Absolute Friends (29 page)

Following his incarceration in the White Hotel, Sasha passed weeks of unlikely recuperation lounging around the Professor's house in Potsdam, walking the Professor's German shepherds in the People's Park, weeding the Professor's flowerbeds, chauffeuring his wife when she went shopping. For yes, the Professor, who was not after all homosexual, possessed a wife, a veritable dragon of a wife, whose single merit in Sasha's eyes was that she detested her husband.

But not even she can restrain the Professor from exercising his self-appointed role of Sasha's patron, power broker and protector. If Sasha promised to behave himself like a true comrade--the Professor's words--and guarded his tongue, and was respectful at all times to other highly placed protectors of the state, the Professor would undertake to guide his footsteps to the light. For the Professor--it is a point he is never tired of repeating--loved Sasha's father like a brother, and possessed no son of his own.

And Sasha gritted his teeth and promised. He behaved himself. He took other wives shopping as well as the Professor's. He carried their shopping up to their apartments for them, and sometimes all the way into the bedroom. Sasha never boasted about his conquests. Discretion was his watchword. But like a bartered bride, he put a metaphorical handkerchief in his mouth, and did not cry out in his repugnance. In the People's Paradise, compliant silence was everything.

"Did you get any fun out of it, or was it all strictly business?" Mundy inquires, as the two of them stroll in one of Leningrad's parks.

Sasha rounds on him in fury. "Go down to the Smolny docks, please, Teddy," he snaps, flinging an arm towards the bleak gray outlines of ships and cranes. "Pick up a ten-ruble whore, and ask her whether it's fun or strictly business."

Under the Professor's auspices, Sasha the favored son acquired a tiny one-room apartment all his own, and was admitted to the lowest rungs of the Stasi's ladder of beings. By the time of his initiation he had mastered, as best his crabby body allowed, the official Party walk. With it went the official Party expression--a nonlook, delivered with the chin raised, to the pavement fifteen yards ahead of him. He wore it as he wheeled the coffee trolley down the disinfected corridors of the Professor's linoleum empire, and set china cups on the desks of state protectors too elevated to acknowledge his existence.

And just occasionally, when Sasha held open the door of a limousine for a great protector, or delivered a package to a comrade's sumptuous villa, a hand would grasp his arm confidingly and a voice would murmur, "Welcome home, Sasha. Your father was a great man."

Such words were balm to his ears. They told him he was one of them, and refueled the fires of his secret anger.

Did Sasha ever _advance__ inside the Stasi? Mundy used to wonder. And if he did, to what rank, office, and when?

It is a question that after all these years Sasha still brushes irritably aside. And when London's analysts from time to time dig out their Stasi orders of battle in search of him, his name does not feature among the distinguished section heads, nor even in the lowest categories of archivist or clerk.

"Promotion, Teddy, I would say, is in inverse proportion to knowledge," he pontificates. "The butler knows more than the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor knows more than the Queen. I know more than all of them."

Sasha does not advance, he entrenches, which in a spy is probably a better way to go. Since his aim is not power but knowledge, he devotes himself to the systematic acquisition of menial responsibilities, keys, combination numbers and protectors' wives. Put together, they make a traitor's kingdom. What Mundy Two pretends to do in the virtual world, Sasha does in the real one.

A secure storeroom is to be established for files that are out of action but not yet officially dead? _But of course, Comrade Counselor! Yours to command, Comrade Counselor! Three bags full, Comrade Counselor!__

An immediate destruction program is to be implemented for certain sensitive material that should have been got rid of months ago? _No problem, Comrade Counselor! Sasha will give up his free weekend so that state protectors burdened with heavier responsibilities than his own may take their well-deserved ease.__

The Frau Oberst is expecting an important visitor from Moscow and has nobody to mow her lawn for her? _The Frau Oberst's grass need not wait another minute. Sasha is standing brushed and shiny on her doorstep with a mower and an able-bodied serf!__

Yet how can all this take place, Mundy asks himself repeatedly over the years, in such an immense, all-powerful and vigilant state security system as the Stasi? Is not the Stasi a model of legendary Prussian efficiency, of the sort that accounts for every ball bearing, stub of pencil and gold tooth?

