Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  Would you do it all again tomorrow, Daddy, if the bugle sounded? Irrelevant. There isn’t a tomorrow. Not one like yesterday.

  He refills his glass and drinks to himself. Better to be a salamander and live in the flames. Very funny. So what happens when the fire goes out?

  Sasha will come back. He always does. Sasha’s the boomerang you can’t throw away. A couple more minutes and he’ll be banging on the door, telling me I’m an arsehole and kindly pour him another Scotch, and I’ll pour myself another while I’m about it.

  And Mundy does just that, not bothering to add water.

  And when we’ve had a belt or two, as dear old Jay Rourke would say, we’ll get down to the real business of celebrating our achievement: Cold War’s over, communism’s dead, and we were the boys who made it happen. There’ll be no more spies ever, and all the frightened people in the world can sleep peacefully in their beds at night because Sasha and Teddy made the world safe for them at last, so cheers, old boy, well done both of us and here’s to the salamander, and Mrs. Salamander, and all the little salamanders to come.

  And in the morning we’ll wake up with a god-awful hangover and think: What the fuck’s all this singing and rejoicing and clapping and honking, up and down the riverbank? And we’ll throw open those double windows and step onto the balcony and the cruise boats and barges will be covered in flags and sounding their sirens at us and the crowds will be waving and yelling, “Oh thank you, Sasha! Thank you, Teddy! That’s the first good sleep we’ve had since Our Dear Führer went to his reward and we owe it all to you two boys. Three cheers for Teddy and Sasha. Hip hip!”

  And cheers to you too.

  Mundy stands up a little too quickly for his head, but makes it to the door and hauls it open, but the corridor is empty. He goes to the top of the stairs and yells, “Sasha you arsehole, come back!” But instead of Sasha it’s an elderly night porter who appears, and guides him respectfully back to his suite. The door in the meantime has locked itself, but the night porter has a master key. Another retired spy, no doubt, thinks Mundy, handing him fifty marks. Watching over the world while it sleeps. Sleeping while it goes to the devil.

  11

  BELOW THEM at the Bavarian lakeside the merry-go-round is still belching out its honky-tonk and the Silesian matador is still crooning about amor. Now and then a surface-to-air rocket bursts ineffectually among the stars, and the surrounding mountains tremble to its red and gold. But there is no answering fire, no plume of black smoke as an enemy plane comes plunging to earth. Whoever they are shooting at has air supremacy. A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no airplane, Mundy hears Judith say in his ear. It’s been a long time since he has let Judith into his life, but with a whiskey in his hand and an attic ceiling over his head and Sasha’s crooked back not ten feet from him, it’s hard to control the memories swirling around.

  It’s Christmas evening in Berlin, he decides, except that no carols play, no church candles flicker on piles of stolen books. And Sasha is cooking, instead of a chunk of bullet-hard venison, Mundy’s favorite Wiener schnitzel from the shopping bag that he nursed so carefully up the spiral staircase. The attic apartment has rafters and bare brick walls and skylights, but that’s as far as the similarity goes. A modern kitchen of ceramic tile and brushed steel fills one corner of the room. An arched window looks onto the mountains.

  “Do you own this place, Sasha?”

  When did Sasha ever own anything? But as with any two friends reunited after more than a decade, their conversation has yet to rise above small talk.

  “No, Teddy. It has been obtained for us by certain friends of mine.”

  For us, Mundy notes.

  “That was considerate of them.”

  “They are considerate people.”

  “And rich.”

  “You are correct, actually. They are capitalists who are on the side of the oppressed.”

  “Are they the same people who own that smart Audi?”

  “It is a car they have provided.”

  “Well, hang on to them. We need them.”

  “Thank you, Teddy, I intend to.”

  “Are they also the people who told you where to find me?”

  “It is possible.”

