A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  Standing in front of the Rathaus on the same day that Kofi and Joseph were flying into Berlin, Katya dismissed the sense of foreboding which had been stalking her for the last couple of days. Watching her grandson skipping over the pavement, she reflected that perhaps nothing would change, and that, at least until young Serge grew up, everything would be all right.

  It was then that she looked up and saw the fat man’s car on the other side of the street, its darkened windows blank and somehow menacing. She could see no one in it and she had no evidence that it was the same car because she hadn’t noted the licence plate, but in the instant she saw it she had known. Immediately, she looked back at Serge, a few metres away, and called to him, her voice louder and sharper than she intended, and he stared at her curiously as he came to her side. For the merest moment it was George rather than Serge that she saw, a frown creasing his little forehead as he noted the terror in his mother’s voice. That was how it had been years ago, and now she remembered the sensation of a fist clenching around her heart when she caught sight of her surveillance. It’s all different now, she told herself urgently, and whatever this was the old days were over for good.

  ‘Let’s go home now,’ she told Serge.

  The sun was still high above them, but for Katya, it was as if a shadow had crossed the sky.

  EIGHTEEN

  When they got through the barrier at the airport, Radka saw them immediately. She was standing at the back of the crowd which was massed around the doors to the customs hall, but she could see the passengers emerging over the shoulders of the chauffeurs and taxi drivers holding up the placards which indicated who they were. She had dressed in a style which was both more casual and more Western than she usually affected, a pair of glasses which had a faint pink tint, black leather jacket and jeans, and, leaving the apartment she had realised with a faint sense of amusement at herself, that she was trying to make an impression. What kind of impression it was, she wasn’t sure, but she recognised the feeling of anticipation which was hurrying her movements. It was the pleasure of looking forward to Katya’s surprise, she told herself, but she also knew that this wasn’t the way she would have dressed if Kofi had been the only person she was about to collect from the airport. She guessed instead that it was something to do with seeing Joseph again. Only an hour ago Katya had commented on how good her mood was that morning. What would her mother-in-law have thought, she wondered, if she had understood her excitement?

  She didn’t quite understand it herself. She knew, of course, that this meeting might be the prelude to a new life for all of them, and that was enough to provoke her exhilaration. At the same time, she had been touched by flurries of wayward emotion ever since receiving Joseph’s phone call. Until then, she had begun to fancy that the entire episode had been a kind of dream. It had happened, of course, no doubt about that. George’s brother had come to the apartment, they had met and talked. She had assumed, however, that hoping so eagerly for some change was a guarantee that it would not take place, and she had more or less resigned herself to hearing nothing more about the matter. Joseph’s call had altered the equation, and suddenly, the visions she had been ready to dismiss as fantasies were the foundations of a new reality. Somewhere in the middle of all this was her first sight of Joseph, which memory, sometimes, for a fleeting moment, superimposed on her recall of the first time she had seen his brother George. It was possible, she guessed, that this confusion was the source of the daydreams which had been creeping, unannounced, through her mind.

  Coming through the barrier at the airport, he was as she remembered. Tall, his skin a pale brown, curling black hair cut close to his scalp around the sides, a smile beginning to light up his features as he saw her. She was seeing, it occurred to her, a younger, sweeter version of George, as if some magic had swept over the image of the man she knew, erasing a corrosive patina of guilt and shame. Behind him she looked for Kofi, an erect figure with a loose, swinging walk, a face carved in black stone, topped with a brush of iron grey.

  Close to her now Joseph fumbled a little, putting down his suitcase and making to kiss her on the cheek. Instead she put her arms round him and squeezed him.

  ‘I’m glad to see you,’ she whispered in his ear, the words unrehearsed, almost involuntary.

  When she turned to Kofi, he was watching her, a thoughtful frown creasing his forehead, as if he was trying to work out who she was.

  ‘This is Radka,’ Joseph told him.

  ‘My husband is George,’ she said. She felt lightheaded, conscious that she was babbling. He knows who my husband is, she thought, and she took a deep breath, trying to calm down.

  Kofi nodded with the same distant air.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Radka blinked, a little disconcerted by the question. Of course, they must have expected to see George, waiting.

  ‘He’s not here yet.’

  In the car Kofi sat in the back seat, staring out of the window, his expression dreamy and abstracted. He answered Radka’s polite questions, but it was as if he had removed himself into another world for the moment. Radka watched him in the driving mirror, remembering what Joseph had said about his health, and wondering whether she would recognise the symptoms if he began to show signs that the trip had been too much for him. Joseph must have been thinking similar thoughts because she noticed that he kept glancing at Kofi’s reflection.

  Serge was with his grandmother, she told them. She had considered bringing him but she couldn’t be sure that he would keep the secret about his grandfather until Katya’s birthday party the next day.

  ‘Twenty-four hours is a long time in a little boy’s life,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m going to tell her in the morning. I thought maybe George should tell her, but if he doesn’t come by then I must tell her before she sees you tomorrow. I don’t want to give her too much of a surprise.’

