Absolute Friends Read online

  It is his tonight.

  Standing his full height beneath the frugal ceiling lamp, Mundy extracts a penlight from his pocket, unfolds the note until it becomes a rectangle of plain white paper, and sees what he expects to see: Sasha’s handwriting, as it always was and ever shall be: the same spiky Germanic e’s and r’s, the same adamant downstrokes that declare the man. The expression on Mundy’s face as he reads its message is hard to parse. Resignation, anxiety and pleasure all play a part. A rueful excitement dominates. Thirty-four bloody years, he thinks. We’re men of three decades. We meet, we fight a war, we separate for a decade. We meet again, and for a decade we’re indispensable to each other while we fight another. We part forever, and a decade later you come back.

  Fishing in his jacket pockets he takes out a scuffed book of matches from Zara’s kebab café. He plucks a match, strikes it and holds the note in the flame by one corner then another until it’s a twisted flake of ash. He lets it fall to the flagstones and grinds it to black dust with his heel, a necessary observance. He looks at his watch and does the arithmetic. One hour and twenty minutes to kill. No point to ringing her yet. She’ll just have started work. Her boss goes crazy when the staff take personal calls in peak hours. Mustafa will be at Dina’s house with Kamal. Mustafa and Kamal are bosom pals, leading lights of the Westend’s all-Turkish national cricket league, president, Mr. Edward Mundy. Dina is Zara’s cousin and good friend. Scrolling through a mildewed cellphone, he locates her number and dials it.

  “Dina. Greetings. The bloody management have called a meeting of tour guides for tonight. I totally forgot. Can Mustafa sleep over at your place in case I’m late?”

  “Ted?” Mustafa’s croaking voice.

  “Good evening to you, Mustafa! How are you doing?” Mundy asks, slowly and emphatically. They are speaking the English that Mundy is teaching him.

  “I - am - doing - very - very - well, Ted!”

  “Who is Don Bradman?”

  “Don - Bradman - is - greatest - batsman - ever - the - world - was - seen, Ted!”

  “Tonight you stay at Dina’s house. Yes?”

  “Ted?”

  “Did you understand me? I have a meeting tonight. I will be late.”

  “And - I - sleep - at - Dina.”

  “Correct. Well done. You sleep at Dina’s house.”

  “Ted?”

  “What?”

  Mustafa is laughing so much he can hardly speak. “You - very - bad - bad - man, Ted!”

  “Why am I a bad man?”

  “You - love - other - woman! I - tell - Zara!”

  “How did you guess my dark secret?” He has to repeat this.

  “I - know - this! I - have - big - big - eyes!”

  “Would you like a description of the other woman I love? To tell to Zara?”

  “Please?”

  “This other woman I’ve got. Shall I tell you what she looks like?”

  “Yes, yes! You - tell - me! You - bad - man!” More hoots of laughter.

  “She’s got very beautiful legs —”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “She’s got four beautiful legs, actually—very furry legs—and a long golden tail—and her name is —?”

  “Mo! You love Mo! I tell Zara you love Mo more!”

  Mo the stray Labrador, thus named by Mustafa in honor of himself. She took up residence with them at Christmas, to the initial horror of Zara, who has been brought up to believe that touching a dog makes her too dirty to pray. But under the concerted pressure of her two men, Zara’s heart melted, and now Mo can do no wrong.

  He rings the apartment and hears his own voice on the answering machine. Zara loves Mundy’s voice. Sometimes, when she’s missing him in the daytime, she says, she plays the tape for company. I may be late, darling, he warns her in their common German over the machine. There’s a meeting of staff tonight and I forgot all about it. Lies like this, told protectively and from the heart, have their own integrity, he tells himself, wondering whether the enlightened young imam would agree. And I love you quite as much as I loved you this morning, he adds severely: so don’t go thinking otherwise.

  He glances at his watch—one hour and ten minutes to go. He advances on a worm-eaten gilded chair and puts it in front of a dilapidated Biedermeier wardrobe. Balancing on the chair, he gropes behind the wardrobe’s pediment and extracts an ancient khaki knapsack thick with dust. He pats the dust off, sits down on the chair, sets the knapsack on his lap, yanks the webbing straps free of their tarnished buckles, lifts the flap and peers dubiously inside as if uncertain what to expect.

