Читать книгу: «A Shadow of Myself»

ONE

The two Africans in the forecourt of the Hauptbahnhof were playing an old Motown hit. One of them was standing up, strumming a battered old guitar, the other was seated cross-legged on the ground behind him, beating on a drum balanced between his knees. You could hear them all over the railway station, but it took George a long while before he could make out the tune or the words. He had heard the song a few times on the radio, but the Africans gave the melody a mournful, wailing twist which made it almost unrecognisable. George also spoke English well enough to realise that their intonation was so peculiar and their pronunciation so incorrect that they were mangling the words, running them together into lines which made no sense. Another three Africans sat alongside in a short line, open suitcases spread out in front of them stacked full of curios, carved wooden figures, necklaces and bracelets made from beads and shiny stones. All of them wore loose shirts made from printed material, cheap imitations of African cloth.

It was about lunchtime, and the station had begun to fill up with office workers making short trips. It wasn’t as crowded as it had been earlier in the morning, or as it would be later during the rush of the evening, but there was a constant flurry of people coming and going. Around the margins prowled a scattering of hucksters, buskers, hawkers and hustlers; a flock of gypsy women, brown faces and heavy eyebrows shrouded in rainbow shawls, a couple of Turks selling lottery tickets, three lurking Uzbekis, swarthy and battered, red eyes darting furtively, a red-haired German youth in a tight black suit and dark glasses playing riffs on an alto sax, a middle-aged drunk with a ravaged face above his outstretched hand.

Beggars, drunks and pickpockets from all over the city gathered here, mostly because of the international traffic which flowed through its doors. To make matters worse the city’s Hauptbahnhof stood a stone’s throw away from the dramatic bulk of the Kunsthalle Museum, along Glockenweisserwall. In comparison the station was a drab and unattractive building, a big square rectangle of glass and ugly grey brick, having been rebuilt in the forties after Hamburg was blasted into twisted rubble by Gomorrah, the firestorm of British bombs in 1943.

It had the appearance, George thought, of a hundred other such places in the centre of Europe, like a beach where the ebb and flow of passage washed up and deposited human flotsam.

Behind him the station exploded with the noise of a new arrival, and he guessed that the train from Copenhagen had just pulled in. A minute later the buzz of voices and a flood of young tourists streamed through the forecourt, the rucksacks on their backs proclaiming their mission. A group of blonde teenage girls filed past George, pushing mountain bikes, their faces red and pink with the sun, spun-sugar hair bleached to a uniform pale yellow. As they reached the Africans, playing now with renewed vigour, they paused and stared, giggling in unison. Then one of them reached out and dropped a couple of coins on the blanket in front of the musicians before the little group moved on, wheeling their bikes down the slight incline towards the Adenauerallee.

Watching them, George felt a slight prickle of irritation. The girls had looked at the Africans with the patronising curiosity they would probably apply to all the other exotic sights they were about to see during their vacation. Part of what he felt was embarrassment for them; the other part was mainly anger. For most of his childhood, conditioned by his mother’s tales, whenever he heard the word Africa or the name of particular African countries, he had experienced a thrill of curiosity and a peculiar spike of nostalgia, as if he had been there and was now living in exile. In his heart he dreamt of sitting in the shade of a giant tree, singing strange songs, surrounded by a pure aura of effortless joy. In time the dream vanished, but somewhere inside he still had the hope that Africans would be tall and heroic presences, men whose eyes looked into far and beautiful distances. He knew now that this was also a fantasy he had manufactured out of his own longing, but, in spite of his adult understanding, he still couldn’t help a swell of resentment towards Africans like the ones in front of the Hauptbahnhof. In the last few years he had seen too many of them, their breaths furred and stinking, their bodies racked with the pain and exhaustion of how far they had come, their skins and hair grey with the dread of long nights locked in the hold of a ship or a container, listening for the footsteps which might mean death. Even so they stayed alive, red eyes glistening with the lust to survive, movements swift and stealthy as rats, scuttling steadily through alien cities, from disaster to oblivion.

‘Vlasti chornim. Zamyechatyelni.’

