Nobody gets out. Like Mundy, the men are waiting. One has his head in a book. The other is talking on his cellphone. To Dimitri, Richard? Or to Rourke? The van has a Viennese registration. Mundy makes a mental note of it. You’re a proper wizard for the memorizing, Ted, says a sycophantic Edinburgh instructor, I don’t know how you do it, I’m sure. Simple, old boy, nothing else in my head. A sleek Mercedes limousine drives past. Black woman driver, white male passenger, the city flag flying from the wing, police motorcyclist riding point. Some city bigwig has his residence just up the road. The limousine is followed by a humble station taxi, the property of one Werner Knau, who likes to inscribe his name in gold Gothic lettering. A rear door opens, Sasha’s left sneaker emerges, then the leg. A pianist’s fingers enfold the door pillar. Now the whole man has hauled himself out, his Party briefcase after him. He stands but, unlike Mundy, does not have to beat his pockets to discover which one has the money in it. He has his little leather coin purse, and he is methodically counting out the change from one palm to the other, just as he counted it in Berlin, or Weimar, or Prague, or Gdansk and any of the cities where East met West in a spirit of peace, friendship and cooperation. He pays the taxi and exchanges a couple of words with the men in the van while he points imperiously up the brick path.
Forsaking his post at the bay window, Mundy makes his way downstairs to meet him. It’s our first day again, he is thinking. Do I embrace him, Judas-style? Or shake his hand, German-style? Or go all English and do nothing?
He opens the front door. Sasha is hobbling jubilantly up the path towards him. The evening sun lights one side of his face. Mundy is standing on the step. Sasha arrives three feet below him. He drops his briefcase and flings out his arms, but to embrace the whole world rather than just Mundy.
“Teddy, my God,” he cries. “Your house, this place—we are fantastic! Now Heidelberg is famous for three things: Martin Luther, Max Weber and Teddy Mundy! You can stay in Heidelberg tonight? We can talk—drink—play? You have time?”
“How about you?” says Mundy.
“Tomorrow I go to Hamburg to interview certain important academics, each one separately. Tonight I am an irresponsible Heidelberg student. I shall get drunk, challenge you to a duel, sing ‘Wer soll das bezahlen’ and land up in the students’ cells.” He has put his hand on Mundy’s shoulder and is about to use him as a walking stick when he dives away again to extract something from his briefcase. “Here. For you. A gift from decadent Paris. You are not the only one who gets a good salary these days. Do we have a refrigerator? Power? We have everything, I am sure.”
He shoves it into Mundy’s hands: a bottle of vintage champagne, the best there is. But Sasha is not interested in Mundy’s thanks. He is pushing past him into the hall to make his first inspection of their new domain while Mundy hates himself for the dark suspicions that Rourke planted in his head.
First they must stand in the hall while Sasha feasts his gaze on the molded ceilings, the grand staircase and mahogany rotunda of curved doors leading to the separate classrooms. And Mundy must watch how the diamonds of color from the great art nouveau skylight make a Pierrot of him, but a happy one.
Gradually they proceed—by magnetic attraction evidently, since Mundy has not pointed him the way, but perhaps the sinister surveyors have—to the old library, formerly divided into cubicles but now restored to its full glory, with new battens for adjustable bookshelves already fitted to the walls. Shoulders pressed back, the Schiller head revolving in marvel, Sasha attains by stages the far end of the room and unlocks a glazed door onto a courtyard.
“But good heavens, Teddy! I thought you were a master at this kind of thing! We can add this whole area to our library! Throw a glass roof over, a couple of steel pillars and you can accommodate another thousand volumes. Expand now, it’s no problem. Later, it will be a nightmare.”
“Reason number one: books don’t like glass. Reason number two: you’re standing in the new kitchen.”
On every floor, Sasha’s satisfaction grows. The top floor pleases him particularly.
“You propose to live up here, Teddy? With your family, did I hear?”
Who from? Mundy wonders. “Maybe. It’s an option. We’re thinking it over.”
“Is it absolutely necessary for you to be resident?”
“Probably not. Have to see how the project works.”
Sasha puts on his Party voice. “I think you are actually being a little bit self-indulgent, Teddy. If we knock out the partition walls we can make a mattress dormitory and accommodate twenty poor students at least. We did it in Berlin, why not here? It’s important you don’t give the accidental impression of being a landlord. Dimitri is most concerned we do not create the semblance of an authoritarian structure. We must present a contrast to the university. Not imitate it.”
Well, let’s hope the walls heard that too, Mundy is thinking. He is spared a reply by halloos from the stairwell. The delivery men have fork-lifted their load as far as the front door and need to know where they should put it next.
“Why, in the library, obviously!” Sasha shouts gaily down the stairs. “Where else do books go, for God’s sake? These fellows are ridiculous.”
But Mundy and the foreman have already agreed that the best place for the books is the hall: make an island at the center and cover it with dust-sheets until the library’s finished. The delivery men are venerable and wear white coats. To Mundy they look more like cricket umpires than removal men. Undeterred, Sasha launches on a ponderous description of his wares.
