When the opening bars were struck, he saw the others pushing back their chairs and standing, and he stood, understanding even as Mr Catti whispered, ‘Our national anthem.’

  There was something in the music and in the way they held their heads that was strangely moving. He hummed beneath his breath. When it was over he would ask for the words.

  But even while he heard the final triumphal chord still sounding, the piano struck up ‘God Save the King’. It was not nearly so stirring. Then swiftly modulating they swept into the ‘Internationale’, to words about an international army. He was carried back to when he was a small boy marching in the streets behind the bands that came to his southern town …

  Mr Catti had nudged him. He looked up, seeing the conductor looking straight at him, smiling. They were all looking at him. Why, was it his eye? Were they playing a joke? And suddenly he recognized the melody and felt that his knees would give way. It was as though he had been pushed into the horrible foreboding country of dreams and they were enticing him into some unwilled and degrading act, from which only his failure to remember the words would save him. It was all unreal, yet it seemed to have happened before. Only now the melody seemed charged with some vast new meaning which that part of him that wanted to sing could not fit with the old familiar words. And beyond the music he kept hearing the soldiers’ voices, yelling as they had when the light struck his eye. He saw the singers still staring, and as though to betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a suddenly amplified radio:

  ‘… Gave proof through the night

  That our flag was still there …’

  It was like the voice of another, over whom he had no control. His eye throbbed. A wave of guilt shook him, followed by a burst of relief. For the first time in your whole life, he thought with dreamlike wonder, the words are not ironic. He stood in confusion as the song ended, staring into the men’s Welsh faces, not knowing whether to curse them or to return their good-natured smiles. Then the conductor was before him, and Mr Catti was saying, ‘You’re not such a bad singer yourself, Mr Parker. Is he now, Mr Morcan?’

  ‘Why, if he’d stay in Wales, I wouldn’t rest until he joined the club,’ Mr Morcan said. ‘What about it, Mr Parker?’

  But Mr Parker could not reply. He held Mr Catti’s flashlight like a club and hoped his black eye would hold back the tears.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. · Letter from Birmingham Jail

  ALLEN GINSBERG · Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

  DAPHNE DU MAURIER · The Breakthrough

  DOROTHY PARKER · The Custard Heart

  Three Japanese Short Stories

  ANAÏS NIN · The Veiled Woman

  GEORGE ORWELL · Notes on Nationalism

  GERTRUDE STEIN · Food

  STANISLAW LEM · The Three Electroknights

  PATRICK KAVANAGH · The Great Hunger

  DANILO KIŠ · The Legend of the Sleepers

  RALPH ELLISON · The Black Ball

  JEAN RHYS · Till September Petronella

  FRANZ KAFKA · Investigations of a Dog

  CLARICE LISPECTOR · Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

  RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI · An Advertisement for Toothpaste

  ALBERT CAMUS · Create Dangerously

  JOHN STEINBECK · The Vigilante

  FERNANDO PESSOA · I Have More Souls Than One

  SHIRLEY JACKSON · The Missing Girl

  Four Russian Short Stories

  ITALO CALVINO · The Distance of the Moon

  AUDRE LORDE · The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

  LEONORA CARRINGTON · The Skeleton’s Holiday

  WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS · The Finger

  SAMUEL BECKETT · The End

  KATHY ACKER · New York City in 1979

  CHINUA ACHEBE · Africa’s Tarnished Name

  SUSAN SONTAG · Notes on ‘Camp’

  JOHN BERGER · The Red Tenda of Bologna

  FRANÇOISE SAGAN · The Gigolo

  CYPRIAN EKWENSI · Glittering City

  JACK KEROUAC · Piers of the Homeless Night

  HANS FALLADA · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

  TRUMAN CAPOTE · The Duke in His Domain

  SAUL BELLOW · Leaving the Yellow House

  KATHERINE ANNE PORTER · The Cracked Looking-Glass

  JAMES BALDWIN · Dark Days

  GEORGES SIMENON · Letter to My Mother

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS · Death the Barber

  BETTY FRIEDAN · The Problem that Has No Name

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA · The Dialogue of Two Snails

  YUKO TSUSHIMA · Of Dogs and Walls

  JAVIER MARÍAS · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots

  CARSON MCCULLERS · The Haunted Boy

  JORGE LUIS BORGES · The Garden of Forking Paths

  ANDY WARHOL · Fame

  PRIMO LEVI · The Survivor

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV · Lance

  WENDELL BERRY · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

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  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  All stories taken from Flying Home and Other Stories, first published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 1996

  This selection first published 2018

  Copyright © Fanny Ellison, 1996

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-241-33923-7

 

 

  Ralph Ellison, The Black Ball

 

 

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