Absolute Friends Read online

  Airborne once more, Mundy drifts between dream and reality. Rome, Athens, Cairo, Bahrain and Karachi receive him without comment and pass him on. Landing in Lahore, he declines the airport’s many imaginative offers of a night’s accommodation and delivers himself into the hands of a driver called Mahmoud who speaks English and Punjabi. Mahmoud has military mustaches and a 1949 Wolseley car with a mahogany dashboard and wax carnations in a vase fixed in the rear window. And Mahmoud knows his way to the very precise location, sahib, no ifs and buts, the perfectly exact position where an Irish Roman Catholic nursemaid and her dead daughter would have been most reverently laid to rest. Mahmoud knows this because by coincidence he is a lifelong friend and also first cousin of an ancient white-turbaned Christian sacristan who says his name is Paul after the saint, and is the owner of a leather-bound register which, when encouraged by a small donation, indicates where the most gracious sahibs and memsahibs are buried.

  The cemetery is an enclosed oval of descending terraces beside a derelict gasworks. It is strewn with decapitated angels, bits of ancient car and smashed concrete crosses with their intestines open to the sky. The grave lies at the foot of a tree whose spreading branches make such a pool of blackness under the glaring sun that Mundy in his half-dazed state fancies it is open. The headstone is sandy-soft, the carved inscription so faded that he has to guess the words with his finger. In memory of Nellie O’Connor of County Kerry Ireland and her baby daughter Rose. Beloved of her husband Arthur and son Edward. Rest in God.

  I’m Edward.

  A score of children have attached themselves, tendering flowers from other graves. Unheeding of Mahmoud’s protests, Mundy presses money into every small hand. The hillside becomes a hive of begging children, and the tall, stooping Englishman longs to be one of them.

  Crammed into the passenger seat with his knees knocking against the mahogany dashboard of the ancient Wolseley, the Returning Son watches himself enter the dusty haze that in India you must always pass through on your way to somewhere. And when you arrive, the haze is waiting for you. On lush hillsides he recognizes the deserted stone breweries built by the Raj to wash down the Major’s curry. It’s the road we drove down when they sent us back to England, he thinks. These are the bullock carts we honked at. These are the children who stared at us but I didn’t stare back.

  The bends have acquired a rhythm. Like a willing dray-horse the Wolseley responds to it. Brown mountains with their peaks sawn off by haze lift ahead of them. To their left lie the foothills of the Hindu Kush, presided over by the mother peak of Nanga Parbat.

  “Your very town, sahib!” cries Mahmoud, and there it is: a glimpse of brown houses perched on a ridge, gone again with the next turn. Now the relics of the departed British take on a military note: a collapsed sentry post, a dying barrack hut, an overgrown reviewing stand. A final push by the Wolseley, a few more turns. They are in the town. From tour guide and chauffeur Mahmoud promotes himself to estate agent, conversant with every fine property in Murree and the bargain price that will secure it. This main street, sahib, is today one of the most fashionable in all of Pakistan: note the fine restaurants, food stalls and clothes shops. In these secluded side streets you may observe the elegant summer villas of the richest and most discerning citizens of Islamabad.

  “Kindly reflect upon the most superb views, sahib! Admire the distant plains of Kashmir! As to the climate, it is most jolly. And the pine forests are full of animals at all times of year! Smell also the sweet Himalayan air! Oh gladness!”

  Please drive on uphill, says the Returning Son.

  Yes, this way. Past the Pakistani Air Force base and keep going.

  Thank you, Mahmoud.

  The air force base is made of smart tarmac instead of grass. A second floor has been added to the officers’ quarters. Those bloody pansies in blue, they hog the budget every time, Mundy hears the Major fume. The road is pitted now, and overgrown. Dusty poverty replaces the affluence of the town. After a couple of miles they reach a brown slope strewn with abandoned military cantonments and poor villages.

  Stop here, please, Mahmoud. Thank you. Here is fine.

  Goats, pye-dogs and the eternal poor drift across the overgrown parade ground. The dust-patch next to the mosque where the great cricketers of tomorrow honed their skills is today a hostel for the dying. The same hand that erased Number Two, The Vale has turned the Major’s bungalow into a half-dried skull, ripping off its tin roof, doors and balcony but leaving the eyeless sockets of the windows to stare at the destruction.

