Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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.

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 lessons 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.