. The Third Man, hurrying to Arch’s assistance, dropped his wallet, and coins scattered across the pavement. The children swooped. I put my foot down on a one-rand coin and examined the little ones to see if there was a deserving case among them.

The Queen got a leg over the elephant’s neck and sprang up, overbalanced, grabbed at an ear, which snapped off in her hands, and plunged over the other side. Her head struck the fender of the [Henry] Ford parked at the kerb. The car began to shriek; the Queen, God save her, was silent. Darryl came to a shuddering halt. A tiny peep, the sound a crib toy might make if you squeezed it, issued from the elephant’s trunk.

‘Meesta Ferreira! Meesta Ferreira! Pleece comb tew da frount!’ the cashier said urgently into a microphone. Mr Ferreira’s face appeared in a diamond of glass in the door at the back of the shop.

Enough. I kicked the coin down a stormwater drain and hurried on to the Café Europa. I had seen enough to know what would inevitably follow: skop, skiet and donner, and their corollaries, snot and trane. (These are Wesselisms for trouble and tears, and the fact that I stoop to them is a sign that better words have failed me.) Mr Ferreira arrives on the scene, thrusting out the managerial bulges of his pink blazer. Arch and Darr wrestle. The Queen bleeds unconsciously. Voices and fists are raised. The Queen comes round and begins to wail. Her courtiers creep out of their holes and try to console her by falling over her and tugging at her clothing. Speaking in indigenous tongues, roaring and cursing, laying on of hands and feet. Mr Ferreira enters into the spirit by taking out his revolver. The Third Man trots across the street, opens the door of a black sedan (one of those ubiquitous abbreviations that issue in an unbroken line from the Bayerische Motoren Werke) and reaches for something under the driver’s seat. The owner of the stricken Ford comes running with a serviette tucked into his pullover, and examines the dented fender as if it is a wound in his own flesh. Multilingual sobbing. Four-letter words fly, the whole dashed alphabet. The air goes dark with obscenity, the leading players are obscured by it, the bystanders grow restless, Darryl is still darrylling away in the gloom, Arch is arching, the manager managing. And then warning shots, Your Honour, falling down.

In a word: chaos.

One Sunday morning not too long ago, on an overgrown plot in Prospect Road, I saw a body in the weeds, under a shroud of pages from the Sunday Times. I saw it from the window of my own flat, where I stood with a carton of long-life milk in my hand, and I could almost smell the pungent scent of the kakiebos crushed by its fall. It lay among the rusted pipes, blackened bricks and outcrops of old foundations that mark every bit of empty land in this city, as if a reef of disorder lay just below the surface, or a civilization had gone to ruin here before we ever arrived.

What do I mean by ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh.

*

Wessels was waiting for me as usual in the Café Europa. Properly: Martinus Theodosius Wessels – but I’m afraid I think of him as Empty. Empty Wessels make the most noise. Or in this case, makes the most noise. Appropriately, it grates the grammatical nerve-endings. Errors of number are Wessels’s speciality.

‘Yes yes, Mr Tearle,’ he said through a jet of smoke. ‘Hullo-ss.’ Perhaps the sibilant centre of his own surname created this propensity for letting off steam. Before I could even sit down, he was rootling in my shopping-bag, trying to put me off my food. ‘Salamis, hey. Sweating like a pig in there.’

Salamis? Rang a bell. I made a note to look it up.

‘You’ll never guess what I just saw.’

‘Me first,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a major something to tell you.’

‘So long as it’s not a joke.’

‘Uh-uh. Sit down, you making me nervous.’

‘Take your foot off my chair.’ The foot in question was encased in plaster of Paris. I’d known Wessels for several years, but I’d only recently made the acquaintance of this grisly extremity. The toes were squashed together like foetuses in a bottle, and there were lumps of plaster stuck to the hairs curling out of them. He made a performance of moving crutch and limb and dusting the plastic seat cover with a serviette.

Moçes appeared at my shoulder. Properly: Moses Someone-or-Other. I’d added the hammer and sickle because he was from Moçambique. A little joke between myself and my inner eye, entirely lost on the flapping ear.

‘Have a dop,’ said Wessels. He ordered himself a brandy.

I ordered my usual tea and specified separate bills. Wessels was obsessed with getting me drunk. Ditto himself, with more success. When he’d broken his ankle, falling down somewhere in a stupor, I asked him, ‘Did it leak when you broke it?’ But he didn’t get it. He had the most fantastic excuse, though: said he’d hurt himself trying to effect a citizen’s arrest on a cutpurse outside the Mini Cine.

(What sort of a name is that for a cinema? They might as well call it the Silly Billy. I won’t be surprised if it goes out of business.)

‘So what’s the story?’

‘The Café Europa,’ waving his crutch recklessly, ‘is closing down.’

‘You’re joking.’ But I could see that for once he wasn’t.

‘At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error.’

He mispronounces things deliberately to get under my skin. The last day of 1993 was less than a month away.

‘Shame man,’ Wessels went on. ‘Tony told me this morning. I wished you was here to hear it with your own ears. Because you our main man and everythink.’

‘God forbid.’

So the New Management was throwing in the towel. Properly: Anthony, pronounced ænθәni: for a reason I could never fathom. Popularly: Tony. But tony he wasn’t, so I preferred to think of him as the New Management, which he was.

I called Moçes back. I said I would have a whiskey after all, with an ‘e’ please, deciding to indulge. Time was when you couldn’t get anything stronger at the Café Europa than a double espresso. On high days and holidays, when grandchildren were born or horses came in, Mrs Mavrokordatos – the Old Management, although we never thought of her that way – might slip you an ouzo under the counter, in a thimble of a glass with a bunch of grapes and a twist of vine etched on it. That was before her own standards slipped in the direction of the shebeen.

‘Did he say why?’

