If I had not already been so crazy about Katya I would have stayed in the hostel all day, and to hell with the regulations. Instead I wrapped myself up and set out on what was now the long trek to the university. I would have walked through the fires of hell for that girl, although on that morning, ploughing waist deep through the snow was almost as terrible.
ELEVEN
Joseph was in no doubt that the events which occurred in Prague had been the most important of his life. It wasn’t simply that he had discovered a brother about whose existence he had been unaware. It wasn’t, either, the fact that his father seemed to be a different and more considerable person than he had previously imagined. What troubled him more than any of these things was the sense that his meeting with George had been the first step on an escalator of events whose speed or direction he had no hope of controlling.
After seeing Kofi that morning he had been plagued by another emotion, whose source he had no difficulty in locating because it was connected with one event which was still clear in his mind. This was the time, long ago, when he was still borrowing his mum’s car and driving round London with all the unfettered exuberance of a seventeen-year-old with a new driving licence in his pocket. One evening he’d turned a corner at speed, and banged into a small grey cat. Alarmed at the impact and by its high-pitched screams, he’d stopped and got out just in time to see the animal’s legs kick frantically, then stiffen and lie still. As he watched it heave the last breath, he felt a wave of grief and terror, which he knew even then was not for the cat. Instead, it was to do with the feeling that he had committed a final act, one which could never be called back or altered, and as a result his world would never again be the same. There was a similar shadow across Joseph’s nerves during the day after he returned from Prague, and his meeting with his father had merely intensified the feeling of gloom which dominated his emotions.
His mood was complicated by the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about Radka. He felt guilty about doing so, because his thoughts of her were dominated by the urge to touch her, to feel the texture of the strands of hair straying down the side of her face, to hold her against him and feel her heart beating. Sitting in the car next to her he had felt the blood rushing through his veins and mad images ran through his head, her long white fingers stroking his cheek, her body unarmoured, supine and murmurous below him. These were pictures which, from time to time, piqued his imagination in a way that was both thrilling and unpleasant, like the unexpected pain of hot pepper on the tongue. He couldn’t escape his guilt, because, she was, after all, the wife of the man whom he now knew to be his brother. It would have been different, he thought, if they had met in London. If he had known for certain that George was his brother, he told himself, he would never have had these visions. It was the ambiguity of the situation which had shoved the unthinkable into his mind, because he had not been absolutely sure about George until he had come back and spoken to Kofi. He argued like this, trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to answer for, but at the same time he understood that he was merely making excuses.
Halfway through the afternoon he decided to obey one of his mother’s axioms: confront the problem. Why was it that Radka had attracted him so strongly, and why was it that he continued to think about her? First was the fact that she had the kind of looks which had always attracted him; blonde hair, regular even features, not unlike his mother. She was also tall, slender with an impression of strength about her hips, reinforced by a coiling of the long muscles which ran down her thighs. But that wasn’t enough. He had met women with the same kind of looks before. None of them, however, had her mystery or enigmatic presence. But that too was an illusion which reflected the fact that he knew hardly anything about her. Perhaps the truth was that the situation in which they had had their first encounter was the key. When he thought of her it was against a background of the city’s medieval atmosphere, its tenebrous subtlety, its spires and the unexpected hollows which revealed themselves at every turn. At the end of a long journey, he had gone to her through a forest, climbed a winding staircase, and seen her face framed within the slate of ancient rooftops. She was his sleeping princess, and he saw her dreaming, her eyes closed, the long fair lashes tremulous, before the sheer foolishness of the vision struck him. For the first time that day he laughed out loud, amused at the effortless speed with which he had drifted into fantasy. Immediately, though, another more disturbing fancy arrived. George was the monster who possessed her, but perhaps the spark of jealousy which glowed inside him from the moment he knew the truth was something to do with how brothers felt about each other.
This idea added to Joseph’s confusion. Hoping to hear something, anything, which might dispel the fog, he telephoned Kofi’s flat a few times during the course of the afternoon, but there was no answer. He prowled restlessly up and down the house, unable to begin the task of re-inserting himself into the routine of his own life. Usually he would have been answering the letters and messages which had been piling up while he was away, or ringing round the TV companies to arrange freelance shifts editing film or videotape. Instead, when he could put Radka and George out of his mind, he kept thinking about the way Kofi had almost collapsed in the café. Up to that point he had thought of his father as someone who, in spite of his previous illnesses, looked irritatingly healthy. He actually showed few signs of ageing, except for the receding hairline and the dusting of grey which had crept over the tuft of beard on his chin. For Joseph it had been almost the biggest shock of the week to see Kofi slumped in his chair, his jaw slack, his eyes staring blindly into space.
