Suddenly, absolutely nothing is happening. Or nothing Mundy is aware of. It is as if film and soundtrack have stopped simultaneously, then started up again. Sasha is still speechifying from his soapbox, but the extras are screaming. Rings of armed police are tightening round the protesters, the beating of truncheons on shields has become thunderous, the first tear gas canisters have gone off, which doesn’t bother the police, because very sensibly they’ve put on their masks. Amid the mist of smoke and water cannon, students are escaping in all directions, howling and whining from the gas. Mundy’s ears, nose and throat are dissolving with the heat, tears are blinding him but he knows better than to wipe them away. Jets of water are crashing into his face, he sees flying truncheons and hears horses’ hooves clattering on the cobble and the childlike whimpering of the wounded. In the scrum of yelling, punching bodies round him, there is only one player showing any class, and that’s Legal Judith. To his amazement, she has produced a family-sized baseball bat from inside her Mao jacket and, ignoring Sasha’s exhortations to passive resistance, whacks a young policeman so hard on the side of his new helmet that it falls into his hands like a gift from heaven as he sinks smiling stupidly to his knees. “Teddy, du gibst bitte Acht auf Sasha!” she advises Mundy politely, speaking for once the delicious language of Thomas Mann rather than the English of their passion. Then she vanishes under a snake-heap of brown-and-blue uniforms and there is no way on earth he can reach her. The last he sees of her she has swapped her fireman’s hat for a cap of blood, but her exhortation is burning in his ears: Teddy, you will kindly take care of Sasha, and he remembers that Ilse made the same request of him, and that he has made the same request of himself.
The water cannon are being wheeled up but the two armies are now so intermingled that the pigs are reluctant to drench their own, and Sasha is still yelling out his message from his soapbox. The pigs are within truncheon range of him, a very fat sergeant screams, “Get me this shit-faced poison dwarf!” and Mundy is doing what he never dreamed of doing, and if he had planned it he would never have done it. The son of Major Arthur Mundy, holder of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor, emptier of twenty saddles, is charging the enemy. But it is Sasha, not a Bren gun, he is holding in his arms. Blindly obedient to Legal Judith’s command as well as his own good impulses, he has whisked Sasha from his soapbox and slung him across his shoulders. He has Sasha’s thrashing feet in one arm and flailing hands in another and he is wading through the enemy tear gas and the mass of howling, bleeding bodies, not feeling the truncheons that rain on him and not hearing anything except Sasha’s bitching and complaining—Let me down, you arsehole, run, get out of here, the pigs will kill you—until the sun comes out and Mundy is lighter by an entire millstone because by now he has carried out Judith’s orders to the best of his ability, and Sasha has slipped from his shoulders and hightailed it across the open square, and it is Mundy, not Sasha, who sits in the police van with his hands cuffed to a bar above his head while two policemen take turns to beat the living daylights out of him: Ted Mundy is being eingebläut, and he doesn’t need Sasha’s translation to tell him what it means.
It was never afterwards easy for Mundy to document what followed. There was the van, there was the police station. There was the cell that smelled of the things cells are supposed to smell of: excreta, salt tears, vomit and, from time to time, warm blood. For a while he shared it with a bald-headed Pole who proclaimed himself a multiple murderer, rolled his eyes a lot and giggled. In the interrogation room there was no Pole. It was the private domain of Mundy and the same two policemen who had given him his first beating in the van, and were now giving him another under the mistaken impression that he was Peter the Great with his beard shaved off, pretending to be a British subject. He possessed a perfectly good student’s card they could have looked at, even if it had the wrong address on it, not to mention a British passport, but unfortunately he had left them back in the attic for fear of losing them in the fray. He offered to go and fetch them, but obviously he couldn’t tell his inquisitors where to find them for themselves because to do so would have been to point them straight at Sasha and the illegal squat. His stubbornness on this point drove them to new heights of fury. They stopped listening to him and whaled into him for the hell of it: groin, kidneys, soles of the feet, groin again, but for cosmetic purposes leaving the face relatively intact, though ultimately not as intact as any of them might have wished. Periodically he dropped off. Periodically they carted him back to his cell while they had a rest. How many times this happened was always a blur to him, just as the sudden end of it all, and the ambulance ride to the British military hospital, were blurs. He had an impression of blue lights that flashed inside his head instead of in the street where they belonged, and of clean bedsheets that smelled of disinfectant. And of a glistening ward presided over by a children’s nursemaid with a silver-plated stopwatch pinned to her white linen bosom.
