Читать книгу A Shadow of Myself - Mike Phillips - Страница 10

The first time Joseph Coker saw George he had the peculiar feeling that he was looking at a jumbled up version of himself, and, as it happened, this wasn’t far from the truth. A careful observer might have noted that their skins were both the same shade of light burnt ochre, that they were roughly the same height and weight, that they had the same straight, broad nose, and the same long upper lip, with a little peak in the middle, the sort of feature that Joseph’s wife had pronounced cute in the days when they first got together. Joseph must have noticed, but, oddly enough, when he looked back at his memories of that first time none of these characteristics came to mind, and, during the months which followed that first meeting, he was never quite able to admit that they looked very much alike. On the contrary what he remembered later about his first sight of George was his hair.

Perhaps he would have paid more attention if he’d been prepared for the encounter, but his only warning had been a phone call from the reception desk which came just after he had walked into the hotel room and tossed his jacket on the bed.

‘Mr,’ the receptionist hesitated over the pronunciation, ‘Mr Cocker,’ she said eventually. ‘Your visitor is here.’

She put the phone down before he could ask who it was, and after a moment of indecision he shrugged the jacket back on and set out for the lobby.

The organisers had put him in a hotel ‘on the outskirts’ of the city, perhaps because his had been a late invitation. Most of the other film makers seemed to have been accommodated in the hotels clustered around Wenceslas Square, and at first Joseph had been irritated by the prospect of being out of touch with the action. During the odd moments when his colleagues would be dropping into the cafés to rap with the local movers and shakers, he thought, he’d be struggling out to the suburbs. On the other hand, even though he already knew it would be very different, the mental image he’d had of the city was of somewhere the size of London, where a trip to the outskirts would have taken at least an hour; but to his astonishment the drive from his hotel to the centre of Prague had been a matter of less than fifteen minutes. It had seemed shorter because he was busy looking around, trying to fix in his mind the qualities of the scene through which he was moving. He had also been nervous, anxious about how the film would be received, and what he would say afterwards.

He needn’t have worried. He had imagined his film up on the screen of a cinema, with rows of upturned faces following every move, but the showing actually took place in a large room on the first floor of a building sandwiched between a hotel and a shopping mall. The audience consisted of hardly more than a dozen people, and all the way through their attention was distracted by the sound of music from somewhere outside. The problem was, as one of the organisers explained to him later on, that his film had been scheduled at the same time as The Exorcist. The director was in the city that day, and everyone wanted to be at the session where he would speak. Hearing this, Joseph had to admit that he would have preferred to meet the famous director rather than watch his own film once again, and he had the depressing feeling that his audience were mainly people who had not been able to secure tickets for the main event, or festival staff whose duty it was to be there.

In the circumstances, after that day’s session at the festival he felt more or less relieved to be at a distance from the crowd of students, cinéastes and journalists swarming like wasps around the group of writers and directors whose films were on show. Even so, he guessed that, for some reason, one of them had managed to track him and was now lying in wait for him downstairs. The idea was curiously annoying.

In the lift he wondered about the way the receptionist had pronounced Coker. He had told them his name at the desk when he checked in, emphasising the long vowel, and he was surprised that she had found it difficult. After all it sounded not unlike Coca Cola, and that had to be one of the more familiar brand names in Prague. But Jarvis Cocker might have toured the area, or maybe his near namesake, old Joe Cocker. That would account for it. He’d recognised the voice of the receptionist, a stocky blonde whose broad features had a battered look, and he remembered that, out of all the women who worked on the desk, she was the one who spoke the most fluent English. Perhaps he’d ask her why she had said his name that way.

Stepping out of the lift he’d begun framing the words in which he would put the question, but when she saw him she merely smiled and pointed towards the far end of the lobby. Looking in that direction he saw a group of middle-aged Germans sitting together, but he’d already seen them all in the morning, or perhaps it was an exactly similar group, plump, pink and noisy, moving with a ponderous speed towards the buffet tables. He looked back at the receptionist and she pointed again. This time he followed the line of the gesture and saw an armchair next to the windows, facing away from the room. Poking over the top of it was a tuft of blond curls.

