A Shadow of Myself
Page 38
Joseph knew what he was saying, but somehow he couldn’t follow George’s reasoning.
‘You want to get rid of her?’
‘No. I love her, but I want to be another person.’ He paused and gestured, trying to get his feelings into words. ‘Mr Kirichenko. I admire him.’
Joseph was startled.
‘He used us to get his hands on those paintings. He doesn’t even want to keep them. All he wants them for is to get an edge in some business deal. I don’t believe all that stuff about our father. If we had got in his way he’d probably have wiped us out just as quickly as he did Liebl.’
‘I don’t think so,’ George said. ‘But that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that he shaped himself to live in a horrible time and to get the best result. Look at me.’ He tapped himself on the chest. ‘I lived most of my life in a kind of prison. Now I’m lucky to be alive and lucky to be free. The way I live with Radka is not how I want to live. She wants me to be the way I was. I’ll never be that again, but I want to find out what I am. You must understand. This is a new world for me. I’m going to shape myself to live on top of it.’
‘How are you going to do that?’
George smiled.
‘I don’t know, but everything has changed. Ten years ago Valery Kirichenko was a kind of civil servant, now he’s a king. I can do that.’
‘You’ve got as much money as you’re ever likely to need already. You can live how you want.’
‘That’s not the point,’ George said. ‘The point is that I want more than I can ever have, and I’m going to get it.’
THIRTY-TWO
In Berlin it was raining. The rain had a curious effect on the shiny façade of the new Reichstag, making it flash and go dim in different sections at the same time. Joseph had booked into a hotel nearby, and, from his window, he could see the top of it through the spray.
‘Would you like to come and live with me in London?’ he asked Radka. He didn’t look round.
When he got back to Katya’s apartment George had already telephoned and spoken to each of the family. Kofi and Katya were curiously philosophical, he thought, about George’s leaving Radka and going off to make his fortune, or whatever it was he intended to do.
‘We’ll see him in London,’ Kofi said.
Later on when Katya had left the room Joseph asked Kofi the question that was burning in his mind.
‘What about Radka?’
‘What about her?’
‘Radka and me.’
‘She doesn’t want you,’ Kofi said. ‘She’s like George. She wants to be free.’
‘That’s what everyone wants.’
‘It doesn’t mean the same to everyone.’ He hesitated. ‘They grew up with the idea that it was possible to be a new kind of person, that the kind of society in which they lived would reshape their identity. It didn’t happen, so they’ve either got to give up or reshape life in some other way. That’s what they have to find out.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Joseph said. He had the feeling, somehow, that everything that had happened since he met George would have a point.
‘Don’t expect everything to make sense,’ Kofi said.
Gazing out at the rain Joseph was thinking about his conversation with Kofi. On the way back from Düsseldorf he had been certain of what he felt and what he wanted to happen. Now the ground had shifted under his feet, without his knowing how or why. He hadn’t spoken with Radka about what George had said to either of them. She seemed as calm and collected as Kofi and Katya had been, and she had turned up at his hotel that afternoon and gone to bed with him as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but the moment he asked her about coming to live with him a pang had shot through his heart, as if he knew in advance that she would refuse.
‘Will that money buy me an apartment?’
She was sprawled across the bed, her chin resting in her hands, watching him.
‘It will buy you whatever you want.’
George had packed a chunk of the money from the briefcase into a bag and given it to him, and he’d held it by his side during the flight, feeling thankful that he didn’t have to pass through customs. He hadn’t bothered to count, but there must have been close on half a million dollars there.
‘I think I’ll live by myself in London,’ she said.
‘Are you hoping he’ll come back?’ he asked. A spike of jealous anger went through him at the thought.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But that has nothing to do with it. I just want to know what it’s like.’
She was using almost the same words as George had, and listening to her voice it struck Joseph that perhaps they were more alike than he had understood.
The night before he left Berlin they had dinner together, early enough for young Serge to join in. At the end of the meal Kofi held up his glass in a toast.
‘Here’s to another life.’ He pointed his glass at his grandson. ‘This is for Serge, African, Russian, Czech, German, soon to be Englishman Serge. A new life for a new man.’
Katya leant over and kissed Serge on the cheek. Joseph avoided looking at Radka. He hadn’t given up hope of changing her mind, but he didn’t want her to see it in his eyes.
