A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘How did you meet George?’

  ‘At a recital of African poets in Berlin in ’89. I was language student.’ Her grammar, Joseph noted, had deteriorated, but that was the only sign that the vodka was having an effect. ‘I went there to improve my English.’ She giggled. ‘I don’t know why George attended. He was not a student there. I had never seen him before, and he is bored by poetry. Of course he says that he loves Pushkin, but that is because he’s Russian. A special Russian, he says, like Pushkin.’

  Joseph guessed she was talking about Pushkin’s African origins and he nodded in acknowledgement.

  ‘Afterwards we went to demonstrate at the Wall. In the morning we went to his room and went to bed. We have been together since that time.’ Her voice was suddenly sober. ‘We were changing the shape of the world.’ She paused. Her hand touched his, a light pressure. She grinned at him, signalling the irony. ‘You should have been there. It would have made a great movie.’

  A stream of images flowed through Joseph’s mind, a mob of young people chanting, ecstatic with fear and rage, a row of grim-faced refugees, curling nests of barbed wire. At that moment, as these pictures passed in review, he found it hard to tell whether he had actually seen them on the TV screen or whether he had cobbled them together out of his imagination.

  ‘Tell me about England,’ she said. ‘It’s better than Germany?’

  He struggled with the words. His brain felt numb when he tried to think about what to tell her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She gestured, and gave an abrupt gurgle of laughter.

  ‘For a black man. In Berlin it’s difficult. Before unification it was not so bad. Only the Vietnamese had such trouble.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe I didn’t notice because I lived among students. After the end of the Wall everything changed anyway.’ She gave him a clown smile, the corners of her mouth arching high up under her eyes. ‘You have skinheads in England?’

  ‘They were invented in England. A long time ago. Now they’re out of fashion. They don’t matter.’

  He noted, with a flash of amusement at himself, that he felt a kind of unreasonable pride in saying this.

  ‘But there is no problem for you,’ she said. ‘You are a director.’

  He could tell, by the way she said this, that what she had in mind was something like a director of Hollywood features.

  ‘I’m not that sort of director,’ he told her.

  A frown momentarily creased her forehead, and spurred on by her puzzlement he explained that he was the first time director of a small TV documentary. ‘It didn’t even come out the way I wanted it.’

  She frowned again, searching for the word she wanted.

  ‘Censorship?’

  ‘No, it’s not like that.’

  Now it was his turn to struggle for words, and, slowly, he found himself beginning to talk about his conflict with the producer, and about the way she had frustrated his intentions.

  ‘This is censorship,’ she interrupted.

  Suddenly he remembered that Radka had lived through times when censorship was backed up by banning or imprisonment. In comparison, his story must make him seem spineless. George would have dealt with it differently, he thought. From the moment they met he had sensed a hard core to his brother’s personality which he was certain that he himself didn’t possess, and yet George had survived growing up isolated and surrounded by whites. Now he was thriving. His father’s comments after the preview flashed through his mind, along with the suspicion that, like Kofi, George would have begun with a clear understanding of who his enemies were and where the lines were drawn. George would have had the guts to say no.

  Radka was still frowning at him and he wondered whether she was comparing him with his brother. Perhaps she imagined that his mother had been a woman like Katya, someone who encouraged her son to think of his absent father as a hero. Would Radka understand if he told her now that he had been brought up to doubt the part of himself which he identified with Kofi?

  ‘So,’ she said suddenly. ‘You are married?’

  ‘I was. We separated.’

  Her eyebrows arched and her lips pouted.

  ‘Ah. She was like you?’

  ‘No. She was white if that’s what you mean.’

  He felt a curious irritation about telling her this.

  ‘It was difficult? To be married to a white woman?’

  It wasn’t a question, he realised, that anyone he knew in England would have asked him, not unless they were trying to be offensive, and in normal circumstances he would have told anyone who asked to mind their own business. The fact that their presence in a room together could excite hostility or a prurient curiosity was an irritant that he had shared with Liz.

