Absolute Friends (14 page)

_And now I beseech you to go home, sir, please,__ he advises, with the utmost good humor. _Don't bring us your commerce, I implore you. Don't send us any more soldiers, we have quite enough, thank you. You British have taken what you need from us. You have enough now. It's time you gave us a bit of a rest, I say!__

Wait here, Mundy tells Mahmoud. Look after the car.

He treads softly down the forest path, thinking he is barefoot. In a minute, Ayah will call to me, telling me I mustn't go too far. The two great tree trunks are as vast as they ever were. The zigzag footpath between them leads down to the stream's edge. The rock pool still flashes with mother-of-pearl. But the only face he sees in it is his own.

_Very dear Judith,__ Mundy writes the same night in stern school English, from his hotel room in a poor part of Lahore. _You owe me at the very least some sign of yourself. I need to know that our time together meant as much to you as it did to me. I have to believe in you. It's one thing to keep searching in life. It's another to have no firm ground under one's feet. I believe you would love this place. It is populated by what you would call the true proletariat. I know about Sasha and I don't mind. I love you. Ted.__

Which doesn't sound like me at all, he decides. But what does? The postbox in the hotel bears Queen Victoria's insignia. Let's hope Her Majesty knows where to find the Kreuzberg squat.

He is in England again. Sooner or later you have to turn yourself in. Perhaps his visa ran out. Perhaps he grew tired of his own bad company. Availing himself of time-honored tradition, the former head prefect and cricket hero signs up with a rural preparatory school that accepts unqualified teachers at a discount. Embracing its discipline like an old friend, he throws himself with his habitual zeal on the Germanic mysteries of verb-comma-verb, gender and plurality. In the hours left him after correcting schoolwork, he masterminds the school's production of _Ambrose Applejohn's Adventure__ and makes furtive love to a Judith substitute, who happens to be the science master's wife, in the scorers' shed beside the cricket field. In the school holidays he persuades himself that he is the coming Evelyn Waugh, a view not shared by publishers. Betweentimes he dashes off ever more desperate letters to the squat. Some propose marriage, some profess a broken heart, but all are mysteriously dogged by the prosaic tone of his letter from Lahore. Knowing only that her family name is Kaiser and she is from Hamburg, he plows through telephone directories in the local library, besieges Overseas Inquiries, and pesters Kaisers across the North German seaboard in case they have a Judith. None points him in the direction of his former language pupil.

Towards Sasha he adopts a reserved approach. There are too many bits of his erstwhile roommate that in retrospect he finds difficult to enjoy. He resents the spell Sasha cast over him when they were face to face. He regrets his undue reverence for Sasha's zany philosophical abstractions. He is irked, despite his protestations to the contrary, that Sasha went before him as Ilse's lover, and after him as Judith's. One day I'll write to him. Meanwhile, I'll write my novel.

All the more disconcerting, therefore, that a full three years after being thrown out of Berlin, he should receive a battered bunch of readdressed envelopes sent care of his Oxford college and forwarded to his bank after long months of convalescence in the porters' lodge.

There are a round dozen of them. Some are as long as twenty sides of single-spaced typescript from Sasha's Olivetti portable, with addenda and postscripts in his spiky Germanic hand. Mundy's first dishonorable thought is to consign the whole lot to his wastebasket. His second is to hide them somewhere he won't find them: behind the chest of drawers, or in the rafters of the scorers' shed. But after days of shifting them from place to place he pours himself a stiff drink and, laying out the letters in their chronological order, works his way through them.

He is at first moved, then ashamed.

All his self-indulgent obsessions disappear.

This is Sasha in despair.

This is a cry of real pain from a fragile friend who has not left the battle front.

Fled the snappish tone, the dogmatic statements from the throne. In place of them, a desperate appeal for a glimmer of hope in a world that has collapsed around his ears.

He asks nothing material. His daily wants are few and easily taken care of. He can cook his own food--Mundy shudders. He does not lack for women--when did he ever? He is owed money by magazines; one or other will pay before it goes under. Faisal at the café makes an illicit arrack that can blind a horse. No, the tragedy of Sasha's life is of a grander, nobler order altogether. It is that West Germany's radical left is a spent force and Sasha is a prophet without a country.