  Do the asking, please, Mahmoud. I have forgotten my Punjabi.

  Ayah? Everyone’s an ayah, sahib! What’s her name?

  She has no name but Ayah. She was very big. Mundy wants to add that she had a huge bottom and perched on a tiny stool in the corridor outside his bedroom, but he doesn’t want the children to laugh. She worked for an English major who lived here, he says. The major left suddenly. He drank too much whiskey. He liked to sit under that neem tree over there and smoke cheroots called Burmas. He mourned his wife, loved his son and regretted the Partition.

  Does Mahmoud translate this? Probably not. He too has his delicacy. They find the oldest man in the street. Oh, I remember Ayah most well, sahib! A Madrasi, as I recall. All her family had perished wretchedly in the many massacres, except for the good lady herself. Well, sir, yes, there we are, as we say. After the English left, nobody wanted her anymore. First she begged, then she died. By the end, she was most diminutive. The sahib would not have recognized her as the large lady he is describing. Rani? he speculates, warming to his work. Now which Rani would that be, sahib?

  The Rani whose father ran a spice farm, Mundy replies, by a feat of memory that bewilders him until he recalls how she used to bring him gifts of spices wrapped in leaves.

  Suddenly the oldest man in the street remembers Rani exactly! Miss Rani, she is married most suitably, I assure you, sahib. You will rejoice to hear of her good fortune, thank you, sir. When she was but fourteen years of age her father gave her to a rich factory owner resident in Lahore, what we call in this region a most suitable match. To date they have been blessed with three fine sons and one daughter already, which I say is not bad going, thank you, sahib. You are most gracious, like all the British.

  They are walking back to the Wolseley but the oldest man is still with them, clutching Mundy’s arm and peering into his eyes with unearthly benevolence.

  And now I beseech you to go home, sir, please, he advises, with the utmost good humor. Don’t bring us your commerce, I implore you. Don’t send us any more soldiers, we have quite enough, thank you. You British have taken what you need from us. You have enough now. It’s time you gave us a bit of a rest, I say!

  Wait here, Mundy tells Mahmoud. Look after the car.

  He treads softly down the forest path, thinking he is barefoot. In a minute, Ayah will call to me, telling me I mustn’t go too far. The two great tree trunks are as vast as they ever were. The zigzag footpath between them leads down to the stream’s edge. The rock pool still flashes with mother-of-pearl. But the only face he sees in it is his own.

  Very dear Judith, Mundy writes the same night in stern school English, from his hotel room in a poor part of Lahore. You owe me at the very least some sign of yourself. I need to know that our time together meant as much to you as it did to me. I have to believe in you. It’s one thing to keep searching in life. It’s another to have no firm ground under one’s feet. I believe you would love this place. It is populated by what you would call the true proletariat. I know about Sasha and I don’t mind. I love you. Ted.

  Which doesn’t sound like me at all, he decides. But what does? The postbox in the hotel bears Queen Victoria’s insignia. Let’s hope Her Majesty knows where to find the Kreuzberg squat.

  He is in England again. Sooner or later you have to turn yourself in. Perhaps his visa ran out. Perhaps he grew tired of his own bad company. Availing himself of time-honored tradition, the former head prefect and cricke
t hero signs up with a rural preparatory school that accepts unqualified teachers at a discount. Embracing its discipline like an old friend, he throws himself with his habitual zeal on the Germanic mysteries of verb-comma-verb, gender and plurality. In the hours left him after correcting schoolwork, he masterminds the school’s production of Ambrose Applejohn’s Adventure and makes furtive love to a Judith substitute, who happens to be the science master’s wife, in the scorers’ shed beside the cricket field. In the school holidays he persuades himself that he is the coming Evelyn Waugh, a view not shared by publishers. Betweentimes he dashes off ever more desperate letters to the squat. Some propose marriage, some profess a broken heart, but all are mysteriously dogged by the prosaic tone of his letter from Lahore. Knowing only that her family name is Kaiser and she is from Hamburg, he plows through telephone directories in the local library, besieges Overseas Inquiries, and pesters Kaisers across the North German seaboard in case they have a Judith. None points him in the direction of his former language pupil.