  The hotel Joseph had booked was in a side street off the Ku’damm, and Radka drove up the Bismarck Strasse so they could see the glass cage of the Zoo station. It was mid-afternoon and though the traffic was moderate for that part of the city, it was still enough to stop them within sight of the building. At that moment a group of Africans walked across the street in front of the car, and seeing Joseph and Kofi in its interior, they stared curiously. She met their gaze with a pleasant expression but refrained from smiling, because after one or two disagreeable experiences she now feared that her attempts at friendliness might be misinterpreted. Apart from this she was marvelling over their resemblance to her husband’s father. There was the shade of their skin, to begin with. Unlike the negroes she saw on TV or the cinema screen their colour was glaringly dark, more black than brown. Then there was their hair, black wire piled like a carpet, and their large flaccid lips. She couldn’t resist a look into the mirror, seeing Kofi’s tired face like a reflection of the faces in front of her. The strange thing was that, in normal circumstances, her mind hardly ever linked her husband or her son together with such faces, and doing so now gave her an uneasy, almost frightened feeling. It reminded her of going with George for the first time to Prague to meet her mother, who persisted until her death in giving his name a French pronunciation. Her nerves had been tighter and tighter the closer she got to the city, as if she was developing eyes in the back of her head to catch the expressions on the faces of the other passengers as they looked at her and George. In Berlin people stared less. George’s dress and manner marked him out as a native, like a camouflage for his colour. In Prague it was different. People feigned indifference, but they looked twice, seeing her with George.

  Her mother had been, as usual, talking about her teaching job from which she was soon due to retire. She would receive the usual medal for her long service, she said angrily. This was how they had treated her brother, who had worked, before his death, in the petrochemical complex at Litvinoff. His skin had been wasted and discoloured, his lungs rotted, but the swine had given him a medal. Nothing else, just a medal. Her mother could go on like
this for hours, and in any case she showed little curiosity about George. She knew better than to ask him too many questions about his own background and work. For over a decade she had survived by close-mouthed discretion, her personality resembling a surface which offered no reflection. In the circumstances she would refuse to know too much detail, even about her own son-in-law. It was afterwards, when they were alone towards the end of the visit that she ventured something which hinted at her thoughts.

  ‘He’s not very dark-skinned,’ she remarked thoughtfully. ‘In Romania no one would notice him.’

  Remembering the conversation Radka smiled at the thought of what her mother would make of Kofi. By this time she was driving into the curving forecourt of the hotel.

  ‘Shall I come and help you check in?’ she asked Joseph.

  He shook his head. Even from the outside it was clear that this was the sort of establishment where the staff would speak English, and as if to emphasise the point a young man dressed in a neat waistcoat and a white shirt emerged and began unloading the suitcases from the boot of the car. Joseph grinned at her.

  ‘They probably speak better English than we do.’ He took her hand. ‘What are you doing later?’ Radka felt like gasping for breath and she didn’t trust herself to speak, so she shook her head. ‘Let’s meet later. My dad’s tired. He’ll probably go to bed early, but we need to talk.’

  On the way back to Schöneberg, the district where Katya lived, Radka realised that she was feeling elated at the prospect of being out alone with Joseph, her mood pervaded by a kind of frivolous gaiety she hadn’t experienced in a long while. This was how she had been with Renate as they walked out for the evening, or getting ready to meet someone new. In her mind now, her emotions about George were exhausted, as if he had been her opponent in a long struggle which neither of them could win. When they talked it was without revelation, and George’s mind seemed closed to her, their intimacy a mere habit which left her feeling solitary and vulnerable. In comparison Joseph was like an open book. When she embraced him his body had been taut and edgy, the uncertainty in his eyes when they met hers like a confession. On the telephone she had heard something in his voice, but she hadn’t been certain until she had touched him at the airport. Thinking about his reaction she felt the heat rising in her face, and, involuntarily, she found herself wondering how to behave when she met him later. If she was cold and distant, perhaps they would never be friends.

  Ten years ago, this had been how she felt about seeing George, the air charged with bubbles, and the sense that something momentous, she didn’t know what, would happen before the night was over. The thought conjured up the image of his face when she had first seen him across the room, younger than Joseph’s, brooding with a hint of pain. It had been Renate who took the initiative and spoke to him on that occasion. This had been at the party after the group of African poets performing in the Freundschaft Hall had finished their final reading. Renate nudged Radka to make sure they were looking at the same person.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Radka breathed into her friend’s ear.

  This was typical of how they operated. Renate was the bolder one of the pair, making deadpan jokes and flashing the dark Mediterranean eyes she had inherited from her mother. Radka went along with her, throwing fuel on whatever fires her friend lit. This was the way they confronted George, Renate weaving through the crush of students, dragging Radka by the hand behind her. Radka smiled, remembering the look on George’s face, halfway between surprise and pleasure, as he raised his head to see them bearing down on him.

  She had been the best of friends with Renate then. This was in the time of calm before the storm. It was true that no one knew for certain that the regime was dying, but there was something in the air, a hint of expectancy which seemed to make their hearts beat faster. Both of them had agreed that they would never settle for men who were contented with things as they were, or who wanted to stagnate in some niche until they were worn smooth like stepping stones in concrete.