  Mundy is hearing Sasha’s words, but what he is listening to is his voice. It is as intense as it ever was and as vigorous. But what it can never conceal is its excitement, which is what Mundy is hearing in it now. It’s the voice that bounced back from whichever genius he had been talking to last, to announce that they are about to reveal the social genesis of human knowledge. It’s Banquo’s voice when he stepped out of the shadows of a Weimar cellar and ordered me to pay close attention and keep my comments to a minimum.

  “So you are a contented man, Teddy,” he is saying briskly, while he busies himself at the stove. “You have a family, a car, and you are selling bullshit to the masses. Have you as usual married the lady of your choice?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “And you are not homesick for Heidelberg?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “You ran an English-language school there until six months ago, I believe.”

  “It was the last of a long line.” How the hell does he know this stuff?

  “What went wrong?”

  “What always went wrong. Grand opening. Flyers mailed to all the big firms. Full-page ads. Send us your tired and weary executives. Only problem was, the more students we had, the more money we lost. Didn’t somebody tell you?”

  “You had a dishonest partner, I believe. Egon.”

  “That’s right. Egon. Well done. Let’s hear about you, Sasha. Where are you living? Who’ve you got? What are you doing and who to? And why the hell have you and your friends been spying on me? I thought we’d given all that up.”

  A lift of the eyebrows and a pursing of the lips as Sasha selects one half of the question and pretends he hasn’t heard the other. “Thank you, Teddy, I am fully extended, I would say. My luck appears to have changed for the better.”

  “About time then. Itinerant radical lecturer in the hellholes of the world can’t have been a laugh a minute. What’s extending you?”

  Another no-answer.

  The table is laid for two. Fancy paper napkins. A bottle of burgundy on an arty wooden coaster. Sasha lights the candles. His hand is shaking the way he says it shook when it carried Mundy’s visa application to the Professor more than twenty years ago. The sight triggers a rush of protective tenderness in Mundy that he has sworn not to feel. He has sworn it in his mind to Zara, to Mustafa and to himself, and to the better life all three of them are leading. In a minute he will tell Sasha exactly that. If this is another of your great visions that we’re about to share, Sasha, the answer is no, no and no, in that order, he will say. After that they can have a natter about old times, shake hands and go their separate ways.

  “I propose that we drink sparingly, Teddy, if that is acceptable to you. It is possible we have a long night ahead of us,” says Sasha.

  The Wiener schnitzel, predictably, is undercooked. In his excitement, Sasha has not waited for the fat to heat.

  “But you received my letters, Teddy? Even if you failed to answer them.”

  “Indeed yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “I presume so.”

  “Did you read them?”

  “Naturally.”

  “My newspaper articles also?”

  “Stirring stuff. Admired them.”

  “But you still weren’t moved to reply.”

  “It seems not.”

  “Is this because we were not friends when we parted in Bad Godesberg?”

  “Oh, we were probably friends. Just a bit tired. Spying takes the stuffing out of you, I always say,” Mundy replies, and gives a bark of laughter because Sasha doesn’t always recognize a joke, and anyway it’s not a very good one.

  “I drink to you, Teddy. I salute you in these wonderful, terrible times.”
/>   “And to you, old boy.”

  “All these years, all over the world, wherever I was, teaching or being thrown out, or locked up, you have been my secret confessor. Without you—there were places, times—I could have believed that the struggle was hopeless.”

  “So you wrote. Very kind of you. Not at all necessary,” Mundy replies gruffly.

  “And you enjoyed the recent little war, I hope?”

  “Every minute. Couldn’t get enough of it.”

  “The most necessary in history, the most moral and Christian—and the most unequal?”

  “It made me sick,” says Mundy.

  “And still does, I hear.”

  “Yes. Still does.”

