A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  ‘If I call myself a German,’ George said. ‘Other people are likely to say – yes, but what are you really?’ He laughed, then a question occurred to him. ‘What are you?’ He wanted to know the answer. As a boy he had wanted to be the same nationality as his father, and sometimes when someone asked where he came from he would say Ghana.

  Kofi considered the question with care.

  ‘I was once a Ghanaian. Now I have a British passport. As for what I am in here,’ he tapped his heart, ‘I don’t know any more. You can say I’m like the singer, the artist formerly known as Prince. I am a man formerly known as a Ghanaian.’

  George guessed he was expected to laugh.

  ‘What did you think when you heard about me?’

  Kofi studied George, turning the question over with even more care.

  ‘I was very happy. If I’d known at the time I would have been very pleased. Not having been there while you grew up makes me very sad.’

  ‘But you didn’t know.’

  ‘I wish that I had.’

  ‘Are you glad to see her?’

  Kofi smiled.

  ‘I didn’t think I would ever be so happy again.’

  Hearing this George felt a peculiar little thrill inside him, and for a moment he couldn’t think what else to say. In another minute, he thought, his mind would be full of questions.

  ‘Tell me something about your life,’ Kofi asked. ‘Did you have a happy childhood?’

  ‘That is not how I would describe it,’ George replied. ‘It wasn’t her fault, but I felt alone, you know, most of the time. At school they used to think I was American, or that my father must be a Yank. That’s not so good. Sometimes they expected me to be able to sing the blues, or play jazz like I had some genetic heritage. When they knew my mother was Russian they said Schwarzer Russky, when they weren’t calling me nigger. It was easier when I went into the army.’

  ‘You should have gone to university,’ Kofi said. ‘It would have opened windows.’

  He had the strange feeling that George was more like him than Joseph, and already he felt a kind of sympathy between them that was absent in his conversations with his younger son.

  ‘I should have,’ George said, ‘but I wouldn’t have known what to study.’ He grinned at Kofi, struck by a sudden thought. ‘What made you go to study in Russia? All the people there were trying to get out.’

  ‘In some ways I was just doing what I was told. It was strange, yes, but all these white man’s countries were strange, although not in the same way. Part of it was that we couldn’t take anything on trust, because everybody in the world lied to us about everything. They really did treat us like savage children who were only entitled to know what they thought was good for us. So everything was a kind of opposite. When the British and the Americans said freedom, they meant freedom for themselves, servitude for us. When they said the Russians were enslaved it was not hard to believe that it really meant freedom.’

  ‘It didn’t mean freedom.’

  Kofi shrugged.

  ‘I still don’t know what it meant. For me going to a place where you weren’t supposed to go was a kind of freedom, like getting out of prison.’ He smiled at George. ‘Why did white men go to Africa? Europe was our dark continent.’

  George watched him, searching for signs of resemblance. The eyes, he thought, were very similar.

  ‘When I was younger,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t understand why you would come to a place where you didn’t belong and have a child who didn’t belong either.’ He hurried on to prevent Kofi misunderstanding his intent. ‘Now I can see all this belonging is bullshit. You can belong where you choose to belong.’

  ‘What did your mother tell you about me?’

  George grinned at him. ‘She said you were a kind of hero.’ It would have been better, he thought, if I had believed you were an ordinary person. All his life he had felt that his father would have done things he couldn’t.

  ‘I’m going to Prague today,’ Kofi said.

  ‘Prague?’

  George wasn’t sure that he’d heard right.

  ‘I’m going to meet an old friend.’ Kofi hesitated, uncertain how much to tell him, then he described how he’d met Valery, and how they used to share a room in Cheryomushki. George was astonished. He’d heard the name on the radio and read it in the newspapers, but it had never occurred to him that the man had any connection with his parents.

  ‘You know that man?’

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you about him?’

  George shook his head, and Kofi guessed that Katya hadn’t told him, either, about the part his grandfather had played in their lives.

  ‘He can help us,’ he said.