The voice behind him spoke one of the words which had floated through his mind, sounding like a mocking commentary on his own thoughts. A soft laugh followed, as if to underline the sarcasm. George didn’t bother turning round. Only Valentin would have wanted to get under his skin by using the expression Black Power about these ragged buskers.

‘Den Mund halten,’ he muttered out of the side of his own mouth. ‘Or speak German. Around here they don’t like Chechens.’

This was true. On the other hand, Valentin was not from Chechnya at all. He had been part of the army of Russian conscripts which had been despatched by Yeltsin and Grachev to have the stuffing knocked out of them by the Chechens. That had been over four years ago, but it was still the worst thing that had happened to Valentin and George knew that the reference would stop him in his tracks.

‘Es ist kühl,’ Valentin said, switching to German. ‘I don’t like them either.’

He stood beside George, watching the Africans. He was dressed today in authentic American clothes: Levi’s, Nike sneakers, and a brown Calvin Klein jacket. The Africans were droning through the same number, but he clicked his fingers like an American in the movies, trying to gee up their rhythm.

‘I know this number,’ he said. He spoke the title in thickly accented and halting English, but his eyes gleamed with pride at being able to do so: ‘If I was carpenter.’

‘That is all the English you can speak,’ George told him.

‘Bullchite,’ Valentin shot back at him. ‘One, two, three, four. Hello mister. I speak good.’

He looked round triumphantly, and George nodded, suddenly tired of the game.

‘Where’s the car?’ he asked.

The car was an English model, a ’96 Jaguar, which Valentin had picked up in Berlin, off the Ku’damm, early that morning.

‘We’re going to Altona,’ he said.

‘Take care then,’ George told him.

‘Ja, ja,’ Valentin grunted mockingly, and shot off along the Mönckebergstrasse. The traffic was moving freely, and soon they were close to the lanes of stalls and the clutter of tourists clustering round the front of the Rathaus. George put his hand out to attract Valentin’s attention and pointed towards the town hall.

‘Langsam bitte.’

Valentin grinned in acknowledgement, but instead of cutting his speed he made a quick left turn towards the river, heading for the Landungsbrücken harbour and the road which ran up to Altona along the Elbe. All the way he kept up his inane chatter in two languages which George hardly noticed. Instead he watched the city going by. The problem was that something had happened that morning on which he couldn’t quite put his finger, but which had darkened his mood as effectively as if a black cloud had passed across the sky. After Berlin this was his favourite city, and in normal times he would have enjoyed the mere sensation of cruising along the waterfront anticipating the changes in the landscape that he knew like the back of his hand. First the red brick warehouses and cobblestones of the Speicherstadt, then the big green sailing ship, then the writings on the wall in the Hafenstrasse. He had walked here with his mother. In the Fischmarkt they had sat at a trestle table in the yard of a restaurant by the water’s edge. At the counter nearby two fat women tossed handfuls of fresh fish in sizzling pans, and a delicious smell of frying filled the air. ‘You speak to them,’ his mother said. In unfamiliar places she was still nervous about the distinctive sound of her Russian accent which she had never lost. ‘They’re staring at me.’ He had laughed, enjoying the irony. ‘They’re staring at me,’ he told her. ‘A black man, with a blonde beauty old enough to be his mother.’ He had tickled her hand and she laughed with him, losing her self-consciousness for a moment.

As if reading his mind, Valentin spoke her name.

‘Katya.’

‘What?’

‘I said I saw Katya last night. I went to the apartment. She wants to see you.’

