A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  In this case the warden called me into his office when I got back one afternoon. He spoke English which, though not fluent, was still better than my Russian, and it allowed him to conduct his usual game of sly interrogation which, when the occasion required, he would alternate with outright intimidation. This time he was smiling.

  ‘Comrade Coker,’ he told me right away, ‘I have good news for you.’

  The good news was that there was going to be a festival of youth in Jelenia Gora. He showed me the place on the map on his wall. It was on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia. A place of great natural beauty, the warden said, where Soviet youth mingled with each other, skiing, hiking and sharing fraternal discussions about the achievements of Soviet society. After thorough consultation I had been chosen as an appropriate candidate to join the delegation of foreign students. It had been Valery’s doing, of course. He denied it, with a suspicious blandness, but he was also a member of the delegation, a fact which, according to Hussein, clinched the matter.

  ‘He’s got to keep an eye on you,’ he said, chuckling. ‘Can’t leave you here to get up to mischief.’

  ‘I’m not like you,’ I told him. ‘I’m not interested in their politics.’

  As it happened I was alarmed by the ‘opportunity’. A few months before this, as winter was closing in we had heard the news about the British and French invasion of Suez. After an address by some of the Komsomol cadres, the students’ union at Cheryomushki had drawn up an indignant petition. The report that Soviet troops had been invited by the Hungarian government to restore order meant little to us at that point. It was only later, after the visit of a CPP delegation, that we understood more about what had also been happening in Hungary at the time of Suez. After that I had begun to approach everything political with a new sense of caution. The warden had warned me that I would have to make a fraternal speech, which, he said, had to be prepared in time to be translated. ‘They need time to vet it,’ Hussein said. So everything about the part they wanted me to play in this festival had me worried.

  The next day all the worries vanished in a flash. After the class Katya told me that she would be leading the delegation to Jelenia Gora, and that she would be translating my speech into Russian and German. Everyone, it seemed, spoke one of those languages. After she told me this, I forgot my objections and set to work.

  In the meantime Hussein invited me to meet a friend of his. A zek, he called him, a man who’d been in the labour camps, and when I hesitated he told me the man was black, now a Russian citizen, but originally from an island in the Caribbean.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he added. ‘There’ll be no trouble. His sentence was annulled last year and they let him come back to Moscow. He’s only a sick old man. They’re not interested in him.’ He paused. ‘But don’t tell your roommate.’

  I shrugged, but I didn’t tell Valery. Next day we went to his house. We got out at Komsomolskaya and found ourselves in the middle of the group of railway stations. I recognised Leningradsky Vokzal from where the train had set out on my trip north with Valery, but I didn’t mention it to Hussein. As we crossed the road we were passed by a group of short, thick-bodied men wearing fur hats and carrying big bundles, like donkeys loaded for the market.

  Hussein paid no attention, heading straight on towards a massive white tower which looked almost exactly like the tower at the university but which he said was the Ministry of Transport. A little past the tower we turned a corner and then went through an alleyway which gave on to an empty square of muddy dirt, part stubborn grass, part rubbish. On the other side there was a row of old houses, shacks of crumbling brick and weatherbeaten plaster. Some of the windows were covered with tar paper, others were boarded up. I had seen houses like this before, but none of them quite so desolate. These had been run down when they were assembled, hasty, temporary structures which you would have imagined to be long abandoned.

  ‘When you get to Jelenia Gora,’ Hussein said, laughing, ‘tell them about this.’

  ‘I could tell them they’re getting rid of all this.’

  I was on firm ground here. The warden had taken us on a tour in the first week and outlined Khrushchev’s crash programme of new housing. A couple of months later we were all familiar with the word Khrushcheby, a pun on their word for slum – truscheby, and it was true that sites like this were soon to be converted. I had seen it happening already, all over the city.

  We crossed the rubbish dump, mud squelching beneath our shoes, and Hussein knocked at the door of one of the shacks. ‘Vera’, he shouted, ‘Vera.’

