A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  He picked up the telephone and dialled Katya’s number, and when she answered he asked whether George had arrived.

  ‘No. We haven’t heard from him yet. When are you coming back?’

  He said he would join them later, and he was on the verge of telling her that he was going to meet George when it struck him that if his brother wanted to see him alone he might be about to reveal something that he wanted kept from his wife and mother. Kofi was the same. There were times, he had said to Joseph once, when men should keep their conversations hidden from women. Joseph was about thirteen then, and hearing this he had smiled, thinking what an antique his father sounded but not wanting to say it. George had not telephoned his mother’s apartment, but that might well be par for the course, and his brother, a man who kept his comings and goings secret even from his wife, would probably regard his telling Katya as some breach of male etiquette.

  The car was waiting in front of the hotel, as the voice on the telephone had promised. It didn’t look like a taxi, but he knew that meant nothing. The driver, a nondescript middle-aged man wearing a peaked hat, looked up from his newspaper as Joseph approached.

  ‘Herr Coker?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Joseph asked him.

  In reply the man shrugged and gestured, as if indicating that he spoke no English. He reached behind him and pushed open the rear door, but instead of getting in Joseph beckoned to the young man hovering by the entrance who had carried his baggage in the day before.

  ‘Ask him where we’re going.’

  A brief exchange.

  ‘He says a bar in Kreuzberg. Near Dresdenstrasse.’ He paused. ‘There are many bars there.’

  Indecisive, Joseph caught an ironic twitch on the boy’s face, and suddenly his fears seemed ridiculous. It was still broad daylight, the rays of the red sun slanting across the entrance. Hearing that he had been too apprehensive to get into a taxi in front of his hotel, Kofi would probably smile sarcastically, and George would make a joke about the bourgeois timidity of the English. Joseph made up his mind.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he told the driver.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It was early evening when George telephoned Radka from a bar in the Prenzlauer Berg to tell her he was back. The news that his father and brother had arrived left him troubled and restless, so he had another drink with Valentin before heading for Schöneberg.

  ‘I want to see this fabulous African,’ Valentin declared.

  George could see that he meant what he said. Over the years Kofi had become part of the mythology of their family, a curious and secret romance which Valentin had heard and only half believed from the time he was a toddler. In his childish mind, he told George, Katya had been an innocent princess lured away by a dark magician, and when he arrived in Berlin to embrace his aunt, it was if he had walked through the entrance to a forgotten fairy tale.

  George was by now accustomed to Valentin’s rhetoric which went in one ear and out the other. He was thinking about Radka, who had sounded disgruntled and irritable on the telephone. Perhaps she was annoyed about being left by herself to cope with his relatives. She had wanted him with her in Berlin, and when he told her that he wouldn’t get there for a few days she had been furious. It was a matter of business, he kept insisting, and eventually she had retreated into a sullen silence. On the other hand, they’d been through rows of that kind before. She was used to his absences, and it didn’t take too long for her to come round. Her bad temper was probably more to do with the fact that he was with Valentin. Radka hated the bond between them, and in recent times, when he talked about his cousin, she tended to withdraw into a sudden silence. She’d had an idea that what they were doing was illegal and dangerous, but that wasn’t the real problem, the difficulty was what she felt about Valentin. George couldn’t understand it. When they argued about his cousin, it all came back to the same thing. This was a paradox which grew more difficult as time went by. For Radka George’s association with Valentin represented a kind of failure on his part. If he was going to engage in business, she said once, why not take the opportunity to become a proper Western businessman, instead of getting into shady dealings with Valentin? Unable to crawl out of the mud, she shouted, he had dragged George in with him. In his turn, George accused her of double standards. In the West business was even more crooked, he told her. She was simply deceived by the skill with which they covered their tracks, and everything she said revealed the typical mentality of the old comrades to whom any kind of enterprise was a crime.

  This was an argument which made her even more angry and he knew that, in any case, her dislike of Valentin had never been altogether rational. The way Radka felt about his cousin, he pointed out, was very similar to the deep prejudices he’d read about which the whites held against negroes in the American South. This was hitting below the belt, and her eyes filled with tears. The negroes, she argued, had never done anything to her, and she could never sympathise with those who wished to murder and ill-treat them simply because of their colour. Russians were different. It was they who had ruined her father’s life and caused his premature death. It was they who had separated and destroyed families, looted her country and every other country in the region, it was they who had raped and tortured and massacred, and it was they who had perverted entire societies.

