A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘It would be okay in a multi-cultural slot,’ she said, ‘but we’re dealing with a general audience here. All these guys are talking in generalisations. It’s too abstract. They’re like experts rambling through history trying to come up with an overview. Half the time they’re talking about events at which they weren’t present. It’s all very well going on about riots or what some politician said, but if they weren’t there, what’s the point?’

  They were all intelligent men, he explained, who imagined they were communicating a thoughtful view of the history through which they had lived. If they made it sound impersonal it was because their own equilibrium demanded some distance between themselves and the most unpleasant events.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Hattie interrupted, ‘but that’s not the point. The central issue is how the audience reacts to these people. They’re saying complex and difficult things. That’s no problem. Let’s take it for granted that their analyses are correct and they’re telling the truth. It still doesn’t work unless you give the audience characters with which they can sympathise and identify.’

  Joseph brought out his best arguments, but there was no shifting her.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ she said eventually. ‘Do another edit. Keep the same structure, but take out every story and every statement which doesn’t begin with the word I.’

  Joseph went back to the drawing board, but his second effort had no more success.

  ‘Maybe you’re too close to it,’ Hattie said before she left.

  The next day Joseph got a message from her asking for copies of the transcripts of his interviews, and the following day she gave them back to him, several pages marked with yellow highlights.

  ‘Try editing these in,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the length. We’ll bring it down later.’

  The final product was a long way from the film Joseph had set out to make, but Hattie’s satisfaction was infectious. His success in this project, she hinted, would make the going a lot easier when he put in for his next commission. Joseph had felt more or less vindicated, and Mr Mensah’s comment after the preview in Soho was the first indication that his pleasure might have been misplaced.

  That afternoon he sat watching the film, spooling back to see various sections and trying to separate himself from it for long enough to gauge what an objective observer might think. He reached his conclusion in a time so short that he understood he had already known it. The context of political action and social change that the old men had struggled to outline had disappeared, and with it the story about the courage and perseverance of his father’s generation, which he had hoped to tell. Instead, he had produced a gallery of entertaining characters, their features drawn as clearly as if he had asked them to act out the parts. There was a funny man, a romantic, a rogue, and someone else whose ludicrous argumentativeness had become a running theme. His father, too, had become a character in the show, aloof and a little enigmatic. Mr Mensah was right, Joseph thought bitterly, the whites would love it. There was nothing here to disturb the sleep of the great British public, no reflection of the anger and grief he had experienced while listening to the old men, and remembering Mr Mensah’s smile he guessed they believed he had made a deliberate choice to misrepresent and trivialise them.

  In that mood, he telephoned Kofi.

  ‘I understand what Mr Mensah was trying to say.’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you.’

  Joseph couldn’t read his father’s tone, but he knew that, somehow, he needed to explain. Without giving Kofi a chance to interrupt he began quickly to describe the long process of editing, and the way that the company exerted its control over the product.

  ‘I would have done it differently if I could,’ he ended.

  ‘I know that,’ Kofi said. ‘We all knew that. The man who pays the piper gets to call the tune. That’s what they say, and why would she want our version of a story she thinks she owns?’ Joseph heard him chuckling down the line. ‘None of us would have done any better. History is written by the winners. They will never allow you to say what they don’t want to hear.’

  Joseph guessed that these words were meant to be reassuring, but their cynicism didn’t make him feel any better, partly because his unease was compounded by the sense that if he had fought harder he might have been able to preserve some of his original vision. To make matters worse, during some of his arguments with Hattie he had experienced the same feeling of powerlessness he used to feel in his quarrels with his mother. Some of it was due to the way she had always forced him to question himself and his own motives. Coming home with some story of a fight in the playground, or an insult in the classroom, she would look at him sternly – ‘Are you sure you did nothing to provoke them?’

