Life Times (75 page)

‘You hear it, you play it? It's in your fingers?' Susan is relentless in pursuit of the process, from one who's been an eloquent man of words people haven't always wanted to hear.

He lifts his shoulders and considers. Doesn't she know that's the way, equivalent of scribbled phrases, jotted half-sentences, essential single words spoken into a recording gadget, which preceded the books she's written, the books he wrote. The symphony he's – hearing? playing? transposing to the art's hieroglyphics? – it's based on Jewish folk songs and Palestinian laments or chants.

Ours is a choir of enthusiasm. When will the work be completed. How far along realised. ‘It's done,' Edward says. Ready. ‘For the orchestra,' and spreads palms and forearms wide from elbows pressed at his sides. I read his mind as the dreamer can: just unfortunate Barenboim can't be ready to conduct the work; isn't here yet.

These are people who are accustomed to being engaged by the directions taken by one another, ideas, thought and action. No small table talk. Anthony Sampson takes the opportunity, simply because he hasn't before been able to acknowledge to Susan she shamed the complacent acceptance of suffering as no one else has done. Since Goya!

Susan gives her splendid congratulatory, deprecatory laugh, and in response quotes what confronts TV onlookers ‘still in Time, the pictures will not go away: that is the nature of the digital world'. Not long dead, she hasn't quite vacated it: this comes from one of her last looks at the world, the book which Anthony is praising,
Regarding the Pain of Others
.

But that's for the memory museum left behind as if it were the phenomenon that, for a while, the hair of the dead continues to grow. Susan has brought with her the sword of words she has always flashed skilfully in defence of the disarmed. She's taken up the defence of men.

‘You!' Edward appreciates what surely will be a new style of feminist foil. We're all laughing anticipation. But Susan Sontag is no Quixote, wearing a barber's basin as the helmet of battledress.

‘What has made them powerless to live fully? Never mind Huntington and his clash of civilisations. The clash of the sexes has brought about subjection of the heterosexual male. We women have achieved the last result, surely, as emancipated beings, we wanted? A reversal of roles of oppressor and oppressed, the demeaning of fellow humans. Affirmative action has created a gender elite which behaves as the male one did, high positions for pals just as the men awarded whether the individual was or was not qualified except by what was between the legs.'

Someone – might have been I – said, ‘Muslim women – still behind the black veil – men suffer from them.' It's taken as rhetorical.

I'm no match for Susan.

‘See them trailing the wives and mothers grandmothers matriarchs aunts sisters along with endless children: that's the power behind the burka.
Their
men – don't forget the possessive – carry the whole female burden through entire male lives, bearing women who know that to come out and fend for yourself means competing economically, politically, psychologically in the reality of the world. The black rag's an iron curtain.'

‘And gay men?' Anthony's a known lover of women but his sense of justice is alert and quizzical as anyone's.

Susan looks him over: maybe she's mistaken his obvious heterosexuality, his confidence that he's needed no defence in his relations with females. She's addressing us all.

‘When the gay bar closes, it's the lesbians who get the jobs – open to their gender
as women
. Gay men aren't even acceptable for that last resort of traditional male
amour propre
, the army, in many countries. Unfit even to be slaughtered.'

Meanwhile Edward's found his appetite, he's considering this dish, then that, in choice of which promises the subtlety that appeals to him as (oh unworthy comparison I'm making) he might consider between the performance of one musician and another at the piano. As the left hand pronounces a chord and the right hand answers higher. But the discrimination of taste buds' pleasures does not temper his demand, ‘What's happened to penis envy?'

Nevertheless, Susan gives him the advice he clearly needs, not duck, the prawns are better, no, no, that chicken concoction is for dull palates.

The waiter is already swaying servilely this way and that with a discreet offer of the dessert menu; some of us have done with the main spread. Maybe we're ready for what I remember comes next in this place which is just as it was, the trolleys of bounty will never empty. Fortune cookies. Sorbet with lychees; mangoes? Perhaps it's the names of tropical fruits that remind us of Anthony's form of dress.

‘What are you up to?' It's Edward. ‘Whose international corporate anatomy are you dissecting?' As if the African robe must be some kind of journalist surgeon's operating garb. Oracular Edward recalls, ‘Who would have foreseen even the most powerful in the world come to fear of running dry – except you, of course, when you wrote your
Seven Sisters
. . . that was . . .' The readers of his book about the oil industry, the writer himself, ignore reference to the memory museum, its temporal documentation. ‘Who foresaw it was those oilfields witches' brew that fuels the world which was going to be more pricey than gold, platinum, uranium, yes! Yes! – in terms of military strategy for power, the violent grab for spheres of supply, never mind political influence. Who saw it was going to be guns for oil, blood for oil.
You did!
'

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 – for ever – 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, bestselling. 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 Sophiatown ‘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-brake fluid, 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.

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.

B
eethoven was one-sixteenth black . . .

. . . the presenter of a classical music programme on the radio announces along with the names of musicians who will be heard playing the String Quartets No. 13, op. 130, and No. 16, op. 135.

Does the presenter make the claim as restitution for Beethoven? Presenter's voice and cadence give him away as irremediably white. Is one-sixteenth an unspoken wish for himself?

Once there were blacks wanting to be white.

Now there are whites wanting to be black.

It's the same secret.

 

Frederick Morris (of course that's not his name, you'll soon catch on I'm writing about myself, a man with the same initials) is an academic who teaches biology and was an activist back in the apartheid time, among other illegal shenanigans an amateur cartoonist of some talent who made posters depicting the regime's leaders as the ghoulish murderers they were and, more boldly, joined groups to paste these on city walls. At the university, new millennium times, he's not one of the academics the student body (a high enrolment robustly black, he approves) singles out as among those particularly reprehensible, in protests against academe as the old white male crowd who inhibit transformation of the university from a white intellectuals' country club to a non-racial institution with a black majority (politically correct-speak). Neither do the students value much the support of whites, like himself, dissident from what's seen as the other, the gowned body. You can't be on somebody else's side. That's the reasoning? History's never over; any more than biology, functioning within every being.

One-sixteenth. The trickle seemed enough to be asserted out of context? What does the distant thread of blood matter in the genesis of a genius. Then there's Pushkin, if you like; his claim is substantial, look at his genuine frizz on the head – not some fashionable faked Afro haloing a white man or woman, but coming, it's said, from Ethiopia.

Perhaps because he's getting older – Morris doesn't know he's still young enough to think fifty-two is old – he reflects occasionally on what was lived in his lifeline before him. He's divorced, a second time; that's a past, as well, if rather immediate. His father was also not a particular success as a family man. Family: the great-grandfather, dead long before the boy was born: there's a handsome man, someone from an old oval-framed photograph, the strong looks not passed on. There are stories about this forefather, probably related at family gatherings but hardly listened to by a boy impatient to leave the grown-ups' table. Anecdotes not in the history book obliged to be learned by rote. What might call upon amused recognition to be adventures, circumstances taken head-on, good times enjoyed out of what others would submit to as bad times, characters – ‘they don't make them like that any more' – as enemies up to no good, or joined forces with as real mates. No history-book events: tales of going about your own affairs within history's fall-out. He was some sort of frontiersman, not in the colonial military but in the fortune-hunters' motley.