in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant? Is that what I am saying? And if so, what does it mean? But to return to Willi. He was the emotional centre of our sub-group, and had been, before the split, the centre of the big group-another strong man, similar to Willi, was now leading the other sub-group. Willi was centre because of his absolute certainty that he was right. He was a master of dialectic; could be very subtle and intelligent in diagnosing a social problem, could be, even in the next sentence, stupidly dogmatic. As time went on, he became steadily more heavy-minded. Yet the odd thing was that people continued to revolve around him, people much subtler than he, even when they knew he was talking nonsense. Even when we had reached the stage when we could laugh, in front of him and at him, and at some monstrous bit of logic-chopping, we continued to revolve around and depend on him. It is terrifying that this can be true. For instance, when he first imposed himself and we accepted him, he told us that he had been a member of the underground working against Hitler. There was even some fantastic story about his having killed three S. S. men and secretly buried them and then escaped to the frontier and away to England. We believed it, of course. Why not? But even after Sam Kettner came up from Johannesburg, who had known him for years, and told us that Willi had never been anything more in Germany than a liberal, had never joined any anti-Hitler group, and had only left Germany when his age-group became eligible for the army, it was as if we believed it. Because we thought him capable of it? Well, I'm sure he was. Because, in short, a man is as good as his fantasies? But I don't want to write Willi's history-it was common enough for that time. He was a refugee from sophisticated Europe stuck for the duration of the war in a backwater. It is his character I want to describe-if I can. Well, the most remarkable thing about him was how he would sit down to work out everything that might conceivably happen to him in the next ten years, and then make plans in advance. There is nothing that most people find harder to understand than that a man can continuously scheme to meet all the contingencies that might occur five years ahead. The word used for this is opportunism. But very few people are genuinely opportunists. It takes not only clarity of mind about oneself, which is fairly common; but a stubborn and driving energy, which is rare. For instance, for the five years of the war Willi drank beer (which he hated) every Saturday morning with a C. I. D. man (whom he despised) because he had worked out that this particular man was likely to have become a senior official by the time Willi needed him. And he was right, because when the war ended, it was this man who pulled strings for Willi to get his naturalisation through long before any of the other refugees got theirs. And therefore Willi was free to leave the Colony a couple of years before they were. At it turned out he decided not to live in England, but to return to Berlin; but had he chosen England, then he would have needed British nationality-and so on. Everything he did had this quality of careful calculated planning. Yet it was so blatant that nobody believed it about him. We thought, for example, that he really liked the C. I. D. man as a person, but was ashamed of admitting he liked a 'class enemy.' And when Willi used to say: 'But he will be useful to me,' we would laugh affectionately as at a weakness that made him more human. For, of course, we thought him inhuman. He played the role of commissar, the communist intellectual leader. Yet he was the most middle-class person I have known. I mean by this that in every instinct he was for order, correctness and conservation of what existed. I remember Jimmy laughing at him and saying that if he headed a successful revolution on Wednesday, by
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