A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘so happy that you found your brother.’

  She hadn’t shown any surprise or scepticism so far. If he had told this story to one of his English friends, he thought, they would probably have seen it as a kind of freakish coincidence – believe it or not, he could imagine someone saying. In comparison, Lena came from a landscape in whose history many families had separated and come together again.

  ‘So happy,’ she said again.

  Her cheeks glowed pink and there were tears in her eyes. For a moment he wondered whether his story had triggered some terrible memory, then it struck him that she had taken it as evidence that she was his confidante, someone to whom he could tell his deepest secrets.

  ‘Your father,’ she said. ‘What does he think?’

  She had never met Kofi, and, for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on, Joseph wanted to avoid telling her about how his father had reacted. He shrugged. Sensing a slight change in his mood she got up, lay beside him on the sofa and began to kiss him, with a gentle, teasing touch. He returned her kisses, pulling her closer, and she rolled over on top of him. This was the familiar prelude. The kissing would become longer and more intense. Soon they would touch each other, her hands sliding the skirt down over the smoothness of her thighs. Eventually they would get up, his fingers still entangled in her body, and shuffle to the bedroom. Typically, this was the way they almost always spent the first evening of her visit. This time, however, Joseph knew, something was different. Although he’d been, from time to time, bored or uneasy about the prospect of sex with Lena, when it came right down to it his body usually took over, his arousal would conquer his doubts, his thoughts focusing on the sensual pleasure of touching her, the blood pumping faster through his veins as she moved against him.

  This evening, his reactions seemed to have changed. Her weight on his body brought no response, and instead of reaching down to fondle her thighs, he merely lay back, his hand trailing on the floor, his muscles passive and indifferent.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Lena asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘I understand,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You have things on your mind.’

  She slid off him, sat down on the floor again and began stroking him gently. He lay back and closed his eyes as she traced the outline of his supine penis with her fingers, then tugged at the zipper on his trousers. Thoughts of Radka floated through his head as she stroked him into erection and he felt the first soft touch of her lips, but almost immediately he suppressed them, deliberately bringing up the image of the Roma woman Milena. Perhaps, he thought, it would have been like this with Milena. As for Radka, it would have been different between them. Somehow his imagination wouldn’t go beyond taking her in his arms and kissing her. When they said goodbye in the car by the side of the street in Zizkov, she had pressed close to him, and her mouth had lingered on his cheek. It was Milena who had gripped his genitals and looked into his eyes.

  He was close to orgasm when the doorbell rang. His instinct was to ignore it, but it rang again, two long insistent bursts, and Lena pulled away from him. He looked up and she gave him an enquiring look.

  ‘I’ll just see who it is,’ he muttered.

  Kofi was standing on the doorstep.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You were sleeping.’

  ‘No,’ Joseph told him. ‘Come in.’

  Kofi came through the door, moving cautiously, like an animal scenting a trap. Lena had scampered up the stairs as Joseph went to the door, but his father spotted the signs of her presence immediately, half-empty glasses, her shoes tumbled into a corner, the smell of perfume. He grinned at Joseph.

  ‘You have a visitor. I came too late.’

  ‘It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.’

  Kofi sat down, refusing Joseph’s offer of a drink. He was thinking about how to begin, but before he could open his mouth Lena came back into the room. She had changed into a long black dress and looking at her through his father’s eyes Joseph saw, as if in the days when they first met, how attractive she was.

  After she shook hands with Kofi she offered to make him some coffee and he accepted immediately.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want any,’ Joseph reminded him.

  ‘Ah,’ Kofi exclaimed, beaming. ‘When such a beautiful girl offers you refreshment you should never refuse.’

  Joseph shook his head, laughing, but Lena made a triumphant face at him before marching off to the kitchen.

  ‘I think I’ll go to Germany,’ Kofi said abruptly.