George nodded. Valentin’s relationship with his mother was another irritant. He had turned up a few years ago, out of the blue, a big grin on his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand. His mother, Yelena, was dead, he had told her. This was Katya’s favourite cousin from her youth in Moscow, nearly forty years previously. She had made him promise, he said, to go to her dear Katya in Berlin and cherish her. By the time George arrived, his mother seemed beside herself with delight. This was his cousin Valentin, she had informed him. He had got her address from some old letters, and arriving in Berlin had come straight to see his relatives. To George’s eyes Valentin looked like any other Ivan, short, dirty blond hair, lean, a crude way of shovelling food into his mouth as he sat spreading himself at the small dining table in his mother’s apartment. She had been cooking with special care that day, as George realised from the smells which struck him even before he put his key in the door. Most of the time she bought herself the cheap convenience foods she found in the nearby supermarket, stuffed chicken breasts, perhaps, frozen or easy to prepare. Sometimes, when he came to visit, all she would have to offer him was an omelette or a grilled chop. By contrast, there was an enormous bowl of borshch in front of Valentin, flanked by dark rye bread and a saucer of sour cream, which he was dolloping on to the surface of the soup in great white lumps. Dotted around the table were a heap of meatballs, a stack of blini, and a plateful of aubergines sliced, rolled and stuffed.

As George came into the room Katya looked up from the table opposite the stranger, her blonde curls, now going white, dishevelled, her cheeks pink and her eyes shining.

‘Your cousin,’ she called out, her voice shrill. ‘Valentin Valentinovich’.

Far from being thrilled at being able to embrace this new relative, as his mother seemed to think he should be, George was angry. All he knew of his mother’s family was that they had ignored her for decades, as if she was dead. She had explained to him many times how dangerous the situation had been for them all at the time when she had to leave Moscow, but he believed in his heart that it might also have been something to do with him, the baby who would grow up to be an African like his father, his colour a sign of the relationship which had marked Katya’s fate. Her family had no choice, she would say, but although George knew everything she told him was true he still wanted to shout at her, to warn her to keep her distance. But it was too late. Something about Valentin had charmed his mother silly. Her heart, as she often told George, bled daily for the days of her childhood, and for several years she had longed to return, dissuaded only by her son’s opposition. Her parents had died years ago, so there was now no home to which she could return, and no one in Moscow to look after her, he would reply. Besides, he told her, life was tough there in Russia. Most Russian women like her would give their right arms to be ensconced in a comfortable apartment in the middle of Berlin, with their own friends around them, their own routine, their own welcoming cafés on the doorstep. But only for a visit, she had wheedled, so you can see the town where I grew up. One day soon, he always said. At the back of his mind was the fear that once she was in Russia he wouldn’t be able to persuade her to leave.

As sometimes happened, he ended the argument by reminding her about his race. ‘It’s bad enough to be a German,’ he told her. ‘I’m not ready yet to go through the same shit in Russia.’

She accepted this without question because it was a part of his life about which she knew nothing.

For instance he hadn’t set out to be a boxer, and left to his own devices he would have gone for swimming or running, but he had sealed his own fate at the age of ten in his fourth year at polytechnic school. Filing out of the classroom after a Russian lesson, Gerhard Havemann whispered in his ear, ‘Schwarzer Russky.’ Almost instinctively, George had turned and punched him in the face, a good clean hit. Afterwards he could never explain to anyone why he had done something so undisciplined. ‘Nekulturny,’ Katya said, in a voice of disappointment. She didn’t understand any better than George himself, because the only unusual thing about what had happened was his reaction. The fact was that other children often referred to him as black and sometimes when they knew about his mother they called him ‘the Russian’, but there was something about the way that Gerhard put those two words together which had sparked a moment of instant and blinding rage.

What happened next was even less cultured than his mother feared. In the afternoon of the following day he was escorted to the gym where the boxers were sparring, skipping and punching a bag. In one corner the director of physical education was supervising two shadow boxers, calling out instructions as they punched and shuffled. ‘Left – left – right – move your feet.’

George waited, standing to attention, wondering how they would punish him. He had been in the gym many times before, and a couple of years earlier he had been put through a couple of perfunctory lessons along with the rest of his class, more for the purposes of assessment than anything else. This was different. The boys in the room were veterans of countless competitions with other polytechnics. Some of them had been in teams which fought abroad, in places as distant as Krakow or Tbilisi, even Moscow, and it was rumoured that Kruger, the sixteen-year-old star of the school, would qualify for the Olympic trials the following year.