  As he grew older he stopped talking to her about the anger and outrage he felt at these times. If his father had been there, he thought, he would have understood. As it was his mother’s questions made him feel isolated and alone. Years later, as a resentful fifteen-year-old, he accused her of undermining his confidence and filling his mind with self-doubt. She’d heard him out with a puzzled frown. ‘I didn’t want you to be full of hate,’ she said. ‘Like your father.’

  It was only after she died that, free of guilt, he allowed himself to know his father better. At that point he realised, with an odd pang of sorrow, how little she had understood about either of them. On the surface there was practically no resemblance between Hattie and his mum, but there had been times, while they wrangled about the editing, that he had seen the same look crossing her face. It was a look he had frequently seen on the faces of white people he knew well, an expression which hinted that whatever the problem was, he was somehow denying the fact that it was his own fault.

  Joseph would have been too embarrassed to tell Kofi about any of this, so he accepted his father’s implied rebuke in silence. Luckily, he had a couple of months’ grace before the series was broadcast to reassemble his confidence, but apart from a couple of short newspaper features he hadn’t been required to talk in any great detail until the World Service interview. By the time he was invited to the festival in Prague, he had almost forgotten the misery and embarrassment he had felt on the afternoon of the first preview.

  Oddly enough, sitting in his hotel room in Holesovice he had been thinking about Mr Mensah. If what George said was all true, did his father’s friends know? Why had Kofi never told him?

  He leant over to pick up the telephone, but as he did so the volume of music outside increased another notch. He got up and pushed the window shut, then, glancing at the clock, realised that he had been sitting on the bed for more than half an hour. He moved quickly to the door, then slowed down, thinking about how to deal with George. He dialled London again. Still no answer. Perhaps, he thought, putting the phone down at last, the man might have got fed up waiting and left.

  As he got out of the lift he was still torn between curiosity and a kind of reluctance to encounter George again. Instinctively he looked at the armchair, but now it had been turned round to face the room, and it was occupied by a bulky old man with a bald head and a bushy beard. Joseph felt a surge of relief, then a movement caught his eye and he saw George sitting at the bar waving at him, his hand raised above his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Joseph said. ‘I had some things to do.’

  George shrugged.

  ‘I understand.’

  He rapped lightly on the bar.

  ‘Prosim. Slivovice.’

  ‘You’re a Czech?’ Joseph asked him.

  George frowned, his mouth twisting a little, as if it was an unpleasant notion.

  ‘Me? No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I am German.’

  ‘I thought your mother was Russian.’

  ‘She is. But I was born in Berlin. East Berlin.’

  ‘How come?’

  The barmaid, a wispy blonde with a pale translucent skin, put two glasses in front of them, and he put a note on the counter. George slid off the stool and stood up, put some money
on the counter and grunted something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I say thank you to her. Dekuju.’

  To Joseph it sounded like dekweege, and he repeated it to himself, testing the sound. George grinned at him and picked up his glass.

  ‘Drink,’ he announced. ‘We go.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Joseph said. ‘Go where? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Home.’ George’s voice had lost all traces of uncertainty as if everything had been discussed and arranged. ‘My wife Radka, and my son Serge. They are in Prague. Yes. You eat with us.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Joseph told him.

  He was confused again, because, in the last few minutes George had, somehow, subtly begun to take charge, in much the way he imagined an older brother would, as if Joseph had accepted the truth of his story, and as if, all of a sudden, they had an established and long-standing relationship.

  ‘There is no problem,’ George said. ‘You come. You are my brother. My son you are his uncle. Yes? There is no problem.’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ Joseph declared firmly. ‘Even if what you say is true this is still weird. I phoned my father in London, but he wasn’t in, and until I speak with him all bets are off. So cut the brotherhood shit till I know what’s going on here.’

  George frowned, listening intently, his lips moving fractionally, as if mouthing some of the words.

  ‘I understand,’ he said slowly. ‘This is not easy for you. No one has told you. But for me, too. Because you are English you think this is some mad man from the East.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ Joseph cut in quickly. ‘That’s not how I feel. Not the way you think.’

