A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  MIKE PHILLIPS

  * * *

  A SHADOW OF MYSELF

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This edition 2001

  First published in Great Britain by Collins Crime 2000

  Copyright © Mike Phillips 2000

  Mike Phillips asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780006511977

  Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007400362

  Version: 2016-01-04

  Dedication

  For Jenny, Kip and Kwesi

  In memory of Ronald Ivor Phillips

  With gratitude to the Arts Foundation for its support

  and to John Akomfrah, and David Upshal for the

  vital sparks,

  and with heartfelt thanks to Tereza Brdeckova,

  Trevor Carter, Grigory Chartishvili, Daria Chrin,

  Sacha Dugdale, William Elliott, Masha Gessen, Henri

  Jansova, Maria Kozlovskaya, Yelena Krishtof, Julia

  Latynina, Milada Novakova, Martina Moravcová,

  Kevin O’Flynn, Sergeant Stiina Rajala, as well as all

  the others who so generously contributed their memories

  and experiences … and last but not least, Radka, for

  lending me her name.

  Epigraph

  Then I told him to let me go away from their church and I do not want to marry again, because I could not bear to be baptised with fire and hot water any longer, but when all of them heard so, they shouted, ‘Since you have entered this church you are to be baptised with fire and hot water before you will get out of the church, willing or not you ought to wait and complete the baptism.’ But when I heard so from them again, I exclaimed with a terrible voice that, ‘I will die in their church.’ So all of them exclaimed again that, ‘You may die if you like, nobody knows you here.’

  AMOS TUTUOLA – My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

  The whole people in the village saw us but as we were strange to them although they recognised us, they gathered together and were following us with wonder. They were also shouting on us as they were following us: ‘Why the moneys you bring from your journey are nearly to kill you? Why? Are these lumps of iron which you carry now the moneys you bring? Wonderful.’ It was like that the whole people of the village were making mockery of us.

  AMOS TUTUOLA – Ajaiyi And His Inherited Poverty

  … it is not that I would forbid the making of statues, shaped in marble or bronze, but that as the human face, so is its copy, futile and perishing, while the form of the mind is eternal, to be expressed, not through the alien medium of art and its material, but severally by each man in the fashion of his own life.

  TACITUS – from the Epilogue of Agricola

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hamburg

  One

  Prague

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  London

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Prague

  Fourteen

  London

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Berlin

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  Hamburg

  September 1998

  ONE

  The two Africans in the forecourt of the Hauptbahnhof were playing an old Motown hit. One of them was standing up, strumming a battered old guitar, the other was seated cross-legged on the ground behind him, beating on a drum balanced between his knees. You could hear them all over the railway station, but it took George a long while before he could make out the tune or the words. He had heard the song a few times on the radio, but the Africans gave the melody a mournful, wailing twist which made it almost unrecognisable. George also spoke English well enough to realise that their intonation was so peculiar and their pronunciation so incorrect that they were mangling the words, running them together into lines which made no sense. Another three Africans sat alongside in a short line, open suitcases spread out in front of them stacked full of curios, carved wooden figures, necklaces and bracelets made from beads and shiny stones. All of them wore loose shirts made from printed material, cheap imitations of African cloth.

  It was about lunchtime, and the station had begun to fill up with office workers making short trips. It wasn’t as crowded as it had been earlier in the morning, or as it would be later during the rush of the evening, but there was a constant flurry of people coming and going. Around the margins prowled a scattering of hucksters, buskers, hawkers and hustlers; a flock of gypsy women, brown faces and heavy eyebrows shrouded in rainbow shawls, a couple of Turks selling lottery tickets, three lurking Uzbekis, swarthy and battered, red eyes darting furtively, a red-haired German youth in a tight black suit and dark glasses playing riffs on an alto sax, a middle-aged drunk with a ravaged face above his outstretched hand.

  Beggars, drunks and pickpockets from all over the city gathered here, mostly because of the international traffic which flowed through its doors. To make matters worse the city’s Hauptbahnhof stood a stone’s throw away from the dramatic bulk of the Kunsthalle Museum, along Glockenweisserwall. In comparison the station was a drab and unattractive building, a big square rectangle of glass and ugly grey brick, having been rebuilt in the forties after Hamburg was blasted into twisted rubble by Gomorrah, the firestorm of British bombs in 1943.

  It had the appearance, George thought, of a hundred other such places in the centre of Europe, like a beach where the ebb and flow of passage washed up and deposited human flotsam.