Immediately Joseph began riffling through his memory of the day, searching for a woman whose hair was cut in this dramatic style, then the head moved, turning to face him, and he saw that the curls belonged to a man. The hairstyle was actually a fairly conventional fade, with the two sides of the head cut short and the middle part fluffed up and dyed blond with an auburn undertone which he suspected was natural, since his own hair was patched with the same light streaks. In the same instant he saw that the man’s skin was light brown, like his own, and it struck him that this was a black man with a white parent, like himself. Another visitor from England, he guessed. Perhaps a tourist who had seen him enter the hotel and stopped in to say hello. He must be on some kind of business, Joseph thought, because his clothes had none of the casual flavour that most of the tourists affected. Unusually, he was dressed in a neat dark suit and a white shirt with an open collar; and even with the punky hairdo, he looked stylish, almost elegant.

‘Hiya man,’ Joseph called out, ‘what are you doing here?’

In reply the man stood up and stuck his hand out in greeting.

‘Hello mister,’ he said.

Joseph couldn’t place the accent, and for a moment he thought it was a joke. Then, looking at the expression of polite diffidence on the man’s face, it struck him that this must be a black man who belonged to the region. He felt a surge of excitement at the idea. He knew that there would be mixed-race people dotted around various parts of Europe, but meeting one made him feel a bit like an explorer encountering another one of his own kind in the middle of an uncharted wilderness.

‘Hello,’ Joseph said. He took the man’s hand and shook it. ‘How are you?’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His mind went back to the reason for the man’s presence. Perhaps he’d been at the festival and was eager to meet privately with the black director from England. Joseph smiled, trying to communicate the sense of comradeship the man must have been seeking. ‘Were you at the festival today? I’m Joseph Coker.’

The man smiled back at him.

‘I know. I read of you in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘I am George Coker.’

His English seemed almost perfect, but he spoke slowly, as if struggling to get the words right before he let them go.

‘You’re kidding,’ Joseph said, amazed at the coincidence. No wonder the guy had come to see him. ‘Same name.’

George Coker smiled, his lips twisting ironically.

‘I know. My mother saw you on BBC World Service television. Your father’s name is Kofi.’

Joseph grinned. This, he thought, was the closest he’d come to fame.

‘He was a student in Russia,’ George continued. ‘Yes?’

Joseph nodded, remembering. He’d said all that when they interviewed him. At the time he’d wondered whether anyone would be interested.

‘Kofi Coker,’ George said slowly. ‘That is my father’s name also.’

‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Joseph replied. ‘No offence, man, but this is weird.’

George frowned, as if trying to understand. Then he smiled again.

‘Not weird. This is the same Kofi Coker who is my father, too. This is why I have an English name like you. You are my brother.’

George had stopped smiling and was staring at him intently, as if trying to gauge the effect of what he’d said. Joseph looked back at him steadily, noting the colour of his eyes, a light greenish brown, and his relaxed pose, left hand in his trouser pocket, the other resting casually on the armchair. Paradoxically it was his visitor’s assurance which steadied Joseph, because it offered him a clue about what was happening. On the previous evening he’d been met at the airport by a thin, middle-aged woman with a twitchy neurotic manner, who described herself as his festival guide. As they drove towards the town she’d given him a rapid tour of its history and geography. At the end she offered him a few warnings, mostly about pickpockets and tricksters, who were, apparently, ‘foreigners, Ukrainians, gypsies, Hungarians. Prague has many rich tourists, so they come here from the East.’ As she said this her eyes glared anxiously at him from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Be careful.’

Remembering her intensity, Joseph wondered how she would have reacted to George, but he was also certain that this approach had to be some variation on the kind of scam about which he’d already been warned. George had the assurance of an experienced con man, and it occurred to Joseph that, for this man to survive in this world of whites, where they still treated the dark-skinned gypsies like outcasts, some formidable skills were required. Be careful, he reminded himself. Whatever this guy wanted he’d be tough and smart and probably dangerous.

