Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  The money she was bringing in eased some of the stringencies in their life. Peter had fine sports equipment he had yearned for, the old car was traded in for a later second-hand model and now was Fred’s exclusively—the Agency provided Zsuzsi with a car that would give clients confidence in her income status as high enough to be informed of the expectations of their own. But funds didn’t extend to provide for major changes in their life—she had to spend considerably on being well-dressed (no time for homemade outfits), groomed, visits to an expensive hairdressing salon, including manicure, people notice proletarian hands as a sign of limitations. Of course she had the luck to be good-looking, right basis for being produced by these methods as exceptionally so.

  They made a handsome couple when it was assumed, on occasion, husbands, wives, or gay partners of the Agency personnel would get together for the obligatory Christmas party, or some cocktail hour to mark particular progress in the business. He did not know the personal incumbents of Zsuzsi’s colleagues, beyond these encounters, well enough to discover what range of topics they might have in common to talk about; except sports events. In this country even women shared this lingua franca. Spectator passion for team sports is the only universal religion. Its faithful adherents are everywhere; he was a football centre-forward as a student somewhere else but the litany held good; he followed the matches on fields locally and internationally and could give all the responses. There were the lunches among the agents only, with professional concerns to be discussed ‘in house’; anyway lunch break at the supermarket didn’t allow time for such leisurely customs. Fred ate in the canteen, or picked up something more to his taste in the deli section where there were hams and spiced sausage imported from Italy and other European countries . Zsuzsi said, yes, good idea, when he once suggested, after mother and son had spent a happily riotous half-hour teasing each other in South African English slang, that they should speak to the boy a short time every day, even round a meal, in Magyar. So that he would have it. It turned out meals were not a suitable choice, the boy was tired after a day at school, play, homework. She didn’t have other spare time.

  He began to speak their language to the boy without explanation while they were absorbed together in the things fathers are drawn into by young sons—construction with plastic building kits, articulating bodies of battery-operated outer-space monsters. The child spoke unawaringly the Magyar word for ‘leg’, ‘face’, used the verbs for ‘fly’, ‘shoot’. But he resented that the creativity he wanted to share with his father was turning into another kind of homework when his father tried to get him to put the words into a sentence, repeating this as it came from his father’s voice. He’d suddenly kick over the half-finished creation, scatter the weapons and cloak of the monster, laughing angrily.

  Photographs that had been brought in the baggage of emigration and had sifted away somewhere in immigration: when they were shown to the boy so that he might make the words material, come to life in images—‘That’s our house’—he was only half-attentive. ‘Our house isn’t like that.’ ‘It’s my house, where I lived when I was like you. A little boy.’ Of course, the turret and balustrade would seem to him a picture in a book of fairy tales—but this generation of kids don’t have Grimm read to them . . . he wouldn’t even have that vision, to match.

  Murmured to in the real intimacy of a mother tongue in bed, Zsuzsi wasn’t aware she was responding softly in English. Well. She had been speaking in that essential other tongue all day, showing prospective clients the features of living-places that if grander, were like those in the familiar images the boy had; been born among.

  Zsuzsi was more more and more successful. Perhaps this was ‘what she was made for’ that she couldn’t define when she knew she had enough of being the ladies’ little dressmaker. This was the proof that if there is something in you which wasn’t recognised, the political situation and economic order had no place for, where you came from, it’s true that there are opportunities to realise your potential, build yourself a life with the kit of values of another society. She invested some of her high commissions in the stock market, on the expert advice of stockbrokers who felt they owed to her sensitivity and native shrewdness (these Eastern Europeans), her reading of their ambitions, calculated status, the finding of the material image, the statement of a home that would announce this, unmistakable as a fox has its lair to distinguish it, an ordinary rich pig its sty. Fred could not take leave from the supermarket at Christmas, when Peter was on holiday from school and the estate agency more or less idle in the absence of clients—gone sailing or abroad to snow countries, skiing. So she took Ferenc and Peter to a Club Méditerranée on an Indian Ocean island at another time of year, when the availability of all three made this possible—one of the many treats she provided.