  An old woman opened the door slowly. She was bundled up in a scarf and a shapeless wad of a dress, babushka style, and when she recognised Hussein she smiled and turned her head to shout over her shoulder.

  ‘Hussein. It’s Hussein.’

  Later on he told me that a knock on the door would terrify the old man until he knew who it was.

  Inside, the old zek, Alexy, was sitting in a bed next to the stove. The room was dim and stuffy, a combination of smells, cabbage predominating, but it was warm and quiet. The walls had been pasted all over with old posters, newspapers and flyers so that everywhere you looked it was like being surrounded by a strange billboard, advertising meetings, railway timetables, and warnings about entering forbidden territory. On one side was a giant poster for the circus, which showed, in the middle of the picture, a clown balancing on a barrel, juggling a set of blazing clubs.

  ‘See what he’s doing?’ The old man spoke English like an American, but also with the hint of a Russian accent. ‘That’s Russian life.’

  ‘They call me Alexy,’ he said. He had a light complexion, and a sturdy crop of white hair which seemed to run down the sides of his face and flower into the bush around his mouth and chin. I had never seen a black man with so much hair. ‘You’re the student Hussein told me about?’ he asked me.

  We drank the vodka Hussein had brought. I told him a bit about myself. He was interested in my experience on the boats, and he asked me about Padmore, whose photograph he had seen standing near Stalin at a parade in Red Square. Alexy had studied engineering in the USA and joined the Party there. In the early thirties he had travelled to Russia and found a job as an engineer on the railways. During the decade he married and became a Soviet citizen, but it all came to an end six years later, when at the height of the great purges in Moscow he was arrested and sentenced to a period of indefinite detention. Someone had denounced him as a foreign spy, he couldn’t say who, and in those days it was enough. He had been lucky to escape execution, but by that time the terror was slackening off in Moscow and they’d become more sparing with the death penalty. That was fifteen years ago.

  ‘But you were innocent,’ I said. In the face of his tragedy I felt sadness and guilt about being there in that place where such things happened, free and privileged as we foreign students were.

  Alexy smiled broadly.

  ‘Innocent? I don’t know if you could be innocent then. I remember the year before going to a meeting and listening to Khrushchev. That same Khrushchev who has just condemned the excesses of former days. He was First Secretary of the Moscow Party then, and he gave a real fire and brimstone speech about the Trotskyists and the saboteurs, enemies raising their hands against Comrade Stalin.’ He gave a chuckle which turned into a rumbling cough. ‘There were about a quarter of a million people jammed into Krasnaya ploschad. Every one of them was shouting for the enemies of the people to be executed. We’d have cut their heads off and shoved them up their asses if we could, and I was shouting as loud as anyone.’ He held his hand up, the finger pointing. Bony and curved, it looked like the prong of a claw. ‘How many innocent people go to jail in the West? They’re still lynching black men in the States. That won’t stop. What they did here was no worse. The state had to defend itself. Mistakes were made. We shouldn’t pretend that didn’t happen. The vozhad and Beria used the situation. The innocent went with the guilty, but maybe that’s how it had to be.’
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  Baffled, I glanced over at Hussein. He was watching Alexy closely, his face impassive.

  ‘Did you never want to go back home?’

  ‘Home? Where’s that? I left when I was a boy. No one knows me. I don’t know what I would do there. Maybe they wouldn’t even let me in.’ He laughed and coughed again. ‘I’ll die here, unless Nikita Sergeyevich gets me out of this hole and into one of his nice new apartments in time. Then I’ll die there.’

  On the way back to Cheryomushki I asked Hussein the question that had been on my mind while I listened to the old zek.

  ‘How can he be so calm about what they did to him?’

  ‘What else can he be? It would be much worse if he believed that all of it had been pointless.’ He gave me an ironical look. ‘You really don’t understand. They’re breeding a new kind of man here. That’s what they believe. You think that because they’re poor and life is tough they’re just holding on. That’s not how they look at it. They believe that it’s possible for people to be moved by altruism rather than greed, and by love of their fellow men rather than hatred and suspicion.’

