Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

When her letters started to come post-marked Germany her son demanded she leave at once. She lingered with cajoling, reassuring excuses — just another week, what’s the difference. At last she took ship in Holland, emigrating a second time from the same Rotterdam on the same line. Three days at sea: the news that war was declared between Britain and Germany. What was to be the Second World War had begun. When the ship reached Senegal on the West Coast of Africa, it was impounded at the port of Dakar. Senegal was a French colony and France, by then, had entered the war as Britain’s ally. The truant mother still held a German passport and along with others who did, she was taken under guard from the ship to detention at a camp in the ruin of a leper asylum outside the city. Her son expected her to arrive at a port in their adopted country on a scheduled date. Holland had not declared war, there was no reason that a ship of the Holland Afrika Line would be hampered on its route. He arranged for a friend to meet his mother when she disembarked and see her onto a train bound for home upcountry, where he was awaiting her. Instead there came an incoherent frantic call from the friend. The ship had docked, passengers emerged, but Grete did not. There were relatives and friends ready to greet returning travellers who also waited in bewilderment as these did not come waving happily down the gangplank. Everyone sought an explanation from somebody, anybody. Out of the clamour at last the Captain appeared and as if still stunned by fear told that he could do nothing when the French authorities boarded his ship and demanded to take German passport holders into custody. He did not know where they were held.

There began for the son what must have been a nightmare both surreal and desperately practical. He has somewhere stowed — what does one do this for? — in the cache of his documented life, the letters, the official rejections, the notes of imploring visits to consulates and government departments in strategy to get her released.

If she were still alive.

How could bureaucratic processes — only ones available, badgering the Red Cross, importuning the aghast Swedes who hastily had been made the representatives of people detained in makeshift camps God knows how where by the chaos of war — reach the void, silence; worse, a gust of images tossing up thirst, hunger, parched desert, tropical deluge.

After three weeks there was a letter. The headed address: Camp de Concentration de Sébikholane. Alive: her flowing hand on a dirty piece of paper. Her English. Many exclamation marks following the announcement that because she speaks French she has been able to persuade a guard to mail the letter. She has had fever but it’s quite okay now. The other people with her are wonderful. There’s a circus troupe and she’s great pals with them; the trapeze girl has a bed next to hers in the tent where everyone sleeps, and so her boy-friend, also from the high wire, comes to her, so sweet, I just put up my umbrella that side of my bed. I know, darling son, you are doing everything what’s for sure to get me out of here. There are big rats! It is terribly hot but they say that in a few weeks will be cooler.

A postcript. Everyone is so pleased because I’ve also got the French guard to bring us each a quarter litre of red wine a day!

The Red Cross, French Consulate, bewildered Swedes somehow succeeded; after six weeks the inhabitants of the camp were released to complete their journey on the Holland Afrika Line. She opened her arms to her son just the way she had always done when he was a boy and she returned from Deauville or a spa in Switzerland. And as herself a child who charms with the assumption that all is forgiven she showed no contrition for the anxiety and dread she had caused by her naughty escapade. Anger and frustration had battled with fear, in her son, and fear had won — how could he reproach her. Looking instead for what might have been part of the reason for his mother taking off against his edict, he thought to install her in a comfortable apartment with a daily maid, but she had her way with her usual style of retort, staying on in the boardinghouse: Where else I can live where I’m the youngest?

For old Grete everything was a party. At least he persuaded her to have a health check with one of her boardinghouse salon habitués, an immigrant doctor from Frankfurt. He confirmed that the fever symptoms he asked her to recollect were indeed those of malaria, and the virus might be sleeping in her blood, to recur with another bout. She chose to misunderstand. ‘ Ach Kwatsch! I sleep like a baby.’ It was true that in her cubby-hole room she kept to her divisions of time decided long ago in the style of Berlin high life — never in bed until after midnight and never up before noon. From this came one of the impossible old Grete incidents. The room did not have an adjoining private bathroom, she trailed sociably in flounced dressinggown and flowered plastic mobcap to a communal one. There was only a hand-basin with running water in the room. The boardinghouse also did not employ maids; it was usual in those years for ‘bedroom boys’ to serve instead. The grown men, black, came from rural areas and were issued with a garb of coarse white cotton shorts that mimicked the baggy khaki ones of early British settlers. She chatted with her elderly ‘bedroom boy’, and had secretly arranged with him to come quietly into her room and fulfil his cleaning duties while she was asleep, since she rose long after his morning round was supposed to be completed. This was something else to be concealed, this time from the boardinghouse proprietor, both for the employee’s sake and her own. She opened her eyes one morning and saw the bedroom boy watching himself in the mirror while brushing his bared teeth with her toothbrush. When told to amuse him, her son also drew back lips, bared teeth, in incredulous distaste: what did she intend to do about it? She had bought a toothbrush and presented — Here is yours, Josiah.

Her social life, like her time, was constructed in accordance with its diminished scale on the old model she knew. No post-opera parties — not much opera around — concerts and, of course, nightclubs. As dancing partners she had her one or two regulars. They were homosexuals (gay was not yet a mood exclusive to gender), therefore not gigolos, with sexual obligations. They were not paid; just younger immigrants in her set who missed partying as she did and for which, less impecunious than they, she paid. She also picked up as other friends people with whom her son and the family wouldn’t have thought she would have anything in common, just as they wouldn’t. A bustling talkative Afrikaner woman, The Pienaar (these useful women were referred to in the definitive by their surnames), perhaps began as someone paid for small services, fetching clothes from the dry cleaners’, sewing on buttons, and then stayed for coffee and cake. There was an Italian or was it a Portuguese pickup, young, who sold tickets at a cinema — with her married lover she was invited to threesome dinners. When Marlene Dietrich on the final-appearance world tour that famous actors and musicians are reduced to in their decline, came to Africa, the sister-Berliner who had idolised the unique voice and incomparable legs, treated the family to a performance. The family saw another old lady up on stage, whom the grandmother with the same raggedly-red painted mouth as the singer jumped to cheer emotionally as they did live appearances of pop stars. But old Grete’s love of celebrity did not belong back in the past. The adrenalin worked even for current sports heroes in the adopted country, and certain political figures, General Jan Smuts, as it had for Walter Rathenau. Grandmother is a groupie. As there are playboys, she must be accepted for herself, a playgirl.