  ‘No. Not really,’ he said. ‘Other people’s behaviour was sometimes difficult. For us it was normal. In the beginning we read the same books, watched the same movies.’

  The night they met he’d walked into a pub out of the rain and she’d been sitting with a bunch of students. Two of them were in his seminar group and he’d sat down next to her. It was one of those boring Saturday nights, when no one could afford to go anywhere interesting and they’d all had it with the local clubs, and all that remained was to sit there and talk and get pissed. Just before closing time she had taken his hand and pressed it against her stomach.

  In bed later on she told him that their sex was a poem of contrasts, and that it was this contrast between their skins which excited her so much, especially his dick, the darkest part of his body. ‘Is that a terrible thing to say?’ she asked immediately. He had laughed, partly because the earnest anxiety of her question seemed incongruous. The other reason was that he felt the same about the pale gleam of her flesh and the bright gold fringes of her hair. In a far corner of his mind the sight stirred a distant memory of going into his mum’s room at night and seeing her body glowing like this.

  ‘We’re not writing an essay together,’ he told her, ‘and sex isn’t about all that boy-next-door shit, and all that courtly love propaganda. It’s about the pleasure and excitement we’re getting from each other’s bodies. Otherwise the human race would have died out long ago.’

  In those days it was the one idea in which he had total confidence.

  ‘It was like finding a best friend I didn’t know I had,’ he told Radka.

  ‘In the beginning,’ she repeated thoughtfully. ‘The beginning is always good. Yes?’

  ‘Is it difficult for you with George?’ he asked.

  Asking the question seemed to release something inside him, and in that moment he realised that he was, somehow, jealous of George. He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought, and he wondered whether Radka sensed what he’d been thinking. But she didn’t reply. Instead she looked at him, her forehead crinkling as if she was considering her answer. Their eyes met, and he looked away.

  ‘It’s very bad now,’ she said quietly. She was still staring at him with the same look of serious consideration. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  The room seemed to have gone silent. Joseph was on the verge of asking what was wrong between her and George, then he remembered that he had only known them for a matter of hours, and there was something more to his silence. It was as if he was standing in front of a dangerous cliff, where to utter one more word would be to step over the edge. His head swirled as he tried to think of something safe to say to her.

  ‘Your family,’ he ventured. ‘They still live in Berlin?’

  She frowned, then she shook her head irritably.

  ‘I’m not German. I was born here in Prague.’ This surprised Joseph. He had assumed she was a German. ‘My mother was Hungarian. Born near Bratislava. Slovakia.’

  ‘So you’re Slovakian?’

  She was laughing now at his confusion.

  ‘No. No. No.’ She shook her head, her mane of hair swirling round and settling back to spread itself lazily on her shoulders. ‘My father is Czech.’

  They seemed to have come closer tog
ether on the sofa, and as if for emphasis, she tapped lightly with the hand which now rested on his arm.

  ‘Your father’s here?’

  For some reason he looked around as if expecting her father to walk through the door.

  ‘He died.’

  In a flash her expression was sombre. Her forehead creased and her eyes flickered away from his.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Joseph said. He felt as if he was stumbling after her, through a maze of indirection.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ She was silent for a few seconds. On the other side of her profile a red light in the black night sky blinked. On his arm her fingers tightened as she was about to speak. ‘He was professor of languages at the university. He wrote supporting the charter in ’76. After that they sent him to prison. When he came out they sent him to dig graves in the cemeteries and sweep floors. He was not so old. But after a year, more or less, he was dead.’ She sighed, then she turned to face him again. ‘He was too brave, I think. Like Kofi. It is not so good to be the child of such men.’