  Somehow the conversation calmed George’s nerves, and soothed the restlessness which had kept him awake. Kofi was talking about Valery, but his attention kept wandering, and in a few minutes he felt himself dozing off. When he opened his eyes again, there was a grey light gleaming through the window and Kofi had disappeared.

  He went to bed, sliding in beside Radka who shifted to make room for him without waking. He woke again a couple of hours later, and walking into the kitchen interrupted Kofi and Katya who were sitting at the table conversing intently in quiet voices.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ Katya said. ‘We were talking about what to do in Prague.’

  George shrugged. He had been too tired to argue during the night, in the face of Katya’s firmness, but in the cold light of day he found himself unable to believe in the idea that his elderly parents could resolve matters at a stroke. He was on the verge of opening his mouth to say so, but, looking at Katya’s determined expression he changed his mind. After all it would do no harm for Kofi to go to Prague and see his old friend, and it might keep them quiet while he worked out a way of getting out of the mess.

  After breakfast, when the arrangements for his father’s trip had been made, and Kofi was waiting to be picked up, George telephoned Liebl’s office. The receptionist put him through at once.

  ‘I was waiting to hear from you,’ Liebl said. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘You fat shit,’ George said. ‘Next time I’ll come looking for you.’

  ‘Don’t get so excited,’ Liebl wheezed. ‘It’s your brother’s fault. You should tell him to be more careful. I didn’t think anyone would be fooled by that old trick. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to do with him.’

  ‘He’s not accustomed to dealing with criminals,’ George said.

  Liebl chuckled appreciatively.

  ‘I take it you’re ready to talk business.’

  ‘Yes,’ George told him.

  He had discussed this with Katya and Valentin and they’d agreed that he should open negotiations with Liebl. That would give them a couple of days in which Kofi’s billionaire might step in. If that didn’t work at least they’d have a breathing space in which to make new plans. In any case, whatever they decided they would have to contact Victor and talk with him.

  ‘I’m not the only one involved,’ George continued. ‘This will take a few days.’

  ‘I’ll give you another day,’ Liebl said. He paused. ‘Don’t worry about the Georgians. If you take me as a partner I’ll take care of them.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Kofi’s flight to Prague took off from Tempelhof in the middle of the morning. After breakfast, Katya had taken a telephone call from a young woman who spoke German with a snooty Wessi accent, and who said all the arrangements had been made. A couple of hours later a young man wearing a dark suit and dark glasses picked him up in a limousine and drove him to the airport. Before that, George, Joseph and Radka had all insisted that someone should accompany him to Prague, but he had shrugged off their arguments.

  ‘I’ve done more difficult things through most of my life,’ Kofi told his sons firmly, ‘and this will be hard enough without having to look after you as well,’ he said with finality. ‘Stay here, and don’t go out. I’ll telephon
e you when I get there.’

  A fortnight ago he would never have spoken to his younger son with such an assumption of authority, but now Joseph’s manner had changed towards him, and, as if in imitation of George, he treated his father with a new respect.

  The flight was uneventful. At the airport outside Prague another young man, also dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, picked him up in another limousine. The car and the chauffeur were so much like the other one that Kofi was tempted to look over his shoulder to check that he wasn’t back at Tempelhof.

  They came in through Holesovice, swung right out of the Letenské Tunnel, drove along the embankment. It was a bright day, and the sun danced on the river beside them. He thought of George walking here, a solitary figure. It had been the same in Berlin. Looking at the landscape his mind had kept returning to the idea of George’s footsteps branded on the pavement, trying to imagine what his son had been feeling as he passed through the streets. A phrase from the Bible occurred to him as he did so. A certain man had two sons. The prodigal son, he remembered, had been the younger one. Did that make a difference? Would Joseph eventually reproach him for what he felt about George? He craned his neck to stare up at the trees in the park, feeling as if they were acquaintances he had not seen for many years. Katya had said she loved him, but he didn’t know how to respond. His emotions seemed to have been frozen for so long that he couldn’t work out what they meant. Perhaps they could stay together. He smiled, thinking of her presence while he slept.

