‘This is paradise,’ she heard her mother say in the kitchen one day as she got up to get ready for school. Her voice had a deep, angry pitch, and Radka could tell she was close to tears. ‘A professor sweeping floors.’
Her father didn’t answer. When he came out of the door and saw her standing there, he gave her his thin smile and walked past without touching her. He died soon after this, and in later years when the carp began to appear on the street corners Radka would often think of the bloody footprints and of her father’s strange smile.
George was the only person she had ever told about the carp. This was when he proposed returning to Prague, and she had held out against it stubbornly while he ran through all the obvious and good reasons why they should. Setting up the business would be easier there, he said. The materials and skills they needed would be more readily available. There would be better chance of success for a business run by a Russian and a black man. In Berlin who knew what would happen? Maybe one night they would wake to find the place burning.
At that point she told him about the carp, and the irrational fear she had always nursed, that the blood she tracked through the snow had somehow been linked to her father’s fate. George listened without comment, simply holding her hand and stroking it. Then he told her that their lives might be in danger. After that she surrendered to his will, but some part of her had never forgiven him.
George should have realised, even though she never managed to explain it properly to him, that both she and her mother had somehow been imprisoned along with her father. Before that time she had experienced no problems in seeing herself as a part of every activity at the school and among her friends. At the age of ten she had competed for the Youth Union banner. Her entry was a dramatic recital from Jirásek’s rendering of ‘The War of the Maidens’, and the judges had been taken with the sweetness of her voice and the innocent intensity of her pose as she recounted the massacre of Sharkah’s Valley. At the end she threw up her arms, shrilling Jirásek’s words: ‘Pay attention, men, to this sign from the gods! Hear me, and do not take the warring women lightly.’ The hall exploded with applause, and, as her mother always said, she would have won by a kilometre had she not been immediately followed by a nine-year-old who recited, from memory, a long section of the speech Lenin made in Petrograd during 1917. She had left with an honourable mention and the acclaim of her schoolmates, confirming her position as one of the leading spirits in her year. But her father’s incarceration changed everything, and when he returned she lost even the secret hope that his presence would restore her life to normal. At first she imagined that her anger was directed at this tattered relic of her dad, who had taken from her what she had without putting anything in its place. Later on, after he died, she understood that the hot rage hidden in her chest was really about the sense that she, too, had been locked into an airless room. This was a perception which had merely grown deeper as she grew older. Berlin had been the key to her escape, the place where, in her mind, she had broken with her own past and begun remaking her future. In Prague she hardly knew anyone now. The friends with whom she had been through school and university were scattered, and her closest relatives, people she had not seen since childhood, were in Pilsen, a few hundred kilometres away. Sometimes she encountered a man or a woman whom she had known well more than a decade in the past; it made her feel more than ever like a stranger in a place which echoed with hidden loyalties and hatreds. Even stronger was the sense that during her childhood she had learnt to prepare a face to meet the faces that she met, a surface which covered in deceit all that she felt. This wasn’t merely a question of politics. Her politics before Berlin had been unformed, a matter of resentment and irritation at the restrictions and stupidities about which everyone grumbled. It was more the feeling that she could not be herself, and that she didn’t know what it might mean to be exactly the kind of individual she wanted to be. When she left the city she had rejected the numb emptiness she had filled with the diligence of study, sitting night after night with her books while her mother slept. In Berlin, she had thought she would become the person she was meant to be. She always knew that the city was in many ways drabber and life more controlled than the one she was leaving, but she also knew that no one would recognise her there, that the future would be a blank, like a sheet of fresh snow on which her footprints would trace a new, untrodden path.
In this sense she felt her return to Prague as a kind of defeat, a step backwards, and walking in the park with Serge, she felt the memories clouding round her, coupling her again with the self she’d left behind.
Ironically, her work there gave her more time and freedom. In Berlin she’d worked for a magazine, translating documents and articles from Czech and Russian, and assembling diaries about events and attitudes in Eastern Europe from information that she picked up on the Internet. When she left Germany she continued writing, filing her copy by e-mail, but now she made her own schedules and wrote about a broader range of subjects, whatever caught her fancy. Most of it, George told her once, was a kind of therapy in which she explored her own identity, using as raw material the passions and frustrations of people, like herself, who had grown up in the shadow of the Party and its methods. For instance, when a young man in his twenties was appointed as head of Czech broadcasting, the profile she wrote started with a fairly curt biography, then went on to argue that men and women between the ages of thirty and fifty had disappeared from public life because they were all compromised by their past complicity with the system, or incapable of coping with the challenges of a new society. George read it without comment, then he smiled at her.
‘I’d agree with this,’ he said, ‘except that you’re defining public life in the same way as the old comrades. Head of this and secretary of that. Everything’s changing so quickly that in a couple of years all the people you thought had disappeared might be back.’
She shrugged. When they first met it was the kind of exchange which would have been the signal for a pleasurably heated argument. Now the prospect offered no excitement to either of them.