  In this mood she reduced George to silence. In her heart, he thought, Radka believed that Russians were capable of anything bad. She was polite enough to Valentin, but George suspected that she really thought of him as a peasant with snow on his boots. At first he had taken it as a joke, but the closer he got to Valentin the wider the distance between himself and Radka seemed to grow. It had been worse in Prague, partly because building up the new business had taken almost all of his time, and partly because he was spending all of that time with Valentin. The problem was that Prague was a place where a Russian could enjoy himself. It wasn’t depressed like the capitals in Romania or Bulgaria, or untrustworthy like Budapest, or dull like the Scandinavian cities – ‘like St Petersburg with no style,’ Valentin said. As for Poland, forget it, in Warsaw and Lodz they took your money but made their resentment obvious, and Berlin was an enigma. You never knew where you were with the Germans. The Czechs were different. These were people who knew how to enjoy themselves. Valentin set himself up nicely with a house in a quiet street in Holesovice and he was at home from the first day. George spent most of his spare time in the house. Radka refused to accompany him on his outings with Valentin, and he abandoned the attempt to persuade her after a short while because it had become part of the life that he lived for himself, without her. For instance, the house seemed to be stocked with an endless supply of women, travellers from everywhere, young Americans with rucksacks on their backs, Hungarian and Bulgarian women passing through the city, and visiting Russians. Sometimes they were pals of Milena’s, working girls from massage parlours and bars, sometimes they were ordinary Czech women who Valentin had encountered at an office or a party. The house was usually full, a party every weekend, and a few times in summer they took to the woods, waving champagne bottles and screeching like birds. George had never lived with such flagrant and reckless enjoyment. He loved it and he hated it, alternating between moments of wild ecstasy and periods of guilt and gloom, which he imagined sometimes was the product of his Russian blood. In any case, the life his cousin had made for him was like a drug. Going home to Radka he felt bored and restless, and lying in bed next to her he found himself musing about the dusting of freckles across the breasts of a girl from Kansas, or the wet rasp of Milena’s tongue on his foreskin. One drunken night Valentin hugged him so tight that his ribs almost cracked.

  ‘You are Russian!’ he shouted in George’s ear, ‘and I think Kofi was Russian too.’

  ‘He was African,’ he shouted back.

  ‘I forgive him,’ Valentin said grandly.

  Thinking about it, George grinned. Only Valentin could have said this to him without offence. The truth was that Valenti
n was most of the things Radka said she despised about the Russians, a loudmouth, unreliable, unpredictable, but being with him had brought out an aspect of George’s personality which had, for many long years, been suppressed. Now he couldn’t imagine giving up his cousin’s company. When Valentin talked about returning to Russia to move Victor’s treasure he seemed to assume that George was coming. George told himself that the sensible thing would be to say no, but once the arrangements were made he also knew that he couldn’t leave his partner to make the trip without him.

  They had driven the two trucks over nearly three thousand kilometres in a few days, crossing late at night at the posts where Valentin had distributed his bribes. They’d lashed a few old chairs and a chest of drawers on to the back of the load so as not to cause embarrassment and since they were not carrying drugs, they’d ridden through the inspections with ease. The German border was the hardest, but they’d come through escorted by a British army captain who’d cost Valentin a fortune. After that they’d driven from East to West, skirting Dresden and Düsseldorf, ending the journey fifty kilometres from the Dutch border. There was an old Luftwaffe base there, now occupied by the British air force, but a third of the runways and hangars were disused. They lay within the former perimeter fence which was not patrolled or linked into the security system, although it was guaranteed to keep out casual passers-by. At two in the morning they’d driven along the dirt road which wound through the woods bordering the site, cut their way through the wire and driven the trucks into one of the old hangars, then left the way they’d come, carefully weaving the fence back into place with new lengths of wire.

  Victor stayed nearby. He would get himself a place in Düsseldorf, he said, and until they worked out how to dispose of the hoard or found a better hiding place, he would drive out from time to time to inspect the fence. During the journey they had discussed what to do. The idea was to get rid of it all at once, and to take a reasonable price from anyone who would take it off their hands. The problem was finding a buyer who could be trusted not to rob them or cut their throats before the deal was done. The alternative was to park the goods somewhere innocuous, like a furniture warehouse where no one would suspect their presence, until things cooled down.

  ‘Someone will find it, wherever it is,’ Victor said with a gloomy air.

  Valentin raised his eyebrows at George and smiled. Victor simply wanted to get the money. His dream was to go to California with a few millions in his pocket. There he would meet Sharon Stone or someone who looked exactly like her.

  They were no closer to finding a solution by the time they got back to Berlin. But confronted by his father’s presence and the prospect of meeting him, George resolved to put the problem out of his mind. In front of his mother’s apartment he paused for a minute before getting out of the car, checking his appearance in the driving mirror. As he climbed the stairs his footsteps dragged. In his heart he was eager, wanting to fly like a bird to his father’s side, but there was, at the same time, another emotion weighing him down, a kind of fear about what he might encounter at the top of the stairs, and about how he would behave.

  His mother met him at the door, and she hugged him fiercely. She seemed normal, but her eyes, he noticed, were red and tearful.

  ‘Guess who is here,’ she said loudly.

  Kofi was sitting in an armchair near the window, one arm around Serge, who stood by him, leaning against the chair. When the boy saw George come into the room he shouted, twisted away, ran to his father and hugged him, then climbed on to his back, arms draped round his neck.

  ‘That’s my grandfather,’ he announced.

  Kofi got up, came towards George, and, a little awkwardly, embraced him, pressing his cheek to his son’s. Seeing his father’s face close to him, George felt the prickle of tears behind his eyelids.

