TWENTY

DIARY OF DESIRE

The life and times of Kofi George Coker

Moscow 1957

That winter seemed to be going on for ever. It did not, of course, it was simply that the arrival of the spring didn’t mean the end of snow and ice. But after our visit to Jelenia Gora I hardly noticed the weather. Katya and I were in love, and we didn’t think of much apart from each other. In those days we were like tigers in the snow, leaping to each other whenever the opportunity offered. We must have made love every day for weeks, underneath convenient trees, against freezing walls, knee deep in snow, once in a tunnel near Komsomolskaya, once while she bent with her back to me over the railing of a bridge over the Moskva, then we walked over the bridge down Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya, went into the archway that led into the massive apartment building they called the Visoky Zdaniye, and then did it all over again, facing each other this time. Another time we did it on the floor of the empty classroom at the college. Under her skirt, during that period, she wore two or three slips. When I lifted them under her coat I could feel her naked belly heaving against me. Sometimes, it seemed, I thought of nothing else except the next time.

The snow was wet underfoot when she invited me to meet her parents. By this time I had begun to acquire a grasp of what the people were like. For instance, talking to Valery about Katya showed me a picture of her that was new to me. He’d noticed how often we were together, of course, although I was careful not to say too much about how we spent our time. Like all the others, he guessed. Calvin’s ‘jokes’ about ‘educational pussy’ and ‘bringing teacher a banana’ would have told him, in any case. When I mentioned that I had been invited to Katya’s apartment he laughed as if I’d said something funny. Her father, he told me, was one of those who had survived the purges and travelled with Khrushchev to the Ukraine in order to repeat the entire process. They knew him well there.

As usual, I had to read the meaning of Valery’s comments between the lines, and I had the feeling he was trying to tell me to be cautious about this visit, or perhaps not to go, but, in the end, I closed my ears.

As it happened there seemed to be nothing very alarming about Katya’s family. They lived to the west of the city, near Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The apartment was on the first floor of a quiet block at the end of a crooked lane pitted with holes and ruts, which were full of cracked ice and muddy slush. Inside, the place seemed like an explosion of colour and decoration, packed to bursting with objects, and it took my eyes a little time to adjust. The floor was covered with fringed carpets, mostly red, the walls were lined with shelves, full of books, dolls, little brass knick-knacks and wooden statuettes. Stepping across the threshold I was hit by a strong smell, some kind of herb I had never encountered before.

Katya led me through the hallway into the room next to the kitchen. Her father was sitting at a desk. I had expected someone who looked meaner, but he appeared to be jovial, with a cheerful round face, topped by a fringe of blond hair, going white in streaks. Put a beard and a red hood on him and he’d look like Santa Claus, I thought. Later on, when I told Hussein this he nearly fell over laughing.

‘You haven’t really seen him yet,’ he said, and this was true, because the next time I caught sight of Vladimir Andreyevich he was wearing a huge black overcoat and a black hat and he was getting out of a big black car surrounded by a group of men who looked exactly the same, and according to Hussein this was what he really looked like.

When I first met him, though, the questions he asked me seemed natural and harmless, just the sort of thing that any concerned father would ask of a young man who came home for dinner with his daughter. ‘Oochenik,’ he called me with a burst of laughter. That meant pupil and it seemed to be a family joke, because he kept on addressing Katya as oocheetyelneetsa – teacher – drawing out the syllables ironically. It made her laugh, for some reason, and I laughed along with her, and we all seemed to be getting on like a house on fire. Katya’s mother was, in contrast to her husband, a stern-looking woman, lean and greying with little round spectacles perched on her nose. She worked in one of the ministries, I gathered. The odd thing was that they were the reverse of what I expected – the woman cool and gloomy, the man warm and welcoming. After dinner he brought out a bottle of Polish Zubrowka and we began talking seriously. Katya sat next to me on the sofa, her face covered in smiles, translating quickly the words I didn’t understand and phrasing my replies to her father. Her mother, who spoke barely two words for the whole of the evening, sat at a little distance from us behind a table on which was a pile of books with some sort of journal propped up against them. She was reading it most of the time, but occasionally she would lay it down and listen to what we were saying, her chin resting in her open palm, her eyes magnified and bulging behind the glasses, switching from one to the other of us.