  ‘So what’s the KGB for?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s because people aren’t perfect yet. If you think that things are going to reach their most extreme form before turning into their opposite, you have to control the effects. It’s all about tomorrow. Today the misery and cruelty of life is normal. Tomorrow pays for all.’

  The following week we set out for Poland. We were going by rail to Warsaw, and then by coach to the border. The train left around the middle of the afternoon and for the next twenty hours I was to be ensconced with Katya in a compartment for two. The sleeping arrangements were not segregated between men and women, and Katya had chosen me for her companion so that we could work on the speech. To say I was in ecstasy would be no exaggeration.

  I was treading a tightrope in what I had written. Essentially I had made it a long account of the jobs I had done so far, moving on to a condemnation of colonialism and ending with a splurge of tribute to the Soviet Union. Katerina had no trouble translating it, but when it came to the final part of the speech she kept suggesting changes. I can’t remember the details, but the general effect of them was to alter the language into something that the warden might have said, and towards the end it sounded as much of an arse-licking as any of the Party officials could desire. It might be a good idea, she told me at one point, to say that after the imperialists had been driven from the oppressed colonies, the youth of the world would be united in socialist friendship. I didn’t exactly argue with her, but I tried to keep it within the bounds of what I knew about, telling her that it wouldn’t be convincing if I seemed to be saying things about which I was ignorant. On the other hand, I knew that the translation would probably say whatever she wanted.

  All this took several hours. The attendant, an old lady with a seamed face and little black eyes like stones, kept bringing us tea, which she dispensed from a battered samovar, and from time to time, Valery appeared. His manner with Katya was not exactly unfriendly, but he wasn’t warm towards her. Later on, when he knew more about how matters stood, he told me that Katya’s father was high up in the region, one of those who supported Khrushchev in his struggles with Malenkov over the Virgin Lands programme. Instead of departing for Siberia to harvest wheat however, his daughter had found a nice little niche in Moscow.

  None of this would have concerned me at the time. Katya was about the same age as me, and I was simply happy to be occupying the same space, listening to her talk and breathe. The seats were padded, but unlike British trains there were no gusts of warm air flowing from beneath them. It wasn’t freezing but it was cold enough to keep our overcoats on, and when the samovar came, we warmed our hands beside it. She was wearing a long woollen dress below which I caught hints of her body, her soft breasts bouncing a little when the train went round a corner, or straining at the fabric when she stretched. There were dimples at the sides of her mouth which gave her a mischievous look when she smiled, but for most of the trip she was very much in earnest. Relaxing as the landscape outside disappeared into blackness, she told me that my speech would be significant because it would be an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of the Party’s foreign aid policy. When she talked like this I found it difficult to meet her eyes, because I was torn between lust and boredom, and I didn’t want her to see either. I couldn’t work out at that moment, either, what she felt towards me. If I touched her would she turn away in revulsion or would she wrap her arms around me? Either one was possible, I thought. The strange thing was that, for the moment, I didn’t want to find out. I was happy enough locked into the box on wheels rushing through the night in which no one existed except for ourselves. In between arranging the words to her satisfaction I told her about myself. She asked me about my mother and my father, and what it had felt like to be at sea for weeks on end. That part of my experience fascinated her because she loved floating on the river, she told me. When she stopped talking about the oppressed people and the achievements of the Soviet Union she sounded like an innocent, naïve and sweetly curious about a world she didn’t know.

  It must have been close to midnight by the time we were finished. The seats folded down into beds and when she decided it was time for sleep she told me to wait outside. I walked down the corridor and went into the compartment which Valery was sharing with a couple of others. They were already wrapped in blankets, passing a bottle of vodka between them.

  ‘I’m not coming back with you,’ Valery told me.