  Towards Sasha he adopts a reserved approach. There are too many bits of his erstwhile roommate that in retrospect he finds difficult to enjoy. He resents the spell Sasha cast over him when they were face to face. He regrets his undue reverence for Sasha’s zany philosophical abstractions. He is irked, despite his protestations to the contrary, that Sasha went before him as Ilse’s lover, and after him as Judith’s. One day I’ll write to him. Meanwhile, I’ll write my novel.

  All the more disconcerting, therefore, that a full three years after being thrown out of Berlin, he should receive a battered bunch of readdressed envelopes sent care of his Oxford college and forwarded to his bank after long months of convalescence in the porters’ lodge.

  There are a round dozen of them. Some are as long as twenty sides of single-spaced typescript from Sasha’s Olivetti portable, with addenda and postscripts in his spiky Germanic hand. Mundy’s first dishonorable thought is to consign the whole lot to his wastebasket. His second is to hide them somewhere he won’t find them: behind the chest of drawers, or in the rafters of the scorers’ shed. But after days of shifting them from place to place he pours himself a stiff drink and, laying out the letters in their chronological order, works his way through them.

  He is at first moved, then ashamed.

  All his self-indulgent obsessions disappear.

  This is Sasha in despair.

  This is a cry of real pain from a fragile friend who has not left the battle front.

  Fled the snappish tone, the dogmatic statements from the throne. In place of them, a desperate appeal for a glimmer of hope in a world that has collapsed around his ears.

  He asks nothing material. His daily wants are few and easily taken care of. He can cook his own food—Mundy shudders. He does not lack for women—when did he ever? He is owed money by magazines; one or other will pay before it goes under. Faisal at the café makes an illicit arrack that can blind a horse. No, the tragedy of Sasha’s life is of a grander, nobler order altogether. It is that West Germany’s radical left is a spent force and Sasha is a prophet without a country.

  “Passive resistance has become no resistance, civil disobedience has become armed violence. Maoist groups are fighting each other for the entertainment of the CIA, the extremists have taken over from the radicals, and those who do not conform with the Bonn reactionaries are banished from what is to be called society. Perhaps you did not know that we now have a law which officially bars from public life all who do not pledge allegiance to the basic principles of liberal democracy? One-fifth of West German employees, from train drivers to professors to myself, are to be considered nonpersons by the fascists! Think, Teddy! I am not allowed to drive a train unless I agree to drink Coca-Cola, bomb the Red River dam and napalm Vietnamese children! Soon I shall be forced to wear a yellow S declaring me a socialist!”

  Mundy is by now searching hungrily for word of Judith. He finds it submerged in a footnote devoted to matters not associated with the letter’s central theme, which as usual is Sasha.

  “People leave Berlin in the night, often we cannot tell where they go. Peter the Great, one hears, has gone to Cuba. He will fight for Fidel Castro. If I had two good legs and Peter’s shoulders I would perhaps offer myself to the same great cause. Of Christina, we have depressing rumors that through her father’s influence she has been permitted to return to Athens. By kind consent of her country’s American-backed fascistic military dictatorship she will join her family’s shipping company. Judith, ignoring my advice, has joined Karen in Beirut. I fear for her, Teddy. The path she has taken is heroic but misguided. Even among revolutionaries, there are too many cultural differences to be resolved. According to a friend who recently returned from those regions, not even the most radical Arabs take kindly to our sexual revolution, dismissing it as decadent Westernism. Such prejudice does not bode well for Judith’s libertarian appetites. Unfortunately by the time of her departure I exerted little influence over her actions. She is a willful woman, led by her senses and not easily persuaded by arguments of moderation.”

  Such an unjust portrait of Mundy’s true love rekindles his romantic longings: Go to her! Fly to Beirut! Comb the Palestinian training camps! Join the struggle, separate her from Karen, bring her back alive! Discovering that he is still sitting in his chair, however, he reads on.

