‘And yours?’
George smiled.
‘For me change and movement is still possible.’
‘Can you come to Berlin?’ Radka asked. She took in Joseph’s look of surprise. ‘Katya was so excited to hear your voice. She wants to meet you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Joseph told her. ‘I’m leaving here in a couple of days.’
‘There is a message,’ she said, as if she had anticipated his reply.
She’d hardly completed the sentence before George broke in, speaking rapidly in German. Immediately Serge slid off his seat and stood next to Radka, reaching out to hold her hand.
‘It is now his bedtime,’ George told Joseph.
The boy seemed surprisingly obedient, walking round the table to shake hands with Joseph and then toddling off serious-faced behind Radka.
‘There is a message,’ George said.
He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and brought out a lilac-coloured envelope. On the front there were only two words, written in an elegant copperplate script. His father’s name – Kofi Coker.
Joseph turned the envelope over in his hands.
‘You’ll give this to him?’ George asked.
Joseph was about to say yes, then it occurred to him that in all the time he had been discussing his father with George he had never once considered the effect that this event might have on the old man. If it was true.
‘He had a heart attack a couple of years ago,’ he told George. As he said this he felt a curious sense, almost of betrayal, at revealing such an intimate matter.
‘He’s okay now?’
‘Yes,’ Joseph replied, ‘except I’m worried about how he’ll take all this. He’s an old man.’
If George understood the hint implicit in his words he ignored it. I’d take no notice too, Joseph thought, if it was my dad whom I’d never seen.
‘You must understand this,’ George said quickly. ‘My mother and father were separated by the authorities. She still loves him. Everyone loved him. He was known to everyone. Even Nikita Khrushchev spoke with him.’ He grinned at Joseph. ‘Maybe he was not such a great hero as she thinks, you know, but that is what she told me. This is forty years ago. She was fighting the rules when I was born.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Regulations. She could have made me never to exist – that would have been easy – or sent me away. But that would have been surrender.’ He looked away from Joseph, gazing through the French windows out into the evening sky. ‘This was not easy. I lived with a German family when I was a small boy, like Serge. I called the mother my mutti. You have two mothers, they told me. What a lucky boy. Then Katya married a German, an important policeman. He wanted to forget me, I think, but my mother insisted.’ He chuckled. ‘I think he hated me. No one would think I was his son, you know. But I was lucky. Only a few years, then he was killed.’ He got up and paced to the window without looking at Joseph. ‘My mother still speaks of Kofi, Kofi, Kofi, as if no time has passed. But I think she had believed that he was dead or lost, that she would never see or hear of him again. Then she hears you and her life begins. If she cannot touch him in some way she will die.’ He paused. ‘She is a woman of great passion.’
He said this last bit with a kind of gloomy pride. In the corner of the room the phone began to ring. George ignored it. The ringing stopped.
‘Maybe wrong number,’ George said carelessly.
‘Could it be your mother?’ Joseph asked. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
‘No. No. We spoke before. She is waiting for me to call.’
The ringing started again. After a while Radka came into the room and picked up the phone. She listened in silence, then held it out towards George. He got up, his face expressionless, took the phone from her, and reeling out the long cord by which it was attached to the wall, went out and shut the door behind him.
It was dark outside now, and before Radka sat down she turned on a standard lamp perched in the corner below the photographs. She had changed her clothes, switching from the sweater and jeans she’d been wearing to a long white dress in some sort of crinkly material, which seemed to wrap around and envelop her body, giving her a comfortable, relaxed air, as if she had slipped it on to illustrate the fact that this was her province in which she was at home. She smelt of flowers – something with a lemony undertone which Joseph couldn’t identify. Citrus, but not lemon. Earlier on her hair had been bundled together into a bun on top of her head. Now she had let it down and it rippled in smooth flowing waves, over her shoulders and across her back. In the margin of the pool of light around the lamp, she glowed.
‘This is very important to George,’ she said. She gazed at him seriously, her eyes intent. ‘There was always something missing in his life. Just as his mother’s. Being with you is a great experience. Already he loves you.’
Joseph shrugged, too embarrassed to speak. It wasn’t so much the idea of what she was saying that disturbed him. It was the fact that she was saying it.
Suddenly he could hear George shouting, a ranting, angry sound. Radka’s expression didn’t change.
‘I put some photographs in the envelope with Katya’s letter,’ she said calmly. Outside the door George’s voice had risen to a roar without eliciting any apparent reaction from Radka. Perhaps it was the language, Joseph thought. To English ears emphatic German speech still carried the sound of a threat. ‘She wants to see him,’ Radka continued.
The door flung open and George strode in.
‘I have to go,’ he said without preamble. ‘Half an hour.’ He pointed at Joseph. ‘You wait? Okay?’
Joseph started to object, but before he could find the words George had turned and walked out. Radka got up quickly and went out after him, closing the door behind her. Joseph hovered for a moment, undecided about whether he should get up and follow, but then he heard their voices echoing in the hallway. It sounded like an argument, so he stayed where he was, and in a moment he heard the sound of the outer door slamming shut.
‘Where are you going?’ Radka asked George.
She had followed him out on an impulse which was something to do with Joseph’s presence. It wasn’t unusual for George to leave the house without explanation, and in normal circumstances she wouldn’t have asked. There had been a time when such questions would have seemed impolite or even suspicious, and the old habit of reticence about these matters died hard. But this was different. Seeing it through the eyes of someone who, like Joseph, knew nothing of the way they had lived, George’s departure seemed abrupt and strange. In any case, she also felt a sudden surge of resentment at his assumption that he could simply leave her with someone, his brother, who they were both meeting for the first time.
George’s hand was on the bolt of the door, but, halted by the tone of her voice, he stopped and looked round.
‘It’s business,’ he told her quickly. ‘I have two madmen at the garage who are about to fight each other. The customer is crazy and making a fuss, and the Roma is worse. It won’t take long.’
She nodded her head, accepting the explanation. Since the time that he and Valentin had set up business in the city, she’d become accustomed to the eruption of minor emergencies.
‘Can’t Valentin do it?’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
She