Absolute Friends (8 page)

Yet Ilse's advice is not misplaced. Bit by bit, in cafés, impromptu clubs, at street corners where students lounge, smoke and rebel, the name Sasha raises the odd smile, rings a distant bell. Sasha? You mean Sasha the Great Rouser--_that__ Sasha? Well now, we have a problem here, you see. We don't give just anybody our addresses these days. The Schweinesystem has long ears. Best leave your name with Students for Democratic Socialism and see if he wants to get in touch with you.

Schweinesystem, Mundy the new boy repeats to himself. Remember that phrase. The Pig System. Does he feel a momentary wave of resentment against Ilse for launching him into the eye of the radical storm with no charts or instruments? Perhaps. But evening is drawing in, his path is set and despite his state of mourning he has a great appetite to begin his new life.

"Try Anita, Commune Six," a somnolent revolutionary advises him, in a clamorous cellar dense with pot smoke and Vietcong flags.

"Maybe Brigitte can tell you where he is," another suggests, over the strains of a girl guitarist in a Palestinian keffiyeh giving her rendering of Joan Baez. A child sits at her feet, a big man in a sombrero at her side.

In a bullet-pocked former factory as high as Paddington railway station hang likenesses of Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. A portrait of the late Che Guevara is draped in black bunting. Hand-daubed slogans on bedsheets warn Mundy that _It Is Forbidden to Forbid,__ urge him to _Be Realistic,__ _Demand the Impossible, Accept No Gods or Masters.__ Strewn across the floor like survivors from a shipwreck, students doze, smoke, breast-feed babies, play rock music, fondle and harangue each other. Anita? Left, oh, hours ago, says one advisor. Brigitte? Try Commune Two and fuck America, says another. When he asks to use a lavatory, a tender Swede escorts him to a line of six, each with its door smashed in.

"Personal privacy, comrade, that's a bourgeois barrier to communal integration," the Swede explains in earnest English. "Better that men and women piss together than bomb Vietnamese kids.... Sasha?" he repeats, after Mundy has courteously declined his advances. "Maybe you find him at the Troglodyte Club, except they call it the Shaven Cat these days." He detaches a cigarette paper from its packet and, using Mundy's back to press on, draws a map.

The map leads Mundy to a canal. With the knapsack slapping his hip, he sets off along the towpath. Sentry towers, then a patrol boat bristling with guns, glide past him. Ours or theirs? It is immaterial. They are nobody's. They are part of the great impasse he is here to unblock. He turns into a cobbled side street and stops dead. A twenty-foot-high cinder-block wall with a crown of barbed-wire thorns and a sickly halo of floodlights bars his way. At first he refuses to recognize it. You're a fantasy, a film set, a construction site. Two West Berlin policemen call him over.

"Draft dodger?"

"English," he replies, showing his passport.

They take him to the light, examine his passport, then his face.

"Ever seen the Berlin Wall before?"

"No."

"Well look at it now, then go to bed, Englishman. And stay out of trouble."

He retraces his steps and finds a side road. On a rusted iron door, amid Picasso peace doves and BAN THE BOMB signs, a hairless cat on two legs brandishes its penis. Inside, music and argument combine in a single feral roar.

"Try the Peace Center, comrade, top floor," a beautiful girl advises him, cupping her hands.

"Where's the Peace Center?"

"Upstairs, arsehole."

He climbs, his feet clanging on the tile steps. It's close on midnight. At each floor a fresh tableau of liberation is revealed to him. On the first, students and babies lounge in a Sunday school ring while a stern woman harangues them on the crippling effect of parents. On the second, a postcoital quiet reigns over bundles of intertwined bodies. _Support the Neutron Bomb!__ a handmade poster urges them. _Kills your mother-in-law! Doesn't harm your TV set!__ On the third, Mundy is thrilled to see some sort of theater workshop is in progress. On the fourth, shaggy Septembrists pummel typewriters, confer, feed paper into hand presses and bark orders into radio telephones.

He has reached the top floor. A ladder rises to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. He emerges in an attic lit by a builder's inspection light. A passage like the entrance to a mine shaft leads from it. At its end, two men and two women are bowed over a candlelit table strewn with maps and beer bottles. One girl is black-haired and grim-faced, the other fair and large-boned. The nearer man is as tall as Mundy: a Viking with a golden beard and mop of yellow hair bound in a pirate's headscarf. The other man is short, vivid and dark-eyed, with uneven, spindly shoulders that are too narrow for his head. He wears a black Basque beret drawn dead level across his pale brow, and he is Sasha. How does Mundy know this? Because all along, he realizes, he has known intuitively that Ilse was talking about someone as small as herself.

