Absolute Friends (23 page)

"Sasha--listen to me."

"What?"

Mundy is pleading now. He's the one person at the table who isn't smiling. "I've got modern ballet all afternoon. And I've got the British Embassy reception in the evening and mad dancers round the clock. I can't just--"

"You are being a total arsehole as usual. Modern ballet is pretentious shit. Skip the ballet, I'll get you back to town in time for the Queen. Don't argue."

Sasha has carried the company. Frau Doktor Bahr is beaming her blessing, Lothar is chuckling, Horst is saying he will come too, but Lothar is wagging his finger in an avuncular way and saying these boys deserve a bit of time on their own.

_And the great thing about bicycles, Edward, is they're hell on wheels to follow.__

_Hotel rooms are not sanctuaries, Edward. They're glass boxes. They're where they watch you and search you and listen to you and smell you.__

And marriage is not a sanctuary either, or not for the British Council has-been, closet radical and resentful failed writer who haunts the basements of the arts bureaucracy. His phone calls to Kate must reflect this. First thing this morning he filled in a laborious application form at hotel reception: foreign number to be called, foreign party to be spoken to, purpose of foreign call, proposed duration of foreign call, practically the content of the foreign call in advance--which strikes him as pretty bloody silly, seeing that they'll all be listening in, and ready to cut him off if the talk gets dirty. Crouched on the bed, with the silent phone beside him, he discovers he is shivering. When the phone finally rings it screams so loud he imagines it's about to commit suicide by hurling itself off the bed. Speaking into the mouthpiece, he notices that his voice is higher and slower. Kate notices it too, and wonders whether he is ill.

"No fine, really. Just a bit danced out. Miranda's being an absolute bitch, as usual."

Miranda his boss, the regional supervisor. He asks after the baby. It's kicking, she says. Jolly hard too: maybe one day he'll play football for Doncaster. Maybe one day she will, he agrees in a lackluster voice, but the joke, like Mundy, sounds flat. And how are all the drama kings and queens of St. Pancras? he asks. They're all fine, thank you, she replies, irritated by his low spirits. And has Ted met anyone _nice,__ she asks pointedly, or done anything _amusing?__

Well. Not really.

_You don't mention Sasha to her__ _EVER___,__ Amory is saying. _Sasha belongs to your secret heart. Maybe you've got a crush on him, maybe you want to keep him to yourself. Maybe you're already thinking exactly what they hope you're thinking: that you want to jump over the Wall and sign up with them.__

Mundy rings off and sits at the table, head in hands. He is acting "Christ, life is awful"--but it is. He loves Kate. He loves his family-in-the-making.

I'm doing this so that our unborn child and other people's unborn children will be able to sleep at night, he tells himself with one voice.

He goes to bed and doesn't sleep. He doesn't expect to.

Five a. m. Cheer up. There's hope just around the corner. In a couple of hours our first ballerina of the day will be throwing her tutu out of her crib because her hair dryer doesn't work.

For Mundy, Sasha has obtained a giant-sized English policeman's black bicycle complete with a basket in front of the upright handlebars. For himself, a child's version of the same thing. Side by side they ride between tramlines to a suburban railway station at the edge of town. Sasha wears his beret, Mundy an anorak over his one good suit, and his trousers tucked into his socks. The day is beautiful, the city brave and careworn, its Hapsburg glory crumbling in the sun. There are few cars. The people walk warily, not looking at one another. At the station the two friends board a three-coach local train. Sasha insists they sit in the guard's van with their bicycles. The straw reeks of cow manure. Sasha is still wearing his beret. He unbuttons his jacket to show Mundy a tape recorder in the inside pocket. Mundy nods, to say I understand. Sasha makes small talk. Mundy does the same: Berlin, girls, old times, old friends. The train stops at every lamppost. They are entering deep countryside. The recorder is voice-activated. Its pin light goes out when things are quiet.