‘Didn’t have to. No customers, no profits. This kind of place isn’t in any more.’

‘What about Errol and Co? I thought the New Management was catering for them. Specifically.’

‘Get real. They don’t spend their bucks here. They shoot pool, they sit outside in the sun, they have a couple of pots. Half the time they don’t even pay for those − it’s cheaper to bring your own. I see them topping up their glasses with nips from the girls’ bags. They think they clever, but I got experience in covert operations.’

‘My eye.’ He can hear a cork pop at fifty paces.

‘I saw it coming. Three years ago already I told Mrs Mav changing with the times won’t save us. We’ve had our chips.’

Wessels had taken to echoing me in the most infuriating manner. Still does. He swirls my sentiments around in his cavernous interior until they’re completely out of shape and mixed up with his own, and then he booms them back at me, made discordant and disagreeable, and reeking of the ashtray. I was the one who said: Changing with the times is not for us. Staying the same is our forte. He never gave the matter a thought; he was too busy feeding his face and ogling the coloured girls, most of them young enough to be his daughters. To tell the truth, I was hardly surprised that the Café was closing down. I’d been predicting it for years.

‘Our days are numbered.’

I’d said that too! And in my mind’s eye, the numbered days were perfect spheres, like pool balls.

The pool room was through an archway. It was always dark in there, because the blinds were never opened, and when the fluorescent tubes over the tables glowed, the surrounding darkness thickened. Now Errol came suddenly into focus in the smoke-marbled light. He took a cloth from his pocket and drew his cue tenderly through it. The thing was his pride and joy. He’d tried to impress me once with the name of the manufacturer, but it meant nothing to me. He carried it in two parts, in a case lined with velvet, and would screw them together with the practised efficiency of an assassin.

Moçes brought my whiskey, John Jameson’s on the rocks. Don’t suppose that this semi-literate peasant appreciated the distinction between Scotch and the real thing: ‘with an “e”’ was shorthand, drummed into him with difficulty.

‘To us!’ said Wessels.

‘Absent friends!’ I regretted that afterwards, because it set his cogs whirring.

The whiskey made me sentimental. I don’t like sentiment − it’s one of the reasons I seldom indulge − but Wessels was waffling on about the good old days and I found myself looking around me with new eyes. Now that the existence of the place was threatened, I saw it in a new light. I would have to look at everything properly, preserve the details that the years had somehow failed to imprint on my mind.

Décor. Tables and chairs – travesties of their former selves since the reupholstering, but still affectingly receptive to the contours of the familiar human body. The espresso machine on the counter. Even the new fixtures I had despised so much – the venetian blinds where I would have preferred to see the old brocade, the fake stained glass of the chapel where the one-armed bandits resided, the posters of football teams – all suddenly felt fragile. But not the television sets. There was a limit to everything.

The impending loss that grieved me most was Alibia, the painted city that covered an entire wall of the Café. I imagined workmen in overalls slapping polyvinyl acetate over our capital without a second thought. It should be moved to a new location, I decided: sawn up into blocks, numbered and packed, transported to safety, and reassembled. The Yanks were all for that sort of thing, carving up the world and recycling it as atmosphere. I don’t know why I was thinking this way. After all, it was no Florentine fresco, it was of no historical significance, nothing important had ever happened in this room. There was no point in preserving any of it. It was merely − that phrase so beloved of the Lost and Found columns came into my head – ‘of great sentimental value’.

‘If these walls could speak, hey,’ Wessels said as if he’d read my thoughts.

‘If they could speak English, you mean.’ Then I might have asked them: what is that stuff you’re covered with? Apart from the one with the mural, the walls were papered, and the pattern had always bothered me. What did it represent? Rising damp? Autumn leaves? ‘Besides, ears are common enough among walls, but mouths are rare.’

‘Now that’s above my fireplace,’ said Wessels, and looked baffled.

‘Never mind. I wonder what will open here when we’re gone?’

‘A whorehouse.’ As if he knew for a fact. ‘Or a disco.’ He made Christmas lights with his fat fingers.

‘So long as it’s not another chicken outlet,’ I said. ‘We’ve got enough of those. Though why they should be called chicken outlets, I don’t know. It sounds like the orifice through which a fowl passes an egg.’

‘I know this tone of voice,’ Wessels said, too familiarly by half. ‘It’s your letter-to-the-editor tone. We should write a letter to the Star. We haven’t done that for ages. Hey, Mo-siss.’

He ordered another round, make that doubles, and I didn’t protest. These were extraordinary circumstances.

‘Dear Editor,’ Wessels dictated, steepling his fingers and gazing up at the ceiling in what I understood to be a parody of my own attitude. ‘It have come to my attention that Europa Caffy, last outpost of symbolization in the jungly flatland that go by the name of Hillbrow, most densely populated residential hairier in the southern hemisphere …’

And growing denser by the day. More people and fewer motor vehicles. No one who could afford to drive a car wanted to come here any more.

I have never been able to hold my liquor, as they say, whereas Empty Wessels can hold a gallon (an ancient measure for liquids) in each leg without getting plastered. The walls have ears. I found myself going over the porous surface of Wessels’s face as incredulously as I had just examined the wallpaper. Another crumbling ruin. His face sat like a lump of porridge on the cracked calyx of his old-fashioned suit with its ridiculously wide lapels. A drinker’s nose, a real grog berry, with little sesamoid nodules in the wings of the nostrils. His features were all too big. You could say of him, without a hint of the figurative, that he was all ears. They were large and fleshy in the lobe and full of gristle, tufty in the middle, with tops like the curve of fat on a pork chop. It made sense to me that Empty Wessels should have these meaty handles attached to his head. Auditory meatus. To coin a false etymology.