  “I am so sick of theory, Teddy. I am so sick of bourgeois posturers whose idea of revolution is smoking pot instead of tobacco in front of their children! The hated Lutheran in me will not sleep, I admit it, I admit it. Writing to you at this moment I am ready to give up half of what I believe in exchange for one clarifying vision. To see one great rational truth glowing on the horizon, to go to it regardless of cost, regardless of what must be left behind, is what I dream of beyond all things. Will tomorrow change me? Nothing changes me. It is only the world that changes. And here in West Germany there is no tomorrow. There is only yesterday, or banishment, or enslavement to the forces of imperialism.”

  Mundy begins to feel the old fuzziness descend on him. If he were listening, he would by now have switched off. Somehow he continues reading.

  “Any acts of protest currently performed by the Left only legitimize the rightist conspiracy that we are forced to call democracy. Our very existence as radicals underpins the authority of our enemies. Bonn’s military-industrial junta has strapped West Germany so tight to the American war wagon that we shall never be able to raise a finger against its atrocities.”

  He thunders on. Mundy is by now reading him diagonally.

  “Our officially tolerated voices are all we have left to fight the corporate tyranny. . . . True socialist ideals have become the court eunuchs of the Bonn Pantheon . . .”

  Did the Pantheon keep eunuchs? Mundy the pedantic schoolmaster doubts it. He licks a finger and skims a couple more pages, then a couple more. Great news. Sasha is still a cyclist. I have taken no more falls since that day you taught me in the Tiergarten. The news of his former mentor in Cologne is less good:The bastard has retracted half his writings and done a bunk to New Zealand!

  Mundy pushes the letter aside and takes up the last of all. It opens with an ominous announcement: Here beginneth the second bottle of arrack. The writing is freer and, for all its high-flown style, more intimate.

  “I do not begrudge you your silence, Teddy. I grudge you nothing. You saved my life, I stole your woman. If you are still angry with me, please remain angry. Without anger we are nothing, nothing, nothing.” Good to hear it. Now what? “If you are guarding your literary muse with silence, guard her well, write well, tend your talent. I shall never again take you for granted. When I talk to you I talk to that good ear that has listened to so much of my bullshit that I blush.” Well, now you know. “Does it listen still? I believe so. You are not ideologically encumbered. You are my bourgeois confessor as I pursue my odyssey of logical metamorphosis. To you alone I am able to think aloud. Therefore I will whisper to you through the grille that I am like the Persian poet wh
o, having heard all the world’s great arguments, evermore comes out of the same door he went in through. I see the dark door before me now. It is open, waiting for me to enter.” Dark door? What the hell’s he bleating about—suicide? For Christ’s sake, Sasha, get a grip on yourself! thinks Mundy, but he is seriously alarmed.

  Unfinished page. Turn to the next one. The writing is now hectic, a message in a bottle from a marooned man contemplating the jump off the rocks.

  “Therefore, Teddy, you see your friend standing at the crossroads of his life”—a crossroads, or a dark Persian door? Get on with it, arsehole! “What names do I read on the signpost? The fog is so thick I can barely decipher them! For answer me this, dear friend. Or better, answer my new seducers. If our class enemy is capitalist imperialism—and who can doubt that it is?—who ultimately is our class friend? Do I hear you warn me that Sasha is venturing into a quicksand?”—Ah, got it, your dark door opens onto a beach, naturally—“You are right, Teddy! You are right as always! Yet how many times have you not heard me declare that it is the duty of every true revolutionary to throw his weight where it will be most effective to the cause?” Mundy recalls no such times, but then probably he wasn’t listening. “Well, Teddy, now you may see for yourself how neatly I am impaled on the imperfect logic of my own convictions! Go well, dear Teddy. You are my absolute friend! If I decide as I fear I have already decided, I shall carry your loyal heart with me!”

  Groaning theatrically, Mundy pushes the letter away from him, but he has one more page to go.

  “Write to me care of Faisal at the Istanbul Café. I shall arrange for your letters to reach me in whatever improbable circumstance I find myself. Have the pigs left you with a limp? Oh, what bastards those fellows are! Can you still found a dynasty? I hope so, for the more Teddys there are in the world, the better place it will be. What about the headaches? All this I need to know. Yours in Christ, in agape, in friendship, in despair, Sasha.”