Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (6 page)

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.

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.

Well, it
was
. I have a neighbour, a young architect, whom I see head-down under the bonnet, repairing his car at weekends; there was no course of action but to wait until he could be expected to come home that evening. He is a fixer who can open anything, everything. What to be done in the meantime? Take up where I left off. Send words stringing shadows across the body. Indeed, the disturbance might hope to rouse the intruder somehow to seek the way to leave.

I am accustomed to being alone when I work. I could not help seeing that I was not; something was deliberately
not watching
me—anyway, I couldn't make out its eyes—but was intimately involved with the process by which the imagination finds record, becomes extant.

It was then I received as I hadn't heard in this way before; Can't be.

Night after night I had been reading Franz Kafka's diaries, the subconscious of his fictions, that Max Brod wouldn't destroy. So there it all is, the secret genesis of creation. Kafka's subconscious was nightly conducting me from consciousness to the subconscious of sleep.

Had I
caused
that creature.

Is there another kind of metamorphosis, you don't wake up to find yourself transformed into another species, wriggling on light-brown shiny back and feeling out your space with wispy sensors, but the imagining of such a being can create one, independent of any host, physical genesis; or can imagination
summon such a live being to come on out of the woodwork and manifest itself?

What nonsense. There are no doubt the usual domestic pests living clandestinely among and nourished by whatever there is to be nibbled from piles of paper and newspaper cuttings. Who else eats the gilt lettering on book jackets? Next morning he/she/it was still there, no ectoplasm of my imagination, flattened under the glass and moving, with long intervals of watchful immobility, a little way laterally or vertically as the machine warmed in use.