Pitcher ~ pitchy ~ plague ~ plaguy. The whiskey beginning to talk. Then there was the hair. Also too big, obscenely thick for a man of his age, and worn in the ducktail style. The rear end of a bloody Muscovy. He dyes it black. Why does it vex me so?

‘What’s to become of us?’ he was still dictating, mocking my accent. ‘We part of the furniture around here.’

Speak for yourself. The whole of his person appears to be covered with the same stiff horsehair that sprouts from his ears. The way it sticks out of him, you could believe that he was stuffed with it. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a shiny spring burst out of the fabric stretched over his belly.

‘Those were the days. Yours faithfully.’

He has all the finesse of an ottoman, I thought. He had stopped speaking at last and was gazing at me over the spatulate ends of his fingers. You piece of wood. You wing-eared lounger. You stool. And then by anatomical association: You clot. You thrombus. ‘Those were the days?’ You have no idea what the days were. By the time you arrived on the scene, the days were no longer what they were supposed to be. That it should come to this. That I should end up with Wessels, of all people, up the creek in a leaky kayak. It was a bitter irony. I had often consoled myself that things were not as bad as they might have been, but now it came home to me that they were actually worse.

The same canoe coming and going (5): kayak.

Wessels called Moçes to turn up the volume on the television set. News from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. For some time now, Wessels had been making a show of interest in national affairs. Oddly enough, I had a feeling he was trying to impress the waiters. CODESA this and CODESA that. The country was disappearing behind a cloud of acronyms. As for the décor at the ‘World Trade Centre’ – how could one expect proper political decisions to be made in those dreadful surroundings? The place looked like a brothel.

I excused myself.

Alcohol does not agree with me. It argues, it presents opposing viewpoints − like that Freek Robinson on the television. In the Gentlemen’s room I scrutinized, as I always did, the peculiar geometrical pattern in the frosted glass of the window. In the beginning, it had reminded me of those abstract designs in nails and string that were thought so modern when I was starting out at Posts and Telecommunications. But then I’d begun to think of it as a hide stretched between stakes, the skin of some animal kept under glass.

I turned to the wall above the washbasin where the mirror was meant to be (I had seen it there myself as recently as the day before): four small holes and a faint outline of grime showed where it had been secured to the tiles. Someone had unscrewed it and carried it off. I couldn’t believe it was gone. In the shiny tiles, my image wavered. I wet my fingers under the tap and ran them over what was left of my hair, then dried the bumpy top of my head with a wad of paper towels, staring down the pale ghost. I took off my spectacles, huffed on them, dried them on my tie. Without my eye-glasses, the ghost in the wall disappeared entirely.

Alcohol spoke in the archaic, extravagant language it uses during our arguments. It said: This is your lucky day, spindleshanks. Nature has done you a favour by dimming your sight. And some petty thief, working hand in hand with natural forces, a marvellous example of symbiosis, has performed a greater service by carrying off the mirror, in which you might otherwise see yourself as you really are: not the distinguished figure you think you cut, not the debonair sea-captain, but a shabby deckhand, a figure of fun, a fogram. You and Wessels make a perfect pair, Wessels with his sprouty ears, you with your raisiny cranium and your fish-eyes.

When I got back to the table, Wessels was just leaving. He said he had to get home to feed the cat. That was rich. He wanted to get to the off-sales at the Senator before closing time.

That reminded me. ‘I saw something amazing at the Jumbo Liquor Market when I was on my way over here. You know that mascot thing of theirs that they put out on the pavement, the elephant—’

‘Dumbo.’

‘Jumbo,’ I corrected him.

‘Dumbo, from the comics, the heffalump who could fly.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You mean you haven’t read his books?’

‘It didn’t occur to me that he might be an author.’

‘Sorry, Aubs-ss, got to run. We’ll speak later.’

I had to call him back for his bill, which he was conveniently forgetting under the pot of sugar sachets. He paid up and hobbled out. Someone had written a message on the plaster cast and drawn an anatomical diagram. Obscene graffiti, I suppose.

When he had gone, I summoned Moçes to turn the sound down on the television. I was the only person watching, if you can call the idle apperception of an image on a screen ‘watching’: men in suits voicing opinions. Talking heads. Strictly, heads and shoulders. Moçes tapped the volume button with the end of a warped pool cue. Old Eveready used to make do with his forefinger, but these days people need ‘equipment’ for the simplest tasks. The set in the opposite corner went on murmuring. There was a different image on that screen: a football match. Alarmingly green lawn, cunningly mown into the MacLaren tartan. Arsenal 2, Urinal 1. A punchline, if I’m not mistaken. Half a dozen men (the Olé ’Enries, between you and me) were lounging in a semicircle of chairs below the set. The baize of an empty pool table, glimpsed through the archway, was the same acid green as the lighter squares on the football pitch. Errol and Co must have moved to another table, out of sight. I could hear the balls clicking together, like the building cracking its knuckles.

Why would a company that sold alcoholic beverages have a pink elephant as its mascot? It was supposedly a sign of extreme intoxication, even of delirium tremens. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (the incomparable fourth edition, revised and reprinted with corrections in 1957, henceforth referred to as ‘the Pocket’), which I happened to have stored in the place it was made for, was mum on the derivation, and I’d had no first-hand experience of such things, but the connotations were hardly attractive. Was it black humour? Or mere ignorance? Why not purple snakes? Could the elephant’s name really be Dumbo? Lately, Wessels was always trying to trick me.

He would stow his nightcap under his pillow and hurry back for company. I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to be gone before he arrived.

Usually when I left the Café, I took a turn around Hillbrow, my daily constitutional, sometimes as far as the Fort, or even the Civic Theatre to watch the sun sink over Braamfontein. Our highveld sunsets are spectacularly garish, thanks to the quantities of mine dust and chemicals in the air. But this evening, I was drawn straight back to the opposite end of Kotze Street.

