Absolute Friends Read online

  Dawn has broken. With tears streaming down his cheeks at last, Mundy pins the citation to the wall above his bed and next to it the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes and their minions, and hammers them both home with his shoe.

  Ilse’s radical principles like her eager little body are unappeasable, and Mundy in the flush of his initiation can be forgiven for not spotting the difference. Why should he care that he knows even less about Mikhail Bakunin than he does about the parts of the female anatomy? Ilse is giving him the crash course in both, and it would be downright impolite to accept the one without the other. If she rails against the state as an instrument of tyranny, Mundy passionately agrees with her, though the state is about the last thing on his mind. If she lisps of individualization, extols the rehabilitation of the I and the supremacy of the individual, and promises to cut Mundy free of his submissive self, he implores her to do exactly that. That she talks in the same breath of radical collectivism disturbs him not at all. He will make the bridge. If she reads aloud from Laing and Cooper, while he dozes temporarily sated on her naked belly, a nod of appreciation can scarcely be accounted hardship. And if making love appeals to her more than making war—for in her spare moments away from anarchism and individualism Ilse is also an evangelizing pacifist—he will hang up his musket for her any day, just as long as her impatient little heels keep hammering his rump on the coconut matting of her anchorite’s horse trailer in St. Hugh’s—gentleman callers tolerated between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m. for Earl Grey tea and Marmite sandwiches with the door open. And what more soothing, in the afterglow of lust temporarily assuaged, than the shared vision of a social paradise ordered by the free agreement of all component groups?

  Yet none of this should imply that Ted Mundy is not by predisposition committed to the New Jerusalem that Ilse has revealed to him. In her starry radicalism he has found not only echoes of the venerable Dr. Mandelbaum, but evidence of his own vague stirrings of revolt against most of the things that England means to him. Her just causes are his by adoption. He’s a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example. He’s a frozen child who is beginning to thaw out. Occasionally, trotting off to a lecture or library, he will brush up against a former schoolmate in sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and polished brown toe caps. Awkward exchanges pass before each hurries on his way. Christ, that fellow Mundy, he imagines them thinking, gone completely off the rails. And they’re right. Pretty much, he has. He belongs neither to the Gridiron nor the Bullingdon, the Canning nor the Union. At raucous if dismally attended political meetings he relishes his tussles with the hated rightists. His height notwithstanding, his favored position away from Ilse’s arms is perching cross-legged with his knees up by his ears in the cramped rooms of left-leaning dons while he listens to the gospel according to Thoreau, Hegel, Marx and Lukács.

  That he is not persuaded by intellectual argument, that he hears it as music he can’t play rather than the iron logic it professes to be, is neither here nor there. He is undaunted by belonging to a tiny band of gallant comrades. When Ilse marches, Mundy the great joiner puts his whole good self where her loyalties are, boarding the coach with her at Gloucester Green at daybreak equipped with the Mars bars she likes, and the carefully wrapped egg-and-cress sandwiches from the market, and a thermos of tinned tomato soup, all stowed for her in the Major’s army-issue knapsack. Shoulder to shoulder and often hand in hand, they march to protest against Harold Wilson’s support of the Vietnam War, and—since they are robbed of the chance to dissent through the parliamentary process—proclaim themselves members of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. They march to Trafalgar Square to protest against apartheid and issue passionate declarations of support for American students burning their draft cards. They cluster in Hyde Park, are politely dispersed by the police, and feel vindicated if a little hangdog. Yet hundreds of Vietnamese are dying every day, bombed, burned and thrown out of helicopters in the name of democracy, and Mundy’s heart is with them, and so is Ilse’s.

  To protest the seizure of power in Athens by the CIA-backed Greek colonels and the torture and killing of unnumbered Greek leftists, they linger vainly outside London’s Claridge’s Hotel where the colonels are believed to be residing during a furtive visit to Britain. None emerges to receive their jeers. Undaunted, they repair to the Greek Embassy in London under banners reading Save Greece Now. Their most satisfying moment comes when an attaché leans out of a hotel window and shouts, “In Greece, we would shoot you!” Safely back in Oxford, they still feel the wind of that imaginary bullet.