Vladimir Andreyevich looked like a bit of an idiot, but he knew a lot, I’ll say that for him. He asked me what I thought about Nasser, and he asked me to describe Dr Nkrumah. Nikita Sergeyevich, he told me, had proved to the colonial leaders that he was the real friend of Africa and Asia when he forced Eisenhower to call for the withdrawal of Britain and France from Egypt. It wouldn’t be long, he said, before my people realised that their true interests lay in alliance with the socialist countries against the bullying and oppression of the capitalist world. I kept my thoughts to myself. I already knew the depth of our politicians’ scepticism about Khrushchev’s intentions. I had the feeling that Vladimir knew it too, but if he was trying to draw out my opinions about such matters as Suez and Hungary and their implications for my country, he would have to wait a long time.

To prove his point he told me a few stories about China. He had been part of a delegation to Beijing, which had been headed by Nikita Sergeyevich and Nikolai Aleksandrovich. The Chinese were very polite people who couldn’t do enough for their comfort, but after a time, everyone in the Russian party began to be depressed by the sheer quantities of tea they had to drink. Every time they drained their cups the Chinese would refill them. If it had been vodka, of course, it would have been different, but so much tea was intolerable, especially for Nikita Sergeyevich who had to keep getting up in the middle of negotiations to empty his bladder. In the end he simply refused to drink any more tea. Half the delegation followed his example. The other half modelled themselves on Bulganin who continued to drink the innumerable cups of tea, and as a result was out of the room when many important matters were being decided.

At the end of this story, Vladimir leant over and refilled my glass. I told him that for a foreigner like myself tea might be easier to cope with. He found this hilarious, but it didn’t stop him pouring the vodka. By the time I left I was only just able to walk. Maybe Katya’s father knew what he was doing, because at the beginning of the evening it had crossed my mind that later on we might have a quick bout in the dark stairway. That night, however, I was only capable of lurching slowly to the metro station.

After this our relationship was more open, that is to say, we took less trouble to hide it, and, as if the two things went together, the desperation of our attacks on each other’s bodies grew less intense.

Valery and Hussein issued warnings couched in their different styles. Valery’s comments were in code. He took to speaking ironically about Party apparatchiks, quoting fragments about hypocrisy from Khrushchev’s speeches, and so on. Hussein was more open. ‘Be careful with these people,’ he said. All this meant little to me. The fact is that I was too happy, uncaring in my ignorance, like a blind man strolling towards a cliff, his face turned upwards to the sun. The disaster, when it came, was sudden and definitive.

