At half past nine in the morning Kofi Coker was sitting in a café near Ladbroke Grove, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper article about the IMF. He had dressed with special care because he was meeting his son Joseph. He wasn’t sure why he’d taken so much trouble, but perhaps it was something to do with the note of urgency in Joseph’s voice when he had telephoned just before midnight. Perhaps he wanted advice, or perhaps he wanted some piece of information about his mother. It couldn’t be money, Kofi thought, an involuntary smile twisting his lips, because Joseph earnt more money than his father had ever done.
That might have been one of the reasons he had arranged their meeting in the café, and why he was wearing his second best dark-blue suit. In the last year he had spent more time with Joseph than ever before, mainly because he’d been helping him to find the subjects for his film and using what influence he had to cajole them into sitting in front of the camera. Of course, he knew that most of the old fools were lying their heads off, repeating stories they’d been told as if they were their own, and enlarging their deeds into monstrous epics. At the same time Joseph had been so pleased, and their narratives seemed so convincing that Kofi had never had the heart to contradict even those accounts he knew for certain to be completely invented. At the same time, the more intimate he was with his son, the more it seemed that Joseph’s manners were unnecessarily direct, and sometimes even rude. It was not his intention, Kofi knew, but sometimes the way Joseph behaved, coming from anyone else, would have seemed insulting. For instance, the last time he visited Kofi’s flat, he had refused to eat even a sandwich, claiming that he was not hungry. Just before leaving he had glanced round, his eyes resting on the battered sofa and the scarred kitchen table. ‘You like living here, Dad?’ he had murmured in his flat English voice. Kofi had shrugged without replying. Of course I like living here, he thought, but even while the words ran through his head, he was conscious that his son pitied him for being trapped, at the end of his years, in these two small ugly rooms. As it happened he couldn’t find it in himself to resent Joseph’s patronising thoughtlessness because he imagined he understood where it came from. Joseph’s mother had been the daughter of a doctor, and her family was prosperous. ‘Comfortable’ was the word they used, and as a qualified teacher, then a writer of books for children, she had always had enough money to live in comfort. When she died of cancer, a few days after her fiftieth birthday, she had left Joseph the house which her father had bought in North London between the wars. He still lived there, and he still possessed, almost untouched, a portfolio of investments she had gathered as a result of the family legacies and gifts which had come to her over the years. She would have been a little surprised to be described as a rich woman, but the fact was that the house which had been suitable for the small family of a professional man when she was born, had become a major asset by the time she died. Her income had been Kofi’s means of support when they lived together, and the riches she called her ‘savings’ had underlined his dependence, a canker in the mind and a barrier between them. Equally, he sometimes felt, it had separated him from Joseph. His son was a stranger to need, and it often seemed to Kofi that they existed on two sides of an immense gulf in understanding about the world and its nature.
He was still reading the article when Joseph came in through the door, and he folded the paper with a feeling of disappointment at not being able to finish it immediately, but as he stood up to embrace his son he experienced a distinct feeling of pride. There was something impressive about Joseph, so tall and cleancut, which made him want people to know that the boy was his flesh and blood.
‘How are you, Dad?’ Joseph asked, but the glum look on his face and the stiffness of his body put Kofi on the alert immediately.
It was an oddity to which he had never become accustomed. In his days as a young man like Joseph, whenever confronting his elders he had been used to maintaining a strict control over his features. An air of respectful attention or perhaps a friendly smile was the face he would have presented to his own father on almost every occasion. By contrast, Joseph seemed to have no inhibition about displaying his anger and frustration, no matter what the circumstances were. Kofi had long ago come to terms with his son’s disrespectful manners, because it was simply the style of the English, the mode in which he had been reared. On the other hand, whenever his son’s behaviour embarrassed Kofi, he felt a swelling tide of resentment against his former wife. During his childhood he had never heard his own mother say a bad word about his absent father. In comparison Joseph was accustomed to hearing his father spoken of in the most abusive and insulting terms. It was no wonder, Kofi thought, that he had never been able to teach the boy how to show respect in the company of his elders. Greeting him now, for instance, Joseph could hardly be bothered to conceal the fact that he was angry or disturbed about something, and Kofi sensed that he was unlikely to trouble himself with a period of sociable conversation before broaching whatever was on his mind. Ignoring the danger signals, he ordered more coffee and asked whether Joseph had enjoyed the festival.
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘The festival? The film was a success?’
‘I suppose so,’ Joseph replied. ‘But I didn’t mean the festival. A guy came to my hotel in Prague and said he was my brother.’
Kofi smiled, thinking that some stray student must have been trying to con Joseph by claiming the brotherhood of blackness.