  Behind him the station exploded with the noise of a new arrival, and he guessed that the train from Copenhagen had just pulled in. A minute later the buzz of voices and a flood of young tourists streamed through the forecourt, the rucksacks on their backs proclaiming their mission. A group of blonde teenage girls filed past George, pushing mountain bikes, their faces red and pink with the sun, spun-sugar hair bleached to a uniform pale yellow. As they reached the Africans, playing now with renewed vigour, they paused and s
tared, giggling in unison. Then one of them reached out and dropped a couple of coins on the blanket in front of the musicians before the little group moved on, wheeling their bikes down the slight incline towards the Adenauerallee.

  Watching them, George felt a slight prickle of irritation. The girls had looked at the Africans with the patronising curiosity they would probably apply to all the other exotic sights they were about to see during their vacation. Part of what he felt was embarrassment for them; the other part was mainly anger. For most of his childhood, conditioned by his mother’s tales, whenever he heard the word Africa or the name of particular African countries, he had experienced a thrill of curiosity and a peculiar spike of nostalgia, as if he had been there and was now living in exile. In his heart he dreamt of sitting in the shade of a giant tree, singing strange songs, surrounded by a pure aura of effortless joy. In time the dream vanished, but somewhere inside he still had the hope that Africans would be tall and heroic presences, men whose eyes looked into far and beautiful distances. He knew now that this was also a fantasy he had manufactured out of his own longing, but, in spite of his adult understanding, he still couldn’t help a swell of resentment towards Africans like the ones in front of the Hauptbahnhof. In the last few years he had seen too many of them, their breaths furred and stinking, their bodies racked with the pain and exhaustion of how far they had come, their skins and hair grey with the dread of long nights locked in the hold of a ship or a container, listening for the footsteps which might mean death. Even so they stayed alive, red eyes glistening with the lust to survive, movements swift and stealthy as rats, scuttling steadily through alien cities, from disaster to oblivion.

  ‘Vlasti chornim. Zamyechatyelni.’

  The voice behind him spoke one of the words which had floated through his mind, sounding like a mocking commentary on his own thoughts. A soft laugh followed, as if to underline the sarcasm. George didn’t bother turning round. Only Valentin would have wanted to get under his skin by using the expression Black Power about these ragged buskers.

  ‘Den Mund halten,’ he muttered out of the side of his own mouth. ‘Or speak German. Around here they don’t like Chechens.’

  This was true. On the other hand, Valentin was not from Chechnya at all. He had been part of the army of Russian conscripts which had been despatched by Yeltsin and Grachev to have the stuffing knocked out of them by the Chechens. That had been over four years ago, but it was still the worst thing that had happened to Valentin and George knew that the reference would stop him in his tracks.

  ‘Es ist kühl,’ Valentin said, switching to German. ‘I don’t like them either.’

  He stood beside George, watching the Africans. He was dressed today in authentic American clothes: Levi’s, Nike sneakers, and a brown Calvin Klein jacket. The Africans were droning through the same number, but he clicked his fingers like an American in the movies, trying to gee up their rhythm.

  ‘I know this number,’ he said. He spoke the title in thickly accented and halting English, but his eyes gleamed with pride at being able to do so: ‘If I was carpenter.’

  ‘That is all the English you can speak,’ George told him.

  ‘Bullchite,’ Valentin shot back at him. ‘One, two, three, four. Hello mister. I speak good.’

  He looked round triumphantly, and George nodded, suddenly tired of the game.

  ‘Where’s the car?’ he asked.

  The car was an English model, a ’96 Jaguar, which Valentin had picked up in Berlin, off the Ku’damm, early that morning.

  ‘We’re going to Altona,’ he said.

  ‘Take care then,’ George told him.

  ‘Ja, ja,’ Valentin grunted mockingly, and shot off along the Mönckebergstrasse. The traffic was moving freely, and soon they were close to the lanes of stalls and the clutter of tourists clustering round the front of the Rathaus. George put his hand out to attract Valentin’s attention and pointed towards the town hall.

  ‘Langsam bitte.’

