‘What do we do now?’ he asked Valentin.
George expected an answer. Without working it out consciously he also knew that when it came they would argue for the next couple of hours, and during that time the decision would be made. He couldn’t put his finger on the moment when the two of them had begun to operate in this way, like a double act, but nowadays they were both conscious that they relied on each other. The strange thing, he thought, was that his real brother, the one lying asleep behind him, was a man he hardly knew and didn’t understand, while his cousin had become, to all intents and purposes, as much of a brother as anyone could be.
‘We should take him to Katya’s apartment,’ Valentin said, looking at Joseph in the mirror. ‘He needs a doctor for that leg. She’ll know what to do.’
‘I don’t want her involved in this,’ George said automatically.
‘So what would you do? Leave your brother at the door of a hospital? Or just dump him at the hotel? That’s not wise. He should change hotels anyway. To be safe. And what about your father? What are you going to tell him? Some dog just came up in the street and nearly chewed his son’s ass off?’
George shrugged.
‘It’s difficult. I don’t want to tell her the whole story.’ He paused, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know what she’ll say.’
‘I know what she’ll say.’ Valentin sounded amused. ‘She already knows.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Why do you think I came to you with the painting that first time? I didn’t know whether I could trust you. I talked to Katya about it. She said you might say no, but if you said yes you would never betray me.’
‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
George was thunderstruck. How was this possible?
‘I don’t know. I told her everything. She told me not to tell you. I don’t know why. That you must ask her.’
At the apartment in Schöneberg they parked out in the street, woke Joseph up and walked him between them up the stairs. Katya answered the door.
‘Ah. The boys,’ she cried out gaily when she saw them.
She hugged and kissed George, but then she noticed Joseph’s condition, slumped against the wall as if it was the only thing holding him upright, his trouser leg torn, the bloodstained bandage showing through it.
‘What happened?’
‘It’s a long story,’ George told her. ‘Some people who were after me set a dog on him.’
She gave him a serious, direct look, and he returned it with the blank innocence he used with her when he was lying. She frowned.
‘You can tell me later. We’ll put him in your room. Take Serge out and put him in with Radka.’
When George went into the room the boy was asleep, lying on top of the covers. Beside him was a furry creature with bulging eyes, and a book whose cover showed a mechanical digger, its robot arm raised against a blue sky. Serge loved reading about machines, and passing building sites he would stand and stare at the tractors and cranes, gazing at the men in hard hats as if they were heroes on white horses. George smiled, thinking about it. His own dreams had been about rifles and men marching in shiny boots. He scooped Serge up in his arms, and the boy opened his eyes and smiled at him.
‘Vati,’ he murmured sleepily.
Disturbed by the movement the furry thing on the bed opened its eyes and made a farting sound. Serge giggled.
‘Er gefurzen.’
George carried him along the corridor into the next room. Radka was lying propped up in bed, spectacles on her nose, reading an English book she had bought in a secondhand bookshop. When she looked up and saw them, she put the book down, took off her glasses and threw the duvet aside to make room for Serge.
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s a long story. Joseph is going to sleep in there tonight.’
She made a face of surprise, and as he left the room she started getting out of bed.
In the sitting room, Joseph was lying half dressed on a sofa. Kofi had taken his torn trousers off and they lay on the floor in a dark puddle, topped by the coils of bloodstained bandages which Katya had unwrapped. She knelt alongside, surrounded by objects from her first aid kit, scissors, bandages, cotton wool and antiseptic powder, looking as calm and efficient as a nurse as she wiped Joseph’s leg carefully with the antiseptic, cleaning the punctures gently. She was taking care not to hurt him, but he was, in any case, showing no reaction, lying back with his eyes closed, half asleep. Kofi stood alongside, his expression sober.
‘How is he?’
Radka had come into the room, and she stood beside Kofi, peering over the back of the sofa at Joseph.
‘He’s okay,’ Katya told her. ‘It looks bad, but I don’t think it’s infected, and his father says he’s had the tetanus vaccine recently.’