The one-eared elephant was behind bars, between the two cash desks, with his silver chain and padlock coiled like a serpent at his feet. He was looking out between the burglar bars with the same ecstatic expression frozen on his face. Dumbo? It was possible.

Sausages for a Greek island (7): Salamis. Ruled by Ajax, the king of detergents.

*

I was an old hand at the Café Europa, their most venerable patron, an incorrigible ‘European’. Not a member though, never mind what Wessels said. We were never a club.

I am a proofreader by profession. When I retired half a dozen years ago, I came to live in a flat in Prospect Road on the edge of Hillbrow. Though my vocation had been a solitary one and I was used to my own company (never been married), I felt cooped up at home. The place was spacious enough and light, but my view of the skyline was all nickel and paste by night and factory roofs and television aerials by day. So I ventured out.

The public spaces in my neighbourhood were uninviting. The parks provided no seating arrangements. Where once there had been benches for whites only, now there were no benches at all to discourage loitering. The loiterers were quite happy to lie on the grass, but, needless to say, I was not. The park in Beatrice Street had a bench; but then it also had a reniform paddling pool that attracted the wrong sort of toddler. The public library was a morgue for dead romances. A series of children’s drawings, hideous without exception, had been stuck on the walls in a misguided attempt to brighten the place up. There were no pavement cafés à la française. The weather was suitable, but not the social climate: the city fathers quite rightly did not want people baring their fangs in broad daylight, cluttering the thoroughfares, and giving the have-nots mistaken ideas about wealth and leisure.

After a week of fruitless wandering around the streets of Hillbrow, the happy day arrived when an escalator carried me up into the Café Europa on the first floor of Meissner’s Building in Pretoria Street.

The ambience appealed at once. There was a hush in the din of traffic, a lull in the beat of the sunlight, with a melody tinkling through it like a brook. At the grand piano was a woman in a red evening dress, with a swirl of hair on a lacquered skewer. Even seated, she was tall and imposing. She was playing ‘I Love Paris’, which suited the establishment, if not the city and the season, down to a semiquaver. French doors gave onto a balcony, a sort of elevated pavement café with wrought-iron tables and chairs of bottle-green, shaded by striped umbrellas in the Cinzano livery, delicious monsters and rubber plants in pots. It was tempting to sit out of doors. On the other hand, it was so cool and quiet inside, with comfortable armchairs and sconces for reading by. At half a dozen tables, men of my generation, more or less, were playing backgammon or chess on inlaid boards, or reading newspapers with their folds pinched in wooden staves. Good idea: gave the news a bit of backbone. Another clutch of papers hung from hooks on a pillar, chafing their wings in the moted air.

I crossed the carpet, an autumnal layer as soft and yielding underfoot as oak leaves, past a glass counter where dainties were displayed in rows, like miniatures of the pianist’s hairdo, and chose a little square table against the wall near the French doors, where I could have the best of both worlds: from inside, the ceiling fans circulated a muted hubbub of conversation in foreign tongues, piano music, the clack of dominoes, the smell of cigar smoke and ground coffee; while a breeze from outside carried in the hum of traffic and the scent of the Levant, thanks to the lamb on the rotisserie at the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant down below. The doors were set into a wall of plate glass, segmented by brocade curtains drawn into Corinthian columns, allowing a panoramic view of the buildings opposite. Between two of them, against a postcard of bright blue sky, the top of the Hillbrow Tower stuck up like an attachment for a vacuum cleaner. I had never been fond of it. But then I had never seen it from this perspective – gazing skywards is next to impossible with my bad neck – and I thought it made a touching contrast to the cast-iron Tours d’Eiffel in the balcony railing.

I sat down and opened my paper. I was accustomed to working in silence, and so the piano was unsettling at first, but I would discover in time that the right sort of background music supplies a very productive rhythm for browsing through telephone directories or hunting for literals in the classifieds. A fugue, well played, will facilitate the identification of anagrams, for example, while a march will ginger up a letter to the editor.

The waiter, an affable and fairly efficient old boy who introduced himself as Eveready, brought my tea in a civilized cup and saucer; the cup was spoilt somewhat by a picture of a coffee bean in a sombrero dancing the cachucha, but in these days of polystyrene, the lapse might be forgiven. The serviette was folded into an episcopal mitre. The sugar was in a pot (later one would find it in nasty little sachets, which were supposed to promote economy, and instead encouraged pilfering) and the pot was equipped with a genuine spoon (rather than a plastic spatula). An unobtrusive perspex sign, which now came to my attention, informed me that I was table No. 1, and this pleased me inordinately.

A European ambience. Prima. The least one would expect from an establishment that called itself the Café Europa. Importantly, it was ambience rather than atmosphere. You may find ‘atmosphere’ in fast-food restaurants, thick enough to cut with a plastic knife and obedient to the strictest laws, being the necessary by-product of gingham curtains and sepia-tinted photographs, tables shaped like kegs and lithographs of the Three Little Pigs. Atmosphere is an American commodity. And that is why the citizens of the Golden City covet it. They want to breathe deep-fried oxygen, they want to be part of the Space Age. Europeans prefer ambience, which cannot be pumped in overnight or sprayed on with an aerosol, but has to accrue over time.

*

My first impressions came back to me the day after I heard that the Café was closing. By noon, I found myself walking down to the Europa. I wanted to have the place to myself, before Wessels arrived sloshing over with inanities. I had been dwelling on everything that had happened to me there, on the old days and the old faces, as we think of them, when we mean the younger ones. I was surprised at how indistinct some of those faces had become, ghosts of their former selves. Platitudinously, your memories are a precious possession; they can’t take them away from you, as Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, used to insist. I always wondered what she meant. Who were these robbers? And why should they want one’s memories? They would want something of material value, surely, wristwatches, wallets, shoes …

I came to the Café more concerned than ever to get it clear in my head. I brought my notebook along for a change, in case I wished to make a few sketches or diagrams. I pictured the establishment as a set about to be struck. If only I could arrange it all in my mind, like a diligent stage manager, with every prop in place, perhaps the characters would troop on from the wings of memory and take a bow.

