a new and rich area in a modern concrete block with an elevator.
He thought, “I must remember not to mention it to Joseph. He may be a tough customer, not easy to talk to, but I must not make his block, the place where he lives, a topic of conversation. It’s just the kind of thing that fatigue might make me do. I will have to be careful.”
The elevator had folding metal doors. They were black with grease and were very noisy opening and closing. Willie was used to rough building in his remote corner of Africa (where people in their heart of hearts had always known that one day they would have to pack up and leave); but he had seen nothing so unfinished-looking as what he saw when he got out at Joseph’s floor. The building here seemed to have been abandoned at its first brutal stage, with nothing to soften the raw concrete, which was pegged along the top of the corridor walls with many cables, thick and thin and covered with old dust. And all the time, to the distress of Willie, there came the happy cries of children playing in the warm afternoon dust among the dirt mounds in the yard, and the threatening shouts of women.
Joseph opened the door himself. He was a big man, as his voice and manner had suggested, and he was dressed in white or near-white, wearing something which might have been a tunic suit or pyjamas. He would have been about fifty.
He said to Willie, “Do you like my university quarters?”
Willie didn’t fall into the trap. He said, “It’s for you to tell me.”
They were in the sitting room. Through an open door at one corner Willie could see the kitchen, with a woman sitting on the terrazzo floor and kneading something in a basin. Two other doors led to inner rooms, bedrooms perhaps.
Willie also saw that there was in the sitting room a couch or narrow bed spread with bedclothes. Joseph lay down carefully on the couch, and Willie saw that Joseph was an invalid. Below the couch, and nearly all hidden by the bedclothes, could be seen the handle of a chamber pot, and just below Joseph’s head was a tin cup, made perhaps from a condensed milk tin, with a welded tin handle—his spittoon.
Joseph, perhaps seeing the distress in Willie’s face, stood up again and showed himself to Willie. He said, “It isn’t as bad as it looks. You see, I can stand up and move. But I can only move for about a hundred yards a day. That’s not a lot. So I have to ration myself, even here, in my university quarters. Of course, with a car and a chair it is possible to have something like a normal life. But you have seen our lift. So when I am at home I am most disadvantaged. Every trip to the toilet takes up a precious part of my ration. When that is used up it’s pure pain. Something about my spinal cord. I’ve had the trouble before, and they did something then. Now they tell me that it can be cured, but then I will have no sense of balance. Every day I measure one against the other. When I lie down I’m all right. They tell me that there are some people with this condition who are in pain when they lie down or sit still. They have to keep on the move. I can’t imagine that one.”
Willie’s ache began to come back. But he thought he should explain himself. Joseph made a gesture with both hands that told Willie he was to stop. And Willie stopped.
Joseph said, “How do you think it compares with Africa? Here.”
Willie thought, and couldn’t say. He said, “I always had sympathy for Africans, but I saw them from the outside. I never really found out about them. Most of the time I saw Africa through the eyes of the colonists. They were the people I lived with. And then suddenly that life ended, Africa was all around us, and we all had to run.”
Joseph said, “When I was in England I did a course in Primitive Government for my degree. Just after the war. The time of Kingsley Martin and the New Statesman, people like Joad and Laski. Of course, they wouldn’t call it that now, Primitive Government. I loved it. The Kabakas, the Mugabes, the Omukamas, the various chiefs and kings. I loved the rituals, the