‘He showed me a picture,’ Joseph said, ‘of you and a woman, his mother. Katya, he said her name was.’
The sound of her name, coming out of the blue from Joseph, gave Kofi a shock, and for a few minutes he listened without hearing, as if he already knew what his son was telling him. In his mind he was trying to summon up a picture of her face. He had begun to recall immediately and without effort moments when they were together – watching her enter the classroom on his first day of tuition, or following her through the market on Tsvetnoy Bulvar where a toothless old man had stopped him and shook his hand. This was the first time it had happened to him, and when the man got in his way he had tried to step aside, until Katya lifted her eyebrows at him and said, ‘He wants to welcome you.’ Another time, at the beginning of a thaw, walking on the packed snow along the embankment at Kotelnichskaya, he had slipped and when he clutched at her to save himself they had both fallen on to their backs. The sky was empty, pale and grey. Then he saw her face as she rolled over and crouched above him on her hands and knees, her eyes smiling, strands of her long hair plastered on her wet cheek, while he lay kicking his legs and laughing helplessly. These images ran through his head, as it were, involuntarily, but when he tried to see her face the details eluded him. While writing his journal he had tried to remember such matters as the colour of her eyes, and now it occurred to him that his memory of everything had been selective, and riddled with guesswork. Something like a spasm crossed his face, and he rested his fingers on his cheek to stop himself twitching. A child, he thought, a child, testing his emotions, but all he felt was bewilderment at the idea that somewhere in the world there was this person, a mixture of himself and Katya. The pain he felt when he thought of her had ended long ago, he didn’t know when, but he retained a memory of it which was almost physical, like an ugly wrenching ache in the guts, and he felt now a shadow of that agony, looking at Joseph’s expectant frown, and picturing the man, his son, whom he had never seen or touched. The image that came was of himself, forty years younger, looking through a porthole at the vanishing landscape. This had been a moment in which he seemed to feel his heart bleeding inside his chest. Thinking back on it, a wave of anger crested in his mind and he seemed to see his child, helpless and alone, adrift in a formless ocean. If he had known, he thought, he would never have accepted their disappearance. It was true that he had waited, but if he had known he would have found them somehow, even if it meant grubbing in the deepest Siberian swamp.
‘What did he look like?’ he asked.
His heart was racing and his voice croaked.
The question seemed to irritate Joseph. He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and took out the envelope George had given him.
‘They said he looked like me,’ he said curtly, putting the envelope down in front of Kofi. ‘This is the letter she sent you. See for yourself.’
Kofi fumbled at the letter, reading the writing on the front of it, then eventually picking it up and trying to open it, but his hands shook so badly that it defeated all his efforts. At last Joseph reached out and took it from him, but as he did so Kofi slumped back in his seat, his skin suddenly grey, his mouth open and gasping. His head was suddenly light, as if filled with air, but he didn’t experience the momentary collapse as pain or weakness. Instead he felt as if the rage inside him had sucked the energy from his body to feed itself, leaving him nerveless and empty.
‘Dad,’ Joseph called out, ‘Dad!’
He got up and hurried round the table. Before he could do more than touch his father on the shoulder, Kofi sat up and began taking deep breaths, his face buried in his cupped hands. Then he looked up at Joseph. Part of his anger, he realised, had been to do with the fact that this news had been brought to him by Joseph, whose feelings for him seemed so ambiguous and difficult.
‘I’m going home now,’ he said, forcing himself to sound calm. ‘We can talk there.’
They walked back to Kofi’s flat in silence. When they crossed the road he stumbled a little over the kerb, and Joseph took his arm. It was the first time he had ever done that, Kofi realised, trying to collect his thoughts. From the moment he recognised Katya’s handwriting on the envelope it was as if his whirling brain had leapt from his head, and was now floating independently, frantic and bewildered, as his body went through its routine and automatic operations. In this eddy of confusion the feel of his son’s firm grip steadied him and gave him a sense of comfort.
Back in the flat Kofi sat on the sofa staring into space, while Joseph hurried to make a cup of tea. This was another thing, Kofi thought, that he seemed to be doing for the first time.
‘You okay, Dad?’
Kofi gave him a reassuring smile without speaking. At that moment he felt that there was nothing to say. The problem was that he had forgotten the details of those forty-year-old events. He remembered Katya, of course, and he remembered the waves of emotional turbulence on which he seemed to be riding as the bus trundled down Leninsky Prospekt on the way to the airport. He knew also how much he had wanted Katya as the plane lifted into the sky, and how hard it had been, for the first few months, to bear their separation. But over the years he had come to think of her in much the same way as he thought of his dead parents, as if they had somehow been relocated in another distant and unreal world in which he had once travelled. The events which linked them together seemed to him to have happened to another person in that other universe, and the memories rushing through his brain were now a spectacle in front of which he was an onlooker, moved only by a feeling of curiosity about the motives and identity of the figures parading in procession. At the same time he felt himself being racked by uncontrollable eddies of emotion which seemed to come from nowhere.