‘I suppose there’re thousands of Kofi Cokers in Ghana. Like in this country they’re probably all named Václav or something like that. You know what I mean?’ George nodded slowly, as if following his words with care. ‘Your father might be named Kofi. He might even have lived in Russia. Sorry to disappoint you, man, but it doesn’t mean it’s the same Kofi.’

George nodded again.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘This is not easy to believe. For many years my mother believed that my father was in Africa. She wrote to the embassy, and to Ghana. But there was no answer. Then she saw you.’

Joseph felt himself losing patience. This was some kind of smokescreen, he was certain, but he couldn’t begin to guess what the man was after.

‘Bullshit,’ he said tersely. ‘This is bullshit. I appreciate you coming and talking to me. I really do. If you want something, tell me what it is and I’ll say yes or no. But don’t bullshit me, man.’

George frowned, a shade of anger in his expression.

‘No bullshit, mister,’ he said. He took his hand out of his pocket and held it out to Joseph. ‘Look.’

Joseph took the photograph reluctantly. In that moment he already knew what he would see, and he already knew, somehow, that what George had told him was true.

‘What’s this?’

George shrugged.

‘You look.’

The photograph was faded and creased, but still clear. His father was standing on some kind of bridge with his arm round a woman. She was pretty with long fair hair and she was looking up at his dad with a broad and adoring smile on her face. Joseph brought the photo closer and studied the faces carefully. No mistake about it. He was forty years younger, but Joseph had already seen a few pictures of him at around this age. It was his dad.

‘Who is this woman?’ he asked George.

‘My mother. Her name is Katya. This was in Moscow.’

His voice trembled a little, and Joseph avoided looking at him. He turned the photo over. There was a line of writing in Russian letters on the back and a date: 1956.

‘Vajlooblenni navzegda. In English,’ George said, pointing, ‘it says true lovers always.’

Quickly, ignoring George’s hesitation, Joseph thrust the photograph into his hand.

‘Wait a minute,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll be back.’

Without a pause, he turned and walked away. Behind him George said something, but he paid no attention. His head seemed, literally, to be spinning. In his mind the image of his father’s face loomed. Pacing down the corridor to his room, the whirlpool settled for a few seconds and he found himself focusing on the Russian woman who had been nestling next to his dad, and whose features were, oddly, very much like those of the receptionist downstairs. She was prettier, he thought, like his mum had been, and suddenly, it struck him that she also resembled his mother. In his bedroom, in his flat in Kentish Town, there was a framed photograph of his parents in precisely the same pose, arms around each other.

In the room he sat on the bed, picked up the phone and dialled his father’s number in London. As he did this he checked the time by the electronic clock on the TV set. Seven o’clock in Prague. It would be six in London. Whatever the old man had been doing during the day he’d probably have staggered in by that time. No answer. Joseph let it ring, watching the seconds flash past in a blur of green numerals. Then he slammed the phone down.

From where he sat he could see the building site at the back of the hotel. They were rebuilding everywhere, he thought idly, even here in Holesovice, outside the central loop of the town. Typically, though, there were no workers in sight, and no signs of activity. He imagined that they must have packed in and gone home to their families, or whatever it was they did during the evening, and as if in response to his thought a sudden blare of music filled the air, blasting effortlessly through the window. He recognised it immediately. George Michael, his voice quavering under the pressure of relentless amplification.

If George Coker was telling the truth, Joseph thought, there was a great deal he didn’t know about his father – he corrected himself, their father. Would his mother have known, and if she did, why hadn’t she told him before she died?

Thinking about his mother steadied him, imposing a kind of gloomy calm on his thoughts. There could still be some rational explanation. Indeed, everything George had said could be discounted or explained away, if it hadn’t been for the photograph. They could have picked up the name Kofi from the interview, and perhaps none of this would have happened if he hadn’t talked about his father on television. He hadn’t intended to, but when the interviewer asked him where he’d got the idea for the film, a story about his father had simply popped out.

