Absolute Friends (12 page)

And all right, Berlin isn't Hyde Park, it isn't Whitehall. It's less sporty, a rougher deal. And all right, the odds aren't exactly evenly distributed, what with one team all geared up with guns, truncheons, handcuffs, shields, helmets, gas masks, tear gas, water cannon and busloads of reinforcements round the corner; and the other side with--well, come to think of it--not very much at all, beyond boxes of rotting tomatoes and bad eggs, a few heaps of rocks, a lot of pretty girls and a shining message for mankind.

But I mean, we're all civilized--well, aren't we? Even on Sasha's special day: Sasha our charismatic orator, our coming man for the leader's throne, our Quasimodo of the social genesis of knowledge, who according to the prevailing pot-talk could fill the Aula with the girls he's screwed. For this same Sasha--quoting information covertly obtained by the ubiquitous Magda while in bed with a policeman--has today been singled out for particular attention, which is why Mundy, Judith, Peter the Great and other members of his supporters' club are rallied to him on the university steps. It is also why the pigs themselves have turned out in such spectacular numbers to acquaint themselves in greater detail with the doctrines of the Frankfurt School before politely inviting Sasha to step into a _grüne Minna,__ which is what Germans call a Black Maria, and ride with them to the nearest police station, where he will be requested with due respect for his constitutional rights under the Basic Law to make a voluntary statement listing names and addresses of his comrades and their plans to cause mayhem and rapine in the highly inflammable half-city of West Berlin, and generally return the world to where it was before it succumbed to the multiple diseases of fascism, capitalism, militarism, consumerism, Nazism, Coca-Colonization, imperialism and pseudo-democracy.

Exactly these topics are Sasha's text for today's sermon on the hallowed lawn of the Free University, and the sight of the police cordon as it closes round him inspires him to develop his themes to their extremity. He has poured scorn and hatred on America for the carpet-bombing of Vietnam's cities, the poisoning of her crops and napalming of her jungles. He has called for the Nuremberg Tribunal to be reconvened, and the fascist-imperialist American leadership arraigned before it on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has accused the morally degenerate American lackeys of the so-called government in Bonn of sanitizing Germany's Nazi past with consumerism, and turning the Auschwitz generation into a flock of fat sheep with nothing in their heads but new refrigerators, TV sets and Mercedes cars. He has railed against the Shah and his CIA-backed secret police, the Savak, and spread himself on the subject of the American-sponsored Greek colonels and the "American puppet state of Israel. " He has listed America's wars of aggression, from Hiroshima through Korea by way of Central America, South America and Africa to Vietnam. He has sent fraternal greetings to our fellow activists in Paris, Rome and Madrid and saluted America's courageous students of Berkeley and Washington, D. C., "who blazed the trail we are all now marching." He has lashed out at a mob of infuriated rightists who are yelling at him to shut his big mouth and get on with his studies.

"Shut our mouths?" he yells at them. "You who were silent under the Nazi tyranny are telling us we should be silent under _yours?__ We are good children! We have learned our lessons too well! From _you,__ arseholes! From our silent Nazi parents! And we can promise you this. The children of the Auschwitz generation will never, NEVER be silent!"

He is raised on a soapbox of Mundy's manufacture in order to say this. Mundy has run it up on Faisal's workbench at the back of the café. Judith stands at Mundy's side wearing a fireman's helmet and a keffiyeh bound across her lower face. Her Chairman Mao jacket is bulked out with Mundy's cricket pullover. But her best-kept secret is the peerless body that she keeps hidden under all the shapeless tat, and it is a secret that Mundy shares with her. He knows it better than his own, every fold and contour of it. Each cry of indignant pleasure that he draws from her is a cry from his own heart. In politics as in lovemaking she is never content until they have crossed together into the wild borderlands of anarchy.

