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
