A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  Thinking about this, I told her about getting lost in the forest with Valery, and imagining the peasant we found was a snowman. She laughed herself silly, and so did I. I hadn’t found it funny until then, but we were at that stage when everything made us laugh. We were more than halfway through the bottle when the last gleam of sunshine began fading over the next ridge. It was dark around us and we had drawn close together, keeping each other warm against the cold air. I put my arm round her while she gulped from the bottle, and handing it back, she nestled closer. I turned and found her lips under mine. We kissed, awkwardly at first, then our lips grew warmer and my hands reached for her soft breasts under the thick overcoat which seemed to have opened of its own accord. Looking back I can hardly believe that merely touching each other could generate so much passion in that climate. After a couple of minutes we nearly fell off the narrow plank of wood on which we were sitting, so we got up and stood amongst the roots of the big tree nearby. She leant against the trunk, pressing back against me, her arms tight around my neck. I lifted her skirt, scrabbling at the layers of cloth under it until I found her bare thighs. My hands were still cold and when I touched her she cried out quite loudly, ‘Oh!’ But she moved her feet apart and in that instant my fingers were playing in the soft warm place between her legs. In my head was the thought now or never, and I unbuttoned my trousers quickly with one hand, and releasing my erection pushed it into the heat. For a few seconds it seemed to blunder interminably, poking around in the hair at the bottom of her belly like a blind snake, then she moved, climbing up on one of the roots, and parting her boots wider, shuffling a little as she felt for a good grip, then she was standing a little higher, and then she leant over on my shoulders and it went in. I remember such things, the technical details, we called them, because I thought about them over and over again for a long while. I remember also the strangeness and the delight of the contrast between the cold air on my face and the furnace of her flesh where our bodies were joined. It was the sensation which was everything. At first I thought, at last, then I stopped thinking.

  Afterwards she kissed me, then settled her clothes around her. We walked back through the woods in silence, hand in hand, smiling at each other from time to time. Back at my dormitory she put her hand on my arm.

  ‘I have a secret. You must tell no one.’ I nodded. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘Nikita Sergeyevich will be here on a secret visit. I will make certain that you meet him.’

  She stared at me, the colour high in her cheeks, her eyes shining.

  Even then, I thought that was a little strange after our moment in the woods. Had she been thinking about Nikita Sergeyevich while I poked her under the tree? I didn’t want to think about it and there seemed nothing to say.

  ‘Thank you,’ I told her. ‘I’ll be there.’

  Of course, when I did think about it I understood her excitement. Nikita Sergeyevich was a real hero, in many ways which I still think today; maybe not for the same reasons as someone like Katya. To her and her friends who thought of themselves as modern and enlightened, Khrushchev had thrown open the windows with his programme of reform and decentralisation, his uncovering of Stalin’s crimes, even the Virgin Lands project which would make them independent of foreign grain. Some found pleasure in the wiliness he’d shown in shaming and defeating Beria, settling a million scores in the process. For many others it was a vindication of all they’d had to do to survive, a symbol of what it meant to spring from the black earth of the countryside, because this was the same man who had been treated as a jumped up peasant, a useful buffoon. He had held on through the years of terror and sycophancy, swallowing Stalin’s murder of his son and the obliteration of friends and family. In the end he had survived it all, and now he was ready to begin transforming the world he had helped to shape. With his thick body and awkward walk and his face like a potato he was a sign of hope and vigour.

  That was how it seemed, anyhow, during that morning on the mountain, although as with so many of the things I saw over there change was already on the way, carried along by currents which remained invisible, hidden below the ice.

  It seemed that the secret had got out, because the hall was full to overflowing. Halfway through the second speech, delivered by a balding Komsomol member in a brown leather jacket, there was a bustle at the back and the comrade speaker threw his arm out dramatically and announced the presence of the First Secretary. We all went a bit crazy, standing and applauding for minutes on end and every time it seemed to be dying down it would start again as Khrushchev, grinning broadly, sure of his welcome, mounted the platform and stood waiting for the applause to stop. Eventually he spread his arms and waved them down, then he made a short speech. I didn’t catch much of it, but I made out some of the phrases, like youth being the hope of the future, the triumph of Soviet science and technology, the promise of the Virgin Lands. It was a standard speech which I don’t think said anything they didn’t already know, but they loved it. Maybe it was more that they loved him.

  I was standing in the hall applauding with the rest of the delegates when he got off the platform. It was clearly a flying visit, maybe one of many he was making that day. As he came close to the row where I was standing he looked round and caught my eye. I guess that wasn’t difficult, since I was one of only half a dozen black men in the hall. He stopped short, with that rolling walk of his it was as if he’d suddenly stumbled, and he gestured to me. I pushed past the others in the row and emerged into the aisle to shake his hand. Around me the delegates applauded as if this was the climax of a summit meeting. He said something in Russian, then brought his other hand across to clasp mine in both of his. Close up his smile was infectious, a merry look which creased his face and made you want to smile back. I was dumb, all I could think of to say was one English word, ‘Sir. Sir.’ He grinned broadly and let my hand go and in a moment he was swallowed up by the crowd around him, moving quickly down the aisle and through the doors.

