A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘That can’t be true,’ Joseph protested automatically. ‘You know a lot of people.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ Kofi said. ‘What I mean is about understanding that you’re real.’ He looked at Joseph, chuckling a little at the puzzled look on his son’s face. ‘Everything about the life I lived as a young man is a memory now, pictures in a box like the television. I got used to that, watching that person I used to be walking around and talking with all the other memories, like a shadow of something that wasn’t there any more. I stopped remembering a long time ago. I really couldn’t recall the colour of her eyes, or how long her hair was, and when I thought about those times there were even things blended in there that happened to other people, and when I stopped to think about it I realised that I’d taken them over as if they’d happened to me.’

  He chuckled again, and it struck Joseph that his father was laughing at himself this time.

  ‘When you told me,’ he continued, ‘it was like the first time in a long while that I remembered that something real had happened, and that those were real people out there, instead of dreams in my head. That’s what I’m doing now, trying to get a grip on the reality.’

  ‘You need a rest,’ Joseph told him. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘This isn’t easy,’ Kofi said. ‘I was just thinking when you came in that if I had my way I would lie here until it was time to go home.’

  ‘You need a rest,’ Joseph said again.

  To his surprise, Kofi nodded obediently.

  ‘Yes. I think I’ll take a rest.’

  He closed his eyes and lay back, as if preparing to go to sleep.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ Joseph confessed to Radka later on.

  They were sitting in an Indian restaurant on the Kantstrasse. By some coincidence it had exactly the appearance of an Indian restaurant he sometimes went to in Bayswater, and waiting for the meal he had the momentary and absurd delusion that if he walked out the door he would find himself walking towards Notting Hill. The illusion was strengthened by the fact that the waiters spoke English, not with the fluency of an English Asian, but with an accent he hadn’t heard since he was a child.

  ‘They speak German in the same way,’ Radka said. ‘I think they haven’t been here long.’

  ‘Their German is still better than mine,’ he told her. ‘Anyway they’ve been here long enough to invent currywurst.’

  Perhaps, he thought, it was something to do with the familiarity of the place which made him feel as if everything was so – he searched for the word in his mind – normal, as if he was out for an evening in London with a friend. In England, he told Radka, the equivalent of currywurst was called chicken tikka masala. She repeated the words carefully, giggling as she did so.

  ‘In a hundred years,’ Joseph said, ‘everyone will have forgotten where those words came from.’

  She was wearing a black dress, and a pair of gold earrings dangled by her neck, swaying and trembling as she moved. Joseph had been prepared for anything, but to his surprise the atmosphere between them had been light and flirtatious from the moment he took her hand in the hotel lobby and they began walking towards Savignyplatz.

  It was like the first outing with a new woman, with the knowledge that after this evening anything was possible. She told him more about herself without urging. She worked part-time at a research institute at Charles University. Mostly what she did was to translate texts. There was always work for a good translator. Lately she had begun to work for an English language publisher who gave her work she could do at home so she could spend more time with Serge. Moving around as they did he had few opportunities to make friends.

  Listening to her, Joseph began to feel that he knew and understood her. He felt relaxed, in control of himself. They didn’t talk about George until the meal was finished.

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she told Joseph. ‘He was pleased about us leaving Prague and coming back here and crazy to see his father. But he spends most of his time with Valentin.’

  She didn’t have a good relationship with Valentin, she said, even though he was George’s cousin and Katya liked him. Ever since he appeared there had been trouble between herself and George. There was something about him, in any case, as if he brought with him the violence and chaos that was Russia. Even without the mysteries in which he had involved George she probably wouldn’t like him.

  ‘Because he’s Russian?’ Joseph asked her.

  She hesitated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Katya?’

  ‘The women are different,’ she replied immediately.

  George had said that he would be there on Katya’s birthday, but that was all she knew.

  ‘How do you stay with someone who tells you so little?’ Joseph asked.

