Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  It has just happened to me. Every year I re-read some of the books I don’t want to die without having read again. This year one of these is Kafka’s Diaries, and I am about half-way through. It’s night-time reading of a wonderfully harrowing sort.

  A few mornings ago when I sat down at this typewriter as I do now, not waiting for Lorca’s duende but getting to work, I saw under the narrow strip of window which displays words electronically as I convey them, a roach. A smallish roach about the size and roach-shape of the nail of my third finger—medium-sized hand. To tell that I couldn’t believe it is understatement. But my immediate thought was practical: it was undoubtedly there, how did it get in. I tapped the glass at the place beneath which it appeared. It confirmed its existence, not by moving the body but wavering this way and that two whiskers, antennae so thin and pale I had not discerned them.

  I proceeded to lift whatever parts of the machine are accessible, but the strip of narrow glass display was not. I consulted the User’s Manual; it did not recognise the eventuality of a cockroach penetrating the sealed refuge meant for words only. I could find no way the thing could have entered, but reasoned that if it had, shiny acorn-brown back, fine-traced antennae, it could leave again at will. Its own or mine. I tapped again overhead on the glass, and now it sidled—which meant, ah, that it was cramped under that roof—to the top limit of the space available. This also revealed bandy black legs like punctuation marks. I called a friend and she reacted simply: It’s impossible. Can’t be.

  Well, it was. I have a neighbour, a young architect, whom I see head-down under the bonnet, repairing his car at weekends; there was no course of action but to wait until he could be expected to come home that evening. He is a fixer who can open anything, everything. What to be done in the meantime? Take up where I left off. Send words stringing shadows across the body. Indeed, the disturbance might hope to rouse the intruder somehow to seek the way to leave.

  I am accustomed to being alone when I work. I could not help seeing that I was not; something was deliberately not watching me—anyway, I couldn’t make out its eyes—but was intimately involved with the process by which the imagination finds record, becomes extant.

  It was then I received as I hadn’t heard in this way before; Can’t be.

  Night after night I had been reading Franz Kafka’s diaries, the subconscious of his fictions, that Max Brod wouldn’t destroy. So there it all is, the secret genesis of creation. Kafka’s subconscious was nightly conducting me from consciousness to the subconscious of sleep.

  Had I caused that creature.

  Is there another kind of metamorphosis, you don’t wake up to find yourself transformed into another species, wriggling on light-brown shiny back and feeling out your space with wispy sensors, but the imagining of such a being can create one, independent of any host, physical genesis; or can imagination summon such a live being to come on out of the woodwork and manifest itself?

  What nonsense. There are no doubt the usual domestic pests living clandestinely among and nourished by whatever there is to be nibbled from piles of paper and newspaper cuttings. Who else eats the gilt lettering on book jackets? Next morning he/she/it was still there, no ectoplasm of my imagination, flattened under the glass and moving, with long intervals of watchful immobility, a little way laterally or vertically as the machine warmed in use.

  My neighbour had come and studied the situation, or rather Gregor’s—I had come to think of the creature that way, never mind. The young architect found that the array of tools he owned were too clumsy for the Italian finesse that had gone into the making of the machine. He would try to borrow a jeweller’s tools. Two more days passed and I continued not to be alone as I wrote. At first I wanted the thing in there to die; how could it exist without water, food—and air. As the glass display seemed hermetically sealed, wouldn’t any oxygen trapped within be exhausted. Even a beetle, a roach, whatever, must have lungs. Then I began to want it released alive, a miraculous survivor, example of the will to live evidenced beyond its humble size and status in the chain of life. I saw myself receiving it from the deliverer and releasing it on some leaf in the garden. I called the firm from which I had bought the typewriter two years ago to ask for the visit of a know-how mechanic and was told they didn’t service obsolete business machines any more, handled only computers.

  He, my creature, didn’t die; when I would pause a moment to acknowledge him, there under my words, and he was perfectly immobile, I would think, he’s gone; that other sense of ‘gone’, not escaped. Then the remaining antenna would sway, the other had broken off, no doubt in patient efforts to find the secret exit by which he came in. There were times when he hid—I had seen him slip into what must be some sliver of space below where the glass window was flush with its casing. Or I’d glance up: no, not there; and then he’d appear again. My young neighbour had warned, I hope it doesn’t lay eggs in there, but I thought of the prisoner as male—maybe just because I’m a woman, assuming the conventional partner I’ve had in intimate situations faced together. On Friday night I happened to go back into my work-room to fetch a book, turned on the lamp, and there he was, moving up his inch of vertical space and then arrested, frustrated that what he seemed to have forgotten, the way he got in, the way he might get out, was not found. He looked darkened, flat and shiny beetle-black, but that aspect was by lamplight.