  So this is what he’s come about, thinks Mundy. He knows I’ve been loosing off about the war and wants to enroll me in some campaign. Well, if he’s wondering what got into me, join the club. I was asleep. Shelved. Yesterday’s spy boring the ears off the English-Spokens at the Linderhof on an overdraft. My white cliffs of Dover lost in the fog, when suddenly —

  Suddenly he’s as mad as a hornet, pasting the walls of Zara’s flat with press clippings, telephoning people he hardly knows, fuming at the television set, besieging our beloved British newspapers with letters they don’t bloody read, let alone print.

  So what had happened to him that hadn’t happened before?

  He’d weathered Thatcher and the Falklands. He’d watched British schoolchildren display the Churchillian spirit, bawl “Rule Britannia!” at hastily commissioned cruise liners and decrepit naval destroyers with the mothballs still rattling inside them sailing away to free the Falklands. He’d been ordered by our Leaderene to rejoice at the sinking of the Belgrano. He’d nearly vomited. He was case-hardened.

  As a tender schoolboy, aged nine, he had shared the Major’s delirium at the sight of our gallant British forces liberating the imperiled Suez Canal—only to see it remain firmly in the hands of its rightful owners, and to discover that the government, then as now, had lied in its teeth about its reasons for taking us to war.

  The lies and hypocrisies of politicians are nothing new to him. They never were. So why now? Why leap on his soapbox and rant uselessly against the same things that have been going on since the first politician on earth lisped his first hypocrisy, lied, wrapped himself in the flag, put on God’s armor and said he never said it in the first place?

  It’s old man’s impatience coming on early. It’s anger at seeing the show come round again one too many times.

  It’s the knowledge that the wise fools of history have turned us over once too often, and he’s damned if they’ll do it again.

  It’s the discovery, in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of empire, the dismally ill-managed country he’d done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its fiefdom.

  And which nations are Ted Mundy’s most vociferous allies when he airs these futile opinions to anybody civil enough to listen to him?

  The beastly Germans.

  The perfidious French.

  The barbaric Russians.

  Three nations who have the guts and good sense to say no, and may they long continue.

  In his shining bright anger Mundy redux writes to Kate his ex-wife—now, for her sins, tipped for high office in the next government. Perhaps he’s not as diplomatic as he should be, but he was married to the woman, for heaven’s sake, we have a child in common. Her four-line typed reply, signed in her absence, advises him that she has taken note of his position.

  Well, it’s a hell of a long time since she did that.

  Mundy redux next appeals to his son, Jake, after several false starts now in his final year at Bristol, urging him to get his fellow students onto the streets, put up barricades, boycott lectures, occupy the vice chancellor’s lodgings. But Jake relates better to Philip these days, and has little time for menopausal offshore fathers who haven’t got e-mail. A handwritten reply is beyond his powers.

  So Mundy redux marches, the way he used to march with Ilse, or with Sasha in Berlin, but with a conviction he never felt before because convictions until now were essentially what he borrowed from other people. It is a little surprising, of course, that the beastly Germans should bother to demonstrate against a war that their government condemns but, bless them, they do. Perhaps they know better than most just how easy it is to seduce a gullible electorate.

  And Mundy redux marches with them, and Zara and Mustafa come, and so do their friends, and so do the ghosts of Rani, Ahmed, Omar and Ali, and the Kreuzberg cricket club. Mustafa’s school marches and Mundy redux marches with the school.

  The mosque marches and the police march alongside, and it’s a new thing for Mundy redux to meet policemen who don’t want war any more than the marchers do. After the march he goes with Mustafa and Zara to the mosque, and after the mosque they sit sadly over coffee in a corner of Zara’s kebab house with the enlightened young imam who preaches the value of study as opposed to dangerous ideology.

  It’s about becoming real after too many years of pretending, Mundy decides. It’s about putting the brakes on human self-deception, starting with my own.

  “Your little prime minister is not the American president’s poodle, he is his blind dog, I hear,” Sasha is saying, as if he has been looking in on Mundy’s thoughts. “Supported by Britain’s servile corporate media, he has given spurious respectability to American imperialism. Some even say that it was you British who led the dance.”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” says Mundy, sitting upright as he recalls something he has read somewhere, probably in the Süddeutsche, and repeated.