“Mundy? Mundy? Not related to a little shit called Major Arthur Mundy, are we, ex-Indian Army? Can’t be,” the chief medical officer asks suspiciously, peering down at the bandaged length of him.
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“Don’t be afraid, old boy. Count yourself bloody lucky is all I can say. How many fingers am I holding up? Well done. Jolly good.”
He is lying in the ship’s cabin, but without the comfort of the Major’s Burmas. He is crouched beside Rani at the rock pool, but can’t stand up. He has his head in a handbasin and is clutching the taps in the school washroom while the prefects take it in turns to beat him for his lack of Christian reverence. He is out of bounds, a plague case. The sight of him could be infectious. He’s an untouchable, and there’s a stenciled notice hanging just the other side of his door to prove it:
AUTHORIZED MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY
Or as Judith would say, fuck off. In earnest of this, there is also a red-capped military police sergeant to watch over his well-being. The sergeant makes his feelings clear on the first occasion Mundy is strong enough to shuffle down the corridor to pee.
“We’d have put the manners on you if we’d had you, son,” he assures him. “You’d be bloody dead, and grateful for it.”
A British official comes to visit. He is Mr. Amory, and brings a printed card to say so: Mr. Nicholas Amory, Vice Consul, the British High Commission, Berlin. He is only a few years older than Mundy and, for an unredeemed bourgeois Englishman of the oppressive classes, disconcertingly agreeable. He wears a good tweed suit but is shaggy in a reassuring way. His suede shoes are particularly disgraceful. The Major’s knapsack dangles from his nicely tailored shoulder.
“Whoever sent you these grapes, Edward?” he inquires, fingering them and grinning.
“The Berlin police.”
“Did they, by Jove? And the chrysanthemums?”
“The Berlin police.”
“Well, I think that’s mighty handsome of them, don’t you, given the strain the poor chaps are under these days?”—laying the knapsack at the foot of Mundy’s bed. “This is the front line, you know. Nobody can be blamed for losing their rag now and then. Specially when they’re provoked by a bunch of state-funded students who don’t know their radical arses from their elbows—any more than you do, I suspect.” He has pulled up a chair and is studying Mundy’s face critically in close-up. “Who’s your nice friend, Edward?”
“Which one?”
“The little twerp who came storming into our office like the bloody SS,” he replies, helping himself to a grape. “Jumped the queue, slammed your passport on the reception desk and barked at our German clerk to secure your immediate release from the West Berlin police, or else. Then barged out again before anyone could take his name and address. The poor clerk was scared out of his wits. A submerged Saxon accent, he said. Audible but not ridiculous. Only a Saxon would be such an oaf. Do you have a lot of chums like that, Edward? Angry East Germans who won’t leave their names?”
“No.”
“How long ha
ve you been in Berlin?”
“Nine months.”
“Living where?”
“My grant ran out.”
“Living where?”
“In Charlottenburg.”
“Someone told me Kreuzberg.”
No answer.
“You should have come and signed the book. Distressed British students are what we do best.”
“I wasn’t distressed.”
“Well, you are now. You bowled for the public schools, didn’t you?”
“A couple of times.”
“We’ve got quite a decent side here. Too late now. Pity. What’s his name, as a matter of interest?”
“Whose?”
“Your short-arsed Saxon knight with a hobble. His ugly face struck our clerk as familiar. Thought he might have seen it in the papers.”
“I don’t know.”