  He was about to say that he was troubled and disturbed, that he couldn’t begin to describe how he felt, but it struck him at the same time that to do so would be to enter George’s story, to tell him that it was real. He stopped, uncertain how to proceed. George’s eyes, he noted, a tremor starting somewhere inside his guts, were the same colour as his own. A few seconds passed while they stood staring at each other.

  ‘So,’ George said slowly. ‘You come?’

  THREE

  George’s car was a shiny dark-red Jaguar. It looked brand new. The interior was lined with soft cream-coloured leather into which Joseph sank, his muscles relaxing and coming to rest by an instant reflex. Through the darkened windows a premature twilight softened the harsh geometry of the city’s suburban fringe. Suddenly Joseph felt like a part of the surroundings, gliding imperceptibly through its streets, floating on a carpet whose discreet vibrations filled him with a sense of power and command. As soon as they’d got into the car the stereo had started up, playing a Stevie Wonder album that Joseph remembered buying as a teenager. George tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to the music, looking round and smiling at Joseph, but for a couple of minutes he said nothing.

  In spite of his determination to maintain his distance, Joseph found himself studying George’s profile, searching it for signs of a resemblance to himself or his father. He was conscious of waiting for George to speak, to explain more about who he was, how he had arrived at this time and place, but in a few minutes he was also overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the situation. He looked round the interior of the car again. There was no way, he thought, that George could be a common or garden confidence trickster. To drive a car like this he’d need to be making some serious money.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ Joseph asked, pitching his voice above the music.

  George grinned, as if the question amused him.

  ‘Business. I’m a businessman.’

  ‘All right,’ Joseph said. ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Business, you know. I buy. I sell. Only business.’

  There was something final about the tone in which he said this, as if he had no intention of volunteering anything further, and Joseph tried another tack.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I was born in 1958. In Berlin.’

  That would make him four years older than Joseph.

  ‘Is that where you live?’

  George glanced sideways at Joseph, smiling reflectively, as if he understood the point of all these questions, and had no intention of giving too much away.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  His enigmatic manner had begun to drive Joseph to a high point of exasperation. He peered out of the window, trying to control his irritation. On their right was some sort of wood.

  ‘Letinsky Sady,’ George said when he saw Joseph looking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Letna Park.’

  It didn’t look much like a park, Joseph told him. In England parks were man-made, manicured pieces of turf and garden reclaimed from the sprawling of cities. Even the royal parks, which had been there for a very long time, were designed and designated as places of leisure. In comparison Letinsky looked like a tract of forest which had somehow survived from prehistory, its tall dark trees climbing up a steep slope which was crowned by a rectangular block of rusting concrete. Even though they were close to the middle of the city the scene had a gloomy deserted air which made Joseph think of running wolves and bodies abandoned among the fallen leaves.

  ‘When Michael Jackson came to Prague,’ George said, ‘he placed a big statue of himself here in the park.’ Joseph peered out trying, without success, to imagine it. George nodded his head as if to emphasise a point. ‘I was here. There were kids fucking everywhere under the trees. It was great. Before that they say there was a big statue of Stalin, the biggest in the world.’ He looked round at Joseph, grinning. ‘In those days nobody fucked without permission.’

  It was easier to imagine Stalin’s frown brooding over the dark wood.

  ‘So what happened to it?’

  ‘Oh, they exploded it many years ago.’

  They had crossed a bridge, but they seemed to be climbing, going away from the centre of the city. Ahead of them reared a tower, three pillars of shiny metal like the needle noses of rockets thrusting upwards into the supine grey sky. Streaks of water, fine and delicate lines of wet beads, began tracing decorations along the outside of the glass.

  ‘All year it rains in Prague,’ George said.

  ‘My father never lived in Berlin,’ Joseph told him. ‘In 1958 he was in London.’

  ‘Yes,’ George said. ‘When I was born he was not there.’