From time to time he asked her why she felt the urge to be so busy. She was no longer tied to a routine, and now that Katya no longer lived nearby, caring for Serge took up more of her time. Even so, she worked occasionally for a language school where she taught English to businessmen. They had enough money, George would say, and it wasn’t necessary. When she didn’t answer it was partly because she was convinced that he already understood, and that the question was a provocation whose purpose was to expose the distance between them. In the years since they had come together everything had changed, and now it was as if she hardly knew him.
It was tempting to imagine that this was something to do with the move, but the truth was that after Serge’s birth their relationship had been different. When they’d met she was just twenty-one, and George had been beautiful and exotic, curly and dark like a Roma, with a tint of gold under his skin. The odd thing was that seeing Joseph had immediately reminded her of how George seemed at that first moment when she saw him threading his way through the crowd in the Freundschaft Hall at the university. It wasn’t so much that they looked alike, although they did. It was something about the way he moved, a slight hesitation in his step, and a kind of wide-eyed boyishness which had long ago disappeared from George’s features. Watching him as he walked through the door behind George she had felt for a second or two as if time had spun backwards and she was once again the young innocent making eyes at a golden stranger across the room.
Remembering, she smiled, searching the shadowy image in the glass of the window for traces of the child she had been. She had imagined that George was a foreigner, a student or teacher from somewhere like Cuba or Mozambique. She soon found out who he really was, but the thrill she’d felt in that first instant hadn’t gone away. It was true enough that George was different. He was an experienced man, more than ten years older, who had lived through a stint in the army and suffered disappointments at
which she could only guess. He also had a contempt for the bureaucracy of politics and administration which Radka shared, and the confidence of his sarcasms and jokes about the system made her feel lighter, almost joyful, as if her isolation was at an end. Like herself, he was an outsider who played by the rules, and kept his feelings to himself, expressing them only within the confines of their mutual privacy. For Radka, being with George was like a final release from the mould in which the first crack had appeared at the time of her father’s imprisonment. In their first couple of years they seemed to have been always together, but later on, when she found out more about what George had been doing at the time, she knew that the memory was an illusion, like a magic trick in which he’d caused the truth to disappear.
Her first clue had come on the night they started demolishing the Wall, tearing with their bare hands at the chips and lumps of concrete. It was a moment she remembered like a piece of music, starting slowly then building rapidly to a crescendo. The first notes, distant and piercing, came as they paced along Stargarder Strasse, following the streams of people, sometimes a couple like themselves, sometimes a chattering group of students, or a dozen young men chanting slogans in unison. Up ahead the columns of pedestrians thickened around the bulk of the Gethsemanekirche. Clinging to George she pushed her way behind him into the entrance in the Greifenhager Strasse, and caught up in the eddying movement of the mob, they drifted further and further in, moving, without volition, among the press of bodies as the crowd broke away and headed for the Bornholmer Gate. Around her was the smell of garlic, tobacco and sweat, then strange vagrant streaks, the sweet taste of roses and wine. Walking up Bornholmer Strasse, she linked arms with Peter, whose father had become a drunken closet fascist, and then Wolfgang, who reached under her coat to hug her, his fingers digging into her breast, indifferent in his exaltation to George marching on the other side, and Renate, who clasped her hand tightly, swinging it up and down in the rhythm of their steps. The noise was unbelievable but she didn’t hear it. ‘The Wall must fall,’ they chanted, and all up and down the line people, their spirits fired by the magnitude of the event, were spouting off impromptu bursts of rhetoric. ‘Let us go see the Ku’damm,’ Peter shouted over at her, ‘and then we’ll come right back.’ Sometimes George looked round at her, laughing, and from time to time they kissed openly, squeezing each other’s bodies, more united than they had ever been. She remembered all this as if it had been a drunken roaring dream, oases of clarity alternating with moments of crazed frenzy. At the Wall they shouted, kicked and tore at the crumbling fabric with their hands, tossing the fragments around them like so much rubbish. In one of the moments she remembered, Peter leapt on to a pile of bricks, a few metres from where she stood, and holding up a piece of the concrete, began making a speech, shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Tonight!’ he yelled. ‘Tonight we sweep away all lies, all illusion.’
Turning round she saw George grinning. ‘Without a few lies and illusions,’ he muttered, ‘none of us will survive.’
She’d laughed then, but later on it struck her that this was exactly how it had turned out.
FIVE
They were drinking more vodka. When Radka tilted the bottle the long strand of grass in it wavered like weed in a pond. Joseph tried to count the number of glasses filled with the spirit that he had drained so far, but somehow he couldn’t concentrate. The ends of his fingers felt numb. Radka emptied her glass with a long fluent swallow. When she threw her head back the long muscles rippled in her velvet throat. His head spun with drink and the desire to touch her smooth pale skin.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ Joseph said.
‘No.’ Radka stretched her arm out along the back of the sofa and put her hand on his. ‘Please stay. If you leave now it will be bad for George. And for me. Waiting to see you he has been like a cat on a hot tin roof.’ She frowned as if conscious that there was something wrong about the expression. ‘No. Cat on hot bricks. Right? You must wait.’ Her eyes were fixed on his with an intensity which gave him the sense that there was something more beneath the surface of her words. Something she wanted him to know without her having to say it.