  TWELVE

  He had made the decision during the course of the day. After Joseph left him at lunchtime he’d continued sitting on the sofa. He was thinking about Katya, but, actually, a stream of images kept on pouring through his mind, some of which were connected with her, some of them not. The University Tower at Leninsky Gory kept on recurring, the red spark like a star in the night sky. He remembered, too, walking along the banks of the Moskva, staring up at the group of statues on top of the Kotelnicheskaya building, his head rearing back on his shoulders as if he was nursing a bleeding nose. In the metro approaching Lubyanka he had seen a woman, hair cropped short, but so light and glossy that it shone like a beacon in the artificial light. Her profile, flawless, a pale smooth skin, from which gleamed a bright blue eye. She had sensed him watching her, and she had turned a little towards him and smiled. If his Russian had been better he would have spoken to her, but in a couple of seconds the train pulled into the station and she had gone for ever. Looking at the photos of Katya with George in Germany he wondered whether the woman in the metro had survived and, if she had, whether she bore any resemblance now to the vision he had seen that day.

  He must have sat motionless for a couple of hours, but eventually, he got up and went to the telephone. He dialled the number on the top of the letter he’d received, and as he did so, his heart seemed to thump and twitch unpleasantly. When the ringing suddenly stopped and Katya’s voice answered, the ground lurched and if he had not been holding on to the back of the sofa he would have fallen. As it was he couldn’t speak, and moving as if in a dream he lowered the receiver and put it carefully back in its cradle. Without sitting down again he went to put his overcoat on and left the house. At the library he realised that he was too agitated to work on his journal, so he gathered together a pile of novels he had read before, some of them more than two or three times. At last he settled on War and Peace, unable to begin at the beginning, but then forcing himself into concentration as he read about the march on Moscow, seeing in his mind the monument to Prince Bagration on the hill near the museum at Borodino. As they walked up the slope Katya, in a mournful voice, told him how many men had died there. The sun was shining, but as he listened to her, a chill seemed to settle in the air. ‘We walk on their bones,’ she said.

  When the library closed he was still reading. At first he began walking back home, but his feet carried him to a pub on the corner, where he stood for a while nursing half a pint of lager. In normal circumstances the look of the place or the buzz of conversation would have been part of a background which he saw and heard without taking notice, but on this occasion he had found himself paying attention, listening to the words and gauging the quality of the sounds as if they were somehow important to him. Opposite where he stood, on the other side of the bar, a young couple sat, facing each other, their heads close together. On another day his eye would have passed over them, dismissing the pair as possessing no interest or distinction. The woman’s hair was a mousy brown straggle, her profile thin-lipped and beaky. Her companion, whose gaze seemed always to be fixed on her eyes, was an exact male equivalent. Nothing special. As Kofi watched, he saw that their hands were clasped together on top of the table. This was a case of love, Kofi guessed, and he wondered whether he and Katya had looked like this in their time, obviously wrapped up in each other, and transported by the unpredictable surging of vagrant emotions. Of c
ourse, in public, he had never held her hand like this. That would have been foolish. Their intention, when they walked together in the city, was to look like teacher and student, Katya gravely reciting facts and figures or brief sketches of history while she pointed to various features of the buildings they passed. In the Central Market they walked closer together, and he ran his fingers along the back of her hand, or squeezed the crook of her elbow. Feeling his touch she would turn and smile. This was one of the places where they felt at ease. The traders were swarthy, leather-skinned brown people, or dark-eyed women, bulky in layers of padded cloth and trailing scarves, sometimes a family scurrying like ants round a stall piled with vegetables. Pushing through the fringe of women, while Kofi lingered, his eyes fixed on the smooth fall of her hair, Katya handled and squeezed peppers from Georgia, tomatoes from Kazakhstan, potatoes from the Ukraine. She stroked squashes and peered at jars of pickled fish and interrogated prices. When she looked back at him over her shoulder, her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were pink with pleasure.

