But two weeks pa.s.sed, and three weeks, and four weeks. And there was no letter from Sarojini. The waiting was a strain, and a way of dealing with it was to give up altogether, to say that nothing was going to come. This was what Willie did. And, as it happened, his court life and jail life at this time had become dramatic.
He was sentenced to ten years" imprisonment. He told himself it could have been worse. The jail to which he was finally taken had a big board above the front gate. On this board was painted, in tall, narrow letters, HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER. He saw it from the prison van as he went in, and he often thought about it. Was it Gandhian, this expression of a difficult kind of forgiveness, or was it Christian? It could have been both, since many of the mahatma"s ideas were also Christian. He often imagined the letters on the other side of the front wall of the jail. What was painted on the inside of the wall was THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT. This was not meant for the prisoners, but for visitors.
One day he had a letter. The stamps were Indian, and on the Indian envelope (no mistaking that) the address of the sender was an address Willie knew well: it was the house where he had grown up, the address of his father"s pathetic ashram. He would have been unwilling to unfold the pages (the jail people had cut the envelope open at the top) if he hadn"t seen that the letter was not from his father, but from Sarojini, unexpectedly transported from Charlottenburg. She was instantly, in Willie"s mind, stripped of the style Berlin had given her. She came back to him as she was twenty-eight years or so before, before Wolf, and travel, and her transformation. And it was as though something of that earlier personality had repossessed her as she wrote her letter.
Dear Willie, I left the Charlottenburg flat long ago, and your letter was pa.s.sed on from one address to another and finally here. Berliners are very good about that sort of thing. I am sorry you have had so long to wait for a reply. It must have been awful for you. And all the time I was so close to you, less than a day away. But please don"t think I will come to see you if you don"t want it. In London when I went to see you that time at the college you didn"t like it too much. I remember that. And all I wanted was to do good. It is my curse. The business went so wrong so quickly for you. What can I say? I will never forgive myself. That is no consolation for you, I know. You were sent to the wrong people, and as it turned out the other lot were not going to be much better. You were going to be snookered either way.I came here because I needed a rest from Berlin, and I thought I should come and be with our father, who is near the end. I have told you this before, but I think now he was a finer man than any of us gave him credit for. Perhaps in the end one way of life is as good as any other, but that probably is what defeated people have to tell themselves. I am not too happy with what I have done, though everything was always done with the best of intentions. It is awful to say, but I believe I have sent many people to their doom in many countries. I know now that in the last few years the intelligence people of various countries followed us wherever we went. People trusted us because of what we had done, and we let n.o.body down. But then in these last few years the people we persuaded to let us make films about them were later picked up one by one. I can give you a list of the countries. It wasn"t always like that, and Wolf had nothing to do with it. He is as much of a dupe as the rest of us People trusted us because of what we had done, and we let n.o.body down. But then in these last few years the people we persuaded to let us make films about them were later picked up one by one. I can give you a list of the countries. It wasn"t always like that, and Wolf had nothing to do with it. He is as much of a dupe as the rest of us.I don"t know how I can live with this idea. I was acting for the best, but when the chips were down people would say I was acting for the worst. Perhaps the best thing now would be for someone to b.u.mp me off in revenge.I have nothing more to say just now. You wouldn"t believe from what I have written that my heart is breaking. If I read this letter over I will sc.r.a.p it and never start writing another. So I will send it as it is. Please let me know whether you want me to come and see you. A little money always comes in handy in jail. Please remember that.
It took him some time to digest all that was in the letter. He had felt at first that the letter, childish in parts, was emotionally false. But after some time, considering that when she wrote the letter she would have been surrounded by memories of childhood despair (which would have been like his own), he felt that everything was true. The news of betrayals did not surprise him; but that might have been because in these past few years he had got used to the fluidity, so to speak, of human personality as it adapted to new circ.u.mstances. What was upsetting was that for so long she (who had misled him) had been so near and in such a penitent mood. When the world had become phantasmagoric for him, during those desolate marches and bivouacs in the forest, fruitless and unending, he might at any moment have reached out a hand to her, so to speak, and been put in touch again with reality.
He waited for some days before writing. He wanted to clarify his thoughts and to find the right words. (There was no need for rush. Every everyday thing had to be stretched out now: a new form of yoga.) And this time her reply came in ten days.
Dear Willie, I was expecting some word of rebuke from you. There was none. You are a saint. Perhaps after all you are our father"s son ...