Suddenly, absolutely nothing is happening. Or nothing Mundy is aware of. It is as if film and soundtrack have stopped simultaneously, then started up again. Sasha is still speechifying from his soapbox, but the extras are screaming. Rings of armed police are tightening round the protesters, the beating of truncheons on shields has become thunderous, the first tear gas canisters have gone off, which doesn't bother the police, because very sensibly they've put on their masks. Amid the mist of smoke and water cannon, students are escaping in all directions, howling and whining from the gas. Mundy's ears, nose and throat are dissolving with the heat, tears are blinding him but he knows better than to wipe them away. Jets of water are crashing into his face, he sees flying truncheons and hears horses' hooves clattering on the cobble and the childlike whimpering of the wounded. In the scrum of yelling, punching bodies round him, there is only one player showing any class, and that's Legal Judith. To his amazement, she has produced a family-sized baseball bat from inside her Mao jacket and, ignoring Sasha's exhortations to passive resistance, whacks a young policeman so hard on the side of his new helmet that it falls into his hands like a gift from heaven as he sinks smiling stupidly to his knees. "Teddy, _du gibst bitte Acht auf Sasha!__" she advises Mundy politely, speaking for once the delicious language of Thomas Mann rather than the English of their passion. Then she vanishes under a snake-heap of brown-and-blue uniforms and there is no way on earth he can reach her. The last he sees of her she has swapped her fireman's hat for a cap of blood, but her exhortation is burning in his ears: _Teddy, you will kindly take care of Sasha,__ and he remembers that Ilse made the same request of him, and that he has made the same request of himself.

The water cannon are being wheeled up but the two armies are now so intermingled that the pigs are reluctant to drench their own, and Sasha is still yelling out his message from his soapbox. The pigs are within truncheon range of him, a very fat sergeant screams, "Get me this shit-faced poison dwarf!" and Mundy is doing what he never dreamed of doing, and if he had planned it he would never have done it. The son of Major Arthur Mundy, holder of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor, emptier of twenty saddles, is charging the enemy. But it is Sasha, not a Bren gun, he is holding in his arms. Blindly obedient to Legal Judith's command as well as his own good impulses, he has whisked Sasha from his soapbox and slung him across his shoulders. He has Sasha's thrashing feet in one arm and flailing hands in another and he is wading through the enemy tear gas and the mass of howling, bleeding bodies, not feeling the truncheons that rain on him and not hearing anything except Sasha's bitching and complaining--Let me down, you arsehole, run, get out of here, the pigs will kill you--until the sun comes out and Mundy is lighter by an entire millstone because by now he has carried out Judith's orders to the best of his ability, and Sasha has slipped from his shoulders and hightailed it across the open square, and it is Mundy, not Sasha, who sits in the police van with his hands cuffed to a bar above his head while two policemen take turns to beat the living daylights out of him: Ted Mundy is being _eingebläut,__ and he doesn't need Sasha's translation to tell him what it means.

It was never afterwards easy for Mundy to document what followed. There was the van, there was the police station. There was the cell that smelled of the things cells are supposed to smell of: excreta, salt tears, vomit and, from time to time, warm blood. For a while he shared it with a bald-headed Pole who proclaimed himself a multiple murderer, rolled his eyes a lot and giggled. In the interrogation room there was no Pole. It was the private domain of Mundy and the same two policemen who had given him his first beating in the van, and were now giving him another under the mistaken impression that he was Peter the Great with his beard shaved off, pretending to be a British subject. He possessed a perfectly good student's card they could have looked at, even if it had the wrong address on it, not to mention a British passport, but unfortunately he had left them back in the attic for fear of losing them in the fray. He offered to go and fetch them, but obviously he couldn't tell his inquisitors where to find them for themselves because to do so would have been to point them straight at Sasha and the illegal squat. His stubbornness on this point drove them to new heights of fury. They stopped listening to him and whaled into him for the hell of it: groin, kidneys, soles of the feet, groin again, but for cosmetic purposes leaving the face relatively intact, though ultimately not as intact as any of them might have wished. Periodically he dropped off. Periodically they carted him back to his cell while they had a rest. How many times this happened was always a blur to him, just as the sudden end of it all, and the ambulance ride to the British military hospital, were blurs. He had an impression of blue lights that flashed inside his head instead of in the street where they belonged, and of clean bedsheets that smelled of disinfectant. And of a glistening ward presided over by a children's nursemaid with a silver-plated stopwatch pinned to her white linen bosom.

"Mundy? Mundy? Not related to a little shit called Major _Arthur__ Mundy, are we, ex-Indian Army? Can't be," the chief medical officer asks suspiciously, peering down at the bandaged length of him.