  Remembering this, Kofi felt a sudden catch in his breath, a spasm which was physically insignificant but, in his mind, seemed unexpected and dislocating, as shocking as the tremor of an earthquake, the ground threatening to slide away from under his feet. It was an effect which disturbed him without being astonishing because, before this event, he had viewed his life as a series of distinct and separate periods, each one of which he had left behind him, discarding it like the old skin of a moulting snake.

  He had been born in Accra and spent his early life there. Then he had been incarcerated in the hold of a ship floating through the formless ocean. Then he had been Makonnen’s apprentice, and later on a student. Then he became a diplomat, and after that a man who drifted, more or less, without a struggle into the contemplation of old age. These layers in his life had their existence in different countries, or in environments which were isolated from each other by moments of oblivion. In every one of these periods he had been associated with one or another person who, for a time, had been everything to him but who had eventually disappeared, to be replaced by another. Sometimes when he encountered someone who had always lived in the same town or village, Kofi had a sensation of disbelief about the fact that their lives had been so static and unchanging. In fact the barriers of space and time between his present existence and his other lives gave him a feeling of safety and reassurance. On some occasions hearing a snatch of music or becoming aware of a scent, he would be thrown into a pool of memory in which he would float for a few minutes, halfway between sorrow and nostalgia. These incursions were like a breach in the stoicism which had become a necessary and inevitable part of his survival, and he would note them with a cautious interest, while he waited for the wound to heal.

  On the other hand, since talking to Joseph that day, and since viewing the photographs of his son George, Kofi had been shaken and tormented by storms of unaccustomed emotion. Oddly enough, although these cataclysms were triggered by thoughts of Katya and by the sound of her voice, he knew that she wasn’t their focus. He had long ago accommodated his separation from her, and now his recollections of that time were merely an alluvial sediment, a dark sludge of regret which weighed down his heart but which had no significance for the way that he lived. What he felt about George was entirely different. Looking at the photographs he had experienced a strange burst of hope and brightness. Although he was looking at the picture of a grown man, older than Joseph, it was as if this son had just been born, a tiny and vulnerable infant with the power to change his life.

  In an instant he knew what he had to do, and as if triggered by the turmoil inside him, he put his glass down and walked out of the pub, then across the road into the tube station.

  He reached Joseph’s house without being entirely conscious of getting there, or what he had seen along the way. He had made his decision before leaving the pub, but faced with his son’s incredulous expression, he found it next to impossible to describe the train of thought which had led him to it, or to defend what he wanted to do in the rational way that he knew Joseph would expect.

  ‘What’s brought this on?’ Joseph asked. As he spoke he watched his father with narrowed eyes. Kofi guessed he was casting about in his mind for arguments which would make his disapproval sound reasonable and dispassionate.

  ‘I telephoned,’ Kofi said. ‘I telephoned and I heard her voice.’ He looked over at the kitchen where the sound of cups rattling seemed to be announcing Lena’s return. A brief pause, then he lowered his voice and spoke with a rapid urgency, as if he wanted to get the words out before he had to stop. ‘I thought I’d forgotten all of it. Even when you told me about George I wasn’t too worried because I’ll probably see him sooner or later, but there’re other things that happened that I must know about. I have to see her and talk to her. I can’t leave it like this.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it,’ Joseph said quickly.

  Seeing the expression of concern on Joseph’s face, Kofi wondered whether he was thinking of George as a rival. If that was so, trying to reassure him might make things worse, but the truth was that although he loved Joseph, he was often uncertain of what he was thinking or how he would react. As a child Kofi had thought of his parents’ role in his life as part of the structure of the world, predestined and unalterable as the sun rising. During that time he had hardly seen his father, and knew practically nothing about him. If he had it would have made very little difference, certainly not to his father, who, in any case, took his respect and submission for granted. In contrast Joseph had grown up in a world where the status of their relationship was conditional, subject to sudden reversals and dependent on the movement of unpredictable emotions. For years Kofi had struggled with the perception that Joseph, schooled by his mother, didn’t know how to be a son. Meanwhile he suspected that Joseph believed that his father had no idea how to be a real parent, and whatever happened between them there would always be something missing. This was one of the reasons he now found it so difficult to say anything about the emotions stirred up by the sight of George’s photograph. In some hidden recess of his heart he hoped that when he met George, they would be father and son.