Amory seems quietly amused by this. He consults the disgraceful suede shoes. “Well, well. Question is, Edward, what are we going to do with you?”
Mundy has no suggestions. He is wondering whether Amory is one of the prefects who beat him in the washroom.
“You could raise a stink, I suppose. Call in six lawyers. We can give you a list. The coppers would press charges of their own, of course. Causing a breach of the peace, for openers. Abusing your status as a foreign guest, which the judges won’t like. Registering yourself under a false address. We’d do our best for you, naturally. Feed you french bread through the bars. Did you say something?”
Mundy hasn’t said a word, Amory can beat him as much as he likes.
“As far as the police are concerned, you’re simply a case of mistaken identity. If you’d been the right person, they’d have been highly commended. They say some mad Polish murderer did it to you. Is that possible?”
“No.”
“However, they are prepared to cut a deal, if we are. They won’t throw the book at you, and you won’t press charges for any little mishap that may or may not have occurred while you were in the nick. And we will save our British blushes at this delicate time of international crisis by smuggling you out of Berlin disguised as a Nubian slave. Done?”
The night nurse is as big as Ayah, but she tells no stories about the Prophet Mohammed.
He arrives as a doctor, the way clever heroes do in movies: at crack of dawn while the sergeant’s man is dozing in the sentry’s chair, and Mundy is lying on his back sending messages to Judith. The white medical coat has three pips on each shoulder and is several sizes too big for him. A stethoscope dangles haplessly round his neck, and a pair of enormous surgical galoshes cover his fraying sneakers. The whole of West Berlin must have been looking out for a shit-faced poison dwarf, but that hasn’t stopped him, he’s resourceful. He’s wriggled or talked his way past the sentries at the gate, and once inside the hospital he’s made a beeline for the orderlies’ room and forced a locker. There is a yellowy sickness round his eyes. His forelock is too young for him, his revolutionist’s scowl replaced by deep uncertainty. The rest of him is smaller and more crumpled than ever.
“Teddy, I am without words. What you did for me—saving my life, no less—this was the gesture of a friend I do not deserve. How can I repay you? Nobody has ever performed such an absurd act of sacrifice on my behalf. You are English, and for you, all life is a silly accident. But I am German, and for me, if it has no logic it is meaningless.”
Lakes have formed in the brown eyes. His oversized voice is husky inside the little chest. His words sound carefully prepared.
“How’s Judith?” Mundy asks.
“Judith? Legal Judith?” He seems to have difficulty remembering the name. “Judith, ah well, she is in good form, thank you, Teddy, yes. Affected, as we all are, by this outrage but, as you would expect of her, not bowed. She suffered a small head wound, she breathed too much gas. She is eingebläut like you, but she is recovered. And she asks to be remembered to you”—as if that settles the matter—“warmly remembered to you, Teddy. She admires you for what you did.”
“Where is she?”
“In the squat. A small bandage for the first few days. Then nothing.”
The nothing, and the silence that follows it, prompt Mundy to pull a humorless grin. “To the girl who has got nozzings on,” he intones idiotically in English, quoting a line of doggerel the Major was fond of reciting in his cups. “She knows they’re throwing me out, does she?” he asks.
“Judith? Of course. A totally unconstitutional act. The lawyer in her is outraged. Her immediate instinct was to go to the courts. I had to use all my persuasive powers to convince her that your legal position here is not as strong as she would wish.”
“But you managed.”
“Only with great difficulty. Like many women, Judith does not take kindly to arguments of expediency. However, you would be proud of her, Teddy. Thanks to you, she is completely liberated.”
After that, as good friends may, Sasha sits at Mundy’s bedside, holding his friend’s wrist rather than his smashed-up hand but somehow contriving not to look Mundy in the eye. Mundy lies staring at him, Sasha sits staring at the wall, until Mundy out of politeness finally pretends to be asleep. Sasha leaves and the door seems to close twice: once on Sasha and once on the completely liberated Judith.