  Turning round, I saw Katya standing by my side, her expression full of delight, almost exalted.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked her.

  ‘He said that it was nice to see you here, comrade, and he hoped you had many good memories to take home.’

  It was a nice thing to say, I thought, and for a while I felt as if I was walking on air. I was twenty-seven. I was making my way in the strangest of distant lands, the leader of half the world had shaken my hand and wished me well, and I had just possessed the body of a beautiful woman who was the subject of my dreams. I was on top of the world.

  Berlin

  September 1999

  SEVENTEEN

  It was Radka who saw the fat man first. She and Katya had just emerged from the supermarket, a trip they had undertaken primarily for the purpose of buying cakes for Serge. Radka disapproved, of course, having been increasingly infected by American obsessions about diet and exercise, but Katya could always talk her round, and after a little wheedling and teasing from Serge she had consented to a shopping trip. This was about the third evening after their return from Prague, when Serge was just beginning to settle into the apartment, colonising it with the bleeping sound of his electronic toys and appearing at the earliest hours of the morning when Katya sat at the window sipping her coffee and watching the street come to life.

  On this evening, Radka had been chattering about the gypsies who had flocked to Canada and England. It was TV Nova in Prague which had started it all, she said, with their programmes about how life was a paradise for gypsies in those countries. They were buying their audience, she said, as they always had with cheap and prejudiced nationalism, as if a constant diet of crap Hollywood movies wasn’t enough.

  Katya hardly noted her indignation, to which she was now accustomed. She had understood for a long time that these outbursts were a cornerstone of the friendship between them; and Radka let herself go on these matters to her mother-in-law because she assumed that, because of George and Serge, they shared a common loathing for the ethni
c bigotry which pervaded everyday life. What interested her more was the fact that every turn in their conversation in the last few days had somehow led to the subject of Britain, and specifically London. If this had been the old days, Katya thought, she would have been certain that Radka was about to defect. As it was, she imagined that she understood why Radka’s thoughts so frequently led off in that direction. It had to be the consequence of her mentioning the interview she had seen on the TV, with the young man who looked like George and said that his father’s name was Kofi. Katya had tried to put the experience out of her mind, without success, but the more she thought about it, the more her feeling of doubt grew. Over the decades since she had last seen him, she had imagined more than once that she recognised Kofi in the turn of an African’s head, or the image of a black man in the background of a scene on the TV news. For instance, when she heard the name of the UN chief, Kofi Annan, her heart had leapt dizzyingly, but in the next moment she realised that this couldn’t be George’s father. When she saw Joseph on TV, it had struck her, with the same kind of vertiginous rush, that he looked very much like George. Her first impulse was to go to Prague and see him in person, but George had persuaded her that it would be best if he saw the man and found out whether there was any substance to her intuition. On the phone he had said that the result was inconclusive. The young man was uncertain about the dates of his father’s stay in Russia, and in any case, the name was a common one in Africa. According to George the boy had promised to speak to his father, who lived in London, but Katya had heard enough. She had endured similar disappointments before. Now, she thought, this would be like all those other times, and it was too late to upset herself needlessly over a ghost.

  On the other hand, she found herself disturbed by Radka’s prattle. She felt odd, uneasy, as if something was about to happen. During the period she had spent in Siberia, in Yekaterinburg before the time of George’s birth, she had met miners who spoke about knowing when a mudslide would occur, and she had heard the same story about avalanches in the Northern Urals. It wasn’t merely a question of the air going still, the sounds of nature quelled. There was something else which happened inside you, they told her, almost like a kind of trance in which your body began to predict the future.

  In this mood Katya wasn’t surprised to find herself shivering as they walked the supermarket aisles, but then she remembered that the air conditioning, together with the refrigeration, always affected her this way. She made a mental note to check on how she would feel when they got outside. In recent years she had returned to a routine concern about her health, visiting the doctor regularly and noting the variations in her physical well-being with interest. She supposed it was something to do with her release from behind the Wall. Since then she had begun to find herself interesting in a way that she couldn’t have imagined before.

  It was while they were loading the shopping into the boot of Radka’s car that the big black limousine stopped immediately opposite, blocking the aisle of the car park. There were no cars in the way, and Katya, seeing Radka staring, and the shape of the car from the corner of her eye, assumed that someone known to one of them had paused to exchange a greeting. She turned to look, but all she saw was the glass on the rear window sliding down slowly, and behind it, the face of a fat man she could not remember ever having seen. She glanced at Radka, expecting some sign of recognition, but there was only puzzlement on her face.

  ‘Hello,’ Serge called out suddenly, in the cute way he sometimes had with strangers, and, slowly, the man’s face creased up in a smile. Then the window closed, and the car drove on.

