Life Times Stories Part 25

Tape Measure.

No one of any kind or shape or species can begin to imagine what it's like for me being swirled and twisted around all manner of filthy objects in a horrible current. I, who was used to, knew only, the calm processes of digestion as my milieu. How long will this chaos last (the digestion has its ordained programme) and where am I going? Helpless. All I can do is trace back along my length it is considerable also in the measure of its time how I began and lived and what has happened to me.

My beginning is ingestion yes, sounds strange. But there it is. I might have been ingested on a sc.r.a.p of lettuce or in a delicacy of raw minced meat known as, I believe, Beefsteak Tartare. Could have got in on a finger licked by my human host after he'd ignored he'd been caressing his dog or cat. Doesn't matter. Once I'd been ingested I knew what to do where I found myself, I gained consciousness; nature is a miracle in the know how it has provided, ready, in all its millions of varieties of eggs: I hatched from my minute containment that the human eye never could have detected on the lettuce, the raw meat, the finger, and began to grow myself. Segment by segment. Measuredly. That's how my species adapts and maintains itself, advances to feed along one of the most intricately designed pa.s.sageways in the world. An organic one. Of course, that's connected with perhaps an even more intricate system, the whole business of veins and arteries b.l.o.o.d.y; our species has nothing to do with that pulsing about all over in narrow tubes.

My place was warm and smooth-walled, rosy-dark, and down into its convolutions (around thirty coiled feet of it) came, sometimes more regularly than others, always ample, many different kinds of nourishment to feed on, silently, unknown and un.o.bserved. An ideal existence! The many forms of life, in particular that of millions of the species of my host who go hungry in the cruel light and cold my darkness protected me from (with the nourishment comes not only what the host eats but intelligence of what he knows of his kind's being and environment) they would envy one of my kind. No enemy, no predator after you, no rival. Just your own winding length, moving freely, resting sated. The nourishment that arrived so reliably years and years in my case was even already broken down for consumption, ready mashed, you might say, and mixed with sustaining liquids. Sometimes during my long habitation there would be a descent of some potent liquid that roused me pleasurably all my length which, as I've remarked, had become considerable so that I was lively, so to speak, right down to the last, most recently added segments of myself.

Come to think of it, there were a couple of attempts on my life before the present catastrophe. But they didn't succeed. No! I detected at once, infallibly, some substance aggressive towards me concealed in the nourishment coming down. Didn't touch that delivery. Let it slowly urge its way wherever it was going in its usual pulsions, just as when I have had my fill; untouched! No thank you. I could wait until the next delivery came down: clean, I could tell. Whatever my host had in mind, then, I was my whole length aware, ahead of him. Yes! Oh and there was one occurrence that might or might not have had to do with whatever this aggression against my peaceful existence might mean. My home, my length, were suddenly irradiated with some weird seconds-long form of what I'd learnt second-hand from my host must have been light, as if some Thing was briefly enabled to look inside my host. All the wonderful secret storage that was my domain. But did those rays find me? See me? I didn't think so. All was undisturbed, for me, for a long time. I continued to grow myself, perfectly measured segment by segment. Didn't brood upon the brief invasion of my privacy; I have a calm nature, like all my kind. Perhaps I should have thought more about the incident's implication: that thereafter my host knew I was there; the act of ingestion conveys nothing about what's gone down with the sc.r.a.p of lettuce or the meat: he wouldn't have been aware of my residency until then. But suspected something? How, I'd like to know; I was so discreet.

The gouts of that agreeable strong liquid began to reach me more frequently. No objection on my part! The stuff just made me more active for a while, I had grown to take up a lot of s.p.a.ce in my domain, and I have to confess that I would find myself inclined to ripple and knock about a bit. Harmlessly, of course. We don't have voices so I couldn't sing. Then there would follow a really torpid interval of which I'd never remember much when it was over . . .

A contented, shared life; I knew that my host had always taken what he needed from the nourishment that came on down to me. A just and fair coexistence, I still maintain. And why should I have troubled myself with where the residue was bound for, when both of us had been satisfied?

O how I have come to know now! How I have come to know!

For what has just happened to me I can only relive again, again, in all horror, as if it keeps recurring all along me. First there was that period, quite short, when no nourishment or liquid came down at all. My host must have been abstaining.

Then-.

The a.s.sault of a terrible flood, bitter burning, whipping and pursuing all down and around into a pitch-black narrow pa.s.sage filled with stinking filth. I've become part of what is pushing its path there that was where the nourishment was bound for all the years, after the host and I had done with it, a suffocating putrefaction and unbearable effusions.

Jonah was spewed by the whale.

But I the term for it, I believe was shat out.

