Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  We took up, three of us now, the interrupted talk of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists, homegrown in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and those created by the hubris of the West. A waiter subserviently intruded with distributed menus but we all ignored him as if it were understood we were waiting for someone. I was waiting for you. Even in that Chinese restaurant though it was never your favourite cuisine.

  Whom were we waiting for?

  I wonder now, awakened in bed by a heavy cat settling on my feet, but I didn’t then, no-one asked me so I didn’t have to give my answer: you. Edward opened a menu big and leather-bound as a book of world maps. Perhaps this meant he and Anthony knew no-one was coming. No-one else was available among the dead in their circle. Maybe the too newly-dead cannot enter dreams. But no; Anthony was recent, and here he was, if strangely got up in the category of the childhood belief that when you die you grow wings, become angels in the Empyrean.

  Suddenly she was there, sitting at the head of the table as if she had been with us all along or because there was no time we hadn’t remarked when it was she’d joined us. Susan. Susan Sontag. How to have missed the doorway entrance of that presence always larger-than-life (stupid metaphor to have chosen in the circumstances, but this is a morning-after account) not only in sense of her height and size: a mythical goddess, Athena-Medea statue with that magnificent head of black hair asserting this doubling authority, at once inspiring, menacing, unveiling a sculptor’s bold marble features, gouged by commanding eyes.

  It seemed there had been greetings. Exclamations of pleasure, embraces and less intimate but just as sincere pressures of hands left animation, everyone talking at once across one another. Susan’s deep beautiful voice interrupted itself in an aside to call a waiter by name—well of course, so this is the Chinese restaurant in New York’s SoHo she used to take me to! The waiters know her, she’s the habituée who judges what’s particularly good to order, in fact she countermands with an affectionate gesture of a fine hand the hesitant choices of the others and questions, insists, laughs reprovingly at some of the waiter’s suggestions; he surely is aware of what the cooks can’t get away with, with her. She does let us decide on what to drink. Susan was never a drinker and this one among her favourite eating places probably doesn’t have a cellar of the standard that holds the special French and Italian cultivars for which she makes an exception.

  As if, non-smoker, she carries a box of matches, there strikes from her a flame flaring the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The light’s turned on Edward, naturally, although this is not a group in which each sees personal identity and its supposed unquestioning loyalty cast by birth, faith, country, race, as the decisive and immutable sum of self. Edward is a Palestinian, he’s also in his ethics of human being, a Jew, we know that from his writings, his exposure of the orientalism within us, the invention of the Other that’s survived the end of the old-style colonialism into globalisation. If Susan’s a Jew, she too, has identity beyond that label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self.

  They carry all this to the Somenowhere. In the Chinese restaurant, there between us.

  Sampson doesn’t interject much in that understated rapidity of half-audible upperclass English delivery, yet gives a new twist to what’s emerging from the other two eloquently contesting one another from different points of view even on what they agree upon. A journalist who’s achieved distinction of complete integrity in venturous success must have begun by being a good listener. And I—my opinions and judgments are way down in the confusion of living, I don’t have the perspective the dead must have attained. But the distance with which Edward seems to regard Susan’s insistent return to passionate views of opposing legitimacies between Palestinians and Israelis is puzzling. After all his clarity and commitment on that conflict-trampled ground of the earth he’s left behind, searching the unambiguous words and taking the actions for a just resolution (on the premise there is one), putting his brilliant mind to it against every hostility, including the last—death: how this lack of response? Lassitude? Is that the peace of the dead that passeth all understanding the public relations spin doctors of religions advertise? The hype by one to counter that other, a gratis supply of virgins? Lassitude. But Edward Said: never an inactive cell in that unique brain.

  ‘What did you leave unfinished?’

  The favoured waiter had wheeled to the table a double-deck buffet almost the table’s length, displaying a composition of glistening mounds, gardens of bristling greens. Susan with her never sated search for truth rather than being fobbed off with information, dared to introduce as she turned to the food’s array, a subject it perhaps isn’t done to raise among the other guests.

