They were drinking more vodka. When Radka tilted the bottle the long strand of grass in it wavered like weed in a pond. Joseph tried to count the number of glasses filled with the spirit that he had drained so far, but somehow he couldn’t concentrate. The ends of his fingers felt numb. Radka emptied her glass with a long fluent swallow. When she threw her head back the long muscles rippled in her velvet throat. His head spun with drink and the desire to touch her smooth pale skin.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ Joseph said.
‘No.’ Radka stretched her arm out along the back of the sofa and put her hand on his. ‘Please stay. If you leave now it will be bad for George. And for me. Waiting to see you he has been like a cat on a hot tin roof.’ She frowned as if conscious that there was something wrong about the expression. ‘No. Cat on hot bricks. Right? You must wait.’ Her eyes were fixed on his with an intensity which gave him the sense that there was something more beneath the surface of her words. Something she wanted him to know without her having to say it.
Joseph sat back against the cushions. The truth was that he wanted to stay with Radka so much that the feeling frightened him.
‘Tell me about George’s mother,’ he said.
Radka gestured as if trying to gather the words up out of the air.
‘She loves three things in life. Her memories of Kofi, George and Serge. She told me this. Without George she would have been glad to die.’ She paused. ‘She lives in the past, I think. I don’t know if she always did this, but now she speaks to Kofi as if he was there next to her. She talks about what happened during the day and what she thinks about her son, as if he was sitting on the other side of the room. She’s not mad. Her brain is still good. She cooks, she cleans the apartment, her appearance is good, she watches TV and she votes. Everything. It is just that her companion is her memory of Kofi.’
Hearing his father spoken of in this way gave Joseph an unpleasant feeling, and he felt the urge to reply sharply, to utter some kind of sarcasm. These people talked about Kofi as if he belonged to them. You know nothing about him, he wanted to tell her. You have no right. At the same time he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was the interloper. It struck him, also, that his feelings about Kofi had always been ambiguous. ‘A slippery customer’ was how he had often heard his mother refer to him, and he realised now that this was how he had always thought of his father. Looking back to those times thirty years later he understood that his attitude had largely been shaped by the things his mother had said. ‘I threw him out,’ she would say to her friends, and, ‘I couldn’t put up with that shit any more.’ Sometimes, overhearing this, he thought that he hated her, but the worst times were when Kofi was late picking him up on Sundays, or when he didn’t come at all. His mother would telephone various people, her voice either low and complaining or shrill and angry. Once she had made him telephone a woman who sounded irritable and puzzled when he started asking to speak to his father.
As Radka spoke he was remembering one of these Sundays. Ten years old, he was sitting in the single armchair in Kofi’s room. It was somewhere in Kentish Town, facing an adventure playground, where they would usually wander listlessly for half an hour before going back to the room to watch television. In normal circumstances they spoke very little, largely because neither of them could think of anything to say. Kofi busied himself making tea and sandwiches, which Joseph would nibble politely, because although he never said so, he disliked the food his father gave him. Somehow it didn’t taste right, and, listening to Kofi bustling about at the end of the room he was flexing his stomach, nerving himself to bite into the thick triangles of floppy white bread.
‘I’ve been there,’ Kofi said suddenly, coming up behind him and pointing at the TV. In the picture Joseph half recognised the onion-shaped domes, although he had no idea who the men were, filing across the square in front of it. ‘Moscow,’ his father said. ‘I’ve stood there. Before you were born. Many years ago.’
Joseph nodded.
‘Was it nice?’
Kofi laughed his great roar, a noise which, according to Joseph’s mother, used to make people look round and stare in the street.
‘Nice – I don’t know about nice. It was unforgettable. Very cold. In winter sometimes the snow came up to here.’ He pointed to his waist. ‘But the people were warm. Passionate.’ He paused. ‘Those were great days for me. I spoke with Khrushchev.’ He peered down at Joseph, trying to read his expression. ‘Do you know who Khrushchev was?’
Joseph shook his head.