And all around him was the regimented, protected life of the jail: nine outdoor hours, fifteen hours of confinement.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT: that, for visitors, was on the inside of the front wall, at the end of the lane leading to the double main gate. For the prisoners there were smaller signs in sloping, racy lettering. Truth always wins. Anger is a man"s greatest enemy. To do good is the greatest religion. Work is worship. Nonviolence is the greatest of all religions Truth always wins. Anger is a man"s greatest enemy. To do good is the greatest religion. Work is worship. Nonviolence is the greatest of all religions. The time would come when he would cease to see the signs. But in the beginning, out of some kind of student"s impishness, surviving in him though he was now not far off fifty, Willie thought he should write on a wall: A st.i.tch in time saves nine A st.i.tch in time saves nine. He never attempted it. Punishments were severe. But in his mind"s eye he saw the sign sitting casually among the other pieties, and it amused him for weeks.
WILLIE SHARED A CELL with seven or eight other prisoners. The number varied: some people came and went. The cell was quite big, thirty feet by ten or twelve feet, and for some prisoners it was bigger than anything they had known outside. with seven or eight other prisoners. The number varied: some people came and went. The cell was quite big, thirty feet by ten or twelve feet, and for some prisoners it was bigger than anything they had known outside.
One or two prisoners had grown up in factory slums in a city, with brothers and sisters and parents all in one room. The standard room in those places was a cube, ten feet in all directions, with a loft about seven feet up that provided extra sleeping s.p.a.ce (especially useful for night workers, who could sleep through the morning or afternoon while daytime family life went on below them). The man who told Willie this did so in a straightforward way at first, speaking of things that to him were quite straightforward, but when he saw that he was shocking Willie he began to swagger a little and exaggerate. In the end (Willie asked a lot of questions) the man had to admit, unwillingly, since it spoiled his story, that the one-room family life he was describing was possible only because so many things were done outside the room, in the wide corridor and in the yard. For the rest, the man said, it was like getting on a crowded bus. You didn"t think you could get on, but somehow you did; once you were in, you didn"t think you could last, but just a minute or two later, with the movement of the bus, everybody had shaken down and after a while everyone was quite comfortable. It was a little bit like jail, the man said. You didn"t think you could do it, but then you found it wasn"t so bad after all. A good roof, a ceiling fan in the really hot weather, a good solid concrete floor, regular food, a splash below the standpipe in the yard every morning, and even a little television, if you didn"t mind standing up with the others to watch it.
This man"s pleasure in the jail routine helped Willie. And even when, in the way of jails, the man had moved on, Willie remembered what he had said about "shaking down" and added it to his yoga.
The people in the cell gradually changed until they were all like Willie, men of the movement who had surrendered. Their treatment then was much better, and the jail superintendent, as if explaining this, said one day, when he was doing his weekly round, with all his deferential officials, that they were now regarded as "politicals." The British, the superintendent said, had established this category of prisoner to deal with Gandhi and Nehru and the other nationalists who broke the law but couldn"t be treated like other criminals.
Willie was excited by the prospect of favoured treatment. But his excitement didn"t last long. The people in the political cells (there was another) were free, always within the jail routine, to organise their activities. And very quickly Willie saw that this favoured treatment had taken him back to what he had walked away from. The routine the politicals established was very much like the routine of the first camp in the teak forest, but without guns and military training. At five thirty they were awakened. At six they a.s.sembled outside, and then for two and a half hours they worked on the jail"s vegetable plots and orchard. At nine they came back and had breakfast. After that they read the local regional newspapers (provided by the jail) and discussed the news. But the serious intellectual work of the morning was studying the texts of Mao and Lenin. This study, half pious, half mendacious, with people saying what they felt they had to say about the peasantry and the proletariat and the revolution, was sterile to Willie, always a waste of education and mind, and soon, in spite of the favoured treatment and even respect it secured in the jail, it became unbearable. He felt that what remained of his mind would rot away if for three or four hours a day he had to take part in these discussions. And even after the afternoon games and exercise, volleyball, jogging, which was meant to tire them out so that they could sleep, there were evening political discussions, shallow and lying and repet.i.tive, with nothing new ever said, in the cell after lock-up time at six thirty.
Willie thought, "I will not last. I will not shake down, as that man said people shook down in the crowded bus when the bus began to move. In the bus you can shake down because you are all body. You are not asked to use mind. Here you have to use mind or half-mind in a terrible, corrupting way. Even sleep is poisoned, because you know what you are going to wake up to. One terrible day follows another. It is extraordinary to think that people do this to themselves."
