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I met Lenin at the Mombasa Club for drinks. He had come to Africa during his most recent exile to study the effects of colonization. He wanted first-hand knowledge, he said. He was writing his book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. He valued verisimilitude, he said. I drank to his success and to his repatriation. Carlson and Blunt folded their napkins decisively and, after scraping back their chairs in an audible display of huff, left. I ordered another bottle of claret. Russian politics meant nothing to me. Lenin interviewed the waiter while a nubile, young Nubian in jodhpurs sang "Viens-tu cherie?" I was becoming increasingly annoyed.
 "What's wrong, comrade?" he asked, looking up from his notebook.
"Nothing, Vladimir Ilich. Nothing at all."
But something was wrong: Lenin was in love with Mrs. Willoughby, whose husband managed the railroad. I coveted Mrs. Willoughby. I pictured her constantly in the most provocative poses -- slightly clothed or altogether undressed, on alternate nights. Nights of humid fantasy when I tossed restlessly under the mosquito net. Africa has that effect on a man -- its luxuriance, its many visible engines of engendering. All animal life seems in a high state of rut.
Lenin sat, oblivious, taking notes. The waiter brought a third bottle
of claret. Lenin asked him home. He was collecting illustrations, he said.
He had a stevedore, a street-sweeper, and a minor government official in his rooms.
"A waiter will enhance the collection," Lenin said.
"Don't you ever get drunk, Vlady?" I asked him.
I myself was -- was, in fact, well on the way to resting my head in the middle of the cold-meat platter that had been set before me. I roused myself. I proposed a visit to the Mission of the White Fathers.
"You shall have a missionary for your collection," I promised.
I felt cruel, because of Mrs. Willoughby.
We left. Lenin insisted that I tip the waiter generously -- too generously, I thought.
"Someday there will be no more waiters," he told me as we stepped into the African twilight. "Until then a man must grovel if he must."
On the way to the mission we saw flamingos swimming by the thousands on the lake. When they rose, they looked like an enormous pink cloud.
"They put me in mind of Mrs. Willoughby," Lenin said.
I reproached him, "It is wrong to sleep with Mrs. Willoughby. There is Mr. Willoughby. He manages the railroad, a heavy responsibility."
"I don't believe in private ownership -- of railroads or of women."
At the mission, I introduced Lenin as the routed revolutionary who had written Materialism & Empirio-Criticism, a major philosophical tract. The Bishop hated it and said so. Lenin did not take criticism well. He wiped his muddy shoes on the Bishop's Turkish carpet. But the Bishop
waved ecclesiastical fingers of forgiveness over him.
They argued, they argued about Africa. I waited.
"There is a fierceness here, a vividness, that makes the rest of the
world seem only a pale copy," said the Bishop. "Behind everything I feel His galvanizing presence. He is here, in Africa, more than anyplace else on
earth!"
"Then why do you send your missionaries if He is already here?" demanded Lenin.
The Bishop made his reply:
"To reveal Him! He hides Himself as does a termite under loose bark. Our missionaries tear off the bark, turn the rotted leaves to let His shining out. They go forth to penetrate the wilderness -- to rub up against the unspeakable, to ...!"
"Fuck the underside of things!" Lenin screamed.
The Bishop stood on ceremony. His face went white. It contrasted nicely with his red hat.
"Life lives in the vernacular," said Lenin, shrugging his shoulders.
The Bishop resumed his seat. He put his fingertips together. He made a little steeple out of them.
"God lives in the Latin," he said.
"A dead language!" Lenin sneered.
The Bishop pulled a bell-rope. My patience would soon be rewarded.
Lenin rose to his feet, doffed his cloth cap, and cleared his throat.
"I take comfort in the thought that someday the earth will be burnt clean of paper, of documents -- instruments of ownership: charters, deeds, titles, mortgages, land surveys. Incinerated. Ashes -- last flowers."
He looked to me for admiration, and I gave it to him gladly.
Two policemen appeared, fine-looking blacks in creased trousers.
"I believe in the triumphal march of progress!" Lenin shouted. "I
believe in the future!"
His words echoed down the colonnade as they dragged him away.
Lenin was tried and convicted of heresy. Duly deported, he returned to Europe to finish his book. He was obliged, sadly, to leave his
illustrations behind.
Blunt said later of the incident (which was always referred to in a complete and unabridged way as "That Shocking Incident in Mombasa"):
"Lenin was turning over rocks to see what crawled out. Best leave them unturned. Let what belongs covered, stay covered. At the heart is violence and instability."
Lenin -- the lover -- would for ever after frustrate my petit-bourgeois desire to possess Mrs. Willoughby. I would lie down in his shadow -- in the shadow of his imagined superiority. He was to be the yardstick by which I was measured, and found wanting. It is my unhappy boast that V. I. Lenin overthrew me first, Russia second!
Is it any wonder I hated him?
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