“You will discover on inspection that each box carries a plastic envelope tacked to its lid, Teddy. The envelope contains a list of titles inside the box and the initials of the packer. The volumes are assembled in alphabetical order by author. You will see that each box is numbered in the sequence in which it will eventually be opened. Are you listening to me, Teddy? Sometimes I fear for your concentration span.”
“I’m getting the idea.”
“We are speaking in toto of a core library of four thousand volumes. Books that we anticipate will be heavily in demand are supplied in multiples. Clearly no box must be opened until all building work has ceased. Books that are placed prematurely on their shelves will gather dust and will only have to be removed and cleaned at a cost of valuable time and money.”
Mundy promises to give the matter his close attention. While the men cart the boxes into the hall, he guides Sasha to the garden, where he can do no harm, and sits him on an old swing seat.
“So what kept you in Paris?” he asks casually, thinking that whatever it was hasn’t hurt his self-esteem.
The question pleases Sasha. “I had a stroke of good fortune, actually, Teddy. A certain lady whose acquaintance I had enjoyed in Beirut happened to be passing through the city, and we were able to have what diplomats I believe describe as a full and frank exchange of views.”
“In bed?”
“Teddy, I think you are being indelicate”—with a smirk of satisfaction.
“What does she do for a living?”
“She is formerly an aid worker, now a freelance journalist.”
“Of the radical variety?”
“Of the truthful variety.”
“Lebanese?”
“French, actually.”
“Is she working for Dimitri?”
Sasha pulls in his chin to indicate his disapproval.
So yes, she is working for Dimitri, thinks Mundy.
At the same moment they hear the van’s engine start. Mundy jumps to his feet but he’s too late. The umpires have departed, leaving nothing to sign and nobody to tip.
Sasha is delighted by Teddy’s great idea. After his exertions in Paris, an outing is just what he needs. It’s what Mundy needs too, but for different reasons. He wants the woods outside Prague on the day you told me the Herr Pastor was a Stasi spy. He wants the bucolic intimacy of shared confession. He has borrowed the bicycles from old Stefan. The small one, Stefan’s own, is for Sasha, and
a big one, which belongs to Stefan’s hulk of a son, for Mundy. He has bought sausage and hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and cheese and cold chicken, and pumpernickel bread which he detests and Sasha loves. He has bought whiskey and a bottle of burgundy to help loosen Sasha’s tongue and, no doubt, his own. They have agreed by now that Mundy will keep Sasha’s bottle of champagne for Opening Day.
“But do you know where we are going, my God?” Sasha asks in fake alarm as they set off.
“Of course I do, idiot. What do you think I’ve been doing all day?”
Should I pick a row with him? Yell at him? Mundy has never conducted an interrogation before and friends are certainly the wrong people to begin with. Think Edinburgh, he tells himself. The best interrogations are the ones the suspect doesn’t know are happening. He has marked down a secluded spot a few miles out of town. Unlike Prague it has no hummocks to sit on, but it’s a quiet, leafy place set low on the riverbank, and impossible to overlook. It has a bench, and willow trees trailing in the swift clear water of the Neckar.
Mundy is being mother, pouring the wine, setting out the picnic. Sasha, spurning the bench, is stretched flat on his back with his bad leg tossed over his good one. He has unbuttoned his shirt and bared his skinny chest to the sun. On the river, earnest oarsmen wrench themselves a path against the current.
“So what else have you been up to in Paris apart from choosing books and sleeping with journalists?” Mundy inquires, by way of an opening bid.
“I would say I have been mustering the troops, Teddy,” Sasha replies airily. “Has your Zara been beating you again?”—Mundy’s black eye not being fully recovered.
“Young troops, old troops? People you know from other lives? What sort of troops?”
“Our lecturers, of course. Our visiting lecturers and intellectuals. What troops do you suppose? The best unbought minds in every major discipline.”
“Where do you dig them up?”
“In principle from all the world. In practice, from so-called Old Europe. That is Dimitri’s preference.”
“Russia?”
“We try. Any country that was not a member of the Coalition of the Willing has pride of place in Dimitri’s selections. In Russia unfortunately it is difficult to recruit from the uncompromised left.”
“So the lecturers are Dimitri’s selections, not yours.”
“They are the result of a consensus. Certain names are put forward—many by myself, if I am immodest—a list is agreed, and placed before Dimitri.”
“Any Arabs on the list?”
“It will happen. Not at once, but in the second or third stage. Dimitri is a born general. We declare our limited aim, we achieve it, we regroup, we advance on the next aim.”
“Was he present with you in Paris?”
“Teddy, I think you are being a little indiscreet actually.”
“Why?”
“Please?”
Mundy hesitates. A barge slips by, its washing flapping in the evening sun. A green sports car is lashed to its forward deck.
“Well, don’t you feel it’s all getting a little bit damned stupid—all this secrecy about what everybody’s up to?” he suggests awkwardly. “I mean we’re not mounting a putsch, are we? Just creating a forum.”
“I think you are being unrealistic, Teddy, as usual. Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today’s taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. You know the words of the American thinker Dresden James?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“‘When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.’ Dimitri will display this quotation in the entrance hall to every one of our colleges. It was in his mind to name the project the University of Raving Lunatics. Only prudence restrained him.”
