Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (8 page)

Incredible.

She was sitting calmly with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching—the seat the armrests anything—as I was. She was letting the fury of the plane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was everyone's face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me and I
heard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, Good evening.

—It's all right. The plane will somehow land. You're safe. Everyone.—

I didn't know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad.

She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body. —It won't happen. Because I'm aboard. This last year I have to tell you I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can't die, no flight I take will kill.—

THE
order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way—those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct—by slides let down from the plane's sides. Banners of flame unfurled about it behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.

I'm sure she was.

 

 

 

 

BUT
everything's by chance—how else would she ever have met him? Been here.

THEY
fell in love in her country. Met there.

A taxi he had taken skidded into her small car. It was raining the way Europe weeps in winter, and the taxi driver slammed out of his vehicle and accosted her from the other side of her window, streaming water as if dissolving in anger. His passenger intervened, exonerating her and citing the weather as responsible. The damage to taxi and car was minimal; names, addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged for the purpose of insurance claims. —A hoo-hah about nothing.— He said that to her as if this was something he and she, in their class as taxi patron and private car owner would rate it before the level of indignation of the Pakistani or whatever the taxi man was. The passenger spoke in English, native to him,
but saw through the blur of rain the uncertain nod of one who has heard but not quite understood. He didn't know a colloquial turn of phrase to translate the passing derision into that country's language.

How he came to call her had to do with a document he was to sign, as witness; couldn't have been an opportunity to follow up any attraction to a pretty face, because the rain had made hers appear smeary as the image in a tarnished mirror. So they met again, over a piece of paper in a café near the lawyer's office where she worked. It was of course still raining, and he was able to make conversation with his cobbled-together vocabulary in the country's language, remarking that you didn't have days on end like this where he came from; that's how she learnt: from Africa.
South Africa. Mandela.
The synapses and neurons made the identifying connection in the map of every European mind. Yes, he had picked up something of her language, although the course he'd taken in preparation hadn't proved of much use when he arrived and found himself where everybody spoke it all the time and not in phrase-book style and accent. They laughed together at the way
he
spoke it, a mutual recognition closer, with the flesh-and-bone structure, shining fresh skin, deep-set but frank eyes, before him in place of the image in the tarnished mirror. Blond hair—real blond, he could tell from experience of his predilection for Nordic types, genuine or chemically concocted (once naked, anyway, they carelessly showed their natural category). She knew little of his language, the few words she remembered, learnt at school. But the other forms of recognition were making communication between them. They began to see each other every day; she would take his calls on her mobile, carried into the corridor or the women's room out of earshot of others in the
lawyer's office. There among the wash-basins and toilet booths the rendezvous was decided.

He worked for one of the vast-tentacled international advertising agencies, and had got himself sent to her country by yet another kind of recognition; the director's, of his intelligence, adaptability, and sanguine acceptance of the need to learn the language of the country to which he would be sent as one of the co-ordinators of the agency's conglomerate hype (global, they called it). He was not a copywriter or designer, he was a businessman who, as he told her, had many friends and contacts of his generation in different enterprises and might—as they were all on the lookout for—move on to some other participation in the opportunities of their world. By this he also meant his and hers, both of them young. He saw that world of theirs, though they were personally far apart geographically, turning round technology as the earth revolves round the sun.

She shared an apartment with a girl-friend; the first love-making was in his apartment where he lived, alone, since coming to Germany some months past. He had had his share of affairs at home—that surely must be, in view of his composed, confidently attractive face, the lean sexual exuberance of his body, and his quick mind; by lapse of e-mails and calls between them, the affair with someone back there was outworn. The girl met by chance probably had had a few experiments. She spoke of ‘a boy-friend' who had emigrated somewhere. Of course she might just be discreet and once they were in their sumptuous throes of love-making, what went before didn't matter. Her flesh was not abundant but alertly responsive—a surprising find. He'd thought of German female types as either rather hefty, athletic, or fat.

But it was her tenderness to him, the loving
ness
in the sexuality that made this foreign affair somewhat different from the others, so that—he supposed it's what's called falling in love—they married. In love. Passed that test. An odd move in his life, far from what would have been expected, among his circle at home. But powerful European countries are accustomed to all sorts of invasions, both belligerent and peaceful, and this foreign one was legal, representing big business, an individual proof of the world's acceptance of Germany's contrition over the past. He was suitably well received when she took him to her family, and as a welcome novelty among her friends. With their easy company he became more fluent in the to-and-fro of their language. And of course it was the language of the love affair and the marriage that had been celebrated in true German style, a traditional festivity which her circle of friends, who had moved on to an unceremonious lifestyle, nevertheless delightedly animated around the veiled bride and three-piece-suited groom. His was a personality and a growing adeptness in exchanges that, in their remaining months there, made Germany a sort of his-and-hers.