From that cess I've been ejected into what was only a more s.p.a.cious one, round, hard-surfaced, my segments have never touched against anything like it, in my moist-padded soft home s.p.a.ce, and I am tossed along with more and many, many kinds of rottenness, objects, sections of which I sense from my own completeness must be dismembered from organic wholes that one such as myself, who has never before known the outside, only the insides of existence, cannot name. Battered through this conduit by these forms, all ghastly, lifeless, I think I must somehow die among them I have the knowledge how to grow but not how to die if, as it seems, that is necessary. And now! Now! The whole putrid torrent had somewhere it was bound for it discharges (there is a moment's blinding that must be light) and disperses into a volume of liquid inconceivable in terms of the trickles and even gouts that had fed me. Unfathomable: I am swept up in something heady, frothy, exhilarating; down with something that flows me. And I am clean, clean the whole length of me! Ah to be cleansed of that filth I had never suspected was what the nourishment I shared with my host became when we'd taken our fill of it. Blessed ignorance, all those years I was safe inside . . .

My host. So he knew. This's how he planned to get rid of me. Why? What for? This's how he respected our coexistence, after even sharing with me those gouts of agreeable liquid whose happy effects we must have enjoyed together. It ends up, him driving me out mercilessly, hatefully, with every kind of ordure. Deadly.

But I'm adapting to this vastness! Can, at least, for a while, I believe. It's not what I was used to and there's no nourishment of my habitude but I find that my segments, the entire length of me still obeys; I can progress by my normal undulation. Undulating, I'm setting out in an element that also does, I'm setting out for what this powerful liquid vastness is bound for nature's built into my knowledge that everything has to move somewhere and maybe there, where this force lands, one of my eggs (we all have a store within us, although we are loners and our fertilisation is a secret) will find a housefly carrier and settle on a sc.r.a.p of lettuce or a fine piece of meat in a Beefsteak Tartare. Ingestion. The whole process shall begin over again. Come to life.

Dreaming of the Dead Did you come back last night?

I try to dream you into materialisation but you don't appear. I keep expecting you. Because dream has no place, time. The Empyrean always liked that as my free-floating definition of Somenowhere balloon without tether to earth. There is no past no present no future. All is occupied at once. Everyone there is without boundaries of probability.

I don't know why it was a Chinese restaurant ah, no, the choice is going to come clear later when a particular one of the guests arrives! Guests? Whose invitation is it. Who hosts. Such causation doesn't apply; left behind. Look up and there's Edward, the coin-clear profile of Edward Said that is aware how masculinely beautiful it still exists in photographs, he's turning this way and that to find where the table is that expects him. It's his decision it's this one. He's always known what was meant for him, the placing of himself, by himself, through the path of any obstacles, Christian-Muslim, Palestinian-Cairene, American. He's his own usher, shining a torch of distinctive intellectual light and sensibility to guide him. It's not the place to remember this, here, but if you're the one still living in the flesh wired up by synapses and neurons you recall his wife Mariam told that on his last journey to the hospital he disputed the route taken by the driver.

Edward. He stands a moment, before the embrace of greeting. His familiar way of marking the event of a meeting brought about by the coordination of friends' commitments and lucky happenstance. It's rea.s.suring he's wearing one of the coloured shirts and the flourished design of his tie is confirmed by the ear of a silk handkerchief showing above the breast pocket of the usual elegant jacket. Edward never needed to prove his mental superiority by professorial dowdiness and dandruff. We don't bother with how-are-yous, there's no point in that sort of ba.n.a.lity, here. He says why don't we have a drink while we're waiting he seems to know for whom although I don't (except, for you) any more than I knew he would come to this place hung with fringed paper lanterns. He beckons a waiter who doesn't pretend in customary a.s.sertion of dignity against servility that he hasn't noticed. Edward never had to command, I'd often noted that, there is something in those eyes fathomless black with ancient Middle Eastern ancestry, that has no need of demanding words. With the glance back to me, he orders what we've always drunk to being well-met. He apologises with humour 'I don't know how I managed to be late, it's quite an art' though he isn't late because he never was expected, and there can be no explanation I could understand of what could have kept him.