Too diffident to intrude, he hovers at the opening to the mineshaft, clutching her letter in his hand. He hears fragments of war talk, all Sasha's. The voice is stronger than the body and carries naturally. It is accompanied by imperious gestures of the hands and forearms.... _Don't let the pigs cram us into side streets, hear me?... Stand up to them in the open, where the cameras can see what they do to us...__ Mundy is already deciding to tiptoe back down the ladder and make his entrance another time when the party breaks up. The black-haired girl folds up the maps. The Viking rises and stretches. The blond girl hugs him to her by his buttocks. Sasha stands too, but is no taller than when he was sitting. As Mundy steps forward to present himself, the others move instinctively to shield the little emperor at their center.

"Good evening. I'm Ted Mundy. I've got a letter for you from Ilse," he says in his best head prefect's voice. And when he receives no answering light of recognition from the wide, dark eyes: "Ilse the Hungarian student of political philosophy. She was here last summer and had the pleasure of meeting you."

Perhaps it is Mundy's politeness that catches them off balance, for there is a moment of shared suspicion among them. Who is he, this courtly English arsehole with the Beatle haircut? The tall Viking is first to respond. Placing himself between Mundy and the rest of them, he accepts the envelope on Sasha's behalf and subjects it to a quick examination. Ilse has stuck down the flap with tape. Her peremptory scrawl of _Private, Strictly Personal!__ twice underlined, is a clear claim to intimacy. The Viking hands the envelope to Sasha, who rips it open and extracts two blotchy pages of Ilse's densely packed handwriting, with afterthoughts charging up the margins. He reads the first few lines, turns to the back page to find the signature. Then he smiles, first to himself, and then at Mundy. And this time it's Mundy who is taken off balance, because the wide dark eyes are so brilliant and the smile is so young.

"Well, well. _Ilse!__" he muses. "That's quite a girl, yes?"--slipping her letter into the side pocket of his threadbare lumber jacket.

"One can really say that," Mundy agrees in his best High German.

"Hungarian"--as if to remind himself. "And you are _Teddy.__"

"Well, Ted actually."

"From Oxford."

"Yes."

"Her lover?" It's a straight question. "We are all lovers here," he adds, to laughter.

"I was until a few weeks ago."

"A few weeks! That's a lifetime in Berlin! You are English?"

"Yes. Well, not completely. Foreign born, but English bred. Oh, and she sends you a bottle of Scotch. She remembers you liked it."

"Scotch! What a memory, my God! A woman's memory will hang us all. What are you doing in Berlin, Teddy? Are you a revolutionary tourist?"

Mundy is pondering his reply when the black-haired girl with the grim face cuts in ahead of him. "He means, do you sincerely wish to take part in our movement, or are you here for the purposes of human zoology?" she demands, in a foreign accent he can't place.

"I took part in Oxford. Why not here?"

"Because here is not Oxford," she snaps. "Here we have an Auschwitz generation. In Oxford you do not. In Berlin we can lean out of the window and shout 'Nazi swine,' and if the arsehole on the pavement is more than forty years old we shall be right."

"What are you proposing to study here in Berlin, Teddy?" Sasha inquires, in a softer tone.

"Germanistic."

The dark-haired girl takes immediate exception to this. "Then you will have to be lucky, comrade. The professors who teach that archaic shit are so scared they won't come out of their bunkers. And the twenty-year-old stooges they send us are so scared they sign up with us."

Now it's the turn of the blond girl beside her. "Have you any money, comrade?"

"Not very much, I'm afraid."

"You are without _money?__ Then you are a worthless human being! How will you eat cutlet every day? How will you buy a new hat?"

"Work, I suppose," says Mundy, trying his best as a good fellow to share their unfamiliar brand of humor.

"For the Pig System?"

The girl with the dark hair is back. She wears it pushed behind her ears. She has a strong, slightly crooked jaw. "What is the purpose of our revolution, comrade?"

Mundy has not expected a viva voce, but six months of Ilse and her friends have not left him unprepared. "To oppose the Vietnam War by all means... To arrest the spread of military imperialism... To reject the consumer state... To challenge the nostrums of the bourgeoisie... To awaken it, and educate it. To create a new and fair society... and to oppose all irrational authority."

