Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (9 page)

He gets up to go over and greet someone he thinks has forgotten him—he's been away in Europe a whole year—and when the shoulder-grasping embrace, the huge laughter, is over, comes back, but by chance in the meantime someone has been waved to the seat next to his wife. So he pulls up a chair on the woman's other side. He hasn't deserted—it's a threesome. His newly-imported wife happens to have already met this woman on some other occasion within the circle. The woman is very attractive, not really young anymore but still wild, riling the company with barbed remarks, running hands up through her red-streaked plumage as if in a switch to despair at herself. People are distracted from their own talk by her spectacle. More wine is tilted into glasses as they come up to laugh, interject. The husband is one of her butts. He's challenging a reminiscence of an incident in the friends' circle his neighbour is recounting, flourishing loudly. All around the wife are references back and forth, a personal lingo—every clique has this, out of common experience. It was the same, among her friends in that past life in Germany. Jokes you don't understand even if you know the words; understand only if you're aware what, who's being sent up. She doesn't know, either, the affectionate, patronising words, phrases, that are the means of expression of people who adapt and mix languages
, exclamations, word-combinations in some sort of English that isn't the usage of educated people like themselves. There are so many languages in this country of theirs that his friends don't speak, but find it amusing to bring the flavours of into their own with the odd word or expression; so much more earthy, claiming an identity with their country as it is, now. Anecdotes are being argued—interruptions flying back and forth as voices amplify over re-filled glasses.

. . . so
they threw him with a stone
, right?—the director's office,
nogal
. . .

. . .
In your face
. That's her always . . .
Hai! Hamba kahle . . .

. . .
Awesome!
Something to do with a sports event or, once, a dessert someone made? They use the word often in talk of many different kinds; she's looked it up in a dictionary but there it means ‘inspiring awe, an emotion of mingled reverence, dread and wonder'. And there are forms of address within the circle borrowed from other groups, other situations and experiences they now share. Someone calls out—
Chief
, I want to ask you something—when neither the speaker nor the pal hailed, white or black (for the party is mixed) is tribal—as she knows the title to be, whether in Indonesia, Central America, Africa, anywhere she could think of. Some address one another as
My China
. How is she to know this is some comradely endearment, cockney rhyming slang—‘my mate, my china plate'—somehow appropriated during the days of apartheid's army camps.

Smiling, silent; to be there with him is enough.

The party becomes a contest between him and the woman who sits between them. Each remembers, insists on a different version of what the incident was.

—You're confounding it with that time everyone was shagging in the bushes!—

—Well, you would be reliable about
that
—

—Listen, listen, listen to me!— He slaps his arm round the back of her neck, under the hair she's flung up, laughing emphasis. She puts a hand on his thigh: —
You
never listen—

It's a wrestling match of words that come from the past, with touch that comes from the past. The hand stays on him. Then he snatches it up palm to palm, shaking it to contradict what she's jeering, laughing close to his face and drowning out the calls of others. —O-O-O you were still in
kort broek
, My China! Loverboy—you remember Isabella that time water skiing? Kama Sutra warns against games under water—

—No ways! You're the one to talk—also did some deep-diving in search of marine life,
ek sê
. No-oo,
kahle-kahle
was my line!—

—And what happened to your great fancy from where was it, Finland. That Easter. Well why not—whatever you did's politically correct with me, they say the grave's a fine and private place but no
okes
do there embrace.— Among the well-read of the friends this adaptation of Marvell was uproariously appreciated.

She was alone and laughed—she did not know what at. She sat beside the woman and her husband who were hugging, celebrating each other in the easy way of those who have old connections of intimacy encoded in exchanges of a mother tongue, released by wine and a good time had by all. She laughed when everyone else did. And then sat quiet and nobody noticed her. She understood she didn't know the language.

The only mother tongue she had was his in her mouth, at night.

 

 

 

 

WHOM
to talk to.

Grief is boring after a while, burdensome even to close confidants. After a very short while, for them.

The long while continues. A cord that won't come full circle, doesn't know how to tie a knot in resolution. So whom to talk to. Speak.

It comes down to the impossible, the ridiculous: talk then; about
this
! But to whom. Nobody knew about it. No, of course there must be some friends among those who surrounded us all those years of ours who did know, but since it was not spoken by them, it didn't ever happen.

So whom to talk to. Necessary; to bring him back, piece him together, his life that must continue to exist for his survivor. Talk to.

There's no-one.

Wind shivers along blue plastic covering the pergola of the house next door.

Wind in sun over the sea; come, abandon that crazy component of the quest and travel to contemplate an ocean!

Wind wags the trees' heads. No message there, for the survivor.

Nothing to avoid it. There's only one.

To supply answers to questions that were never asked, never necessary to be asked in an intimacy of flesh and mind that reassured, encompassed and transfigured everything, all pasts, into the living present? Answers. Is that what such
understanding
, coming to terms with loss, will prove to be? For so far understanding has turned out to have no meaning.
Come to lunch, come to the theatre, attend the meeting, take up new interests, there's your work, you're a historian—for Christ's sake, it's important.
Grief is speaking a language that reaches no-one's ears, drawing hieroglyphs for which there is no cracked code. ‘Nor hope nor dread attend the dying animal / Man has created death.' Everyone fears death but no-one admits to the fear of grief; the revulsion at that presence, there in us all.