  Saturday mid-morning my young neighbour arrived with German precision tools arranged like jewellery in a velvet-lined folder. The tenant of the display window was not to be seen; tapping on the glass did not bring him up from his usual hiding-place in that interstice below level of the glass. My neighbour studied more informedly than I had the components of the typewriter as described in Italian, German, French, Japanese and English in the User’s Manual and set to work. The machine slowly came apart, resisting with every minute bolt and screw and the rigidity of plastic that threatened to snap. At last, there was the inner chamber, the glass display. It would not yield; the inhabitant did not rise into view despite the disturbance. We halted operations; had he found his egress, got out; then he might be somewhere in the cavern of the machine exposed. No sign. My neighbour was not going to be defeated by the ingenuity of Italian engineering, he tried this tiny implement and that, managing to unwind the most minute of pin-head screws and disengage complex clamps. With one last thumb-pressure the glass lifted. The shallow cavity beneath, running the width of the machine, was empty. Where was he who had survived there for five days? Had he freed himself and was watching from among papers and newspaper cuttings instead of on a garden leaf. We continued to search the innards of the typewriter. No sign. Then I ran a finger tracing the narrow space where certainly he had been, existed, hadn’t he, and felt a change in the surface under my skin. Peered close, and there he was.

  His own pyre. Somehow consumed himself.

  A pinch of dust. One segment of a black leg, hieroglyph to be decoded.

  safety procedures

  LORRIE didn’t want me to go and was embarrassed to come out with it. My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer. We’ve never gone in for steel grilles on our doors or been afraid to walk in the streets. We’ve succeeded in keeping our children free; with sensible precautions. But these last few months there have been a number of airline disasters not really accounted for—pilot error, radar control affected by ground staff strikes, possibility of a fellow passenger aboard with the Damocles weapon not overhead but as explosives down in his boot-soles. Who has the ultimate Black Box that really knows. And only a week ago two people shot dead while queuing to register at an airline desk. We usually make love the night before I leave, I kiss the
children in the morning and we all accept naturally that we’ll talk on the phone the moment I can use my mobile in the terminal of my arrival—with Lorrie, at least, even if it’s night for her and day for me. It’s as much a routine as going to my executive office of the company every day.

  —Why’d you let Isa book you on that route?—

  Lorrie knows my secretary organises my schedules with perfect efficiency. —Why not? It’s obvious. The best airline to get me where I have to go.—

  —But the country it belongs to. In some conflict among them all . . . These days.—

  —For God’s sake—you know what the security process is like these days. Anyway, that airline’s country isn’t in any hassle between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine—whatever. Since when have we given in to fear of flying my darling.—Quoting (if I remember) the title of a book we once read.

  —No connection you—we—know of.—

  But she’s heard what I was really saying: since when do we have a little-wifey boring conventional scene when hubby goes off on business, since when do we cower, you and I, before life as it is.

  And then she says something the way she has (part of what I love her for) that strikes aside my patronising inference of little-wifeyness.

  —You don’t know whose enemy you are.—

  —What’re you talking about? I’m nobody’s enemy.—

  —By boarding a plane you become one. There’s the line’s insignia painted on the tail. Logo of nationality.—

  I hugged her quickly in recognition of her special quirky intelligence, and laughed. Our closeness made her smile past the issue. No fuss. That’s our way. The company driver picked me up and delivered me to the airport.

  Good young Isa had reserved my favourite seat, window, not too far back in the business class cabin (the company has decided to be globally politically correct, no more first class wasteful expenditure), but not near the toilets and galley—too many people queuing up to pee and too much chatter among the attendants.

  There was a long flight ahead with time sliding backwards all the way. On these journeys I keep home time, I don’t change my watch until I reach time as measured at my destination. Wonder how many hours of my life-span I’ve lost—maybe gained?—on these many trips to and fro across date-lines.

  I tell people I actually like to work in planes, I can take out my laptop and prepare myself for the meetings and decisions awaiting me, in productive isolation among strangers. It’s not often there’s someone I know on the same flight, and if there should be I don’t want any change of seat to place me beside an acquaintance. Of course, in recent years there’s been the unavoidable distraction of the fold-out individual TV screen which goes with every seat, and invariably my anonymous neighbour will have the thing set up and flickering away in my peripheral vision although thank God the sound passes directly into the individual’s ears, spares mine. The truth is—no, the fact is—truth’s too important a word for such a trivially boastful lie—it’s never long before I pack away the monitor of my industriousness, the laptop, wrestle a few minutes with folding back the pages of the newspapers offered (why aren’t there special tabloid editions of The New York Times, Herald Tribune, Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Corriere della Sera, et al., for airline distribution) and then look—gaze—at what’s outside. The window: nothing. All right. The void that, from the ground, is called the sky. Intruded by puffy herds and castles of cloud for a while, scribbled across with a fading vapour trail, a chalked rainbow drawn by another plane out of sight. Other times become an enclosing grey-white element without latitude or longitude or substance like blindness descended upon the eyes. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I’ve half dozed-off, there’s an inbetween form of consciousness that’s not experienced anywhere else but up here. With nothing. The cosy cockpit voice keeps exhorting its charges to sit back and relax. But this state is not relaxation, it’s another form of being I have for a while and have never told anyone about, even Lorrie (specially, perhaps, not Lorrie, with marriage it’s possible you give too much about yourself away).