  George, she knew from the beginning, would never be a dull and spineless functionary. He had been born, in a manner of speaking, out of uniform, and everything about him seemed to announce that he belonged elsewhere. Walking along the Friedrichstrasse with him on that first night Radka indulged herself in the daydream of a new life, in which George would be her guide. Beyond the Wall anything would be possible, she thought, George could probably become a millionaire, and their children would be happy and unafraid, brown and beautiful, treading the white sands of faraway beaches.

  The reality was very different. Everyone knew the facts, but in the years which followed the first rush of exhilaration about their new freedom, most of her friends and acquaintances struggled with a growing sense of disappointment and frustration. Some found it easier than others. Renate, for example, wangled a job with the Greens. They suffered a defeat in the federal elections a year later, and she switched to working for a Christian Democrat deputy. In a couple of years she was indistinguishable from any other Wessi, with an apartment in Bonn, and too busy for more than an occasional expedition to her parents’ house in Saxony. On the other hand, George, whom she had vaguely imagined would take to the atmosphere of the West like a salmon swimming upriver, seemed depressed and fatigued by the effort of finding work and shelter. As for Renate, they had drifted further and further apart, and it was after a long period of silence, in the wake of the baby’s arrival, that Renate had reappeared to drop her bombshell about George. It must have been a kind of revenge, Radka thought at the time. But up to that moment she had still regarded Renate as her best friend, and her revelations seemed to cast a cloud over Radka’s entire life. Worst of all was the sense that just as she had been deceived about George in the past, her visions about their future were an illusion. Renate had talked about the Stasi agent who had recruited herself and George as if he had somehow sapped their will to resist, and although Radka had often heard something similar about people who had spent years spying on their family and friends, the idea offered her no comfort. Renate had described the agent, trying to jog her memory, a fat man whom Radka had seen around the university a couple of times without registering, but the truth was that she didn’t want to hear about it, and she didn’t want to remember.

  As this memory played itself back through her mind, Radka was making a right turn towards Schöneberg, and she paused, her foot frozen on the brake pedal, hardly hearing the angry blasts of horns behind her. All of a sudden, she remembered the smile and the grotesque round face, and, in a flash, she realised why the fat man who had stopped to smile at her outside the supermarket had seemed familiar. She had, for the moment, no idea why he had appeared or what he wanted, but she was now certain that the man she had seen peering out of the big black car was the same agent who had wound his tentacles round her husband and her best friend.

  NINETEEN

  Upstairs on the third floor of the hotel, Joseph unpacked his suitcase, had a shower and made himself a cup of coffee. Alone in the room he felt liberated, as if he’d been carrying Kofi around on his back all day. With a feeling of luxury he drank his coffee, zapped through the TV stations and stared through the window at the quiet street below. They were close enough to the Ku’damm to hear its bustle, but in this street there seemed to be hardly more than a few pedestrians, and, although both sides were lined with parked cars, the stream of vehicles was sparse and intermittent.

  After a while he crossed the corridor and knocked on the door of the room opposite. Kofi had taken his coat off and was lying on the bed, watching a game of football with the sound turned off. Joseph guessed that it was a local match, because he didn’t recognise the colours or any of the players.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a nice room.’

  ‘Not the room.’ Joseph hesitated, then went for it. ‘I mean what do you think about tomorrow? Katya and the birthday party.’

  ‘I don’t know. I wanted to come and see her, but I don’t know about al
l that. But if they think that’s the best thing to do, that’s okay with me.’

  He didn’t take his eyes off the television screen. Joseph hovered uncertainly. He wanted to say something that would bring him closer to Kofi’s thoughts, to cut through the barriers between them, but he didn’t know what.

  ‘I’ve been lying here,’ Kofi said, ‘thinking about Moscow. Being abroad reminds me. Existence shapes consciousness. Consciousness determines existence. The one thing is linked with the other. Katya said that. It was in all the books. In the end I understood that it was a kind of reasoning that accounted for everything.’ He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at Joseph. ‘You see, when I went there I didn’t know how different people could be. I only really understood it when I had to leave. That’s why I was never too worried about finding out what was happening with Katya. I thought I knew. Being here it’s hit me that the world has changed, been changing a long time. I mean I saw some of it on TV but that’s not personal you know.’

  He was rambling, Joseph thought.

  ‘Are you up to it?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Kofi continued as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘At the time I didn’t think that anything I did would last for a long time. What I mean is this. My life was over some time ago. I eat and drink and sleep, go to the library, talk to people. None of it matters except for you, and I’m like a shadow, even to you.’

  ‘No,’ Joseph said quickly. Kofi smiled.

  I’m glad you said that, but it’s true. Some years ago I realised that nothing would happen any more because of me, and all the things that happened to me before are like that. Osageyfo has died and so has everyone else who was there, or else they’re old men like me. I thought Katya had died somewhere or as good as. Everyone who knew me as a real person.’