"Passive resistance has become no resistance, civil disobedience has become armed violence. Maoist groups are fighting each other for the entertainment of the CIA, the extremists have taken over from the radicals, and those who do not conform with the Bonn reactionaries are banished from what is to be called society. Perhaps you did not know that we now have a law which officially bars from public life all who do not pledge allegiance to the _basic principles of liberal democracy?__ One-fifth of West German employees, from train drivers to professors to myself, are to be considered nonpersons by the fascists! Think, Teddy! I am not allowed to drive a train unless I agree to drink Coca-Cola, bomb the Red River dam and napalm Vietnamese children! Soon I shall be forced to wear a yellow S declaring me a socialist!"

Mundy is by now searching hungrily for word of Judith. He finds it submerged in a footnote devoted to matters not associated with the letter's central theme, which as usual is Sasha.

"People leave Berlin in the night, often we cannot tell where they go. Peter the Great, one hears, has gone to Cuba. He will fight for Fidel Castro. If I had two good legs and Peter's shoulders I would perhaps offer myself to the same great cause. Of Christina, we have depressing rumors that through her father's influence she has been permitted to return to Athens. By kind consent of her country's American-backed fascistic military dictatorship she will join her family's shipping company. Judith, ignoring my advice, has joined Karen in Beirut. I fear for her, Teddy. The path she has taken is heroic but misguided. Even among revolutionaries, there are too many cultural differences to be resolved. According to a friend who recently returned from those regions, not even the most radical Arabs take kindly to our sexual revolution, dismissing it as decadent Westernism. Such prejudice does not bode well for Judith's libertarian appetites. Unfortunately by the time of her departure I exerted little influence over her actions. She is a willful woman, led by her senses and not easily persuaded by arguments of moderation."

Such an unjust portrait of Mundy's true love rekindles his romantic longings: _Go to her! Fly to Beirut! Comb the Palestinian training camps! Join the struggle, separate her from Karen, bring her back alive!__ Discovering that he is still sitting in his chair, however, he reads on.

"I am so sick of _theory,__ Teddy. I am so sick of bourgeois posturers whose idea of revolution is smoking pot instead of tobacco in front of their children! The hated Lutheran in me will not sleep, I admit it, I admit it. Writing to you at this moment I am ready to give up half of what I believe in exchange for one clarifying vision. To see one great rational truth glowing on the horizon, to go to it regardless of cost, regardless of what must be left behind, is what I dream of beyond all things. Will tomorrow change me? Nothing changes me. It is only the world that changes. And here in West Germany there is no tomorrow. There is only yesterday, or banishment, or enslavement to the forces of imperialism."

Mundy begins to feel the old fuzziness descend on him. If he were listening, he would by now have switched off. Somehow he continues reading.

"Any acts of protest currently performed by the Left only legitimize the rightist conspiracy that we are forced to call democracy. Our very existence as radicals underpins the authority of our enemies. Bonn's military-industrial junta has strapped West Germany so tight to the American war wagon that we shall never be able to raise a finger against its atrocities."

He thunders on. Mundy is by now reading him diagonally.

"Our officially tolerated voices are all we have left to fight the corporate tyranny.... True socialist ideals have become the court eunuchs of the Bonn Pantheon..."

Did the Pantheon keep eunuchs? Mundy the pedantic schoolmaster doubts it. He licks a finger and skims a couple more pages, then a couple more. Great news. Sasha is still a cyclist. _I have taken no more falls since that day you taught me in the Tiergarten.__ The news of his former mentor in Cologne is less good: _The bastard has retracted half his writings and done a bunk to New Zealand!__

Mundy pushes the letter aside and takes up the last of all. It opens with an ominous announcement: _Here beginneth the second bottle of arrack.__ The writing is freer and, for all its high-flown style, more intimate.

"I do not begrudge you your silence, Teddy. I grudge you nothing. You saved my life, I stole your woman. If you are still angry with me, please remain angry. Without anger we are nothing, nothing, nothing." Good to hear it. _Now__ what? "If you are guarding your literary muse with silence, guard her well, write well, tend your talent. I shall never again take you for granted. When I talk to you I talk to that good ear that has listened to so much of my bullshit that I blush." Well, now you know. "Does it listen still? I believe so. You are not ideologically encumbered. You are my bourgeois confessor as I pursue my odyssey of logical metamorphosis. To you alone I am able to think aloud. Therefore I will whisper to you through the grille that I am like the Persian poet who, having heard all the world's great arguments, evermore comes out of the same door he went in through. I see the dark door before me now. It is open, waiting for me to enter." _Dark door?__ What the hell's he bleating about--suicide? For Christ's sake, Sasha, get a grip on yourself! thinks Mundy, but he is seriously alarmed.