  The Agency had become alert to the development opportunity of a change in currency-law restrictions that now allowed nationals of the country to own property abroad, which had been illegal for decades. Zsuzsi went back; not to the countries the Danube flowed through but to France, Spain, England, on a visit apparently with several colleagues from the Agency to make contact with famous ones like Christie’s and Sotheby’s for co-operation in finding properties for clients interested in a pied-à-terre if not a castle in Spain. She came back with T-shirts for the son, picturing famous sights, Gaudí in Barcelona, Houses of Parliament in London, and CDs made by the latest rave bands. The boy didn’t ask about the identity of what he saw was going to be displayed across his chest. The CDs overjoyed him. He was older now and did his homework clamped between headphones accompanying him with the sounds of the different kinds of pop music—how could the child concentrate? But his mother said, amused, we can’t live in the past, they say even cows give more milk when music’s played to them.

  But that’s Mozart. Ferenc coming up from incarceration in Fred, correcting an incomplete quotation.

  HIS Zsuzsi had—what?—some kind of conscience over the unfairness though it was no fault of hers—the traditional social distortion of emigration had thrust a Doctor of Philosophy into a supermarket storeroom—that he had not got out of there, as when they moved to something better she found for them, she had left behind in the little house that was their first shelter in Africa, the sewing machine. Again through resource of client contacts, this time the Agency, at some stage in her success she broached to him that maybe there was some position—well, with his education—in what her clients called the advisory echelons of big business. Such firms were wanting to move into world enterprise. He could do some kind of the research they required?

  He wasn’t an economist.

  Somewhere in her was buried the small-town girl who saw the distinction attained by the Budapest graduate in philosophy as a Tree of Knowledge fruitful along any branch. He was touched by this returned glimpse of her; vivid vision of how she looked, which was how she was, essential self getting up to dance, belonging in the images of the musicians’ wild tossing hair, the twisting bodies, limbs rearticulated like Picasso’s arrangement of body parts, by a ceiling wheel of turning lights in a student night haunt he’d taken her to.

  She did try a few other possibilities for him; nothing had come of them so far. It seemed the initiative for one was from a client not for whom Zsuzsi had found an ideal home but who was a seller of one, his with sauna as well as swimming pool, guest apartment and secure parking for three cars, for which she had found a buyer at top asking price while what other agencies had told the seller was impossibly high. On triumphant first-name terms with his agent, he extended the assumption to the husband, inviting Zsuzsi and Fred to dinner in this successfully overvalued home before he vacated it. For what reason and for where next, if Zsuzsi knew, it was not Fred’s business to ask, and did not interest Ferenc. Zsuzsi showed him round. What he saw was that the house was, in fact, beautiful, an interior expressing what must have been someone’s sense of what his or hers—their?—containment was meant to be: the eyes met with well-made objects of use,
and of visual pleasure—the vista opening from doors as well as the drawings by European artists—Dufy and Braque, lithographs probably—confidently along with the three-dimensional assertion of African wooden sculptures. But the vision might have been the wife’s, Zsuzsi had sometime remarked that the man was divorced, or perhaps she said was in the process of divorce.

  So this was the kind of scene, background to her life that she—his Zsuzsi—moved through every day. Property to property, kitchen gleamingly equipped as, maybe, a surgeon’s operating theatre, deep rooms interleading, wide staircase, bar, patio. He’s never seen it before, but it was hers. Connection to the supermarket. The asparagus and scampi to follow, served at dinner by a black man in white jacket, probably came from the cooling chamber for delicate vegetables and the freeze room, where other black men steered loads in wild trajectories and the storeman manager in his open booth surveyed the scene.