  In the winter term, it’s true, Mundy takes time out to stage a German-language production of Büchner’s Woyzeck, but its radical sentiments are impeccable. And in the summer, if a little sheepishly, he plays valiant cricket for his college and would have a high time drinking with the boys if he didn’t remind himself of his allegiances.

  Ilse’s parents live in Hendon, in a semidetached villa with a green roof and plaster dwarfs fishing in the garden pond. Her father is a Marxist surgeon with a wide Slav brow and fuzzy hair, her mother a pacifist psychotherapist and disciple of Rudolf Steiner. Never in his life has Mundy met such an intelligent, broad-minded couple. Inspired by their example, he wakes up in his rooms one morning seized with a determination to propose marriage to their daughter. The case for doing so strikes him as overwhelming. Bored out of her wits by what she perceives as half-baked British protest, Ilse has for some while been hankering for a campus where students go the whole hog, such as Paris, Berkeley or Milan. Her choice, after much soul-searching, has fallen on the Free University of Berlin, crucible of the new world order, and Mundy has pledged himself to accompany her there for his year abroad.

  And what more natural, he argues, than to go as man and wife?

  The timing of his proposal is not perhaps as propitious as he imagines, but Mundy in the grip of a great plan is blind to tactic. He has turned in his weekly essay on the symbolic use of color by the early Minnesänger, and feels master of the moment. Ilse on the other hand is worn out by two days of ineffectual marching in Glasgow in the company of a Scottish working-class history student named Fergus, who she claims is irredeemably homosexual. Her response to Mundy’s declaration is muted, if not downright contemptuous. Marriage? This was not one of the options they considered when they were debating Laing and Cooper. Marriage? Like a real bourgeois marriage, he means? A civil ceremony conducted by the state? Or has Mundy so far regressed in his radical education that he covets the blessing of a religious institution? She stares at him, if not angrily, with profound gloom. She shrugs, and not with grace. She requires time to reflect on whether such an outlandish step can be reconciled with her principles.

  A day later, Mundy has his answer. A squat Hungarian angel wearing nothing but her socks stands feet splayed in the only corner of her anchorite’s horse trailer where she can’t be spotted from across the quad. Her pacifist-anarchist-humanist-radical philanthropy has run out. Her fists are clenched, tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.

  “You have completely bourgeois heart, Teddy!” she bawls in her charmingly accented English. And as an afterthought: “You wish stupid marriage and you are complete infant for sex!”

  3

  THE ASPIRING STUDENT of the German soul who steps off the interzonal train into the vibrant Berlin air possesses six of his late father’s shirts that are too short for him in the sleeve but mysteriously not in the tail, one hundred pounds sterling, and fifty-six deutschmarks that a weeping Ilse has discovered in a drawer. The grant that kept him just below water at Oxford, he has been advised too late, is not available for study overseas.

  “Sasha who, Sasha where, for God’s sake?” he yells at her on the platform of Waterloo station while Ilse, wracked by Magyar remorse, decides for the umpteenth time to change her mind and jump aboard with him, except she hasn’t brought her passport.

  “Tell him I sent you,” she implores him as the train mercifully pulls out. “
Give him my letter. He is a graduate but democratic. Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha,” which to Mundy sounds about as convincing as everybody in Bombay knows Gupta.

  It is 1969, Beatlemania is no longer at its zenith, but nobody has told Mundy. In addition to a monkish mop of brown hair that flops over his ears and bothers his eyes, he sports his father’s webbing knapsack to denote the rootless wanderer he intends to become now that life has lost its meaning for him. Behind him lies the wreckage of a great love, ahead of him the model of Christopher Isherwood, illusionless diarist of Berlin at the crossroads. Like Isherwood, he will expect nothing of life but life itself. He will be a camera with a broken heart. And if by some remote chance it should turn out that he can love again—but Ilse has obviously put paid to that—well, just maybe, in some sleazy café where beautiful women in cloche hats drink absinthe and sing huskily of disenchantment, he will find his Sally Bowles. Is he an anarchist? It will depend. To be an anarchist one must have a glimmer of hope. For our recently anointed misanthrope, nihilism is closer to the mark. So why then, he might wonder, this spring in my stride as I venture forth in search of Sasha, the Great Militant? Why this sense of arriving in a fresher, jollier world, when all is so demonstrably lost?