This was on the occasion of Joseph’s solitary trip to West Africa a couple of years before, when he’d had every kind of inoculation to be had. Kofi had smiled broadly when he heard about his son’s preparations, and Joseph, a little stung, had replied, ‘I don’t think your being born over there gives me some kind of immunity.’
When Katya was finished with him, Kofi and George helped Joseph up and walked him into the bedroom. Then they sat him down on the narrow bed, from which George had just taken Serge, and where he himself had slept as a child. Anticipating frequent visits, he had brought it from the old apartment near the Friedrichstrasse when they moved to Prague. They tugged his shirt and his jacket off, then, as he lay back, George covered him with the duvet. As he did so he had the curious feeling that he was handling his own body, the smooth ochre skin, the curling black hair, the stubborn stubble on the chin, more pronounced at the end of the day. He sat by the side of the bed watching, wondering about the emotion inside him. Joseph opened his eyes, then they fluttered shut.
‘Good night,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’
George touched his brother on the shoulder, feeling as if a vibration passed between them at that moment.
‘What happened?’ Kofi asked.
His tone wasn’t angry, but looking up George saw him frowning, his eyes fixed and intent. Under his gaze, George felt the urge to confess.
‘It’s my fault,’ he muttered. ‘It was me they wanted. I think the dog was an accident. It’s just a madman who thinks I have something he wants. I was handling it, but I didn’t think that anything like this would happen to him.’
Kofi rested his hand on George’s shoulder.
‘You didn’t do this. I know how hard it is to stop things happening. You can explain later.’
He sat on the bed and waved George away.
‘I’ll stay with him. Get some rest.’
Outside the door Katya was waiting.
‘Come.’
They went into her bedroom. It was a big, light room, so familiar as to give George a feeling of nostalgia as he settled down in the armchair. It was here that he pictured Katya when he was away, deliberately forgetting the other places where they had lived before. It was here that she seemed to have relaxed and arrived at a kind of peace with herself. The furnishings seemed to reflect her mood, a light-coloured oatmeal carpet, pale wallpaper with big patterns of flowers in gold. The room looked open and uncluttered, the big mirrors on the walk-in closet throwing back a bright sunny vista. On one of the walls there was a blown-up copy of the photograph of herself and Kofi. It had already been faded when the copy was made, and looking at the image, it struck George that it bore only a vague general resemblance to either of his parents. He had devoured this photograph with his eyes on innumerable occasions, but, since seeing his father, its significance seemed suddenly to have disappeared, and now it was merely a picture of two young people he hardly recognised. Opposite was a huge poster of Man Ray’s photograph of Nancy Cunard. There were some other photos, of scenes which had a significance she had never explained to George. Krasnaya Ploschad, with the red sun rearing up behind the domes, a green ridge in Poland, the Charles Bridge in Prague
.
‘What happened?’ Katya asked.
‘Didn’t Valentin tell you?’
‘Are you jealous?’
They both knew he was, but he refused to dignify the question with an answer, so he stood and faced the wall, staring at the Man Ray photograph with its strange, translucent eyes. Katya once told him that his father had known this woman, and he made a mental note to ask Kofi whether this was true and what she had been like. Thinking of Kofi made him remember that for most of his life he had pictured him as a distant dream, floating between sleep and wakefulness, lost for ever. Occasionally he had wondered whether what his mother told him was entirely true. Now the man was sitting in the next room he didn’t know what he felt or what to say to him. When they embraced he had tried to suppress his tears, uncertain whether Kofi would think it unmanly if he cried. Now he wondered what his father was angry about, what had happened to Joseph, and facing Katya he tried to guess whether she knew what Kofi was thinking.
He told her about Liebl and how the chain of events started when he went to Liebl for help in selling the first picture.