  ‘At last,’ he murmured. ‘At last.’

  He sat next to Radka, still hugging Serge, who immediately broke away and went to stand by his grandfather again. Radka gave him a strained smile, then turned her head away.

  ‘Time to get ready for bed,’ she told Serge. ‘You’ve had a long day.’

  The boy pouted, but after she promised Kofi would be back he went quietly enough.

  ‘I’m very happy to see you,’ Kofi said. ‘If I’d known I would have come sooner. But I’m here now.’

  ‘I thought you must be dead,’ George told him, ‘until I saw Joseph. Then I knew.’

  His voice choked and Kofi got up again, came to the sofa, sat down and put his arm around George, who hung his head, feeling the tears start behind his eyes. For a few seconds George felt Katya watching him, and he seemed to see himself from the outside cringing like a tearful child. In that instant he felt bewildered and embarrassed, struggling with the waves of emotion which flooded through him, then he gave in and rested his head against Kofi’s shoulder.

  He heard Katya leave the room and he sat up, looking at Kofi who was watching him with a gentle smile. George, controlling his features, smiled back. He was thinking, with a feeling of surprise, that at first sight, Kofi looked nothing like himself or Joseph. He had, of course, seen his mother’s photograph of Kofi, but he had often tried to guess what his father would look like as an older man, forty years later. He had various pictures in his head, most of them assembled from glimpses of Africans on the TV screen, but he had always imagined him as looking like himself with a darker skin. Now he realised that the photo, a black-and-white snap in which all the tones were really shades of grey, had not prepared him for the vivid impression that his father’s appearance would make: the velvet-black undertones of Kofi’s skin, the contrast of his greying hair, his gleaming white teeth had a visual power which struck George almost like a physical sensation.

  ‘Your mother did a good job,’ Kofi said, his mouth still curved in a smile. ‘You look great.’

  George felt the same smile on his own face, noting a resemblance for the first time. The middle of Kofi’s upper lip curved upwards in a peak, like Joseph’s, and he had always seen the same shape when he looked in the mirror. He ducked his head, not knowing quite what to say. For as long as he could remember he had talked privately to his father in his head, especially in moments of stress or anguish, knowing instinctively that Kofi was a man who would understand and sympathise. Now he could think of nothing to say. As if reading his mind, Kofi patted his arm.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of time for us to talk,’ he said.

  As it turned out, when Katya came back a dam seemed to have burst, and they talked with hardly a pause for the next few hours. Kofi told them the story of his life since he had seen Katya. He had hoped to be part of changing the world, he said, then found himself trapped in a bubble, around which the world changed without his help. Katya told George about the days when she had first met Kofi, a wide-eyed and innocent African, whose hair she had wanted to touch to see whether it felt the same as sheep’s wool. Kofi asked George about how he had fared during his schooldays, and George found himself reciting the tale of precisely those times when, alone and mad with frustration, he had wished for Kofi’s presence.

  It was a couple of hours later when George asked about Joseph.

  ‘He had some trouble last night. Radka was there.’

  Kofi’s tone was nonchalant, and it seemed to George that whatever had happened to Joseph hadn’t made a huge impression on him.

  ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Radka said quickly.

  She told him the outlines of the event. They had been approached by a couple of men who had hit Joseph. She had got him up to his room and called a doctor before leaving. During the day he’d been fine, so there was no real damage done.

  ‘Shit,’ George exclaimed. ‘It’s getting worse.’

  Kofi shrugged. What had happened to Joseph, he seemed to be saying, was part of the occupational risk of being a black man walking around a white city. George knew that, but there was something about the impersonal manner in which Radka had told the story that wor
ried him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Katya said. ‘He telephoned before you came. He’ll be here later.’

  ‘I’ll call him anyway,’ George told them.

  He got up and went to the room which Katya had decorated with some of his things: a poster of Mohammed Ali, a block of concrete from the Wall still spray-painted with part of a sketch, blown-up photos of himself in the ring, a couple of shelves of classic English books – Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens and others, the paper yellow and curling. Radka had taken some of these objects down and added her own touches, but he still thought of it as his room.

  He rang Joseph’s hotel from his mobile, but there was no reply when he got through to the room. He switched the phone off with an irritable flick, suddenly realising that the news of Joseph’s beating had crystallised a kind of guilt he was feeling. He had nothing to lose, he thought, by this reunion, but perhaps it might seem to Joseph that for the first time in his life he would have to share with a brother he had never known. In Prague he had put Joseph’s stiffness down to English reserve, but, thinking about it now he began to wonder whether his brother’s coolness had in fact been concealed anger. On top of that he had come to Berlin only to be attacked in the street.

  George was about to try the number again when Radka came in and shut the door, standing with her back to it as if she wanted to stop him getting out.

  ‘I didn’t tell you everything about last night,’ she said. ‘Those men attacked us because they thought Joseph was you. They gave me a message for you.’

  She gave the rest of the details then, and as he listened he felt a cold certainty that Liebl had been behind it all. His fists clenched with rage. Blackmail and intimidation had always been Liebl’s favourite weapons.