  He pulled over to the kerb and stopped. Peering out, Joseph saw that they were parked in a street where a gaggle of shopfronts alternated with offices and apartments, most of which seemed to be lined with scaffolding. Everywhere he went in the city it occurred to him, there was scaffolding. The façades of the building were usually long ruled blocks of plaster, like the grand streets of an English seaside town, but there was nothing elegant about them. Instead the surfaces were peeling and spotted, some of them with a bulging rotten look, as if only the grey piping of the scaffolding was holding the plaster in place.

  Next to the car was a massive doorway faced with rusty metal. It was painted black, but the gloss was crumbling and peeling, the grey patches giving it a scaly, diseased air.

  ‘We are here,’ George announced. ‘Come.’

  Joseph got out of the car and looked over at George on the other side.

  ‘I’ve gone far enough,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m going to take a taxi back to my hotel. Maybe after I phone my father we can talk.’

  George frowned. He put his keys in his pocket and walked round the front of the car towards Joseph. As he came closer Joseph made a quick sweep of the street behind him. Apart from a couple of pedestrians on the other side it was practically deserted. This was a feature he had noticed earlier. Once outside of the central district of the city, there were very few people to be seen walking around. In comparison the suburban streets in London were thronging with traffic. Suddenly the empty street seemed alive with menace. Anything could happen, Joseph thought. As George came closer he took his hand off the car and stood up straight, holding his groun
d.

  ‘My father is always called Kofi, but his full name begins with the English letter “a”. Akofi. He trained to be a lawyer at the School of Economics, the great institute in the centre of London. He was a freedom fighter against the British. When his country was liberated he became an important diplomat in Russia. In 1957, one month before Christmas, the authorities in Moscow demanded his deportation. They sent my mother away on the same day. That is how I was born in Berlin. When my mother heard you speak on the TV, it was the first time she’d heard his name in over forty years.’ He paused. His jaws clenched tight, the lines of his face set stone hard. He took the keys out of his pocket. In the silent twilight of the street they jingled. ‘We came to Prague to see you. My brother. But come, go, phone. No difference. Fuck you.’

  He turned away from Joseph and quickly walked round the car, across the narrow pavement. Without looking back he stuck the key in the lock, yanked the door open and went in, slamming it shut behind him.

  Left alone, standing by the car, Joseph experienced a moment of irrepressible doubt, and without pausing to think about what he was doing, he ran after George and banged on the door. It opened immediately, and Joseph had the feeling that George had simply been leaning against it, waiting for him to knock. In the moment before George opened the door Joseph had been full of angry words, but as their eyes met he was dumb. They stood like this, on either side of the open door, before Joseph spoke.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  George took a deep breath. He shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘So?’

  ‘All right,’ Joseph said. ‘All right.’

  The stairs were dingy, wide and bare, their footsteps echoing back from the muddy brown walls. In contrast the apartment was neat and gleaming with the air of being newly painted and furnished.

  They had come in through a short hallway into the big living room. On Joseph’s right the wall was dominated by a huge abstract painting, a curling red shape which flowed ominously off the bottom corner of the canvas. Beside it a group of framed photographs which he guessed were views of the city. On the other side of the room a big round table, already laid out for dinner, was posed next to a pair of French windows which opened on to a balcony guarded by a sinuous wrought-iron rail. The apartment building was close to the top of a hill, and beyond the windows Joseph could see a wide vista, the grey slate of roofs punctuated by the pointing fingers of the church steeples, sweeping upwards to the sky out of gracefully curved triangles. This was the frame within which he saw Radka for the first time, her back towards him, and silhouetted against the pearlescent twilight of the evening city. Remembering the moment later on, he guessed that there must have been a stray beam of late sunlight striking through the glass, because her light fair hair seemed to be shining so that her head was shrouded by a bright and golden aura. It was only when George called her name, and she turned, smiling, to greet him, that Joseph noticed little Serge standing beside her.