That evening we had been walking around the Kremlin, St Basil’s and Red Square. I remember wanting to see the domes against the beams of the setting sun. It was the kind of romantic idea which astonishes me now when I think about it, but we walked there for more than an hour. After dark we headed for the embankment, savouring the fresh cool spring breeze blowing off the river. It wasn’t late, but it was an ordinary working day, and by this time of night there were few pedestrians in this part of the town. We were walking past some railings as I remember it. There was an old church or a building which used to be a monastery. The area was littered with them. In the gardens the birches were budding. In the reflected light they shone with a pale translucent and unearthly green. Ahead of us a red star lit up the top of the Visoky Zdaniye. Everywhere you looked there was something to see. I seem to remember that Katya was describing a letter she’d received that day from her brother, who was a rocket engineer, full of excitement about some tests they were doing. By the end of the year he had said, Soviet science would overtake all the achievements of the West. I was frankly sceptical, but of course, Katya was right about that because soon enough they produced the triumph of Sputnik. Deep in the argument, we didn’t notice the young men following us until we heard the voices. At first I couldn’t distinguish what they were saying. Then I heard the words ‘abyezhyana’ and ‘chornim’. I’d been called a black monkey in the streets before, but usually I had been with one of the other boys or a group of students when some drunk started to bellow abuse. There was something about the situation and the sound of the voices which told me that this was different. The four boys behind us didn’t sound drunk or mad. I was familiar with the feel of it, because the vibrations, the passion aroused by the mere sight of a black man and a white woman swinging along hand in hand, were the same in any language. The last time I’d experienced it was coming out of a pub in Wilmslow Road, late on Saturday and bumping into a crowd of white men. The girl with me needed no telling and she’d whipped off her high heels and started running before I had time to think. Remembering this I grabbed Katya by the arm and began urging her along, looking around for a convenient building or a house to which we could run. Unfortunately, I reckoned without her sense of security – ‘arrogance’ Hussein called it later, but the fact was that this was new to her. The girl who ran with me that night in Wilmslow Road knew that being with me put her beyond the pale. In Katya’s case running away from hooligan elements within sight of the Kremlin simply wasn’t in her nature. I was poised for flight when I realised that she had swung around and started berating the boys. It was all too fast and agitated for me to understand, but I moved back to her side, trying to ease her away. Of course I couldn’t leave her to it, but it was a mistake. As I reached for her, one of the young men hit out at me. He was blond and wearing a leather jacket, which is about all I remembered later. I swayed back, but Katya kept trying to get in front of me, which meant that we got tangled in each other’s feet and by the time I could set myself to push her aside I had been surrounded. One of the youths held me from behind, the others set to work hitting me. They weren’t experts. I think they meant to beat me up. Instead they knocked me unconscious with only a few blows. I must have been out for a few minutes, and I woke up to find myself still lying on the ground, cradled in Katya’s arms. My jaw felt as though it had been broken, and I could feel my face growing agonisingly tight as it swelled.

‘Don’t move,’ she kept saying, but there wasn’t much prospect of that, and in a few seconds I passed out again.

I was aware of being put on a stretcher and driven away, although I kept falling asleep. I guess that they must have given me some kind of drug, because I felt no pain. I was floating above the city, watching my ambulance speeding along the embankment. Ahead of me the red star loomed, and I felt like laughing.

Next morning when I woke up in the hospital Hussein and Valery were both there, standing round my bed. When I tried to speak it hurt, but I could feel that there was nothing broken.

‘Is Katya okay?’ I asked them.

‘She’s back at work this morning,’ Hussein said. ‘They didn’t touch her.’

That was true, and I was relieved but not totally surprised. What surprised me was how much the incident changed our relationship. I didn’t see Katya until my face was getting back to normal and I could walk without limping. I didn’t go to my classes, and she didn’t show up at Cheryomushki. This was as expected. I was foreign and one of her students, so there was a flavour of transgression about our relationship which would have made it difficult for her to confront the warden. She wrote me a letter which Valery delivered with a shrug and a flick of his eyebrows. It was a careful message, saying how sorry she was and how she hoped I would be better soon, and that she was looking forward to resuming my instruction. I knew this last bit was her real message to me, put in a way that she knew would make me laugh, so I felt better right away. This was a relief because I was having to deal with another matter about which I was in two minds.

After I returned to Cheryomushki I found that I had become the focus of attention among my fellow students, a fact which didn’t altogether please me. On my second day back the students’ union held a meeting at which I was invited to speak about my unfortunate experience. The problem was that afterwards, Hussein proposed a resolution to be sent to the regional committee condemning this example of racial violence directed against comrade students from abroad in the shadow of Lenin’s tomb. I knew he was making mischief. I wasn’t certain why, but he hardly ever attended the students’ meetings and he had often sneered in private about the language in which his resolution was framed. Predictably, the subsequent debate split the student body in half. Hussein had talked to a number of the boys about his intentions during the day and most of them had already discussed it and decided to abstain. I couldn’t be sure whether the warden had spoken to them, but everyone knew by now what his line was on such attacks. He had come to see me in my room after I got back and told me that I’d had the misfortune to come across some drunken hooligans. My impression that they had called me a black monkey was incorrect. According to Vladimir Andreyevich, Katya’s father, she had heard no such comment. The brawl was a misunderstanding provoked by my ignorance of the language. Repeating my story would merely lower the morale of my comrades in Cheryomushki and give ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union’s forward-looking policy of aiding the oppressed colonies.

