Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  How he came to call her had to do with a document he was to sign, as witness; couldn’t have been an opportunity to follow up any attraction to a pretty face, because the rain had made hers appear smeary as the image in a tarnished mirror. So they met again, over a piece of paper in a café near the lawyer’s office where she worked. It was of course still raining, and he was able to make conversation with his cobbled-together vocabulary in the country’s language, remarking that you didn’t have days on end like this where he came from; that’s how she learnt: from Africa. South Africa. Mandela. The synapses and neurons made the identifying connection in the map of every European mind. Yes, he had picked up something of her language, although the course he’d taken in preparation hadn’t proved of much use when he arrived and found himself where everybody spoke it all the time and not in phrase-book style and accent. They laughed together at the way he spoke it, a mutual recognition closer, with the flesh-and-bone structure, shining fresh skin, deep-set but frank eyes, before him in place of the image in the tarnished mirror. Blond hair—real blond, he could tell from experience of his predilection for Nordic types, genuine or chemically concocted (once naked, anyway, they carelessly showed their natural category). She knew little of his language, the few words she remembered, learnt at school. But the other forms of recognition were making communication between them. They began to see each other every day; she would take his calls on her mobile, carried into the corridor or the women’s room out of earshot of others in the lawyer’s office. There among the wash-basins and toilet booths the rendezvous was decided.

  He worked for one of the vast-tentacled international advertising agencies, and had got himself sent to her country by yet another kind of recognition; the director’s, of his intelligence, adaptability, and sanguine acceptance of the need to learn the language of the country to which he would be sent as one of the co-ordinators of the agency’s conglomerate hype (global, they called it). He was not a copywriter or designer, he was a businessman who, as he told her, had many friends and contacts of his generation in different enterprises and might—as they were all on the lookout for—move on to some other participation in the opportunities of their world. By this he also meant his and hers, both of them young. He saw that world of theirs, though they were personally far apart geographically, turning round technology as the earth revolves round the sun.

  She shared an apartment with a girl-friend; the first love-making was in his apartment where he lived, alone, since coming to Germany some months past. He had had his share of affairs at home—that surely must be, in view of his composed, confidently attractive face, the lean sexual exuberance of his body, and his quick mind; by lapse of e-mails and calls between them, the affair with someone back there was outworn. The girl met by chance probably had had a few experiments. She spoke of ‘a boy-friend’ who had emigrated somewhere. Of course she might just be discreet and once they were in their sumptuous throes of love-making, what went before didn’t matter. Her flesh was not abundant but alertly responsive—a surprising find. He’d thought of German female types as either rather hefty, athletic, or fat.

  But it was her tenderness to him, the lovingness in the sexuality that made this foreign affair somewhat different from the others, so that—he supposed it’s what’s called falling in love—they married. In love. Passed that test. An odd move in his life, far from what would have been expected, among his circle at home. But powerful European countries are accustomed to all sorts of invasions, both belligerent and peaceful, and this foreign one was legal, representing big business, an individual proof of the world’s acceptance of Germany’s contrition over the past. He was suitably well received when she took him to her family, and as a welcome novelty among her friends. With their easy company he became more fluent in the to-and-fro of their language. And of course it was the language of the love affair and the marriage that had been celebrated in true German style, a traditional festivity which her circle of friends, who had moved on to an unceremonious lifestyle, nevertheless delightedly animated around the veiled bride and three-piece-suited groom. His was a personality and a growing adeptness in exchanges that, in their remaining months there, made Germany a sort of his-and-hers.

  She knew when she began to love this man that the condition would be that she would live in another country. A country she had never seen, touched the earth, felt the wind or sun, rain, heard in its expression by its inhabitants, except through him, touch of his skin, sound of his voice; a country landscaped by his words. Love goes wherever the beloved must. The prospect of going home with him to Africa: her friends saw that she was—first time since they’d all grown up together—exalted. The anticipation actually showed in the burnish of the shine over her fine cheekbones and the eagerness in her readied eyes. She ceased to see the Bauhaus façade of the building where the lawyer’s offices were, the familiar tower of the ancient church that had survived the bombs of the parents’ war, the beer stube where she was among those friends. Her parents: how did that church’s marriage ceremony put it? An old biblical injunction along with many of the good precepts she had learnt at the Lutheran Sunday school they had sent her to as a child. ‘Leave thy father and thy mother and cleave only . . .’ Something like that. The emotional parting with the parents, handed from the arms of one to the other, each jealous to have the last embrace of the daughter, was not a parting but an arrival in the embrace of a beloved man.

  THEY were in Africa. His Africa, now defined out of a continent. Further defined: his city there. The property market, he was told by his friends who wanted to bring him upto-date with what was happening while he was away ‘doing the disappearing act into the married man’, was ‘flat on its arse’ and this was the time to do what married men did, quit the bachelor pad and buy a house. So they spent only a month in his apartment that was to her a hotel room vacated by a previous occupant. She didn’t know any of the objects in it which must have been personal to the man she had not known while he lived there. She looked through his books, took down one here and there as if she were in a library expecting to find some particular subject, but even when he was absent did not touch letters she saw lying in a drawer she had pulled out to find a ballpoint likely to be at hand in the unit of desk, computer, fax and photocopier. When they bought a house and he decided the only furniture worth taking along was the complex of his communications outfit, he cleared into a garbage bin the bundle of letters along with other papers, outlived.