We plunge right away into our customary eager exchange of interpretations of political events, international power-mongering, national religious and secular conflicts, the obsessional scaffolding of human existence on earth, then ready to turn to personal preoccupations, for which, instinctively selected in each friendship, there is a different level of confidences. Before we get to ours, someone else arrives at our table; even I, who have known that face in its changes over many years and in relation to many scenes and circ.u.mstances, from treason trials in the country where I am still one of the living, to all-night parties in London, don't recognise his entry. Once standing at this table, the face creased in his British laugh of greeting: it's Anthony Sampson. Who? Because instead of the baggy pants unworthy of tweed jacket, he's wearing an African robe. Not just a dashiki shirt he might have picked up on his times in Africa, and donned for comfortable summer informality of whatever this gathering is, but a robe to the ankles by the way, it can't be hot in the Chinese restaurant; there's no climate in dream. When he was editor of a black-staffed newspaper in South Africa and belonged, was an intimate of shebeen ghettos, never mind his pink British skin, this preceded the era when African garb became fashionable as a mark of the wearer's non-racism. Sampson had no interest in being fashionable within any convention. He showed no consciousness, now, of his flowing robe. So neither did I; nor did Edward though I suppose they had met in the Elsewhere. Edward rose while Anthony and I hugged, kissed on either cheek, he greeted Edward with recollected it seemed admiration and chose a chair, having to arrange the robe out of the way of his shoes, like a skirt.

We took up, three of us now, the interrupted talk of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists, homegrown in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and those created by the hubris of the West. A waiter subserviently intruded with distributed menus but we all ignored him as if it were understood we were waiting for someone. I was waiting for you. Even in that Chinese restaurant though it was never your favourite cuisine.

Whom were we waiting for?

I wonder now, awakened in bed by a heavy cat settling on my feet, but I didn't then, no one asked me so I didn't have to give my answer: you. Edward opened a menu big and leather-bound as a book of world maps. Perhaps this meant he and Anthony knew no one was coming. No one else was available among the dead in their circle. Maybe the too newly dead cannot enter dreams. But no; Anthony was recent, and here he was, if strangely got up in the category of the childhood belief that when you die you grow wings, become angels in the Empyrean.

Suddenly she was there, sitting at the head of the table as if she had been with us all along or because there was no time we hadn't remarked when it was she'd joined us. Susan. Susan Sontag. How to have missed the doorway entrance of that presence always larger-than-life (stupid metaphor to have chosen in the circ.u.mstances, but this is a morning-after account) not only in sense of her height and size: a mythical G.o.ddess, Athena-Medea statue with that magnificent head of black hair a.s.serting this doubling authority, at once inspiring, menacing, unveiling a sculptor's bold marble features, gouged by commanding eyes.

It seemed there had been greetings. Exclamations of pleasure, embraces and less intimate but just as sincere pressures of hands left animation, everyone talking at once across one another. Susan's deep beautiful voice interrupted itself in an aside to call a waiter by name well of course, so this is the Chinese restaurant in New York's SoHo she used to take me to! The waiters know her, she's the habituee who judges what's particularly good to order, in fact she countermands with an affectionate gesture of a fine hand the hesitant choices of the others and questions, insists, laughs reprovingly at some of the waiter's suggestions; he surely is aware of what the cooks can't get away with, with her. She does let us decide on what to drink. Susan was never a drinker and this one among her favourite eating places probably doesn't have a cellar of the standard that holds the special French and Italian cultivars for which she makes an exception.

As if, non-smoker, she carries a box of matches, there strikes from her a flame flaring the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The light's turned on Edward, naturally, although this is not a group in which each sees personal ident.i.ty and its supposed unquestioning loyalty cast by birth, faith, country, race, as the decisive and immutable sum of self. Edward is a Palestinian, he's also in his ethics of human being, a Jew, we know that from his writings, his exposure of the orientalism within us, the invention of the Other that's survived the end of the old-style colonialism into globalisation. If Susan's a Jew, she too has ident.i.ty beyond that label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self.

They carry all this to the Somenowhere. In the Chinese restaurant, there between us.

Sampson doesn't interject much in that understated rapidity of half-audible upper-cla.s.s English delivery, yet gives a new twist to what's emerging from the other two eloquently contesting one another from different points of view even on what they agree upon. A journalist who's achieved distinction of complete integrity in venturous success must have begun by being a good listener. And I my opinions and judgements are way down in the confusion of living, I don't have the perspective the dead must have attained. But the distance with which Edward seems to regard Susan's insistent return to pa.s.sionate views of opposing legitimacies between Palestinians and Israelis is puzzling. After all his clarity and commitment on that conflict-trampled ground of the earth he's left behind, searching the unambiguous words and taking the actions for a just resolution (on the premise there is one), putting his brilliant mind to it against every hostility, including the last death: how this lack of response? La.s.situde? Is that the peace of the dead that pa.s.seth all understanding the public relations spin doctors of religions advertise? The hype by one to counter that other, a gratis supply of virgins? La.s.situde. But Edward Said: never an inactive cell in that unique brain.

'What did you leave unfinished?'