  The question seemed to have slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it. They were walking back towards the hotel, along a quiet cross-street. It was lined with the lighted windows of closed shops, and at the end of it he could see the traffic of pedestrians flowing up and down the Ku’damm. Radka hadn’t replied, and for a moment he wondered whether she was angry. She looked round at him, her eyes glowing with the reflections of the street.

  ‘I grew up in a kind of silence,’ she said. ‘There were many things I didn’t know. Secrets were normal.’ She paused, then she smiled quizzically, as if something new had occurred to her. ‘Do you tell your wife everything?’

  There hadn’t been much to tell. Liz had left him, rather than the other way round, and she was the one who had led a secret life for more than a year before that. Even so she had accused him of being distant, impossible to live with, because he kept his thoughts and emotions to himself. On that occasion she had spoken with a cold, vicious contempt which left him feeling whipped and humiliated. George, he thought, would probably never have married a woman like Liz.

  ‘I’m not married,’ he replied.

  ‘Right. I forgot.’

  She gave him a wry grin and he laughed, charmed and inexplicably excited by the idea that his brother possessed this woman who was so beautiful and at the same time so amiable and compliant. Almost without thinking he put his arm round her and she leant towards him without resistance. Walking on, their hips bumped in rhythm. In a couple of minutes they reached her car. She leant against it, head back, a pose of exhausted languor. Joseph watched her, thinking that if she had wanted to go she would have simply opened the door and stepped into the car.

  ‘If only you weren’t married to my brother,’ he heard himself say. She turned her head gradually, like a puppet being pulled by slow wires, and the greenish glinting of her eyes in the reflected light seemed to ignite the air between them. Her eyes opened wider still, and for a moment he thought that he had shocked or offended her, then behind him he heard a voice calling out. Radka frowned, lowering her head to stare past him.

  ‘George.’

  There were two of them a few metres away, tall and bulky, wearing black leather jackets and blond crewcuts. Joseph grinned at them, making a gesture of denial. These must be a couple of George’s weirder friends, he thought.

  ‘You’d better tell them they’re making a mistake,’ he told Radka.

  She said something, in a peremptory and dismissive tone, but instead of moving off the men loomed closer.

  ‘I’m not George,’ Joseph insisted. The men didn’t look like old friends of anyone at all, and they were moving with a menacing purpose, but hearing Joseph speak in English the nearest man paused, staring, a puzzled frown creasing his forehead. Radka snapped out something which Joseph didn’t understand, but he caught the word ‘polizei’. His guess was that she had threatened them with calling the police if they didn’t go away, but that didn’t seem to impress the two men. Instead, one of them took a quick stride that brought him close enough for Joseph to catch the sour smell of beer on his breath. For a long moment they stared into each other’s eyes.

  ‘What do you
want?’ Joseph asked, trying to keep his voice level and calm.

  Radka spoke again, louder, her voice shrill, and Joseph heard the word for brother repeated a couple of times. The man didn’t reply. He clamped his lips together and nodded his head as if coming to some conclusion, then, suddenly, whirled round, grabbed Radka by the shoulders, pinning her against the side of the car, and spat out some words in a fierce, angry mutter.

  ‘Let her go!’ Joseph shouted. It was as if he’d come to life, the blood coursing through his veins and driving him to the attack. ‘Let her go!’

  He hit out automatically, punching the man’s arm just above the biceps, connecting with a satisfying thud on the solid muscle. The man let Radka go and she stumbled against the car, reaching out to stop herself falling. This was all he had time to see because, in the next instant, the world exploded in a kaleidoscope of colours. He didn’t lose consciousness, but his legs would no longer hold him upright and he sagged to the ground. All he could see was a blur.

  ‘Joseph,’ Radka said loudly. ‘Joseph. Can you hear me?’

  She was kneeling above him, her hands supporting his head. He lolled against her breasts, feeling warm and drowsy, ready to drift off to sleep. Time seemed to have stopped and he had no idea how long he’d been there.

  ‘Can you get up?’

  She tugged at him and he got up slowly, beginning to feel a stinging pain in his ear. As he stood, he staggered, leant on Radka for support, and then he pressed his hand to his side, feeling the pain in his ribs.