‘He was the Russian leader. Very important man. Maybe if it wasn’t for him I’d still be in Moscow.’ He put the plate of sandwiches in Joseph’s lap. ‘Would you like to go there?’
What Joseph wanted to do was to go home, but something about the tone of Kofi’s voice told him that this was somehow important to his father, so he nodded.
‘Maybe. One day.’
Later on, when Joseph told his mother about this conversation she clicked her tongue with annoyance.
‘It’s just one of his stories,’ she muttered.
Remembering all this, Joseph experienced a quick spike of anger. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure, either, whether he was angry with Kofi, his mother, or himself.
‘He’s not dead,’ he said to Radka. ‘You talk about him as if he were dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, and made a little ducking movement of her head. ‘This is how Katya speaks of him.’
Joseph nodded, his anger receding.
‘Forgive me,’ Joseph said, ‘but it sounds a little strange. George said that the authorities separated them. What happened? What did they do?’
She didn’t reply for a few seconds. Instead she stared at him openly, her eyes exploring every line of his face. Looking back at her, watching the tiny movements of her pupils, Joseph felt irresistibly drawn, as if she was exercising some hypnotic power over him.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘People didn’t have to do anything to be sent away. It is hard for someone from the West to understand how it was. You must ask Kofi.’
‘I’m asking you.’
She shook her head firmly.
‘No. This is their story. Those two people. You should ask them.’
She stared at him with a tinge of defiance, as if declaring that nothing he could do would drag the secret out of her.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you allowed to talk about yourself?’
She laughed. An intimate, throaty sound.
‘Of course. Ask me.’
She poured more vodka, the bottle rattling against the rim of his glass. As the liquid ran down the side of the glasses and pooled on the table she laughed again. Her senses were as pickled as his own, Joseph guessed.
‘How did you meet George?’
‘At a recital of African poets in Berlin in ’89. I was language student.’ Her grammar, Joseph noted, had deteriorated, but that was the only sign that the vodka was having an effect. ‘I went there to improve my English.’ She giggled. ‘I don’t know why George attended. He was not a student there. I had never seen him before, and he is bored by poetry. Of course he says that he loves Pushkin, but that is because he’s Russian. A special Russian, he says, like Pushkin.’
Joseph guessed she was talking about Pushkin’s African origins and he nodded in acknowledgement.
‘Afterwards we went to demonstrate at the Wall. In the morning we went to his room and went to bed. We have been together since that time.’ Her voice was suddenly sober. ‘We were changing the shape of the world.’ She paused. Her hand touched his, a light pressure. She grinned at him, signalling the irony. ‘You should have been there. It would have made a great movie.’
A stream of images flowed through Joseph’s mind, a mob of young people chanting, ecstatic with fear and rage, a row of grim-faced refugees, curling nests of barbed wire. At that moment, as these pictures passed in review, he found it hard to tell whether he had actually seen them on the TV screen or whether he had cobbled them together out of his imagination.
‘Tell me about England,’ she said. ‘It’s better than Germany?’
He struggled with the words. His brain felt numb when he tried to think about what to tell her.
‘What do you mean?’
She gestured, and gave an abrupt gurgle of laughter.
‘For a black man. In Berlin it’s difficult. Before unification it was not so bad. Only the Vietnamese had such trouble.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe I didn’t notice because I lived among students. After the end of the Wall everything changed anyway.’ She gave him a clown smile, the corners of her mouth arching high up under her eyes. ‘You have skinheads in England?’
‘They were invented in England. A long time ago. Now they’re out of fashion. They don’t matter.’
He noted, with a flash of amusement at himself, that he felt a kind of unreasonable pride in saying this.
‘But there is no problem for you,’ she said. ‘You are a director.’
He could tell, by the way she said this, that what she had in mind was something like a director of Hollywood features.
‘I’m not that sort of director,’ he told her.
A frown momentarily creased her forehead, and spurred on by her puzzlement he explained that he was the first time director of a small TV documentary. ‘It didn’t even come out the way I wanted it.’
