Absolute Friends (9 page)

"The question is _why,__ not _why not.__ Is it your English practice to marry every girl you sleep with a few times? We had that here in Germany once. It was a disaster."

No longer sure how he is expected to reply, Mundy takes another mouthful of sausage and washes it down with a swig of whiskey while Sasha returns to the letter.

"_Teddy loves peace as much as we do, but he's a good soldier.__ Jesus Christ. What does she mean by _that?__ That Teddy obeys orders without questioning them? You shoot whoever you're told to shoot? That's not a virtue, that's grounds for criminal proceedings. Ilse should pick her compliments more carefully."

Mundy grunts, partly in agreement, partly in embarrassment.

"So why does she say you're a good soldier?" Sasha insists. "Good soldier like I'm a good democrat? Or does she mean you're a great hero in bed?"

"I don't think so," says the complete infant for sex.

But Sasha won't leave the point alone. "Did you fight somebody for her? Why are you a good soldier?"

"It's a phrase. We went on demos together. I took care of her. I play sports a bit. What the hell?" He is standing, his bag slung over his shoulder. "Thanks for the whiskey."

"We haven't finished it."

"She sent it to you, not me."

"But you brought it. You didn't keep it, you didn't drink it. You were a good soldier. Where do you propose to sleep tonight?"

"I'll find somewhere."

"Wait. Stop. Put your stupid bag down."

Compelled by the insistence in Sasha's voice, Mundy pauses, but doesn't quite put down the bag. Sasha tosses the letter aside and stares at him for a while.

"Tell me something truthful, no bullshit, okay? We get a little paranoid here. Who sent you?"

"Ilse."

"Nobody else? No pigs, spies, newspapers, clever people? This town is full of clever people."

"I'm not one of them."

"You're who she says you are. Is that what you're telling me? A political tyro, reading Germanistic, a good soldier with a socialist heart, or whatever the hell? That's the whole story?"

"Yes."

"And you always tell the truth."

"Mostly."

"But you're queer."

"No. I'm not."

"Me neither. So what do we do?"

Looking down on Sasha, puzzling how to reply, Mundy is again struck by his host's fragility. It's as if every bone in his body has been broken and stuck back the wrong way.

Sasha takes a pull of whiskey and, without looking at Mundy, hands him the glass to drink from. "Okay," he says reluctantly.

Okay what? Mundy wonders.

"Put that fucking bag down."

Mundy does.

"There's a girl I like, okay? Sometimes she visits me up here. She may come tonight. She's young. Bourgeois. Shy, like you. If she shows up, you sleep on the roof. If it's raining, I'll lend you a tarpaulin. That's how shy she is. Okay? If necessary I do the same for you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Maybe I need a good soldier. Maybe you do. What the fuck?" He takes back the glass, drains it, and refills it from the bottle, which seems too big for his wrist. "And if she doesn't show up, you sleep down here. I've got a spare bed. A field bed. I don't tell that to everyone. We can put it the other end of the room. And tomorrow I get you a desk for your Germanistic, we put it over there under the window. That way you get daylight. If you fart too much, if I don't like you after all, I ask you nicely to fuck off. Okay?" He goes straight on, not bothering with Mundy's answer. "And in the morning I put you up for selection to the commune. We have a discussion, then a formal vote, it's all bullshit. Maybe you get a couple of questions from Christina about your bourgeois origins. She's the biggest bourgeois of us all. Her father's a Greek shipowner who loves the colonels and pays for half the food here." He takes another pull of whiskey, and again hands the glass to Mundy. "Some squats are legal. This one isn't. We don't like Nazi landlords. When you register with the university, you don't give this address, we provide you with a nice letter from a guy in Charlottenburg. He says you live with him, which isn't true, you're a good Lutheran boy, which isn't true, you're in bed alone every night at ten o'clock, you marry everyone you fuck."

Which is how Mundy learns that he is to become Sasha's roommate.

A golden age has unexpectedly dawned in Ted Mundy's life. He has a home, he has a friend, both new concepts to him. He is part of a brave new family determined to rebuild the world. An occasional night of exile under the stars is no hardship to a soldier's son serving at the front line of the revolution. He is not offended when a red ribbon round the attic doorhandle advises him that his general is not receiving. While Sasha's dealings with women are swift and purposeful, Mundy remains true to his vow of abstinence. Occasionally he is obliged to exchange a platonic word or two with one of the squat's indecently high proportion of beautiful girls, but that is only because within hours of his admission he is gallantly providing free conversation lessons in English three times a week to any fellow communard so inclined.

And the salamander is living in the flames. Dr. Mandelbaum would be proud of him. The awareness of being in a combat zone, the knowledge that any moment he may be summoned to join his fellow partisans at the barricade, the nightlong debates on how the world's rotten wood can be swept away and the new growth planted act on him like a constant stimulant. If Mundy arrived in Berlin a greenhorn, under the guidance of Sasha and the comrades he becomes an eager inheritor of the movement's noble history. The names of its heroes and villains are soon as familiar to him as those of great cricketers.