5
FLAT YEARS, frustrating years, years of directionless wandering are about to blight the progress of Ted Mundy, life’s eternal apprentice. He later thinks of them as his Empty Quarter, though in number they amount to less than a decade.
Not for the first time in his brief existence, he is hustled out of town at first light. He has no disgraced father to care for, the road is flat and metaled. No weeping Rani hunches as if crippled at the compound gates and, though he searches everywhere for her, no Judith. Murree’s ancient army truck has been replaced by a polished Jeep with white spats, and it’s the military police sergeant, not a Punjabi warrior, who offers a last piece of friendly advice.
“Come back any time you like, son. We’ll remember you, and we’ll be bloody waiting for you.”
The sergeant need not worry. After three weeks of studying the ceiling of his hospital ward, Mundy has no plans to return, and no destination in mind. Should he return to Oxford? As who? In what disguise? The prospect of resuming a degree course among a bunch of overeducated children who have never seen an ideal fired in anger is repugnant to him. Landing at Heathrow he heads on an impulse for Weybridge, where the inebriated lawyer who attended his father’s funeral receives him in a dark mock-Tudor house called The Pines. It’s raining, but then it always was.
“One had rather hoped you’d have the decency to reply to one’s letter,” the lawyer complains.
“One did,” Mundy says, and helps find the missing document among a heap of chewed files.
“Yes, well, there we are then. Something in the kitty after all. Your late father Arthur signed a banker’s order on his savings fund, stupid bugger. He’d have stopped it years ago if he’d known. Don’t mind if I knock off the first five hundred for fees?”
A lawyer is always an arsehole, Mundy reminds himself as he slams the garden gate behind him. Striding down the road, he meets the fairy-lit outline of the Golden Swan. The night’s last revelers are departing in the rain. Mundy spots himself and his father among them.
“Good crowd tonight, boy,” the Major is remarking, dragging on his arm like a drowning man. “High level of conversation. You don’t get that in a mess. All shop.”
“It was really interesting, sir.”
“If you want to feel the heartbeat of England, they’re the ones to listen to. I don’t say much, but I listen. Specially Percy. Fund of knowledge. Can’t understand where the fellow went wrong.”
Number Two, The Vale has been razed to the ground. All that remains, so far as Mundy can make out by the streetlamp, is a builder’s board offering family homes with three bedrooms and a ninety percent mortgage. At the railway station, the last train to anywhere has left. An old man with a German
shepherd offers bed and breakfast for five pounds cash in advance. By midday Mundy is a new boy again, riding westward on the school train, looking out for chaps who comb their hair in public.
The abbey with its flag of St. George looms like a risen crypt over the dismal town. At its foot lies the close, and up the hill the ancient school. But Mundy doesn’t climb the hill. Somehow there was never quite the space up there for impecunious refugees from Hitler’s Germany to teach cello or the language of Goethe. They were deemed more comfortable living above a redbrick shoe-shop on the roundabout. The side door is in an alley. The same faded handwritten notice in Mandelbaum’s pedantic German hand is fastened to it with rusted drawing pins. For out of hours, press only LOWER. For Mallory, press only TOP and afterwards please WAIT. Mundy presses only TOP and is pleased to wait. He hears footsteps and starts to smile until he realizes they are not the footsteps he wants. They are swift and flurried and whoever owns them is yelling back up the stairs as she descends: Hang on, Billy, Mummy will be back in a minute!
The door opens six inches and stops dead. The same voice says, Shit. The door slams shut, he hears the chain come off. The door flies open.
“Yes?”
Young mothers never have time. This one has a pink, flustered face and long hair she has to sweep away to let him see her.
“I was hoping for Mr. Mallory,” Mundy says. He indicates the faded notice. “He’s a teacher at the school. Top floor.”
“Is he the one that’s dead? Ask in the shop. They’ll know. Coming, Billy!”
He needs a bank. Somewhere they cash checks from lawyers in Weybridge for young men in search of Godot.
Absolute Friends Page 10