  It was odd hearing his father’s name in this context, especially when they talked about him as being brave or important. According to Joseph’s mother his father used to have an embarrassing habit of boasting about his friendship with famous men and his involvement with affairs of state. She knew that he had been on the staff of his country’s consulate, but his claims were so grandiose that she had never known what to believe. He had to understand, she told Joseph once, that black men like his father suffered a series of crippling wounds to their egos, as they grew old in Britain, and were condemned to shabby obscurity. She had meant it kindly, he knew, but the idea had filled him with contempt for these fantasies of power, and when he went to visit his father he had made a point of discouraging him from talking about his past. Hearing Kofi’s name now, he was struck, for the first time, by the idea that it was his mother who had been wrong. If this vision of Kofi was correct, his mother must have seen him through the lens of her own narrow experience, and missed the plain fact that his boasts were simply true.

  ‘’89 was bad for my mother,’ Radka said. ‘When we were full of celebration, she was thinking of my father. How happy he would have been.’

  She closed her eyes, drew her breath in sharply, and covered her face with one hand. With the other hand she squeezed Joseph’s arm convulsively. Her shoulders heaved. He reached up and patted her hand awkwardly. She opened her eyes. The lashes shone with tiny wet beads. She blinked, got up abruptly and walked away, the dress falling back in swirling folds down her thighs. At the window she stood looking out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is too much vodka. Too much vodka makes me cry. I’m sorry.’

  Joseph watched her from the sofa, wondering whether her tears had been precipitated by her memories of past grief or whether he had said or done something to upset her. She’d said that she was glad he’d come, but perhaps she didn’t mean it. Perhaps his mere presence had set something off. Perhaps he’d walked into the middle of a row between her and George. Perhaps that was why George had disappeared. For a few seconds he felt at a total loss. He knew nothing about these people or about how they might behave. Perhaps he should have returned to his hotel after the meal. Perhaps he should never have come.

  As if in answer to his thoughts there was a jangling of keys outside, and the door of the apartment creaked open, announcing George’s arrival. He came swinging through the door, his manner breezy, spreading his arms out towards Joseph.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. Business never ends. But pain in the ass is over. For now.’

  He threw himself on to the sofa in the space that Radka had just vacated, shooting out his legs in front of him. As he sat down Radka turned away from the window, came back to the table, poured a glass of vodka and gave it to George who took it with a brief nod of his head. Joseph avoided looking at her and if George noticed that she’d been crying he didn’t comment.

  ‘I think it’s time I went,’ Joseph said.

  George looked round at him, an expression of shock on his features.

  ‘No. This is too soon.’ He slapped his hand hard down on Joseph’s leg. ‘You must stay with me a little longer. We have much to say.’

  SIX

  ‘Look there,’ George said. ‘Václav.’

  They were swinging round the corner into Wenceslas Square past the massive statue of King Wenceslas. Joseph had seen it a couple of times already, but he didn’t want to disappoint George, who had insisted on taking him sightseeing.

  ‘Jan Palach sat there and burnt himself to death. Then a month later Jan Zajic also,’ George said. ‘I hate these monuments. All over Europe, in every city, there are monuments to some hero. But all they did was to create terror. Then they put these monsters there to remind you that such things are possible. When I was a little boy I could never bring myself to look these statues in the face. I had the belief that somehow they would recognise me as a foreigner, someone who didn’t belong.’ He paused. ‘Pushkin understood all this. He wrote about Peter’s statue, but I think of his poem every time I come here: “The Rider of Bronze”. This is what frightened me. “And softly, slowly his face was turning …”’ He stopped. ‘I don’t know how to do it in English.’

  ‘In English it’s called “The Bronze Horseman”,’ Joseph told him.

  Joseph, weighed down and bewildered by the sheer strangeness of the evening’s events had insisted on leaving the apartment, and when George pressed him to stay he said that he had already drunk too much. Radka had wished him good night, her face expressionless, and disappeared. Joseph asked about taxis, but George insisted on driving him home.

  ‘In Prague all taxi drivers are thieves,’ he said confidentially. ‘Thieves and pimps. I take you to the hotel.’

  Once in the car he drove in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the city. He was taking Joseph on a tour, he announced. It would take five minutes.

