He stayed for eighteen years.
He slipped one day on the front steps of the estate house. Ana's white grandfather, who at one time went every year to Lisbon and Paris—that was the story—had built the house in the early days of money, after the 1914 war, and the front steps were semi-circular and of imported white-and-grey marble. The marble was now cracked, mossy in the cracks, and on this rainy morning slippery with the wet and the pollen from the big shade tree.
Willie woke up in the military hospital in the town. He was among wounded black soldiers with shining faces and tired red eyes. When Ana came to see him he said, “I am going to leave you.”
She said, in the voice that had enchanted him, and which he still liked, “You've had a nasty fall. I've told that new girl so often to sweep the steps. That marble has always been slippery. Especially after rain. Foolish, really, for a place like this.”
“I am going to leave you.”
“You slipped, Willie. You were unconscious for some time. People exaggerate the fighting in the bush. You know that. There's not going to be a new war.”
“I'm not thinking of the fighting. The world is full of slippery substances.”
She said, “I'll come back later.”
When she came back, he said, “Do you think that it would be possible for someone to look at all my bruises and cuts and work out what had happened to me? Work out what I have done to myself?”
“You're recovering your spirits.”
“You've had eighteen years of me.”
“You really mean that you are tired of me.”
“I mean I've given you eighteen years. I can't give you any more. I can't live your life any more. I want to live my own.”
“It was your idea, Willie. And if you leave, where will you go?”
“I don't know. But I must stop living your life here.”
When she left he called the mulatto matron and, very slowly, spelling out the English words, he dictated a letter to Sarojini. For years, for just such a situation, he had always memorised Sarojini's address—in Colombia, Jamaica, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Jordan, and half a dozen other countries—and now, even more slowly, for he was uncertain himself about the German words—he dictated an address in West Berlin to the matron. He gave her one of the old English five-pound notes Ana had brought for him, and later that day the matron took the letter and the money to the almost stripped shop of an Indian merchant, one of the few merchants left in the town. There was no proper postal service since the Portuguese had left and the guerrillas had taken over. But this merchant, who had contacts all along the eastern African coast, could get things onto local sailing craft going north, to Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa. There the letters could be stamped and sent on.
The letter, awkwardly addressed, passed from hand to hand in Africa, and then awkwardly stamped, came one day in a small red mail-cart to its destination in Charlottenburg. And six weeks later Willie himself was there. Old snow lay on the pavements, with paths of yellow sand and salt in the middle, and scatterings of dog dirt on the snow. Sarojini lived in a big, dark flat up two flights of stairs. Wolf wasn't there. Willie hadn't met him and wasn't looking forward to meeting him. Sarojini said simply, “He's with his other family.” And Willie was happy to leave it like that, to probe no further.
The flat seemed to have been neglected for years, and it made Willie think, with a sinking heart, of the estate house he had just left. Sarojini said, “It hasn't been decorated since before the war.” The paint was old and smoky, many layers thick, one pale colour upon another, with decorative details on plaster and wood clogged up, and in many places the old paint layers had chipped through to dark old wood. But while Ana's house was full of her family's heavy furniture, Sarojini's big flat was half empty. The few pieces of furniture were basic and second-hand and seemed to have been chosen with no particular care. The plates and cups and knives and spoons were all cheap. Everything had a makeshift air. It was no pleasure at all to Willie to eat the food Sarojini cooked in the small stale-smelling kitchen at the back.
She had given up the style of sari and cardigan and socks. She was in jeans and a heavy sweater and her manner was brisker and even more authoritative than Willie remembered. Willie thought, “All of this was buried in the girl I had left behind at home. None of this would have come out if the German hadn't come and taken her away. If he hadn't come, would she and all her soul have just rotted to nothing?” She was attractive now—something impossible to think of in the ashram days—and gradually from things she said or let drop Willie understood that she had had many lovers since he had last seen her.
Within days of coming to Berlin he had begun to lean on this strength of his sister. After Africa, he liked the idea of the great cold, and she took him out walking, treacherous though the pavements were, and shaky though he still was. Sometimes when they were in restaurants Tamil boys came in selling long-stalked roses. They were unsmiling, boys with a mission, raising funds for the great Tamil war far away, and they hardly looked at Willie or his sister. They were of another generation, but Willie saw himself in them. He thought, “That was how I appeared in London. That is how I appear now. I am not as alone as I thought.” Then he thought, “But I am wrong. I am not like them. I am forty-one, in middle life. They are fifteen or twenty years younger, and the world has changed. They have proclaimed who they are and they are risking everything for it. I have been hiding from myself. I have risked nothing. And now the best part of my life is over.”
Sometimes in the evenings they saw Africans in the blue light of telephone kiosks pretending to talk, but really just occupying space, taking a kind of shelter. Sarojini said, “The East Germans fly them into East Berlin, and then they come here.” Willie thought, “How many of us there now are! How many like me! Can there be room for us all?”
He asked Sarojini, “What happened to my friend Percy Cato? You wrote about him a long time ago.”
Sarojini said, “He was doing well with Che and the others. Then some kind of rage possessed him. He had left Panama as a child and he had a child's idea of the continent. When he went back he began to see the place differently. He became full of hatred for the Spaniards. You could say he reached the Pol Pot position.”
Willie said, “What is the Pol Pot position?”
“He thought the Spaniards had raped and looted the continent in the most savage way, and no good could come out of the place until all the Spaniards or part-Spaniards were killed. Until that happened revolution itself was a waste of time. It is a difficult idea, but actually it's interesting, and liberation movements will have to take it on board some day. Latin America can break your heart. But Percy didn't know how to present his ideas, and he could forget he was working with Spaniards. He could have been more tactful. I don't think he cared to explain himself too much. They eased him out. Behind his back they began calling him the negrito. In the end he went back to Jamaica. The word was that he was working for the revolution there, but then we found out that he was running a night-club for tourists on the north coast.”
Willie said, “He wasn't a drinking man, but his heart was always in that work. Being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough.”
And just as once his father had told Willie about his life, so now, over many days of the Berlin winter, in cafés and restaurants and the half-empty flat, Willie began slowly to tell Sarojini of his life in Africa.
*
THE FIRST DAY at Ana's estate house (Willie said) was as long as you can imagine. Everything in the house—the colours, the wood, the furniture, the smells—was new to me. Everything in the bathroom was new to me—all the slightly antiquated fittings, and the old geyser for heating water. Other people had designed that room, had had those fittings installed, had chosen those white wall tiles—some of them cracked now, the crack-lines and the grouting black with mould or dirt, the walls themselves a little uneven. Other people had become familiar with all those things, had considered them part of the comfort of the house. In that room especially I felt a stranger.