Under London's promptings, the long-suffering Mundy has put the question to Sasha in a dozen different ways, and always received the same answer: in a mammoth bureaucracy obsessed with its own secrecy, the fault lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from the top, stand at the bottom and look up.

Sasha's entrenchment quickly yielded unexpected prizes. One of the earliest was an old safe, locked and apparently disused, that stood inside the antechamber to the office of the Professor's prodigiously overweight female first assistant, a Sasha conquest. Its only perceptible function was to act as a table for a vase of plastic flowers with which she brightened her drab surroundings. She said the safe had long been empty and, when Sasha accidentally on purpose banged his coffee trolley into it, it rang reassuringly hollow. Undertaking a discreet search of the sump of her enormous handbag one night, he came upon an orphan key with a label on it. The safe became his treasure chest, the deniable storehouse for his expanding crock of gold.

In the absence of a fellow underling on holiday, Sasha was given custody of a storeroom full of obsolete operational equipment awaiting shipment to a Third World ally in the common struggle against the imperialist enemy. By the time the colleague returned, Sasha was unofficial owner of a subminiature camera, a user's handbook and two family-sized cartons of subminiature film cartridges. Henceforth, instead of attempting to smuggle his stolen documents out of the building, Sasha could photograph them and then destroy them or, if needful, return them to their rightful homes. Smuggling out subminiature film cartridges presented no problem unless he was intimately searched. By tacit edict, the Professor's chosen son is not subjected to this indignity.

"Any qualms I had about the life expectation of my undeveloped films were put to rest by the handbook," Sasha recalls drily. "First I should seal the cartridges in a condom, then I should bury the condom in a tub of ice cream. Comrades operating in conditions where no refrigerators, ice cream, electricity or condoms are available should presumably consult a different handbook."

For his memoranda of conversations overheard, he availed himself of the same technique.

"I committed my thoughts to paper in the comfort of my apartment. I photographed the paper with my thirty-five millimeter domestic camera. I then burned the paper and added the undeveloped film to my collection."

Then came a golden Friday evening when Sasha was going about his weekly chore of logging visa applications from citizens of nonsocialist countries who wished to enter the GDR on official business. Staring up at him were the unmistakable features of Mundy, Edward Arthur, born Lahore, Pakistan, husband of Kate née Andrews, occupation British Council traveling representative. And attached to it, the information thrown up by Stasi Central Records: 1968-69: member Oxford University Socialist Club and Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR, peace activist, various marches... while a student of the Free University of Berlin (West) engaged in anticapitalist, pro-peace demonstrations... suffered severe beating at hands of West Berlin police... later deported from West Berlin for riotous and anarchistic tendencies (West Berlin police report, source CESAR).

Sasha's breathless account of what he did next will resound in Mundy's memory forevermore. They are crouched in a bar in Dresden during a conference of international agrarians.

"At the sight of your not very beautiful face, Teddy, I experienced a revelation comparable to that of Archimedes. My undeveloped films need not after all spend a thousand years frozen into condoms. On the Monday morning when I took your visa application to the Professor, my hand was shaking. The Professor observed this. How could he not? It had been shaking all weekend. 'Sasha,' he asked me. 'Why is your hand shaking?'

"'Comrade Professor,' I replied, 'on Friday evening providence delivered me the opportunity I have been dreaming of. With your wise help I believe I am at last able to repay the trust you have invested in me, and assume an active role in the struggle against those who wish to frustrate the advance of socialism. I beg you, comrade: Please, as my patron, as the lifelong counselor and friend of my heroic father, grant me this chance to prove that I am worthy of him. The Englishman Mundy is an incurable bourgeois but he cares for the human condition and makes radical if incorrect perceptions, as his record shows. If you allow me to develop him aggressively under your incomparable guidance, I swear you will not be disappointed.'"

"And you didn't mind?" Mundy asks diffidently.

"Mind what?"--Sasha, combative as ever.

"Well--that I was going to be passing your information to the hated capitalists of the West?"

"You are being ridiculous, Teddy. We must fight all evil where we find it. One evil does not justify another, or negate another. As I told you already, if I could also spy on America, I would happily do so."

