‘Since I met you and George,’ he said coldly, ‘all you’ve talked about is Katya and how she feels and what George wants. I don’t suppose it occurs to you that my father might have feelings about this too? Or me?’
She stared at him, her face set and pale, and he wondered whether she was about to lose her temper. Suddenly her eyes blinked and he saw that the lashes were wet.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice quavered. A tear ran down her face. ‘You are right. I was only thinking of myself. I thought you could help us.’
She got up abruptly and began walking away. Joseph sat, watching her go, dumbstruck by her reaction. Up to that moment, he realised, he’d had the feeling that it was necessary to be on his guard; that somehow, all this was a kind of swindle he had not yet begun to understand. Now it was dawning on him that he was the one who had been thinking only of himself.
By the time he reached her she was unlocking her car, a dark-blue Opel parked on the corner, and when she heard his footsteps she stood still without turning, her fingers curled round the handle of the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘Let’s talk about this. I don’t understand why it’s so important.’
She was drying her eyes with quick, efficient movements, and when she spoke her voice was controlled and matter-of-fact.
‘I want to get away from here. To live in England. I want Serge to live a normal life. Here it’s not possible. In England it’s better.’
‘It’s not that good in England,’ Joseph told her.
She gave him a wry smile.
‘I know that, but here he is the only one of his kind. Maybe there are others, but not enough to be normal. It might be different if my parents were alive, but there is no one here for him. When he was growing up George felt like a freak.’ She turned her head away, gazing out into the distance. ‘Nothing has changed. I don’t want Serge’s life to be like that. In England there is Kofi,’ she hesitated, ‘and you, and many other people like him. It’s better.’
It was on the tip of Joseph’s tongue to tell her that her expectations of himself and Kofi were unrealistic, but he choked the words back.
‘What does George think about this?’
‘Maybe he would go if it wasn’t for Katya. He’s very loyal to her.’ She said this with a slightly bitter twist. ‘She will not leave, and he will not leave her.’
‘Give it time,’ Joseph said. ‘Maybe you can persuade them.’
‘There’s no time!’ she burst out impatiently. ‘This might be the last chance for George and me.’
So that’s it, Joseph thought, she wants to talk about George, and I’m the lightning rod.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked her.
‘About four years ago we almost separated. I stayed because of Serge. I thought that later on life would be difficult for him. To take him away from his father would have made things worse. It would have been like Katya.’
Behind the sympathetic mask he’d assumed, Joseph felt a twinge of disappointment at the thought that the mystery amounted to little more than the fact that George had screwed another woman.
‘He loves you, I think,’ he told her. ‘And Serge. Very much.’
‘Oh, love,’ she said sadly. ‘Sometimes love is not enough.’ She smiled at him. ‘Now you’re thinking I’m crazy.’ She shook her head. ‘You can’t imagine how different it used to be here. Everything was corrupt, even love.’
‘You’re right,’ Joseph said. ‘I can’t imagine it.’
‘You’ve heard of the Staatssicherheitsdienst?’ she asked abruptly.
‘The what?’
‘The Stasi. The secret police.’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘When we met, George was working for them. Just an informer. He was giving them information about me and my friends. He told them things like I had copies of Sputnik. This was a banned magazine. He told them about the meetings we went to. It’s all in their files.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘My best friend at the university was a student named Renate. She works for the government in Berlin. I wanted to read my Stasi file. I was sure that there must be one about me. Then she told me about George. This was four years ago.’
‘Was it true?’
She smiled bitterly.
‘Yes. This was a confession. She knew I would find out she had been fucking with George all the time. Maybe that wasn’t so bad, but she was also making reports about us.’ She laughed. ‘It was funny. While she was informing them about us, George was informing them about her. This was how we lived.’
Joseph watched her, tongue-tied. He hadn’t the slightest idea what to say. Instead he wanted to put his arms round her and comfort her, but just as he was about to reach out and take her hand, she turned away as if she’d read his thoughts and intended to reject his sympathy.
‘That wasn’t why I wanted to leave. I didn’t blame George too much. It was hard for him to resist, and when it started he didn’t know me. Before I found out, I wasn’t afraid. After that I knew he wasn’t the person I thought him, and now I think he resents my judgement. I understand that too. Everyone did what they were told. There were no heroes. I can’t blame George for not being different, but I do.’
‘All that is over,’ Joseph told her. ‘I don’t think you have to worry about the secret police any more.’
‘There are other things to worry about,’ she said. ‘George is in some kind of trouble he doesn’t tell me about. It’s something to do with Valentin and their business deals. Before we came here he said they were being threatened by gangsters. It was very bad. He got a couple of bodyguards. We were guarded everywhere we went. He was more frightened than in the days of the Stasi. Then we came here and it seemed that it was over.’ She gave him a quick sidelong glance. ‘Until last night.’
‘Why don’t you ask him about it?’
