Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

a frivolous woman

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?

For old Grete everything was a party. At least he persuaded her to have a health check with one of her boardinghouse salon habitués, an immigrant doctor from Frankfurt. He confirmed that the fever symptoms he asked her to recollect were indeed those of malaria, and the virus might be sleeping in her blood, to recur with another bout. She chose to misunderstand. ‘Ach Kwatsch! I sleep like a baby.’ It was true that in her cubby-hole room she kept to her divisions of time decided long ago in the style of Berlin high life — never in bed until after midnight and never up before noon. From this came one of the impossible old Grete incidents. The room did not have an adjoining private bathroom, she trailed sociably in flounced dressinggown and flowered plastic mobcap to a communal one. There was only a hand-basin with running water in the room. The boardinghouse also did not employ maids; it was usual in those years for ‘bedroom boys’ to serve instead. The grown men, black, came from rural areas and were issued with a garb of coarse white cotton shorts that mimicked the baggy khaki ones of early British settlers. She chatted with her elderly ‘bedroom boy’, and had secretly arranged with him to come quietly into her room and fulfil his cleaning duties while she was asleep, since she rose long after his morning round was supposed to be completed. This was something else to be concealed, this time from the boardinghouse proprietor, both for the employee’s sake and her own. She opened her eyes one morning and saw the bedroom boy watching himself in the mirror while brushing his bared teeth with her toothbrush. When told to amuse him, her son also drew back lips, bared teeth, in incredulous distaste: what did she intend to do about it? She had bought a toothbrush and presented — Here is yours, Josiah.

Her social life, like her time, was constructed in accordance with its diminished scale on the old model she knew. No post-opera parties — not much opera around — concerts and, of course, nightclubs. As dancing partners she had her one or two regulars. They were homosexuals (gay was not yet a mood exclusive to gender), therefore not gigolos, with sexual obligations. They were not paid; just younger immigrants in her set who missed partying as she did and for which, less impecunious than they, she paid. She also picked up as other friends people with whom her son and the family wouldn’t have thought she would have anything in common, just as they wouldn’t. A bustling talkative Afrikaner woman, The Pienaar (these useful women were referred to in the definitive by their surnames), perhaps began as someone paid for small services, fetching clothes from the dry cleaners’, sewing on buttons, and then stayed for coffee and cake. There was an Italian or was it a Portuguese pickup, young, who sold tickets at a cinema — with her married lover she was invited to threesome dinners. When Marlene Dietrich on the final-appearance world tour that famous actors and musicians are reduced to in their decline, came to Africa, the sister-Berliner who had idolised the unique voice and incomparable legs, treated the family to a performance. The family saw another old lady up on stage, whom the grandmother with the same raggedly-red painted mouth as the singer jumped to cheer emotionally as they did live appearances of pop stars. But old Grete’s love of celebrity did not belong back in the past. The adrenalin worked even for current sports heroes in the adopted country, and certain political figures, General Jan Smuts, as it had for Walter Rathenau. Grandmother is a groupie. As there are playboys, she must be accepted for herself, a playgirl.

What was banished was much; quite other. What could not make a good story to entertain, draw on light-hearted liveliness, was not admitted for communication. Foreign to her nature. Although they had lived through devastating events together in their life, back there, she and her son never talked of them to one another, nor, for relief, in private confession to others; evidently she imposed this self-practice to be respected by him. His father, her husband, had died at fifty when the boy was twelve. Apparently she felt no need to return to what the loss must have meant to them, together and differently. The son learnt by chance, later, that his father had had an affair with an intellectual, a woman among their familiars, that ended only when he suddenly became ill and died. His mother had known; but the only reference that could be traced to this was that sometimes, describing the company recalled at splendid social occasions she mentioned mischievously, by name, the usual presence of the woman whom, she added, she and her sister knew as ‘Die Bärin’, the She-bear, unfemininely hairy.

His mother married again when he was eighteen and his brother already living away in Hamburg in the first stage of a peripatetic career with women. The new man was a fashionable surgeon with the added distinction of reputed great skill and a professorship at a university. He must have been one of the guests at the dinners and midnight suppers the lively and wealthy widow continued to host after her husband’s death. Edgar was a catch, almost a celebrity, his knife restored the health of opera singers and he contributed piquant indiscretions about some of his patients — oh Richard Tauber achieved such sweet high notes because he had only one ball.

Arnulf (but to his mother her son was always ‘Arnie’) found a kind of elder-brother intimate friend in his mother’s substitute husband, if not exactly the substitute father; the biological one had disappeared with childhood and in the adolescent six years since there had formed some sort of scaffolding for the structure of guided adulthood processes missing behind it. Perhaps as fellow male but not one in authority Eddie was an ally in the sociable trio with the flighty mother. There was comfort in unconventional family relations that were unconsciously in line with the shifting of certainties being declaimed by beery oratory in Munich. If that voice was ignored by the new happy couple, the younger son became more and more aware that the professors at his university were preparing him for a life that no longer existed. It would be replaced by the fellow students wearing the swastika instead of sports insignia on their caps who beat him up when he turned for some sort of alternative future by joining the student socialist association. The year he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy was that of the burning of books. He completed his cycle, so far, to 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.

The past is a foreign country…

— L. P. HARTLEY, The Go-Between