I was tempted to sit at No. 1, where I’d spent my very first hours at the Europa. But as I’ve already indicated, sentimentality irks me, especially the American variety, which is descended from the Irish. I sat instead at my usual place, the round table where Spilkin and I first shared our thoughts on the crossword puzzle, which had been the great love of his life until grosser affections supplanted it, and ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, which was and always will be mine. This table was No. 2. A signpost, a relic saved through my intervention, declared the fact (all the others had long since been filched, for reasons one can only guess at).

My eye was drawn to the city on the wall, to the walled city of Alibia, where I had roamed so often in my imagination.

In the foreground was a small harbour, with a profusion of fishing boats and yachts, and a curve of beach freckled with umbrellas. The palm-lined promenade cried out for women twirling parasols and old men nodding in Bath chairs with rugs over their knees. There were wharves and warehouses too, by no means quaint but necessarily somewhat Dickensian, and silos fat with grain, and tower cranes with their skinny shins in the water. Houses were heaped on the slopes behind, around narrow streets and squares. Despite the steepness of the terrain, there were canals thronged with barges, houseboats and gondolas. On one straight stretch of canal, evidently frozen over, one expected to see skaters in woollen caps racing to the tune of a barcarole. In the squares, there were outdoor cafés and neon signs advertising nightclubs; but in the windows of the houses up above, oil-lamps were burning. The baroque steeple of St Cloud’s, intricately iced, measured itself against glazed office blocks of modest proportions, while in the east a clutch of onion domes had been harrowed from the black furrow of the horizon. A Slav would feel just as at home there as a Dutchman. It was a perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere in which the immigrant might find the landmarks he had left behind. I had seen pointed out St Peter’s and St Paul’s, the Aegean and the Baltic. A receptionist at the German Consulate had shown us a bridge over the Neckar; and once an engineer from Mostar, then painting traffic signs for Roads and Works, had pinpointed the very house in which he had been born. His poor mother still lived there, with mortar-bombs raining down all around her.

What did Alibia mean to me? Certainly it was not ‘home’. I am a true Johannesburger, because I was born within sight of the Hillbrow Tower, our very own Bow Bells – or so Spilkin used to say. Of course, this was long before the Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom Tower (properly) was built, but he said it had retrospective effect: had it been standing at the time of my birth, I would have seen it from my crib.

Alibia was close to my heart for a different reason, an egocentric one, I suppose: in the middle of the city, bulging above the skyline and overhung by a dirty brown cloud, was a hill whose bumpy summit looked auspiciously like the crown of my own head. My personal Golgotha.

I came into the world, as many do, with a healthy head of hair. In my case, it was black and enviably thick (but not a thatch, like Empty Wessels’s). As a boy, I wore it with a parting in the middle, and as a young man, brushed straight back in the fashion of the day, which is how it stayed. In my prime, I cultivated a windswept appearance, with the tousle combed in and the loose ends held in place with oil. I fancied that this hairstyle reflected my character rather well: quick-witted and sporty, tidy but not without flair. However, as my hairline receded, which it began to do during my mid-twenties, I saw coming into view a skull to make a phrenologist’s fingertips itch. It was singularly bumpy, roughly-hewn and battered-looking, with a pronounced mound right on top. The most dismaying revelation was a bluish blemish on the occipital plate, around three o’clock, which looked a bit like a raisin embedded in the sugared icing on a custard slice. My marchpane pate. Over the years, as the denuding of my head proceeded, several more of these partly submerged excrescences appeared. Another four to be precise: two more occipitals at eight and nine o’clock and a brace of cranials at twelve on the dot and half past five. But none was more disconcerting than the first. I went to see a dermatologist about it, a Dr Zinn, who was as bald as a coot himself, and he tugged on my forelock, then extant, and told me not to worry. Easier said than done. It was as surprising to me that I should be thinking inside this malformed and discoloured lump as it is to find white flesh inside a fractured coconut.

From much massaging with various preparations in an attempt to revivify the follicles, my fingertips had memorized every square inch – as we used to say then – of my scalp. The digits have a surprisingly long memory, no less enduring than the eyes. I knew my dome’s shape exactly, and strange to say, it perfectly matched the hill that beetled over Alibia. Indeed, that hill might have been a study of my head, cast into relief against a permanent sunset, with the features below lost in a clown’s ruff of staircases, closes and wynds.

‘Yes yes.’ The echo chamber slumped down in one chair and propped his plaster cast on another. Seeing the toes of Wessels that close to the table top made my stomach churn. ‘Peace & luv’ had been printed on the cast in red ink, next to a drawing of a bird. Glory be. The duv of peace, the pidgin. I averted my eyes.

‘How’s it?’

‘Can’t complain,’ and so on. I don’t know why I bother. One may as well speak to a plank.

Then a spar of sense sluiced out on the bilge water: ‘I had a great idea.’

‘You’re moving back to Halfway House?’

‘Serious. Let’s have a party, before we close down here. A farewell.’

‘What for?’

‘To say fare thee well, what else? It’ll be tough not seeing the guys any more.’

‘I’ll be only too pleased to see the back of this mob, if that’s who you mean. I won’t even grace them with a goodbye.’ Errol and Co were lounging on the balcony. Goodbye wouldn’t suit them, godless heathen that they were. They were always shouting chow-chow at one another like a bunch of jinricksha men.

‘Not a goodbye bash,’ he said brightly. ‘A get-together, a reunion. We’ll ask all the old faces.’

