Absolute Friends Read online

  Mustafa’s gratification in Mundy is immense. Until now, he has been obliged to sit upstairs with his mother and the younger kids. Thanks to Mundy he is now downstairs with the men. When prayers are over, Mustafa and Mundy may now shake hands with all the men around them, while each expresses the hope that the other’s prayers have found a good reception in heaven.

  “Study and God will make you wise,” the enlightened young imam advises Mundy as he leaves. “If you do not study, you will become the victim of dangerous ideologies. You are married to Zara, I believe?”

  Mundy has the grace to blush, and mutters something about, well, hope to one day.

  “The formality is not important,” the young imam assures him. “Responsibility is all. Be responsible and God will reward you.”

  A week later Zara gets herself a night job at the kebab café by the station. The manager, having failed to go to bed with her, decides instead to depend on her. She wears the scarf and becomes his star employee, allowed to handle cash and protected by a very tall Englishman. A couple more weeks and Mundy too finds himself a place in the world: as English tour guide at the Linderhof. Next day, Zara pays a solitary visit to the enlightened young imam and his wife. Returning, she closets herself for an hour alone with Mustafa. The same night Mustafa and Mundy exchange beds.

  Mundy has known stranger passages in his life, but none, he is convinced, has filled him with such satisfaction. His love for Zara knows no bounds. He loves Mustafa no less, and loves him best for loving his mother.

  The English Spoken cattle pen is opening, the usual multicultural gaggle of sightseers shuffles forward. Canadians with red maple leaves on their backpacks, Finns in anoraks and tartan golf caps, Indian women in saris, Australian sheep farmers with air-dried wives, Japanese elders who grimace at him with a pain he has never learned the source of: Mundy knows them all by heart, from the colors of their tour buses to the first names of their rapacious minders who wish only to lure them to the gift shops for the greater good of their commissions. All that is missing from this evening’s mix is platoons of Midwestern teenagers with barbed wire round their teeth, but America is celebrating its Victory Over Evil at home, to the dismay of the German tourist industry.

  Removing his bowler and brandishing it above his head, Mundy places himself at the front of his flock and leads the march to the main entrance. In his other hand he clutches a home-built soapbox of marine plywood that he has knocked together in the boiler room beneath the apartment block. Other guides employ the staircase as a speaker’s platform. Not Ted Mundy, our Hyde Park Corner orator. Plonking the box at his feet, he steps smartly onto it, to reappear taller than his audience by eighteen inches, the bowler once more aloft.

  “English speakers to me then, please, thank you. English listeners, I should be saying. Though by this time in the day I wish you were the speakers. Hah! Not true, really”—the voice kept deliberately low at this stage so that they have to quiet down to hear him—“not running out of steam yet, I promise you. Cameras welcome, ladies and gents, but no videos, please—that’s you too, please, sir, thank you—don’t ask me why, but my masters assure me that the merest whiff of a video camera will land us in the intellectual-property courts. The normal penalty is a public hanging.” No laughter but he doesn’t expect it yet from an audience that has spent the last four hours wedged into a bus, and another hour queuing in the heat of the sun. “Gather round me, please, ladies and gentlemen, a little closer, if you will. Plenty of room here in front of me, ladies”—to a bunch of earnest schoolmistresses from Sweden—“Can you hear me over there, young sirs?”—to a clutch of bony teenagers from across the invisible border to Saxony who have wandered into the wrong pen by mistake, but have decided to stay and get a free English lesson. “You can. Good. And can you see me, sir?”—to a diminutive Chinese gentleman. “You can. One personal request, if you don’t mind, ladies and gents. Handies, as we call them here in Germany, known otherwise as your mobile telephones. Kindly make sure they’re switched off. All done? Then perhaps the last one in will close those doors behind you, sir, and I’ll begin. Thank you.”

  The sunlight is cut off, an artificial dusk is lit by myriad candle-bulbs reflected in gilt mirrors. Mundy’s finest moment—one of eight in every working day—is about to begin.

  “As the most observant among you will see, we are standing in the relatively modest entrance hall of the Linderhof. Not Linderhof Palace, please, because hof here means farm, and the palace where we are standing was built on the land where the Linder farm once stood. But why Linder? we ask ourselves. Do we have a philologist among us? A professor of words? An expert on the old meanings?”