Serge had been silent for most of the meal, waving his fork, digging it into the food on his plate, but not getting much into his mouth. Kofi kept telling him about the lions in the zoo at Regent’s Park and about how they would go to see them. Katya translated when Kofi’s German failed, and the boy listened, eyes wide with pleasure at the thought. As they drank the toast he lifted his glass hurriedly in imitation of the adults.
‘Will Vati be in London?’ he asked.
Katya looked at Radka, who shrugged at her, as if declaring the fact that she didn’t know what to say.
‘Of course he will be,’ Katya said. ‘There’ll be nothing to stop him.’ She glanced at Radka. ‘He told you that he would be there soon, didn’t he? And I will be there, and Kofi, and Joseph. All your family.’
Serge nodded, as if he had the answer he wanted.
Later on that night Kofi walked to the end of the road with Joseph.
‘That man,’ Joseph said. ‘Valery Kirichenko. You said he was your friend.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m beginning to wonder what you mean by that. George said he admired him, and I expect you’ll say that too, but he seemed like a bit of a bastard to me. He told you he’d help us, but he treated it like a business deal and walked away with a profit. On top of that, we nearly got killed.’
‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I wanted.’
A few weeks ago, Joseph thought, he would have been irritated by his father’s complacency. Now he was curious.
‘What makes you think he’s so great?’
‘I don’t think he’s so great,’ Kofi said. ‘I know what he is. Back in Moscow when we were both boys, he arranged to get me beaten up. Then he found out that we were running off to Paris, and he told her father, so they expelled me. That’s how we never saw each other again.’
‘Was he in love with her?’
‘Oh no.’ Kofi seemed shocked. ‘He would never have done those things for a reason like that. He did it because a high official told him to. That was his way of surviving, and it bought him the favours which started him in the oil business.’
‘See, Dad,’ Joseph said, ‘that seems despicable to me. I don’t care how hard things were.’
‘Don’t imagine that he took it lightly,’ Kofi told him, his tone a sharp rebuke. ‘You have no idea, and in any case if that hadn’t happened forty years ago you might not be alive now.’ He slapped himself on the forehead, laughing at what he’d said. ‘If. If. If. Did he tell you anything about himself?’
‘No.’
‘You saw the shoes he was wearing? The work he got as a favour for betraying us nearly froze his feet off. There’s a balance to everything.’
‘Even
so, Dad, how can you like him?’
‘Let me tell you something. He told me a story about Father Christmas.’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Father Christmas,’ Kofi said, ignoring the sarcasm of Joseph’s tone. ‘In Europe and the USA they have this Father Christmas flying across the sky behind his band of reindeer. Valery said that when he first went to Siberia the tribe he lived with had a legend about a spirit which flew across the sky just like that. But he wasn’t a jolly old man. Instead he was an evil, malevolent creature who would come down and rummage around in your yard and if he found anything that annoyed him, or didn’t find something he wanted, he would come into your house and take the children, smash your belongings and make your life a misery. Those were the kinds of gods those people believed in. When they discovered oil in their country the Russians came, ransacked the land, destroyed their villages, and drove their young people away.’
‘I get the point, Dad,’ Joseph told him, ‘there’s no Santa Claus.’
‘That’s not my point,’ Kofi said. ‘My point is that there is a Santa Claus, but there’s a secret to controlling him.’ He paused, and Joseph thought that he was about to reveal the secret, but instead he made a gesture of dismissal. ‘I don’t care about Santa Claus. I was born on the African coast in a country which didn’t exist. I travelled to places I could never have imagined. Now I have a family I never dreamt of. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? We don’t control how the world works. I don’t think anybody does. It’s a kind of magic which does unexpected things, but we have to survive wherever we find ourselves, and whatever the magic does to us. All I can tell you is to stay alive, wait and hope.’
Looking at him, Joseph was struck by the energy with which Kofi said this.
‘Well, all right,’ he said. ‘But at your age, Dad, what are you hoping for? What do you expect?’
‘I don’t know what to expect,’ Kofi told him. ‘But I’m not dead yet.’
About the Author
Mike Phillips is a Londoner and author of several books and screenplays. He is the author of the highly praised thriller The Dancing Face, and of the Sam Dean series of novels, published to universal acclaim. The first, Blood Rights, was serialized for BBC TV; the second, The Late Candidate, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Award.
Mike Phillips also wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, the book which accompanied the BBC TV series Windrush, chronicling the controversial story of how West Indian immigration has altered the face of British life in the twentieth century.
Also by the Author
The Dancing Face
An Image to Die For
Point of Darkness
The Late Candidate
Blood Rights
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