There was something about the interviewer, too. She’d had a kind face which smiled easily and a shock of dark brown curls which had just begun to acquire a sprinkle of grey. She had arrived a few minutes late for the preview, but at the end, she had introduced herself, taking his hand and complimenting him on ‘a wonderful piece of work’. She gestured. ‘Those men. So much larger than life.’ Something about the men in the film, she said, had touched her deeply.

Joseph nodded and smiled, feeling the dizzy pleasure which still flooded through him every time this happened. Of course, he’d been lucky in his subjects. The film was no more than a series of interviews with a group of ageing Africans who had lived in Britain shortly after the war, more than fifty years ago. After he had filmed them he found himself thinking that most of them would be dead within the next ten years, but they spoke about their lives with a vitality and charm which seemed to belong to another, more expansive age. Some of them, recounting incidents from their past, made the preview audiences rock with sympathetic laughter. After the first showing a critic from one of the broadsheets had patted him on the back and told him that it would be a hit in the documentary section on the festival circuit.

The woman at the World Service had used almost precisely the same phrase before the interview, and when the recording started Joseph talked freely and with confidence, eager to please. The film, he told her, had always been somewhere in the back of his mind, because his father had been one of those Africans who had come to Britain shortly after the end of the war as a student. After Ghana achieved independence he had become part of its diplomatic corps and studied in Moscow before eventually returning to Britain. Part of his intention, Joseph said, had been to record and to understand the experiences of men like his father and the environment in which they had lived.

His interviewer listened with a flattering attention, smiling and nodding from time to time. Afterwards she complimented him again. ‘Great, great. That was really fascinating.’

At the time he had been too dazzled to remember what he had said. Now he sat running the interview through in his mind, struggling to isolate the information that a listener might have gleaned from it about his background, and about his father’s life. What he remembered best was how much he hadn’t been able to say. This wasn’t because the interview hadn’t been long enough. On the contrary, she kept encouraging him to tell stories about the men and their experiences. At the same time she made it clear that her audience would be bored and alienated if he started to talk about the process by which the film had emerged, or about the pain and rage which it concealed. When people complimented him on the work his head spun with pleasure, but underneath his excitement he sometimes experienced a spurt of churning unease about the meaning of their words.

The truth was that the first audience who saw a rough cut of the film had received it very differently. These were the men he had interviewed and whose stories he had culled and assembled. He showed it to them in a preview cinema in Soho, and, sitting in the dark it seemed to go down well. They laughed in the right places, and sometimes they shouted with approval when someone made a telling point or told a funny story. Afterwards, as they filed out, most of them shook hands and congratulated him. The only discordant note came when one old man, Mr Mensah, a Ghanaian and a particular friend of his father, held his hand for a moment and gave him a knowing smile. ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘The whites will love it. You’ll do well.’

Later on, alone with his father, this was the first question he asked.

‘What did Mr Mensah mean by that?’

Kofi shrugged his shoulders, cutting his eyes sideways at Joseph and away again.

‘Mensah is a radical. He’s got his own opinions.’

In that instant Joseph knew how much his father despised what he had done. His first reaction was anger, then he wondered how to get Kofi to say what was wrong. The problem wasn’t simply that his father would try to spare his feelings. He knew that Kofi and his friends were privately contemptuous of people who were governed by fear of damage to their self-conceit. ‘Most of the people in the world,’ he told Joseph once, ‘have to live with the terror of sudden death for themselves and their children, or famine or torture. Out of my mother’s eleven children I am one of three survivors and I don’t know what happened to the other two. In this country they spend years weeping over a nasty remark, or because they didn’t get enough love.’

On the occasions when he said such things it was clear that he was also talking about the differences between himself and Joseph’s mother. There was no arguing with Kofi about this. In this respect he was like most of the black people Joseph encountered, regarding the whites and the fuss they made about their emotions as ludicrously soft, self-indulgent; and Joseph already knew that if he confessed to being hurt by the old man’s reaction it would prompt a sarcastic smile.

‘I really want to know how they felt about it,’ he told Kofi.

The handshakes had been sincere enough, but he knew that their praise was not for what they had seen. Instead, it was a compliment on his achievement in wrestling so much from the hands of the whites. Coming from Kofi’s son, a man who was almost one of themselves, it was a matter for congratulations.