  She was helping herself with critical concentration, this, no, then that—and some more of that—filling to her satisfaction, aesthetic and anticipatory, the large plates the restaurant earned its reputation by providing.

  Edward waited for her to reach this result. ‘Everything is unfinished. Finality: that’s the mistake. It’s the claim of dictatorship . Hegemony. In our turn, always we’ll be having to pick up the baggage taking from experience what’s good, discarding what’s conned us into prizing, if it’s destructive.’

  Dream has no sequence as we know it, this following that. This over, that beginning. You can be making love with someone unrecognised, picking up coins spilled in the street, giving a speech at a board meeting, pursued naked in a shopping mall, without the necessary displacements of sequence. Whether the guests were serving themselves—the others, Anthony and Edward—and whether they were talking between mouthfuls and those swallows of wine or water which precede what one’s going to say at table, I was mistaken in my logic of one still living, that they were continuing their exchange of the responsibilities for 9/11, the Tsunami, famine in Darfur, elections in Iraq, the Ukraine, student riots against youth employment restrictions in Paris, a rape charge in court indicting a member of government in my country: preoccupations of my own living present or recent months, years; naturally all one to them. What was I doing there in Susan’s Chinese restaurant, anyway?

  It is news they’re exchanging of what they’re engaged in. Now. Edward’s being urged to tell something that at least explains to me his certain distance from Susan’s perceptions of the developments (at whatever stage these might have been when she left access to newspapers, television, inside informants) in the Middle East. He’s just completed a piano concerto. I can’t resist putting in with delight ‘For two pianos.’ The Said apartment on the Upper West Side in New York had what you’d never expect to walk in on, two grand pianos taking up one of the livingrooms. Edward once remarked to me, if affectionately, ‘You have the writing but I have the writing and the music.’ An amateur pianist of concert performance level, he’d played with an orchestra under the baton of his friend Daniel Barenboim.

  Here was his acknowledging smile of having once led me into that exotically furnished livingroom; maybe a brush of his hand. Touch isn’t always felt, in dream. There was a scholar, a politico-philosophical intellect, an enquirer of international morality in the order of the world, a life whose driving motivation was not chosen but placed upon him: Palestinian. An existential destiny, among his worldly others. It’s cast in the foundations, the academic chairs, honours endowed in the name. All that. But death’s the discarder he didn’t mention. Edward Said is a composer. There’s also the baggage you do take. Two grand pianos. Among the living, it’s Carlos Fuentes who asks if music is not the ‘true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation—beyond death—of our mortal visibility: body of words’. Is only music ‘free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our bodily misery’?

  Edward. A composer. What he always was, should have been; but there was too much demand upon him from the threatening outer world? It’s a symphony Edward Said’s working on now.

  ‘What’s the theme, wh
at are you giving us?’ Susan is never afraid to be insistent, her passion for all creation so strong this justifies intrusion.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that the movements of a symphony are in sum just that, a resolution, symphonically.’ Edward is paying an aside tribute to her non-performer’s love and knowledge of music. ‘It’s still—what should I say—’

  ‘You hear it, you play it? It’s in your fingers?’ Susan is relentless in pursuit of the process, from one who’s been an eloquent man of words people haven’t always wanted to hear.

  He lifts his shoulders and considers. Doesn’t she know that’s the way, equivalent of scribbled phrases, jotted half-sentences, essential single words spoken into a recording gadget, which preceded the books she’s written, the books he wrote. The symphony he’s—hearing? playing? transposing to the art’s hieroglyphics?—it’s based on Jewish folk songs and Palestinian laments or chants.

  Ours is a choir of enthusiasm. When will the work be completed. How far along realised. ‘It’s done’ Edward says. Ready. ‘For the orchestra’ and spreads palms and forearms wide from elbows pressed at his sides. I read his mind as the dreamer can: just unfortunate Barenboim can’t be ready to conduct the work; isn’t here yet.