  “And since the so-called coalition, by making an unprovoked attack on Iraq, has already broken half the rules in the international law books, and intends by its continued occupation of Iraq to break the other half, should we not be insisting that the principal instigators be forced to account for themselves before the International Courts of Justice in The Hague?”

  “Good idea,” Mundy agrees dully. If not exactly his own, it’s certainly one he has lifted, and used to stunning effect.

  “Despite the fact, of course, that America has unilaterally declared itself immune from the jurisdiction of such courts.”

  “Despite it.” He has made the same point to a packed meeting at the Poltergeist just two weeks ago, after something he heard on the BBC World Service.

  And suddenly that does it for Mundy. He’s had enough and not just of this evening. He’s sick to death of sly games. He doesn’t know what Sasha’s up to, but he knows he doesn’t like it nor the superior grin that goes with it. And he’s about to say some of this and perhaps all of it when Sasha barges in ahead of him. Their faces are very close and lit by the Christmas candles from the Berlin attic. Sasha has grasped him by the forearm. The dark eyes, for all their pain and desperation, radiate an almost pathetic enthusiasm.

  “Teddy.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “I have only one question for you. I already know the answer but I must hear it from you personally, I have promised. Are you ready?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Do you believe your own rhetoric? Or is all your huffing and puffing some kind of self-protection? You are an Englishman here in Germany. Perhaps you feel you must strike an attitude, speak louder than you feel? It would be understandable. I don’t criticize you, but I’m asking you.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sasha! You wear the beret. You drag me out here. You smirk at me like Mata Hari. You throw my own words in my face. Now will you kindly lay your egg and tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “Teddy, please answer me. I bring unbelievable hope. For both of us. An opportunity so great you cannot imagine. For you, immediate release from your material worries. Your role as teacher restored, your love of the multicultural community made real. For me—a
platform greater than I ever dreamed of. And nothing less than a hand in the making of a new world. I think you are going to sleep.”

  “No, Sasha. Just listening without looking at you. Sometimes it’s a better way.”

  “This is a war of lies. Do you agree? Our politicians lie to the press, they see their lies printed and call them public opinion.”

  “Are these your words or something I stole?”

  “They are the words of a great man. Do you agree with them? Yes or no.”

  “All right: Yes.”

  “By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war. These are also his words. Do you agree with them? Please, Teddy! Yes or no?”

  “Yes again. So what?”

  “The process is incremental. As more lies become necessary, more wars are needed to justify them. Do you still agree?”

  With the anger rising inside him Mundy waits with seeming impassivity for the next salvo.

  “The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. Anyone who does that should be hounded out of office for all time. Am I being too strident for you, Teddy, or do you agree with this sentiment also?”

  Mundy finally explodes. “Yes, yes, yes. All right? I agree with my rhetoric, your rhetoric and your latest guru’s rhetoric. Unfortunately, as we have learned to our cost, rhetoric doesn’t stop wars. So goodnight and thank you, and let me go home.”

  “Teddy. Twenty miles from here sits a man who has pledged his life and fortune to the Arms Race for Truth. That expression also is his own. To listen to him is to be inspired. Nothing you hear will alarm you, nothing will be to your peril or your disadvantage. It is possible he will make a proposal to you. An amazing, unique, completely electrifying proposal. If you accept it, and he accepts you, you will come away with your life immeasurably enriched, spiritually and materially. You will enjoy a renaissance as never before. If no agreement is achieved, I have given him my word that his secret will be safe with you.” The grip on Mundy’s forearm tightens. “Do you want me to flatter you, Teddy? Is that what you are waiting for? Do you want me to woo you the way our beloved Professor wooed you? Hours of foreplay over expensive meals? Those times are over too.”