A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘This is my son, Serge,’ George said proudly. He pushed the little boy towards Joseph. ‘Speak. Speak to your uncle.’

  The boy’s forehead furrowed with anxiety. He was about six years old, Joseph guessed, with a pale freckly skin, light green eyes, and a mop of reddish-brown curls in a halo round his head. At first Joseph had been startled by his appearance, but when he looked closely he could see the African ancestry in the shape of the boy’s lips, in the dark undertone of his skin, and in the tight shape of the curls edging his cheeks. On the other hand he felt a peculiar flutter of disturbance somewhere inside him. His father Kofi was a man so dark that, out in the sunshine, his skin seemed to splinter and absorb the light. The thought that this pretty, curly-haired white boy might be his grandson was strange and unsettling.

  Over Serge’s head George smiled broadly. In the short time it had taken them to climb the stairs his mood had lightened, and he was now cheerful and expansive, the genial host. The contrast with his outburst of rage on the street left Joseph bewildered and uncertain.

  ‘Speak,’ George told the boy. ‘Speak.’

  ‘Ahoy,’ Serge said eventually.

  ‘Not Czech,’ George muttered, stooping down behind him. ‘English.’

  The boy’s lips worked silently for a moment.

  ‘Hello,’ he said eventually.

  Standing behind George, Radka clapped her hands loudly.

  ‘Bravo Liebling. Gut. Gut.’

  ‘Speak English,’ George said quickly, looking round. He stood up. ‘This is Radka.’

  Joseph put out his hand to shake hers, but she came past George and grabbed his hands, pulling him towards her and kissing him on both cheeks. As she did this George watched with an ironical smile, as if he could sense Joseph’s unease at being cast in the role of an affectionate brother-in-law. The odd thing, Joseph thought, was that he could already sense the changes in George’s mood, and even work out what he was thinking.

  ‘You are just like him,’ Radka said, still holding his hands. Her voice had a husky sound, unexpectedly low in pitch. Joseph shrugged. After all, everything that had happened in the last hour had been a shock, and somehow it seemed natural and inevitable that the touch of Radka’s hands should be alive, tingling in his nerves like the aftermath of electricity.

  They drank vodka sitting round the table. Serge sat opposite Joseph playing with a long thin glass filled with some kind of fruit juice. He was quiet, his eyes round and fixed on the visitor, and Joseph guessed that his English had been exhausted with the single word. Occasionally he asked his mother a question in German.

  ‘He wants to know,’ Radka said, ‘if you have seen a lion in Africa. Like the Lion King.’

  Her eyes laughed at Joseph. They were a light blue, and against the slight tan of her skin they gave her face an exotic reckless look, as if she was making him a dare.

  ‘I saw one once in Africa,’ Joseph said. ‘But I live in London where they keep the lions in a zoo.’

  Radka translated and the boy gave a sharp, ‘Ah,’ as she said the first bit. His eyes grew wider, glued to Joseph’s face.

  ‘My mother wanted to come,’ George said suddenly. ‘To see you. But her health is not good, you know.’

  ‘She lives in Berlin?’ Joseph asked politely.

  There were many other questions that he wanted to ask instead, but with Serge’s eyes following his every move he felt constrained about challenging George. Looking across at the boy he wondered whether this was what his brother had intended. In the next instant he realised, with a slight shock, that for nearly an hour this had been how he was thinking about George. As his brother.

  The first course was a cold beetroot soup, the earthy flavour heightened by the resin taste of the wine. Joseph’s head was swimming after his second glass, and he remembered that since they had arrived George had been drinking steadily. It didn’t seem to affect his manner, but Joseph could feel his own senses clouding.

  ‘She refused to leave,’ George said. ‘She lived in the same apartment until the Wall came down. Berlin is her home.’

  ‘And yours?’

  George smiled.

  ‘For me change and movement is still possible.’

  ‘Can you come to Berlin?’ Radka asked. She took in Joseph’s look of surprise. ‘Katya was so excited to hear your voice. She wants to meet you.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Joseph told her. ‘I’m leaving here in a couple of days.’

  ‘There is a message,’ she said, as if she had anticipated his reply.

  She’d hardly completed the sentence before George broke in, speaking rapidly in German. Immediately Serge slid off his seat and stood next to Radka, reaching out to hold her hand.

  ‘It is now his bedtime,’ George told Joseph.

  The boy seemed surprisingly obedient, walking round the table to shake hands with Joseph and then toddling off serious-faced behind Radka.

  ‘There is a message,’ George said.

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and brought out a lilac-coloured envelope. On the front there were only two words, written in an elegant copperplate script. His father’s name – Kofi Coker.

  Joseph turned the envelope over in his hands.

  ‘You’ll give this to him?’ George asked.

  Joseph was about to say yes, then it occurred to him that in all the time he had been discussing his father with George he had never once considered the effect that this event might have on the old man. If it was true.

  ‘He had a heart attack a couple of years ago,’ he told George. As he said this he felt a curious sense, almost of betrayal, at revealing such an intimate matter.