Towards the end of the student meeting, Calvin of all people got up and put this argument. Hussein watched him with an ironical smile curving his lips, but when he asked for someone to second the motion there was no response. Hussein looked at me. ‘Leave it,’ I told him. I knew by then the resolution would be defeated, and there seemed no point in pursuing it, even if I had been certain that I wanted to.

Next day I asked Hussein why he had bothered. He must have known that our flock of sheep would refuse to pass such a resolution. He grinned at me, triumphant.

‘I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I really do. I’ve had enough. My work is more or less finished. I don’t need to be here, but if I just went I’d be in some trouble when I got back. They’ve spent quite a bit on my research. Now they’ve revoked my scholarship they’ve got no claims on me.’ He took in my astonished expression, still grinning. ‘The warden told me this morning. They’re kicking me out. I’ll be in London in a couple of days.’ He clapped me on the back. ‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks?’

‘It was all your doing. You gave me the idea when we were talking about Padmore. If I’m going to work in the West it will help me a lot to have been kicked out of Moscow. I don’t want anyone to think I’m some kind of Party plant. But I had to wait for a good excuse. Nothing too serious, something that everyone can find understandable. You gave it to me.’

‘I’m glad,’ I told him, unable to restrain my resentment at that moment, ‘that you found my getting beaten in the street so useful.’

Hussein looked at me seriously.

‘Let me tell you something,’ he said. ‘That was nothing. To those men you were probably a symbol of privilege, and you are. In their existence the richness and variety of your life is unimaginable. What they did to you is their revenge on the world. Everyone knows that. Misery is relative. The point is that there is nothing the Party can do about it, and it will get worse. I’ve been studying the Virgin Lands programme. Remember? It won’t work. But Siberia’s the next big thing. The Russians will do the same there. Invent some crazy way of extracting as many resources as possible, take as much as they can out of it, send it to the centre and use it for whatever they want, and then leave the place in a state worse than they found it. What does that sound like to you? Colonialism, right? The thing is they can see how it ends up right now in Africa and Asia, but they won’t take any notice. At this moment imperialism looks good to the Party, and by the time they understand the real cost it will be too late. They think that the West is getting out of the business because they’re decadent. Believe me that’s what Nikita Sergeyevich was brought up to think, and what he won’t understand is that Western Europe is running for cover, so he’s going to maintain Stalin’s imperialist system in the republics and Eastern Europe, and one day some bunch of nationalists is going to get up and start killing Russians and then it will get worse. These people are in for a very bad time. My resolution was a bad joke, but the tragedy here isn’t yours. Be glad you’re what you are. In my country and yours within a few years we’ll be driving limousines and ordering executions the way the big men do here. Save your sense of justice for that.’

The following week I walked with Katya around the university campus under the shadow of the tower and asked her why she’d given her father a false version of the incident. She gazed at me with astonishment. ‘I didn’t say that.’ The warden must have invented it all, she said. I should have known, I thought. He’d said what he had to in order to confuse matters and keep me quiet. Now I knew the truth it was too late. Katya sighed and told me she was sorry. The worst of it, she told me, was that at the end of the week, she was going off to Komsomolsk to see her brother. The visit had been promised for months, but this was his first and perhaps his last break for a while, so he wanted her to come now. If she refused he would be hurt and she might not see him for a long time. I told her I understood. When we said goodbye, I didn’t know that I would only see her one more time.

