Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

What was banished was much; quite other. What could not make a good story to entertain, draw on light-hearted liveliness, was not admitted for communication. Foreign to her nature. Although they had lived through devastating events together in their life, back there, she and her son never talked of them to one another, nor, for relief, in private confession to others; evidently she imposed this self-practice to be respected by him. His father, her husband, had died at fifty when the boy was twelve. Apparently she felt no need to return to what the loss must have meant to them, together and differently. The son learnt by chance, later, that his father had had an affair with an intellectual, a woman among their familiars, that ended only when he suddenly became ill and died. His mother had known; but the only reference that could be traced to this was that sometimes, describing the company recalled at splendid social occasions she mentioned mischievously, by name, the usual presence of the woman whom, she added, she and her sister knew as ‘Die Bärin’ , the She-bear, unfemininely hairy.

His mother married again when he was eighteen and his brother already living away in Hamburg in the first stage of a peripatetic career with women. The new man was a fashionable surgeon with the added distinction of reputed great skill and a professorship at a university. He must have been one of the guests at the dinners and midnight suppers the lively and wealthy widow continued to host after her husband’s death. Edgar was a catch, almost a celebrity, his knife restored the health of opera singers and he contributed piquant indiscretions about some of his patients — oh Richard Tauber achieved such sweet high notes because he had only one ball.

Arnulf (but to his mother her son was always ‘Arnie’) found a kind of elder-brother intimate friend in his mother’s substitute husband, if not exactly the substitute father; the biological one had disappeared with childhood and in the adolescent six years since there had formed some sort of scaffolding for the structure of guided adulthood processes missing behind it. Perhaps as fellow male but not one in authority Eddie was an ally in the sociable trio with the flighty mother. There was comfort in unconventional family relations that were unconsciously in line with the shifting of certainties being declaimed by beery oratory in Munich. If that voice was ignored by the new happy couple, the younger son became more and more aware that the professors at his university were preparing him for a life that no longer existed. It would be replaced by the fellow students wearing the swastika instead of sports insignia on their caps who beat him up when he turned for some sort of alternative future by joining the student socialist association. The year he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy was that of the burning of books. He completed his cycle, so far, to adulthood, by marrying his girl and took authority to urge that the family must leave what had been their native country. Eddie disagreed. They were assimilated, well-connected, no one would touch them. Arnie was young, leftist therefore misled. A few months later the professor was informed that he was dismissed from his university appointment and in private medical practice could treat only people of his own race, Jews. He shot himself.

EDGAR the surgeon left behind with a bullet in his head. With the Dom Pérignon after the opera, when Richard Tauber sang and Eddie whispered his titillating medical indiscretions to suppressed giggles. In the boardinghouse room her son wanted to rescue her from and that she defended as cosy, she was busy, late nights, writing in the diary the wedding anniversary celebration she was looking forward to, the date with one of her escorts to a musical, the address of a nightclub said to be the place to go, a café date next week with a friend who needed cheering up, her husband just left her for the wife of his golf partner. Incorrigible scatterbrain charming, exasperating in innocent craziness. Her son would shrug, not a serious thought in her dear head; she’s always been that way. Her serious son, himself, had spent four years in the Allied army settling their scores with the Nazis.

A grandmother who’d never grown up.

Life: a stack of fancy dress costumes in a pirate chest. No number tattooed on an arm; no. No last journey in a cattle truck.

Who among the responsible adults, grown up at the distance, had found a lover-cum-husband sitting in his consulting room with a revolver bullet in his brain that finally outlawed the doctor-for-Jews-only. Who had put up an umbrella against the Camp de Concentration de Sébikholane as if to shelter from a passing shower.

So what’s significant about that?

The past is a foreign country.

No entry.

The past is a foreign country…

— L. P. HARTLEY, The Go-Between

ANYONE who is a reader knows that what you have read has influenced your life. By ‘reader’ I mean one from the time you began to pick out the printed words, for yourself, in the bedtime story. (Another presumption: you became literate in some era before the bedtime story was replaced by the half-hour before the Box.) Adolescence is the crucial period when the poet and the fiction writer intervene in formation of the sense of self in sexual relation to others, suggesting — excitingly, sometimes scarily — that what adult authority has told or implied is the order of such relations, is not all. Back in the Forties, I was given to understand: first, you will meet a man, both will fall in love, and you will marry; there is an order of emotions that goes with this packaged process. That is what love is .

For me, who came along first was Marcel Proust. The strange but ineluctable disorder of Charles Swann’s agonising love for a woman who wasn’t his type (and this really no fault of her own, he fell in love with her as what she was, eh?); the jealousy of the Narrator tormentedly following a trail of Albertine’s evasions.

Swept away was the confetti. I now had different expectations of what experience might have to take on. My apprenticeship to sexual love changed; for life. Like it or not, this is what love is . Terrible. Glorious.

But what happens if something from a fiction is not interiorised, but materialises? Takes on independent existence?

It has just happened to me. Every year I re-read some of the books I don’t want to die without having read again. This year one of these is Kafka’s Diaries , and I am about half-way through. It’s night-time reading of a wonderfully harrowing sort.

A few mornings ago when I sat down at this typewriter as I do now, not waiting for Lorca’s duende but getting to work, I saw under the narrow strip of window which displays words electronically as I convey them, a roach. A smallish roach about the size and roach-shape of the nail of my third finger — medium-sized hand. To tell that I couldn’t believe it is understatement. But my immediate thought was practical: it was undoubtedly there, how did it get in. I tapped the glass at the place beneath which it appeared. It confirmed its existence, not by moving the body but wavering this way and that two whiskers, antennae so thin and pale I had not discerned them.

I proceeded to lift whatever parts of the machine are accessible, but the strip of narrow glass display was not. I consulted the User’s Manual; it did not recognise the eventuality of a cockroach penetrating the sealed refuge meant for words only. I could find no way the thing could have entered, but reasoned that if it had, shiny acorn-brown back, fine-traced antennae, it could leave again at will. Its own or mine. I tapped again overhead on the glass, and now it sidled — which meant, ah, that it was cramped under that roof — to the top limit of the space available. This also revealed bandy black legs like punctuation marks. I called a friend and she reacted simply: It’s impossible. Can’t be.