Unfinished page. Turn to the next one. The writing is now hectic, a message in a bottle from a marooned man contemplating the jump off the rocks.

"Therefore, Teddy, you see your friend standing at the crossroads of his life"--a crossroads, or a dark Persian door? Get on with it, arsehole! "What names do I read on the signpost? The fog is so thick I can barely decipher them! For answer me this, dear friend. Or better, answer my new seducers. If our class enemy is capitalist imperialism--and who can doubt that it is?--who ultimately is our class friend? Do I hear you warn me that Sasha is venturing into a quicksand?"--Ah, got it, your dark door opens onto a beach, naturally--"You are right, Teddy! You are right as always! Yet how many times have you not heard me declare that it is the duty of every true revolutionary to throw his weight where it will be most effective to the cause?" Mundy recalls no such times, but then probably he wasn't listening. "Well, Teddy, now you may see for yourself how neatly I am impaled on the imperfect logic of my own convictions! Go well, dear Teddy. You are my absolute friend! If I decide as I fear I have already decided, I shall carry your loyal heart with me!"

Groaning theatrically, Mundy pushes the letter away from him, but he has one more page to go.

"Write to me care of Faisal at the Istanbul Café. I shall arrange for your letters to reach me in whatever improbable circumstance I find myself. Have the pigs left you with a limp? Oh, what bastards those fellows are! Can you still found a dynasty? I hope so, for the more Teddys there are in the world, the better place it will be. What about the headaches? All this I need to know. Yours in Christ, in agape, in friendship, in despair, Sasha."

Seized with guilt and concern, as well as some kind of habitual unease whenever Sasha's shadow falls across his path, Mundy grabs pen and paper and applies himself to the task of explaining his silence and vowing eternal loyalty. He has not forgotten how precarious was Sasha's hold on life; or the feeling, whenever he hauled his little body out of the room, that he might never come back. He remembers the uneven shoulders, the dramatic head, the daffy, uncoordinated hobble, on or off a bicycle. He remembers Sasha by Christmas candlelight, soliloquizing about the Herr Pastor. He remembers the brown, overstudious eyes, fervently searching for a better world, incapable of compromise or diversion. He determinedly forgives him Judith. He forgives Judith too. He has been forgiving her for longer than he cares to think, and failing every time.

The writing starts well but dries.

Do it in the morning when I'm fresh, he tells himself.

But morning is no better than the night before.

He tries a moment of postcoital lassitude after a particularly satisfying encounter in the scorers' shed, but the fond, lightly humorous letter that he plans remains stubbornly unwritten.

He makes the usual feeble excuses to himself. It's three bloody years, for God's sake. Four probably. Faisal will have closed down the Istanbul, he was saving up to buy a taxi.

Anyway, whatever mad step Sasha was contemplating, he'll have taken it. And besides, I've got this pile of fifth-form German compositions staring at me.

Mundy is still prevaricating in this way when the science master's wife, yielding to an implausible fit of remorse, makes a clean breast of her misdemeanors to her husband. The trio are summoned to the headmaster's study, where a solution is crisply arrived at. By adding their signatures to a document the headmaster has obligingly prepared for them in advance, all parties contract to put their passions on hold until exams are over.

"You wouldn't care to take her on for the holidays, would you, old boy?" the science master murmurs in Mundy's ear in the village pub while his wife pretends not to listen. "I've been offered this rather good part-time job at Heathrow airport."

Mundy regrets that he has already made his holiday arrangements. And it is while he is debating what these arrangements might be--and not just for the holidays--that he is freed from his writer's block. In a few warmhearted sentences, he echoes Sasha's pledge of undying loyalty, urges him to cheer up and not be so serious--Dr. Mandelbaum's term _foolishly earnest__ springs happily to his pen. He recommends the middle way. _Don't be so hard on yourself, man, give yourself a break! Life's a botch and you can't solve it single-handed, nobody can, least of all your new seducers, whoever the hell they are!__ And for amusement's sake, but also as a way of saying he has put male jealousy behind him, he provides a Rabelaisian and not wholly accurate account of his recent affair with the science teacher's wife.