This was complex reasoning for Wessels – so early in the day too. I examined his nose, the surest barometer of his state of inebriation the night before. Strawberry this morning, a full three degrees – raspberry, ruddy, Rudolph – from the top of the scale. And out came the Paul Reveres. When he was really the worse for wear, it was Peter Stuyvesant. Perhaps he’d missed the bottlestore last night after all? Those old faces I had spent the night thinking about, those speechless heads with fading features, drifted through my mind.

‘The old faces on their own might be awkward,’ I said. ‘You’d have to ask them to bring their old bodies along.’

‘Serious Aub.’

‘You could append it to the invitation, it’s quite acceptable: BYOB.’ Suitably baffled. I hate being called Aub.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see everyone again − Mevrouw Bonsma and them. Merlé. And Bogey – I wonder where he’s at? Mrs Mav.’

‘I honestly can’t imagine that Mrs Mavrokordatos would want to come back here. It would rake up too many painful memories. It would break her heart to see what the place has become. To see what we’ve become.’

‘Nothing wrong with us.’

‘Not that her hands are clean. But in any case, we don’t know where she is. We don’t know where anyone is.’

‘Tone’s got Mrs Mav’s number.’

So the New Management had finally turned into a monosyllable. He’d be an initial next and then he’d vanish altogether. ‘What does Tone say about your plan?’

‘He thinks it’s a great idea to go out with a bang. You’ll see. It’ll be a jôl. I’ll organize everything. You don’t have to lift a finger, you can just pull in.’

A (from the Old Norse jól, a heathen festival) is a rowdy sort of Afrikaner party, accompanied by heavy drinking and smoking of marijuana. And ‘pulling in’ is one of the more popular vehicular metaphors for arriving unannounced.

‘If it’s all the same, I think I have a prior arrangement. Or will have any minute.’

I didn’t like going out on New Year’s Eve anyway. It had become far too dangerous, with flat-dwellers of colour using the occasion to heave unwanted furniture from their windows into the streets below. In fact, the entire ‘festive season’ had degenerated into a drunken street fight, and the wise lay low until it was all over.

‘Anyway, you’re invited. Now give us a page of your notebook.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be so snoop man.’

(Snoop? Put it on the list after ‘tawty’.)

‘I can’t.’ I showed him why: I number all the pages in advance, in the top right-hand corner, in ink, precisely to deter filchers. A tactic I learnt from Erasmus, whom I’ve mentioned before, my colleague at the Department of Posts and Telecommunications in the days of pen and paper.

*

During the course of my constitutional, I found the elephant’s ear in the gutter at the top of Nugget Hill. The Queen of Sheba must have dropped it there; when the weather was good, the Pullinger Kop park served as her country seat. In the rosy light of sunset, the ear looked for all the world like a gigantic petal fallen from some impossible bloom. Closer inspection revealed treadmarks from tyres and shoes, gooey fingerprints, splashes of what might have been royal blood. Perhaps Her Majesty’s minions had used the ear to stretcher her hither? Understandably, I was reluctant to touch this repulsive, disease-ridden thing, but I meant to drop in at the Jumbo Liquor Market the next morning to clear up the Dumbo question, and so I sacrificed a few pages from the classified section of my Star to wrap it in and bore it along with me.

As I was crossing Abel Road with my unsought trophy, a little preoccupied it’s true, but as mindful of the traffic regulations as ever, a baker’s delivery van, adorned with a painting of Atlas shouldering a crisply browned Planet Earth still steaming from the oven, careered around the corner and very nearly knocked me down. I am in good shape for a man of my age, pate excepted, and I was able to leap to safety. I had the presence of mind, even as I overbalanced on the kerb and plummeted to the pavement, to glance at the rear of the vehicle to note the registration number. And there on the bumper I saw, to my annoyance, a sign that read: ‘How am I driving?’

Some bystanders came to my assistance, but I fended them off with elbows and epithets, equally sharp. They try to pick your pockets under cover of kindness. My fall had loosened the newspaper covering the ear, and people were staring. I rewrapped it as best I could, picked myself up, and hurried away. The mishap had disorientated me and I found myself going down Catherine Street, the way I had come. This was all too much. Unable to turn back without losing face, unwilling to stray from my accustomed path, I took refuge in the lounge at the Chelsea Hotel, and ordered a whisky to steady my nerves. They didn’t have whiskey at all – which I should have taken as forewarning that the place had gone to the dogs.

No sooner had my drink arrived than a woman sidled into the chair opposite and commanded me to buy her one too. My astonished expression produced a gust of tittering from her friends at the next table. Ladies of the night, I would say. They all seemed to be wearing foundation garments on top of their daywear. I took out my notebook and jotted down a few points about the Atlas Bakery van while the episode was still fresh in my memory. The harlot did not go away. Instead, she started picking at the newspaper in which the ear was swaddled. I had to gulp my drink and leave. She made a crack in isiSotho or whatever, and the streetwalkers tee-heed in the same lingo.