  The house new to them was in fact an old house, as age is measured in a city founded as a gold-mining camp 120 years ago. His white parents’ generation were all for steel and glass or fake Californian-Spanish, didn’t want to live with wooden verandah rails and coal-burning fire-places. To their offspring generation the Frank Lloyd Wright and Hispano-Californian look-alikes were symbolic of people looking to take on an identity outside the one they weren’t sure of. Even if they didn’t think in this way of their impulse to be worldly-fashionable, the assumed shell was also another shelter in their chosen isolation from the places, the manner in which the black people who surrounded, outnumbered them, lived: in hovels and shacks. Young whites on an economic level of choice found the old high-ceilinged, corrugated-iron-roofed houses more interestingly built, spacious for adaptation to ways of a life open to the unexpected. Everyone was doing it; fixing up old places. Blacks too, the professionals, media people and civil servants in what was called the new dispensation—civic term for what used to be called freedom. The houses were short of bathrooms, but those were easily installed, just as the kitchen, in the house he bought, was at once renovated with the equipment she knew—as the model of her mother’s in Germany—was essential.

  Home. A real his-and-hers. Friends came to help him thin overgrown trees, she had the beer chilled and the snacks ready for this male camaraderie. She planted flowers she had never seen before, didn’t bloom where she came from. She hadn’t found work yet—that wasn’t urgent, anyway, her share in the creation of the house w
as a new and fulfilling occupation, as anything in the service of devotion is, centred by the big bed where they made love. There was the suggestion that she might find part-time employment to interest her at the local Goethe Institute. But she didn’t want to be speaking German—English was her language now. She was introduced to, plunged into immersion in his circle. She talked little, although back in her own country, her circle where he’d made a place for himself so easily, she was rather animated. Here, she listened; it seemed to be her place. She was happy to feel she was understanding everything said in his language, even if she couldn’t use it confidently enough to speak up.

  There were many parties. Even without any special occasion, his friends black and white clustered instinctively in this or that apartment, house or bar, like agents of some cross-pollination of lives.

  On a terrace the sunken sun sends pale searchlights to touch a valance of clouds here and there, the darkness seems to rise from damp grass as the drinking ignites animation in his friends. She has asked him to stop the car on the way, where there’s a flower-seller on a corner. —What for? No-one’s birthday, far as I know.— He forgets it’s the rule, in her country, to take flowers or chocolates—some gift—to a party. —Wine’d have been a better idea, my sweet.— And it happens that the host or one of the hosts—it’s a combined get-together—dumps the bunch of lilies on a table where they are soon pushed aside by glasses and ashtrays.

  When they arrived she sat beside him. At these gatherings married people don’t sit together, it’s not what one does, bringing a cosy domesticity into a good-time atmosphere. But she’s still a newcomer, innocent of the protocol and he’s too fond to tell her she should—well, circulate. She’s one of the prettiest women there: looks fresh-picked; while the flowers she brought wilt. She’s younger than most of the women. She sits, with the contradiction of knees and feet primly aligned and the lovely foothills of breasts showing above the neckline of her gauzy dress. Perhaps the difference between her and the others is she’s prepared herself to look her best to honour him, not to attract other men.

  He gets up to go over and greet someone he thinks has forgotten him—he’s been away in Europe a whole year—and when the shoulder-grasping embrace, the huge laughter, is over, comes back, but by chance in the meantime someone has been waved to the seat next to his wife. So he pulls up a chair on the woman’s other side. He hasn’t deserted—it’s a threesome. His newly-imported wife happens to have already met this woman on some other occasion within the circle. The woman is very attractive, not really young anymore but still wild, riling the company with barbed remarks, running hands up through her red-streaked plumage as if in a switch to despair at herself. People are distracted from their own talk by her spectacle. More wine is tilted into glasses as they come up to laugh, interject. The husband is one of her butts. He’s challenging a reminiscence of an incident in the friends’ circle his neighbour is recounting, flourishing loudly. All around the wife are references back and forth, a personal lingo—every clique has this, out of common experience. It was the same, among her friends in that past life in Germany. Jokes you don’t understand even if you know the words; understand only if you’re aware what, who’s being sent up. She doesn’t know, either, the affectionate, patronising words, phrases, that are the means of expression of people who adapt and mix languages , exclamations, word-combinations in some sort of English that isn’t the usage of educated people like themselves. There are so many languages in this country of theirs that his friends don’t speak, but find it amusing to bring the flavours of into their own with the odd word or expression; so much more earthy, claiming an identity with their country as it is, now. Anecdotes are being argued—interruptions flying back and forth as voices amplify over re-filled glasses.

  . . . so they threw him with a stone, right?—the director’s office, nogal . . .

  . . . In your face. That’s her always . . . Hai! Hamba kahle . . .