  ‘No it won’t,’ Joseph objected.

  ‘All right.’ George looked round at him, grinning. ‘So? It will take longer.’

  In fact it had only taken about five minutes to get down past the statue of Wenceslas. It was close to midnight, but the square, Vaclavske Namesti, which was actually more like a broad avenue flanked by shops and hotels, was crowded with pedestrians. Most of them seemed to be tourists.

  ‘This is a fact of sociology,’ George said. ‘Twins who grow up separated, marry the same kind of woman, have the same tastes, wear the same clothes.’ Joseph thought about Radka. George looked round and grinned. ‘Your wife. I think she looks like Radka.’

  Joseph hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but once he did he had to concede that there was a resemblance.

  ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘She didn’t.’

  George laughed as if he’d said something funny.

  ‘I think so. You love Pushkin, I love Shakespeare. You love Shakespeare, I love Pushkin. I know this.’

  ‘We’re not twins,’ Joseph told him.

  ‘We’re brothers,’ George shouted.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Joseph said, but in spite of himself he couldn’t help being infected by George’s high spirits.

  ‘I want you to meet someone,’ George said. ‘My cousin Valentin. He’s Russian.’

  Joseph laughed. Suddenly it was as if he had entered a parallel world in which every element was so surreal as to be downright comical.

  ‘You’ve got no idea,’ he told George, ‘how weird all this is.’

  George looked round, a little puzzled.

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘Strange, peculiar, exotic.’ Joseph gestured towards the scene outside. ‘I’m driving through a city which was behind the Iron Curtain till a few years ago, with a brother I’ve only known about for a few hours, and he tells me he’s taking me to meet his Russian cousin. Yesterday I wouldn’t have dreamt that this would happen. It’s weird.’

  ‘I think it’s weird too, finding you.’

  Joseph shook his h
ead vigorously.

  ‘That’s not what I mean. None of this would have surprised me much if it had been the USA or South America. Anywhere except Eastern Europe. These are places where you expect to find black people. We’re part of the culture, we helped to shape it, we’re part of what it is. It seems natural somehow to be there. Out here it’s as white as a bowl of milk. That’s the way it’s always been. You can’t imagine how black people can live and grow here. That’s what European means. White people.’ He looked at George’s profile, wondering whether he understood. ‘Being here was interesting, but nothing else. Just another country, until you showed up. Now I’ve got relations who belong here, but there’s no way I can feel that someone like me is part of all this. That’s what makes it weird.’

  A few seconds of silence in the car. They stopped at a traffic light and a clatter of American voices came through the window as a trio of backpackers crossed in front of them, heading for the bright lights of the McDonald’s opposite. Across the street Joseph saw a group of men he recognised as having been at the showing of his film that morning. They were conversing animatedly as they walked along and he wondered whether they were talking about the film. At the same time it struck him that during the entire evening he hadn’t thought about the reason why he was here in Prague. At any other time his mind would have been occupied with selling the rights or hooking up with a distributor in some new part of the world.

  ‘America,’ George muttered. ‘I don’t like Americans.’

  ‘Have you met any Americans?’ Joseph asked him.

  George caught the sarcastic note in his voice and gave him a quick glance.

  ‘I’ve met plenty,’ he said. ‘My work used to be renting cars at the airport. Because I spoke English.’ He paused. ‘At school my passion was English. I had an idea that when I met my father we would speak in English.’ He sounded amused, but there was an undertone to his voice which made Joseph suspect that there was nothing amusing about the memory. ‘Most of the customers were Americans. Some were okay, but mostly they treated you like shit on their shoe. The blacks are bad, too. They call you brother but then the way they act is the same as the whites. They can’t believe that there are black men who don’t speak the same kind of English. Like them.’ He grimaced, his face arranging itself into a caricature, jaw dropping open, eyes rolling. ‘Hey man,’ he drawled. ‘How come you talk like a German?’