  ‘He kicked you,’ she said, seeing the gesture.

  His nose was bleeding, and she gave him a wad of tissues. He walked upright through the lobby, Radka’s arm holding him up, the bloody tissues clutched to his face, and somehow she got him into the hotel and up to his room. His vision was clear now, but he felt weak and distant as though an invisible curtain had come down between himself and his surroundings. In his room he lay on the bed while she called the reception, and, speaking in an urgent and authoritative voice, asked them for a doctor. He sat up. The pain had dwindled to a dull throbbing.

  ‘I don’t need a doctor.’

  ‘To be safe,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘Do you want to make a report to the police?’

  ‘No,’ he replied automatically.

  In London his reaction would have been the same. In normal circumstances the police were unpredictable and difficult. In a country where he spoke only a few words of the language he recoiled instinctively from the prospect. For all he knew the men who had attacked him could have been policemen themselves. The other complication was the fact that they had called out George’s name.

  ‘Who were those men? What did they want?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘They said George’s name,’ he insisted.

  ‘I don’t know. I told them you were George’s brother.’

  ‘He said something to you.’ He took a guess. ‘A message for George?’

  ‘I don’t know what he was talking about.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  She didn’t reply and he tried again.

  ‘The least you can do is tell me why I got punched.’

  ‘I think it was all a mistake,’ she said. ‘It makes no sense. He said to tell George they were waiting.’

  The doctor came in a short while. He examined Joseph, told him there was no serious damage, and gave him a few aspirins.

  ‘I must go,’ Radka said when the doctor left. ‘Shall I get Kofi?’

  He shook his head. At that moment he couldn’t face the idea of coping with his father.

  ‘No. Stay for a little while.’

  ‘I have to speak with Katya,’ she said. ‘To tell her you’re here.’

  ‘Good,’ Joseph told her. Radka’s plan had always struck him as risky. No one really knew whether Katya would want to see Kofi, and even if she said she did, she might well change her mind when she knew he was nearby.

  Radka sat on the bed facing him.

  ‘Just for a few minutes,’ she said vaguely.

  Joseph began fumbling with the buttons of the bloody shirt. The doctor had opened it to look at his chest, then, ridiculously, carefully buttoned it up again.

  ‘Let me help you,’ Radka said.

  She unbuttoned his shirt and drew it over his head. As she did this she didn’t meet his eyes and, feeling the delicate touch of her hands, he wondered whether she was thinking about George. She held the shirt by the arm and threw it across the room. She gasped and wiped her hand on the bedspread. She was breathing faster, the blood drained from her face.

  ‘Blood,’ she said angrily. ‘I hate to see blood. It frightens me.’

  Her fingers traced the bruise on his ribcage.

  ‘Your skin is very pale here,’ she said. ‘Just like George.’

  For an instant, George’s face flashed through his mind, then he dismissed the image. He put his hand over hers, pressing it close against his skin. He drew her gently, and inclining gradually towards him, she touched her lips to his face. They kissed, her body still tumbling down on his, with the endless slowness of a hallucination. They stayed like this for a few minutes, then when he touched her breasts, stroking them through the fabric of her dress, she opened her eyes, gazing into his.

  ‘I must go,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  They kissed again. Joseph’s body was tense and humming, his pain forgotten. He was more excited than he expected or wanted to be. Time vanished. They lay facing each other, their bodies entwined, and he was moving slowly, feeling himself like a great bulk inside her.

  ‘George,’ she whispered. ‘Liebling.’

  He was lying dazed and half asleep when he felt her swing off the bed and he heard the noise of water running in the bathroom. When he opened his eyes again, she was standing beside the bed. In the reflected light from the open door he could see that she was fully dressed.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  She bent over and kissed him quickly on the cheek. Then she was gone.

