Absolute Friends Read online

  On restless safaris in the shadow of the Wall, he seeks out foreign sightseers and regales them with inspiring tales of escape. Should a factual episode elude him, then he will invent one, and feel rewarded by their gratitude. And if these remedies are not enough to rescue his occasionally flagging spirits, there is Sasha to come home to.

  At first they are wary of each other. Like a couple who have rushed to the altar without benefit of courtship, each is inclined to fall back until he sees what he’s got. Is Mundy really the good soldier Sasha took him for? Is Sasha really the limping, charismatic firebrand who needs Mundy’s protection? Though they share the same territory, they live their lives in parallel, only overlapping at mutually agreeable moments. Of Sasha’s personal background, Mundy knows next to nothing, and the word around the squat is that the subject is taboo. He is of Saxon Lutheran origin, an East German refugee, an avowed enemy of all religion and like Mundy an orphan—though he has this last from hearsay only. That is all that need be known. It is not till Christmas Eve, or as the Germans have it, Holy Evening, that they experience one of those moments of mutual self-revelation from which there can be no retreat.

  Already by December 23 the squat is three-quarters empty as communards abandon principle and slink home to celebrate in the bosom of their reactionary families. Those who have nowhere to go remain behind like uncollected children in a boarding school. Heavy snow is falling, and Kreuzberg is a sentimental dream of Yule. Waking early the next day, Mundy is exhilarated to see the attic skylights above him whited over, but when he calls this to Sasha’s attention he receives only a groan and the injunction to fuck off. Undaunted, he flings on all the clothes he possesses and wades down to the Turkish settlement to build a snowman and cook kebabs with Faisal and the kids from the cricket club. Returning to the attic at dusk, he finds the radio playing carols and Sasha looking like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, wearing his beret and an apron, and stooped over a mixing bowl.

  The desk is set as a dinner table for two. An Advent candle burns at its center beside a bottle of Christina’s father’s Greek wine. More candles are balanced on the piles of stolen books. An unpromising chunk of red meat sits on a wooden board.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Sasha demands, without lifting his eyes from his work.

  “Walking. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Christmas, isn’t it? The fucking family feast. You’re supposed to be at home.”

  “We haven’t got families. We’ve got dead parents and no brothers and sisters. I tried to wake you up, but you told me to fuck off.”

  Sasha has still not raised his head. The bowl contains red berries. He is preparing some kind of sauce.

  “What’s the meat?”

  “Venison. Do you wish me to take it back to the shop and change it for your eternal fucking Wiener schnitzel?”

  “Venison’s fine. Bambi for Christmas. Is that whiskey you’re drinking, by any chance?”

  “Probably.”

  Mundy chatters but Sasha will not be humored. Over dinner, trying to jolly him along, Mundy rashly relates the tale of his aristocratic mother who turned out to be an Irish nursemaid. He selects a merry tone, designed to assure his listener that he has long ago come to terms with an amusing byway of family history. Sasha hears him out with ill-concealed impatience.

  “Why do you tell me this bullshit? Do you wish me to shed tears for you because you are not a lord?”

  “Of course not. I thought you might laugh.”

  “I am interested only in your personal liberation. There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.”

  “All right. What about your dead parents? What did you have to overcome in order to arrive at the perfect state in which we find you?”

  Is the taboo of Sasha’s family history to be broken? Apparently so, for the Schiller head is giving a succession of tight nods as if overcoming its reservations one by one. And Mundy notices how the deep-set eyes have aged somehow, and appear to absorb the candlelight rather than reflect it.

  “Very well. You are my friend and I trust you. Despite your ridiculous preoccupations with duchesses and housemaids.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My late father is not quite as late or as dead as I would wish him to be. If we are to judge him by normal medical criteria, he is in fact offensively alive.”

  Either Mundy has the wit to stay silent, or he is too bemused to speak.