‘What would they feel about it?’ Kofi said with an undertone of irritability in his voice. ‘It was a nice film.’

It was the response Joseph had feared. He could question his father all day without getting a direct answer. In comparison his mother had taught him that a direct question was to be answered directly. If someone asked about her actions or her feelings she would tell them, except on the occasions when she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Sometimes she said, ‘None of your business.’ ‘I can’t be bothered to beat around the bush,’ she would tell Joseph.

Kofi and his friends found such behaviour irritatingly confrontational and sometimes downright rude. In their world politeness and respect demanded circumspection. To make matters worse, they had all spent most of their lives in countries like Britain, where concealing their deepest feelings and beliefs from the whites had become second nature, an instrument of their survival.

‘You didn’t like it,’ Joseph said. ‘I could tell you didn’t.’

‘It was okay,’ Kofi replied. Then he relented a little. ‘Maybe it was light. You left some things out.’

It was Joseph’s turn now to be irritable, but he held his tongue; he knew precisely what his father meant. The lightness and charm of the film was the result of careful selection. Most of it was actually made up of spontaneous fragments, some of them off the cuff remarks or stories incidental to the main drift of the interview. Joseph hadn’t planned it that way. The film had been commissioned as part of a television series about ‘outsiders’ in Britain, but Joseph had been trying to make a version of it for more than a couple of years. In a sense it was the project at which he had been working for nearly two decades, and which had started with a long interview he had conducted with his father as part of a film school exercise. From that point he had believed that the reminiscences of men like Kofi were a sort of hidden history which had to be told. Making it happen was another matter, and it took more than a dozen years, during which he worked as a TV researcher, then a film editor, attending courses in his spare time, and assiduously writing proposals and scripts which were inevitably rejected. It wasn’t until his mother died that her legacy gave him the resources to set up his own company. The company consisted of himself, a computer and a rented office near King’s Cross, but he was able to begin touting for work as an independent producer. The jobs were few and far between, consisting mainly of short segments of film or video for other producers’ programmes, and it had taken a couple of years, but his big break came when he was asked to submit a proposal for one film in the series on outsiders. The offer wouldn’t have been made, he knew, at the time when he started his first job. In those days the largest companies still patted themselves on the back when they hired a black researcher, but attitudes in the industry had changed gradually, and it was now conventional practice, in most of the less prestigious TV series, to make room for at least one black independent.

On the other hand, he was competing with another dozen hungry black producers with more or less the same experience, but the passion and detail of Joseph’s proposal, in preparation for most of his career, won him the commission. In the moment that he heard the news, it was as if, having been born dumb, he had suddenly been granted the gift of speech. And when he started work he had a clear outline of what he wanted in his mind, and for a time the project seemed to be going smoothly. All of the men he contacted had a lot to say, most of it the product of long years of disappointment and frustration. In comparison, Joseph’s life had been comfortable and secure, but their words stirred echoes inside him, and, sometimes, listening to some story of insult or violence he felt an outrage stronger than any of the feelings prompted by his own experiences. The first edit was an angry polemic in which the men described a hostile, oppressive society and the way they had survived it. Joseph had no doubt that it was powerful and moving, but when he showed it to the producer of the series it was obvious that she didn’t share his satisfaction.

‘It’s a bit gloomy,’ was Hattie’s first comment.

She had a businesslike, almost curt manner which, he suspected, was partly to do with the fact that when she started her training, fresh from university, he was already working as a researcher. At the beginning she had been warmer. Discussing his proposal in her office for the first time she had brought him a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of her desk swinging her legs which were clad in battered jeans. It was more or less what he would have expected, given their previous acquaintance as colleagues, and she had been friendly and sympathetic, nodding as she listened, then commenting that his passion was exactly the kind of motivation the series needed. Viewing his first draft, however, she seemed to have forgotten her initial enthusiasm.

