in place.
Next to the car was a massive doorway faced with rusty metal. It was painted black, but the gloss was crumbling and peeling, the grey patches giving it a scaly, diseased air.
‘We are here,’ George announced. ‘Come.’
Joseph got out of the car and looked over at George on the other side.
‘I’ve gone far enough,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m going to take a taxi back to my hotel. Maybe after I phone my father we can talk.’
George frowned. He put his keys in his pocket and walked round the front of the car towards Joseph. As he came closer Joseph made a quick sweep of the street behind him. Apart from a couple of pedestrians on the other side it was practically deserted. This was a feature he had noticed earlier. Once outside of the central district of the city, there were very few people to be seen walking around. In comparison the suburban streets in London were thronging with traffic. Suddenly the empty street seemed alive with menace. Anything could happen, Joseph thought. As George came closer he took his hand off the car and stood up straight, holding his ground.
‘My father is always called Kofi, but his full name begins with the English letter “a”. Akofi. He trained to be a lawyer at the School of Economics, the great institute in the centre of London. He was a freedom fighter against the British. When his country was liberated he became an important diplomat in Russia. In 1957, one month before Christmas, the authorities in Moscow demanded his deportation. They sent my mother away on the same day. That is how I was born in Berlin. When my mother heard you speak on the TV, it was the first time she’d heard his name in over forty years.’ He paused. His jaws clenched tight, the lines of his face set stone hard. He took the keys out of his pocket. In the silent twilight of the street they jingled. ‘We came to Prague to see you. My brother. But come, go, phone. No difference. Fuck you.’
He turned away from Joseph and quickly walked round the car, across the narrow pavement. Without looking back he stuck the key in the lock, yanked the door open and went in, slamming it shut behind him.
Left alone, standing by the car, Joseph experienced a moment of irrepressible doubt, and without pausing to think about what he was doing, he ran after George and banged on the door. It opened immediately, and Joseph had the feeling that George had simply been leaning against it, waiting for him to knock. In the moment before George opened the door Joseph had been full of angry words, but as their eyes met he was dumb. They stood like this, on either side of the open door, before Joseph spoke.
‘What do you want from me?’
George took a deep breath. He shrugged.
‘I don’t know.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘So?’
‘All right,’ Joseph said. ‘All right.’
The stairs were dingy, wide and bare, their footsteps echoing back from the muddy brown walls. In contrast the apartment was neat and gleaming with the air of being newly painted and furnished.
They had come in through a short hallway into the big living room. On Joseph’s right the wall was dominated by a huge abstract painting, a curling red shape which flowed ominously off the bottom corner of the canvas. Beside it a group of framed photographs which he guessed were views of the city. On the other side of the room a big round table, already laid out for dinner, was posed next to a pair of French windows which opened on to a balcony guarded by a sinuous wrought-iron rail. The apartment building was close to the top of a hill, and beyond the windows Joseph could see a wide vista, the grey slate of roofs punctuated by the pointing fingers of the church steeples, sweeping upwards to the sky out of gracefully curved triangles. This was the frame within which he saw Radka for the first time, her back towards him, and silhouetted against the pearlescent twilight of the evening city. Remembering the moment later on, he guessed that there must have been a stray beam of late sunlight striking through the glass, because her light fair hair seemed to be shining so that her head was shrouded by a bright and golden aura. It was only when George called her name, and she turned, smiling, to greet him, that Joseph noticed little Serge standing beside her.
‘This is my son, Serge,’ George said proudly. He pushed the little boy towards Joseph. ‘Speak. Speak to your uncle.’
The boy’s forehead furrowed with anxiety. He was about six years old, Joseph guessed, with a pale freckly skin, light green eyes, and a mop of reddish-brown curls in a halo round his head. At first Joseph had been startled by his appearance, but when he looked closely he could see the African ancestry in the shape of the boy’s lips, in the dark undertone of his skin, and in the tight shape of the curls edging his cheeks. On the other hand he felt a peculiar flutter of disturbance somewhere inside him. His father Kofi was a man so dark that, out in the sunshine, his skin seemed to splinter and absorb the light. The thought that this pretty, curly-haired white boy might be his grandson was strange and unsettling.
Over Serge’s head George smiled broadly. In the short time it had taken them to climb the stairs his mood had lightened, and he was now cheerful and expansive, the genial host. The contrast with his outburst of rage on the street left Joseph bewildered and uncertain.
‘Speak,’ George told the boy. ‘Speak.’
‘Ahoy,’ Serge said eventually.
‘Not Czech,’ George muttered, stooping down behind him. ‘English.’
The boy’s lips worked silently for a moment.
‘Hello,’ he said eventually.
Standing behind George, Radka clapped her hands loudly.
‘Bravo Liebling. Gut. Gut.’
‘Speak English,’ George said quickly, looking round. He stood up. ‘This is Radka.’
Joseph put out his hand to shake hers, but she came past George and grabbed his hands, pulling him towards her and kissing him on both cheeks. As she did this George watched with an ironical smile, as if he could sense Joseph’s unease at being cast in the role of an affectionate brother-in-law. The odd thing, Joseph thought, was that he could already sense the changes in George’s mood, and even work out what he was thinking.
‘You are just like him,’ Radka said, still holding his hands. Her voice had a husky sound, unexpectedly low in pitch. Joseph shrugged. After all, everything that had happened in the last hour had been a shock, and somehow it seemed natural and inevitable that the touch of Radka’s hands should be alive, tingling in his nerves like the aftermath of electricity.
They drank vodka sitting round the table. Serge sat opposite Joseph playing with a long thin glass filled with some kind of fruit juice. He was quiet, his eyes round and fixed on the visitor, and Joseph guessed that his English had been exhausted with the single word. Occasionally he asked his mother a question in German.
‘He wants to know,’ Radka said, ‘if you have seen a lion in Africa. Like the Lion King.’
Her eyes laughed at Joseph. They were a light blue, and against the slight tan of her skin they gave her face an exotic reckless look, as if she was making him a dare.
‘I saw one once in Africa,’ Joseph said. ‘But I live in London where they keep the lions in a zoo.’
Radka translated and the boy gave a sharp, ‘Ah,’ as she said the first bit. His eyes grew wider, glued to Joseph’s face.
‘My mother wanted to come,’ George said suddenly. ‘To see you. But her health is not good, you know.’
‘She lives in Berlin?’ Joseph asked politely.
There were many other questions that he wanted to ask instead, but with Serge’s eyes following his every move he felt constrained about challenging George. Looking across at the boy he wondered whether this was what his brother had intended. In the next instant he realised, with a slight shock, that for nearly an hour this had been how he was thinking about George. As his brother.
The first course was a cold beetroot soup, the earthy flavour heightened by the resin taste of the wine. Joseph’s head was swimming