The favoured waiter had wheeled to the table a double-deck buffet almost the table's length, displaying a composition of glistening mounds, gardens of bristling greens. Susan with her never-sated search for truth rather than being fobbed off with information, dared to introduce as she turned to the food's array, a subject it perhaps isn't done to raise among the other guests.

She was helping herself with critical concentration, this, no, then that and some more of that filling to her satisfaction, aesthetic and antic.i.p.atory, the large plates the restaurant earned its reputation by providing.

Edward waited for her to reach this result. 'Everything is unfinished. Finality: that's the mistake. It's the claim of dictatorship. Hegemony. In our turn, always we'll be having to pick up the baggage taking from experience what's good, discarding what's conned us into prizing, if it's destructive.'

Dream has no sequence as we know it, this following that. This over, that beginning. You can be making love with someone unrecognised, picking up coins spilled in the street, giving a speech at a board meeting, pursued naked in a shopping mall, without the necessary displacements of sequence. Whether the guests were serving themselves the others, Anthony and Edward and whether they were talking between mouthfuls and those swallows of wine or water which precede what one's going to say at table, I was mistaken in my logic of one still living, that they were continuing their exchange of the responsibilities for 9/11, the Tsunami, famine in Darfur, elections in Iraq, the Ukraine, student riots against youth employment restrictions in Paris, a rape charge in court indicting a member of government in my country: preoccupations of my own living present or recent months, years; naturally all one to them. What was I doing there in Susan's Chinese restaurant, anyway?

It is news they're exchanging of what they're engaged in. Now. Edward's being urged to tell something that at least explains to me his certain distance from Susan's perceptions of the developments (at whatever stage these might have been when she left access to newspapers, television, inside informants) in the Middle East. He's just completed a piano concerto. I can't resist putting in with delight 'For two pianos'. The Said apartment on the Upper West Side in New York had what you'd never expect to walk in on, two grand pianos taking up one of the living rooms. Edward once remarked to me, if affectionately, 'You have the writing but I have the writing and the music.' An amateur pianist of concert performance level, he'd played with an orchestra under the baton of his friend Daniel Barenboim.

Here was his acknowledging smile of having once led me into that exotically furnished living room; maybe a brush of his hand. Touch isn't always felt, in dream. There was a scholar, a politico-philosophical intellect, an enquirer of international morality in the order of the world, a life whose driving motivation was not chosen but placed upon him: Palestinian. An existential destiny, among his worldly others. It's cast in the foundations, the academic chairs, honours endowed in the name. All that. But death's the discarder he didn't mention. Edward Said is a composer. There's also the baggage you do take. Two grand pianos. Among the living, it's Carlos Fuentes who asks if music is not the 'true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation beyond death of our mortal visibility: body of words'. Is only music 'free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our bodily misery'?

Edward. A composer. What he always was, should have been; but there was too much demand upon him from the threatening outer world? It's a symphony Edward Said's working on now.

'What's the theme, what are you giving us?' Susan is never afraid to be insistent, her pa.s.sion for all creation so strong this justifies intrusion.

'I don't have to tell you that the movements of a symphony are in sum just that, a resolution, symphonically.' Edward is paying an aside tribute to her non-performer's love and knowledge of music. 'It's still what should I say-'

'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 antic.i.p.ation. 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 s.e.xes has brought about subjection of the heteros.e.xual male. We women have achieved the last result, surely, as emanc.i.p.ated 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 heteros.e.xuality, 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 appet.i.te, 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 p.r.o.nounces a chord and the right hand answers higher. But the discrimination of taste buds' pleasures does not temper his demand, 'What's happened to p.e.n.i.s 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 doc.u.mentation. '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 embarra.s.sedly 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 cla.s.sic 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, G.o.dknowswhat, 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.

. . . Some we loved, the loveliest and the best . . .

Have drunk their cup a round or two before And one by one crept silently to rest.

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.

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Beethoven was one-sixteenth black . . .

. . . the presenter of a cla.s.sical 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 rest.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sed 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, circ.u.mstances 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.

A descendant in the male line, Frederick Morris bears his surname, of course. Walter Benjamin Morris apparently was always called Ben, perhaps because he was the Benjamin indeed of the brood of brothers who did not, like him, emigrate to Africa. No one seems to know why he did; just an adventurer, or maybe the ambition to be rich which didn't appear to be achievable anywhere other than a beckoning Elsewhere. He might have chosen the Yukon. At home in London he was in line to inherit the Hampstead delicatessen shop, see it full of cold cuts and pickles, he was managing for another one of the fathers in the family line, name lost. He was married for only a year when he left. Must have convinced his young bride that their future lay in his going off to prospect for the newly discovered diamonds in a far place called Kimberley, from where he would promptly return rich. As a kind of farewell surety for their love, he left inside her their son to be born.