  . . . Awesome! Something to do with a sports event or, once, a dessert someone made? They use the word often in talk of many different kinds; she’s looked it up in a dictionary but there it means ‘inspiring awe, an emotion of mingled reverence, dread and wonder’. And there are forms of address within the circle borrowed from other groups, other situations and experiences they now share. Someone calls out—Chief, I want to ask you something—when neither the speaker nor the pal hailed, white or black (for the party is mixed) is tribal—as she knows the title to be, whether in Indonesia, Central America, Africa, anywhere she could think of. Some address one another as My China. How is she to know this is some comradely endearment, cockney rhyming slang—‘my mate, my china plate’—somehow appropriated during the days of apartheid’s army camps.

  Smiling, silent; to be there with him is enough.

  The party becomes a contest between him and the woman who sits between them. Each remembers, insists on a different version of what the incident was.

  —You’re confounding it with that time everyone was shagging in the bushes!—

  —Well, you would be reliable about that—

  —Listen, listen, listen to me!— He slaps his arm round the back of her neck, under the hair she’s flung up, laughing emphasis. She puts a hand on his thigh: —You never listen—

  It’s a wrestling match of words that come from the past, with touch that comes from the past. The hand stays on him. Then he snatches it up palm to palm, shaking it to contradict what she’s jeering, laughing close to his face and drowning out the calls of others. —O-O-O you were still in kort broek, My China! Loverboy—you remember Isabella that time water skiing? Kama Sutra warns against games under water—

  —No ways! You’re the one to talk—also did some deep-diving in search of marine life, ek sê. No-oo, kahle-kahle was my line!—

  —And what happened to your great fancy from where was it, Finland. That Easter. Well why not—whatever you did’s politically correct with me, they say the grave’s a fine and private place but no okes do there embrace.— Among the well-read of the friends this adaptation of Marvell was uproariously appreciated.

  She was alone and laughed—she did not know what at. She sat beside the woman and her husband who were hugging, celebrating each other in the easy way of those who have old connections of intimacy encoded in exchanges of a mother tongue, released by wine and a good time had by all. She laughed when everyone else did. And then sat quiet and nobody noticed her. She understood she didn’t know the language.

  The only mother tongue she had was his in her mouth, at night.

  allesverloren

  WHOM to talk to.

  Grief is boring after a while, burdensome even to close confidants. After a very short while, for them.

  The long while continues. A cord that won’t come full circle, doesn’t know how to tie a knot in resolution. So whom to talk to. Speak.

  It comes down to the impossible, the ridiculous: talk then; about this! But to whom. Nobody knew about it. No, of course there must be some friends among those who surrounded us all those years of ours who did know, but since it was not spoken by them, it didn’t ever happen.

  So whom to talk to. Necessary; to bring him back, piece him together, his life that must continue to exist for his survivor. Talk to.

  There’s no-one.

  Wind shivers along blue plastic covering the pergola of the house next door.

  Wind in sun over the sea; come, abandon that crazy component of the quest and travel to contemplate an ocean!

  Wind wags the trees’ heads. No message there, for the survivor.

  Nothing to avoid it. There’s only one.

  To supply answers to questions that were never asked, never necessary to be asked in an intimacy of flesh and mind that reassured, encompassed and transfigured everything, all pasts, into the living present? Answers. Is that what such understanding, coming to terms with loss, will prove to be? For so far understanding has turned out to have no meaning. Come to lunch, come to the theatre, attend t
he meeting, take up new interests, there’s your work, you’re a historian—for Christ’s sake, it’s important. Grief is speaking a language that reaches no-one’s ears, drawing hieroglyphs for which there is no cracked code. ‘Nor hope nor dread attend the dying animal / Man has created death.’ Everyone fears death but no-one admits to the fear of grief; the revulsion at that presence, there in us all.

  Thinking about it (about the One) and not acting. The trivial irritabilities that are the only distraction; e.g., no bananas left today in the fruit bowl—regression to the quick fix of a child’s craving to eat something it likes best.

  SHE, the survivor, was divorced when she met the man who was to be hers, and so was he, her man who now is dead—months ago, the long while beyond the short while when others still talked of him with her. She had had a couple of brief affairs in the interim between divorce and the marriage, and he had had only one. That was not the difference. It was with a man. He had told her of it as part of the confidentiality, confessions, that come as the relief of another kind of blessed orgasm after the first few of love-making. A form of deep gratitude that is going to be part of love for the other being, if there is going to be love.

  There was love and there is love, but only on one side; the reciprocal recipient is gone. Gone? That implies somewhere. There is no somewhere in this death that man has invented. Because if the poet is right, man invented it, there’s no Divine-supplied invention of an after-life in a fully-furnished heaven or torture-equipped hell gymnasium. The beloved hasn’t gone anywhere. He is dead. He is nowhere except in the possibility of recall, a calling-up of all the times, phases, places, emotions and actions of what he was, how he lived while he was. Almost half that life—you don’t count childhood, of course—was theirs. What came before was thought of by them as a sort of prolonged adolescence—full of the mistakes and misconceptions of that state: the two early marriages, his and hers, rather inconceivable, in the knowledge of this one, theirs. The one and only, he would say to her, the days he was dying. The conclusion along with his own coming conclusion.