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

distribution) and then look—gaze—at what’s outside. The window: nothing. All right. The void that, from the ground, is called the sky. Intruded by puffy herds and castles of cloud for a while, scribbled across with a fading vapour trail, a chalked rainbow drawn by another plane out of sight. Other times become an enclosing grey-white element without latitude or longitude or substance like blindness descended upon the eyes. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I’ve half dozed-off, there’s an inbetween form of consciousness that’s not experienced anywhere else but up here. With nothing. The cosy cockpit voice keeps exhorting its charges to sit back and relax. But this state is not relaxation, it’s another form of being I have for a while and have never told anyone about, even Lorrie (specially, perhaps, not Lorrie, with marriage it’s possible you give too much about yourself away).
    Nothing. Up there, out there, I do not have within me love, sex, wife, children, house and executive office. I do not have a waiting foreign city with international principals and decisions. Why has no artist—not even the abstractionists—painted this state attainable only since the invention of passenger aircraft? The gaze. Freedom.
    On this trip I have beside me—I notice only when the bar trolley pauses at my row—a middle-aged woman who’s evidently slim, doesn’t overflow or hog the armrest space between us, something at least in her favour. We exchange ‘Good evening’ and that’s that. She is good-looking (as her face turns towards me in the brief greeting) in an impersonal way, without any projection of her fiftyish remains of beauty, as if the face is something she has assumed as you take along an umbrella. I dread, on my numerous long flights, someone in the next seat who wants to talk and will take up a monologue ifyou don’t respond. This one, apparently, no more wanted conversation than I did. She didn’t set up her TV screen, either. I was aware that after dinner was served she leant forward and took from her cabin bag a book.
    I suppose it was the food, the wine. I returned to the laptop, to the presence within me of the voice and body of my wife, the hands of my children upon me, the boardroom, known expressions of the faces, and the issues I was to meet. Nothing. Replaced by tomorrow.
    As I worked at my computer and time was lost in passage the aircraft began to shudder. The seatbelt sign was illuminated. Turbulence, we expect to climb out of it, the cockpit voice soothingly reassured. But my window went black—it was afternoon, not nightfall—the swollen black of a great forest of storm. Out of nothing: this was the other power, like the opposition of Evil to Good religions tell us about on earth. I was determined to ignore what became the swooping, staggering of the plane, its teeth-chattering of overhead lockers, the collision of trolleys, spilling of glasses. I tried to focus on the screen of the laptop jiggling on my knees, but my eyes refused to function. As I managed to stow the laptop in a seat pocket I saw the woman beside me had put down her book. In a violent lurch of the enraged structure that encased us the book flung itself from her lap to the floor. I watched it slither onto the aisle, where it was joined by someone’s shoes taken off, as we do on long flights, for comfort. Now the cockpit voice commanded everyone to stay seated, forbidden to walk about the cabin, make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened.
For your own safety.
    I’ve weathered (that old cliché) a few spells of ‘turbulence’ in the hundreds of flights I’ve survived. There was never in mymemory anything like this. Lorrie feared for me: a hijack. This was a hijack by the elements. Whatever force had us wouldn’t let go, no escape by gaining height or lowering it. There were crashes sounding from the galley. Two cabin attendants