One Monday, about two months later, when the superintendent was doing his round with his retinue of lesser jail officials, Willie broke out of the line of standing prisoners. He said to the superintendent, "Sir, I would like to see you in your office, if that is possible." The lower jail people, warder and head warder and chief head warder, were all for beating Willie back with their long staffs, but Willie"s civility and educated voice and his calling the superintendent sir acted like protection.
The superintendent said to the jailer, "Bring him to my office after the round."
The hierarchy of the jail! It was like the army, it was like a business organisation, it was a little bit like the hierarchy of the movement. The foot-soldiers were the warder and head warder and chief head warder (though "warder" sounded such a good, polite word). The officers were the sub-jailer and the jailer (in spite of the brutal, key-jangling a.s.sociations of the word, more suited, Willie always thought, to the lower men who padded about outside the cells). Above the sub-jailer and jailer was the deputy superintendent of jails and, at the very top, the superintendent of jails. When a prisoner came to the jail, he might know nothing about the hierarchy that now ruled his life, might not be able to read the uniforms, but soon his reaction to uniforms and t.i.tles was instinctive.
The superintendent"s office was panelled in some dark brown wood that had possibly been varnished. At the top of the wall a metal grille with a flat diamond pattern provided an air vent. On one panelled wall was a very large plan of the jail: the compounds, the cells, the a.s.sembly grounds, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the two perimeter walls, with every important exit marked with a thick red X.
On the superintendent"s shoulders were the shining metal initials of the state prison service.
Willie said, "I asked to see you, sir, because I wish to be moved from the cell where I am."
The superintendent said, "But it"s the best cell in the jail. A nice, big s.p.a.ce. A lot of open-air activity. And you have the most educated people there. Discussions and so on."
Willie said, "I can"t stand it. I have had eight years of that sort of thing. I want to be with my own thoughts. Please put me among the ordinary criminals."
"This is most unusual. It"s very rough in the other cells. We are trying to treat you here as the British treated the mahatma and Nehru and the others."
"I know. But please move me."
"It will not be easy for you. You are an educated man."
"Let me try."
"All right. But let me do it in two weeks or so. Let people forget that you came to see me. I don"t want them to believe that you asked to be moved. They might feel insulted, or they might think you were an informer, and they might make trouble for you in various ways. In a jail everybody is at war. You must remember that."
Three weeks later Willie was moved to a cell in the other part of the jail. It was terrible. The cell was a long concrete room seemingly without furniture. All the way down the middle was a clear pa.s.sageway about six feet wide. On either side of this pa.s.sageway were the prisoners" floor s.p.a.ces. Willie"s strip of floor was about three feet wide, and he had a jail rug (in a bold blue pattern) on his strip of floor. That was all. No table, no cupboard: prisoners here kept such possessions as they had at the head of their floor s.p.a.ce. s.p.a.ce was tight; one rug touched the other. The prisoners, sleeping or waking, kept their heads against the wall and their feet pointing towards the pa.s.sageway. Each rug had a different pattern and colour; this helped every man to know his s.p.a.ce (and was also useful to the warders).
Willie thought, "I can"t go and ask the superintendent to move me back to the politicals. And when I think about it, I am not sure that I want to go back. They have that lovely vegetable garden and fruit orchard to work in. But all that discussion of the newspapers in the morning, which is no discussion at all, and all that study of Mao and Lenin in the evening is too big a price. Even in Africa among the settlers there was nothing quite so bad. Perhaps if I were a stronger man I could do it all and not be affected. But I am not strong in that way."
That first evening, as he was walking in the central open area between the jail rugs and the bed s.p.a.ces, a very small man sprang up crying from one of the rugs and ran to Willie"s feet and held them. He was about four feet nine or ten inches, from Bangladesh, an illegal immigrant; whenever after each jail sentence he was taken to the border the Bangladeshis pushed him back, and he had some months of wandering until some new Indian jail claimed him. The sudden crying and leaping up and running to grasp the knees of some new official or visitor was one of his turns, something he did like a trained animal: his whole life was reduced to that.
A letter came from Sarojini.
Dear Willie, Our father is dead. He was cremated yesterday. I did not think to trouble you with this news, because I did not think you wanted to be troubled. Anyway, this is my news for you. I have decided to take over our father"s ashram. My thoughts have been running in that direction for some time, as I think you know. I have no religious wisdom, and I will not be able to offer people anything of what our father offered them. I think what I will do is to turn the ashram into a place of quiet and meditation, something with a Buddhist slant, which I know a little about, from Wolf. How strange it is that I, who had so little use for this kind of place all my life, should now do this. But life does this to people sometimes. Let me come and see you. I will explain things more fully face to face ...
