A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

The L-shaped interior of the café was a few steps down from street level, and the lighting gave it the impression of being dappled in shadow. It was too early for a crowd and Liebl was sitting by himself at one of the rectangular tables in the short base of the L. Another shaven-headed blond wearing a T-shirt, and built like a wrestler, was sitting a couple of tables away, between Liebl and the door. Ignoring him, George threaded his way between the tables and sat down on the bench opposite Liebl. The surface in front of the fat man was already covered in food and drink. The menu here contained the staple items to be found all over the country, pork, duck, beef, spinach, beetroot, cabbage, and dumplings made of potatoes or flour, the sort of bland, solid food which could see a farmer through the day. George had been reared on the German equivalent of these dishes and now he found the local cuisine boring and unappetising, but Liebl was chomping his way through the potato dumplings like someone in the middle of a banquet. He lifted his head and grunted an acknowledgement when George sat down, then raised his finger in a signal. The waiter, a skinny boy wearing an apron, arrived almost immediately, but George waved the menu away and told him to bring vodka. Liebl gave a muffled chuckle.

  ‘To drink without eating is unhealthy,’ he said.

  George didn’t bother to reply.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  Liebl smiled. There was a ring of grease round his mouth and a little trickle of brown sauce on his chin. George looked away, only now remembering what a messy eater he had been. Around his plate there was a scattering of crumbled bread, a little pile of sticky bones was growing on a napkin in front of him, and there were splashes of sauce and beer on the surface of the table.

  ‘I want to save your life,’ Liebl announced. ‘You’re dealing with savages. Don’t be fooled by their suits and ties. These people would enjoy cutting your head off.’

  He knew about the killing in Smichov, George thought. This was what he had suspected all along. Liebl turning up out of the blue would have been just too much of a coincidence.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ George said.

  Liebl lifted his glass and sucked down a half-litre of beer in one long fluent swallow. He lowered it, rapped it on the table to call the waiter, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He pointed to the empty glass with his stubby finger, belched delicately, then turned his attention to George.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said.

  George listened, his face impassive, but with a sinking feeling in his stomach, accompanied by a hot flush of rage at his own stupidity. What a fool he’d been to go to this man. The story Liebl told him sounded credible, but knowing him of old, George was certain that it was a concoction, made up of the truth, mingled with lies which it would be difficult or impossible to detect, and all of it would be intended to move him in one direction or the other.

  A short while ago, Liebl said, an old friend had come to see him in Berlin. This was Zviad Abuladze, formerly a KGB officer, who also happened to be a Georgian. He was now a powerful and well connected businessman with interests in the security industry and links to several large corporations.

  George knew exactly what that meant. The former KGB man, like many of his intelligence colleagues, would be a gang leader on a large scale, the ruthless and violent instrument of warring entrepreneurs. Over the last decade, as the large corporations jostled to repossess the resources of the Union, few of them could have survived or flourished without the services of the gangsters.

  His friend, Liebl continued, had heard a disturbing rumour. Various pictures, and other valuable objects, looted from private houses, museums and churches in Georgia, were up for sale in the West. Such things had happened before and there was a continual stream of objects marching westwards from Russia and the former republics, but these appeared to come from the same source. Ownership was a difficult matter, and most of the pictures couldn’t easily be authenticated in any case, but it was clear where they had come from. A number of other pictures and works of art had disappeared at the same time and were still unaccounted for. The Georgians guessed that the pictures they had seen on the market were only part of a hoard of loot. This was the cultural heritage of the fledgling state, they believed, and it could ill afford to lose its cultural artefacts, symbols of an ancient identity. This was the real issue. In normal circumstances these people had much more serious business to pursue than a few lost pictures, but the theft was the equivalent of stealing their souls, an extension of what the Russians had done to them for so many years.

  ‘You can imagine,’ Liebl said, ‘what a terrible dilemma I faced.’

  He pushed his plate aside and stared seriously at George.

