Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (5 page)

I don't know at what stage the continuing oil crisis exists in the awareness of the Chinese restaurant Empyrean.

Anthony is shrugging and laughing embarrassedly under an accolade. Now—forever—he's proved prophet but there's only the British tribe's understatement, coming from him. ‘Anybody could have known it.'

Susan takes up with her flourish, Edward's imagery. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, the cauldron that received what gushed from earth and seabed? They didn't.'

Edward and Susan enjoy Sampson's modesty, urging him on.

‘Well, if the book should—could—might have been somehow . . .' Dismissing bent tilt of head.

Of course, who knows if hindsight's seeing it reprinted, best-selling. There's no use for royalties anyway. No tariff for the Chinese lunch.

Now it's Susan who presses. ‘So what're you up to.'

Maybe he's counting that Mandela will arrive soon, so he can add an afterword to his famous biography of the great man.

‘Oh it'd be good to see you sometime at the tavern.'

Tavern?

Probably I'm the only one other than Sampson himself who knows that's the South African politically correct term for
what used to be black ghetto shebeens (old term second-hand from the Irish).

Susan turns down her beautiful mouth generously shaped for disbelief and looks to Edward. The wells of his gaze send back from depths, reflection of shared intrigue.

Anthony Sampson has some sort of bar.

Did he add ‘my place'—that attractive British secretive mumble always half-audible. So that would explain the African dress. And yet make it more of a mystery to us (if, the dreamer, I'm not one of those summoned up, can be included in the dream).

‘How long has this place been going?' Susan again.

Where?

Where isn't relevant. There's no site, just as with the Chinese restaurant conjured up by Susan's expectation of her arrival. (Couldn't have been a place of my expectation of you.)

How long?

The African garment isn't merely a comfortable choice for what might have been anticipated as an overheated New York–style restaurant. It is a ritual accoutrement, a professional robe. Anthony Sampson has spent some special kind of attention, since there is no measure by time, in induction as a sangoma.

Sangoma.
What.
What
is that.

I know it's what's commonly understood as a ‘witch doctor', but that's an imperio-colonialist term neither of Anthony's companions would want to use, particularly not Edward, whose classic work
Orientalism
is certainly still running into many editions as evidence of the avatars of the old power phenomenon in guise under new names.

Sampson's ‘place' is a shebeen which was part of his place in
Africa that was never vacated by him when he went back to England, as the Chinese restaurant is part of her place, never vacated in Susan's New York. But the shebeen seems put to a different purpose; or rather carries in its transformation what really had existed there already. Sampson's not one in a crowd and huddle that always made itself heard above the music in ‘The House of Truth'—ah, that was the name in the Sophia-town ‘slum' of the white city, poetic in such claims for its venues. He's not just one of the swallowers of a Big Mama's concoction of beer-brandy-brakefluid, Godknowswhat, listening to, entering the joys, sorrows, moods defiant and despairing, brazenly alive, of men and women who made him a brother there.

He has returned to this, to something of the world, from isolation in the bush of Somenowhere with knowledge to offer instead of, as bar proprietor, free drinks. The knowledge of the traditional healer. He serves the sangoma's diagnoses of and alleviations of the sorrows, defiances and despairs that can't be drowned or danced, sung away together.

‘Oh a shrink!'

Who would have thought Susan, savant of many variations of cultures, could be so amazed. The impact throws back her splendid head in laughter.

At ‘Tony's Place', his extraordinary gifts as a journalist elevated to another sphere of inquiry, he guides with the third eye his bar patrons—wait a minute; his patients—to go after what's behind their presented motives of other people, and what's harmful behind the patient's own. He dismisses: doesn't make love potions. Hate potions to sprinkle, deadly, round a rival's house? That's witch doctor magic, not healing. The patrons, beer in hand, talk to him, talk out the inner self. As he
reluctantly continues to recount, he says that he observes their body language, he gathers what lies unconfessed between the words. No. He doesn't tell them what to do, dictate a solution to confound, destroy the enemy, he directs them to deal with themselves.

‘A psychotherapist! Oh of course, that's it. Dear Anthony!' He's proved psychotherapy was first practised in ancient Africa, like so many Western ‘discoveries' claimed by the rest of the world. Susan puts an arm round his shoulders to recognise him as an original.

And aren't they, all three. How shall we do without them? They're drifting away, they're leaving the table, I hear in the archive of my head broken lines from adolescent reading, an example that fits Edward's definition of Western orientalism, some European's version of the work of an ancient Persian poet. It's not the bit about the jug of wine and thou. ‘. . . Some we loved, the loveliest and the best . . . Have drunk their cup a round or two before / And one by one crept silently to rest.' Alone in the Chinese restaurant, it comes to me not as exotic romanticism but as the departure of the three guests.

I sat at the table, you didn't turn up, too late.

You will not come. Never.

 

 

 

 

WHEN
she died they found in an old cabin trunk elaborate as a pirate's chest a variety of masquerade costumes, two sequinned masks, and folders protecting dinner menus flourished with witty drawings dedicated by the artists.

She had brought the treasure trove from Berlin as a refugee from Nazi extermination of Jewish Germans. She left behind, dispossessed of, the fine house where the dinners were given, the guests famous opera singers, orchestra conductors, painters, art collectors and Weimar Republic politicians—Walter Rathenau, the Liberal last Minister of Foreign Affairs in that government, a regular at table, had been assassinated by Right Wing radicals.