‘It would be okay in a multi-cultural slot,’ she said, ‘but we’re dealing with a general audience here. All these guys are talking in generalisations. It’s too abstract. They’re like experts rambling through history trying to come up with an overview. Half the time they’re talking about events at which they weren’t present. It’s all very well going on about riots or what some politician said, but if they weren’t there, what’s the point?’

They were all intelligent men, he explained, who imagined they were communicating a thoughtful view of the history through which they had lived. If they made it sound impersonal it was because their own equilibrium demanded some distance between themselves and the most unpleasant events.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Hattie interrupted, ‘but that’s not the point. The central issue is how the audience reacts to these people. They’re saying complex and difficult things. That’s no problem. Let’s take it for granted that their analyses are correct and they’re telling the truth. It still doesn’t work unless you give the audience characters with which they can sympathise and identify.’

Joseph brought out his best arguments, but there was no shifting her.

‘I have a suggestion,’ she said eventually. ‘Do another edit. Keep the same structure, but take out every story and every statement which doesn’t begin with the word I.’

Joseph went back to the drawing board, but his second effort had no more success.

‘Maybe you’re too close to it,’ Hattie said before she left.

The next day Joseph got a message from her asking for copies of the transcripts of his interviews, and the following day she gave them back to him, several pages marked with yellow highlights.

‘Try editing these in,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the length. We’ll bring it down later.’

The final product was a long way from the film Joseph had set out to make, but Hattie’s satisfaction was infectious. His success in this project, she hinted, would make the going a lot easier when he put in for his next commission. Joseph had felt more or less vindicated, and Mr Mensah’s comment after the preview in Soho was the first indication that his pleasure might have been misplaced.

That afternoon he sat watching the film, spooling back to see various sections and trying to separate himself from it for long enough to gauge what an objective observer might think. He reached his conclusion in a time so short that he understood he had already known it. The context of political action and social change that the old men had struggled to outline had disappeared, and with it the story about the courage and perseverance of his father’s generation, which he had hoped to tell. Instead, he had produced a gallery of entertaining characters, their features drawn as clearly as if he had asked them to act out the parts. There was a funny man, a romantic, a rogue, and someone else whose ludicrous argumentativeness had become a running theme. His father, too, had become a character in the show, aloof and a little enigmatic. Mr Mensah was right, Joseph thought bitterly, the whites would love it. There was nothing here to disturb the sleep of the great British public, no reflection of the anger and grief he had experienced while listening to the old men, and remembering Mr Mensah’s smile he guessed they believed he had made a deliberate choice to misrepresent and trivialise them.

In that mood, he telephoned Kofi.

‘I understand what Mr Mensah was trying to say.’

‘Don’t let it worry you.’

Joseph couldn’t read his father’s tone, but he knew that, somehow, he needed to explain. Without giving Kofi a chance to interrupt he began quickly to describe the long process of editing, and the way that the company exerted its control over the product.

‘I would have done it differently if I could,’ he ended.

‘I know that,’ Kofi said. ‘We all knew that. The man who pays the piper gets to call the tune. That’s what they say, and why would she want our version of a story she thinks she owns?’ Joseph heard him chuckling down the line. ‘None of us would have done any better. History is written by the winners. They will never allow you to say what they don’t want to hear.’

Joseph guessed that these words were meant to be reassuring, but their cynicism didn’t make him feel any better, partly because his unease was compounded by the sense that if he had fought harder he might have been able to preserve some of his original vision. To make matters worse, during some of his arguments with Hattie he had experienced the same feeling of powerlessness he used to feel in his quarrels with his mother. Some of it was due to the way she had always forced him to question himself and his own motives. Coming home with some story of a fight in the playground, or an insult in the classroom, she would look at him sternly – ‘Are you sure you did nothing to provoke them?’

As he grew older he stopped talking to her about the anger and outrage he felt at these times. If his father had been there, he thought, he would have understood. As it was his mother’s questions made him feel isolated and alone. Years later, as a resentful fifteen-year-old, he accused her of undermining his confidence and filling his mind with self-doubt. She’d heard him out with a puzzled frown. ‘I didn’t want you to be full of hate,’ she said. ‘Like your father.’