  The man had room for a boat as well as three cars in his garage. He also had a young son, Zsuzsi said, and he thought it would be nice for Peter to go sailing, on a Sunday, with him and his boy. Peter was half-excited, half-dubious: I don’t know them. His mother went along to see him enjoying himself in a new activity. The boat was small, his father didn’t come, that time or other Sundays when the same party sailed a stretch of dam water, not a river, during the season. When Zsuzsi went, was obliged to go overseas several times—on one trip the largest German tourist company appointed her their representative in Southern Africa—Peter and he did things together; he thought up outings like a visit to the museum of the origin of mankind but the only success, in really diverting the boy, was the live spectacle of a football game. He couldn’t picture his father there, in one of the players, as he had pointed out to him on the field the very position his father had had, look, that player out there. The boy saw himself grown, in the bright shorts, the boots, the intense flushed face of that man, there.

  A sculptured figure stood on a small table near the chair where he sat reading when he came from the supermarket evenings while she was away. It was a dignitary whose decorated carved belly rested on crossed legs seated on a low altar of some sort, its protruding oval ledge empty of the offering it was meant for. Picked up, there was on the underside an inscription inked into the wood. King Lukengu Tribe Bakuba Province Kasai. If he glanced up from his book, he saw it; or it saw him. It was a gift from the client of the farewell dinner invitation. Its lidded gaze.

  She must have sold many more houses before the result of that one came about. One night on her return from a trip or was it what she had announced as a weekend conference in some out-of-town centre, she said, Ferenc, we must talk. She had picked up the colloquial jargon of the sales-world as she had adapted her way of expressing herself to the scattered ‘darlings’ of ladies come for fittings. ‘We must talk’ was the euphemism for crisis, something difficult to be said. Zsuzsi has decided upon a divorce. She’s tried some other—what did she say—solution, some way. But in the end. What. Well, they both had been so young, back there . . . didn’t know, really, how either would be . . . If they hadn’t had to leave—she stopped. He waited. If we hadn’t emigrated, maybe. He did not interject but it was as if he had; Yes? If we had still been there maybe we would have found ourselves going the same way together. A change of tone, accusing herself: Maybe we should have stayed. Who knows.

  Maybe. The man she was with now, maybe it was the owner of the house he saw, maybe the buyer or seller of another. She viewed—that’s the word, clients are taken to view what’s on offer—walked through room after room, so many prospective places for herself, the ballroom-size bedroom with its vast draped bed, faintly giving the scent of perfume and semen from an image of how it will be to make love there. The bathroom’s sauna and the electric massage chair, ready to shudder. The kitchen with the face of the black cook placed among the shining equipment. Zsuzsana has found home.

  He is in exile.

  the second sense

  The senses ‘usually reckoned as five—sight, hearing,

  smell, taste, touch.’

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  SHE’S never felt any resentment that he became a musician and she didn’t. Hardly call her amateur flute-playing a vocation. Envy? Only pride in the achievement he was born for. She sits at a computer in a city government office, earning under pleasant enough conditions a salary that at least has provided regularly for their basic needs while his remuneration for the privilege of being cellist in a symphony orchestra has been sometimes augmented by chamber music engagements, sometimes not; and in the summer, off-season for the orchestra, he was dependent on these performances on the side.

  Their social life is in his professional circle, fellow musicians, music critics, aficionados whose connections ensure they have free tickets, and the musical families in which most of the orchestra members grew up, piano-teacher or choir-singing mothers and church-organist fathers. When people among them remember to give her the obligatory polite attention, with the question, What do you do?, and she tells them, it’s clear that they wonder what she and the cellist who is married to her have in common. As for her, she found when still adolescent—the time for discoveries about parental limitations—that her cheerful father with his sports shop, beguiling heartiness a qualification for that business, and her mother with her groupies exchanging female reproductive maladies from conception to menopause, did not have in their comprehension what it was she Wanted To Do. A school outing had taken her to a concert where at sixteen she heard coming out of the slim tube held in human lips the call of the flute. Much later, she was able to identify the auditory memory as Mozart’s Flute Concerto no. 2 in D, K. 314. Meanwhile, attribution didn’t matter any more than the unknown name of a bird that sang heart-piercingly hidden in the parents’ garden. The teacher who had arranged the cultural event was understanding enough to put the girl in touch with a youth musical group in the city; she baby-sat at weekends to pay for the hire of a flute and began to attempt to learn how to produce with her own breath and fingers something of what she had heard.