Her family in the country of emigration lifted this cache forty years later, laughing, shaking heads, grimacing incredulity. One of the adult grandsons, for whom she was history, thought but did not speak: she rescued this junk to bring along while others like her were transported in cattle trucks.

Old Grete! Her son would tell how at party gatherings in
the adoptive country to which he had gained entry for himself, his wife and mother, he was as a young man embarrassed when she would disappear to another room briefly and reappear in the doorway, castanets and mantilla, singing and stamping as Carmen. But he must have been habituated
in utero
to her gregarious flair for performance, because the night of his birth is celebrated on a poster announcing the opening of an exhibition of paintings by the Impressionist Lovis Corinth at a fashionable Berlin gallery; confident that with a second pregnancy she could calculate the progression of birth-pains, his mother had said nothing about them and accompanied her husband to an occasion she would never allow herself to miss, a
vernissage
. On arrival back home, she delivered the boy. The story is verified by his birth certificate (among emigration papers) and the reproduction of the poster in an art book.

What her son didn't tell was the other story of her emigration. The Carmen act, which many people found part of their heightened party mood, was significant in that she had at the same time settled in a boardinghouse apparently without remarking comparison with the elegant rooms that now housed some Third Reich official. But in 1939 she insisted, against her son's vociferous objections, on going back to Europe. How could she abandon Heinrich! She must visit her elder son, who had chosen Denmark. Unlike his intelligently foresighted young brother, he was one of those who wanted to be nearby because the Hitler episode surely couldn't last. She concealed from the son who had managed to bring her safely to a country far enough distant, that she was also going back to Berlin. She couldn't abandon either, the wonderful old family retainers—not Jews, fortunately for them—the faithful gardener-handyman inherited from her own father, the peasant woman
who had been wet-nurse and nanny to the children and stayed on in some undefined capacity in what was her only life. And of course, friends in the old cultured set who, like the humble kind of retainers were securely not Jews—and would never be Nazis? She was apparently blithely unaware that she might compromise them by claiming long friendship; her family had been assimilated for generations. They enjoyed pork like any good German and didn't circumcise their sons.

When her letters started to come post-marked Germany her son demanded she leave at once. She lingered with cajoling, reassuring excuses—just another week, what's the difference. At last she took ship in Holland, emigrating a second time from the same Rotterdam on the same line. Three days at sea: the news that war was declared between Britain and Germany. What was to be the Second World War had begun. When the ship reached Senegal on the West Coast of Africa, it was impounded at the port of Dakar. Senegal was a French colony and France, by then, had entered the war as Britain's ally. The truant mother still held a German passport and along with others who did, she was taken under guard from the ship to detention at a camp in the ruin of a leper asylum outside the city. Her son expected her to arrive at a port in their adopted country on a scheduled date. Holland had not declared war, there was no reason that a ship of the Holland Afrika Line would be hampered on its route. He arranged for a friend to meet his mother when she disembarked and see her onto a train bound for home upcountry, where he was awaiting her. Instead there came an incoherent frantic call from the friend. The ship had docked, passengers emerged, but Grete did not. There were relatives and friends ready to greet returning travellers who also waited in bewilderment as these did
not come waving happily down the gangplank. Everyone sought an explanation from somebody, anybody. Out of the clamour at last the Captain appeared and as if still stunned by fear told that he could do nothing when the French authorities boarded his ship and demanded to take German passport holders into custody. He did not know where they were held.

There began for the son what must have been a nightmare both surreal and desperately practical. He has somewhere stowed—what does one do this for?—in the cache of
his
documented life, the letters, the official rejections, the notes of imploring visits to consulates and government departments in strategy to get her released.

If she were still alive.

How could bureaucratic processes—only ones available, badgering the Red Cross, importuning the aghast Swedes who hastily had been made the representatives of people detained in makeshift camps God knows how where by the chaos of war—reach the void, silence; worse, a gust of images tossing up thirst, hunger, parched desert, tropical deluge.

After three weeks there was a letter. The headed address: Camp de Concentration de Sébikholane. Alive: her flowing hand on a dirty piece of paper. Her English. Many exclamation marks following the announcement that because she speaks French she has been able to persuade a guard to mail the letter. She has had fever but it's quite okay now. The other people with her are wonderful. There's a circus troupe and she's great pals with them; the trapeze girl has a bed next to hers in the tent where everyone sleeps, and so her boy-friend, also from the high wire, comes to her, so sweet, I just put up my umbrella that side of my bed. I know, darling son, you are doing everything what's for sure to get me out of here. There are big
rats! It is terribly hot but they say that in a few weeks will be cooler.

A postcript. Everyone is so pleased because I've also got the French guard to bring us each a quarter litre of red wine a day!

The Red Cross, French Consulate, bewildered Swedes somehow succeeded; after six weeks the inhabitants of the camp were released to complete their journey on the Holland Afrika Line. She opened her arms to her son just the way she had always done when he was a boy and she returned from Deauville or a spa in Switzerland. And as herself a child who charms with the assumption that all is forgiven she showed no contrition for the anxiety and dread she had caused by her naughty escapade. Anger and frustration had battled with fear, in her son, and fear had won—how could he reproach her. Looking instead for what might have been part of the reason for his mother taking off against his edict, he thought to install her in a comfortable apartment with a daily maid, but she had her way with her usual style of retort, staying on in the boardinghouse: Where else I can live where I'm the youngest?