  Opposite the old town, they crossed over the bridge into Narodni, and drew up in front of a huge office building. Like most of the new buildings in the city, it seemed barely finished, as if the workmen had only just packed up their tools and hurried off round the corner when they saw the car approach.

  In the lobby of the building there was a reception behind which an elegant young woman sat, a telephone to her ear. Next to her was another desk which housed two men in what seemed to be the regulation dark suits. Kofi was just about to walk across the marble floor to the reception when another elegant young woman intercepted him.

  ‘I hope you had a smooth flight,’ she said in English as she shook hands with him. Her accent had a strong American tinge. ‘Mr Kirichenko is waiting for you.’

  When they got off the lift she led the way to another door.

  ‘May I bring you something? Coffee, tea, vodka?’

  ‘Coffee,’ Kofi told her.

  He had expected to be tense or disturbed on the brink of this meeting, but what he felt was an intense pleasure at the thought of seeing Valery again, and the building, the decor, and the evidence of his old friend’s success gave him an odd sense of reassurance as if he was part of this power to shape the world.

  She turned the handle of the door and pushed it open. It was a huge room which ended in a glass wall that framed a panoramic view of the river, beyond it the castle and the wooded heights of Letna. Valery was sitting at a desk placed in a corner of the room, where the curtain had been drawn over a section of the glass, blotting out the view and providing the illusion of a dark cubbyhole. As his visitor came in he rose up out of the shadows and came towards him.

  Kofi would have recognised him anywhere. He had changed, of course, but it was as if his features had simply become more clearly what they had been. He carried his head now with a tilt which made his chin stick out, and his body had grown thick, not fat but massive, like something carved out of a giant pine in the Siberian taiga, the world’s largest forest. He still had all his hair, which seemed to spring from his head in a brush of grey wire, and he wore a loose white shirt draped over his trousers and on his feet, a pair of trainers, with the tongues flopping out. He saw Kofi looking and he gestured at his feet.

  ‘I lost part of a toe in Siberia,’ he said in English, ‘and these are the only comfortable shoes I can find.’

  He shook Kofi’s hand, then hugged him. They sat down in a little group of armchairs which had been arranged in the middle of the room, facing the window.

  ‘This is the strangest experience of my life,’ Valery said. ‘To find us here, like this, after so many years.’ He looked intently at Kofi. ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again either. Your English is better.’

  Valery laughed.

  ‘It was always better than you thought.’

  His face fell as if the memory had sobered him.

  ‘Katya told you what happened? I’m sorry.’

  Somehow Kofi didn’t want him to apologise or be humble.

  ‘It was a long time ago. I didn’t come for revenge or apologies. I understand. You did what you had to do.’

  Valery looked him in the eyes for a few seconds, a hint of curiosity in his expression, as if he was trying to make out whether Kofi was telling him the truth. Eventually he sighed.

  ‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But you are a great man, Kofi.’

  ‘What about you?’ Kofi asked. ‘I thought you were going to be an engineer and serve the people. Instead of which I see you’ve wasted your time becoming a billionaire.’

  Valery chuckled.

  ‘This is an accident.’ He waved his hand around the room. ‘You should come to Siberia with me and see where I started out.’

  ‘I expect you’ve got buildings like this in a lot of cities,’ Kofi said. ‘No one does all this by accident.’

  ‘Oh no. The accident was Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The rest was my own work.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Valery looked away from Kofi, staring out at the river, then he began to talk, launching into his forty-year-old memories as if they were fresh and recent in his mind.

  He had still been in his early twenties in 1960 when he set out from Yekaterinburg in Western Siberia for the oil fields which were just being discovered to the north.

  ‘Sverdlovsk, they used to call it.’ Valery laughed. Yakov Sverdlov, Kofi remembered, had been the official charged with overseeing the executions of the tsar and his family in Yekaterinburg. As a reward he had had a city named after him. ‘No one wants to remember Sverdlov now. Boris Nikolayevich was born near there too, in Butka, and east of there Rasputin.’ He laughed again. ‘They produce tough guys up there. They grow up pickled in vodka. You can’t kill them.’