  He was among The Youth Players. His instrument was the very antithesis of the flute. When they came to know one another part of the language of early attraction was a kind of repartee about this, show-off, slangy, childish. The sounds he drew from the overgrown violin between his knees: the complaining moo of a sick cow; the rasp of a blunt saw; a long fart. —Excuse me!— he would say, with a clownish lift of eyebrows and down-twisted mouth. The instrument was the cello, like her flute a second-hand donation to the Players from the estate of some old man or woman who left behind what was of no interest to family descendants. Alaric tended it in a sensuous way that if she had not been so young and innocent she could have read as an augur of how his love-making would begin. Within a year his exceptional talent was recognised by the professional musicians who coached the young people voluntarily, and the cello was declared his, no longer on loan. They played together when alone, to amuse themselves and secretly imagine they were already in concert performance, the low, powerful cadence coming from the golden-brown body of the cello making by contrast her flute voice sound more that of a squeaking mouse than it would have, heard solo. In time, she reached a certain level of minor accomplishment. He couldn’t lie to her. They had with the complicity of his friends found some place where they could make love—for her the first time—and out of a commitment to sincerity beyond their years, he couldn’t deceive her and let her suffer the disillusions of persisting with a career not open to her level of performance. Already she had been hurt, dismayed at being replaced by other young flautists when ensembles were chosen for public performances by ‘talented musicians of the future’.

  You’ll always have the pleasure of playing the instrument you love best. She would always remember what she said: The cello is the instrument I love best.

  They grew up enough to leave whatever they had been told was home, the parents. They worked as waiters in a restaurant, he gave music le
ssons in schools, they found a bachelor pad in the rundown part of town where most whites were afraid to live because blacks had moved there since segregation was outlawed. In the generosity of their passionate happiness they had the expansive impossible need to share something of it, the intangible become tangible, bringing up to their kitchen nook a young man who played pennywhistle kwela at the street corner, to have a real meal with them, not handout small change to be tossed into his cap. The white caretaker of the building objected vociferously. You mad. You mad or what. Inviting blacks to rob and murder you. I can’t have it in the building.

  Paula went to computer courses and became proficient. If you’re not an artist of some kind, or a doctor, a civil rights lawyer, what other skill makes you of use in a developing country? Chosen, loved by the one you love; what more meaningful than being necessary to him in a practical sense as well, with the ability to support his vocation whose achievements are yours by proxy. ‘What do you do?’ Can’t you see? She makes fulfilment possible, for both of them.

  Children. Married more than a year, they discussed this, the supposedly natural progression in love. Postponed until next time. Next time, they reached the fact: as his unusual gifts began to bring engagements for guest performance at music festivals abroad, and opportunities to play with prestigious—soon to be famous—orchestras, the fact clearly was that he could not be a father home for the bedtime story every night, or to be reliably expected to watch schoolboy weekend soccer games at the same time as he was a cellist soon to have his name on CD labels. If she could get leave from her increasingly responsible job—not too difficult on occasion—to accompany him, she would not be able to shelve that other responsibility, care of a baby. They made the choice of what they wanted: each other, within a single career. Let a mother and tea-time friends focus on the hazards of reproduction, contemplating their own navel cord. Let other men seek immortality in progeny; music has no limits of a life-span. An expert told them the hand-me-down cello was at least seventy or eighty years old and the better for it.