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he told Joseph. ‘I’m going to see her. I can’t leave it like this.’

  THIRTEEN

  DIARY OF DESIRE

  The life and times of Kofi George Coker

  Moscow 1957

  In the depth of winter we went north to Kalinin where Valery said we could see the Volga, or if we were lucky, walk on its frozen surface. That never happened. The train journey was fine. We left early from the station where the trains set off for Novgorod and Leningrad, and within a few minutes we were passing through a landscape which looked like a fairy tale in a library book. All around the line the banks of snow stood up higher than our heads; beyond them a forest of black pillars topped with branches of dark green, all buried under a coating of white. Sometimes through a gap in the trees I could see the white fields stretching away into the distance. Sometimes we stopped while they cleared some obstruction along the line, and the only sound to be heard was the voices of the railway people shouting to each other, or strange music of metal striking frozen metal, or somewhere in the forest a muffled crash of falling snow.

  The purpose was to walk in the forest; later on, on the way back we could see the town, he said, but we never did that, either. Instead we got lost. Valery had borrowed a pair of skis for me, but although he had given me a few lessons out on the hills I found it nearly an intolerable task trudging along behind him among the trees, my lungs bursting, my feet frozen, my legs close to collapse. Within a couple of hours we were lost, turning backwards and forwards in the middle of the silent trees. He said there were no wolves but as the sky darkened I had the feeling I could hear the padding of feet around us. My lips were too stiff to open and I had to speak through my teeth. If I survive this, I told him, never again. Some time in the afternoon, we came to a stretch where the tree
s grew thinner. It was snowing again, the flakes of white whirling around our heads, covering us with white powder. Through the white mist we saw a snowman working, digging in the snow, behind the vague outline of a clump of huts. When he saw us he straightened up slowly, shedding a shower of white as he moved, and we saw that he was real. I suppose we were covered in snow ourselves, and we must have looked like spirits emerging from the woods, because he stared at us as if he was seeing ghosts. Valery spoke with him and he laughed, shook our hands and led us into the nearest izba, their name for the cabins in which they lived.

  Inside it seemed like one large room, although when I got my senses back I saw that there was a curtain covering the entrance to another room, and towards the back a door which led to some kind of stable. There was a stove in the middle of the wooden floor around which the family sat, a woman nursing a baby and three children, the eldest about ten. They put our coats into a heap in the corner and brought us stools on which to sit. They seemed friendly, and once the ice was broken the children gathered round us, touching our clothes and asking questions. Valery talked without stopping. I couldn’t understand much of what he said, but mostly it was about me. The peasant had a beard which gave him a wild, strange look, but he sat opposite us and talked as if we were ordinary visitors who had dropped in for the evening. We were on a collective farm somewhere between Kalinin and Klin, he told us, and we couldn’t get to either place in time to catch the train for Moscow. We would have to stay until the morning. ‘Where do we sleep?’ I asked Valery. ‘In the corner,’ he told me, giving a look which warned me to shut up. ‘This is how the peasants live.’ At the time it struck me that the prospect pleased him.

  We ate soup which the wife ladled out of the pot. We had eaten the kolbasa and black bread we brought for the trip on the train and now I was starving hungry. It was some kind of cabbage soup as far as I can remember, with mushrooms and dumplings floating in it. I didn’t ask what was in them. It wasn’t meat, a fact for which I was grateful. Since my time on the boats, when they fed the crews whatever they could find, I always feared eating meat that I couldn’t recognise.