‘Aren’t you going to read the letter?’
They had been sitting in silence, Kofi realised, for several minutes, maybe as long as a quarter of an hour, while he was struggling to contain his thoughts. He gestured at Joseph.
‘Open it.’
Joseph tore open the top of the envelope neatly and gave it to him. Inside was a single sheet of paper folded round half a dozen photographs.
‘It’s in English,’ he said.
The remark puzzled Kofi, until he remembered that Joseph must know little or nothing about Katya.
‘Of course,’ he replied. His voice was still croaking. ‘She spoke it well. She taught languages. I learnt Russian from her. You knew I spoke it.’
He spoke the language badly, but he had boasted of it to Joseph and tried to teach him some of the words. The boy should have remembered, but Kofi had the suspicion that, influenced by his mother’s attitude, Joseph had been dubious about the truth of everything his father said. The thought seemed to stir the turbulence inside him but, struggling for control, he put the matter out of his mind and began looking at the photos one by one, laying them down beside him for Joseph to reach. They were recent photographs, almost all apparently taken on one occasion, and featuring all four members of his new family, individually and in groups. Serge smiled into the camera, flanked by Radka and George. Close up Katya was still pretty, her white hair curling round her face, her eyes wide and level, the line of her mouth looping in a lopsided smile.
Kofi found himself holding on to one of the photographs, studying it carefully, as if trying to commit it to memory. It was different from the others, black and white, and when he eventually laid it aside, Joseph snatched it up, impatient to see what had made him linger. It was older, taken by a different camera. Katya, more than thirty years younger, but recognisably the same woman, was standing in a street. She was wearing a long black coat, but it was hanging open, her light hair blowing around her face. Beside her, holding her hand, was a small boy, who, for one heart-stopping instant, seemed to be Joseph. The resemblance was remarkable, Kofi thought, and it would have been easy to imagine that the two boys had the same mother. In a moment Joseph got up and, holding the photograph in his hand, walked over to Kofi’s little collection of photographs on the wall facing him. He stood there staring at another photograph of himself at the same age, which had been taken at school. From where he was sitting Kofi couldn’t see it, but he knew that it would be hard to locate the difference. Their hair curled in the same way, bristling in a peak over the forehead, and they had the same crooked, almost wry smile, curving their lips.
‘This guy really does look like me,’ Joseph said over his shoulder.
Kofi couldn’t reply. He blinked, trying to clear the tears which had filled his eyes.
‘Didn’t you know about any of this?’
Kofi shook his head, suddenly becoming aware that Joseph couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.
‘What does she say?’
Kofi, still unable to speak, held out the letter to Joseph.
It had been typed on an electric typewriter, and it was short enough to be taken in almost at a glance.
Dear Kofi,
I don’t know what to say to you after all these years. Our time together is almost like part of my childhood, but I still remember it as the most important time of my life. For myself, I have no right to ask anything from you. I can only ask you to forgive me. We did what we had to do. I don’t know what else I could have done, but I can understand it if you hate me. You have a son. I named him George because of your name. He looks like you and he thinks of you. I would like to see you again to explain everything to you if that is possible. I hope that it is.
Love,
Katya
‘What’s it all about?’ Joseph asked.
It was obvious that the letter, with its references to forgiveness, puzzled him, but Kofi found himself wishing that he would shut up, at least for a little while, and stop asking questions. He needed to calm the buzzing in his brain, so that he could think. In the instant before he took in the words of the letter he had been gripped by a fear of what she would say about those times and about why she had disappeared. Thinking over what she had written, he was trying to remember the last words that had passed between them.
‘Dad,’ Joseph said, trying to claim his attention, his voice urgent as if he thought Kofi might be drifting off to sleep. ‘What’s it all about?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kofi told him.
‘Come on, Dad.’ A prickle of resentment seemed to surface as Joseph spoke. ‘You never even mentioned any of this to me. All right, you didn’t know about George, but the rest of it, all this about Katya. You never said.’
‘I told you about Russia,’ Kofi replied. He could remember that much. In afternoons when they wandered together in the park, or he stood behind Joseph in the playground, pushing the swings, he had talked about his life. ‘Maybe you weren’t listening.’
