Free Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black by Nadine Gordimer Page A

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 thecreation 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 toofond 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.
    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