  “Go to Kreuzberg,” Ilse is howling after him, as he waves his last tragic farewells from the carriage window. “Ask for him there! And look after him, Teddy,” she commands as a peremptory afterthought which he has no time to explore before the train conveys him on the next stage of his life.

  Kreuzberg is not Oxford, Mundy observes with relief.

  No kind lady in blue curls from the University Delegacy of Lodgings is on hand with mimeographed lists of addresses where he must behave himself. Priced out of the better parts of town, West Berlin’s unruly students have set themselves up in bombed-out factories, abandoned railway stations and tenement blocks too close to the Wall for the sensibilities of property developers. The Turkish shantytowns of asbestos and corrugated iron, so reminiscent of Mundy’s childhood, sell neither academic books nor squash rackets, but figs, copper saucepans, halva, leather sandals and strings of plastic yellow ducks. The scents of jeera, charcoal and roasting lamb are a welcome-home to Pakistan’s lost son. The handbills and graffiti on the walls and windows of the communes do not proclaim college productions of the plays of minor Elizabethan dramatists, but pour invective on the Shah, the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, President Lyndon Johnson and the Napalm Culture of U.S. Imperialist Aggression in Vietnam.

  Yet Ilse’s advice is not misplaced. Bit by bit, in cafés, impromptu clubs, at street corners where students lounge, smoke and rebel, the name Sasha raises the odd smile, rings a distant bell. Sasha? You mean Sasha the Great Rouser—that Sasha? Well now, we have a problem here, you see. We don’t give just anybody our addresses these days. The Schweinesystem has long ears. Best leave your name with Students for Democratic Socialism and see if he wants to get in touch with you.

  Schweinesystem, Mundy the new boy repeats to himself. Remember that phrase. The Pig System. Does he feel a momentary wave of resentment against Ilse for launching him into the eye of the radical storm with no charts or instruments? Perhaps. But evening is drawing in, his path is set and despite his state of mourning he has a great appetite to begin his new life.

  “Try Anita, Commune Six,” a somnolent revolutionary advises him, in a clamorous cellar dense with pot smoke and Vietcong flags.

  “Maybe Brigitte can tell you where he is,” another suggests, over the strains of a girl guitarist in a Palestinian keffiyeh giving her rendering of Joan Baez. A child sits at her feet, a big man in a sombrero at her side.

  In a bullet-pocked former factory as high as Paddington railway station hang likenesses of Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. A portrait of the late Che Guevara is draped in black bunting. Hand-daubed slogans on bedsheets warn Mundy that It Is Forbidden to Forbid, urge him to Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible, Accept No Gods or Masters. Strewn across the floor like survivors from a shipwreck, students doze, smoke, breast-feed babies, play rock music, fondle and harangue each other. Anita? Left, oh, hours ago, says one advisor. Brigitte? Try Commune Two and fuck America, says another. When he asks to use a lavatory, a tender Swede escorts him to a line of six, each with its door smashed in.

  “Personal privacy, comrade, that’s a bourgeois barrier to communal integration,” the Swede explains in earnest English. “Better that men and women piss together than bomb Vietnamese kids. . . . Sasha?” he repeats, after Mundy has courteously declined his advances. “Maybe you find him at the Troglodyte Club, except they call it the Shaven Cat these days.” He detaches a cigarette paper from its packet and, using Mundy’s back to press on, draws a map.

  The map leads Mundy to a canal. With the knapsack slapping his hip, he sets off along the towpath. Sentry towers, then a patrol boat bristling with guns, glide past him. Ours or theirs? It is immaterial. They are nobody’s. They are part of the great impasse he is here to unblock. He turns into a cobbled side street and stops dead. A twenty-foot-high cinder-block wall with a crown of barbed-wire thorns and a sickly halo of floodlights bars his way. At first he refuses to recognize it. You’re a fantasy, a film set, a construction site. Two West Berlin policemen call him over.