It was true, Joseph remembered, and it was true that he hadn’t paid much attention to his father’s tales.
‘There isn’t much to tell,’ Kofi continued. ‘I was a student there in 1956 and I met Katya. We were,’ he hesitated, ‘in love. Then they expelled me. I wasn’t able to speak to her before I left. That’s all.’
‘Why were you expelled?’
Kofi shrugged.
A lot of reasons, I think. I talked too much to the wrong people. A big dispute in the Students’ Union.’ He hesitated again. ‘I never really knew.’
‘If it was nothing to do with her, why is she asking you to forgive her?’
Kofi shrugged again.
‘I’m not sure.’ He passed his hands over his face, a gesture of uncertainty.
Joseph, it was obvious, could hardly restrain his impatience. Just like an Englishman, Kofi thought, he imagined that the truth was a network of concrete facts and he could find it out simply by asking.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Kofi said. Suddenly he was too tired to work out what Joseph wanted to know. To tell everything would take a long time, and in any case the motives at which Katya had hinted in her letter were still hidden from him. ‘I don’t even remember all of it. I don’t know if I want to remember.’
‘What about George?’ Joseph asked him.
George. In the photograph the boy’s eyes had been wide open, giving his face a curious melancholy expression, or perhaps that was merely a reflection of his own emotions.
‘That’s different.’
He was thinking of the time when Joseph had been small enough to hold in the palm of his hand, his head safely resting against Kofi’s biceps, the same eyes looking up.
‘Did my mum know about Katya?’
Kofi grinned, suddenly amused. Joseph’s mother, Caroline, liked to think of herself as a rebellious spirit, which, he supposed, was one of the reasons their relationship had flowered at the beginning. At heart she was a slave to the romantic conventions with which she had grown up; Cupid’s arrow, roses in June and all the rest of it. The fact that her knight rode into her life on a black charger had merely been a minor local difficulty. If she had known the true state of his feelings about Katya, she would have been devastated, and she would have made his life a misery, even in those early days when she said that all she ever wanted was to be with him. The irony was that he had told her a great deal about Katya, but the way he’d done it transformed the story into a romantic tale in which he was the wounded hero awaiting the healing balm of a woman’s love. It had been an invaluable recipe for getting her into bed quickly. Now it struck him that while he had been calculating the effect that his portrait of Russian life would have on Caroline, Katya had been nursing George, wondering, perhaps, where his father was and whether she would ever see him again.
‘I don’t think she understood my life before I met her,’ he told Joseph.
In his mind a series of pictures flickered, and even though he had just seen the photographs of Katya as an older woman, the images passing through his head showed her as she had been forty years earlier, her hair glinting red and gold in the sun, her booted feet striding towards him. This time, however, his imagination brought her to him as a mother, carrying the baby, his son George, as she stood in a patient queue, or sat swaying on a metro train, or trudged ankle deep through the greying slush of the streets. These were a version of the thoughts, which, when he arrived back in England, he had constantly rehearsed in his mind. Do you love me? Caroline used to ask, while he lay silent, bathed in sad, sweet memories.
‘Why don’t you come and stay with me for a few days, Dad?’
Kofi looked up in surprise. This, too, was the first time Joseph had spoken to him in such gentle tones, and it was the first time he had issued such an invitation. He had visited the house where he had lived with the boy’s mother, of course, but these had been stilted occasions which both of them were usually glad to end. The problem was his sense of Caroline’s presence in the place, which her death had done little to dispel. ‘I don’t want you to set foot in this house again,’ was one of the last things she’d said to him just before he left. ‘You can count on that,’ he had replied with the recklessness of anger. Afterwards he could never feel at ease about accepting her hospitality, even when it came vicariously through his son.
‘I don’t think so,’ he told Joseph, ‘not right now.’ He looked up, met his son’s eyes and saw a shadow of his own pain. ‘Thank you for asking.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’m going to rest for a while and think things over.’ He knew very well that this wasn’t the answer that Joseph was seeking, but some demon of perversity urged evasion.
‘Okay,’ Joseph said. ‘I’ll go now and let you get some rest. I’ll come back later.’
At the door he looked round at Kofi, who was still sitting slumped in the corner of the sofa, the letter and photographs lying scattered beside him.
‘What will you do about all this?’ he asked again.
Kofi didn’t move or speak for a few seconds. The truth was that the idea of doing anything had not yet entered his mind. All he wanted at that moment was to sit and nurse his thoughts, somehow to reassemble the self which felt as though it was floating in fragments around him.
‘I don’t know,’ he told Joseph, the words emerging in a reluctant mutter. ‘I have to think, but right now I don’t know.’