  TWENTY

  DIARY OF DESIRE

  The life and times of Kofi George Coker

  Moscow 1957

  That winter seemed to be going on for ever. It did not, of course, it was simply that the arrival of the spring didn’t mean the end of snow and ice. But after our visit to Jelenia Gora I hardly noticed the weather. Katya and I were in love, and we didn’t think of much apart from each other. In those days we were like tigers in the snow, leaping to each other whenever the opportunity offered. We must have made love every day for weeks, underneath convenient trees, against freezing walls, knee deep in snow, once in a tunnel near Komsomolskaya, once while she bent with her back to me over the railing of a bridge over the Moskva, then we walked over the bridge down Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya, went into the archway that led into the massive apartment building they called the Visoky Zdaniye, and then did it all over again, facing each other this time. Another time we did it on the floor of the empty classroom at the college. Under her skirt, during that period, she wore two or three slips. When I lifted them under her coat I could feel her naked belly heaving against me. Sometimes, it seemed, I thought of nothing else except the next time.

  The snow was wet underfoot when she invited me to meet her parents. By this time I had begun to acquire a grasp of what the people were like. For instance, talking to Valery about Katya showed me a picture of her that was new to me. He’d noticed how often we were together, of course, although I was careful not to say too much about how we spent our time. Like all the others, he guessed. Calvin’s ‘jokes’ about ‘educational pussy’ and ‘bringing teacher a banana’ would have told him, in any case. When I mentioned that I had been invited to Katya’s apartment he laughed as if I’d said something funny. Her father, he told me, was one of those who had survived the purges and travelled with Khrushchev to the Ukraine in order to repeat the entire process. They knew him well there.

  As usual, I had to read the meaning of Valery’s
comments between the lines, and I had the feeling he was trying to tell me to be cautious about this visit, or perhaps not to go, but, in the end, I closed my ears.

  As it happened there seemed to be nothing very alarming about Katya’s family. They lived to the west of the city, near Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The apartment was on the first floor of a quiet block at the end of a crooked lane pitted with holes and ruts, which were full of cracked ice and muddy slush. Inside, the place seemed like an explosion of colour and decoration, packed to bursting with objects, and it took my eyes a little time to adjust. The floor was covered with fringed carpets, mostly red, the walls were lined with shelves, full of books, dolls, little brass knick-knacks and wooden statuettes. Stepping across the threshold I was hit by a strong smell, some kind of herb I had never encountered before.

  Katya led me through the hallway into the room next to the kitchen. Her father was sitting at a desk. I had expected someone who looked meaner, but he appeared to be jovial, with a cheerful round face, topped by a fringe of blond hair, going white in streaks. Put a beard and a red hood on him and he’d look like Santa Claus, I thought. Later on, when I told Hussein this he nearly fell over laughing.

  ‘You haven’t really seen him yet,’ he said, and this was true, because the next time I caught sight of Vladimir Andreyevich he was wearing a huge black overcoat and a black hat and he was getting out of a big black car surrounded by a group of men who looked exactly the same, and according to Hussein this was what he really looked like.

  When I first met him, though, the questions he asked me seemed natural and harmless, just the sort of thing that any concerned father would ask of a young man who came home for dinner with his daughter. ‘Oochenik,’ he called me with a burst of laughter. That meant pupil and it seemed to be a family joke, because he kept on addressing Katya as oocheetyelneetsa – teacher – drawing out the syllables ironically. It made her laugh, for some reason, and I laughed along with her, and we all seemed to be getting on like a house on fire. Katya’s mother was, in contrast to her husband, a stern-looking woman, lean and greying with little round spectacles perched on her nose. She worked in one of the ministries, I gathered. The odd thing was that they were the reverse of what I expected – the woman cool and gloomy, the man warm and welcoming. After dinner he brought out a bottle of Polish Zubrowka and we began talking seriously. Katya sat next to me on the sofa, her face covered in smiles, translating quickly the words I didn’t understand and phrasing my replies to her father. Her mother, who spoke barely two words for the whole of the evening, sat at a little distance from us behind a table on which was a pile of books with some sort of journal propped up against them. She was reading it most of the time, but occasionally she would lay it down and listen to what we were saying, her chin resting in her open palm, her eyes magnified and bulging behind the glasses, switching from one to the other of us.