‘I’m afraid he won’t tell me. That would make things worse.’
‘I don’t know what I can do,’ Joseph said.
He was out of his depth. Suddenly the bright empty square seemed full of menace, and involuntarily he looked round through the rear window of the car, as if to check whether there was anyone there, waiting.
‘If we can bring Kofi and Katya together,’ she said quickly, ‘there is a chance that we can all get out of here. I think nothing will change while we’re here. Too much has happened. Too much history. To begin again we must leave.’
It was the hope of millions, Joseph felt like telling her. All the migrants he had ever encountered nourished this desire for new beginnings. Most of the time they were disappointed. He thought about his father. At this moment he would be sitting in the library turning the pages of his exercise books, writing the obscure tale of his secret life. What would he make of Radka?
He reached out and took her hand, and she clasped at him with a quick warm pressure. Her eyes pleaded.
‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘I really will try.’
EIGHT
DIARY OF DESIRE
The life and times of Kofi George Coker
Moscow 1956
What I remember best is the wind. Moscow is a flat place. In those days, coming from the airport you could probably see all the way up Leninsky Prospekt into the heart of the city if your eyes were good enough. There was nothing in the way, and nothing to stop the wind. I don’t know where it came from, but it blew without stopping during those months in the autumn of 1956 when I first arrived. It blew like knives flying, like something that circled and searched, trying to suck the heart out of your chest and the flesh off your bones, and all the time the sky got darker and greyer with every day that brought the first snows closer.
In those first days, sitting around in the big downstairs room in the hostel at Noviye Cheryomushki where all the students were sent to learn the language (so they said), we talked about it. Whatever other topics of conversation we were pursuing the wind would always come up sooner or later. One of the boys, a Zanzibari named Hussein, sai
d once that this was why all the old churches and other prominent buildings were topped by the round onion-shaped domes, because it was the only shape that would withstand the wind. If they had those needle-shaped Gothic spires you see in the rest of Europe, he said, the whole damn thing would go flying off.
Those were the very first days when we talked without suspicion or purpose. There were boys from everywhere, mostly British colonies, although there were some from French-speaking Africa too, but English was the language we spoke among ourselves, even the Somalis and Ethiopians. Russian boys lived there too, although one or two would always correct you if you called them Russian, because they were from the Soviet Republics, not from Russia itself. My roommate Valery was one of them, a Ukrainian. He was training to be an engineer, and thirty years later when I heard about Chernobyl a picture of him came back to me immediately, flashing past me over the snow-covered slope on Leninsky Gory, or huddling on his bed, the book open over his blanket-covered knees, that funny little smile on his face. He came from the marshes and forests to the north of Kiev, he had said, and knowing how clever and ambitious he was I was certain that if there had been a major engineering project like that happening in his home country he’d have been there. That night I sat up until dawn, drinking Scotch whisky and remembering those times. I always trusted Valery, and I still believe I was right, even though, towards the end, it seemed that he had betrayed my trust. But it was his country, he had to live with the consequences, and he did what he had to do.
As far as we knew then, Valery had come by the same route as most of the other boys: a scholarship to study in Russia awarded by the local party. Nowadays when I talk about shaking hands with Khrushchev or Mikoyan or even about arriving in Moscow in 1956, people look at me as if I had suddenly grown two heads. Sometimes this makes me laugh, but sometimes I can see a certain look in their eyes and I can tell from the sound of their voices that they’re humouring me, as if I was a foolish old man telling crazy stories. Ignorance. They forget, or mostly they don’t know about those days just before the decade of independence, when higher education was something that happened abroad at the LSE or Oxford. Russia was only two steps away. It was true that having to learn a new language was piling difficulty on top of the strangeness, but many of us already spoke two languages, English being the official language of the courts and the administration, while we spoke something else in the villages, Twi or Fanti or Swahili. We had heard all the stories about what barbarians the Russians were, but that was at the same time that we had discovered that the British and their friends were liars who described the world in terms which would keep us quiet. Most of the boys had open minds and a dream inside them about going back as engineers or scientists to build the bridges and dams and turbines which would power their independence and abolish the poverty from which they had come.
There was only one thing different about me. I already knew, or thought I did, what would become of me. I had not been recruited by a local party boss. In fact, up to that time I’d had very little to do with the Communists. My references came straight from the top, from Osageyfo. This was a coin with two sides, but at the time I believed that my future was made, which turned out to be true, but not in the way I expected.
None of it would have happened anyway if it hadn’t been for that crazy old man Ras Makonnen. That was in Manchester, of course. I was sixteen, and it was my first trip with my father. I had lied about my age, but I was big, and just as capable of the work as any other stoker on the ship. After fifty years I can remember very little about the journey, except standing beside my father in the engine room, shovelling and sweating. At night on deck, watching the sparkling trail behind us, or bunked down in the clanking dark of the galley, he would tell me stories about the place to which we were going. Education, he said repeatedly, education would make me a man who could live in the new world that was coming. He was tall, bigger than I ever became. Paul Robeson, someone would always say when we went into the pub near the custom house in Cardiff, but he was even bigger than Robeson.