  Valentin grinned in acknowledgement, but instead of cutting his speed he made a quick left turn towards the river, heading for the Landungsbrücken harbour and the road which ran up to Altona along the Elbe. All the way he kept up his inane chatter in two languages which George hardly noticed. Instead he watched the city going by. The problem was that something had happened that morning on which he couldn’t quite put his finger, but which had darkened his mood as effectively as if a black cloud had passed across the sky. After Berlin this was his favourite city, and in normal times he would have enjoyed the mere sensation of cruising along the waterfront anticipating the changes in the landscape that he knew like the back of his hand. First the red brick warehouses and cobblestones of the Speicherstadt, then the big green sailing ship, then the writings on the wall in the Hafenstrasse. He had walked here with his mother. In the Fischmarkt they had sat at a trestle table in the yard of a restaurant by the water’s edge. At the counter nearby two fat women tossed handfuls of fresh fish in sizzling pans, and a delicious smell of frying filled the air. ‘You speak to them,’ his mother said. In unfamiliar places she was still nervous about the distinctive sound of her Russian accent which she had never lost. ‘They’re staring at me.’ He had laughed, enjoying the irony. ‘They’re staring at me,’ he told her. ‘A black man, with a blonde beauty old enough to be his mother.’ He had tickled her hand and she laughed with him, losing her self-consciousness for a moment.

  As if reading his mind, Valentin spoke her name.

  ‘Katya.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I saw Katya last night. I went to the apartment. She wants to see you.’

  George nodded. Valentin’s relationship with his mother was another irritant. He had turned up a few years ago, out of the blue, a big grin on his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand. His mother, Yelena, was dead, he had told her. This was Katya’s favourite cousin from her youth in Moscow, nearly forty years previously. She had made him promise, he said, to go to her dear Katya in Berlin and cherish her. By the time George arrived, his mother seemed beside herself with delight. This was his cousin Valentin, she had informed him. He had got her address from some old letters, and arriving in Berlin had come straight to see his relatives. To George’s eyes Valentin looked like any other Ivan, short, dirty blond hair, lean, a crude way of shovelling food into his mouth as he sat spreading himself at the small dining table in his mother’s apartment. She had been cooking with special care that day, as George realised from the smells which struck him even before he put his key in the door. Most of the time she bought herself the cheap convenience foods she found in the nearby supermarket, stuffed chicken breasts, perhaps, frozen or easy to prepare. Sometimes, when he came to visit, all she would have to offer him was an omelette or a grilled chop. By contrast, there was an enormous bowl of borshch in front of Valentin, flanked by dark rye bread and a saucer of sour cream, which he was dolloping on to the surface of the soup in great white lumps. Dotted around the table were a heap of meatballs, a stack of blini, and a plateful of aubergines sliced, rolled and stuffed.

  As George came into the room Katya looked up from the table opposite the stranger, her blonde curls, now going white, dishevelled, her cheeks pink and her eyes shining.

  ‘Your cousin,’ she called out, her voice shrill. ‘Valentin Valentinovich’.

  Far from being thrilled at being able to embrace this new relative, as his mother seemed to think he should be, George was angry. All he knew of his mother’s family was that they had ignored her for decades, as if she was dead. She had explained to him many times how dangerous the situation had been for them all at the time when she had to leave Moscow, but he believed in his heart that it might also have been something to do with him, the baby who would grow up to be an African like his father, his colour a sign of the relationship which had marked Katya’s fate. Her family had no choice, she would say, but although George knew everything she told him was true he still wanted to shout at her, to warn her to keep her di
stance. But it was too late. Something about Valentin had charmed his mother silly. Her heart, as she often told George, bled daily for the days of her childhood, and for several years she had longed to return, dissuaded only by her son’s opposition. Her parents had died years ago, so there was now no home to which she could return, and no one in Moscow to look after her, he would reply. Besides, he told her, life was tough there in Russia. Most Russian women like her would give their right arms to be ensconced in a comfortable apartment in the middle of Berlin, with their own friends around them, their own routine, their own welcoming cafés on the doorstep. But only for a visit, she had wheedled, so you can see the town where I grew up. One day soon, he always said. At the back of his mind was the fear that once she was in Russia he wouldn’t be able to persuade her to leave.

  As sometimes happened, he ended the argument by reminding her about his race. ‘It’s bad enough to be a German,’ he told her. ‘I’m not ready yet to go through the same shit in Russia.’

  She accepted this without question because it was a part of his life about which she knew nothing.

  For instance he hadn’t set out to be a boxer, and left to his own devices he would have gone for swimming or running, but he had sealed his own fate at the age of ten in his fourth year at polytechnic school. Filing out of the classroom after a Russian lesson, Gerhard Havemann whispered in his ear, ‘Schwarzer Russky.’ Almost instinctively, George had turned and punched him in the face, a good clean hit. Afterwards he could never explain to anyone why he had done something so undisciplined. ‘Nekulturny,’ Katya said, in a voice of disappointment. She didn’t understand any better than George himself, because the only unusual thing about what had happened was his reaction. The fact was that other children often referred to him as black and sometimes when they knew about his mother they called him ‘the Russian’, but there was something about the way that Gerhard put those two words together which had sparked a moment of instant and blinding rage.