‘I didn’t tell you I knew about what you were doing,’ Katya said, ‘because at first it didn’t matter. I only told him to show you the painting. I hoped you could help him. Afterwards when he told me he had a house full of treasure I suggested a way of dealing with it. Valentin is not a planner, and I knew that sooner or later you would do something crazy, once you’d had enough of kissing the ass of every tourist who came through the airport. He promised me that it would stop after you made some money, and I couldn’t see how dangerous it would be. In my day no one would have been bothered about getting those pictures back. Why should they care? By the time I understood how things had changed the damage was done. I didn’t want you to think I was interfering. I know how proud you are. Later, it was too late.’ She paused. ‘Also, I was excited about being in possession of the secret. No one knew except me. You know what that feels like.’
There was a peculiar expression on her face and George felt the back of his neck flush with heat. It had been more than a dozen years, he thought, and she hadn’t forgotten or forgiven him. Even though she’d told him repeatedly that it didn’t matter, and that she understood, the tension was still there.
He remembered the moment of discovery only too well. He had moved out of the apartment and he’d been squatting temporarily in a block in Prenzlauer Berg. He’d come back one afternoon and having let himself in, had the impression that the place was empty until he tried the door of her room and found it locked.
‘Leave me alone,’ she’d shouted back when he called out. Her voice sounded peculiar, strained and hysterical, and he persisted, fearing that there was something seriously wrong. She had taken his departure with equanimity. He had, after all, been away many times for varying periods, and she could understand him, at the age of nearly thirty not wanting to be tied to her apron strings. So that couldn’t be the problem. He knocked and knocked and when she refused to come out, he settled down to wait. She appeared eventually, her face swollen and red as if she’d been crying for a long time. When he spoke to her she avoided his eyes. It was nearly another hour before she told him what had happened. Someone, a reliable person, she said, emphasising the words, had read her file. George’s heart sank, because he knew that she had to be talking about the reports he had written about her. He had, of course, never given them anything which might damage her. There was nothing, in fact, apart from her boyfriends, who were all short-term and more or less harmless. Her experiences with men had put her off for good, she used to say.
‘Let me explain,’ he’d said.
‘There’s no need,’ she had replied firmly.
Her friend had also read George’s Stasi file. They had known about all his little tricks, dealing in army equipment and rations, trading in all kinds of goods with Russian soldiers, even a little pornography. He had only survived because of the errands he ran for the Stasi, and because his crimes were so petty, but that is exactly what he had been, a petty criminal and an equally petty informer.
‘You were lucky,’ she said bitterly. ‘I expect that sooner or later they would have put you behind bars.’
She had never spoken of it even to Radka because she had been brought up to keep such secrets even from her closest relations. But George knew what she had been thinking, that his father Kofi would have had too much honour for such a career. No matter how many times they called him a black monkey, she had told George, he was a proud man.
‘That was a long time ago, and he was born in a free country,’ George had replied, forgetting for the moment that Kofi had actually been born in a colony.
There was a knock at the door and Radka opened it, looking, with an unreadable expression, at each of their faces in turn.
‘Some coffee?’
Back in the other room Kofi was sitting opposite Valentin. Both of them looked up as George followed Katya in and he guessed that Valentin had been telling Kofi the whole story. The trouble was that Valentin, as George knew only too well, had no sense of shame about what they’d been doing, and if he felt he could trust someone he would have no compunction about boasting of how clever he’d been and how much money they’d been making. Of course, he’d stop short of talking about shooting the Georgians. He had that much sense.
‘Valentin says the gangsters missed you and got Joseph,’ Kofi said in English.
He was sitting back at his ease, one leg swung over the arm of the chair, and he smiled up at George as if he was talking about some childish prank.
Guessing that Valentin had told the story in that way, like one long joke, George felt a surge of irritation.
‘Did you tell him about Konstantine?’ he asked his cousin abruptly.
Valentin shook his head slowly.
