She didn’t have that anxiety now. Just as she had learned how to dress for a cold climate, and had made herself attractive (the days of cardigan and woollen socks with a sari had been left far behind), so travel and study and the politics of revolution, and her easy half-and-half life with the undemanding photographer, appeared to have given her a complete intellectual system. Nothing surprised or wounded her now. Her world view was able to absorb everything: political murders in Guatemala, Islamic revolution in Iran, caste riots in India, and even the petty theft practised as a matter of shopkeeping habit or principle by the wine-shop man in Berlin when he delivered to the flat, two or three bottles always short or changed, the prices altered in complicated, baffling ways.
She would say, “This is what happens in West Berlin. They are at the end of an air corridor, and everything runs on a subsidy. So their energy goes on this kind of petty theft. It is the great failing of the West. They will find out.”
Sarojini herself, through her photographer, lived on a subsidy from some West German government agency. So she knew what she was talking about; and she was easy.
She would say, when the new box of wine and beer came, “Let’s see what the scoundrel is getting up to this time.”
The Sarojini he had left behind at home twenty or more years before could never have done anything like this. And it was to this serenity of hers, this new elegance of language, that he found himself responding more and more in Berlin. He regarded his sister with wonder. It amazed and thrilled him that she was his sister. After six months with her — they had never been together so long as adults — the world began to change for him. Just as he felt she could enter all his emotions, and even his sexual needs, so he began to enter her way of looking. There was a logic and order in everything she said.
And he saw, what he felt now he had always understood deep down but had never accepted, that there were the two worlds Sarojini spoke about. One world was ordered, settled, its wars fought. In this world without war or real danger people had been simplified. They looked at television and found their community; they ate and drank approved things; and they counted their money. In the other world people were more frantic. They were desperate to enter the simpler, ordered world. But while they stayed outside a hundred loyalties, the residue of old history tied them down; a hundred little wars filled them with hate and dissipated their energies. In the free and busy air of West Berlin everything looked easy. But not far away there was an artificial border, and beyond that border there was constriction, and another kind of person. Weeds and sometimes trees grew on the old ruins of big buildings; everywhere shrapnel and shell had dug into stone and stucco.
The two worlds coexisted. It was foolish to pretend otherwise. He was clear in his own mind now to which world he belonged. It had seemed natural to him twenty and more years ago, at home, to want to hide. Now all that had followed from that wish seemed to him shameful. His half-life in London; and then all his life in Africa, that life when he was permanently in semi-hiding, gauging his success by the fact that in his second-class, semi-Portuguese group he didn’t particularly stand out, and was “passing;” all that life seemed shameful.
One day Sarojini brought a copy of the Herald Tribune to the flat. The paper was folded to show a particular story. She passed it to him and said, “It’s about the place you used to live.”
He said, “Please don’t show me. I’ve told you.”
“You must start looking.”
He took the paper and said to himself, speaking the name of his wife, “Ana, forgive me.” He hardly read the words of the story. He didn’t need to. He lived it all in his mind. The civil war had become truly bloody. No movement of armies; only raiders from across the frontier coming to burn and kill and terrorise and then going back. There was a photograph of white concrete buildings with their roofs burnt off and with smoke marks outlining empty windows: the simple architecture of rural settler Africa already a ruin. He thought of the roads he knew, the blue rock cones, the little town on the coast. They had all pretended that the world had been made safe; but deep down they all knew that the war was coming, and that one day the roads would disappear.
One day, at the beginning of the insurgency, they had played this game at their Sunday lunch. Let us assume, they said, that we have cut off the world. Let us imagine what it would be like living here with nothing coming in. First, of course, the cars would go. Then there would be no medicines. Then there would be no cloth. There would be no light. So, at the lunch, with the boys in uniform and the four-wheel drives in the sandy yard, they had played the game, imagining deprivation. And it had all come to pass.
Willie, full of shame in Berlin at the thought of his behaviour in Africa, thought, “I mustn’t hide any longer. Sarojini is right.”
But, following old habit, he didn’t tell her what he was thinking.
THEY WERE WALKING one afternoon below the trees in one of the great shopping avenues. Willie stopped in front of the Patrick Hellmann shop to look at the Armani clothes in the window. Twenty years before he had known nothing about clothes, had no eye for cloth or cut; now it was different.
Sarojini said, “Who would you say is the most important person in the world?”
Willie said, “Armani is pretty great, but I don’t think you want me to say that. You want me to say something else?”
“Try.”
“Ronald Reagan.”
“I thought you would say that.”
Willie said, “I said it to provoke you.”
“No, no. I think you really believe it. But I don’t mean powerful. I mean important. Does the name Kandapalli Seetaramiah mean anything to you?”
“Is he the most important man?”
“An important man is not necessarily a powerful man. Lenin in 1915 or 1916 wasn’t a powerful man. An important man in my book is someone who is going to bend the course of history. When, in a hundred years, the definitive history of twentieth-century revolution comes to be written, and various ethnocentric prejudices have disappeared, Kandapalli will be up there with Lenin and Mao. Of that I have no doubt. And you haven’t even heard of him. I know.”
“Is he part of the Tamil movement?”
“He’s not a Tamil. But Kandapalli and the Tamil movement are parts of the same regenerative process in our world. If only I could get you to believe in that process you will be a changed man.”
Willie said, “I know nothing of French history apart from the storming of the Bastille. But I still have an idea of Napoleon. I am sure I’ll understand about Kandapalli if you tell me.”
“I wonder. Kandapalli’s towering importance as a revolutionary is that he did away with the Lin-Piao line.”
Willie said, “You are going too fast for me.”
“You are being provocative. You are pretending. You must know about Lin-Piao. The whole world knows about Lin-Piao. He gave us the idea of liquidating the class enemy. It was simple and exciting in the beginning and it seemed the way ahead. In India we also liked it because it came from China and we thought it put us right up there with the Chinese. In fact it destroyed the revolution. The Lin-Piao line turned the revolution into middle-class theatre. Young middle-class exhibitionists in the towns putting on peasant clothes and staining their skin with walnut juice and going out to join the gangs and thinking that revolution meant killing policemen. The police had no trouble in wiping them out. People in that kind of movement always underestimate the police, I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because they think a little too highly of themselves.