  ‘He’s okay now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joseph replied, ‘except I’m worried about how he’ll take all this. He’s an old man.’

  If George understood the hint implicit in his words he ignored it. I’d take no notice too, Joseph thought, if it was my dad whom I’d never seen.

  ‘You must understand this,’ George said quickly. ‘My mother and father were separated by the authorities. She still loves him. Everyone loved him. He was known to everyone. Even Nikita Khrushchev spoke with him.’ He grinned at Joseph. ‘Maybe he was not such a great hero as she thinks, you know, but that is what she told me. This is forty years ago. She was fighting the rules when I was born.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Regulations. She could have made me never to exist – that would have been easy – or sent me away. But that would have been surrender.’ He looked away from Joseph, gazing through the French windows out into the evening sky. ‘This was not easy. I lived with a German family when I was a small boy, like Serge. I called the mother my mutti. You have two mothers, they told me. What a lucky boy. Then Katya married a German, an important policeman. He wanted to forget me, I think, but my mother insisted.’ He chuckled. ‘I think he hated me. No one would think I was his son, you know. But I was lucky. Only a few years, then he was killed.’ He got up and paced to the window without looking at Joseph. ‘My mother still speaks of Kofi, Kofi, Kofi, as if no time has passed. But I think she had believed that he was dead or lost, that she would never see or hear of him again. Then she hears you and her life begins. If she cannot touch him in some way she will die.’ He paused. ‘She is a woman of great passion.’

  He said this last bit with a kind of gloomy pride. In the corner of the room the phone began to ring. George ignored it. The ringing stopped.

  ‘Maybe wrong number,’ George said carelessly.

  ‘Could it be your mother?’ Joseph asked. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

  ‘No. No. We spoke before. She is waiting for me to call.’

  The ringing started again. After a while Radka came into the room and picked up the phone. She listened in silence, then held it out towards George. He got up, his face expressionless, took the phone from her, and reeling out the long cord by which it was attached to the wall, went out and shut the door behind him.

  It was dark outside n
ow, and before Radka sat down she turned on a standard lamp perched in the corner below the photographs. She had changed her clothes, switching from the sweater and jeans she’d been wearing to a long white dress in some sort of crinkly material, which seemed to wrap around and envelop her body, giving her a comfortable, relaxed air, as if she had slipped it on to illustrate the fact that this was her province in which she was at home. She smelt of flowers – something with a lemony undertone which Joseph couldn’t identify. Citrus, but not lemon. Earlier on her hair had been bundled together into a bun on top of her head. Now she had let it down and it rippled in smooth flowing waves, over her shoulders and across her back. In the margin of the pool of light around the lamp, she glowed.

  ‘This is very important to George,’ she said. She gazed at him seriously, her eyes intent. ‘There was always something missing in his life. Just as his mother’s. Being with you is a great experience. Already he loves you.’

  Joseph shrugged, too embarrassed to speak. It wasn’t so much the idea of what she was saying that disturbed him. It was the fact that she was saying it.

  Suddenly he could hear George shouting, a ranting, angry sound. Radka’s expression didn’t change.

  ‘I put some photographs in the envelope with Katya’s letter,’ she said calmly. Outside the door George’s voice had risen to a roar without eliciting any apparent reaction from Radka. Perhaps it was the language, Joseph thought. To English ears emphatic German speech still carried the sound of a threat. ‘She wants to see him,’ Radka continued.

  The door flung open and George strode in.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said without preamble. ‘Half an hour.’ He pointed at Joseph. ‘You wait? Okay?’

  Joseph started to object, but before he could find the words George had turned and walked out. Radka got up quickly and went out after him, closing the door behind her. Joseph hovered for a moment, undecided about whether he should get up and follow, but then he heard their voices echoing in the hallway. It sounded like an argument, so he stayed where he was, and in a moment he heard the sound of the outer door slamming shut.

  FOUR

  ‘Where are you going?’ Radka asked George.

  She had followed him out on an impulse which was something to do with Joseph’s presence. It wasn’t unusual for George to leave the house without explanation, and in normal circumstances she wouldn’t have asked. There had been a time when such questions would have seemed impolite or even suspicious, and the old habit of reticence about these matters died hard. But this was different. Seeing it through the eyes of someone who, like Joseph, knew nothing of the way they had lived, George’s departure seemed abrupt and strange. In any case, she also felt a sudden surge of resentment at his assumption that he could simply leave her with someone, his brother, who they were both meeting for the first time.

  George’s hand was on the bolt of the door, but, halted by the tone of her voice, he stopped and looked round.

  ‘It’s business,’ he told her quickly. ‘I have two madmen at the garage who are about to fight each other. The customer is crazy and making a fuss, and the Roma is worse. It won’t take long.’

  She nodded her head, accepting the explanation. Since the time that he and Valentin had set up business in the city, she’d become accustomed to the eruption of minor emergencies.