At a village with an unpronounceable name they unload their bicycles onto the platform. With Mundy practically freewheeling and Sasha pedaling for all he is worth they bump down an unpaved road past horse-drawn carts and flat fields dotted with red barns. Only the occasional motor-tricycle or truck overtakes them. They draw up at the roadside for Sasha to consult a map. A straight yellow track makes an avenue between tall fir trees. They advance in single file, Sasha in his beret leading. They enter a clearing pocked with mining grottoes overgrown with moss, sawn logs and bits of ancient brickwork. Large bearded irises nod in the breeze. Dismounting, Sasha wheels his bicycle up and down the mounds until he finds one that he likes, lays the bicycle in the grass and waits for Mundy to do the same. Reaching inside his jacket, Sasha extracts the tape recorder and holds it in his palm. His small talk acquires a sneering and impatient edge.

"So you are content with your lot, Teddy," he says, watching the pin light flicker. "That is good news, I would say. You have a mortgage, a wife and a petit bourgeois in the pipeline, and you are leaving the revolution for the rest of us to fight. There was a time when we despised such people. Now you are one of them."

Mundy the ham actor is quick to spot his cue: "That's not a fair description of who I am, Sasha, and you know it!" he protests angrily.

"Then what are you?" Sasha demands, unyielding. "Tell me what you are, for once, not what you are not!"

"I am who I always was," Mundy retorts hotly, as the tape turns in its window. "No more and no less. What you see isn't always what you get. Not with you, not with me. Not even with your bloody Communist Party."

It's a radio play. Mundy's lines sound to him like bad improvisation, but Sasha seems content with them. The pin light is out, the tape has stopped turning, but as a precaution Sasha ejects it, drops it into one pocket and the recorder into another. Only then does he tear off his beret, let out a great cathartic cry of "_Teddy!__" and fling up his arms for the unequal embrace.

The ethics of the Edinburgh School of Deportment now require Mundy to ask a number of routine questions of his field agent before they settle down to the business of the day, and Mundy the natural has them waiting in his head: _What is the cover for this meeting?__

_What is the fallback if we are interrupted__?

_Do you have any immediate anxieties?__

_When shall we next meet?__

_Are you sitting comfortably, or do you see people you recognize, and did they follow you here?__

But the School of Deportment can go hang. Sasha's uncensored monologue is sweeping such mundane considerations aside. He is glaring across the lumpy clearing into the distant blue pines, seeing nothing. Confession and revelation pour from him in a stream of outrage and despair.

"In the months and years after you were removed from West Berlin I entered a total darkness. What use were a few burning cars and broken windows? Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes but by the liberal guilt of the affluent. In my personal turmoil I considered the miserable alternatives available to me. According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany was by now the arsenal and craven ally in the world war that appeared inevitable. As to the intelligent exploiters, they were too busy making profits and driving Mercedes cars to avail themselves of the opportunities we had created for them. In the same period the Herr Pastor also rose to rank and influence among the fascistic elite of Schleswig-Holstein. From the politics of the pulpit, he had moved to the politics of the pseudo-liberal ballot box. He joined secret right-wing societies and was admitted to certain very select Masonic committees. There was talk of putting him into Parliament in Bonn. His success inflamed my hatred of fascism. His American-inspired adoration of the God of Wealth goaded me to the point of dementia. My future, if I was to remain in American-owned West Germany, was a desert of compromise and frustration.

"If we are to build a better world than this, I asked myself, where do we turn, whose actions do we support, how do we frustrate the endless march of capitalist-imperialist aggression? You know I have the Lutheran curse. Conviction without action has no meaning for me. Yet what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? I spent much time considering the example of my good friend Teddy. You became my virtue. Imagine. Like you, I had no conscious faith, but if I acted, then the faith would surely follow. After that, I would believe because I had acted. Perhaps that is how faith is born, I thought: by action and not by contemplation. It was worth a try. Anything was better than stasis. You had sacrificed yourself for me without thought of reward. My seducers--you have met one--were wise enough to appeal to me in the same terms. No inducement would have persuaded me. But offer me a long stony path with a single light shining at the end of it, and throw in the opportunity to reverse the hypocrisies of the Herr Pastor, and perhaps I shall listen to you."