  “Draft dodger?”

  “English,” he replies, showing his passport.

  They take him to the light, examine his passport, then his face.

  “Ever seen the Berlin Wall before?”

  “No.”

  “Well look at it now, then go to bed, Englishman. And stay out of trouble.”

  He retraces his steps and finds a side road. On a rusted iron door, amid Picasso peace doves and BAN THE BOMB signs, a hairless cat on two legs brandishes its penis. Inside, music and argument combine in a single feral roar.

  “Try the Peace Center, comrade, top floor,” a beautiful girl advises him, cupping her hands.

  “Where’s the Peace Center?”

  “Upstairs, arsehole.”

  He climbs, his feet clanging on the tile steps. It’s close on midnight. At each floor a fresh tableau of liberation is revealed to him. On the first, students and babies lounge in a Sunday school ring while a stern woman harangues them on the crippling effect of parents. On the second, a postcoital quiet reigns over bundles of intertwined bodies. Support the Neutron Bomb! a handmade poster urges them. Kills your mother-in-law! Doesn’t harm your TV set! On the third, Mundy is thrilled to see some sort of theater workshop is in progress. On the fourth, shaggy Septembrists pummel typewriters, confer, feed paper into hand presses and bark orders into radio telephones.

  He has reached the top floor. A ladder rises to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. He emerges in an attic lit by a builder’s inspection light. A passage like the entrance to a mineshaft leads from it. At its end, two men and two women are bowed over a candlelit table strewn with maps and beer bottles. One girl is black-haired and grim-faced, the other fair and large-boned. The nearer man is as tall as Mundy: a Viking with a golden beard and mop of yellow hair bound in a pirate’s headscarf. The other man is short, vivid and dark-eyed, with uneven, spindly shoulders that are too narrow for his head. He wears a black Basque beret drawn dead level across his pale brow, and he is Sasha. How does Mundy know this? Because all along, he realizes, he has known intuitively that Ilse was talking about someone as small as herself.

  Too diffident to intrude, he hovers at the opening to the mineshaft, clutching her letter in his hand. He hears fragments of war talk, all Sasha’s. The voice is stronger than the body and carries naturally. It is accompanied by imperious gestures of the hands and forearms. . . . Don’t let the pigs cram us into side streets, hear me? . . . Stand up to them in the open, where the cameras can see what they do to us . . . Mundy is already deciding to tiptoe back down the ladder and make his entrance another time when the party breaks up. The black-haired girl folds up the maps. The Viking rises and stretches. The blond girl hugs him to her by his buttocks. Sasha stands too, but is no taller than wh
en he was sitting. As Mundy steps forward to present himself, the others move instinctively to shield the little emperor at their center.

  “Good evening. I’m Ted Mundy. I’ve got a letter for you from Ilse,” he says in his best head prefect’s voice. And when he receives no answering light of recognition from the wide, dark eyes: “Ilse the Hungarian student of political philosophy. She was here last summer and had the pleasure of meeting you.”

  Perhaps it is Mundy’s politeness that catches them off balance, for there is a moment of shared suspicion among them. Who is he, this courtly English arsehole with the Beatle haircut? The tall Viking is first to respond. Placing himself between Mundy and the rest of them, he accepts the envelope on Sasha’s behalf and subjects it to a quick examination. Ilse has stuck down the flap with tape. Her peremptory scrawl of Private, Strictly Personal! twice underlined, is a clear claim to intimacy. The Viking hands the envelope to Sasha, who rips it open and extracts two blotchy pages of Ilse’s densely packed handwriting, with afterthoughts charging up the margins. He reads the first few lines, turns to the back page to find the signature. Then he smiles, first to himself, and then at Mundy. And this time it’s Mundy who is taken off balance, because the wide dark eyes are so brilliant and the smile is so young.

  “Well, well. Ilse!” he muses. “That’s quite a girl, yes?”—slipping her letter into the side pocket of his threadbare lumber jacket.

  “One can really say that,” Mundy agrees in his best High German.