Mundy passes Sasha a leg of chicken but Sasha, lying on his back, has his eyes closed, so Mundy waves it in front of his face until he smiles and opens them. Not in Berlin, not in Weimar, not in any of their other trysting places, has Mundy witnessed such contentment in his friend’s face.
“Are you going to see her again?” he asks, struggling for small talk.
“It is questionable, Teddy. She is at a dangerous age and showed distinct signs of attachment.”
No change there then, Mundy notes a little sourly, momentarily recalling Judith. He tries again.
“Sasha, on your great safari—during those missing years when you were writing to me —”
“They are not missing, Teddy. They were my Lehrjahre, my years of instruction. For this.”
“During those years, did you find yourself”—he was going to say riding with, but that was Rourke’s expression—“did you rub shoulders with the far-out people—the ones who advocated armed resistance, indiscriminately—terror, if you like?”
“Frequently.”
“Were you influenced—persuaded by them?”
“What do you mean?”
“We used to talk about it. You and I. Judith did. Karen did. It was all the rage at the Republican Club. How far is it permissible to go? With the drama of the act, and so forth. What’s a fair price, in what circumstances? When can the shooting legitimately begin? You used to say Ulrike and her kind were giving anarchism a bad name. I wondered whether anything had changed your mind.”
“You wish for my views on this subject—here, today—while we drink this excellent burgundy? I think you are being a little Teutonic, Teddy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“If I were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, I would shoot every occupying Israeli soldier in sight. However, I am a poor shot and have no gun, so my chances of success would be small. A planned act of violence against unarmed civilians is in no case permissible. The fact that you and your American masters drop illegal cluster bombs and other repulsive weaponry on an unprotected Iraqi population consisting sixty percent of children does not alter my position. Is this what you are asking me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
It appears that the interrogation has turned itself round. It is Sasha not Mundy who is keeping his anger at bay, and Sasha who is sitting bolt upright on the grass, glowering at him, demanding an answer.
“It just occurred to me that we might have different agendas, that’s all.”
“In what sense different? What are you talking about, Teddy?”
“Whether you and Dimitri are looking to do more than just challenge the prevailing cant—or challenge it by different means.”
“Such as what?”
“Raising a storm of some kind. Sending out a signal to the real forces of anti-Americanism.” Rourke’s words are winging back to him and this time he is reduced to using them. “Extending the hand of friendship to the perpetrators of the most sensational act of anticapitalism since the invention of gunpowder.”
For a while Sasha appears to doubt his hearing. He inclines his head in question, and puts on his Party frown. With his small hands spread before him in a gesture to command silence, he consults the objects around him for enlightenment: the nearly empty bottle of burgundy, the hard-boiled eggs, cheese, pumpernickel bread. Only then does he lift his dark brown eyes, and Mundy to his alarm sees that they are brimming with tears.
“Who the fuck have you been talking to, Teddy?”
“Am I right, Sasha?”
“You are so wrong it makes me sick. Go and be an Englishman. Fight your own fucking wars.”
Sasha has dragged himself to his feet and is buttoning up his shirt. His breath is coming in retches. He must have an ulcer or some bloody thing. It’s the Dreesen Hotel all over again, Mundy t
hinks, as Sasha peers round him for his jacket. It’s the same bloody river going by, and the same impossible gap between us. In a minute he’s going to ride into the sunset and leave me looking like the unfeeling oaf I always was.
“It’s my bloody bank, Sasha,” he pleads. “For Christ’s sake, sit down and drink some wine and stop behaving like a drama queen. We’ve got a problem. I need your help.”
Which is how he planned to play it if he didn’t extract the sobbing confession he was counting on.
Sasha is sitting again but he has drawn up his knees and locked his hands round them and the knuckles are white with tension. His jaw is set the way it used to be when he talked about the Herr Pastor, and he refuses to take his eyes off Mundy’s face whatever Mundy does. The food and wine have ceased to interest him. All that matters to him are Mundy’s words and Mundy’s face while he speaks them. And this scrutiny would be about as much as Mundy could take, if it weren’t for the hard school he’d been through, and his years of glib lying to the Professor and his acolytes.
“My bank just can’t get over where the money came from,” Mundy complains, wiping his wrist across his brow in agitation. “They have all these regulations about unexpected sums of money these days. Anything over five thousand euros sets their alarm bells ringing.”
He is approaching the fiction, but with fact at his elbow.
“They’ve backtracked on the money orders and don’t like what they’ve found. They’re thinking of going to the authorities.”
“Which authorities?”
“The usual, I suppose. How should I know?” He bends the truth a little further. In a minute it’s going to snap. “They had an extra man there. He said he was from head office. He went on asking me who was behind the payments. As if they were criminal somehow. I said what Dimitri’s people had told me to say, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He kept complaining that I hadn’t anything to show them—no contract, no correspondence. I couldn’t even tell him the name of my benefactor. Just half a million dollars from some pretty odd places, recycled through big-name banks.”
Absolute Friends Page 34