  “He did not assault a brother officer. He has not succumbed to drink, though periodically he tries. He is a religious and political Wendehals—a turncoat whose existence is so intolerable to me that even today, when I am forced to think of him, I can only bring myself to refer to him as the Herr Pastor, never Father. You look bored.”

  “I’m anything but bored! Everyone told me your private life was holy ground. How could I imagine it was this holy?”

  “From his earliest childhood the Herr Pastor believed unquestioningly in God. His parents were religious but he was superreligious, a puritanical Lutheran fanatic of the most incorrigible sort, born 1910. When Our Dear Führer came to power”—his invariable term for Hitler—“the Herr Pastor was already an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party, twenty-three years old and recently ordained. His faith in Our Dear Führer was even greater than his faith in God. Hitler would work magic. He would give Germany back its dignity, burn the Versailles Treaty, get rid of our Communists and Jews and build an Aryan heaven on earth. You are really not bored?”

  “How can you ask? I’m riveted!”

  “But not so riveted that you will rush out and tell your ten best friends that after all I have a father, I hope. The Herr Pastor and his fellow Nazi Lutherans called themselves Deutsche Christen. How he survived the last years of the war is unclear to me, since to this day he refuses to discuss such matters. At some desperate moment he was sent to the Russian front and captured. That the Russians didn’t shoot him is a dereliction of good sense that I have long held against them. Instead they sent him to prison in Siberia, and by the time he was released and returned to East Germany, Herr Pastor the Christian Nazi had become Herr Pastor the Christian Bolshevik. As a consequence of this conversion the East German Lutheran Church gave him a job curing Communist souls in Leipzig. I will confess to you that I greatly resented his return from captivity. He had no right to take my mother from me. He was a stranger, a violator. Other children had no father: why should I have one? This broken little coward of a man, sniffing a lot, preaching himself up to twice his size, with the words of Jesus and Lenin, was repulsive to me. To please my poor mother I was obliged to declare myself a convert. It is true that there were times when I was confused by the bond between the two deities, but since they both had beards it was possible to assume a symbiosis. In 1960, however, God was good enough to appear to the Herr Pastor in a dream and order him to take his family and everything he owned to the West while there was time. So we put our Bibles in our pockets and fled over the sector border, leaving Lenin behind.”

  “Did you have brothers and sisters? This is really appalling, Sasha.”

  “An elder brother whom my parents greatly preferred to me. He died.”

  “At what age?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “What of?”

  “Pneumonia, complicated by respiratory problems. A long, slow dying. I envied Rolf because he was our mother’s favorite, and loved him because he was a good brother to me. For seven months I visited him every day in the hospital and was present at his end. It was not a vigil I remember with pleasure.”

  “I’m sure not.” He risks it. “So what happened to your body?”

  “It appears that I was conceived while the Herr Pastor was on home leave, and subsequently born in a ditch while my mother was attempting to escape from the Russian advance. Her later information, probably inaccurate, was that I was deprived of oxygen in the womb. What my mother wa
s deprived of, I can only imagine. It was not a salubrious ditch.” He resumes. “The Herr Pastor made the spiritual transition from East to West with his customary agility. Having caught the eye of a Missouri missionary organization of dubious connections, he was flown to St. Louis for a course of religious instruction. He graduated summa cum laude and returned to West Germany an ardent Christian conservative of the seventeenth century and a devotee of free market Christian capitalism. Appropriately, a curacy was found for him in the old Nazi stamping ground of Schleswig-Holstein, where every Sunday, to the enchantment of his congregation, he may be heard singing the praises of Martin Luther and Wall Street from the pulpit.”

  “Sasha, this is truly terrible. Terrible and fantastic. Can we go up to Schleswig-Holstein and listen to him?”

  “Never. I have disowned him totally. As far as my comrades are concerned he is totally dead. It is the one point on which the Herr Pastor and I have found common ground. He does not wish to acknowledge an atheist radical militant for a son, and I do not wish to acknowledge an aggressive hypocritical religious turncoat for a father. That is why, with the Herr Pastor’s collusion, I have expunged him from my past. All I ask is that he will not die before I have a chance to tell him once more how much I hate him.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Lives but does not live. Unlike your Irish nursemaid, she did not have the good fortune to die in childbirth. She walks the fens of Schleswig-Holstein in a mist of grief and confusion for her children, and speaks constantly of taking her life. As a young mother she was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators.”

