Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “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.

  “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 insi
sts. “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 America
n 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 favorite 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.