  These are people who are accustomed to being engaged by the directions taken by one another, ideas, thought and action. No small table talk. Anthony Sampson takes the opportunity, simply because he hasn’t before been able to acknowledge to Susan she shamed the complacent acceptance of suffering as no-one else has done. Since Goya!

  Susan gives her splendid congratulatory, deprecatory laugh, and in response quotes what confronts TV onlookers ‘still in Time, the pictures will not go away: that is the nature of the digital world’. Not long dead, she hasn’t quite vacated it: this comes from one of her last looks at the world, the book which Anthony is praising, Regarding the Pain of Others.

  But that’s for the memory museum left behind as if it were the phenomenon that, for a while, the hair of the dead continues to grow. Susan has brought with her the sword of words she has always flashed skilfully in defence of the disarmed. She’s taken up the defence of men.

  ‘You!’ Edward appreciates what surely will be a new style of feminist foil. We’re all laughing anticipation. But Susan Sontag is no Quixote, wearing a barber’s basin as the helmet of battledress.

  ‘What has made them powerless to live fully? Never mind Huntington and his clash of civilisations. The clash of the sexes has brought about subjection of the heterosexual male. We women have achieved the last result, surely, as emancipated beings, we wanted? A reversal of roles of oppressor and oppressed, the demeaning of fellow humans. Affirmative action has created a gender elite which behaves as the male one did, high positions for pals just as the men awarded whether the individual was or was not qualified except by what was between the legs.’

  Someone—might have been I—said, ‘Muslim women—still behind the black veil—men suffer from them.’ It’s taken as rhetorical.

  I’m no match for Susan.

  ‘See them trailing the wives and mothers grandmothers matriarchs aunts sisters along with endless children: that’s the power behind the burka. Their men—don’t forget the possessive—carry the whole female burden through entire male lives, bearing women who know that to come out and fend for yourself means competing economically, politically, psychologically in the reality of the world. The black rag’s an iron curtain.’

  ‘And gay men?’ Anthony’s a known lover of women but his sense of justice is alert and quizzical as anyone’s.

  Susan looks him over: maybe she’s mistaken his obvious heterosexuality, his confidence that he’s needed no defence in his relations with females. She’s addressing us all.

  ‘When the gay bar closes, it’s the lesbians who get the jobs—open to their gender as women. Gay men aren’t even acceptable for that last resort of traditional male amour propre, the army, in many countries. Unfit even to be slaughtered.’

  Meanwhile Edward’s found his appetite, he’s considering this dish, then that, in choice of which promises the subtlety that appeals to him as (oh unworthy comparison I’m making) he might consider between the performance of one musician and another at the piano. As the left hand pronounces a chord and the right hand answers higher. But the discrimination of taste buds’ pleasures does not temper his demand, ‘What’s happened to penis envy?’

  Nevertheless, Susan gives him the advice he clearly needs, not duck, the prawns are better, no, no, that chicken concoction is for dull palates.

  The waiter is already swaying servilely this way and that with a discreet offer of the dessert menu; some of us have done with the main spread. Maybe we’re ready for what I remember comes next in this place which is just as it was, the trolleys of bounty will never empty. Fortune cookies. Sorbet with litchis; mangoes? Perhaps it’s the names of tropical fruits that remind us of Anthony’s form of dress. ‘What are you up to?’ It’s Edward. ‘Whose international corporate anatomy are you dissecting.’ As if the African robe must be some kind of journalist surgeon’s operating garb. Oracular Edward recalls, ‘Who would have foreseen even the most powerful in the world come to fear of running dry—except you, of course, when you wrote your Seven Sisters . . . that was . . .’ The readers of his book about the oil industry, the writer himself, ignore reference to the memory museum, its temporal documentation. ‘Who foresaw it was those oilfields witches’ brew that fuels the world which was going to be more pricey than gold, platinum, uranium, yes! —Yes!—in terms of military strategy for power, the violent grab for spheres of supply, never mind political influence. Who saw it was going to be guns for oil, blood for oil. You did!’

  I don’t know at what stage the continuing oil crisis exists in the awareness of the Chinese restaurant Empyrean.