  ‘Can’t Valentin do it?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  She gestured in resignation and let him go, but instead of returning immediately into the room with Joseph, she walked along the corridor to listen at Serge’s door. The sounds he made might have been imperceptible to anyone else, but she could tell that he was still awake, reading or playing with one of his toys. Usually she would go in and look at him, kiss him, perhaps, and pick up the toys and books which he left scattered around the floor. On this night she didn’t want to take the risk that he would wake up and detain her, so she merely listened. She had intended to go back to Joseph after a few seconds, but, instead she found herself walking on into the kitchen where she stood looking through the window. Her excuse was that she was about to make coffee, but the truth was that she wanted to be alone for a few minutes before facing her husband’s brother. She felt restless and disturbed, in need of a breathing space in which to calm the turmoil inside herself.

  Reflecting on how she felt, she knew that it wasn’t simply to do with Joseph’s visit or George’s sudden departure. In fact it struck her that it was something to do with the game Serge had been playing as she gave him his bath. There was nothing extraordinary about what he had done, and although it sometimes annoyed her a little she was accustomed to seeing him stretched out in the bath tub, his arms along his sides, his mouth opening and closing. This was how he pretended to be a carp, floating in the water like the giant fish George had brought home just before Christmas and dumped in the tub. During the season there were people all over Prague taking home bundles of carp wrapped in wet paper, or stuffed in dripping parcels. Born and brought up in the city, Radka had found this custom unremarkable until she left it. So there was nothing astonishing about Serge’s little game, and he was just as likely to be converted, when she lifted him out of the water, into a roaring lion. On this particular evening, however, she didn’t know why, the sight had triggered a memory of her childhood in Prague, which darkened her mood.

  It had been twenty years ago, when she was twelve, coming home from school; she had walked past one of the trestle tables which were laid out everywhere on the street corners. This one was on a busy junction and there was a crowd of people jostling round it. On the previous day there had been a heavy fall of snow and the mob of shoppers was like a herd of cattle, their feet stamping and their breath steaming in a cloud round their heads. Over the entire scene hung the raw smell of the fish, but Radka didn’t find this unpleasant. On the contrary all the activity gave her a feeling of excitement and anticipation that was associated with the coming festival – the smells, the look of the milling crowd, the tight freezing air. Smiling, she circled round the pedestrians, almost stepping into the road, and stumbling a little as an old woman pushed past her. A few paces further on, she felt something different about her right foot, a wet feeling as if she had sunk into a puddle of melted snow. She looked down and saw the dark stain of fish blood around the toe of her boot, and looking back at where she had walked, she saw that she was leaving a trail of bloody footprints. She scraped at the ground, wiping her boots on the thick carpet of snow, but the pink indentations refused to disappear, following her remorselessly as she ran down the street.

  On the landing in front of the apartment where she lived with her mother she stopped and took off the boots before going in. Then, holding them at arm’s length, she rushed down the corridor towards the bathroom. The door was open a crack, and she could hear her mother’s voice. She’d heard her mother talking to herself before, and eager to wash the blood off her shoes, she shoved the door open. It seemed to stick a little, then it went back, but with difficulty, as if something was in the way. Inside the room, her mother was kneeling by the tub. For a moment, it seemed as if she was playing with the carp which had been floating in the tub for a couple of days, but then Radka realised that the obstacle which had been blocking the door was the same fish wrapped in a wet towel. At the same time she saw that it was her father who was sitting in the tub. As she came in he turned his head and smiled at her. It was a curious smile, tremulous and almost timid as if her entry had frightened him. That was how she remembered him in the period before his death. When she saw him in the bath tub he had been away for two years. On the day he was arrested her mother had told her it was all a mistake, a story which she accepted with relief, but as the weeks and then months wore on she knew that he wasn’t coming back. He had been imprisoned, her mother said, not because he was a bad man, but because of something he had written, and for a time Radka’s dearest wish was to read his book in order to see, with her own eyes, the appalling thing that had ruined her life. At sch
ool no one mentioned her father, but she understood that everyone knew about him by her classmates’ ripple of response to certain names, or by the way that some of them turned to look when teachers mentioned saboteurs or threats to the state. That summer was to be her first visit to a pioneer camp, but a week before the event she told her teacher that she would have to stay and spend the vacation with her mother. Afterwards she avoided taking part in most of her classmates’ activities, inventing one plausible excuse after another. She knew that her anger was connected with her father and his absence, but after a while she stopped thinking about it, and, when her mother said that he would be coming back soon she chose not to believe it, putting that prospect out of her mind in case it turned out to be yet another deceitful hope. His return was a surprise, but it was his appearance and his manner which shocked her.

  Before he had left, he was a broad, powerful man. She seemed to remember his voice booming, and he could still pick her up and hold her high above his head before hugging her against his chest. The man who came back was thin and slouching, with downcast eyes and an apologetic smile. He never recovered his old self. Instead he would shuffle out every morning, clad in neatly pressed blue overalls.