A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘Dad,’ Joseph called out, ‘Dad!’

  He got up and hurried round the table. Before he could do more than touch his father on the shoulder, Kofi sat up and began taking deep breaths, his face buried in his cupped hands. Then he looked up at Joseph. Part of his anger, he realised, had been to do with the fact that this news had been brought to him by Joseph, whose feelings for him seemed so ambiguous and difficult.

  ‘I’m going home now,’ he said, forcing himself to sound calm. ‘We can talk there.’

  They walked back to Kofi’s flat in silence. When they crossed the road he stumbled a little over the kerb, and Joseph took his arm. It was the first time he had ever done that, Kofi realised, trying to collect his thoughts. From the moment he recognised Katya’s handwriting on the envelope it was as if his whirling brain had leapt from his head, and was now floating independently, frantic and bewildered, as his body went through its routine and automatic operations. In this eddy of confusion the feel of his son’s firm grip steadied him and gave him a sense of comfort.

  Back in the flat Kofi sat on the sofa staring into space, while Joseph hurried to make a cup of tea. This was another thing, Kofi thought, that he seemed to be doing for the first time.

  ‘You okay, Dad?’

  Kofi gave him a reassuring smile without speaking. At that moment he felt that there was nothing to say. The problem was that he had forgotten the details of those forty-year-old events. He remembered Katya, of course, and he remembered the waves of emotional turbulence on which he seemed to be riding as the bus trundled down Leninsky Prospekt on the way to the airport. He knew also how much he had wanted Katya as the plane lifted into the sky, and how hard it had been, for the first few months, to bear their separation. But over the years he had come to think of her in much the same way as he thought of his dead parents, as if they had somehow been relocated in another distant and unreal world in which he had once travelled. The events which linked them together seemed to him to have happened to another person in that other universe, and the memories rushing through his brain were now a spectacle in front of which he was an onlooker, moved only by a feeling of curiosity about the motives and identity of the figures parading in procession. At the same time he felt himself being racked by uncontrollable eddies of emotion which seemed to come from nowhere.

  ‘Aren’t you going to read the letter?’

  They had been sitting in silence, Kofi realised, for several minutes, maybe as long as a quarter of an hour, while he was struggling to contain his thoughts. He gestured at Joseph.

  ‘Open it.’

  Joseph tore open the top of the envelope neatly and gave it to him. Inside was a single sheet of paper folded round half a dozen photographs.

  ‘It’s in English,’ he said.

  The remark puzzled Kofi, until he remembered that Joseph must know little or nothing about Katya.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. His voice was still croaking. ‘She spoke it well. She taught languages. I learnt Russian from her. You knew I spoke it.’

  He spoke the language badly, but he had boasted of it to Joseph and tried to teach him some of the words. The boy should have remembered, but Kofi had the suspicion that, influenced by his mother’s attitude, Joseph had been dubious about the truth of everything his father said. The thought seemed to stir the turbulence inside him but, struggling for control, he put the matter out of his mind and began looking at the photos one by one, laying them down beside him for Joseph to reach. They were recent photographs, almost all apparently taken on one occasion, and featuring all four members of his new family, individually and in groups. Serge smiled into the camera, flanked by Radka and George. Close up Katya was still pretty, her white hair curling round her face, her eyes wide and level, the line of her mouth looping in a lopsided smile.

  Kofi found himself holding on to one of the photographs, studying it carefully, as if trying to commit it to memory. It was different from the others, black and white, and when he eventually laid it aside, Joseph snatched it up, impatient to see what had made him linger. It was older, taken by a different camera. Katya, more than thirty years younger, but recognisably the same woman, was standing in a street. She was wearing a long black coat, but it was hanging open, her light hair blowing around her face. Beside her, holding her hand, was a small boy, who, for one heart-stopping instant, seemed to be Joseph. The resemblance was remarkable, Kofi thought, and it would have been easy to imagine that the two boys had the same mother. In a moment Joseph got up and, holding the photograph in his hand, walked over to Kofi’s little collection of photographs on the wall facing him. He stood there staring at another photograph of himself at the same age, which had been taken at school. From where he was sitting Kofi couldn’t see it, but he knew that it would be hard to locate the difference. Their hair curled in the same way, bristling in a peak over the forehead, and they had the same crooked, almost wry smile, curving their lips.

  ‘This guy really does look like me,’ Joseph said over his shoulder.

  Kofi couldn’t reply. He blinked, trying to clear the tears which had filled his eyes.

  ‘Didn’t you know about any of this?’

  Kofi shook his head, suddenly becoming aware that Joseph couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.

  ‘What does she say?’

  Kofi, still unable to speak, held out the letter to Joseph.

  It had been typed on an electric typewriter, and it was short enough to be taken in almost at a glance.

  Dear Kofi,

  I don’t know what to say to you after all these years. Our time together is almost like part of my childhood, but I still remember it as the most important time of my life. For myself, I have no right to ask anything from you. I can only ask you to forgive me. We did what we had to do. I don’t know what else I could have done, but I can understand it if you hate me. You have a son. I named him George because of your name. He looks like you and he thinks of you. I would like to see you again to explain everything to you if that is possible. I hope that it is.