She was still away when a delegation arrived from London. They consisted of the Party officials who were responsible for supervising some of the scholarships, and they were treated as important dignitaries. There was a black man from the Caribbean in the group, who was their troubleshooter for the problems of the blacks. The rumour was that Hussein’s expulsion had caused a great stir and the delegation had come to restore calm and instruct their clients in how to behave. For a few days I saw him going backwards and forwards, interviewing various students. He seemed nice enough, and when he asked to see me I agreed. As I expected he asked me about the incident in which I had been assaulted, and I told him the details exactly as they had happened. ‘If you’re going to stay here, my brother,’ he said at the end of my account, ‘you’ll have to forget about it.’

I didn’t argue with him, because I had come to the same conclusion. In any case, the anger and confusion I had felt was beginning to fade. The truth was that to be abused or attacked because of the colour of my skin was something to which I had become accustomed long before, and the excitement which the incident had caused struck me as exaggerated and false. If so many people had not been so concerned I would have succeeded in putting it out of my mind in a few days. As it was, something about the way that they were trying to cover up the whole business had started to infuriate me. The black man from London was no different. I sensed that he believed everything I said, but I sensed also that his job, unnecessarily as it happened, was to shut me up. ‘There’s always a problem,’ he said in a confiding tone, ‘with the women.’ I didn’t reply, and he must have thought he was getting somewhere. He lowered his voice. ‘This girl of yours,’ he whispered. ‘There’s no question of your marrying her. The parents would block it. I met the father. He’s a nice guy, but there’re problems. These are important people and they expect a lot of her. You’re not even in the Party.’

‘We never discussed marriage,’ I told him.

He shrugged.

‘Well, it’s been mentioned.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s a lot of ignorance even here,’ he continued, ‘although the Party is working hard to educate people. There was a story in one of the papers recently about an African who got permission to marry his Russian girlfriend and take her back with him. They said that when he got back he sold her.’ He gave me a sorrowful look and shook his head. ‘Of course it wasn’t true. We made a hell of a protest, but it’s the kind of rumour that gets around and causes trouble.’ He raised his finger and pointed. ‘We’re going to take up your case behind the scenes, but we have to work with the Party. Once you go public with resolutions and petitions you just hurt the country and it doesn’t do any good.’

I nodded, because I agreed with the last bit and he squeezed my hand warmly before he went away. That was the last of it, but, although I didn’t know it, the attack had been the first step in my expulsion.

Katya returned shortly afterwards. In the evening we went out to Leninsky Gory and walked through the new grass up the slopes. There were a few couples strolling about in the twilight and a wedding party climbing the hill. As they went past a few of the men called out and one of them came towards us. The sound of his voice and his manner was boisterous and friendly, but it was all I could do not to back away. He held out a bottle, and I took it and drank. Then he shook our hands and went away, jogging after his comrades. Unable to stop myself I told her what the official from London had said about the prospects for our getting married.

‘I think he’s right,’ Katya said.

Her tone was calm and dispassionate, as if she was talking about someone else.

‘Did your father talk to you about it? What makes them think we want to get married?’ She didn’t answer. ‘It would be impossible in this country anyway,’ I told her.

We walked on in silence.

‘I can go to Paris next month,’ Katya said. ‘There’s a conference and they’ve asked me.’

Hearing the words was as if someone had switched on the lights in a dark room. Up to that time it had not occurred to me that we might be together in some other place, and when I thought about her there had been no expectation of any future beyond the next time we would meet. Suddenly it was possible to imagine her with me years away from the Lenin Hills.

Walking up the slope we began planning. There had been no need for her to ask me, because her assumption that I would want to be there with her in Paris was entirely correct. We didn’t talk about what would happen there or whether there was any question of her leaving permanently. At the back of both our minds was the thought that no one could stop us getting married in another country. The odd thing was that the whole idea might not have come up at all if it hadn’t been put there, between us, by the intervention of others. Without saying anything, we both knew that being together in Paris would be the first step on a path which might carry us anywhere. The first snag, of course, was that in order to avert any suspicion we would have to stop seeing each other. In the circumstances it wouldn’t take much for them to cancel her trip.