It was growing dark. As I approached Abel Road for the second time that evening, the full horror of my narrow escape overwhelmed me and I broke out in a sweat. I shouldn’t be surprised if the bolted drink also played a part. To think that I might have been lying in the roadway here right now, awaiting the ambulance or, God forbid, the mortuary van. Strangers rifling through my clothing, making a show of ascertaining my identity while lifting my small change, reading my notebook, leafing through my Pocket with their greasy fingers, scattering my bookmarks to the wind … farceur … feather … fiat … fleck … flint … I saw my life ebbing away. I saw my death, touch wood, as a precipitate efflux of vocabulary and idiom, the hoarded treasures of a lifetime spent in a minute, one immaculate vintage running into another, and the whole adulterated brew spilt on the dirty macadam of an unmemorable corner of a lawless conurbation. Flow: glide along as a stream; gush out, spring; (of blood) be spilt; (of wine) be poured out without stint (f. OE flōwan, unconnected with L fluere: flux). Unconnected. This city had a short memory. How many deaths might have occurred on this very spot and left no memorial? How many forgotten Abels had bled out their spirits at these crossroads, how many smooth-cheeked Cains were going about scot-free. And what would I have left behind, apart from these shop-soiled mortal remains? Invisible work. A pile of manuals and documents, obscure gazettes, directories and yearbooks, most of them out of print, which I had proofread well, and on which I had therefore left no visible trace. A negative achievement. ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, through which I had hoped to make a little mark, something of lasting value to which my name might be attached, lay incomplete in my desk drawer. Some second-hand furniture dealer would tip it into the rubbish skip in the alley behind his shop, along with my notes and cards and clippings, and the skip would be emptied into a landfill site and covered over with sand, and in the fullness of time another housing development would arise on the spot and bury it for ever. Hit and run! I saw myself lying there, sprawled across the elephant’s ear, newsprint fluttering around me like the Prospect Road corpse, and some ambulance man, or paramedic as they style themselves nowadays, smelling the alcohol on my breath and making the obvious wisecrack. But could a corpse be said to have something on its breath? The whisky was anachronistic anyway. If the bakery van had delivered me into the hands of the Great Compositor, I should never have stopped at the Chelsea to wet my whistle. I would have come up smelling not exactly of roses, but of Wilson’s XXX mints. My generally impeccable sense of chronology had been quite disordered. And it was all Wessels’s fault, talking about old faces and cartoon characters. He really was the bane of my life.

I didn’t want to take the ear up in the lift with me; what if I bumped into that nosey Mrs Manashewitz? That’s all I needed, to get half of Lenmar Mansions talking. So I left it in the care of Gideon, the nightwatchman, and he put it in the coal room in the parking garage overnight. Now that the thing had nearly cost me my life, I had more reason than ever to barter it for some useful information at the Jumbo Liquor Market.

*

Lenmar Mansions was built just after the war. It’s a six-storey block, square and solid, made of bricks and mortar, as a building should be. I took a one-bedroomed flat on the top floor (the bachelors didn’t suit me, despite my marital status). The minute I set foot in the place, I felt at ease. Spacious rooms, separated by proper walls and doors, parquet throughout, black and white tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The south-facing lounge had large windows – there was no need for burglar-proofing so high up – and a small balcony.

In my researches, I discovered that the block had been built by the property tycoon Ronnie Lazerow, and named for his children Leonard and Marilyn. Portmanteau names of this kind have always been popular in Johannesburg. At one time, supposing the phenomenon might bear closer scrutiny, I started a list in my notebook.

Portmanteaus, residential: Lenmar Mansions … Milrita Heights … Norbeth East … Villa Ethelinda … Alanora Maisonettes …

But the sheer banality of the coinages exhausted my curiosity.

*

In the shiny glass doors of the Jumbo Liquor Market, with my black polythene rubbish bag over my shoulder, I appeared to myself for an instant as a sinister Santa Claus bearing gifts for the black Christmas everyone was threatening to visit upon us if they didn’t get their own way at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, and this perception sent a malicious rush of sangfroid to my head. I deposited the bag on the cash desk. The cashier was the same young woman who had called out to Mr Ferreira, the manager, as the ritual ravishing of Jumbo/Dumbo reached its climax. I expected to be recognized – after all, I had played a prominent if unassuming part in that sordid drama – but the girl was clearly none too observant. Mrs Da Silva, as the badge on her lapel denoted her, seemed improbably young to be married, if you asked me, and inelegantly hirsute in the oxter.

‘Ken I yelp yew, Sir?’

(I hope I’ve captured the accent. A phonetic transliteration –– would be better by far, but not everyone knows the language.)

‘You may summon Mr Ferreira for me.’ I glanced meaningfully at the elephant with its one ear cocked. ‘You may say it is in connection with the corporate image.’ If needs be, I can bandy the jargon about as well as the next man.

‘Sorry, Sir, bud Meesta Ferreira yeece howt.’

Oh. ‘Da Silva has absolutely nothing to do with the metallic element,’ I said, conversationally, ‘whose symbol in the periodic table is Ag, from the Latin argentum; whose properties are lustrous, malleable, ductile. What else? Precious. Well, that first and foremost.’

‘Doughling, I yaven’t god oll dye. Yew god empties in da beg?’

I unbagged the ear, liberating a gust of the anti-canine scent with which the plastic was impregnated. She still didn’t seem to recognize me, but she was delighted to see the ear. She patted it with the convex ends of her manicured left hand. The nails on the other hand, I noticed, the one she used to punch the keys of the till, were half as long. In all likelihood the musculature on that arm would be more developed too.

‘Where dod yew fine deece yeah?’ she demanded.

I explained.

She spoke so fervently into the microphone sticking out of the till that it trembled like an antenna. ‘Joaquim! Joaquim! Pleece comb tew da frount!’

Da Silva. As in sylvan. Forests and so on. Boscage. Woods. Five o’clock shadow on the upper lip, and not even teatime. Lipstick: cherry tomato.

Joaquim appeared from behind a ziggurat of boxed wine. Beaujolais in boxes. Whatever next. Whisky in tins? Instant ice – just add water and chill? Under Mrs Da Silva’s direction, Joaquim tried the ear on the elephant, inserting the snapped-off metal strut like the stalk of a big autumn leaf into the hole in the elephant’s head, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was indeed the missing part.

Mrs Da Silva clapped her lazy hand on her thigh, twice, and said, ‘Tenk yew, tenk yew.’

Joaquim carried the ear into the storeroom at the rear.

Portuguese workforce: manuel labour.