She frowned again, searching for the word she wanted.
‘Censorship?’
‘No, it’s not like that.’
Now it was his turn to struggle for words, and, slowly, he found himself beginning to talk about his conflict with the producer, and about the way she had frustrated his intentions.
‘This is censorship,’ she interrupted.
Suddenly he remembered that Radka had lived through times when censorship was backed up by banning or imprisonment. In comparison, his story must make him seem spineless. George would have dealt with it differently, he thought. From the moment they met he had sensed a hard core to his brother’s personality which he was certain that he himself didn’t possess, and yet George had survived growing up isolated and surrounded by whites. Now he was thriving. His father’s comments after the preview flashed through his mind, along with the suspicion that, like Kofi, George would have begun with a clear understanding of who his enemies were and where the lines were drawn. George would have had the guts to say no.
Radka was still frowning at him and he wondered whether she was comparing him with his brother. Perhaps she imagined that his mother had been a woman like Katya, someone who encouraged her son to think of his absent father as a hero. Would Radka understand if he told her now that he had been brought up to doubt the part of himself which he identified with Kofi?
‘So,’ she said suddenly. ‘You are married?’
‘I was. We separated.’
Her eyebrows arched and her lips pouted.
‘Ah. She was like you?’
‘No. She was white if that’s what you mean.’
He felt a curious irritation about telling her this.
‘It was difficult? To be married to a white woman?’
It wasn’t a question, he realised, that anyone he knew in England would have asked him, not unless they were trying to be offensive, and in normal circumstances he would have told anyone who asked to mind their own business. The fact that their presence in a room together could excite hostility or a prurient curiosity was an irritant that he had shared with Liz.
‘No. Not really,’ he said. ‘Other people’s behaviour was sometimes difficult. For us it was normal. In the beginning we read the same books, watched the same movies.’
The night they met he’d walked into a pub out of the rain and she’d been sitting with a bunch of students. Two of them were in his seminar group and he’d sat down next to her. It was one of those boring Saturday nights, when no one could afford to go anywhere interesting and they’d all had it with the local clubs, and all that remained was to sit there and talk and get pissed. Just before closing time she had taken his hand and pressed it against her stomach.
In bed later on she told him that their sex was a poem of contrasts, and that it was this contrast between their skins which excited her so much, especially his dick, the darkest part of his body. ‘Is that a terrible thing to say?’ she asked immediately. He had laughed, partly because the earnest anxiety of her question seemed incongruous. The other reason was that he felt the same about the pale gleam of her flesh and the bright gold fringes of her hair. In a far corner of his mind the sight stirred a distant memory of going into his mum’s room at night and seeing her body glowing like this.
‘We’re not writing an essay together,’ he told her, ‘and sex isn’t about all that boy-next-door shit, and all that courtly love propaganda. It’s about the pleasure and excitement we’re getting from each other’s bodies. Otherwise the human race would have died out long ago.’
In those days it was the one idea in which he had total confidence.
‘It was like finding a best friend I didn’t know I had,’ he told Radka.
‘In the beginning,’ she repeated thoughtfully. ‘The beginning is always good. Yes?’
‘Is it difficult for you with George?’ he asked.
Asking the question seemed to release something inside him, and in that moment he realised that he was, somehow, jealous of George. He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought, and he wondered whether Radka sensed what he’d been thinking. But she didn’t reply. Instead she looked at him, her forehead crinkling as if she was considering her answer. Their eyes met, and he looked away.
‘It’s very bad now,’ she said quietly. She was still staring at him with the same look of serious consideration. ‘I’m glad you came.’
The room seemed to have gone silent. Joseph was on the verge of asking what was wrong between her and George, then he remembered that he had only known them for a matter of hours, and there was something more to his silence. It was as if he was standing in front of a dangerous cliff, where to utter one more word would be to step over the edge. His head swirled as he tried to think of something safe to say to her.