  Nothing. Up there, out there, I do not have within me love, sex, wife, children, house and executive office. I do not have a waiting foreign city with international principals and decisions. Why has no artist—not even the abstractionists—painted this state attainable only since the invention of passenger aircraft? The gaze. Freedom.

  On this trip I have beside me—I notice only when the bar trolley pauses at my row—a middle-aged woman who’s evidently slim, doesn’t overflow or hog the armrest space between us, something at least in her favour. We exchange ‘Good evening’ and that’s that. She is good-looking (as her face turns towards me in the brief greeting) in an impersonal way, without any projection of her fiftyish remains of beauty, as if the face is something she has assumed as you take along an umbrella. I dread, on my numerous long flights, someone in the next seat who wants to talk and will take up a monologue if you don’t respond. This one, apparently, no more wanted conversation than I did. She didn’t set up her TV screen, either. I was aware that after dinner was served she leant forward and took from her cabin bag a book.

  I suppose it was the food, the wine. I returned to the laptop, to the presence within me of the voice and body of my wife, the hands of my children upon me, the boardroom, known expressions of the faces, and the issues I was to meet. Nothing. Replaced by tomorrow.

  As I worked at my computer and time was lost in passage the aircraft began to shudder. The seatbelt sign was illuminated. Turbulence, we expect to climb out of it, the cockpit voice soothingly reassured. But my window went black—it was afternoon, not nightfall—the swollen black of a great forest of storm. Out of nothing: this was the other power, like the opposition of Evil to Good religions tell us about on earth. I was determined to ignore what became the swooping, staggering of the plane, its teeth-chattering of overhead lockers, the collision of trolleys, spilling of glasses. I tried to focus on the screen of the laptop jiggling on my knees, but my eyes refused to function. As I managed to stow the laptop in a seat pocket I saw the woman beside me had put down her book. In a violent lurch of the enraged structure that encased us the book flung itself from her lap to the floor. I watched it slither onto the aisle, where it was joined by someone’s shoes taken off, as we do on long flights, for comfort. Now the cockpit voice commanded everyone to stay seated, forbidden to walk about the cabin, make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. For your own safety.

  I’ve weathered (that old cliché) a few spells of ‘turbulence’ in the hundreds of flights I’ve survived. There was never in my memory anything like this. Lorrie feared for me: a hijack. This was a hijack by the elements. Whatever force had us wouldn’t let go, no escape by gaining height or lowering it. There were crashes sounding from the galley. Two cabin attendants collided and the one fell across a passenger’s head. The commands from the cockpit became a gabble. Behind the seats where the woman and I were strapped, trapped, someone was vomiting in heaving waves and gurglings. The plane dropped as under a great blow and then bounced this side and that. It wanted to rid itself of us, our laptops, our headsets, our dutyfree, the caverns weighed with bags of possessions we lug around the world as if our life depends upon them.

  Our life.

  The voice from the cockpit made itself heard through broken-up amplification, the captain was going to attempt an emergency landing at a military airfield whose name I recognised as a sign that we had been blown off course. A woman was screaming, there were sobs and voices calling out for help—from whom, where?—praying—to whom, for what? My heart thudded wildly Lorrie’s fear: now mine. I suddenly realised that while everyone was appealing in the solidarity of human terror to everyone else, the woman beside me and I had not looked to each other, had not spoken. So I turned to her.

  Incredible.

  She was sitting calmly with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching—the seat the armrests anything—as I was. She was letting the fury of the pl
ane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was everyone’s face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me and I heard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, Good evening.

  —It’s all right. The plane will somehow land. You’re safe. Everyone.—

  I didn’t know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad.

  She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body. —It won’t happen. Because I’m aboard. This last year I have to tell you I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can’t die, no flight I take will kill.—

  THE order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way—those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct—by slides let down from the plane’s sides. Banners of flame unfurled about it behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.

  I’m sure she was.

  mother tongue

  BUT everything’s by chance—how else would she ever have met him? Been here.

  THEY fell in love in her country. Met there.

  A taxi he had taken skidded into her small car. It was raining the way Europe weeps in winter, and the taxi driver slammed out of his vehicle and accosted her from the other side of her window, streaming water as if dissolving in anger. His passenger intervened, exonerating her and citing the weather as responsible. The damage to taxi and car was minimal; names, addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged for the purpose of insurance claims. —A hoo-hah about nothing.— He said that to her as if this was something he and she, in their class as taxi patron and private car owner would rate it before the level of indignation of the Pakistani or whatever the taxi man was. The passenger spoke in English, native to him, but saw through the blur of rain the uncertain nod of one who has heard but not quite understood. He didn’t know a colloquial turn of phrase to translate the passing derision into that country’s language.