Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  As things stand at the moment, he informs his audience, he calculates that they’re in for about twenty years’ hard labor per head: ten for smuggling Jan out of Poland, ten more for smuggling him into East Germany. So if anyone has any bright suggestions about where to go from here, Mundy would be grateful to hear them.

  He is expecting contrition, but he has forgotten about actors. In a dread, theatrical silence, all heads turn to Viola, who does not fail them. Hands clenched below her chin, she gazes bravely upward at Goethe’s blue heaven. She will kill herself if she is parted from Jan. Jan has assured her he will do the same. Of her friends, she expects nothing. If they have lost faith, then go, go, and she and Jan will throw themselves on the mercy of the East German authorities. God knows, someone somewhere in this country must have a human heart.

  Mundy doubts it. Moreover, it won’t just be yourselves you’ll be throwing at the mercy of the East Germans, he tells Viola. It will be the whole bloody lot of us. So does anyone else have a suggestion?

  For a moment no one has. Viola has played her big scene to the hilt, and it would take a brave actor to follow her. Mainly, Mundy suspects, the kids are scared stiff by what they’ve done, but see no way back. It falls to their self-appointed lawyer, an eighteen-year-old redhead called Len, to put the motion to the vote. His tone is necessarily muted, his courage perhaps also.

  “All right, gang. Which is it? Do we desert a fellow thesp in his hour of need? Forget the love angle a minute. He’s getting shit from the authorities in his own country, right? So what are we supposed to do? Help get him out of it, or send him back to it? How many’re for helping him out?”

  Carried unanimously, if uncertainly—the only abstention being Mundy himself. He is now in a serious quandary. He’d like to talk it through with Kate, but without the East German secret police listening. He doesn’t need reminding that the chances of smuggling a Polish actor or anybody else across the Berlin Wall are wafer-thin. The chances of setting back Anglo-East German cultural relations by ten years, on the other hand, are excellent.

  “From now on, we act happy and bright,” he orders the troupe. “We’re proud of ourselves, we’re stars, we’ve won a prize and we’re on the homeward run. All the rest to follow. Got it?”

  Got it, Pop.

  The matinee for schools is a riot. Shorn kids crammed in rows on the grass forsake their gravity and dissolve in hysterics at the posturings of Lexham as Malvolio in love. Even Erna has a bit of a chuckle. The Walter Ulbricht Youth Club the same evening is a rave, and next morning under the all-seeing eye of Erna and her two sallow boys, the whole troupe including Mundy is marched through Goethe’s town house and thence to admire the Red Army heroes’ memorial with its blood-red hammer and sickle on the gate.

  And nobody misbehaves, everybody’s good as gold. They pose for photographs in front of Shakespeare’s statue. They swap acting notes with Russians, Vietnamese, Palestinians and Cubans. They play chess, and drink to the fellowship of all mankind in a students’ bar in a tower in the city’s ramparts.

  In quick tense visits, while the troupe covers for her, Viola takes Jan food and comfort, but Mundy times her visits to the bus, and keeps them short. The day of their last performance dawns. Tonight they play the National Theater, tomorrow they drive to Berlin and home. There will be no more rehearsal. The troupe will pass the morning in supervised group discussion with fellow actors of other nations, but Mundy is intent on having the day he has long planned. Weimar is his holy city, the shrine of his beloved German muse. He will treat himself to a tour of its treasures, even if Erna insists he do so in the company of a professor of arts from Leipzig who just happens, by the most delightful of coincidences, to be in Weimar.

  The Professor turns out to be an elegant, silvery fellow in his sixties who is determined to show off his unnaturally good English. His manner is so proprietorial that Mundy keeps racking his brain to fathom where they might have met along the road—say in Prague, or Bucharest, or one of the score of cities that have flitted past him in the last five weeks. And with the Professor comes the shapely Comrade Inge, who claims to represent the Goethe Institute.

  “And you are Ted, are you not?” the Professor inquires, with that amused smile he has.

  “Ted. Yes.”