‘Your family,’ he ventured. ‘They still live in Berlin?’
She frowned, then she shook her head irritably.
‘I’m not German. I was born here in Prague.’ This surprised Joseph. He had assumed she was a German. ‘My mother was Hungarian. Born near Bratislava. Slovakia.’
She was laughing now at his confusion.
‘No. No. No.’ She shook her head, her mane of hair swirling round and settling back to spread itself lazily on her shoulders. ‘My father is Czech.’
They seemed to have come closer together on the sofa, and as if for emphasis, she tapped lightly with the hand which now rested on his arm.
‘Your father’s here?’
For some reason he looked around as if expecting her father to walk through the door.
‘He died.’
In a flash her expression was sombre. Her forehead creased and her eyes flickered away from his.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joseph said. He felt as if he was stumbling after her, through a maze of indirection.
‘It was a long time ago.’ She was silent for a few seconds. On the other side of her profile a red light in the black night sky blinked. On his arm her fingers tightened as she was about to speak. ‘He was professor of languages at the university. He wrote supporting the charter in ’76. After that they sent him to prison. When he came out they sent him to dig graves in the cemeteries and sweep floors. He was not so old. But after a year, more or less, he was dead.’ She sighed, then she turned to face him again. ‘He was too brave, I think. Like Kofi. It is not so good to be the child of such men.’
It was odd hearing his father’s name in this context, especially when they talked about him as being brave or important. According to Joseph’s mother his father used to have an embarrassing habit of boasting about his friendship with famous men and his involvement with affairs of state. She knew that he had been on the staff of his country’s consulate, but his claims were so grandiose that she had never known what to believe. He had to understand, she told Joseph once, that black men like his father suffered a series of crippling wounds to their egos, as they grew old in Britain, and were condemned to shabby obscurity. She had meant it kindly, he knew, but the idea had filled him with contempt for these fantasies of power, and when he went to visit his father he had made a point of discouraging him from talking about his past. Hearing Kofi’s name now, he was struck, for the first time, by the idea that it was his mother who had been wrong. If this vision of Kofi was correct, his mother must have seen him through the lens of her own narrow experience, and missed the plain fact that his boasts were simply true.
‘’89 was bad for my mother,’ Radka said. ‘When we were full of celebration, she was thinking of my father. How happy he would have been.’
She closed her eyes, drew her breath in sharply, and covered her face with one hand. With the other hand she squeezed Joseph’s arm convulsively. Her shoulders heaved. He reached up and patted her hand awkwardly. She opened her eyes. The lashes shone with tiny wet beads. She blinked, got up abruptly and walked away, the dress falling back in swirling folds down her thighs. At the window she stood looking out.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is too much vodka. Too much vodka makes me cry. I’m sorry.’
Joseph watched her from the sofa, wondering whether her tears had been precipitated by her memories of past grief or whether he had said or done something to upset her. She’d said that she was glad he’d come, but perhaps she didn’t mean it. Perhaps his mere presence had set something off. Perhaps he’d walked into the middle of a row between her and George. Perhaps that was why George had disappeared. For a few seconds he felt at a total loss. He knew nothing about these people or about how they might behave. Perhaps he should have returned to his hotel after the meal. Perhaps he should never have come.
As if in answer to his thoughts there was a jangling of keys outside, and the door of the apartment creaked open, announcing George’s arrival. He came swinging through the door, his manner breezy, spreading his arms out towards Joseph.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Business never ends. But pain in the ass is over. For now.’
He threw himself on to the sofa in the space that Radka had just vacated, shooting out his legs in front of him. As he sat down Radka turned away from the window, came back to the table, poured a glass of vodka and gave it to George who took it with a brief nod of his head. Joseph avoided looking at her and if George noticed that she’d been crying he didn’t comment.
‘I think it’s time I went,’ Joseph said.
George looked round at him, an expression of shock on his features.
‘No. This is too soon.’ He slapped his hand hard down on Joseph’s leg. ‘You must stay with me a little longer. We have much to say.’