  We do not, which is as well, because Mundy is about to embark on one of his illicit improvisations. For reasons that escape him, he never seems quite to have got his head round the plot. Or perhaps it’s a blind spot he has. Sometimes he takes himself by surprise, which is part of the therapy when he is fighting other, more persistent thoughts, such as Iraq, or a threatening letter from his Heidelberg bank which this morning coincided with a demand note from the insurance company.

  “Well now, we do have the German word Linde, meaning a lime tree. But does that explain the r? I ask myself.” He’s flying now. “Mind you, the farm may just have belonged to Mr. Linder, and that’s the end of it. But I prefer a different explanation, which is the verb lindern, to relieve, to alleviate, to assuage, to soothe. And I like to think it’s the interpretation that appealed most to our poor King Ludwig, if only subliminally. The Linderhof was his soothing place. Well, we all need a bit of soothing, don’t we, especially these days? Ludwig had had a rough deal, remember. He was nineteen when he took the throne, he was tyrannized by his father, persecuted by his tutors, bullied by Bismarck, cheated by his courtiers, victimized by corrupt politicians, robbed of his dignity as a king, and he hardly knew his mother.”

  Has Mundy been similarly mistreated? By the throb in his voice, you would believe so.

  “So what does he do, this handsome, overtall, sensitive, abused, proud young man who believes he was appointed by God to rule?” he asks, with all the pained authority of one overtall man empathizing with another. “What does he do when he is systematically stripped bit by bit of the power he was born to? Answer: he builds himself a string of fantasy castles. And who wouldn’t?”—warming to his subject—“Palaces with attitude. Illusions of power. The less power he’s got, the bigger the illusions he builds. Rather like my gallant prime minister, Mr. Blair, if you want my opinion, but don’t quote me”—bemused silence—“And that’s why personally I try not to call Ludwig mad. The King of Dreamers is what I prefer to call him. The King of Escape Artists, if you like. A lonely visionary in a lousy world. He lived at night, as you probably know. Didn’t like people on the whole and certainly not the ladies. Oh dear me, no!”

  The laughter this time comes from a group of Russians who are passing a bottle between them, but Mundy prefers not to hear them. Raised on his homemade soapbox, his bowler hat tilted slightly forward, Guards-style, over his unmanageable mop of hair, he has entered a sphere as rarefied as King Ludwig’s. Only seldom does he bestow a glance on the upturned heads below him, or pause to let a child bawl or a bunch of Italians resolve a private disagreement.

  “When Ludwig was inside his own head, he was ruler of the universe. Nobody, but nobody, gave him orders. Here at the Linderhof he was the reincarnation of the Sun King, that bronze gentleman you see riding his horse on the table: Louis in French is Ludwig in German. And at Herrenchiemsee a few miles from here, he built his very own Versailles. At Neuschwanstein up the road he was Siegfried, the great German medieval king-warrior, immortalized in opera by Ludwig’s idol Richard Wagner. And high up in the mountains, if you’re feeling athletic, he built the palace of Schachen, where he duly crowned himself King of Morocco. He’d have been Michael Jackson if he could, but fortunately he hadn’t heard of him.”

  Laughter from round the room by now, but once again Mundy ign
ores it.

  “And His Majesty had his little ways. He had his food put on a gold table and sent up to him through a hole in the floor—which in a minute I’m going to show you—so that nobody could watch him eat. He kept the servants up all night and if they annoyed him he’d order them to be flayed alive. If he had one of his antisocial moods on him, he’d talk to you from behind a screen. And kindly bear in mind, please, that all this is happening in the nineteenth century, not the Dark Ages. Out there in the real world they’re building railways and iron ships and steam engines and machine guns and cameras. So don’t let’s fool ourselves that this is long-long-ago and once-upon-a-time. Except for Ludwig, of course. Ludwig had put his life into reverse. He was going back into history just as fast as his money would carry him. Which was the problem, because it was also Bavaria’s money.”

