Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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 was 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.