  Gingerly he unpacks the contents onto a bamboo table: one ancient group photograph of an Anglo-Indian family with its many native servants posed on the steps of a grand colonial house; one buff folder marked FILE in aggressive hand-inked capitals; one bundle of ill-written letters of a similar period; one twist of woman’s hair, dark brown, bound round a sprig of dried heather.

  But these objects attract only a curt acknowledgment from him. What he is looking for, and has perhaps deliberately left till last, is a plastic folder in which float as many as twenty unopened letters addressed to Mr. Teddy Mundy care of his bank in Heidelberg in the same black ink and spiky hand as the note he has this minute burned. No sender’s name is supplied, but none is needed.

  Floppy blue air-letters.

  Coarse-grained Third World envelopes reinforced with sticky tape and blazoned with stamps as radiant as tropical birds from places as far apart as Damascus, Jakarta and Havana.

  First he sorts them into chronological order according to their postmarks. Then he slits them open, one by one, with an old tin penknife, also from the knapsack. He starts reading. For what? When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy, first ask yourself why you are reading it. He is hearing the accented voice of his old German teacher, Dr. Mandelbaum, forty years ago. Are you reading something for information? That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge.

  I’ll settle for knowledge, he’s thinking. And I promise I won’t fall for dangerous ideology, he adds, with a mental doff of the cap to the imam. I’ll settle for knowing what I didn’t want to know, and I’m still not sure I want to. How did you find me, Sasha? Why must I not recognize you? Who are you avoiding this time, and why?

  Folded among the letters are press clippings torn impatiently from newspapers and bearing Sasha’s byline. The salient passages are highlighted, or indicated by exclamation marks.

  He reads for an hour, returns the letters and press clippings to the knapsack and the knapsack to its hiding place. The mixture as expected, he silently tells himself. No quarter given. One man’s war continues as planned. Age is not an excuse. It never was and never will be.

  He puts the gilded chair where he found it, sits down again and remembers he’s wearing his bowler hat. He takes it off, turns it upside down and peers into it, a thing he does in pensive moments. The maker Steinmatzky’s first name is Joseph. He owns to sons, no daughters. His firm’s address in Vienna is No. 19 Dürerstrasse above the Baker’s. Or it was, because old man Joseph Steinmatzky liked to date his handiwork and this example boasts a vintage year: 1938.

  Staring into the hat, he watches the scene unfold. The cobbled alley, the little shop above the baker’s. The smashed glass, the blood between the cobblestones as Joseph Steinmatzky, his wife and many sons are dragged away to the vociferous approval of Vienna’s proverbially innocent bystanders.

  He rises, squares his shoulders, lowers them and wriggles his hands around to loosen himself up. He steps into the stairwell, relocks the door, mounts the stone steps. Strips of dew hover over the palace lawns. The fresh air smells of mown grass and damp cricket field. Sasha, you mad bastard, what do you want now?

  Urging his Volkswagen Beetle over the hump between Mad Ludwig’s golden gates, Mundy turns onto the road to Murnau. Like its owner, the car is no longer in its first youth. Its engine wheezes, tired wipers have
etched half-moons on its windshield. A homemade sticker on the back, written by Mundy in German, reads The Driver of This Car Has No Further Territorial Claims in Arabia. He crosses two small intersections without mishap and as promised encounters a blue Audi with a Munich registration pulling out of the lay-by ahead of him with a silhouetted Sasha in his beret crouched at the wheel.

  For fifteen kilometers by the unreliable gauge of the Volkswagen Mundy clings to the Audi’s tail. The road sinks, enters forest and divides. Without signaling, Sasha takes a left fork and Mundy in his Volkswagen scrambles after him. Avenues of black trees lead downward to a lake. Which lake? According to Sasha, the only thing Mundy has in common with Leon Trotsky is what the great man called topographical cretinism. At a parking sign the Audi descends a ramp and skids to a halt. Mundy does the same, glancing in his mirror to see what, if anything, comes after him, or what went by slowly without stopping: nothing. Sasha with a shopping bag in his hand is scurrying unevenly down a flight of paved steps.