  The man had come to him because they were old acquaintances, and they were, so to speak, in the same business. His request for information was also, in some sense, a commission to locate the hoard that he was certain existed, hidden somewhere in the territory of the former Union. By chance, Liebl continued, he was aware that a minor masterpiece had come into his friend Gunther’s hands. So what was he to tell Abuladze?

  ‘What did you tell him?’ George asked.

  ‘We made a deal. I offered to recover the goods. At a price, of course.’ He paused, swigged at his beer, put it down and wiped his mouth. ‘I’ll make the same deal with you. Put the stuff in my hands and we’ll share the profits. I’m talking about millions of marks.’

  George shrugged.

  ‘I had a few pictures. I sold them to Gunther. That’s it. I can’t help you. I wish I could.’

  Liebl chuckled appreciatively.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Think it over. You should talk about it with your Russian friends. But there is the problem of time. People talk and these rumours get around. I am not the only one now trying to find these things. The bees are searching for the honey. I hear they sent you a little message.’

  Still smiling, he drew his finger across his throat. George stared back, focusing on the moist slits of Liebl’s eyes.

  ‘Was that you?’

  Liebl shook his head.

  ‘You know I don’t work like that. But what you should know now is that the vultures are circling. You don’t have much time.’

  Valentin was waiting on the bridge. He fell into step beside George, and they walked across, meandering through the crowd of tourists, like two friends out for a stroll. Ahead of them the red sun, bisected by the cathedral spires, had begun to cast long shadows over the river.

  ‘He knows everything,’ George said.

  Being with Valentin after such a meeting restored his equilibrium. When it came to these matters his cousin had a core of confidence which always surprised and sometimes delighted George. For instance, after the night of the Romanian’s beheading, he had dealt with the police with an impressive calm, showing them round the factory, explaining the processes and offering them theories about the murder. They had been suspicious, of course, but both George and Valentin had several witnesses to the fact that they were miles away at the time of the killing. In any case, the authorities had recently come across several cases of the same kind of violence, all stemming from the criminal activities of the gangs that were pouring in from the East, and the dead man was a Romanian, a fact which made anything possible. On the other hand, it was no part of their business to harass respectable foreign investors unnecessarily, especially those who, like George and Valentin, had begun by establishing friendly relations with the local police, offering generous rates for part-time security work, and contributing gifts of spare parts and tyres when the occasion arose. By the end of the day the crime had gone down as one more unexplained event in the chain of mayhem inspired by the mafia from the East. All this was due to Valentin’s self assurance, and it was clear that he wasn’t yet prepared to take Liebl as seriously as George did.

  ‘Maybe he’s bluffing.’

  George shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think so. What I think is that Liebl knows what we’ve got and his st
ory about making a deal with Abuladze is exactly true. So I think in Hamburg it was Liebl who sent the Georgians, maybe Abuladze gave him a team to work with. If a gang had sent them the rest of their people would have come looking for them, and maybe they’d have been all over us for the last year. I think Liebl worked out what happened and wrote them off. Since then he’s been waiting. Somehow he kept the Georgians off our backs, or he didn’t tell them where and who we were. When his men didn’t come back he understood that we wouldn’t be easy to take, and he didn’t want us killed before he got his hands on the treasure. So he’s been playing cat and mouse with us. But maybe he’s tired of waiting or his bosses have told him to end the game.’

  Liebl had denied that the break-in and the decapitation of the gypsy mechanic had been his work, but George was certain now that it was all part of a strategy designed to get the result he wanted.

  ‘Liebl moves like a chess player,’ he told Valentin. ‘While you’re worrying about protecting your queen he’ll take a few pawns and then you’ll suddenly find yourself fighting to avoid checkmate, but by then it will be too late.’

  This was more or less what had happened when he had been Liebl’s reluctant protégé. George had worked with him for a year, and, although he had become accustomed to the security chief’s waddling incursions into his routine and his interminable questions, he had felt a distinct sensation of relief when Liebl announced that he was being transferred to the university. His mood changed, however, when he heard that he was also being transferred at the same time.

