He took her gloveless hand and tucked it under his arm between the thicknesses of his enormous coat, laughing. How old could he be? Old enough to be her father, her grandfather, in terms of the wars, invasions, military occupations, uprisings, imprisonments he had lived. The restaurant was warm, warm. A conservatory. It had palms under its glass dome and the waiters were crook-backed and wispy-haired. So was the violinist who played from table to table. Her host ordered little packets made of stuffed vegetable leaves, fish soup, a duck dish and a veal dish, and ‘a wine that isn’t exactly champagne, but it will make you happy tomorrow’. He touched his big head; no headache. He tasted from her plate and encouraged her to taste from his. The wan violinist, bent in one curve with his instrument, came over and played passionately to her, and her new friend was delighted to see that she was not embarrassed, as so many women would think it necessary to be, but listened as if receiving what was her due as a rather beautiful young woman — whether it was the cold they had tramped through, or some private mood, she gave the impression of a coursing of new blood through the vessels of her being, a brilliance of colouring and brightness of gaze, a flow of words. — I’ve been rescued, too. A few times. A bullet went into a door instead of me. But nothing like you … More like a beetle that’s flicked out of a swimming pool. I used to lie on my stomach and do that, as a kid. There’d be rose beetles that had fallen into my aunt’s pool, and I’d flip out one, and let the others drown. Why that one?—
— Someone may just be passing by — that’s the only chance. Two boys teased the girls together in the school yard; then he happened to be President, and I was in jail. So I got flicked out. What are you looking round for? Is there a man you don’t want to see you with another man? But look at my grey hair.—
— No … Is it all right to talk about anything, here?—
He laughed. — Oh I know what’s worrying you, there have been times when we couldn’t talk, either … but it’s all right — everybody talks, everybody says what they think, it doesn’t change anything, now …—
— What do you believe?—
— Ah, that’s the kind of talk my friend the President says we used to have at sixteen! But you’re not much more than that yourself — no, no, I’m insulting you when I think I’m paying you a compliment. You are a woman. Nothing less. — He had asked about a husband, children, and she had told him, walking across the bridge.
— You were against the old regime, you were a socialist when you were young.—
He signalled with a full mouth; he enjoyed his food. — Like everyone. Like you, yes?—
— No. No. I didn’t know what it meant. Everybody told me, explained — but I was white, you see.—
— What has that to do with it? There are white, black and yellow socialists, millions of them …—
— White made it impossible to understand. For me, anyway. Everybody talked and argued, and I thought about other things. And whenever I heard them again, they were still talking and arguing, living the same way in the same place. Liberalism, socialism, communism.—
— What other things? I don’t know what life must be like, down there.—
She sat back against her chair, smiling for herself; the movement drew him to lean towards her across the table in the familiar invitation and approach between a woman and a man.
— Someone to love. A man. Somewhere to go.—
— Where there would be — what?—
— What the others didn’t know about.—
— And did you know what that was?—
— No. But I knew it wasn’t to be found in their talk, they would never find it. Oh it sounds such rubbish — but I’ve never tried to tell anyone before. Oh and now I’m getting like them, all the people I behaved so badly to, I’m talking, talking.—
— You weren’t asking me about God, were you? For god’s sake, my dear! Here religion has been allowed again to offer its soporific until you wake up in the next world, as even we can’t seem to get this one right. But I stick to my cigarettes and wine.—
— Not that. Can I ask you something — you were in that uprising, and this is a communist regime; does that mean you’re no longer a communist? If that’s so, how could you be running that meeting this afternoon? For the Ministry of Culture?—
He put up a large, long-fingered hand with a thin seal-ring on the third finger. He made to comb down the moustache but stopped himself fastidiously as if a gesture might trivialise seriousness or honesty. — It’s right that you should ask me. Don’t be afraid. If we are going to be friends, in your position you must know about me, my dear.—
— My position?—
— Your somewhere to go is right at the centre of this century. In my country you’ve come to ask for backing from the regime, and you’ve got to get that backing. That must be your one and only objective. You must be careful not to give any impression that you have fraternising connections with dissatisfied, critical elements in our population.—
— So you’re no longer a communist.—
— I have been a Marxist since I was sixteen and I’ll die one. That’s what I’ve spent years of my life in prison for, whether it was the fascists or capitalists who put me there, or whether it was the comrades who called me a revisionist. I don’t want this to come back. — He made a conductor’s gesture, taking in the palms, the chipped gilding, the weary servility of the old waiters. — I don’t want my grandfather’s estate with its illiterate peasants dying of tuberculosis. People like me are run down, I can’t afford to buy foreign books anymore, I have to burn them — excuse me, I learnt that from the British, during the war — through boring myself stiff in cultural organizations, I can travel to Rome to see my beloved Piranesi wall only by getting myself invited to conferences — (short of breath or caught by laughter) — bourgeois hardships! But life is better for people who were wretchedly poor before. I wanted that. I still want it. That’s freedom, too. You see, it’s turned out that freedom is divisible. My schoolfriend is right. And I still prefer the way it’s divided here to the way it’s divided in the great riches of the West.—
A moment later he filled her glass and put a hand on her wrist. — But don’t go asking your kind of question among people here.—
— Oh I should keep my mouth shut! But — again — you see, being in this kind of country’s not like talking about it. Reading about it. I read quite a lot, in Ghana — the university library … because Whaila — he hadn’t been brought up in a house with books, the way I was, but he’d managed somehow to know so much; so much you need to know. For me, everything happens for the first time, for him everything grew out of what had already happened. I just think about how to manage; the way people do it, wherever you find yourself.—