The stewardess is telling Mundy to fasten his seat belt. The plane is about to land at Gdansk for his forty-ninth meeting with his secret sharer.

Ted Mundy is these days a seasoned conference animal. Drop him blindfolded into any people-packed exhibition tent or congress hall on the East European circuit, give him a few seconds to sniff the tobacco fumes and deodorant and listen to the babble, and he could tell you to the hour which day it was in the five-day rhythm, who of the usual tribe of cultural minders and officials from which countries had shown up, and whether a joint closing statement was likely to paper over the cracks, or were we going to be looking at another bunch of dissenting minority reports and snide speeches at the farewell dinner?

An important variable is the state of hostilities in the Cold War. If the political atmosphere is tense, delegates will be hunting anxiously for common ground. If relaxed, cathartic verbal mudslinging is likely to break out, resolving itself in frenzied sexual couplings between adversaries who an hour earlier were threatening to tear each other to pieces.

But tonight, the third of the Gdansk Medieval Archaeologists' get-togethers, the atmosphere is unlike any he has ever known: rascally, joyous, rebellious and end of term. The conference hotel is a many-gabled Edwardian pile set among sand dunes on the Baltic shore. On the front steps, under the eyes of powerless policemen, students are pressing samizdats on arriving delegates. The bar is a glass conservatory that runs along the seaward side. If Mundy looks between the talking heads, he can see the sea's black horizon and the lights of distant ships. The medievalists to his surprise have turned out to be a sparky lot. Their Polish hosts are delirious with their own irreverence, and the glorious names of Lech Walesa and Solidarity are on every tongue. A black-and-white television set and several radios provide competing news flashes. Chants of _Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!__ break out periodically round the room.

"If Gorbachev is meaning what he is saying," a young professor from Lodz is yelling in English to his counterpart from Sofia, "where will such reforms end, please? Who will restore devils back to box of Pandora? Where please will be one-party state, if right of choice will be officially exercised?"

And if the wild talk of the delegates tells one side of the story, the apprehensive faces of their hapless minders tell the other. With heresies like these springing up all round them, should they side with the heretics or denounce them to their superiors? They will of course do both.

Mundy has so far seen little of Sasha. An embrace, a couple of waves, a promise to grab a drink together. After the ecstatic reunions of the early years, good sense has dictated that they scale down their demonstrations of mutual affection. Neither the intellectual Horst nor the gruesome Lothar is in attendance. They were replaced six months ago by the spectral and unsmiling Manfred. Tomorrow, the last full day, pretty Wendy from our embassy in Warsaw will pop up to press the flesh of the British contingent--not forgetting, of course, the flesh of Ted Mundy, the Council's evergreen representative. But it's a press, nothing more. Mundy has an eye for Wendy and Wendy has an eye for him. But between them stands the iron prohibition of the Edinburgh School of Deportment: no sex in the workplace. Nick Amory, to whom Mundy has rashly confessed his interest, puts it less delicately.

"There are plenty of good ways to commit hara-kiri in your job, Edward, but getting your rocks off in Badland is undoubtedly the best. Wendy is a part-timer," he adds, by way of further warning. "She's married to a diplomat, she has two children, and she spies to pay the mortgage."

A bunch of medievalists have joined together in a rendering of the "Marseillaise." An abundant Swedish woman with a deep décolleté is conducting. A drunken Pole is playing the piano beautifully. Sasha, fresh from a round of fringe parties, his eyes radiant beneath his beret, is entering at the far end of the bar, slapping backs, shaking hands, embracing anyone within his limited range. On his heels comes spectral Manfred.

Sasha needs a walk on the sand to clear his head. A warm spring wind is rattling off the sea. Ships' lights are strung the length of the horizon. Peaceful fishing boats, or the Soviet Sixth Fleet? It no longer seems to matter. A full moon lights the dunes in black and white. The deep sand is negotiable, but liable to sudden descents. More than once, Sasha is obliged to grab Mundy's arm to save himself from falling, and he's not always successful. On one occasion, as Mundy hauls him to his feet, he feels something soft fall into his jacket pocket.