She knew when she began to love this man that the condition would be that she would live in another country. A country she had never seen, touched the earth, felt the wind or sun, rain, heard in its expression by its inhabitants, except through him, touch of his skin, sound of his voice; a country landscaped by his words. Love goes wherever the beloved must. The prospect of going home with him to Africa: her friends saw that she was—first time since they'd all grown up together—exalted. The anticipation actually showed in the burnish of the shine over her fine cheekbones and the eagerness in
her readied eyes. She ceased to see the Bauhaus façade of the building where the lawyer's offices were, the familiar tower of the ancient church that had survived the bombs of the parents' war, the beer
stube
where she was among those friends. Her parents: how did that church's marriage ceremony put it? An old biblical injunction along with many of the good precepts she had learnt at the Lutheran Sunday school they had sent her to as a child. ‘Leave thy father and thy mother and cleave only . . .' Something like that. The emotional parting with the parents, handed from the arms of one to the other, each jealous to have the last embrace of the daughter, was not a parting but an arrival in the embrace of a beloved man.

THEY
were in Africa. His Africa, now defined out of a continent. Further defined: his city there. The property market, he was told by his friends who wanted to bring him upto-date with what was happening while he was away ‘doing the disappearing act into the married man', was ‘flat on its arse' and this was the time to do what married men did, quit the bachelor pad and buy a house. So they spent only a month in his apartment that was to her a hotel room vacated by a previous occupant. She didn't know any of the objects in it which must have been personal to the man she had not known while he lived there. She looked through his books, took down one here and there as if she were in a library expecting to find some particular subject, but even when he was absent did not touch letters she saw lying in a drawer she had pulled out to find a ballpoint likely to be at hand in the unit of desk, computer, fax and photocopier. When they bought a house and he decided
the only furniture worth taking along was the complex of his communications outfit, he cleared into a garbage bin the bundle of letters along with other papers, outlived.

The house new to them was in fact an old house, as age is measured in a city founded as a gold-mining camp
120
years ago. His white parents' generation were all for steel and glass or fake Californian-Spanish, didn't want to live with wooden verandah rails and coal-burning fire-places. To their offspring generation the Frank Lloyd Wright and Hispano-Californian look-alikes were symbolic of people looking to take on an identity outside the one they weren't sure of. Even if they didn't think in this way of their impulse to be worldly-fashionable, the assumed shell was also another shelter in their chosen isolation from the places, the manner in which the black people who surrounded, outnumbered them, lived: in hovels and shacks. Young whites on an economic level of choice found the old high-ceilinged, corrugated-iron-roofed houses more interestingly built, spacious for adaptation to ways of a life open to the unexpected. Everyone was doing it; fixing up old places. Blacks too, the professionals, media people and civil servants in what was called the new dispensation—civic term for what used to be called freedom. The houses were short of bathrooms, but those were easily installed, just as the kitchen, in the house he bought, was at once renovated with the equipment she knew—as the model of her mother's in Germany—was essential.

Home. A real his-and-hers. Friends came to help him thin overgrown trees, she had the beer chilled and the snacks ready for this male camaraderie. She planted flowers she had never seen before, didn't bloom where she came from. She hadn't found work yet—that wasn't urgent, anyway, her share in the
creation of the house was a new and fulfilling occupation, as anything in the service of devotion is, centred by the big bed where they made love. There was the suggestion that she might find part-time employment to interest her at the local Goethe Institute. But she didn't want to be speaking German—English was her language now. She was introduced to, plunged into immersion in his circle. She talked little, although back in her own country, her circle where he'd made a place for himself so easily, she was rather animated. Here, she listened; it seemed to be her place. She was happy to feel she was understanding everything said in his language, even if she couldn't use it confidently enough to speak up.

There were many parties. Even without any special occasion, his friends black and white clustered instinctively in this or that apartment, house or bar, like agents of some cross-pollination of lives.

On a terrace the sunken sun sends pale searchlights to touch a valance of clouds here and there, the darkness seems to rise from damp grass as the drinking ignites animation in his friends. She has asked him to stop the car on the way, where there's a flower-seller on a corner. —What for? No-one's birthday, far as I know.— He forgets it's the rule, in her country, to take flowers or chocolates—some gift—to a party. —Wine'd have been a better idea, my sweet.— And it happens that the host or one of the hosts—it's a combined get-together—dumps the bunch of lilies on a table where they are soon pushed aside by glasses and ashtrays.

When they arrived she sat beside him. At these gatherings married people don't sit together, it's not what one does, bringing a cosy domesticity into a good-time atmosphere. But she's still a newcomer, innocent of the protocol and he's too
fond to tell her she should—well, circulate. She's one of the prettiest women there: looks fresh-picked; while the flowers she brought wilt. She's younger than most of the women. She sits, with the contradiction of knees and feet primly aligned and the lovely foothills of breasts showing above the neckline of her gauzy dress. Perhaps the difference between her and the others is she's prepared herself to look her best to honour him, not to attract other men.