Thinking about it (about the One) and not acting. The trivial irritabilities that are the only distraction; e.g., no bananas left today in the fruit bowl—regression to the quick fix of a child's craving to eat something it likes best.

SHE
, the survivor, was divorced when she met the man who was to be hers, and so was he, her man who now is dead—months ago, the long while beyond the short while when others still talked of him with her. She had had a couple of brief affairs in the interim between divorce and the marriage, and he had had only one. That was not the difference. It was with
a man. He had told her of it as part of the confidentiality, confessions, that come as the relief of another kind of blessed orgasm after the first few of love-making. A form of deep gratitude that is going to be part of love for the other being, if there is going to be love.

There was love and there is love, but only on one side; the reciprocal recipient is gone. Gone? That implies somewhere. There is no somewhere in this death that man has invented. Because if the poet is right, man invented it, there's no Divine-supplied invention of an after-life in a fully-furnished heaven or torture-equipped hell gymnasium. The beloved hasn't gone anywhere. He is dead. He is nowhere except in the possibility of recall, a calling-up of all the times, phases, places, emotions and actions of what he was, how he lived while he
was
. Almost half that life—you don't count childhood, of course—was theirs. What came before was thought of by them as a sort of prolonged adolescence—full of the mistakes and misconceptions of that state: the two early marriages, his and hers, rather inconceivable, in the knowledge of this one, theirs. The one and only, he would say to her, the days he was dying. The conclusion along with his own coming conclusion.

He had had no children in that first marriage and they had no idea where she, the woman, was—gone to South America, when last her name came up somehow. Unlikely by example of his earthy experience of mayhem with her, that she was still with the man who'd taken her to Peru or wherever. It was agreed between the two who had found the treasure of each other that they had been both naïve and culpable—no excuses—in those marriage episodes; maybe these had even been
an initiation for their own: an experience of everything a mating should not be, so that they would be freed to make a real one, theirs.

So she knew, from her experience doubling with his, what emotions, illusions and disillusions, impulsive responses, compromises (how could any intelligent person have been deceived by such obvious contradictions) could bring about so-called marriages. The woman was a Beauty, and the classic case of the disturbed childhood never left behind, taking revenge on the world through the man who had chosen her; her chance of savage rejection. He had tried to make something of what was the hopelessness of the marriage, refused to recognise this, tried to persuade the woman to go with him to psychiatrists and psychotherapists, marriage counsellors, and when she cursed and jeered at him, went alone to lie on the couch.

In their emotional blunders, what she (is it possible she now has the archaic category Widow, out of the range of Miss, Mrs, Ms) had not experienced as he had, was his affair with one of his own sex. How it came about she could and had fully entered with him; the ‘unnaturalness' of it—not in the sense of some moral judgment on homosexuals, but that she knew, in the exalted gratification he found in her femaleness, that
this
was what was natural to
his
sexuality. It had happened as part of the ugly desperation and humiliation of the first marriage. He would accept any distraction, then. Any invitation to attend gatherings and conferences anywhere. Get away. At an architectural conference he was lined up in the inevitable group photograph; found himself at breakfast next day taking the only free seat, at a table with the photographer. Then talking to him again when encountered in the evening at the hotel pool. The photographer was virtually the only person he had any real exchange
with in three days; he himself made no contribution to discussions, he heard but did not follow his architect and town-planner colleagues' discourses, he was cut off in parched despair of his failure to create some bearable relationship with the woman who was supposed to be his wife; and filled with self-disgust at his failure. The photographer—well, of course—had an unexpected lens on life. An interesting man. He saw wars and floods, nature's disasters, the features of strikers and politicians, not a Fury whose image blocked all else. The two men were the same age in years, but not in their conception of themselves. The photographer offered in place of emasculating catastrophic rejection a simple acceptance of something never imagined, unthinkable in relation to oneself as a man: her man. In that state, she supposed, you could have been grateful for any recognition, any tenderness from a fellow human being: something hardly believed possible could happen.

I'm not bisexual, he had told her long ago, in the confessionals of their beginning. It has been the only time ever. It was some months but to me it's the blank you had a day when you were young and had been drunk all night, your friends told you.

Now that she has seen him dead, felt him cold, she finds there's something
she
can't quite remember—what does it matter—whether he divorced before or after that lapse that was like the blankout of alcohol. Must have told her which, but told nothing else, was asked nothing else by her. No more than he would have put any value on hearing details of her love affairs—and her marriage, unlike his, had no traumatic drama to recount, was amicably ended through mutual agreement that each was leaving youth by differing signposts, shouldn't foolishly have set out on zigzag footsteps.

But now that her man can exist for her survival only through piecing him together in what is available for recall, there is a gap—yes, a blankout. She can make the re-creation for herself whole only if she can recall what is not hers to recall.

Whom to talk to. There's only one. One who can recall.

IF
nobody knows or cares where the Beauty has gone to grow old the one who was the photographer has not disappeared. As if her eye, now, were programmed to react to the small print of the name appearing in accreditation to a series of newsprint photographs, there it is, Hayford Leiden. She had been told this name in the lovers' confessional, long ago. Over the years the modest byline must have appeared here and there in the local and international newspapers she and her man read, but who notices the minute print below the picture?