  Love,

  Katya

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Joseph asked.

  It was obvious that the letter, with its references to forgiveness, puzzled him, but Kofi found himself wishing that he would shut up, at least for a little while, and stop asking questions. He needed to calm the buzzing in his brain, so that he could think. In the instant before he took in the words of the letter he had been gripped by a fear of what she would say about those times and about why she had disappeared. Thinking over what she had written, he was trying to remember the last words that had passed between them.

  ‘Dad,’ Joseph said, trying to claim his attention, his voice urgent as if he thought Kofi might be drifting off to sleep. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kofi told him.

  ‘Come on, Dad.’ A prickle of resentment seemed to surface as Joseph spoke. ‘You never even mentioned any of this to me. All right, you didn’t know about George, but the rest of it, all this about Katya. You never said.’

  ‘I told you about Russia,’ Kofi replied. He could remember that much. In afternoons when they wandered together in the park, or he stood behind Joseph in the playground, pushing the swings, he had talked about his life. ‘Maybe you weren’t listening.’

  It was true, Joseph remembered, and it was true that he hadn’t paid much attention to his father’s tales.

  ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kofi continued. ‘I was a student there in 1956 and I met Katya. We were,’ he hesitated, ‘in love. Then they expelled me. I wasn’t able to speak to her before I left. That’s all.’

  ‘Why were you expelled?’

  Kofi shrugged.

  A lot of reasons, I think. I talked too much to the wrong people. A big dispute in the Students’ Union.’ He hesitated again. ‘I never really knew.’

  ‘If it was nothing to do with her, why is she asking you to forgive her?’

  Kofi shrugged again.

  ‘I�
��m not sure.’ He passed his hands over his face, a gesture of uncertainty.

  Joseph, it was obvious, could hardly restrain his impatience. Just like an Englishman, Kofi thought, he imagined that the truth was a network of concrete facts and he could find it out simply by asking.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Kofi said. Suddenly he was too tired to work out what Joseph wanted to know. To tell everything would take a long time, and in any case the motives at which Katya had hinted in her letter were still hidden from him. ‘I don’t even remember all of it. I don’t know if I want to remember.’

  ‘What about George?’ Joseph asked him.

  George. In the photograph the boy’s eyes had been wide open, giving his face a curious melancholy expression, or perhaps that was merely a reflection of his own emotions.

  ‘That’s different.’

  He was thinking of the time when Joseph had been small enough to hold in the palm of his hand, his head safely resting against Kofi’s biceps, the same eyes looking up.

  ‘Did my mum know about Katya?’

  Kofi grinned, suddenly amused. Joseph’s mother, Caroline, liked to think of herself as a rebellious spirit, which, he supposed, was one of the reasons their relationship had flowered at the beginning. At heart she was a slave to the romantic conventions with which she had grown up; Cupid’s arrow, roses in June and all the rest of it. The fact that her knight rode into her life on a black charger had merely been a minor local difficulty. If she had known the true state of his feelings about Katya, she would have been devastated, and she would have made his life a misery, even in those early days when she said that all she ever wanted was to be with him. The irony was that he had told her a great deal about Katya, but the way he’d done it transformed the story into a romantic tale in which he was the wounded hero awaiting the healing balm of a woman’s love. It had been an invaluable recipe for getting her into bed quickly. Now it struck him that while he had been calculating the effect that his portrait of Russian life would have on Caroline, Katya had been nursing George, wondering, perhaps, where his father was and whether she would ever see him again.

  ‘I don’t think she understood my life before I met her,’ he told Joseph.

  In his mind a series of pictures flickered, and even though he had just seen the photographs of Katya as an older woman, the images passing through his head showed her as she had been forty years earlier, her hair glinting red and gold in the sun, her booted feet striding towards him. This time, however, his imagination brought her to him as a mother, carrying the baby, his son George, as she stood in a patient queue, or sat swaying on a metro train, or trudged ankle deep through the greying slush of the streets. These were a version of the thoughts, which, when he arrived back in England, he had constantly rehearsed in his mind. Do you love me? Caroline used to ask, while he lay silent, bathed in sad, sweet memories.

  ‘Why don’t you come and stay with me for a few days, Dad?’

  Kofi looked up in surprise. This, too, was the first time Joseph had spoken to him in such gentle tones, and it was the first time he had issued such an invitation. He had visited the house where he had lived with the boy’s mother, of course, but these had been stilted occasions which both of them were usually glad to end. The problem was his sense of Caroline’s presence in the place, which her death had done little to dispel. ‘I don’t want you to set foot in this house again,’ was one of the last things she’d said to him just before he left. ‘You can count on that,’ he had replied with the recklessness of anger. Afterwards he could never feel at ease about accepting her hospitality, even when it came vicariously through his son.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he told Joseph, ‘not right now.’ He looked up, met his son’s eyes and saw a shadow of his own pain. ‘Thank you for asking.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’m going to rest for a while and think things over.’ He knew very well that this wasn’t the answer that Joseph was seeking, but some demon of perversity urged evasion.