  His empty glass before him, Sasha is seated at his desk as stiffly as a condemned man. Watching him, listening to his self-ironies, Mundy experiences one of those surges of spiritual generosity that make all things clear to him. And so it is the undemonstrative English pragmatist rather than the anguished German seeker after life’s verities who fills their glasses and proposes a humble Christmas toast.

  “Well, here’s to us, anyway,” he mumbles, with appropriate reserve. “Prosit. Happy Christmas and so on.”

  Still frowning, Sasha lifts his glass and they drink to each other in the German way: raise your glass, look into the other fellow’s eyes, drink, raise it again, look again, allow a moment’s silence to put down your glass and dwell reverently upon the moment.

  Relationships must deepen or die. In Mundy’s later remembering, that Christmas was the night when their relationship deepened, and found an unforced ease. Henceforth, Sasha pays no visit to the Republican Club or the Shaven Cat without tersely inquiring whether Mundy is coming along too. In student bars, on slow, unequal walks along frozen canal towpaths and riverbanks, Mundy plays Boswell to Sasha’s Johnson and Sancho Panza to his Quixote. When their commune becomes richer by a herd of stolen bourgeois bicycles, Sasha insists the two friends extend their horizons by exploring the outer limits of the half-city. The ever-willing Mundy prepares a picnic—chicken, bread, a bottle of red burgundy, all honestly bought from his earnings as a Berlin Wall tour guide. They set out, but Sasha insists they first push their bicycles a distance because he has something to discuss and it is best discussed on foot. They are safely out of sight of the squat before he says what it is.

  “Come to think of it, actually, Teddy, I don’t believe I have ever ridden one of these fucking things,” he confesses with monumental casualness.

  Fearing Sasha’s legs may not be equal to the job, and cursing himself for not having thought of this earlier, Mundy walks him to the Tiergarten and seeks out a gentle grass slope with no children looking on. He holds Sasha’s saddle, but Sasha smartly orders him to let go. Sasha falls, swears foully, struggles back up the slope, tries again, falls again, swears more foully still. But by the third descent he has learned to trim his uneven body so that he remains aloft, and a couple of hours later, flushed with pride, he is squatting in his greatcoat on a bench, eating chicken and with frosted breath dilating on the sayings of the great Marcuse.

  But Christmas, as is usual in warfare, is only a temporary suspension of hostilities. No sooner has the snow melted than the tensions between the students and the city return to breaking point. It is incidental that every university in West Germany is crawling with unrest; that from Hamburg, Bremen, Göttingen, Frankfurt, Tübingen, Saarbrücken, Bochum and Bonn come stories of strikes, mass resignations of ruling professors and the triumphant advance of radical bodies. Berlin has larger, older and more vicious scores to settle than the whole lot of them put together. In the shadow of the approaching storm, Sasha makes a dash to Cologne, where rumor reports that a brilliant new theoretician is pushing out the borders of radical thought. By the time he returns, Mundy is braced for action, and in facetious mood.

  “And did the Oracle pronounce on how men of peace should bear themselves in the forthcoming confrontation?” he inquires, expecting at the very least one of Sasha’s tirades against the repressive tolerance of pseudo-liberalism, or the cancer of military-industrial colonialism. “Tomatoes, stink bombs, thunder flashes—Uzi machine guns, perhaps?”

  “We intend to reveal the social genesis of human knowledge,” Sasha replies, stuffing bread and sausage into his mouth before he hurries off to a meeting.

  “What’s that when it’s at home?” Mundy asks, slipping into his familiar role of test audience.

  “Man’s preternatural state, his ur-state. Day One is already too late. We must begin on Day Zero. That is the entire point.”