  On the way back he was going to leave early and make a stop in Kiev to see his relatives. That made me laugh at the thought of Hussein’s face when I told him. So much for Valery keeping an eye on me.

  When I got back to our compartment Katya was already buried under the blankets. I lay opposite her, listening to her breathe, wondering whether she was asleep and how I would get through the night, but in the time it took to think about it I was asleep too. I woke briefly when the train came to a halt in Minsk, and I remember promising myself that I would get out and try to look around on the way back. When I woke again it was light outside, and Katya had disappeared. She came back later, fully dressed, her hair gleaming as it swung round her face, and we drank our tea in companionable silence. Afterwards she made me read the speech we’d written, practising the speed and pausing for effect. It was funny. When she spoke to me as the teacher she seemed distant and bossy, almost looking down her nose at me, then she would change, and suddenly it was as if I was speaking to a shy and inquisitive child. The contrast was a little confusing, but it merely increased my excitement.

  We had reached Warsaw about the middle of the day. I sat next to Katya on the bus. Turning to me to make some comment about the weather her voice was pitched low, for my ears only. It was as if we had become a couple overnight.

  I don’t remember much about the festival itself. At the back of my mind I’d had the idea that a festival had to be about music and dancing. But, of course, this one seemed to be about a series of interminable speeches. The delegates were scattered between the town and the top of the nearby mountain, on the other side of which was the Czech border. My dormitory was a big cabin up the mountain surrounded by pine trees. All through the day and night there was a sound of dripping water, and when you walked through the trees a kind of fine spray flew against your hands and face. It was beautiful. On the way to the conference hall on the first morning I paused and looked. I had never seen a landscape like this, the trees in different shades of green climbing up the hillside, parting to reveal occasional patches of snow, still pristine white as it melted.

  In spite of the speeches there was a kind of holiday atmosphere around the entire site. As usual at these things the participants split into groups, the smallest consisting of those who were attending with a serious purpose in mind, the drafting of resolutions, meetings with colleagues, and various kinds of political collusions. Some of the delegates were already middle-aged
and they formed a group with the serious Party people who went into a huddle at the beginning and the end of the day, occupying rooms with closed doors, from which they emerged scanning sheets of paper or talking earnestly amongst themselves. Everyone else seemed to be absenting themselves selectively, and you would come across groups of drunken young men and women in the woods or taking over entire dormitories for the night, singing, dancing and imbibing a steady flow of vodka.

  Both Katya and Valery were among the groups of serious Party members and for a couple of days I didn’t see much of them. On the morning of my speech, however, Katya told me that we would go out to celebrate later. She was nervous, I realised. It struck me that she was, in a sense, my patron, and it was possible that if I failed it would affect her standing in some way I couldn’t understand.

  Seeing that, I felt like doing my best for her, and when it was my turn to go to the rostrum I screwed myself up to sound as bold and confident as I could. It went well as far as I could tell, to judge by the applause, and when I went back to my seat, Katya squeezed my arm, her eyes shining and her expression more animated than I had ever seen. Afterwards we went to the canteen where they were serving Polish borshch. As it happened this gave me a fright next morning when I looked back at the toilet bowl and saw that it was stained dark red. I was on the point of running out to find a clinic when I realised that it was the beetroot working through my bowels.

  After the meal we went down to the town and bought a couple of bottles of Zubrowka, a special Polish vodka the Russians said was the best. As we walked back she told me how well the comrades had received what I’d said.

  I listened without interest. I had already made my own plans. Close by my cabin on the side of the mountain there was a spectacular view where you could sit, in a rough shelter, and look at the landscape. I led her there. The sun was going down and we watched the sky turn pink and grey and then dark. She drank from the bottle when I handed it to her. It was cold, but it was a calm spring evening and sitting there was bearable, especially with the vodka warming our insides. It was an anaesthetic against the cold, Hussein used to say. Sometimes when spring came and the snows melted they would begin to find the bodies of drunks who had lain down by the side of the road and been covered by the drifts, too paralysed to notice that they were freezing to death.