He got a sheet of ruled paper from the warder and, lying on his rug and twisting his body a little over his neighbour"s s.p.a.ce so that he could write on the low window sill of the cell, he wrote: Dear Sarojini, You run from one extreme to the other. The idea of the ashram is an idea of death in life, and it goes against everything you have believed. What we discussed in Berlin remains true. I am grateful to you for making me face myself and what I come from. I consider that a gift of life. I am surrounded here by a kind of distress I don"t know how to deal with, but the ashram is not the way. Nor was that foolish war which I went to fight. That war was not yours or mine and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression, but we were exploiting them all the time. Our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves. That was terrible to me, and it continues even here, where the talkers have favoured treatment and the poor are treated as the poor always are. They are mostly village people and they are undersized and thin. The most important thing about them is their small size. It is hard to a.s.sociate them with the bigger crimes and the crimes of pa.s.sion for which some of them are being punished. Abduction, kidnapping. I suppose if you were a villager you would see them as criminal and dangerous, but if you see them from a distance, as I still see them, although I am close to them night and day, you would be moved by the workings of the human soul, so complete within those frail bodies. Those wild and hungry eyes haunt me. They seem to me to carry a distillation of the country"s unhappiness. I don"t think there is any one single simple action which can help. You can"t take a gun and kill that unhappiness. All you can do is to kill people.
SAROJINI CAME TO see him. She wore a white sari-white the colour of grief-and of course she didn"t have to wait with the others who had come to see prisoners in Willie"s cell. Her manner, her speech, and her dress won her immediate regard, and she did not squat in the hot sun-in a low subdued queue, two persons wide-with the other visitors, under the gaze of the warders with their heavy staffs. She sat in a room in the front of the jail and Willie was called to see her. He liked her sari, and her general style, just as much as he had liked the jeans and chunky pullovers she had worn in Berlin. see him. She wore a white sari-white the colour of grief-and of course she didn"t have to wait with the others who had come to see prisoners in Willie"s cell. Her manner, her speech, and her dress won her immediate regard, and she did not squat in the hot sun-in a low subdued queue, two persons wide-with the other visitors, under the gaze of the warders with their heavy staffs. She sat in a room in the front of the jail and Willie was called to see her. He liked her sari, and her general style, just as much as he had liked the jeans and chunky pullovers she had worn in Berlin.
She was enraged about the country people waiting in line in the sun to see their relations.
He said, "They don"t complain. They are happy to be in the queue. Some people make long journeys and wait all night and then in the morning they are turned away. Because they can"t tip the warders, or because they didn"t know they had to tip the warders. Money makes everything easy in the jail. The warders have to make a living, too, you know."
"You are trying to shock me. But I expected that. It tells me you are in good spirits."
"What we can really try to do is to get me in the hospital. There are about sixteen or twenty beds there. It"s a big, airy room, quite bare, but one isn"t looking for interior decoration in a jail. If we can slip the warders thirty or forty rupees a day, then my time in the jail becomes pure pleasure. I get an iron bed with a mattress, which is better than a rug on the floor, and all my meals are brought from the kitchen straight to me. Breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. Like a hotel."
"What about the sick people?"
"They are where they belong, in the cells. What did you expect?"
She said, quite seriously, "If I did it, would you go?"
"I might. I am getting tired of the cell. I also would like to get something to read. The other people can discuss Lenin and Mao until the cows come home. But the only thing they like you to read in the common cells is a religious book."
"You"ll be a mental wreck by the time you leave."
"I think you are right. I am coming to the end of my mental resources. Once in Africa I had arranged to meet someone in the town on the coast. At a cafe or something. For various reasons I was terribly late. More than an hour. Yet when I went to the cafe the man was there, calmly waiting. He was a Portuguese. I apologised. He said, "There is no need. I have a well-stocked mind." I thought that was very grand. Probably he had heard it from somebody else, but I made it my ideal. After that, whenever I was in a doctor"s waiting room, say, or a hospital outpatients department, I never ran to the dingy magazines to kill time. I examined my well-stocked mind. I"ve been doing a lot of that in my cell. But my mind is letting me down now. I am coming to the end of what it has. I"ve thought of our parents and my childhood. Actually, there"s a lot there. I"ve thought of London. I"ve thought of Africa. I"ve thought of Berlin. Very important. I"ve thought of my years in the movement. If I were a religious man I would say that I was putting my spiritual life in order. Counting the beds I slept in."