  Sasha believes that before he was born he lacked oxygen in the womb.

  A jingle-jangle of fairground music is coming up the path. Fairy lights are twinkling through the trees. A village festival is in progress and Sasha is heading towards it. Scared of losing him, Mundy closes the gap. With Sasha fifteen yards in front they plunge into an inferno of roistering humanity. A merry-go-round belches honky-tonk, a matador on a hay cart undulates before a cardboard bull while crooning in broad Silesian about amor. Beer-sodden revelers, oblivious to the war, blow feathered snakes at each other. Nobody is out of place here, not Sasha, not me. Everyone’s a citizen for a day and Sasha hasn’t forgotten his skills either.

  Over a loudspeaker, the Grossadmiral of a flag-bedecked steamer is ordering stragglers to forget their troubles and report immediately for the romantic cruise. A rocket bursts above the lake. Colored stars cascade onto the water. Incoming or outgoing? Ask Bush and Blair, our two great war leaders, neither of whom has seen a shot fired in anger.

  Sasha has vanished. Mundy looks up and to his relief sees him hauling himself and his shopping bag heavenward by way of a spiral iron staircase attached to an Edwardian villa painted in horizontal stripes. His strides are frantic. They always were. It’s the way he ducks his head each time he lunges with the right leg. Is the bag heavy? No, but Sasha is careful to nurse it as he negotiates the curves. A bomb perhaps? Not Sasha, never.

  After another casual look round for whoever else may be coming to the party, Mundy climbs after him. MINIMUM LET ONE WEEK, a painted sign warns him. A week? Who needs a week? These games finished fourteen years ago. He glances down. Nobody is coming up after him. The front door of each apartment as he works his way up is painted mauve and lit by fluorescent strip. At a half-landing a hollow-faced woman in a Sherpa coat and gloves is fumbling in her handbag. He gives her a breathless grüss Gott. She ignores him or she’s deaf. Take your gloves off, woman, and maybe you’ll find it. Still climbing, he glances wistfully back at her as if she were dry land. She’s lost her door key! She’s locked her grandchild in her flat. Go back downstairs, help her. Do your Sir Galahad act, then go home to Zara and Mustafa and Mo.

  He keeps climbing. The staircase turns another corner. On mountaintops around him eternal snow-pastures bask under a half-moon. Below him the lake, the fair, the din—and still no followers that he’s aware of. And before him a last mauve door, ajar. He pushes it. It opens a foot but he sees only pitch darkness. He starts to call out Sasha! but the memory of the beret restrains him.

  He listens and hears nothing except the noise of the fair. He steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him. In the half-darkness, he sees Sasha standing crookedly to attention with the shopping bag at his feet. His arms are as straight to his sides as he can get them and his thumbs pressed forward in the best tradition of a Communist Party functionary on parade. But the Schiller face, the fiery eyes, the eager, forward-leaning stance, even in the flickering dusk, have never appeared so vivid or alert.

  “You talk a lot of bullshit these days, I would say, Teddy,” he remarks.

  The same smothered Saxon accent, Mundy records. The same pedantic, razor-edged voice, three sizes too big for him. The same instant power of reproach.

  “Your philological excursions are bullshit, your portrait of Mad Ludwig is bullshit. Ludwig was a fascist bastard. So was Bismarck. And so are you, or you would have answered my letters.”

  But by then they are hastening towards each other for the long-delayed embrace.

  2

  THE SWIRLING RIVER that winds from Mundy’s birth to Sasha’s reincarnation at the Linderhof has its source not in the shires of England but in the accursed mountain ranges and ravines of the Hindu Kush that under three centuries of British colonial administration became the North-West Frontier Province.

  “This young sahib of mine you see here,” the retired major of infantry who was Mundy’s father would announce in the private bar of the Golden Swan in Weybridge to anybody unfortunate enough not to have heard the story before, or who had heard it a dozen times but was too courteous to say, “is by way of being a bit of an historical rarity, aren’t you, boy, aren’t you?”