It was the Iranian exile Bahman Nirumand, on the eve of the Shah of Iran's visit to West Berlin, who informed a packed student audience in the Free University's Auditorium Maximum of the true awfulness of the Shah's American-backed regime.

It was Benno Ohnesorg who demonstrated against the Shah's visit to the city and was, on the very next day, shot through the head by a plainclothes police inspector outside the West Berlin Opera House.

It was Benno's funeral, and the denial of all wrongdoing by the police and the mayor, that drove the students to greater militancy and sped the rise of Rudi Dutschke, founder of the students' Extra-Parliamentary Opposition.

It was the fascistic rhetoric of the press baron Axel Springer and his odious _Bild Zeitung__ that incited a deranged workman with far-right fantasies to shoot down Rudi Dutschke in Berlin's Kurfürstendamm. Dutschke survived for a time. Martin Luther King, shot the same month, did not.

He knows the dates and places of the great sit-ins and bloody confrontations of the recent past. He knows that the student revolt is raging across the world on a thousand battlefields, and that the students of America have been as brave as any, and as savagely put down.

He knows that the finest publication in the world is _Konkret,__ founded by the movement's high priestess, the immaculate Ulrike Meinhof. Germany's two great revolutionary writers of the moment are called Langhans and Teufel.

So many brothers and sisters everywhere! So many comrades who share the dream! Even if the dream itself is not yet entirely clear to him, but he's getting there, wherever _there__ is.

So a life begins. First thing in the morning the chaste English boarding-school boy and as yet unbruised recruit to the cause of world liberation springs from his field bed while Sasha sleeps off the night's great arguments. After a communal shower enlivened by girls he studiously ignores, he takes his turn in the squat's cookhouse chopping stolen sausages and vegetables for the day's soup then hurries out to pound West Berlin's precious parks and open spaces, trawl the libraries and attend whatever lectures have survived the student body's edict against fascistic indoctrination. Later in the day, he will offer himself as an apprentice at the print-shop to help run off salient passages from the works of the fashionable revolutionaries and, packing them into the Major's knapsack, stand bravely at street corners foisting them on the passing bourgeoisie on their way home to unawakened lives.

And this isn't just a matter of handing out free newspapers. This is risky work. Not only does the Berlin bourgeoisie refuse to awaken, but it has had enough of students to last it several generations. Less than twenty-five years after Hitler, the good citizens are not pleased to see their streets seething with riot police with truncheons, and mobs of foul-mouthed radicals hurling rocks at them. State-funded Berlin students exempted from conscription should pay their fees, obey, study and shut up. They should not smash glass, advocate copulation in public, cause traffic jams and insult our American saviors. More than one good citizen's fist is raised at him. More than one old lady of the Auschwitz generation screams into his face to take his stupid pamphlets _nach drüben__ where they can be used as toilet paper--she means over the Wall to East Germany--or makes a grab for his long hair, but he's too tall for her. More than one taxi driver from the forces of reaction bumps his cab over the curb, sending Mundy scampering for cover and his wares flying over the street. But the good soldier is not fazed. Or not for long. Come evening of the same day, as soon as he has finished his conversation lessons, he can as likely be found relaxing over a beer at the Shaven Cat or the Republican Club, or enjoying Turkish coffee and an arrack in one of Kreuzberg's many ramshackle cafés, where the aspiring novelist likes to spread his notebook and indulge his Isherwood persona.

But there are times when, for all his determined good spirits, Mundy is infected by the unreality of the divided city, its gallows humor and doomed atmosphere of unassured survival. Surrounded by angers that are new and often alien to him, he does wonder in his lowest moments whether his comrades are in fact searchers and puzzlers like himself, drawing their strength from the presumed convictions of their neighbors rather than from their own hearts, and whether, in his quest for the larger truths of life, he has after all ended up living in what Dr. Mandelbaum called a bubble. Clutching his end of a banner at a street demonstration, protesting the latest act of despotism by the terrified university authorities, or waiting manfully at the barricades for a police charge that fails to materialize, the expatriate son of a British army major does occasionally ask himself which war he is fighting: the last one or the next.

Yet his search for connection continues. There is an evening when, inspired by the benign weather and an arrack, he improvises a game of cricket for the many Turkish children hanging around the shanties. A dust-patch serves as a playing field, a stack of empty beer cans makes a wicket. Mundy grabs a handsaw and a plank from Faisal, the proprietor of his favourite café, and hacks out a bat. No Rani steps out of the evening sunlight to greet him, but the shouts of encouragement and despair, the skimming faces and olive limbs lift his heart. The Kreuzberg cricket club is born.

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.