Free The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavic

Pink Cadillac, which only opened its doors after dark, a heap of children, messily corked, theatrically ragged, like urchin extras from a production of Oliver ,slept in black and white. A photograph from the archive of atrocities: a heap of corpses, with their big feet jutting out of blackened clothing, filthy as chimney sweeps. Perhaps they were pavement sweeps, responsible for spreading the dirt under the pretext of mopping it up.
    Two portraits of Steffi Graf, the ladies’ tennis champion, ringed round by garlands of last year’s Weinacht tinsel (or was it this year’s tinsel, ahead of its time?), presided over the Wurstbude. In the first, she was preparing to serve. She was improbably, impeccably muscled, undoubtedly well-fed, a living tribute to scientific nutrition. The fake coals in the grilling machine cast a healthy pink glow over her wintergreened calves. In the second picture, she was holding up a trophy, a silver platter ideal for a sucking-pig, on the centre court at Wimbledon.
    Herr Toppelmann, Kurt, the proprietor, put my Bratwurst and two rolls on a plate, tonged out a goose-pimpled dill pickle, dabbed mustard and patted butter. Everyone else got a cardboard tray, but I had argued for the plate on medical grounds – my dysfunctional duodenum (entirely spurious, I might add) – and he’d conceded. I also got my sausage whole, rather than lopped into segments by the ingenious stainless-steel, counter-top guillotine, as the advertising to the trade might have put it. Most of the regulars went for the Currywurst, which meant that their sausage segments were smothered in tomato sauce and dusted with curry powder. They speared up the segments with two toothpicks, dispensed from a little drum like a schoolroom pencil sharpener. It could be done with one toothpick, to tell the truth, but those in the know found that two afforded a certain Germanic stability. I would have none of it. I told Herr Toppelmann I wanted a Bratwurst, whole, on a plate, and a knife and fork to eat it with, I don’t need my food cut up for me like a child. I had to drag in the duodenum again, and the high blood pressure, when in truth I have the constitution of a man half my age, because there were principles involved, of linguistics and cuisine. Currywurst? It was ersatz, a jerry-built portmanteau if ever I heard one. I had denounced it the very first time I came in here, this having been the express purpose of my visit, but he refused to remove it from the menu. I vowed never to eat one. For the same principled reason, I avoided the pickle-barrel tables on the pavement outside: they were tacky, in the senses popular on both sides of the Atlantic, they smacked of fast food, grubby little hands that might tug at one’s flannels and spoil one’s appetite. I stood at the counter instead, where I could listen to Herr Toppelmann conversing in German with regulars of that persuasion, or, when the place was empty, hold a brief conversation with him myself in English and watch the sausages squirming.
    This afternoon the place was empty, so I told him the news: the Café Europa was closing down. He took it very well.
    ‘Also I,’ he said in his charming English, ‘am closing down.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Ja. I go home to Germany.’
    Typical. But I sympathized, too. ‘I can’t say I blame you. Who would want to live under a black government?’
    ‘No, no, that is most unfair, you do not understand. I go home because my father in Frankfurt is sick. In the kidney.’
    ‘Ah. A Frankfurter. I might have guessed.’
    ‘I am most happy to be governed by the black man. Black persons and I are coming along strongly together.’
    Indeed. The scarlet women of the Quirinale Hotel. Ever willing to put a crease in the Senf, if not quite to cut it. I was in here, eating a sausage, when the Berlin Wall came down. What was it Herr Toppelmann had said then? Communism is kaput in Germany, but here is just starting, it will come very bad. (His English had