  “You’re going to have to spell this one out for me,” Mundy warns, brows appropriately puckered. And the notion is indeed surprising to Mundy, since Sasha has until now insisted that they must deal with harsh political realities rather than fancy visions of Utopia.

  “As a first stage, we shall wipe the human slate clean. We shall detoxify the brain, cleanse it of its prejudices, inhibitions and inherited appetites. We shall purge it of everything old and rotten”—another chunk of sausage—“Americanism, greed, class, envy, racism, bourgeois sentimentality, hatred, aggression, superstition and the craving for property and power.”

  “And enter what exactly?”

  “I fail to understand your question.”

  “It’s simple enough. You’ve wiped my slate clean. I’m pure, I’m not American, racist, bourgeois or materialistic. I’ve got no bad thoughts left, no bad inherited instincts. What do I get in return, apart from a policeman’s boot in the balls?”

  Standing impatiently at the door, Sasha has ceased to take kindly to this inquisition. “You get what is needful to a harmonious society and nothing more. Brotherly love, natural sharing, mutual respect. Napoleon was right. You English are totally materialistic.”

  All the same, it is a theory of which Mundy hears no more.

  4

  “THOSE GIRLS ARE total dykes,” insists the Viking, now better known to Mundy by his kennel name of Peter the Great. Peter is a pacifist from Stuttgart. He came to Berlin to escape military service. His rich parents are whispered to be Sympis, members of the guilt-ridden higher bourgeoisie who secretly give succor to those bent on their destruction.

  “A lost cause,” Sasha, taken up with larger matters of revolutionary strategy, distractedly agrees. “Don’t waste your stupid time on them, Teddy. Freaks, the pair of them.”

  They are speaking of Legal Judith and Legal Karen, so named because they are studying jurisprudence. The fact that they happen to be the two most desirable females in the squat only adds to their offense. Sexual choice for women, in the opinion of the two great liberators, does not include refusing to go to bed with important male activists. Take a look at the sackcloth skirts they wear, for God’s sake, Peter urges. And those mannish shoes like army boots, where do they think they’re marching to? And the way they put their hair up in messy buns and slop around the squat like a couple of lovesick Burghers of Calais! Peter claims they take out one law book from the library at a time so that they have something to read together in bed. Karen moves her fin
ger along the line, he says, Judith does the words.

  The only person they consort with apart from one another is Mundy’s erstwhile inquisitor, the Greek Christina, who is suspected of sharing their sexual predilections. Mundy has never previously encountered the phenomenon of lesbianism, but has to concede that all known evidence supports the rumor. The two women refuse to shower communally. From the day they arrived in the squat they insisted on having their own room, and fitted a padlock to the door with a sign saying FUCK OFF. It’s still there. Mundy has been to see it. Any further proof he should require, let him try his luck and see what he gets apart from a broken jaw, says Peter.

  Yet for all these doom-laden prognostications, Legal Judith is imposing grave strains on Mundy’s vows of Isherwood detachment. Her efforts to disguise her beauty are futile. Where Karen hunches her shoulders and acts grumpy, Judith is wispy and ethereal. At protest meetings Karen snarls like a bulldog, but Judith in anger merely shakes her golden head. Yet as soon as the meeting’s over, there they are again: Legal Judith and Legal Karen, nicely brought-up North German girls, received in Berlin’s best radical drawing rooms, strolling hand in hand along the shores of Lesbos.

  So forget her, Mundy orders himself each time he catches his hopes rising. Those straight looks she gives you during English conversation lessons are because you’re weird and tall and Oxford. Our verbal flirtations—of Judith’s contrivance, admittedly—are opportunities for her to try out her English on you, nothing more.

  “Did I speak that sentence accurately, Teddy?” she will ask, with a smile to melt glaciers.

  “Marvelous, Judith! Not a syllable out of joint.”

  “Joint?”

  “Out of place. Slip of the tongue. You’re immaculate. Official.”

  “But do I suffer from an American accent, Teddy? If I do, you will please immediately correct me.”