George rolled his eyes around, hoping to catch sight of Kruger, but in a moment the teacher turned away from his corner with his arm outstretched, the finger pointing. His eyes, a brilliant blue, seemed to be sighting along a gun barrel aimed directly at the boy. It was a typical pose. The teacher, Wolf Hauser, had been a champion middleweight in the army and he still possessed the mannerisms of a soldier, awesome and overpowering to the smaller boys. George stared back, frozen to the spot.

‘You,’ Hauser said. ‘I hear you have a good punch. Come and show me.’

Later on, remembering the event, George had come to the conclusion that the colour of his skin had more to do with his recruitment to the boxing squad than the power of his punching. The only blacks Hauser had ever encountered were the American and African boxers he had faced in the ring. Sooner or later he would have thought of recruiting the school’s solitary black pupil. If George had been older he might have refused Hauser’s offer, but by the time he understood more about himself and the people around him the drill of training and fighting in competition had become a part of life. When he was conscripted his exploits in the ring were already in his file, part of the official record, and one or two members of his training unit had seen him fighting as a schoolboy in Berlin. Being known as a top sportsman saved him from the extremes of harassment and bullying, and he served out his time in one of the better tank regiments, exercising up and down Thuringia or trundling across Hungary in joint operations. During these years he began to nourish the dream of joining the Olympic squad. This wasn’t a matter of love for the sport. It was as if, by some wonderful accident, his fists had given him the chance of a future which would otherwise be denied to him. He had no serious connections in the Party, and he didn’t possess even a drop of German blood, but if he could fight his way into the Olympic team and survive a few rounds all the doors would open. A nice flat in Berlin, a decent car, a coaching job, and trips abroad. He could have had it all, except for what happened in his last fight, which was against an ageing middleweight from Torun, whose face must have been sculpted from stone. George had put him down eventually, but the shooting pains in his right hand told him something was wrong, and the X-rays confirmed that he had broken a bone. It was several months before he could train again, and by then his chance had gone.

His mother had never quite understood. Perhaps that was why he felt so much resentment at the fact that when Valentin turned up she was wild with happiness to embrace one of her own blood again, and they stayed up, night after night, long past her bedtime, drinking and talking together in Russian, too fluent for George to join in. He had suppressed his anger and the next day, for her sake, he had taken the man out to bars and found him somewhere to stay, steering him gently away from districts like the Savignyplatz where a loud-mouthed Russian could wind up with his face smashed.

It was then, on their second meeting, that Valentin had made his proposition. A friend back home, he said, somewhere in Belarus, he was vague about this, possessed a store of valuable objects, paintings and statues, that he wished to sell. George’s immediate reaction was to laugh. He had heard all this before. Russians sold everything, like hucksters at a market, even the boots off their feet.

The trade in icons was an old story. Back at the beginning of the decade there were genuine icons to be had, but in the last half-dozen years, Russians, along with entrepreneurs from every other ethnic group in the former Union, had been distributing crudely painted bits of wood, some of them barely dry.

‘You can’t sell those things any more,’ George said curtly. ‘Nowadays the collectors go to Moscow or Petersburg and arrange their own fakes.’

Valentin shook his head impatiently.

‘These are not icons, and they’re real. I can show you an example.’ He mentioned a name George had never heard of. ‘An artist of the Peredvizhniki.’ George had a vague idea that the Peredvizhniki were landscape painters.

‘You brought one here? To Katya’s apartment? A stolen painting?’

Valentin looked round and made a shushing sound.

‘It’s not stolen.’

His friend, Valentin said, had been given the paintings by some dead relative who perhaps had stolen them, or had been given them by someone who had. No one knew. But there it was, a collection of priceless works of art about which he could tell no one or sell in Russia.

George had been sceptical, until Valentin took him back to the room he had rented above a Turkish café off the Oranienstrasse in East Kreuzberg, and showed him the picture, a rectangle, about three feet by two, which was a landscape – in the foreground a field of waving corn, in the distance tucked into the bottom corner a house with a windmill beside it. It was a beautiful picture, full of detail, painted some time in the nineteenth century, George guessed, although he really knew nothing about it. In the corner scrawled below the house was the signature – Levitan.