After his fifth or sixth attempt to reach Kofi on the telephone he lost patience. It was already evening and the traffic was thinning out as he drove through Euston Road and Marylebone towards Paddington. The windows of his father’s flat were dark, and he could hear the bell ringing with the desolate echo which told him there would be no answer. Frustrated, he gave up, then walked the nearest streets, looking into half a dozen pubs around Ladbroke Grove, but Kofi was nowhere to be seen. Eventually he gave up and drove back home.
Lena was waiting on the doorstep, and seeing her there Joseph felt the familiar mixture of guilt and irritation. She was carrying a bag, which meant she was planning to stay for the night, or for as long as he would let her.
‘I left you a message,’ she said, ‘but you didn’t reply, so I came anyway.’
He should have guessed, he thought, that there would be a message from Lena, and his only chance of heading her off would have been to telephone and tell her clearly that he didn’t want to see her. The problem was that for almost a year he had failed to be honest with her, and she had exploited his lack of resolution to maintain the appearance of intimacy in a relationship which had long ago, on his side at least, grown mechanical and dispassionate.
He had met Lena when he went to talk about film and video editing at a weekend school in Bradford. This was close to the refugee camp where she had lived when she first arrived in Britain, but Joseph didn’t know this until later.
He’d been aware of her right away, but at the time his mood was one of mild depression about the ideas of the students and the work he was seeing. There were about a dozen of them, all eager to make films or produce television programmes. His job was to teach them the techniques an editor employed in order to assemble a narrative from a series of images, and the tricks he used to create dramatic and emotional effects. Usually Joseph enjoyed showing off his skills, but on this occasion he found himself increasingly irritated by the fact that the ideas in their scripts and videos largely seemed to be secondhand versions of the stock clichés from the glossy magazines and downmarket TV chat shows. He spent most of the first day of the course discussing stories about New Age transcendentalism, about the threat of chemicals to the ecology, and about the role of women in the pop music industry. Some time in the late afternoon he put yet another cassette in the machine, started it with a feeling of weary resignation, and was riveted by a
ten-minute video which consisted merely of a young woman addressing the camera. She was talking about her reaction on hearing the news that one of her relatives had been shot in Sarajevo. Occasionally her eyes filled with tears, but the impression Joseph received was that she had no interest in the gimmicks and theatricality which had characterised the other productions. Turning round to look at the woman who was sitting next to him, he realised that the director had been her own subject.
She was tall, a bit awkward in her movements, with beautifully glossy brown hair cut short over the nape of her neck. She was wearing a black sweater and a short tight denim skirt with a zip which opened a couple of inches at the hem as if designed to call attention to her bare thighs. At the end of the day he went for a drink with a group of the students and found himself, after closing time, in a little Kashmiri restaurant alone with Lena. She came from Sarajevo, she told him. Her father was a Croatian, her mother a Muslim, and they had escaped before the worst of the fighting had destroyed the city. When the Serbs arrived they had moved to the cellar of their building where they lived for the next six months, eventually leaving in a convoy with her brother, while her parents stayed behind. In the countryside they were halted for three days while the Serb militia moved through the vehicles, dragging away the young men to be shot and the young women to be raped. All day and all night they lay, clinging to each other, listening to the sound of gunfire and screams in the night. She and her brother had been lucky. They had discussed what to do beforehand, and under the eyes of the Serbs they pretended to be simpletons, drooling and spitting, grunting and moaning incomprehensible words. Crouched by the roadside, they had watched men being shot in the head, collapsing as if under their own weight, and even while their tears flowed they had maintained the pretence, grinning and grimacing and waving their hands in spastic gestures, gibbering like mad people. Remembering it, her face screwed up in a grimace of pain.
‘Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked if we’d been there longer, but after three days the UN took us through.’
They had ended up on the Croatian coast in a centre for refugees, from where they’d gone to Britain and another centre in Yorkshire. The rest of the family had been lucky, and although two of her uncles had been killed, her parents had survived, arriving in Britain two years later. It had taken her almost four years, she said, to reach the standard in English which would allow her to begin studying for the GCSE examinations, repeating the work she had already done before being forced to leave.
Joseph was as touched as he had ever been by her story, her moist brown eyes, and by the warmth of the rapport between them. Perhaps it was the fact that at her age, no more than twenty-one, she had seen and suffered so much. In the hour past midnight they went back to his hotel, and lying on the narrow bed, she showed him the shrapnel scars on her thigh and described the moment, outside the apartment block where she lived in Sarajevo, when she had felt the bomb which wounded her explode. She had been conscious all the time, and stretched on the ground she had felt a warm gob of flesh and blood splattering on to her neck.
‘I was so lucky,’ she said, her eyes staring, wide and fixed at the wall, ‘so lucky.’
