A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips
into the room with Joseph, she walked along the corridor to listen at Serge’s door. The sounds he made might have been imperceptible to anyone else, but she could tell that he was still awake, reading or playing with one of his toys. Usually she would go in and look at him, kiss him, perhaps, and pick up the toys and books which he left scattered around the floor. On this night she didn’t want to take the risk that he would wake up and detain her, so she merely listened. She had intended to go back to Joseph after a few seconds, but, instead she found herself walking on into the kitchen where she stood looking through the window. Her excuse was that she was about to make coffee, but the truth was that she wanted to be alone for a few minutes before facing her husband’s brother. She felt restless and disturbed, in need of a breathing space in which to calm the turmoil inside herself.
Reflecting on how she felt, she knew that it wasn’t simply to do with Joseph’s visit or George’s sudden departure. In fact it struck her that it was something to do with the game Serge had been playing as she gave him his bath. There was nothing extraordinary about what he had done, and although it sometimes annoyed her a little she was accustomed to seeing him stretched out in the bath tub, his arms along his sides, his mouth opening and closing. This was how he pretended to be a carp, floating in the water like the giant fish George had brought home just before Christmas and dumped in the tub. During the season there were people all over Prague taking home bundles of carp wrapped in wet paper, or stuffed in dripping parcels. Born and brought up in the city, Radka had found this custom unremarkable until she left it. So there was nothing astonishing about Serge’s little game, and he was just as likely to be converted, when she lifted him out of the water, into a roaring lion. On this particular evening, however, she didn’t know why, the sight had triggered a memory of her childhood in Prague, which darkened her mood.
It had been twenty years ago, when she was twelve, coming home from school; she had walked past one of the trestle tables which were laid out everywhere on the street corners. This one was on a busy junction and there was a crowd of people jostling round it. On the previous day there had been a heavy fall of snow and the mob of shoppers was like a herd of cattle, their feet stamping and their breath steaming in a cloud round their heads. Over the entire scene hung the raw smell of the fish, but Radka didn’t find this unpleasant. On the contrary all the activity gave her a feeling of excitement and anticipation that was associated with the coming festival – the smells, the look of the milling crowd, the tight freezing air. Smiling, she circled round the pedestrians, almost stepping into the road, and stumbling a little as an old woman pushed past her. A few paces further on, she felt something different about her right foot, a wet feeling as if she had sunk into a puddle of melted snow. She looked down and saw the dark stain of fish blood around the toe of her boot, and looking back at where she had walked, she saw that she was leaving a trail of bloody footprints. She scraped at the ground, wiping her boots on the thick carpet of snow, but the pink indentations refused to disappear, following her remorselessly as she ran down the street.
On the landing in front of the apartment where she lived with her mother she stopped and took off the boots before going in. Then, holding them at arm’s length, she rushed down the corridor towards the bathroom. The door was open a crack, and she could hear her mother’s voice. She’d heard her mother talking to herself before, and eager to wash the blood off her shoes, she shoved the door open. It seemed to stick a little, then it went back, but with difficulty, as if something was in the way. Inside the room, her mother was kneeling by the tub. For a moment, it seemed as if she was playing with the carp which had been floating in the tub for a couple of days, but then Radka realised that the obstacle which had been blocking the door was the same fish wrapped in a wet towel. At the same time she saw that it was her father who was sitting in the tub. As she came in he turned his head and smiled at her. It was a curious smile, tremulous and almost timid as if her entry had frightened him. That was how she remembered him in the period before his death. When she saw him in the bath tub he had been away for two years. On the day he was arrested her mother had told her it was all a mistake, a story which she accepted with relief, but as the weeks and then months wore on she knew that he wasn’t coming back. He had been imprisoned, her mother said, not because he was a bad man, but because of something he had written, and for a time Radka’s dearest wish was to read his book in order to see, with her own eyes, the appalling thing that had ruined her life. At school no one mentioned her father, but she understood that everyone knew about him by her classmates’ ripple of response to certain names, or by the way that some of them turned to look when teachers mentioned saboteurs or threats to the state. That summer was to be her first visit to a pioneer camp, but a week before the event she told her teacher that she would have to stay and spend the vacation with her mother. Afterwards she avoided taking part in most of her classmates’ activities, inventing one plausible excuse after another. She knew that her anger was connected with her father and his absence, but after a while she stopped thinking about it, and, when her mother said that he would be coming back soon she chose not to believe it, putting that prospect out of her mind in case it turned out to be yet another deceitful hope. His return was a surprise, but it was his appearance and his manner which shocked her.
Before he had left, he was a broad, powerful man. She seemed to remember his voice booming, and he could still pick her up and hold her high above his head before hugging her against his chest. The man who came back was thin and slouching, with downcast eyes and an apologetic smile. He never recovered his old self. Instead he would shuffle out every morning, clad in neatly pressed blue overalls.
‘This is paradise,’ she heard her mother say in the kitchen one day as she got up to get ready for school. Her voice had a deep, angry pitch, and Radka could tell she was close to tears. ‘A professor sweeping floors.’
Her father didn’t answer. When he came out of the door and saw her standing there, he gave her his thin smile and walked past without touching her. He died soon after this, and in later years when the carp began to appear on the street corners Radka would often think of the bloody footprints and of her father’s strange smile.
George was the only person she had ever told about the carp. This was when he proposed returning to Prague, and she had held out against it stubbornly while he ran through all the obvious and good reasons why they should. Setting up the business would be easier there, he said. The materials and skills they needed would be more readily available. There would be better chance of success for a business run by a Russian and a black man. In Berlin who knew what would happen? Maybe one night they would wake to find the place burning.
At that point she told him about the carp, and the irrational fear she had always nursed, that the blood she tracked through the snow had somehow been linked to her father’s fate. George listened without comment, simply holding her hand and stroking it. Then he told her that their lives might be in danger. After that she surrendered to his will, but some part of her had never forgiven him.
George should have realised, even though she never managed to explain it properly to him, that both she and her mother had somehow been imprisoned along with her father. Before that time she had experienced no problems in seeing herself as a part of every activity at the school and among her friends. At the age of ten she had competed for the Youth Union banner. Her entry was a dramatic recital from Jirásek’s rendering of ‘The War of the Maidens’, and the judges had been taken with the sweetness of her voice and the innocent intensity of her pose as she recounted the massacre of Sharkah’s Valley. At the end she threw up her arms, shrilling Jirásek’s words: ‘Pay attention, men, to this sign from the gods! Hear me, and do not take the warring women lightly.’ The hall exploded with applause, and, as her mother always said, she would have won by a kilometre had she not been immediately followed by a nine-year-old who recited, from memory, a long section of the speech Lenin made in Petrograd during 1917. She had left with an honourable mention and the acclaim of her schoolmates, confirming her position as one of the leading spirits in her year. But her father’s incarceration changed everything, and when he returned she lost even the secret hope that his presence would restore her life to normal. At first she imagined that her anger was directed at this tattered relic of her dad, who had taken from her what she had without putting anything in its place. Later on, after he died, she understood that the hot rage hidden in her chest was really about the sense that she, too, had been locked into an airless room. This was a perception which had merely