  A downward peek at his wristwatch. Three and a half minutes gone. By now he should be walking up the staircase, his audience trailing after him. He is. Through adjoining walls he can hear the voices of his colleagues, raised like his own: boisterous Frau Doktor Blankenheim, retired teacher, recent Buddhist convert and doyenne of the reading circle; pallid Herr Stettler, cyclist and erotomane; Michel Delarge from Alsace, unfrocked priest. And behind him, coming up the stairs, wave after wave of invincible Japanese infantry led by a tight-stepping Nipponese beauty queen brandishing a puce umbrella that is a far cry from Neville Chamberlain’s.

  And, somewhere close to him, and not for the first time in his life, the ghost of Sasha.

  Is it here on the staircase that Mundy first feels the familiar prickle on his back? In the throne room? In the royal bedchamber? In the Hall of Mirrors? Where does the awareness, like an old premonition, steal over him? A hall of mirrors is a deliberate bastion against reality. Multiplied images of reality lose their impact as they recede into infinity. A figure who face to face might instill stark fear or perfect pleasure becomes, in his numberless reflections, a mere premise, a putative form.

  Besides which, Mundy is by necessity and training a most watchful man. Here in the Linderhof he does not undertake the simplest maneuver without checking his back and front and all the other approaches to him, either for unwelcome traces of previous lives or for errant members of his present one, such as art thieves, vandals, pickpockets, creditors, writ-servers from Heidelberg, senile tourists struck down by heart attacks, children vomiting on priceless carpets, ladies with small dogs concealed in their handbags, and latterly—on the urgent insistence of the management—suicidally disposed terrorists. Nor must we exclude from this roll of honor the welcome relief, even to a man so happily paired, of a shapely girl whose attributes are best appreciated indirectly.

  To assist him in this vigil, Mundy has covertly appointed certain vantage points or static posts: here a dark painting, conveniently glazed, that looks backward down the stairs; there a bronze urn that supplies a wide-angle image of whoever is to either side of him; and now the Hall of Mirrors itself, where a multitude of replicated Sashas hovers in miles and miles of golden corridor.

  Or not.

  Is he but a Sasha of the mind, a Friday-night mirage? Mundy has seen his share of almost-Sashas in the years since they took leave of one another, as he is quick to remind himself: Sashas down to their last euro who spot him from across the street and, spidery with hunger and enthusiasm, come hobbling through traffic to embrace him; prosperous, sleek Sashas with fur on their coat collars, who wait artfully in doorways to spring out at him or clatter down public stairways yelling, Teddy, Teddy, it’s your old friend, Sasha! Yet no sooner does Mundy stop and turn, his smile faithfully aloft, than the apparition has vanished or, transmuting itself into an entirely different person, slunk off to join the common crowd.

  It is in his quest for solid verification therefore that Mundy now casually changes his vantage point, first by flinging out a rhetorical arm, then by spinning round on his box to point out to his audience the view, the splendid, the magnificent view, afforded from the royal bedstead—just follow my arm, ladies and gents—of the Italian waterfall descending the northern slopes of the Hennenkopf.

  “Imagine you’re lying there!” he urges his audience with a rush of exuberance to match the spectacular torrent. “With somebody who loves you! Well, probably not in Ludwig’s case”—gusts of hysterical laughter from the Russians—“but lying there anyway, surrounded by all that royal Bavarian gold and blue! And you wake up one sunny morning, and you open your eyes, and you look out of the window at—bang.”

  And on the word bang nails him: Sasha—good God, man, where the hell have you been? Except that Mundy says none of this, neither does he indicate it by so much as a slip of the eye, because Sasha in the Wagnerian spirit of the place is wearing his invisibility hat, his Tarnkappe as they used to call it, the black Basque beret worn severely across the brow that warns against the slightest indiscretion, particularly in time of war.

  In addition to which—lest Mundy has by any chance forgotten his clandestine manners—Sasha has placed a curled and pensive forefinger to his lips, not in warning but rather in the dreamy pose of a man relishing the vicarious experience of waking up one sunny morning and looking out of the window at the waterfall coming down the Hennenkopf. The gesture is superfluous. Not the keenest watcher, not the smartest surveillance camera in the world would have caught a hint of their reunion.

