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

collided and the one fell across a passenger’s head. The commands from the cockpit became a gabble. Behind the seats where the woman and I were strapped, trapped, someone was vomiting in heaving waves and gurglings. The plane dropped as under a great blow and then bounced this side and that. It wanted to rid itself of us, our laptops, our headsets, our dutyfree, the caverns weighed with bags of possessions we lug around the world as if our life depends upon them.
    Our life.
    The voice from the cockpit made itself heard through broken-up amplification, the captain was going to attempt an emergency landing at a military airfield whose name I recognised as a sign that we had been blown off course. A woman was screaming, there were sobs and voices calling out for help—from whom, where?—praying—to whom, for what? My heart thudded wildly Lorrie’s fear: now mine. I suddenly realised that while everyone was appealing in the solidarity of human terror to everyone else, the woman beside me and I had not looked to each other, had not spoken. So I turned to her.
    Incredible.
    She was sitting calmly with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching—the seat the armrests anything—as I was. She was letting the fury of the plane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was everyone’s face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me and Iheard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, Good evening.
    â€”It’s all right. The plane will somehow land. You’re safe. Everyone.—
    I didn’t know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad.
    She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body. —It won’t happen. Because I’m aboard. This last year I have to tell you I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can’t die, no flight I take will kill.—
    THE order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way—those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct—by slides let down from the plane’s sides. Banners of flame unfurled about it behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.
    I’m sure she was.

mother tongue

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    BUT everything’s by chance—how else would she ever have met him? Been here.
    THEY fell in love in her country. Met there.
    A taxi he had taken skidded into her small car. It was raining the way Europe weeps in winter, and the taxi driver slammed out of his vehicle and accosted her from the other side of her window, streaming water as if dissolving in anger. His passenger intervened, exonerating her and citing the weather as responsible. The damage to taxi and car was minimal; names, addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged for the purpose of insurance claims. —A hoo-hah about nothing.— He said that to her as if this was something he and she, in their class as taxi patron and private car owner would rate it before the level of indignation of the Pakistani or whatever the taxi man was. The passenger spoke in English, native to him,but saw through the blur of rain the uncertain nod of one who has heard but not quite understood. He didn’t know a colloquial turn of phrase to translate the passing derision into that country’s language.
    How he came to call her had to do with a document he was to sign, as witness; couldn’t have been an opportunity to follow up any attraction to a pretty face, because the rain had made hers appear smeary as the image in a