It was only after she died that, free of guilt, he allowed himself to know his father better. At that point he realised, with an odd pang of sorrow, how little she had understood about either of them. On the surface there was practically no resemblance between Hattie and his mum, but there had been times, while they wrangled about the editing, that he had seen the same look crossing her face. It was a look he had frequently seen on the faces of white people he knew well, an expression which hinted that whatever the problem was, he was somehow denying the fact that it was his own fault.

Joseph would have been too embarrassed to tell Kofi about any of this, so he accepted his father’s implied rebuke in silence. Luckily, he had a couple of months’ grace before the series was broadcast to reassemble his confidence, but apart from a couple of short newspaper features he hadn’t been required to talk in any great detail until the World Service interview. By the time he was invited to the festival in Prague, he had almost forgotten the misery and embarrassment he had felt on the afternoon of the first preview.

Oddly enough, sitting in his hotel room in Holesovice he had been thinking about Mr Mensah. If what George said was all true, did his father’s friends know? Why had Kofi never told him?

He leant over to pick up the telephone, but as he did so the volume of music outside increased another notch. He got up and pushed the window shut, then, glancing at the clock, realised that he had been sitting on the bed for more than half an hour. He moved quickly to the door, then slowed down, thinking about how to deal with George. He dialled London again. Still no answer. Perhaps, he thought, putting the phone down at last, the man might have got fed up waiting and left.

As he got out of the lift he was still torn between curiosity and a kind of reluctance to encounter George again. Instinctively he looked at the armchair, but now it had been turned round to face the room, and it was occupied by a bulky old man with a bald head and a bushy beard. Joseph felt a surge of relief, then a movement caught his eye and he saw George sitting at the bar waving at him, his hand raised above his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Joseph said. ‘I had some things to do.’

George shrugged.

‘I understand.’

He rapped lightly on the bar.

‘Prosim. Slivovice.’

‘You’re a Czech?’ Joseph asked him.

George frowned, his mouth twisting a little, as if it was an unpleasant notion.

‘Me? No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I am German.’

‘I thought your mother was Russian.’

‘She is. But I was born in Berlin. East Berlin.’

‘How come?’

The barmaid, a wispy blonde with a pale translucent skin, put two glasses in front of them, and he put a note on the counter. George slid off the stool and stood up, put some money on the counter and grunted something.

‘What?’

‘I say thank you to her. Dekuju.’

To Joseph it sounded like dekweege, and he repeated it to himself, testing the sound. George grinned at him and picked up his glass.

‘Drink,’ he announced. ‘We go.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Joseph said. ‘Go where? What are you talking about?’

‘Home.’ George’s voice had lost all traces of uncertainty as if everything had been discussed and arranged. ‘My wife Radka, and my son Serge. They are in Prague. Yes. You eat with us.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Joseph told him.

He was confused again, because, in the last few minutes George had, somehow, subtly begun to take charge, in much the way he imagined an older brother would, as if Joseph had accepted the truth of his story, and as if, all of a sudden, they had an established and long-standing relationship.

‘There is no problem,’ George said. ‘You come. You are my brother. My son you are his uncle. Yes? There is no problem.’

‘I don’t know that,’ Joseph declared firmly. ‘Even if what you say is true this is still weird. I phoned my father in London, but he wasn’t in, and until I speak with him all bets are off. So cut the brotherhood shit till I know what’s going on here.’

George frowned, listening intently, his lips moving fractionally, as if mouthing some of the words.

‘I understand,’ he said slowly. ‘This is not easy for you. No one has told you. But for me, too. Because you are English you think this is some mad man from the East.’

‘That’s not it,’ Joseph cut in quickly. ‘That’s not how I feel. Not the way you think.’

He was about to say that he was troubled and disturbed, that he couldn’t begin to describe how he felt, but it struck him at the same time that to do so would be to enter George’s story, to tell him that it was real. He stopped, uncertain how to proceed. George’s eyes, he noted, a tremor starting somewhere inside his guts, were the same colour as his own. A few seconds passed while they stood staring at each other.

‘So,’ George said slowly. ‘You come?’