Liverpool was the city in which we landed that first time. It was 1945 and the big war had only just ended. I thought the city was still buzzing with the joy of it, but my father said this was how it always was. He got me a room at the mission house, then he left, taking most of my pay, leaving me enough for food. Don’t go with any of these women on the street, he told me before he went. They will take all your money and get you in trouble. The warning wasn’t necessary, not because I was frightened of women. In Accra I had already been with women, but they had seemed nothing like the white ladies who smiled boldly and spoke in their strange accents as we walked down Upper Parliament Street. Their red lips, their perfume and pale skins were exciting and revolting at the same time, and I had no idea how to speak to them or where to begin. My attitude had changed by the time of my second trip, but that first time I merely stayed in the mission with the minister, a man from Sierra Leone, who gave me a cup of tea, played the piano, sang, asked me about my mother and talked gently about the Gold Coast.
It was the next day that my father took me to Manchester. He said it was a reward for how well I had worked, but later on it occurred to me that he wanted me out of Liverpool that first time because he didn’t want me bumping into his other family, and he was successful in this for all the time he was alive. I’d heard rumours, of course, but it wasn’t until years later that I came across my three half-sisters, with their mother, a fat Irish woman with greying red hair who said she was his wife. It was a shock but no surprise, although in those early days I had no inkling that my father had another, different life. So I was all innocence that day, going to Manchester. It was my second day in England and the first time I travelled on a train. Below my feet was a wave of warm air, while outside the window the sun shone over the fields. But I was not yet accustomed to the chill that came with this sunshine, and feeling the cold air on my skin as it rushed through the window was strange and dislocating, almost as if what I was seeing was an illusion placed there to persuade me that I was still in the same world where I had grown up.
On the way my father told me about the man we would see in Manchester. Ras Makonnen, he called him, but then he said that the man was not an Ethiopian in spite of his name. It was all something to do with his politics. There were men there, according to my father, who, in one colony or the other, had been trade union leaders or Communists, and in order to escape the authorities used two or three names. Mak must have been one of them and he was no fool, because he had become a rich man in England. Even in this country, my father said, he was more powerful than many whites. In Manchester he owned restaurants, clubs and houses. No one could tell how much he owned. But you had to be careful of such men, my father said, lowering his voice, because although he had done many good things, no one knew where he came from or who his people were, and no one knew what he had done to gain these possessions.
It was clear that he meant all this as a warning, but at my age it was a story which almost made me choke with excitement, behind which was the desperate longing to learn and understand the secrets of this hero, a feeling which grew stronger and stronger during that night at Mak’s restaurant.
It was in Oxford Road. We walked there from the station through the broad thoroughfare which ran from one square to the next, and past the huge stone palace which was St Peter’s. As we walked among the rows of shops and stores, richer than anything I had ever seen, I could feel curiosity inside me swelling and pounding like a pulse. What kind of African, I kept asking myself, owned one of these places in a city like this?
It was called The Cosmopolitan. An old brick house, four storeys high, with long rectangular windows. The ground floor was a big square room with a bar along one wall. On the other side a staircase which led up to the next floor, and under it was a door leading to the kitchens. The floor was polished wood which squeaked a little when you walked on it, and there were about twelve tables covered in white cloths. High on the back wall,
where everyone could see it, was a large picture of the Emperor Haile Selassie in uniform, his sorrowful eyes surveying the room. All around the walls and disappearing up the stairs were huge paintings, murals of men from every nation, some of them half naked, some in the dress of their nation, others in uniform. There were Chinese, Indians, Africans and white men and women, all of them marching or running, straining towards some object, the muscles and sinews of their necks and limbs standing out, their bodies tensed as if about to leap from the walls, their eyes raised towards the heavens. I had never seen anything like it, and as we entered I stood still, almost transfixed by the sights around me.
It was early in the evening and the place was only half full. Most of the customers seemed to be black Americans in uniform and white women from the town. I had an impression of khaki and shiny black hair, smooth like wet tar, next to curly yellow hair and pale skins, but I didn’t look at them as carefully as I wanted to, because I knew that when you saw big men out with their women it was dangerous to stare.
Makonnen was standing at the bar talking to the white woman behind it. When we came in he looked up and greeted my father by name. At the time this didn’t seem strange. Later on I realised that he knew every seaman who came in by name. The funny thing was that he looked like an Ethiopian, with the thin features and delicate frame that marked out people who came from the Horn. He was wearing a black suit, though, like a minister, with a shirt so clean and white that the collar gleamed in the dim light of the room. When he spoke, also, his English was perfect, with an accent like an Englishman. To listen to him was like reading a book.
A Shadow of Myself Page 13