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"Don't be afraid, old boy. Count yourself bloody lucky is all I can say. How many fingers am I holding up? Well done. Jolly good."

He is lying in the ship's cabin, but without the comfort of the Major's Burmas. He is crouched beside Rani at the rock pool, but can't stand up. He has his head in a handbasin and is clutching the taps in the school washroom while the prefects take it in turns to beat him for his lack of Christian reverence. He is out of bounds, a plague case. The sight of him could be infectious. He's an untouchable, and there's a stenciled notice hanging just the other side of his door to prove it: AUTHORIZED MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY Or as Judith would say, fuck off. In earnest of this, there is also a red-capped military police sergeant to watch over his well-being. The sergeant makes his feelings clear on the first occasion Mundy is strong enough to shuffle down the corridor to pee.

"We'd have put the manners on you if _we'd__ had you, son," he assures him. "You'd be bloody dead, _and__ grateful for it."

A British official comes to visit. He is Mr. Amory, and brings a printed card to say so: Mr. Nicholas Amory, Vice Consul, the British High Commission, Berlin. He is only a few years older than Mundy and, for an unredeemed bourgeois Englishman of the oppressive classes, disconcertingly agreeable. He wears a good tweed suit but is shaggy in a reassuring way. His suede shoes are particularly disgraceful. The Major's knapsack dangles from his nicely tailored shoulder.

"Whoever sent you these grapes, Edward?" he inquires, fingering them and grinning.

"The Berlin police."

"Did they, by Jove? And the chrysanthemums?"

"The Berlin police."

"Well, I think that's mighty handsome of them, don't you, given the strain the poor chaps are under these days?"--laying the knapsack at the foot of Mundy's bed. "This _is__ the front line, you know. Nobody can be blamed for losing their rag now and then. Specially when they're provoked by a bunch of state-funded students who don't know their radical arses from their elbows--any more than you do, I suspect." He has pulled up a chair and is studying Mundy's face critically in close-up. "Who's your nice friend, Edward?"

"Which one?"

"The little twerp who came storming into our office like the bloody SS," he replies, helping himself to a grape. "Jumped the queue, slammed your passport on the reception desk and barked at our German clerk to secure your immediate release from the West Berlin police, or else. Then barged out again before anyone could take his name and address. The poor clerk was scared out of his wits. A submerged Saxon accent, he said. Audible but not ridiculous. Only a Saxon would be such an oaf. Do you have a lot of chums like that, Edward? Angry East Germans who won't leave their names?"

"No."

"How long have you been in Berlin?"

"Nine months."

"Living where?"

"My grant ran out."

"Living where?"

"In Charlottenburg."

"Someone told me Kreuzberg."

No answer.

"You should have come and signed the book. Distressed British students are what we do best."

"I wasn't distressed."

"Well, you are now. You bowled for the public schools, didn't you?"

"A couple of times."

"We've got quite a decent side here. Too late now. Pity. What's his name, as a matter of interest?"

"Whose?"

"Your short-arsed Saxon knight with a hobble. His ugly face struck our clerk as familiar. Thought he might have seen it in the papers."

"I don't know."

Amory seems quietly amused by this. He consults the disgraceful suede shoes. "Well, well. Question is, Edward, what are we going to do with you?"

Mundy has no suggestions. He is wondering whether Amory is one of the prefects who beat him in the washroom.

"You could raise a stink, I suppose. Call in six lawyers. We can give you a list. The coppers would press charges of their own, of course. Causing a breach of the peace, for openers. Abusing your status as a foreign guest, which the judges won't like. Registering yourself under a false address. We'd do our best for you, naturally. Feed you french bread through the bars. Did you say something?"

Mundy hasn't said a word, Amory can beat him as much as he likes.

"As far as the police are concerned, you're simply a case of mistaken identity. If you'd been the right person, they'd have been highly commended. They say some mad Polish murderer did it to you. Is that possible?"

"No."

"However, they _are__ prepared to cut a deal, if we are. _They__ won't throw the book at you, and _you__ won't press charges for any little mishap that may or may not have occurred while you were in the nick. And _we__ will save our British blushes at this delicate time of international crisis by smuggling you out of Berlin disguised as a Nubian slave. Done?"