  ‘The university?’ George had asked incredulously. ‘I’m not a professor.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Liebl chuckled. ‘They have canteens there, too.’

  ‘Why me?’ George asked him. ‘You already have people there.’

  He was, in any case, struggling with a feeling of surprise. Liebl’s job at the factory had been concerned with black market infractions, petty thievery and hooliganism. At the university there would be issues of ideology, public relations and espionage. Liebl must have pulled some strings to get the job. Even odder was the fact that they were allowing him to take a petty informant whose only contribution had been to relay a few items of routine gossip.

  Liebl grinned at him.

  ‘You’re more important than you know,’ he said. ‘The university is full of comrades from fraternal socialist countries. We have to keep an eye on them, make sure that they stay fraternal. Vietnamese, Mozambicans, Angolans, Cubans, they’re all here. But it’s not like the old days. We bring them here, give them scholarships, educate them, and their response is distrust. They stay together, read banned books, write to their newspapers complaining about their treatment here, and now they even have meetings from which whites are excluded. We have to protect them, but we can’t do that if we don’t know what’s happening.’ He paused, as if to let the significance of what he was saying sink in. ‘It should be easy for a man of your colour to speak with them, and, of course, you’re one of us.’

  From that moment George saw that there would be no point in arguing, but he made the attempt anyway.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he told Liebl. ‘I want to stay here. I’m sure they’ll keep me here if I tell them I want to stay.’

  ‘If you do,’ Liebl replied immediately, ‘we’ll bring you up in front of the conflict commission. You’ll be on your way to some hole in the countryside in a couple of days. If you’re lucky. They might want to arrest you.’ The conflict commission decided the scale of punishments a worker could suffer for petty theft, as well as resolving disputes, but in particularly difficult cases they could call in the police, and if the security officials recommended it, they certainly would. Liebl paused for the threat to sink in. ‘You don’t want to be arrested.’

  At this point George gave up his objections. As it turned out, the task wasn’t difficult. Once he appeared on the campus African and Asian students came to him, their curiosity piqued by his colour and his air of being at home in the city. They invited him to parties, asked for his help with translating and studying German texts, and harassed him for assistance in meeting and chatting with the women. George’s English and French improved rapidly, and in a short while he was part of the social circle in which the students moved. To his surprise what he had to tell Liebl was not remarkably different from the sort of tittle tattle to which he had been accustomed at the factory. Some students brought in dope, which they smoked amongst themselves. Others smuggled in books and magazines, which soon disappeared. Most of them brought items which pleased the women they pursued; makeup, underwear, sweaters and skirts, scarves and cheap jewellery. The politics they discussed were intricate arguments about what was happening in their home countries, but they avoided talking about internal German matters. This was largely because they had very little interest in the personalities and events which featured in the environment around them. The incidents which caused a series of meetings and heated discussions were to do with the insults and beatings which were occurring with an increasing regularity when students strayed into the wrong areas of the city, or got into disputes with drunken youths.

  George reported all this to Liebl without any sense that his information offered a serious risk to anyone. Liebl seemed pleased, and George noted that with his promotion his manner had become more dignified, echoing that of the academics among whom he was moving. At formal ceremonies and major guest lectures he stood at the back of the hall, flanked by plainclothes men he directed here and there with the air of a man engaged in important affairs of state.

  It was several months before Liebl showed his true colours. By then George had persuaded himself that the security man was merely a fragment of the bureaucracy with which he had grown up, annoying, perhaps, and ruthless on occasion, but meaning no harm except to the fools and villains who asked for it.

  As a result, when he walked into the café near the Friedrichstrasse station, on the evening of their first conversation about Silke, he felt no apprehension about what was to come.

  ‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ Liebl said.

  ‘Who is it?’ George asked. He looked around automatically. ‘Are they coming here?’

  ‘No. No. Nothing like that. I’m talking about Professor Elsner. Silke Elsner.’