He has left the mound and is hobbling impatiently round it with his strange, uneven stride, stepping over the bicycles, gesturing with open hands while he talks, clamping his elbows to his sides as if there is no room to raise them. He is describing covert meetings in apartments in West Berlin, furtive border crossings to safe houses in the East, and solitary lost weekends in the Kreuzberg attic while he struggles to reach his great decision, and his erstwhile comrades slip away to permanent confinement in the open prisons of materialism.

"By the end of many days and nights of deliberation and with the aid of my tireless and by no means stupid seducers, not to mention a good few bottles of vodka, I had reduced my dilemma to two simplistic questions. I described them to you in my letters. Question one: Who is the ultimate class enemy? Answer, unhesitatingly, American military and corporate imperialism. Question two: How do we realistically oppose this enemy? Is it by relying on the enemy to destroy himself, but only after he has destroyed the world? Or is it by swallowing our objections to certain negative tendencies on the part of international communism and allying ourselves with the one great socialist movement that, for all its blemishes, is capable of bringing the victory?" A long silence, which Mundy does not feel inclined to interrupt. Theory, as Sasha has observed, was never his thing. "Do you know why my name is Sasha?"

"No."

"Because it is the Russian abbreviation of Alexander. When the Herr Pastor brought me to the West, he wished for reasons of respectability to rechristen me Alexander. I refused. By keeping my name Sasha, I was able to demonstrate to myself that I had left my heart in the East. One night, after many hours of discussion with my seducers, I agreed to make the same demonstration with my feet."

"The Professor?"

"Was one of them," Sasha confirms.

"Professor what of?"

"Corruption," Sasha snaps.

"Why did they want you so badly?" This is not Amory asking, this is Mundy wanting to know how they both got here. "Why did you matter to them so much? Why go to all this trouble, just for Sasha?"

"You think I didn't ask them?" His mood is black again. "You think I am so vain that I believe I take the whole world with me when I cross one shitty frontier? At first they flattered me. To win over such a great intellect as mine would signify a notable moral victory for the forces of progress. I told them that was bullshit. I was a left-wing minor West German academic with no chance of acceptance by a major university. I was no sort of victory for anybody. Then they admitted me to what they blushingly described as their little secret. My defection would frustrate the counterrevolutionary activities of the increasingly influential Herr Pastor and his fascistic fellow conspirators in Schleswig-Holstein. Millions of American dollars were being siphoned through church channels into the coffers of anti-Communist agitators in North Germany. Local newspapers, radio and television were being infiltrated by capitalistic subversives and spies. For the Herr Pastor's only son to return freely and publicly to his democratic homeland would strike a blow against the imperialist saboteurs and undermine the Herr Pastor's standing. It might even cause the CIA to withdraw some of its covert funding of West German counterrevolutionary elements. I will not conceal from you that this argument compelled me more than any other." He draws to an abrupt halt and fixes Mundy with an imploring stare. "You understand that there is nobody on God's earth with whom I can share this story apart from you? That all the rest of them are enemy, to a man, to a woman--liars, frauds, informants, living in permanent duplicity, as I am?"

"Yes. I believe I do."

"I was not so foolish as to expect a warm welcome from the GDR. Our family had committed the crime of fleeing the republic. My seducers knew I was not a Communist by conviction and I anticipated--they had prepared me for it--a humbling period of reeducation. What future I had after that could only be resolved by time. At best, an honorable place in the great anticapitalist struggle. At the least, a quiet Rousseau life, perhaps on a collective farm. Why are you laughing?"

Mundy isn't, but he has allowed himself a small smile, forgetting for a moment that jokes about Sasha are in bad taste. "I don't see you milking cows, that's all. Not even on a collective farm."

"It is immaterial. All that matters is, in a fit of culpable lunacy that I shall regret for the remainder of my life, I boarded the S-bahn to the Friedrichstrasse station and, on the advice of my seducers, surrendered myself to the East German frontier guards."