But if I thought that was the end of it I had another think coming. Now she wanted to stay the night and when I said maybe it wasn’t such a good idea she burst into tears. Again I asked what the matter was and it transpired that her father had cancer. When she finally told me what kind of cancer it was – prostate – I told her it wasn’t necessarily a matter of life and death, but she carried on about how safe she felt with me and I finally acquiesced, hoping Klara wouldn’t see her car in the driveway and that Kay would leave early the following morning, as she usually did.
“So do you want to sleep now,” I asked somewhat naively.
“No, I actually want you to fuck me.”
“Come on Kay, not everything can be cured with sex, wonderful as it is.”
“Does that mean we’re not going to have sex?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Have you ever had coke before?”
“Once or twice, but I was too broke and disconnected in all directions when it was all the rage in the Eighties.”
“Well, I’m offering you some now. Free.”
So we started snorting away my time, after which she really felt like going out to a disco, but I probably didn’t do that kind of stuff anymore, did I, so off we went to a disco.
It takes me a while to get going on a dance floor and when I do I don’t want to stop and I expect the DJ to have some kind of continuity, some sense of a dramatic arc, though lately the only criterion seems to be to maintain the same beat, which is so fast that it kills all sensuality. There’s lots of exhibitionism, but that’s got very little to do with sex. In fact, it probably serves as a substitute for it. Obviously this beat – a kind of perpetual, masturbatory frenzy without the build-up or climax – also kills off any conversation. In other words, it’s a kind of captivity, a kind of murder, a kind of death. In the meantime, we’d sneak off to some dark corner and snort pinches of the white stuff, get a drink after shouting our fluid desires to a free soul with a half-shorn head of dead black hair, go back onto the dance floor and act like we were being ultra-cool and energetic. The thing about this music is that it’s so loud, so mechanised, so stupid, that after a while it becomes totally silent. It’s a great place to think about other things, but I finally got fully into the swing and even started feeling attracted to Kay again, and she seemed to start feeling the same way.
Back home everything was heading towards a satisfactory consummation of the evening when she told me, in a fit of passion, real or performed, that she didn’t want me to wear a condom. I said there was no way I was going to not wear a condom and she wanted to know why. I said I’d led a fairly licentious lifestyle after my divorce. Had I slept with prostitutes? Yes. (Though I hadn’t slept with them. I had fucked them, or, to be completely accurate, they had fellated my paranoid IMP.) Black? What did the colour matter, I wondered. Nothing, she said. Did I use a condom then? Yes. Well then she was prepared to take a chance. Well, I wasn’t. What about her? She shrugged. That’s very evasive, I said. Was I or wasn’t I going to ditch the condom, she insisted. No. Why did she insist on not using one? She preferred the feeling. Well, it’s a small compromise. Please? No. Okay, she said, adding it was almost dawn and she might as well go home and start studying. What, the politics of condomisation, I wanted to say but didn’t. See you, she said. I wondered out loud how I was going to get through the day and she gave me a small piece of white paper with some powder in it. Sweets for adults.
“Try that. It works for me,” she said, got dressed and left.
I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. This was no good. I had to do something to pass gnawing time so I got up, went downstairs and put on the first of the trio of quartets ambassador Nikolai Galatzin had commissioned, which for me qualified as doing something. Maybe that would balance out the junk we’d been subjected to at the discotheque. I listened while I paced back and forth, stopping every now and again to warm my hands on the heater in that dry Highveld cold.
The B-flat major has a restless first movement, starting off portentously before bursting into a Bach-like cascade, of which we had some forebodings towards the end of the twelfth. But only for a while; then it’s back to the doldrums. Another cascade. All still very Germanic. But the man is moody, coming in from all directions. He’s working towards a shift. Pausing. Wait for it. Shifting. Moving on to the snowy steppes. Here it comes now. Building towards the loveliest, briefest Russian ice melody against driving lower registers, before returning to those Bachian cascades. Back to the court in Moscow. Brooding again. Cascade. Darkness, followed by an upward, courtly ending.
The second movement was the one that had ripped me out of myself and was still as alive and vigorous as ever. It was also completely unrelated to its predecessor. Crisp, soaring, funny, brisk, business-like. I couldn’t understand how people couldn’t perceive its immensity, how Beethoven had conquered indifferent time.
The third movement returns to a courtly situation, nodding to a light, Haydn-like sweetness, but with that dark undercurrent always there, however distantly.
The quartet should be in its final movement now, but the man is only getting into his stride. There is a sentimental start that might well have been heard in a Viennese tavern. It’s verging on oompah sing-along stuff, veers away, but comes back to it.
We return to a slow, almost churchy, but more abstract, seriousness. If it echoes the starting portentousness, then that’s its only relation to any of the rest of the pieces. Then again, they’re all related because they’re all bundled together, like family. Thinking of which, why couldn’t the old man just listen to something like this at night when he lay worrying about his late wife, his dead and alive dogs and, possibly, his son? Was he just worrying? Was he not perhaps mourning and, if so, about what or whom, apart from the obvious? Or was he hurt, or lying awake in fear?
Nothing has prepared us for the Great Fugue. Prince Galatzin probably wanted more Russian music than he might have heard in Razumovsky’s triple commission and the first movement of the present quartet, so Beethoven gave him Russian all right. But it’s the Russian of a century hence, after imperialism, so modern that it’s Stravinsky’s favourite Beethoven piece because it’s so primal, dissonant, fractured, desperate, half hysterical, displaced: a portrait of the Soviet century – in 1825!
What were the listeners thinking of this colossus, eyes widening, ears unbelieving? The near-hysteria ceases for a while, but the letup isn’t much of one, building towards a parody of the court, going beyond it, spitting out defiance, the cascades now cubist, jagged, industrial, the instruments sounding like they want to break, the notes falling down, going right down. Pause. Growl. Pause. Growl. Rebuild. Silence, before returning to a semblance of courtliness.
How could there be anything after this? There is nothing more to say. But that mighty fugue was just too real, too violent, too ugly, if you will, so give them a little cavatina, a merry tune as Butch started barking at the first early-morning joggers passing by, leaving me peeved beyond belief with myself for wasting my one day off from the old man, playing my pseudo-pa role for Kay. Beethoven had wasted so much time trying to father his nephew, Karl, and the old man had spent so little fathering me, except as a loyal kind of servant, hating to leave his home.
Butch did his own little cavatina when I hauled out his chain and he dragged me down to the park, where the sound and sight of Mandla did nothing to improve matters: his cough had become worse and he’d lost quite a lot of weight.