  ‘Okay,’ Joseph said. ‘I’ll go now and let you get some rest. I’ll come back later.’

  At the door he looked round at Kofi, who was still sitting slumped in the corner of the sofa, the letter and photographs lying scattered beside him.

  ‘What will you do about all this?’ he asked again.

  Kofi didn’t move or speak for a few seconds. The truth was that the idea of doing anything had not yet entered his mind. All he wanted at that moment was to sit and nurse his thoughts, somehow to reassemble the self which felt as though it was floating in fragments around him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told Joseph, the words emerging in a reluctant mutter. ‘I have to think, but right now I don’t know.’

  TEN

  DIARY OF DESIRE

  The life and times of Kofi George Coker

  Moscow 1957

  When I arrived in Moscow I knew practically nothing about the people and their way of life. I learnt something new every day, but when I left I knew very little more than I had at the beginning. Nowadays friends and acquaintances who know something of my former life ask me questions about the place, and most of the time I have to restrain myself from replying with sarcasm or rudeness, because they speak in the way that so many people do now, as if there was some great surprise about the fact that the standards and attitudes of our present day do not apply to the past. They ask, for example, questions like – how did the ordinary people live? Didn’t you meet any ordinary people? How did they treat you? I don’t know, I tell them, and I get that look of surprise, before I can summon up the patience to explain. Try to remember, I tell them, that Russia was a totalitarian state, and this was forty years ago. During my time there I don’t think I had any clear idea of what an ‘ordinary’ person was. We students lived in a kind of bubble outlined by our colour, our strangeness and our awkwardness with the language. The officials, teachers and other colleagues who we routinely encountered all had a position in the Party and a responsibility for our indoctrination, or for keeping us isolated from anything they considered undesirable – a concept which covered a lot of ground. The people of the city, we also discovered, were discouraged from contact with foreigners like ourselves, and anyone to whom we spoke might have been an agent reporting our words and actions to another authority. The exceptions were tricksters, whores, women on the lookout for adventure, subversives and economic hooligans eager to barter for the goods we could bring in, and even those would probably have been willing to act as instruments for our entrapment. In the circumstances our behaviour was intended to be circumspect and discreet. But the spirits of young men are like water, and they usually find a way to flow, even through barriers of granite. In any case, it took some time before I began to understand the limits of my existence in Moscow.

  The autumn lasted just long enough for my life to settle down into a routine. Winter came on swiftly, the days becoming shorter and the light fading under the dull grey sky which pressed closer and closer to the domes with every hour that passed. During this time we explored the city. My favourite companions were Valery and Hussein. Both of them had been in Moscow for more than a year, but they seemed to take pleasure in showing me around. Hussein was a slim, elegant man, with smooth Indian hair and a beaky Arabic profile, an economist who had studied at Harvard and the LSE, and was now writing a thesis about Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands programme. This was already two years after Khrushchev had upstaged Malenkov with his dramatic proposal to expand the country’s grain growing capacity into an enormous belt of undeveloped territory stretching through the south west, Kazakhstan and Western Siberia. It was all part of a master plan, Hussein said, in which we were a curlicue, a decoration in an elaborate baroque structure. Of course, Khrushchev wanted us in the country because he hoped for more than that. He believed, Hussein said, that the Africans and Asians who came here would turn out to be the cornerstones of a widespread challenge, worms eating away at the rotten heart of the Western empires. Centuries ago, he told m
e, Western Europe had outstripped its eastern neighbours by looting the riches of Africa and Asia, while creating new markets in the American continent. ‘The Russians think there is a way to do the same now, but they really can’t afford it,’ Hussein said. He laughed. ‘The thing is that no one has yet told Khrushchev the price.’

  He reminded me of Padmore, witty, cynical and with no inhibitions about showing his contempt for most of the students. His family was mostly Arabic, he explained on the first day that we walked together through the university, and his mother had been a slave from Somalia, but his father was the last of a long line of wazirs. During the days of the Sultanate on the Spice Coast, they had sat on the sultan’s right hand advising him on how to run the kingdom and most of the time doing it themselves. The rule of the British was only an episode, and no one knew quite what would happen next, but it would depend, as ever, on the manipulation of political power, and political power was his heritage. He grinned when he said this, as though he was enjoying a great joke, but something in his voice told me that he meant what he was saying.

  When I said that he reminded me of Padmore he gave me a sharp, sidelong look. ‘You know Padmore?’

  I told him then about how I’d met Osageyfo and his friends in Manchester, and he drew in his breath with surprise. ‘I’ll have to stick with you,’ he said, laughing, ‘you know some big men.’

  After this he pressed me to tell him more about the conference, about Osageyfo, Padmore and Kenyatta. He was especially interested in Kenyatta, and if I had been longer in Moscow I’d have been suspicious enough to shut up, but at that time I was happy to talk. Even in the short time I’d been there I had begun to feel anonymous, a castaway adrift in a spinning world about which I knew nothing. Talking about those events gave me back my identity at least for a while.