Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Â 
The past is a foreign country . . .
    â€” L. P. HARTLEY ,
The Go-Between

gregor

    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    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