Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [55]
“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