  “And I of course am Wolfgang. Comrade is really too bourgeois, don’t you think?”

  Why of course? Mundy wonders, as the Professor’s eyes continue to signal their mysterious familiarity.

  With Comrade Inge one side of him and the Professor the other, Mundy inhales the tomblike air of Goethe’s tiny summer house and touches the very desk at which the poet wrote. He hovers dutifully in the rooms where Liszt made music, eats sausage in the cellar bar of the Hotel Elephant and clinks glasses with a group of drunken Chinese publishers while he struggles to evoke the ghost of Thomas Mann. But that damned Polish boy gets in his way each time.

  In the afternoon they travel by unsprung limousine to Ilmenau to worship at the hilltop shrine of the loveliest and shortest poem in the German language. The Professor sits in the front beside his driver, Comrade Inge jogs carelessly against Mundy in the back. The road is pitted and often flooded. Crumbling farmhouses vie with slab apartment blocks jammed into green fields. They pass a horde of cyclists and another of Soviet soldiers in gray singlets taking their afternoon run. The air is wet with smuts, black smoke billows from the chimneys of sprawling roadside factories, the trees beside the road are sickly yellow, gigantic signs remind him that he is in the Land of Peace and Progress. The sky opens and they are on the edge of the Thuringian forest. Flowing wooded hills surround them. They climb a snake road and pull into a lay-by. Their driver, a gangling boy in fancy Texas-style boots, springs to open the doors. Leaving him to watch over the car, they set off up a rocky track between pine trees, the Professor leading.

  “You are happy, Ted?” asks Comrade Inge tenderly.

  “Blissfully, thank you.”

  “Maybe you are missing your wife.”

  No, actually, Inge. I’m worrying about how to smuggle a Polish actor across the Berlin Wall. They have reached the summit. Before them, range after range of forested mountains fades into the distance. The famous hut is locked. An ancient iron plaque in Gothic script provides the only testimony to an old poet’s thoughts as he gazes upon eternity. For a fleeting moment, it is true, Mundy hears the lost, melodious voice of Dr. Mandelbaum intoning the sacred lines: Over all the mountains is peace . . . soon you too will be at rest.

  “You are moved, Ted?” Comrade Inge inquires, laying the flat of her hand along his upper arm.

  “Enormously,” says Mundy grimly.

  They descend the hill, the Professor once more leading. Comrade Inge wants to know whether socialism will ever be possible in Britain without a revolution. Mundy says he hopes so. The unsprung limousine is waiting. The gangling driver hovers beside it, finishing a cigarette. As he opens the doors for them, a mud-spattered Trabant lurches inexpertly out of the shadow of the trees and coasts past them before gathering speed and setting off down the hill. One driver, probably but not certainly male, Mundy registers. Woollen cap pulled low over the forehead.

  “I imagine that will be the curator of our museum,” the Professor remarks in his perfumed English, noticing Mundy’s interest. “Poor Herr Studmann is a great worrier. He is aware we have a distinguished guest today, so he is wishing to ascertain that everything is in order for you.”

  “Then why didn’t he stop and introduce himself?”

  “Poor Herr Studmann is shy. A bookish fellow. Social contact is anathema to him. Also a little eccentric, which you English appreciate.”

  Mundy feels a fool. It was nothing, nobody. Cool down. Somehow the day is passing, which is all that matters. On the journey back, the Professor treats them to a dissertation on Goethe’s relationship with nature.

  “If you are in Weimar again, will you please call me at my office,” Comrade Inge insists, handing Mundy a card.

  Th
e Professor confesses airily that he has no card. He seems to be implying that he is too well known to bother with one. They agree to remain lifelong friends.

  Backstage in Weimar’s National Theater, just a stone’s throw from their youth hostel and the psychedelic bus, the Sweet Dole Company is gearing itself up for the last performance of its tour and Mundy has decided to distract himself by packing up props and costumes in the theater’s basement in preparation for an early getaway tomorrow. Every sane bone in his body is urging him to dump the Polish boy overboard, but the Major’s son can’t do that. Neither can the father of his unborn child or the husband of Kate.