  ‘Who was that?’ Radka asked. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No,’ Katya replied. ‘I thought perhaps he was a friend of you and George.’

  ‘No,’ Radka said quickly. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

  In the car as they drove away from the supermarket, she glanced sideways at Katya.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘Now I think about it, there’s something familiar about that man.’

  Katya nodded her head in agreement, because she had been thinking precisely the same thing.

  ‘George may know who he is,’ she told Radka. ‘We’ll ask him when he gets here.’

  The next day she took Serge to see the Rathaus in Schöneberg, which wasn’t a long walk from her apartment. Radka had an errand to run, but in any case, Katya wanted to do this with Serge because the visit was intended to show him part of the city’s history, and as a matter of course she took every opportunity to pass on to him all she knew about it. The previous night she had told him more about the Wall, and about Kennedy making his famous speech in front of the Rathaus. She hadn’t been there, of course, and it was only a long time afterwards that she had heard about it. She had been living, at the time, in the East, off the Friedrichstrasse, not far from the university, in an apartment block for Soviet functionaries. That much she’d been promised when she came, and, in that respect at least, she had not been disappointed. She told Serge as much, but the truth was that she had developed no loyalty to the neighbourhood where she lived, isolated among the other Russians, and as soon as it was possible she had persuaded George to find the apartment in Schöneberg. Afterwards she spent most of her spare time exploring the western part of the city, walking in the Tiergarten or lingering over the exhibits in the Kunstgewerbemuseum nearby. Beyond the Brandenberg Gate she never ventured.

  Sometimes, following her lead, George had taken Serge to explore the city, and to see the streets through which he had passed as a boy. They walked in famous places like the Unter Den Linden and Alexanderplatz, and once on a sunny day drove out to see the Soviet war memorial at Treptower Park. On these occasions Katya made no comment, but she invariably avoided accompanying them. Alone with Serge she confined herself to exploring neighbouring landmarks like the Rathaus, but, in fact, there wasn’t much to see there and they’d probably end up walking in the little Volkspark next to it. During their travels she found as many stories as she could to tell her grandson about the city and its history, sometimes inventing funny monsters and comical heroes, but much of the interest she tried to communicate to him was equally contrived. In recent months she had come to realise that this counterfeit was a subterfuge, designed to assuage her unease about her inability to talk with him about her own parents. In much the same way she had said very little to George about his grandparents, evading his questions with bland generalisations and quaint stories about her childhood.

  Radka, whose quick intuition matched her own, had spotted her evasions from the beginning, but it wasn’t until Serge began asking questions about their respective families that she spoke up.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested to Katya one day, ‘he should be told about your life in Russia and about your parents. This is also part of his heritage. George tries to tell him about his name and where it came from, but he doesn’t know much.’

  Katya understood the hint. Serge’s name had been her father’s, and there were stories she might have told the little boy about him and what he had done in his life, but when she thought about what she might say, her mouth clamped shut against the words. In forty years her disillusion had hardly faded, and when she thought of her father she still remembered with bitterness the violence of his invective against Kofi, and the sheer obscenity of his tirades. He had never seen George, and he had died only half a dozen years later, before having time to repent. Her mother had followed shortly, but although Katya’s grief had been intense, she also experienced a kind of freedom, as if their deaths had liberated her from the rage and despair of that time. In her mind her parents represented the collective will which had dominated her upbringing, and their deaths seemed to loosen the bonds which tied her to it. The consequence was a kind of amnesia, amplified by the distance from her birthplace. As a Russian working in the German state, her nationality gave her status and protection, while the petty restrictions she encountered seemed tedious rather than crushing; and although the freedom she
experienced was tenuous and conditional, it was also concrete and tangible.

  The problem of her later years had been George. Curiously enough, what worried her most of all as he grew up was the idea that, because he went to a German school, and mingled with young Germans every day, he would become a German. But there was practically no alternative. She wouldn’t have dreamt of sending him back to stay with the relatives she still possessed in Moscow, even if they would have accepted him; and while there were tribal loyalties which tied the Soviet expatriates together, George, even as a toddler, was an obvious outsider. As a teenager he became his own man, and, for a time, they hardly spoke. When he brought Radka to meet her, Katya’s first reaction was to be surprised, then she realised that in some way she hadn’t perceived until she saw them together, he had become a man. From that moment Radka was a bridge between them. They liked each other, in any case. After some time Katya felt that Radka admired her independence and her firmness in cutting the knot between herself and her past. With Serge’s arrival the relationship between them was firmly established, more like sisters she often thought, than a mother and her son’s wife. Holding the little bundle, she could see herself, along with traces of Kofi, paler than in George, but still distinct, and her heart melted. She had been happy then, but in the previous couple of years she had begun to worry about George again. He seemed to have found his feet, but at the same time there was now a sullen undertone to his relationship with his wife. Neither of them would discuss the matter, and Katya’s fears for George intensified after each occasion that she saw them together.