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.
Somehow I got through the day, without Ana or anyone else guessing at my state of mind, the profound doubt that had been with me ever since we had left England. And then it was night. A generator came on. The power it provided went up and down. The bulbs all over the house and the outbuildings constantly dimmed and brightened, and the light they gave seemed to answer a pulse beat, now filling a room, now shrinking back to the walls. I waited all the time that first night for the light to steady itself. At about ten the lights dipped very low. Some minutes later they dipped again, and a while after that they went out. The generator whined down and I was aware of the noise it had been making. There was a ringing in my ears, then something like the sound of crickets in the night, then silence and the dark, the two coming together. Afterwards the pale yellow lights of oil lamps could be seen in the servants' quarters at the back of the house.
I felt very far away from everything I had known, a stranger in that white concrete house with all the strange old Portuguese colonial furniture, the unfamiliar old bathroom fittings; and when I lay down to sleep I saw again—for longer than I had seen them that day—the fantastic rock cones, the straight asphalt road, and the Africans walking.
I drew comfort from Ana, her strength and her authority. And just as now, as you may have noticed, Sarojini, I lean on you, so in those days, ever since she had agreed to my being with her in Africa, I leaned on Ana. I believed in a special way in her luck. Some of this had to do with the very fact that she was a woman who had given herself to me. I believed that she was in some essential way guided and protected, and as long as I was with her no harm could come to me. It may be because of something in our culture that, in spite of appearances, men are really looking for women to lean on. And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die. I know that you have inherited our mother's uncle's radical genes and have different ideas. I am not going to argue with you. I just want to tell you why I was able to follow someone I hardly knew to a colonial country in Africa of which I knew little except that it had difficult racial and social ideas. I loved Ana and I believed in her luck. The two ideas went together. And since I know, Sarojini, that you have your own ideas about love as well, I will explain. Ana was important to me because I depended on her for my idea of being a man. You know what I mean and I think we can call it love. So I loved Ana, for the great gift she had brought me, and to an equal degree I believed in her luck. I would have gone anywhere with