  But Sasha all the same: Sasha the midget-sentry, vital even when he is motionless, poised that little bit apart from the person nearest him in order to escape the comparison of height, elbows lifted from his sides as if he’s about to take off, his fiery brown eyes aimed just above your eyeline—never mind that, like Mundy, you’re taller than he is by a head and a half—bonding, accusing, searching, challenging, eyes to inflame you, question and unsettle you. Sasha, as I live and breathe.

  The tour is ending. House rules forbid guides to solicit but allow them to hover at the doorway, nodding their departing audience into the sunlight and wishing them a safe and simply marvelous holiday. The take has always varied, but war has reduced it to a trickle. Sometimes Mundy stands empty-handed till the end, his bowler roosting on a convenient bust lest it be mistaken for anything as vulgar as a begging bowl. Sometimes a devoted middle-aged couple or a schoolteacher with unruly charges will dart shyly forward and press a banknote on him, then dart back into the throng. This evening it’s a genial building contractor from Melbourne and his wife Darlene who need to explain to Mundy that their daughter Tracey did this very same tour way back in the winter, with the self-same travel company, would you believe it? And had just loved every minute of it—maybe Mundy remembered her, because she sure as hell remembered the big tall Pom in the Bowler Hat! Blond girl, freckles and a ponytail, boyfriend a medical student from Perth, plays rugby for his university? And it is while Mundy is putting on a show of hunting for Tracey in his memory—the boyfriend’s name was Keith, the building contractor confides, in case it’s any help—that he feels a hard small hand encircle his wrist, turn it palm upward, insert a folded note and close his fingers over it. In the same moment, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpses Sasha’s beret disappearing into the crowd.

  “Next time you’re in Melbourne, right?” the Australian building contractor yells, tucking a card into the pocket behind Mundy’s Union Jack.

  “It’s a date!” Mundy agrees with a cheery laugh, and deftly palms the note into a side pocket of his jacket.

  It is wise to sit down before you start a journey, preferably on your luggage. The superstition is Russian but the axiom originates with Nick Amory, who is Mundy’s longtime advisor in matters of self-preservation: If something big is in the air, Edward, and you’re part of it, then for pity’s sake curb your natural impetuosity and give yourself a break before you jump.

  The Linderhof’s day is over, staff and tourists are hurrying towards the parking lot. Like a benign host, Mundy hovers on the steps bestowing multilingual benedictions on his departing colleagues. Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Meierhof!
Still haven’t found them then! He is referring to Iraq’s elusive weapons of mass destruction. Fritz, tschüss! Love to your dear lady! Marvelous speech she made the other night at the Poltergeist!—our local culture and debating club where Mundy occasionally goes to let off political steam. And to his French and Spanish colleagues, a married male couple—Pablo, Marcel, we’ll commiserate together next week. Buenas noches, bonsoir, the both of you! The last stragglers disappear into the twilight as he withdraws into the shadows of the western prospect of the palace, immersing himself in the blackness of a stairwell.

  He stumbled on the place by luck soon after he took up the job.

  Exploring the castle’s precincts one evening—a moonlight concert is to be held in the grounds and, Mustafa allowing, he has a mind to stick around and hear it—he discovers a humble basement staircase that leads nowhere. Descending it, he meets a rusted iron door, and in the door a key. He knocks and, hearing nothing, turns the key and steps inside. To anyone but Mundy, the space he enters is no more than a grubby plant room, a dumping ground for watering cans, old hoses and ailing plants. No window, just a grille high in the stone wall. Air heavy with the stink of putrid hyacinth and the rumblings of a boiler next door. But to Mundy it is everything Mad Ludwig was looking for when he built the Linderhof in the first place: a sanctuary, a place of escape from his other places of escape. He steps back outside, relocks the door, puts the key in his pocket and for seven working days bides his time while he mounts a systematic reconnaissance of his target. By 10 a.m., when the castle gates open, all healthy plants in the public rooms have been watered and unhealthy plants removed. The plant contractor’s van, a flower-painted minibus, leaves the grounds at 10:30 a.m. latest, by which time ailing plants have been consigned to the plant room, or to the van for hospitalization. The disappearance of the key has raised no eyebrows. The lock has not been changed. It follows that from eleven every morning the plant room is his private property.