‘This is about more than Liebl,’ he told Katya. ‘He’s playing games, trying to scare me. All he wants is money. If that was it we could work something out, but I think the people he’s working with are different. They’re real trouble. Georgians.’ He hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘We had to shoot some of them in Hamburg, defending ourselves. In Prague they killed one of our people. I think that they’ve been waiting for Liebl to do the business for them, and he’s been waiting and watching to see whether he could get the pictures away from us without a fight. That’s how he used to work, because in the old days you couldn’t escape. He once told me that everything fell into his hands sooner or later. Now things have changed, and he’s stepping up the pressure. Maybe they’re all tired of waiting, and I have the feeling that if Liebl doesn’t succeed soon, they’ll be coming.’
Without a pause he told her the rest. As she listened her face grew pale and she sat down on the arm of Kofi’s chair and took his hand in hers.
While George talked, Radka came in with a tray full of coffee cups and a percolator. Listening to his words, she stood there, forgetting to put the tray down, as immobile as a shop window dummy.
‘This isn’t just about pictures. They want to kill us, Mutti,’ he said eventually, using the name for her he had grown up with. ‘I don’t think we can survive in Prague or Berlin. We have to get out of here, because it’s only a matter of time now.’
This was the conclusion he’d come to. The logic was inescapable. He couldn’t defend himself and his family indefinitely. In another country he might be able to drop out of sight. He might have a chance.
‘Where would you go?’ Katya asked. She raised her hand and began twirling one of her curls around her finger, a gesture he remembered from his childhood and which told him how worried she was.
‘England maybe, I don’t know. Or the USA. I have enough money. I don’t have to stay.’ He paused. ‘I want you to come too. In England Kofi and Joseph will be there.’
He didn’t look round at the old man. He didn’t want to know what Kofi’s reaction was, he thought. After all this time he couldn’t back away.
‘What about you?’ Katya asked Valentin.
Valentin made a gesture of bewilderment.
‘It doesn’t matter. They don’t frighten me.’
He still didn’t understand, George thought. In George’s mind his world seemed to have changed in a flash after Katya referred to the time when she’d found out the extent of his betrayal. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he wanted to shout in her face, but he knew also that his anger was for himself. It was as if, for all this time, he had been deceiving himself, pretending to be a man, when all the time he was still a child. Life has to change now, he thought, or he would die from being what he was.
‘I think you’re right,’ Katya said. She looked at Valentin. ‘Do what I tell you, malcheek. Don’t go home. Go to a hotel. Five star. Enjoy yourself. Keep away from your women and no clubs. Stay out of sight till lunchtime and then call me.’ She turned to George. ‘And you, go to bed with your wife. I have to talk with Kofi. I think maybe we can fix this. But go. Leave us alone. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
Both of them nodded obediently. When they’d left the room Katya sat down opposite Kofi and looked at him steadily.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him. ‘I have a lot to say.’
TWENTY-SIX
For most of the day Kofi and Katya had talked together. They were at ease with each other, of course, but they had both shied away from the conversation which Kofi had come all this way to have. Instead, they talked about their lives and about what they’d done since their last meeting. Sometimes it seemed like an impossible stretch of years, a desert reaching back to a horizon which was almost invisible. Sometimes it seemed as if the time had passed in the twinkling of an eye.
Telling Katya about his life, Kofi was astonished at how little he had achieved, and how quickly his energy had trickled away. He had gone back to Ghana, working for Makonnen in the Ministry of Tourism. Within a year he had been sent to London where he worked in the Mission, his occupation sitting behind a desk and shuffling papers. From time to time he had been despatched to various capitals, but after his marriage to Caroline he always had a good excuse for returning to what was now his home. Then, in what seemed like an incredibly short time, Osageyfo’s reign was over. He had been dismissed and sent into exile, and Mak, Kofi heard, was in prison, awaiting judgement. The headlines in the newspaper were like an announcement which told Kofi that his own career in diplomacy was over. Without waiting to be recalled to Accra, he simply left his desk and went home. In the intervening years he had tried his hand at a number of things, working to make a living, busying himself with his journal, his horizons shrinking to the round of his daily routine and the walls behind which he lived. In the end there was not much to tell. He had existed, it seemed, somehow apart from all the events and people who mattered to him, a kind of spectator.
A Shadow of Myself Page 32