  Anthony is shrugging and laughing embarrassedly under an accolade. Now—forever—he’s proved prophet but there’s only the British tribe’s understatement, coming from him. ‘Anybody could have known it.’

  Susan takes up with her flourish, Edward’s imagery. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, the cauldron that received what gushed from earth and seabed? They didn’t.’

  Edward and Susan enjoy Sampson’s modesty, urging him on.

  ‘Well, if the book should—could—might have been somehow . . .’ Dismissing bent tilt of head.

  Of course, who knows if hindsight’s seeing it reprinted, best-selling. There’s no use for royalties anyway. No tariff for the Chinese lunch.

  Now it’s Susan who presses. ‘So what’re you up to.’

  Maybe he’s counting that Mandela will arrive soon, so he can add an afterword to his famous biography of the great man.

  ‘Oh it’d be good to see you sometime at the tavern.’

  Tavern?

  Probably I’m the only one other than Sampson himself who knows that’s the South African politically correct term for what used to be black ghetto shebeens (old term second-hand from the Irish).

  Susan turns down her beautiful mouth generously shaped for disbelief and looks to Edward. The wells of his gaze send back from depths, reflection of shared intrigue.

  Anthony Sampson has some sort of bar.

  Did he add ‘my place’—that attractive British secretive mumble always half-audible. So that would explain the African dress. And yet make it more of a mystery to us (if, the dreamer, I’m not one of those summoned up, can be included in the dream).

  ‘How long has this place been going?’ Susan again.

  Where?

  Where isn’t relevant. There’s no site, just as with the Chinese restaurant conjured up by Susan’s expectation of her arrival. (Couldn’t have been a place of my expectation of you.)

  How long?

  The African garment isn’t merely a comfortable choice for what might have been anticipated as an overheated New York–style restaurant. It is a ritual accoutrement, a professional robe. Anthony Sampson has spent some special kind of attention, since there is no
measure by time, in induction as a sangoma.

  Sangoma. What. What is that.

  I know it’s what’s commonly understood as a ‘witch doctor’, but that’s an imperio-colonialist term neither of Anthony’s companions would want to use, particularly not Edward, whose classic work Orientalism is certainly still running into many editions as evidence of the avatars of the old power phenomenon in guise under new names.

  Sampson’s ‘place’ is a shebeen which was part of his place in Africa that was never vacated by him when he went back to England, as the Chinese restaurant is part of her place, never vacated in Susan’s New York. But the shebeen seems put to a different purpose; or rather carries in its transformation what really had existed there already. Sampson’s not one in a crowd and huddle that always made itself heard above the music in ‘The House of Truth’—ah, that was the name in the Sophia-town ‘slum’ of the white city, poetic in such claims for its venues. He’s not just one of the swallowers of a Big Mama’s concoction of beer-brandy-brakefluid, Godknowswhat, listening to, entering the joys, sorrows, moods defiant and despairing, brazenly alive, of men and women who made him a brother there.

  He has returned to this, to something of the world, from isolation in the bush of Somenowhere with knowledge to offer instead of, as bar proprietor, free drinks. The knowledge of the traditional healer. He serves the sangoma’s diagnoses of and alleviations of the sorrows, defiances and despairs that can’t be drowned or danced, sung away together.

  ‘Oh a shrink!’

  Who would have thought Susan, savant of many variations of cultures, could be so amazed. The impact throws back her splendid head in laughter.

  At ‘Tony’s Place’, his extraordinary gifts as a journalist elevated to another sphere of inquiry, he guides with the third eye his bar patrons—wait a minute; his patients—to go after what’s behind their presented motives of other people, and what’s harmful behind the patient’s own. He dismisses: doesn’t make love potions. Hate potions to sprinkle, deadly, round a rival’s house? That’s witch doctor magic, not healing. The patrons, beer in hand, talk to him, talk out the inner self. As he reluctantly continues to recount, he says that he observes their body language, he gathers what lies unconfessed between the words. No. He doesn’t tell them what to do, dictate a solution to confound, destroy the enemy, he directs them to deal with themselves.