  The basement doubles as a conference room. A honey-colored table occupies the center. Leather-backed thrones are arranged on either side. The floorboards are of finest rainforest teak, iron delivery doors give onto a rear courtyard. Picking up Hamlet’s crown, Mundy hears directly above him the booming voice of Lexham our Jamaican Macbeth over claps of witches’ thunder. Wrapping the crown in strips of rag, he stuffs it in a packing case. But as he starts to do the same with Polonius’s chain of office, he spots Banquo staring at him from one of the brick arches to his left, and Banquo tonight is being played by Sasha in modern dress.

  No smoke, no strobe lights. Just a very thin, very small Sasha with his hair cropped short and his hollowed eyes larger than ever, sporting an undertaker’s black suit and a Boy Scout’s brown tie, and holding a Party-issue imitation-leather briefcase in his left hand and keeping his right hand to his side as he stands crookedly at attention in the archway. So obviously the producer has told him: this is what you do with your right hand while your left hand is carrying the briefcase and you are giving your friend Teddy the hairy eyeball.

  The packing case is on the floor and Mundy is hunkered beside it with Polonius’s chain lying across his hands exactly as if he’s about to make a presentation of it. It is in this position that, for a while, he simply denies the evidence of his senses. You’re not Banquo and you’re not Sasha, you’re not anyone. How can you be Sasha in that ridiculous suit?

  Then reluctantly he must admit that the figure who is so patently not Sasha is speaking to him. And nobody, Mundy included, can do Sasha’s voice except Sasha.

  “God’s blessings on you, Teddy. We must be quick and quiet. You are well?”

  “Flourishing. You too?”

  In a dream, instead of saying what’s in your head you say something totally absurd.

  “And married, I hear. And about to found a dynasty, despite the efforts of the West Berlin police. I congratulate you.”

  “Thanks.”

  For a moment the two men share the duelists’ stillness. Sasha does not venture forward from his archway. Mundy remains on his haunches in front of the packing case with Polonius’s chain draped across his palms. From where he crouches the distance to Sasha is as long as the Kreuzberg cricket field, or longer.

  “Teddy, I require you to pay close attention to me and keep your comments to a minimum. It will come hard to you, but try. In West Berlin we were partisans, but in this petit bourgeois kindergarten we are criminals.”

  Mundy lays the chain in the packing case and stands up. He turns to find Sasha at his side peering up at him, a web of fine lines round each dark, dependent eye, but otherwise the basic model with no extras.

  “Are you listening to me, Teddy?”

  He is.

  “The first act of your bizarre production will end in fifteen minutes. I must return to my seat in the audience in time for the ecstatic applause. At the official reception afterwards you and I will spontaneously recognize each other for the first time, express due astonishment and disbelief, and embrace as old friends. You follow me?”

  He does.

  “A certain embarrassment will color our public reunion. You are knocked a little off balance, you are not expecting to be reminded so graphically of your radical past, least of all here in the German Democratic paradise. I also shall be overjoyed but restrained, and a little evasive. This is normal in a society where every word has several meanings and many listeners. What do you propose to do with your besotted Polish actor?”

  “Smuggle him into West Berlin.” Does he say this? Does Sasha hear him? Sometimes in a dream, everyone hears you except yourself.

  “How?” Sasha demands.

  “On the roof of the bus. Roll him up in the backdrop.”

  “Do exactly as you plan. The frontier guards are under orders not to find him. Your Comrade Erna is an old hand and will make sure they are not overzealous by mistake. The boy is a plant: the product of a joint operation by ourselves and the Poles to penetrate the corrupt bastions of the West. When you arrive in West Berlin, go immediately to the British political advisor’s office. Demand to speak to Mr. Arnold, which is the workname of the head of your secret service station. If they try to persuade you he is in London or Bonn, reply that you know he arrived at Tempelhof from London this evening at five o’clock. While you’re about it, you will hand over your Pole to him. Are you already working for British Intelligence?”