Joseph sat back against the cushions. The truth was that he wanted to stay with Radka so much that the feeling frightened him.
‘Tell me about George’s mother,’ he said.
Radka gestured as if trying to gather the words up out of the air.
‘She loves three things in life. Her memories of Kofi, George and Serge. She told me this. Without George she would have been glad to die.’ She paused. ‘She lives in the past, I think. I don’t know if she always did this, but now she speaks to Kofi as if he was there next to her. She talks about what happened during the day and what she thinks about her son, as if he was sitting on the other side of the room. She’s not mad. Her brain is still good. She cooks, she cleans the apartment, her appearance is good, she watches TV and she votes. Everything. It is just that her companion is her memory of Kofi.’
Hearing his father spoken of in this way gave Joseph an unpleasant feeling, and he felt the urge to reply sharply, to utter some kind of sarcasm. These people talked about Kofi as if he belonged to them. You know nothing about him, he wanted to tell her. You have no right. At the same time he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was the interloper. It struck him, also, that his feelings about Kofi had always been ambiguous. ‘A slippery customer’ was how he had often heard his mother refer to him, and he realised now that this was how he had always thought of his father. Looking back to those times thirty years later he understood that his attitude had largely been shaped by the things his mother had said. ‘I threw him out,’ she would say to her friends, and, ‘I couldn’t put up with that shit any more.’ Sometimes, overhearing this, he thought that he hated her, but the worst times were when Kofi was late picking him up on Sundays, or when he didn’t come at all. His mother would telephone various people, her voice either low and complaining or shrill and angry. Once she had made him telephone a woman who sounded irritable and puzzled when he started asking to speak to his father.
As Radka spoke he was remembering one of these Sundays. Ten years old, he was sitting in the single armchair in Kofi’s room. It was somewhere in Kentish Town, facing an adventure playground, where they would usually wander listlessly for half an hour before going back to the room to watch television. In normal circumstances they spoke very little, largely because neither of them could think of anything to say. Kofi busied himself making tea and sandwiches, which Joseph would nibble politely, because although he never said so, he disliked the food his father gave him. Somehow it didn’t taste right, and, listening to Kofi bustling about at the end of the room he was flexing his stomach, nerving himself to bite into the thick triangles of floppy white bread.
‘I’ve been there,’ Kofi said suddenly, coming up behind him and pointing at the TV. In the picture Joseph half recognised the onion-shaped domes, although he had no idea who the men were, filing across the square in front of it. ‘Moscow,’ his father said. ‘I’ve stood there. Before you were born. Many years ago.’
Joseph nodded.
‘Was it nice?’
Kofi laughed his great roar, a noise which, according to Joseph’s mother, used to make people look round and stare in the street.
‘Nice – I don’t know about nice. It was unforgettable. Very cold. In winter sometimes the snow came up to here.’ He pointed to his waist. ‘But the people were warm. Passionate.’ He paused. ‘Those were great days for me. I spoke with Khrushchev.’ He peered down at Joseph, trying to read his expression. ‘Do you know who Khrushchev was?’
Joseph shook his head.
‘He was the Russian leader. Very important man. Maybe if it wasn’t for him I’d still be in Moscow.’ He put the plate of sandwiches in Joseph’s lap. ‘Would you like to go there?’
What Joseph wanted to do was to go home, but something about the tone of Kofi’s voice told him that this was somehow important to his father, s
o he nodded.
‘Maybe. One day.’
Later on, when Joseph told his mother about this conversation she clicked her tongue with annoyance.
‘It’s just one of his stories,’ she muttered.
Remembering all this, Joseph experienced a quick spike of anger. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure, either, whether he was angry with Kofi, his mother, or himself.
‘He’s not dead,’ he said to Radka. ‘You talk about him as if he were dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, and made a little ducking movement of her head. ‘This is how Katya speaks of him.’
Joseph nodded, his anger receding.
‘Forgive me,’ Joseph said, ‘but it sounds a little strange. George said that the authorities separated them. What happened? What did they do?’
She didn’t reply for a few seconds. Instead she stared at him openly, her eyes exploring every line of his face. Looking back at her, watching the tiny movements of her pupils, Joseph felt irresistibly drawn, as if she was exercising some hypnotic power over him.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘People didn’t have to do anything to be sent away. It is hard for someone from the West to understand how it was. You must ask Kofi.’
‘I’m asking you.’
She shook her head firmly.
‘No. This is their story. Those two people. You should ask them.’
She stared at him with a tinge of defiance, as if declaring that nothing he could do would drag the secret out of her.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you allowed to talk about yourself?’
She laughed. An intimate, throaty sound.
‘Of course. Ask me.’
She poured more vodka, the bottle rattling against the rim of his glass. As the liquid ran down the side of the glasses and pooled on the table she laughed again. Her senses were as pickled as his own, Joseph guessed.
A Shadow of Myself Page 9