  And, slipping an affectionate arm round the adolescent Mundy’s shoulder, would muss his hair before turning him to the light for ease of scrutiny. The Major is small, fiery and impassioned. His gestures, even in love, are never less than pugilistic. His son is a beanstalk, already taller than his father by a head.

  “And I’ll tell you for why young Edward here is a rarity, if you’ll permit me, sir,” he would continue, gathering steam as he addresses all the sirs within range, and the ladies too, for they still have an eye for him, and he for them. “On the morning my bearer reported to me that the memsahib was about to do me the honor of presenting me with a child—this very child here, sir—a perfectly normal Indian sun was rising over the regimental infirmary.”

  A stage pause, of the sort Mundy too will one day learn to make, as the Major’s glass also mystically rises and his head dips to greet it.

  “However, sir,” he would resume. “However. By the time this same young man deigned to appear on parade”—swinging accusingly round to Mundy now, but the fierce blue gaze as doting as ever—“without your topee, sir, fourteen days confined to barracks, as we used to say!—that sun up there wasn’t Indian anymore. It belonged to the self-governing Dominion of Pakistan. Didn’t it, boy? Didn’t it?”

  At which the boy will most likely blush, and stammer out something like, “Well, so you tell me, Father,” which would be enough to earn him a kindly laugh, and for the Major just possibly another drink on someone else’s tab, and an opportunity to point the moral of his tale.

  “Madame History a very fickle lady, sir”—in the telegramese later inherited by his son. “You can march for her day and night. Sweat your guts out for her. Shit, shine, shave, shampoo for her. Doesn’t make a blind bit o’ difference. The day she doesn’t want you—out. Dismiss. Scrap heap. Enough said.” A fresh glass is by now making its ascent. “Your good health, sir. Generous man. To the Queen-Emperor. God bless her. Coupled with the name of the Punjabi fighting man. Finest soldier ever lived, bar none. Provided he is led, sir. There’s the rub.”

  And a ginger beer for the young sahib if he’s lucky, while the Major in a fit of emotion whisks a khaki handkerchief from the sleeve of his frayed military sports jacket and, having first hammered his fussy little mustache with it, dabs his cheeks before returning it to base.

  The Major had cause for his tears. The day of Pakistan’s birth, as the Golden Swan’s customers know all too well, robbed him not only of his career, but also of his wife who, having taken one exhausted look at her overdue and overlong son had, like the Empire, expired.

  “That woman, sir —” It is the evening watering hour, and the Major is waxing sentimental. “Only one word to describe her: quality. First time I saw her, she was in her riding clothes, out for a dawn canter with a couple of bearers. Done five Hot Weath
ers in the plains and looked as though she’d come straight from eating strawberries and cream at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Knew her fauna and flora better than her bearers did. And she’d be with us here to this day, God bless her, if that arsehole of a regimental doctor had been halfway sober. To her memory, sir. The late Mrs. Mundy. Forward march.” His tearful eye settles on his son, whose presence he appears momentarily to have forgotten. “Young Edward,” he explains. “Opens the bowling for his school. How old are you, boy?”

  And the boy, waiting to take his father home, admits to sixteen.

  The Major, however, as he will assure you, did not buckle under the tragedy of his double loss. He stayed on, sir. He endured. Widowed, a baby son to look after, Raj collapsing round his ears, you might think he’d do what the other buggers did: lower the Union Jack, sound the Last Post and sail home to obscurity. Not the Major, sir. No, thank you. He would rather slop out his Punjabis’ shithouses than kiss the arse of some limp-wristed war profiteer in Civvy Street, thank you.

  “I summoned my derzi. I said to my derzi, ‘Derzi, you will unstitch the major’s crowns on my khaki drills, and you will replace them with the crescent moon of Pakistan—juldi.’ And I pledged my services—for as long as they were appreciated—to the finest body of fighting men in the world bar none, provided”—his index finger stabs the air in dramatic warning—“provided, sir, that they are led. There’s the rub.”

  And there also, mercifully, the bell will ring for last orders, and the boy will slip a trained hand beneath his father’s arm and march him home to Number Two, The Vale to finish up last night’s curry.