  “No.”

  “You will be. You will also inform Mr. Arnold that the Polish boy is a plant, but he should not act on this information or he will compromise an excellent potential source. He will understand the logic of this instruction. Have you noticed how this country stinks?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Every filthy corner of it. Of cheap cigarettes, cheap sweat, cheap deodorant, and briquettes of compacted brown coal that gas you without heating you. We are stuck in the glue of state bureaucracy. Society begins at the rank of captain, every waiter and taxi driver is a despot. Have you slept with any women here?”

  “Not as far as I remember.”

  “Without first acclimatizing oneself, the experience is not to be recommended. And avoid the wine at all costs. The Hungarians poison us with something they call Bull’s Blood. It is considered a great delicacy, but I suspect it is a vengeance for suppressing their counterrevolutionary uprising in 1956. We have entered the Second Cold War. In the East we have Comrade Brezhnev and Afghanistan, in the West we have Pershing and cruise missiles. Kindly tell your Mr. Arnold to direct them at East Germany before anywhere else.”

  While Sasha talks this way, he unpacks his briefcase in quick order onto the conference table. In the last weeks Mundy has been given the same junk six times over and he’s being given it again now: one blurred picture book of the Bolshoi Ballet, one chrome statuette of a virile worker in baggy cap and plus-fours, one blue-and-white imitation Meissen pottery box with ill-fitting lid bound to the base with transparent tape. And one departure from the usual script: a sealed pack of unexposed thirty-five millimeter Kodak Tri-X film, the type Mundy uses for the camera that takes all the pictures he’s going to show Kate when he gets home.

  “These precious gifts are all for you, Teddy, with the heartfelt affection of your old friend. However, when you reach West Berlin they will be for Mr. Arnold. They contain among other things the terms and conditions of my recruitment by his organization. In the pottery box you will find walnuts. On no account attempt to eat these walnuts during your journey, not even if you are in the last stages of starvation. Pack the films with the rest of your camera gear. They are not for you to use, but to give to Mr. Arnold also. A summer Festival of Dance is to be held in Prague starting on the first of June. Does the British Council propose to send you?”

  “Not as far as I know.” The first of June, he remembers from another life, is six weeks away.

  “It will. Mr. Arnold must arrange for you to escort some British dancers. I shall be there also. Like you, I will have discovered a belated passion for cultural diplomacy. I shall work only with you, Teddy. I am what we call in the spy business a one-man dog, and you are my man for as long as I bark. I have informed Mr. Arnold that I trust nobody else. I am embarrassed to impose this condition on you, but you are a chauvinist at heart and you will enjoy serving your ridiculous country.”

  “What happens
if they find this stuff when we’re searched? It’ll lead straight back to you.”

  “The search of your acting company’s bus and effects will be intrusive but unrevealing. For this we may thank the heroic Jan.”

  Mundy has found his voice at last, or one like it. “Sasha, what are you doing? This is bloody crazy!”

  “After our dramatic encounter at tonight’s reception, the nature of our former relationship will become official knowledge to my masters. You enjoyed your day with Professor Wolfgang?”

  “I had too much on my mind.”

  “At Ilmenau, through my car window, you gave every impression of getting along swimmingly. The good Professor is very taken by you. He considers you an excellent subject for cultivation. I have warned him that you will not be an easy conquest. A sophisticated courtship will have to be mounted in order to obtain you and he has agreed to entrust it to me as your old friend and ideological mentor. In Prague, if I deem the moment right, I shall make the first pass. You will be reluctant and a little shocked. That is normal. You are Teddy, my student friend, still secretly critical of capitalist values perhaps, but fully integrated into the consumerist society. After a period of reflection, however, you will discover that the old rebellious fires still burn in you, and you will succumb to our blandishments. You are as usual broke?”

  “Well—you know—up against it.”

  In a dream, one does not have to explain that the combined salaries of a state-school teacher and a junior civil servant leave little to spare after hefty monthly payments to a mortgage company. But Sasha understands anyway.