‘My friend, we ollaways open. You come any day, twenty-four hour.’
‘I accept that, Stelios (if I may). But my point is that “restless” doesn’t mean that you never rest. Don’t you see? It means, and I quote, never still, fidgety.’
‘But we ollaways busy, never close.’
‘You’d be even busier if you’d just listen to me, man. The name “Restless Supermarket”, it creates the wrong impression. One thinks of mess, of groceries jumbled together, of groceries jumbling themselves together, of wilful chaos. Is that what you want?’
He looked disbelievingly at the shelves on the closed-circuit television, where sturdy towers of Bourneville cocoa and orderly ranks of tinned fruit and washing powder mutely supported my argument, and said, ‘My friend, you come two o’clock, you come three o’clock, I’m talking a.m., I got fresh rolls.’
‘That’s another thing, that sign on the bakery wall that says: “All our food is fresh and clean.” Clean food? I’m sorry, it doesn’t make sense.’
After ten minutes of this, he opened the drawer again.
Then there was the time I ventured down Nugget Hill to the Casablanca Roadhouse, no easy walk with my knees, to point out the unwitting obscenity that shoddy neon calligraphy had produced in FLICK LIGHTS FOR SERVICE. They wouldn’t hear a word of it. Fuck you too, they said quite amiably. Not having a car made my mission doubly difficult: the waiter kept asking what had become of my ‘wheels’ and pretending to attach the tray to my forearm. I had to eat a Dagwood Bumstead for my pains, the speciality of the house, served at a very uncomfortable picnic table with a round of dill pickle adhering to the outside of the wax-paper wrapping. It was one culinary adventure that did not bear repeating, although it repeated itself of its own accord, ad nauseam.
And then there were the ‘wanton dumplings’ at the Majestic Tasty Chinese Take Away, which I wouldn’t touch with a disposable chopstick, and the unfortunate messages in the fortune biscuits.
Not all my efforts at reform, nor even my most telling ones, had to do with commercial signage or catering. Once Spilkin complained so bitterly about the typographical errors in a book he had just purchased that I was persuaded to look into it myself. I hadn’t read a novel in twenty years, and one glance at the contents of The Unhappy Millionaire showed the wisdom of abstention: it was the story of an American Midas whose life had been ruined by his immeasurable riches. On the other hand, it seemed that I had been neglecting an exceptionally rich field for my System of Records. I found a spelling mistake on the title-page and a dittography in the first line. There were five obvious corrigenda on the first page alone. Some professionals regard one proofreading error in five pages as an acceptable norm; I myself think that one should aim for perfection and let the norms take care of themselves. Spilkin was reluctant to demand a refund from the bookseller, and so I took matters into my own hands.
The publishing house was a well-known English one with branches, or perhaps one should say tentacles, all over the world. I decided to make an example of them. I spent the next week proofreading this corny farrago, meticulously as you please, and then mailed it to their head office in London, surface mail. Was it any wonder, my covering letter said, that this millionaire was unhappy, finding himself in such a shabbily produced publication? They were welcome to share my work with their editorial department as a lesson in how it should be done.
Such a high-minded gesture, made at my own expense, would be easy to ridicule. But my new friends at the Café Europa, not excepting Mevrouw Bonsma in her placid way, seemed to understand what was at stake.
Schwarma, incidentally, from the Hebrew for ‘lamb’. I had imagined, rather fancifully, that there might be some connection with ‘schwa’, the character rendered as ә in phonetic transcription and derived from the Hebrew word for ‘empty’. The lexical world was overpopulated with scrawny, open-mouthed schwas, like hordes of hungry little pitas waiting for their stomachs to be filled.
*
The fame of my System of Records, if not their function exactly, had gone before them, and Merle wished to make their acquaintance almost as soon as she had made mine. For someone of her classificatory acumen and experience, it was quite self-evident how the Records worked, but I could see from the word ‘go’ that she wanted to make more of them than I had. From the pocket of her cardigan she produced a rubber thimble for her forefinger and fluttered through my index cards with practised ease, making girlish exclamations of delight. I remember she also leafed through the files of clippings, removing some that caught her eye and piling them face down on the arm of her chair. Then she turned one over in the afternoon sunlight slanting from the balcony windows, and laid it flat on the palm of her hand as gently as if it had been a feather or a pressed flower. It was an advertisement for Stirling’s Hardy Perennails. What might that lackadaisical florilegium contain? Voilets, dandeloins, hiacynths, anenomes. She laid the clipping face up on the table, turned over another, laid them side by side, shuffled them together, turned over a third, piled all three in one order and then another, as if she was trying to discover the rules of an unknown game; later, I came to associate that flick of her wrist with solitaire, which she sometimes played when the Café was full and noisy, turning the cards over expectantly, rediscovering order in the soothing congruences of chance.
The green fingers and thumbs of Mevrouw Bonsma interleaved a catalogue of floral riches: daffodils, heart’s-ease and phlox, meadowsweet and lady’s smocks.
When she was finished, Merle laid two clippings side by side. One was marked with a red cross, which meant that it had already been processed. I might have looked up the distinguishing corrigendum in my index in a matter of minutes. But evidently she had no interest in that, for she pointed to the photographs, which happened to show two women, and said, ‘Look, they could be sisters!’ I examined their faces closely. They looked nothing alike. With a laugh, she pointed out the family resemblance tucked away in the captions: Frau Schneider and Mrs Sartorius.
Merle was a great keeper of lists, as I am. But more than that, she was a lover of names. She had dozens of reference books on the origins of Christian names for boys and girls, surnames, nicknames, eponyms. Merle: from the Latin merulus via the Old French, meaning blackbird, of all things; and Graaff: from the German Graf, earl. She had lists of so-called ‘aptronyms’ that she had compiled herself, and curious theories about nominative determinism. Her memory was a trove of oddities, involving characters real and imaginary. Many people know that Three Men in a Boat was written by Jerome K. Jerome. But she knew what the K. stood for. And many know Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the warring qualities each embodied. But she knew that one was Henry to his friends, and the other Edward. She knew that Patrice Lumumba’s middle name was Emergy. That Ali Baba had a brother Cassim (not nearly as famous, but treacherous as a snake). And she once told me, without batting an eyelid, that Judy Garland had been born Frances Gumm, which surprised me no end.
After I’d introduced her to the System of Records, she started bringing in her reference books and lists to show me. There issued from the black bag in rapid succession (I was keeping track in my notebook) anatomical charts of the alimentary canal, the musculature, the endocrine (but thankfully not the reproductive) system; atlases; posters showing the flags of the world and butchers’ cuts for beef and mutton; a compendium of the internationally accepted rules for sports and games; a board for snakes and ladders, and another for Ludo (‘I play Ludo!’ Mevrouw Bonsma tautologized); lists of weights and measures; handy reckoners; books on the international standard road signs, origami, first aid, national cuisines, bibliography (the last by a person called Bibliotheker); the book of postal codes (the 1972 edition, in which I myself had taken a hand); and the Reader’s Digest Book of the Car. In this way, I supposed, she was expressing her gratitude for my having introduced her to the Records, and I was grateful in turn; I found many of her books interesting and turned up some first-rate corrigenda in them.