Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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.

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.