"_Irrational?__ What is _rational__ authority? All authority is _irrational,__ arsehole. Do you have parents?"

"No."

"Do you share the opinion of Marcuse that logical positivism is a load of shit?"

"I'm not really a philosopher, I'm afraid."

"In a state of unfreedom, nobody has a liberated consciousness. Do you accept this?"

"It seems to make pretty good sense."

"It is the only sense, arsehole. In Berlin the student masses are in permanent movement against the forces of counterrevolution. The city of the Spartacists and the capital of the Third Reich has rediscovered its revolutionary destiny. Have you read Horkheimer? If you have not read Horkheimer's _Twilight,__ you are ridiculous."

"Ask him whether he is _eingebläut,__" the blond girl suggests, using a word Mundy has never heard before--at which everyone laughs except Sasha who, having observed this exchange in quick-eyed silence, decides to come to Mundy's rescue.

"Okay, comrades. He's a nice fellow. Let's leave him alone. Maybe we all meet later at the Republican Club."

Watched by Sasha, one after the other of his aides descends the ladder. Finally he lowers the trapdoor on them, locks it, and to Mundy's surprise reaches up and claps a hand on his shoulder.

"You have that whiskey with you, Teddy?"

"In my bag."

"Don't mind Christina. Greek women have too much mouth. The day she has an orgasm, she won't speak another word." He is opening a small door low in the wainscoting. "And everyone's an arsehole here. It's a term of affection, like comrade. The revolution doesn't like circumlocutions."

Is Sasha smiling as he says this? Mundy can't tell. "What does _eingebläut__ mean?"

"She was asking whether you have had your first beating from the pigs. She wants you to have nice blue bruises from their truncheons."

Stooping double, Mundy follows Sasha into a long, cavernous chamber that at first sight resembles the belly of a ship. Two skylights appear high above him, and slowly fill with stars. Sasha removes his beret and reveals a revolutionist's mop of untamed hair. He strikes a match and lights a lantern. As its flame rises, Mundy makes out a bombé desk with brass inlay, and on it heaps of pamphlets and a typewriter. An iron double bedstead strewn with worn-out cushions of satin and brocade stands along one wall. And on the floor, like stepping-stones, stacks of books.

"Stolen for the revolution," Sasha explains, waving a hand at them. "Nobody reads them, nobody knows the titles. All they know is, intellectual property belongs to the masses, not to bloodsucking publishers and booksellers. Last week we held a competition. Whoever brings the most books has struck the biggest blow against petit bourgeois morality. Have you eaten anything today?"

"Not much."

"_Not much__ being English for nothing? Then eat."

Sasha pushes Mundy towards an ancient leather armchair and sets down two empty tumblers, a chunk of sausage and a loaf of bread. His bony left shoulder rides higher than its companion. His right foot trails as he darts around. Mundy unfastens the buckles of his knapsack, extricates Ilse's bottle of St. Hugh's Buttery Scotch whiskey from the Major's shirts and pours two shots. Sasha perches opposite him on a wooden stool, pulls on a pair of spectacles with thick black frames and settles to a purposeful examination of Ilse's letter while Mundy cuts himself a slice of bread and sausage.

_"Teddy will never let you down,"__ he announces, reading aloud. "That's a quite subjective judgment, I would say. What's it supposed to mean? That I'm going to invest my confidence in you? Why should she make that assumption?"

No answer springs to Mundy's mind but Sasha doesn't seem to need one. His German has a regional accent of some kind, but Mundy is not yet equipped to place it.

"What did she tell you about me?"

"Not much. You were a graduate but democratic. Everybody knows you."

Sasha doesn't appear to hear this. "_A good companion, loyal in all circumstances, a stranger to deceit... belongs to no group__--am I supposed to admire you for that? _In his head a bourgeois, but has a socialist heart.__ Maybe with a capitalist soul and a Communist prick you'll be complete. Why does she write to me like this?" A thought occurs to him. "Did she walk out on you, by any chance?"

"Pretty much," Mundy concedes.

"Now we're getting to the bottom of it. She walked out on you so she feels guilty--and what's this? I don't believe it. _He wanted me to marry him.__ Are you crazy?"

"Why not?" Mundy says sheepishly.