A man in a suit, another pseudo-businessman, a Stan, a Vern, approached with a six-pack of Lion Lagers in his paw, and she excused herself to ring it up.

‘Cheerio, Rosa,’ he said.

‘Yave a nace dye.’

Hypermeat was advertising lambada lamb sosaties, hottest prices in town. Little red and yellow flames flickered around the blistered letters.

‘Ken I yelp yew still?’

‘This elephant of yours interests me. I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.’

‘Heece dere oll da time.’

‘I mean I’ve seen an elephant like him somewhere else.’

‘Oll hour brenches hev dem. Troyeville yas tew.’

‘Wait a minute, it’s coming back to me. It’s Dumbo, isn’t it? The little elephant who wanted to fly?’

‘Ken be.’

Hopeless case.

‘Yew wand somb kesh?’ she said suddenly.

‘For the ear? My dear Mrs Woods, I wouldn’t dream of it. I was just doing my civic duty, as any decent person would.’

Before I could stop her, she had summoned Joaquim again, mumbled something to him − he must be a native of Moçambique, as he speaks the lingo – and in a trice he was pressing a bottle of Sedgwick’s Old Brown Sherry into my hands. It was almost offensive.

‘Could I have my bag, please?’

She spat on a working fingertip and dabbed up one of the yellow ones covered with pink elephants.

‘That’s one of yours,’ I said firmly but politely. ‘I’d prefer to have my own back, if it’s all the same.’

Joaquim fetched my rubbish bag from the storeroom.

‘Obrigado,’ I said nonchalantly, wrapped the bottle of sherry in it and sauntered conveniently out onto the pavement, no wiser than when I had arrived. Old Brown Sherry. Cheapskates. Ships’ kites. At least it wasn’t Paarl Perlé, which was quite undrinkable, by all accounts, and smacked of bitter associations. I supposed it would do for cooking with.

I found one of Dumbo’s literary efforts in the Central News Agency in Hillbrow, an autographed copy of Dumbo and the Pachyderms from Alpha Centauri. He was a brainchild, a brainbeast of that Walter Disney, whose passion for furry animals was surely unhealthy. The family resemblance to the Liquor Market’s mascot was striking. While I was paging, the shop manager came and stared at me over the erasers. Apparently I was acting suspiciously, and not for the first time. News to me. The rubbish bag was probably creating the wrong impression. I took out my Oxford. That made Management’s eyebrows disappear. Ostrogoth … overenthusiasm … pagoda … here we are: pachyderm. From the Greek pakhus, meaning thick, and derma, meaning skin.

‘You may thank your lucky stars,’ I informed Management, pocketing the Pocket again, ‘that I am the last gentleman in Hillbrow, as honest as the day is long, and pachydermatous to boot. As for Henry Watson Fowler, the man’s prejudice against polysyllabic humour did him no credit. No one’s perfect.’

Departed, trumpeting (inwardly).

*

Wessels found me writing in my notebook, an Okay Bazaars (Hyperama) special with a blue cover and white spiral binding, good value for money. To my chagrin, he produced a notebook from his own pocket and rested it on his thigh. A child’s scribbling block of cheap grey paper, feint ruled, with a chubby, bilingual little man called Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak on the cover. It was roughly the same size as mine, but also contrived to be a childish comment on it. He took out a pen, clicked the ballpoint in and out pensively, gazed up at a chandelier, and then made to write. No sooner had the pen touched paper than he let out a cry of frustration and had to wipe it clean on the lining of his jacket. I always write my rough copies with a pencil because it allows for erasure; I saw that Wessels, unable to lick the nib of the pen, but keen to emulate my technique in every particular, was licking the tip of his index finger between flourishes of the writing hand and surreptitiously using his tie as a blotter. The formation of each letter was accompanied by a sympathetic, schoolboyish contortion of facial muscles. That writing should be such a painful procedure! In anyone else, it might have been enough to thaw my frozen heart.

I introduced Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak to his brethren in my notebook – he fitted in between Mr Video and Mr Meat – and went on with my own work. Fortunately, I had finished my composition, in the requisite brief paragraphs, and was busy inking up a fair copy (which I would typewrite later that evening at home), and so I was able to put Wessels from my mind and concentrate on my penmanship.

When I had finished, I laid my notebook down on the table. The sight of a pen in Wessels’s freckled fist in place of a reeking cigarette was compelling. But it was so obviously a ruse to implicate me in his plans for the Goodbye Bash – as I was determined to call it – that I resolved to make no comment. Soon he put down his pad too. He swizzled his brandy with his pen, then clipped it in the flap of his right ear.

No sign of Moçes. Perhaps he was out on the balcony, behind the venetian blinds, where Errol and Co were cackling and hooting. Probably sharing an illicit cocktail laced with amphetamines. Discipline among the waiters had broken down entirely under the influence of these hooligans.

‘What you got there?’

‘A letter to the editor of the Star about an unnerving experience I had yesterday, which I wanted to get off my chest.’

‘We haven’t had one of those for donkey’s years-ss. Can I see?’

The man was a fount of amphibology. It was Café etiquette, in the old days, never to ask to read my communications until they were printed in the newspaper. Wessels’s flouting of the rules, to which I had long thought myself inured, coupled now with his persistent invocation of the past, irritated me all over again. But having watched his version of writing, I was intrigued to see him reading as well, so I handed him the notebook, which he bore up towards his face at once like a toasted sandwich, as if he meant to take a bite out of it. As I expected: the thick lips moved to frame each word. Personally, I prefer reading silently, to myself. Reading belongs in the head, behind the eyes, not just under the breath, but inside the folds of the brain. I can tolerate reading out loud on occasion, if the words are enunciated clearly and the circumstances are fit. But this soundless movement of the lips is uncouth, like a cat twitching through a rutting dream.

7 December 1993

Dear Sir,