In the end it had been surprisingly easy to find a buyer. Later on it struck him that it had been much too easy, but by then it was too late and the damage was already done.

The problem was where he’d started. Thomas Liebl. George had promised himself, when he moved across Berlin after the Wall, never to have anything more to do with some of the people who had previously been a part of his life. But when he began wondering how to dispose of Valentin’s painting, Liebl’s huge body lurched into his head, and although he racked his brains trying to think of an alternative, he knew all the time that he would go back. It wasn’t an appealing prospect. There had been moments in his life when he pictured ripping a knife across the man’s bloated belly, and although that was now a long time in the past, he still couldn’t think of Liebl without a shadow of the rage and fear he used to feel then. The odd thing was that at their first meeting he’d felt nothing but amusement at seeing the man. Liebl had looked like a cartoon character, a huge version of a crudely carved wooden doll, an ovoid shape with short legs and a bulging round gut tapering upwards to a balding head over which a few strands of greasy black hair were carefully pasted.

At the time, George was managing the workers’ canteen at a food processing factory in Prenzlauer Berg. In the early eighties it was a place of factories, workers’ tenements, hole-in-the-wall cafés and hostels, a district where he could arrive and depart more or less unnoticed. The catering job was the sort of position he had held since he left the army; in George’s mind it represented a period of waiting, a time during which he would decide what to do with himself. The problem was that he had been preparing for a career in sport since he was about fourteen, and when the door closed on that prospect he had been left with no idea what to do and practically no incentive to pursue other prospects.

On the morning that Liebl walked into his office that first time George had long outgrown his dreams of sporting stardom, but he retained the habit of weighing up other men for their potential in the boxing ring. Sometimes he would find himself gazing at someone taller than himself and wondering with which hand he would lead or how fast he was on his feet. It took only one glance to see that Liebl would be a hopeless case. One punch and he’d be down. George smiled, thinking about it, and Liebl’s big moonface split in reply.

‘What can I do for you?’ George asked.

Liebl collapsed slowly on to one of the rusty steel chairs. George’s office was also a storeroom where tins of cabbage and beetroot stood piled on the floor next to the bottles of schnapps and vodka. His desk was a sturdy pine table, marked by the scratchings of generations. In one corner a carved swastika had been converted into a crude hammer and sickle. With the addition of three chairs, there was just enough space left to walk around the table and out of the door.

George laid down the sheaf of receipts he had been totting up, and faced Liebl with his arms folded, realising now that the man must have some official function.

‘Thomas Liebl,’ the man grunted. ‘Sicherheit.’

The word startled George.

‘Security? What about Werner?’

On the previous morning he had spoken with the head of security, Werner, an easy-going veteran who had served in George’s unit ten years before.

‘Werner has been transferred. I’m here now.’

George’s heart skipped a beat. He was certain that Werner had not known about his own transfer, and if everything had been as normal he would have toured the place saying goodbye. The answer must be that they had brought him up in front of the factory’s conflict committee in the afternoon and then kicked him out of the gates. Right now his friend would be cleaning up some filthy dump, or shovelling medical waste and body parts. Even worse, he might have been arrested. The entire affair would have had to have taken less than twenty-four hours. Flabbergasted, George was about to ask what had happened when he realised that it might be unwise to show too much interest.

‘You were friends?’

Liebl was smiling again.

‘We talked,’ George said cautiously, ‘about the army.’

He could hardly deny it.

‘Did you talk about the vodka?’

This time George’s stomach lurched. He had been selling cases of the stuff on the black market for over a year. It wasn’t the sort of transgression which interested Werner as long as he got his regular supplies. George had always assumed that he was taking a cut from every hustle which went on in the factory. Everyone had some kind of scam working for them, and it was easy to forget that it was a crime until you were caught.

‘Vodka?’

He was playing for time, but he knew he had been caught, and looking at Liebl he noticed that the curve of his fat lips wasn’t a smile at all, merely a reflex expressing some kind of pain or stress. Realising this, he understood that the man was playing with him, the eyes gleaming through the folds of flesh as cruel as a cat.