  All this was tame country in comparison to where he started.

  ‘There were no roads. In winter fifty degrees below zero was normal. One of the ways we used to amuse ourselves was coming out of our hut and throwing a cup of hot coffee in the air. It never reached the ground. It didn’t freeze, it evaporated into a kind of vapour. Look down on the snow and all you’d see was a little brown powder. At first we lived with the Khants. They were nomads, living off the reindeer and the fish they took out of the river. Nowadays I can’t even look at reindeer meat. Sometimes I see all that stuff about reindeer at Christmas. It makes me laugh. They were vicious brutes. Go near them and they try to hook you with their horns. But in those days when you walked out in the country your feet sank in up to the ankles. Look back and you could see the oil welling up in your footsteps.’

  But even though they could smell the oil on his clothes, when he went into Sverdlovsk to argue with the Ministry for permission to begin drilling test wells, it wasn’t until a few years later that they started hauling the equipment through the swamp. Over the next decade it turned into a mess. Valery’s engineering background had taught him a precise approach to development and construction, but this was no place for careful techniques. Even at the time he understood that the rush for Siberian oil would be as wasteful, and as extravagantly greedy as the gold rush in Alaska a hundred years before. They were taking a quarter of the Soviet Union’s oil out of the district, but they were injecting the fields with water to push the top of the field out, and then moving on to new ones because it simply wasn’t worth pumping the water out to get at the remaining oil. They were burning the natural gas which would later be worth more than the oil they were pump
ing. They were leaving timber, which could have built houses for the workers, to rot in the swamps, and all the time the workers who were taking unimaginable wealth out of the ground inhabited a city of flimsy shacks in a giant clearing in the taiga.

  ‘An entire quarter of Nizhnevartovsk was metal wagons in which they lived,’ Valery said. He shook his head. ‘You had to see it to believe it.’

  He had learnt the trade from the bottom up. His major achievement, he told Kofi, had been nothing to do with engineering. It was his ability to keep the workers happy and increase production targets every year. To this end he racked his brain to create incentives, freeing gangs to rescue timber and build housing for the families, finding space to fly sick children into the regional capital at Tyumen, and even flying to Moscow to return with cans of film for private showings at the Komsomol centre in Nizhnevartovsk.

  ‘When Gorbachev came in the eighties he was horrified,’ Valery said, ‘that there wasn’t a single cinema anywhere in the region. He lectured to the Party in Tyumen. Then he went away and started banning vodka. Somehow he didn’t notice that only two men in the entire country supported him – Ligachev and Solomentsev, and they were both mad. Then the oil prices dropped to nothing and everyone else went mad. This was the worst time.’

  That was the first accident, he said, the one with Gorbachev’s name on it. But by then Valery was a senior manager, liaising with the Party and the Ministry over restructuring the state enterprises. When privatisation came in ’92 he was already president of a company which he took over without much difficulty, converting the five per cent of stock given to the managers into a staggering twenty per cent by dint of his ability to sweet talk his employees. That was the second accident, caused by Yeltsin, but this one had put his engine back on the rails.

  ‘Up there the state used to be king,’ he said, smiling at Kofi. ‘Now it’s the company.’

  ‘I don’t have a story,’ Kofi told him.

  The fact was that listening to Valery’s tales of his progress embarrassed and depressed Kofi. When his own opportunities arrived he had failed to recognise them. In the mid-sixties, for instance, he had been approached by a group of his countrymen who belonged to the opposition to the government. Their intention, they said, was to start a journal, which would be circulated in the country and abroad, detailing Osageyfo’s corrupt practices and the waste and incompetence he had fostered. From one of the most prosperous colonies on the continent, he had created an impossible burden of debt and a vacuum which sucked up millions. He had converted a proud nation into an international beggar.