It was only a few days later that she telephoned him to say that she was coming down to London for the weekend. He had hesitated, half regretting the night they had spent together. Since separating from Liz he’d slept with a number of women, some of them for a period of several months. They had all been, he thought, essentially like himself, footloose and independent, people whose need for him was tentative and occasional. With the relationships which lasted longest, at the moment when intimacy became familiar and predictable, he had found himself growing bored and impatient, eager for a taste of new sensations. Oddly enough when this happened the boredom usually turned out to be mutual, the relationship which seemed so stable suddenly revealing itself as a cover for a distance which had never been explored. On these occasions the regret which followed a breakdown would be shot through with relief and a renewed pleasure in being alone. After a while it was as if Joseph’s antennae were leading him unerringly to women who understood what would happen and were somehow prepared for this precise pattern of events.
Lena was different, her desire for him wrapped up with her hopes for the future and her plans for a new beginning. Seeing her now, Joseph felt the familiar prod of guilt. From the time of that first phone call he had known how it would end.
‘How was it in Prague?’ she called out from the kitchen.
She had gone there immediately, as she usually did, exploring the contents of the cupboards and deciding what they should eat that evening. Her visits always began like this, and invariably the entire weekend would be focused around preparing and eating meals. Afterwards she would disappear to the bathroom and emerge, the scents of the bath floating in front of her, half dressed, her long legs enticingly bare, her lips gleaming with fresh paint.
Once upon a time Joseph had anticipated the ritual with pleasure. Now, its predictability irritated him. In any case he didn’t want to talk about Prague, partly because he sensed that if he mentioned his brother’s wife, Lena would subject him to innumerable questions about her. On the other hand, there was nothing else that he wanted to say. What he really wanted was to be alone, to telephone his father over and over again until he answered the phone, or to sit zapping back and forth between the channels on the television.
‘Prague was fine,’ he told Lena.
He heard her footsteps on the tiles and she appeared on the other side of the counter which marked the limit of the kitchen area.
‘You never tell me anything,’ she said.
‘What do you want to know?’
Her forehead creased up and she bit her lip, a familiar indication that she was uncertain or apprehensive about his reaction. He had first seen that look when he told her that he didn’t want her to come every week. This was the point at which, instead of turning up for a day or two at the weekend, she had taken to arriving halfway through the week and staying for several days. Eventually the suspicion grew in Joseph’s mind that this was a prelude to her moving in permanently. The idea of having to share the house in which he had grown up with his mum was surprisingly unpleasant, and after a couple of months he’d had enough. The quarrel which followed had ended with his bellowing at her, and ordering her out. What he didn’t want to think about was the fact that this was a moment which, for both of them, confirmed her status as a victim. When she packed her suitcase and walked out without a word he didn’t try to stop her. Afterwards he felt a kind of freedom. He would have ended up bullying her and worse, he thought. When she telephoned during the next week he had tried to resist making it up, but she was so amenable, so understanding about what had happened that he found himself giving in. Within a fortnight she was back, her visit opening with the declaration that she had only come for a couple of nights. She understood that he needed his space she said, in the phrase she had learnt. That night her eagerness exhausted him, and he woke later after only a couple of hours’ sleep, to find her stroking his erect penis. ‘Come on,’ she muttered, ‘come on.’
After that weekend everything seemed to have returned to normal, but he sensed that she had never forgotten the violence of the mood which had overtaken him. As he approached her shouting, she had cringed, her face screwing up as if in anticipation of a sudden blow. Somehow that moment had imposed a kind of pattern on what happened between them, and when she made a demand he was more and more likely to respond with some kind of challenge. Innocuous as the words were, they both knew that this was what was happening when he answered her question about his trip with a question of his own.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning away from the counter.
Hearing the sullen note in her voice, he suddenly remembered Radka’s tears as they sat in the car beneath the monument in Zizkov. Did she look like this when George shouted?
‘Hey,’ he called to her, r
elenting. ‘Something happened. It’s hard to talk about.’
She turned back towards him, her smile as eager and artless as a child.
‘Tell me later. After our dinner.’
Later he lay sprawling on the sofa, while she sat on the floor at his feet, her head resting on his leg. It was time for the news, so he switched off the television. He knew by now that her eyes would grow dull and she would hang her head, expecting the inevitable sight of bodies laid out in a row and agonised faces. Once, she told him, she had seen a woman she knew from childhood talking about the torture and rape she had suffered.
‘I met my brother for the first time in Prague,’ he said. She sat up staring at him.
‘Your brother? I thought you had no brothers or sisters.’
‘So did I.’
He told her most of it then. She listened in silence, her eyes wide and glowing. Occasionally she asked him a question. When he mentioned his brother’s wife, she asked how old Radka was and whether she was pretty.
When he was finished, she got up on her knees and hugged him tight.
A Shadow of Myself Page 17