Two weeks after Sarojini"s visit he was transferred to the hospital ward. He received books from her and began to read again. He was dazzled by everything he read. Everything seemed miraculous. Every writer seemed a prodigy. Something like this used to happen to him when very long ago, in another life, as it now seemed, he had tried to write stories and was sometimes stuck, his mind clogged. Those days usually occurred when he was deep in a story. He would wonder how anyone ever had the courage to write a sentence. He might even look at an aspirin bottle or a cough syrup bottle and marvel at the confidence of the man who had written the directions and warnings. In some such way now a deep regard came to him for everyone who could put words together, and he was transported by everything he read. The experience was glorious, and he would think that it was probably worth coming to jail just for this, this heightening of intellectual pleasure, this opening up of something in life he knew little of.
Something unusual happened five months or so after he had gone to the hospital ward.
The superintendent was doing his Monday morning round. Willie felt the superintendent"s eyes on him and the first thought that came to him was that his time in the hospital ward was coming to an end. Sure enough, later that day a message came to Willie from the superintendent, relayed down the chain of command.
The next day Willie went to the superintendent"s dark-panelled office with the diamond pattern in iron over the air vent.
The superintendent said, "You are walking wounded, I see."
Willie made a pleading gesture, asking for understanding.
"I will tell you why I called you. I"ve explained to you the privileged position you enjoy in the jail and which is open to you at any moment to take advantage of. We operate under the same rules as in the British time. You gave an undertaking at the time of your surrender that you had done nothing that could be thought of as a heinous crime under Section 302. It was part of the package. All of you gave that undertaking. So we have the strange situation where hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed by your movement, but we have not been able to find a single one of you who did anything. In all your statements it was always someone else who killed or pulled the trigger. Suppose now that there is someone in the jail who wishes to change that statement. Someone who is actually willing to say that X or Y or Z had actually done a particular killing."
Willie said, "Is there such a person?"
The superintendent said, "There may be. In a jail everybody is at war. I told you that."
HE WAS QUITE lucid in the superintendent"s office. But later in his hospital bed his mind clouded and he was swamped by darkness. Cold fluids seemed to flow through his body. Something like real illness seemed to chill him. And yet all the time with the steadier part of his mind he was also thinking, as though he was filing away something for future use, "This is beautifully done. If you have to betray and damage someone, this is the way to do it. When it is least expected, and with no calling card." lucid in the superintendent"s office. But later in his hospital bed his mind clouded and he was swamped by darkness. Cold fluids seemed to flow through his body. Something like real illness seemed to chill him. And yet all the time with the steadier part of his mind he was also thinking, as though he was filing away something for future use, "This is beautifully done. If you have to betray and damage someone, this is the way to do it. When it is least expected, and with no calling card."
A Gandhi-capped prisoner brought his dinner from the jail kitchen. It was what it always was. A plastic bowl of lentil soup, thickened perhaps with flour (you couldn"t tell until you tasted it). And six pieces of flat bread, cooling and sweating fast.
When he woke up in the night, he thought, in the desolation of the hospital ward, "Yesterday I was happy."
He had trained himself to stay away from the vegetable patches and the orchard where the politicals worked. But the next morning when he went to have a look he saw the man whom he feared to see: Einstein. His mind had fastened on him as the betrayer, and this sighting of him for the first time in the jail grounds was like a confirmation. Einstein, intuitively disliked at first sight (and the memory of that first dislike was always with Willie), intuitively distrusted, then a companion in bad times, and now distrusted again. Willie knew that Einstein would have felt about him what he had felt about Einstein. He had grown to believe, especially in those last years in the forest, that there was a neat reciprocity in relationships. If you liked a man you would invariably get on with him; if you didn"t feel easy with him he almost certainly felt the same way about you. In the jail Einstein and many of the others would have gone back to their hate, each man to his own, as to some secret treasure, something which in a time of uncertainty they could gaze on and be revivified. (Willie remembered the rhetorical and ignorant and boastful revolutionary they had met in the forest, a remnant of a long-defeated rebellion, who had been tramping through the villages for thirty years with his simple philosophy of murder, incapable now of any higher thought, and yet easily made timid.) It didn"t take much to see how in the jail Einstein, daily cherishing the private treasure of his hate, and for no other reason, perhaps for no reward, would find immense satisfaction in this betrayal of Willie.
