was that after Serge’s birth their relationship had been different. When they’d met she was just twenty-one, and George had been beautiful and exotic, curly and dark like a Roma, with a tint of gold under his skin. The odd thing was that seeing Joseph had immediately reminded her of how George seemed at that first moment when she saw him threading his way through the crowd in the Freundschaft Hall at the university. It wasn’t so much that they looked alike, although they did. It was something about the way he moved, a slight hesitation in his step, and a kind of wide-eyed boyishness which had long ago disappeared from George’s features. Watching him as he walked through the door behind George she had felt for a second or two as if time had spun backwards and she was once again the young innocent making eyes at a golden stranger across the room.
Remembering, she smiled, searching the shadowy image in the glass of the window for traces of the child she had been. She had imagined that George was a foreigner, a student or teacher from somewhere like Cuba or Mozambique. She soon found out who he really was, but the thrill she’d felt in that first instant hadn’t gone away. It was true enough that George was different. He was an experienced man, more than ten years older, who had lived through a stint in the army and suffered disappointments at which she could only guess. He also had a contempt for the bureaucracy of politics and administration which Radka shared, and the confidence of his sarcasms and jokes about the system made her feel lighter, almost joyful, as if her isolation was at an end. Like herself, he was an outsider who played by the rules, and kept his feelings to himself, expressing them only within the confines of their mutual privacy. For Radka, being with George was like a final release from the mould in which the first crack had appeared at the time of her father’s imprisonment. In their first couple of years they seemed to have been always together, but later on, when she found out more about what George had been doing at the time, she knew that the memory was an illusion, like a magic trick in which he’d caused the truth to disappear.
Her first clue had come on the night they started demolishing the Wall, tearing with their bare hands at the chips and lumps of concrete. It was a moment she remembered like a piece of music, starting slowly then building rapidly to a crescendo. The first notes, distant and piercing, came as they paced along Stargarder Strasse, following the streams of people, sometimes a couple like themselves, sometimes a chattering group of students, or a dozen young men chanting slogans in unison. Up ahead the columns of pedestrians thickened around the bulk of the Gethsemanekirche. Clinging to George she pushed her way behind him into the entrance in the Greifenhager Strasse, and caught up in the eddying movement of the mob, they drifted further and further in, moving, without volition, among the press of bodies as the crowd broke away and headed for the Bornholmer Gate. Around her was the smell of garlic, tobacco and sweat, then strange vagrant streaks, the sweet taste of roses and wine. Walking up Bornholmer Strasse, she linked arms with Peter, whose father had become a drunken closet fascist, and then Wolfgang, who reached under her coat to hug her, his fingers digging into her breast, indifferent in his exaltation to George marching on the other side, and Renate, who clasped her hand tightly, swinging it up and down in the rhythm of their steps. The noise was unbelievable but she didn’t hear it. ‘The Wall must fall,’ they chanted, and all up and down the line people, their spirits fired by the magnitude of the event, were spouting off impromptu bursts of rhetoric. ‘Let us go see the Ku’damm,’ Peter shouted over at her, ‘and then we’ll come right back.’ Sometimes George looked round at her, laughing, and from time to time they kissed openly, squeezing each other’s bodies, more united than they had ever been. She remembered all this as if it had been a drunken roaring dream, oases of clarity alternating with moments of crazed frenzy. At the Wall they shouted, kicked and tore at the crumbling fabric with their hands, tossing the fragments around them like so much rubbish. In one of the moments she remembered, Peter leapt on to a pile of bricks, a few metres from where she stood, and holding up a piece of the concrete, began making a speech, shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Tonight!’ he yelled. ‘Tonight we sweep away all lies, all illusion.’
Turning round she saw George grinning. ‘Without a few lies and illusions,’ he muttered, ‘none of us will survive.’
She’d laughed then, but later on it struck her that this was exactly how it had turned out.
They were drinking more vodka. When Radka tilted the bottle the long strand of grass in it wavered like weed in a pond. Joseph tried to count the number of glasses filled with the spirit that he had drained so far, but somehow he couldn’t concentrate. The ends of his fingers felt numb. Radka emptied her glass with a long fluent swallow. When she threw her head back the long muscles rippled in her velvet throat. His head spun with drink and the desire to touch her smooth pale skin.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ Joseph said.
‘No.’ Radka stretched her arm out along the back of the sofa and put her hand on his. ‘Please stay. If you leave now it will be bad for George. And for me. Waiting to see you he has been like a cat on a hot tin roof.’ She frowned as if conscious that there was something wrong about the expression. ‘No. Cat on hot bricks. Right? You must wait.’ Her eyes were fixed on his with an intensity which gave him the sense that there was something more beneath the surface of her words. Something she wanted him to know without her having to say it.
Joseph sat back against the cushions. The truth was that he wanted to stay with Radka so much that the feeling frightened him.
‘Tell me about George’s mother,’ he said.
Radka gestured as if trying to gather the words up out of the air.
‘She loves three things in life. Her memories of Kofi, George and Serge. She told me this. Without George she would have been glad to die.’ She paused. ‘She lives in the past, I think. I don’t know if she always did this, but now she speaks to Kofi as if he was there next to her. She talks about what happened during the day and what she thinks about her son, as if he was sitting on the other side of the room. She’s not mad. Her brain is still good. She cooks, she cleans the apartment, her appearance is good, she watches TV and she votes. Everything. It is just that her companion is her memory of Kofi.’
Hearing his father spoken of in this way gave Joseph an unpleasant feeling, and he felt the urge to reply sharply, to utter some kind of sarcasm. These people talked about Kofi as if he belonged to them. You know nothing about him, he wanted to tell her. You have no right. At the same time he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was the interloper. It struck him, also, that his feelings about Kofi had always been ambiguous. ‘A slippery customer’ was how he had often heard his mother refer to him, and he realised now that this was how he had always thought of his father. Looking back to those times thirty years later he understood that his attitude had largely been shaped by the things his mother had said. ‘I threw him out,’ she would say to her friends, and, ‘I couldn’t put up with that shit any more.’ Sometimes, overhearing this, he thought that he hated her, but the worst times were when Kofi was late picking him up on Sundays, or when he didn’t come at all. His mother would telephone various people, her voice either low and complaining or shrill and angry. Once she had made him telephone a woman who sounded irritable and puzzled when he started asking to speak to his father.
As Radka spoke he was remembering one of these Sundays. Ten years old, he was sitting in the single armchair in Kofi’s room. It was somewhere in Kentish Town, facing an adventure playground, where they would usually wander listlessly for half an hour before going back to the room to watch television. In normal circumstances they spoke very little, largely because neither of them could think of anything to say. Kofi busied himself making tea and sandwiches, which Joseph would nibble politely, because although he never said so, he disliked the food his father gave him. Somehow it didn’t taste right, and, listening to Kofi bustling about at the end of the room he was flexing his stomach, nerving himself