  George had heard the name, of course. She was one of the youngish, high-profile professors teaching in the departments of language and literature. Only about forty years old, but she was a recognised expert on Brecht who had acted as a consultant to the Berliner Ensemble. This had given her a platform of official approval which, it was said, she had used to tread a dangerously radical path. She had written famously about Günter Grass, walking a tightrope between admiration for his writing and condemnation of his anti-Communism. Her essays on authors published in the West, like Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf, were eagerly read and discussed, and she had even championed the satirist Volker Braun. The authorities had drawn a line at her interest in Solzhenitsyn, and in the last few years she had been forbidden permission to attend conferences abroad, even in countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. At the same time her reputation protected her in the university, and her work continued to be published without interference.

  ‘Professor Elsner?’ George was genuinely startled. He had nothing in common with the woman and he couldn’t imagine what they would have to say to each other. ‘Why?’

  Liebl gestured in resignation.

  ‘She left her husband a little while ago. Now we have no one close to her. We need to know as much as we can about what she’s doing.’ He leant forward. ‘The truth is that the state puts a high value on intellectuals like her right now. We don’t want to lose her.’

  That meant her husband had been Stasi’s conduit to Elsner’s private thoughts.

  ‘What can I do with a woman like that? Why should she talk to me?’

  Liebl grinned, his face creasing in folds of moist fat.

  ‘Don’t worry. All we want is for you to be part of her
circle. We’ll tell you what to say.’

  All George had to do was to tell Elsner that he wanted her help. He was to follow this by saying that he was a fervent admirer of her work, and that he would love nothing more than to enter the university, but his race and his rebellious attitude had probably made the local authorities regard him as politically unreliable. Refusing to give up, he had worked his way into the job in the canteen in the hope of proving himself and becoming a student in her department.

  ‘These intellectuals,’ Liebl said, ‘imagine that they are closer to the people than the people’s own representatives. When she hears this from a black man who has served his time in the army and works in the canteens she’ll embrace you with open arms.’

  George understood now that the story was meant to trigger Elsner’s empathy with rebellious underdogs and excite her guilt about the country’s behaviour to racial minorities. As the icing on the cake she would get the opportunity to become the patron of a genuine proletarian outcast who would be her intellectual disciple and protégé.

  ‘No liberal intellectual could want more,’ Liebl said. ‘She’ll probably write a book about you.’

  ‘And you’ll ban it,’ George told him.

  He doubted, in any case, that Elsner would be so easy to deceive.

  ‘Don’t look so stubborn,’ Liebl’s tone was light, but he was watching George narrowly. ‘No one will harm her, and if we know she’s not going to do anything unpatriotic we can leave her free to do whatever work she wants.’

  Later on, in the midst of his depression about Silke and what he’d done to her, George knew that he had never believed Liebl’s assurances, and looking back, it was hard to explain, even to himself, why he had tamely agreed to do what had been asked of him. It was as if he had walked in his sleep into a tunnel from which there was no way back. All he could do was to go forward, hoping that one day he would see a light.

  Once he had agreed, however, George felt a rising excitement about meeting and getting close to the famous intellectual. The story that Liebl had given him wasn’t altogether fanciful, because he’d always had a sneaking desire to be, like the father Katya had told him about, a man who knew the world, and could win the respect of distinguished people. He had no intention of doing anything to hurt the professor, and it was possible that meeting her might open new doors for him. He prepared himself carefully, reading a couple of her essays and some of Brecht’s plays. All this took a week, but he imagined himself dying with embarrassment if she exposed him with a few easy questions. In the meantime he made the acquaintance of Gisela, a skinny and intense woman from Meissen, who studied in Elsner’s department. He had actually seen the professor walking past him with a couple of colleagues, and if he’d been so minded he could have gone up and spoken to her, but by now he was anxious to get it right, and seeing her, he averted his eyes and hurried past. He had confessed his interest in Elsner and his desire to meet her to Gisela, and within a fortnight she invited him to a private reading of one of Volker Braun’s satires. The book had been published, but the print run was so small that hardly anyone at the university had got hold of it, so this was an eagerly awaited event. ‘Not that I’m a supporter of his,’ Gisela said, ‘but everyone’s talking about it.’