After that sighting of Einstein Willie went back to his hospital bed. He asked the warder for a sheet of writing paper and wrote to Sarojini.
Two weeks later she came to see him. When he told her what had happened she said, "This is serious."
And immediately he could see, in spite of her ashram life and white cotton sari, her fixer"s mind at work. To agitate on behalf of political prisoners all over the world had been part of her political work. In the small room in the jail he could see her mind ranging fast over the possibilities.
She said, "Who published your book in London? The book of stories."
He told her. It seemed like another life now.
"A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?"
"The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London."
"Clearly those riots had an effect on you?" She was like a lawyer.
"I don"t know."
"Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you a.s.sociated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that."
"There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don"t suppose that"s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That"s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book."
"Thirty years on he might be famous."
He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarra.s.sed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.
ROGER, THE LAWYER, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years there he had often looked at it. As the Latin poet says As the Latin poet says, Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way, books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you. Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger"s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.
It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.
"Still walking wounded," the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, "You never told us you were a writer."
Willie said, "It was a long time ago."
"That"s just it," the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. "It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing."
And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.
Six months later, under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.
EIGHT.
The London Beanstalk
THE PLANE THAT took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter. took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter.
Willie felt old stirrings, the beginning of old grief. But then he thought, "I have been there. I have given part of my life and I have nothing to show for it. I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible."
Roger was at the barrier outside, camouflaged among the taxi-drivers with name cards and the large, buzzing family groups waiting for the travellers with heavy baggage. In spite of himself Willie was looking for a man thirty years younger, and Roger was not immediately recognisable. At first sight he was like a man in disguise.
Willie apologised for making him wait.
Roger said, "I have learned to possess my soul in patience. The board told me that you had landed, and then it told me that you were most probably in the baggage hall."
The voice and the tone were familiar. They recreated the vanished man, the man Willie remembered, who was now like someone hidden within the person before him. The effect was disturbing.
Later, when Willie"s small suitcase was in the boot of Roger"s car, and parking charges had been settled at the machine, Roger said, "It"s like being at the theatre. But in real life it"s unnerving. The second act ends, and after the interval the man comes out with a powdered wig and a creased face. You see him as old. Old age can often look like a moral infirmity, and in real life to see someone suddenly old is like seeing a moral infirmity made suddenly clear. And then you understand that the other man is looking at you in the same way. Do you know anyone here? Have you kept in touch?"
"I used to know a girl at the Debenhams perfume counter. Hardly knew her, really. She was the friend of a friend, and all the time she was engaged to somebody else. The whole thing is too embarra.s.sing to think about now. Do you think she would remember, after twenty-eight years?"
Roger said, "She would remember. When she counts her lovers-and she would do that quite often-she would count you in."
"How terrible. What do you think would have happened to her?"
"Fat. Faithless. Betrayed. Complaining about the wicked world. Vain. Talking too much. Commoner than ever. Women are more physical and more shallow than one imagines."
Willie said, "Will I have to be here now forever and ever?"
"It was part of the deal."
"What will happen to me? How will I pa.s.s the time?"
"Don"t think about it now. Just let it happen. Let it begin. Let it flow over you."
"When I went to Africa I remember that on the first day I looked out of the bathroom window and saw everything outside through a rusty screen. I never wanted to stay. I thought that something was going to happen, that I would never unpack. Yet I stayed for eighteen years. And it was like that when I joined the guerrillas. The first night in the teak forest. It was too unreal. I wasn"t going to stay. Something was going to happen and I was going to be liberated. But nothing happened, and I stayed seven years. We were always on the move in the forest. One day in a village I met a man, a revolutionary, who said he had been in the forest for thirty years. He was probably exaggerating, but he had been there a very long time. He was someone from the previous revolution. That revolution had died long before, but he had carried on. It had become a way of life for him, hiding, pretending to be a villager. Like an ascetic in his hermitage in the forest in an old story. Or like Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. The man was mad. His mind had stopped, like a dead clock, and he was still living with the ideas that were in his head when the clock stopped, showing the same time forever. Those ideas were very sharp, and when he talked of them he was like a sane man. There were people like that in the jail. I could always step back from myself, and consider my situation. But there were moments when I felt myself changing. The whole thing was so strange, such a string of unreal episodes, I feel in time I would have gone mad like the others. The brain is so delicate, and man can adapt to so many situations. That"s how it"s been for me. Has it been like that for you too? At least in some ways?"