Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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.