‘The next time I see you,’ Katya said, ‘will be in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.’

I don’t know what would have happened if everything had been as normal. Instead, I was on edge, nervous and agitated. I wrote to Makonnen saying that my father had been in poor health when I left and that I hadn’t heard from him. It was preying on my mind to the point where I couldn’t concentrate on my studies, and I wanted him to get me permission and to pay for the fares so that I could go back for a couple of weeks to sort matters out. Mak had lost touch with my father years ago, and in any case, he was a mere toiler, a sparrow whose fall no one would have noticed, but I trusted that my patron would take the hint. The story about my father was the safety net. If they thought this was a journey of compassion and that I was coming back, no one would connect my leaving with Katya.

The arrangements were made faster than I thought possible. Ghana had by now established an embassy in Kitay-Gorod and Mak had sent a message through the ambassador. I think that the warden was pleased at the thought that I would have a holiday and return refreshed. Since my ‘accident’ I had discussed the matter with him twice, pretending to slowly come round to his point of view. I had met with worse things in England, I told him, and I had no intention of confusing the issues by allowing myself to be used as a tool of propaganda by anyone. He nodded approvingly, and returning my passport to me, shook my hand warmly.

I went to see Hussein’s friend, Alexy, the black zek, before I left. He was still sitting up in bed, as if he hadn’t moved since my last visit. I gave Vera the bottle I had brought and sat beside him.

‘I wanted to tell you something,’ he said. ‘Hussein told me about what happened to you. Don’t judge us because of that. In twenty-five years nothing has ever happened to me, because of my colour, even in the camps. But even if it had, it wouldn’t matter. When you go back to Africa tell them that this system offers more freedom to more people. If they imitate the West what they’ll have is a ruling class working for the Americans. The hope is here.’ He paused. ‘Without Stalin and Beria this would have been a paradise.’

This time I couldn’t restrain my curiosity.

‘So you’re still a Communist?’

‘Of course. When comrades come here from the West they expect perfection. What they never understand is that this is a state which is still on the way to changing the world.’

I half expected Valery to lecture me too, but he had said very little since my accident, which I appreciated. In spite of the suspicions Hussein planted in my mind, we had been good friends, sharing many thoughts, as young men do. When the time came for me to leave he held my hand in his and looked straight into my eyes. ‘Are you coming back?’

Something inside me refused to lie to him, although I couldn’t tell the truth either. ‘Maybe,’ I told him. ‘I’ll see how it goes.’

I got one letter from Katya with one word written on a sheet of paper. I knew it was her from the handwriting, although it was unsigned. ‘Abyssinia’, it said. It was a childish code I had learnt from a girl in England: ‘I’ll be seeing you’. No one would guess its meaning but I hid it away among my papers, and I still have that letter, the ink faded, the paper creased and falling apart.

It is all I have. She never came to Paris in the spring. I waited, haunting the hotel where the Russians were staying, perusing the faces at the conference long after I knew she wasn’t there, and I didn’t give up until they left. In desperation, finally, I arranged to bump into one of the delegates whom I recognised from the Komsomol college. I explained that I was doing a brief period of research in Paris, and asked after Katya. The delegate looked surprised. Katya had not been part of the delegation. They left the following day and I returned to London, where I got a summons from the Ghanaian embassy. The Russians had revoked my scholarship and withdrawn my visa, the attaché told me. He looked at me with obvious disapproval. ‘You’re not the first,’ he said, ‘to get into trouble over these women. But we expected more discipline from you.’

Coming out of the embassy there were tears in my eyes, and I walked the pavements between the high stone buildings without knowing or caring where I was going. In my mind I was wondering what had happened to her, and whether I would ever see her again, and what to do with the rest of my life.