A MOOD OF MUTED festivity informs Mundy’s forty-ninth mission behind the Iron Curtain, and all Bedford Square shares it.
“One more trip, Ted, and you’ll have notched up the half-ton,” says Paul, the head dispatcher, as he makes a last check of Mundy’s pockets, suitcase, wallet and diary for the nightmare clue that could spell the end of ten years of alpha double plus material. “And after that, you won’t want to know us, will you?”
At the door, the girls give him a kiss and Amory, as usual, tells him to watch his arse.
It’s a beautiful day, six in the morning. Spring is in the air and so is Gorbachev’s perestroika. The marionette dictatorships of Eastern Europe are under serious threat at last. A few months earlier in New York, Gorbachev unilaterally volunteered massive tank and troop withdrawals, and repudiated the Brezhnev doctrine of intervention in the affairs of client states. The old oligarchs, he was telling them, are on their own. Though on the surface relations between Washington and the Evil Empire remain as frozen as ever, the stirrings beneath the ice are enough to persuade the wishful that one day, maybe not in our generation but the next, sanity will break through. And Mundy, as he sets course for Victoria station air terminal on his way to the International Convention of Medieval Archaeologists in Gdansk, is one of the wishful. Maybe Sasha and I have played a part, he thinks. Maybe we’ve helped the thaw. Amory says they have, but then he would.
True, Mundy has the usual predeparture butterflies—when didn’t he? Amory and the sages of Edinburgh will never let him forget that the longer an operation runs, the hairier it gets and the more there is to lose. But as soon as he starts to compare his lot with Sasha’s—which he does every time he embarks on one of these journeys, and on this day particularly—he sees himself as the spoiled dilettante and Sasha as the real thing.
Who briefs Sasha? he argues. Nobody does. Who grooms him, dispatches him? Nobody. Who dresses the shot for him when he steals his photographs? Nobody. The finger shadows and the camera-shake and the misfires happen in the heat of battle while he waits for the footfall in the corridor that could lead straight to a bullet in the back of the head.
And look at the sheer distance the man’s covered, the miles and miles of impossible achievement! How in heaven’s name did he ever get from there to here? How does a lame East German child-refugee turned West German anarchist recross the border and emerge as the improbable provider of information vital to the national security—theirs as well as ours—all in the space of a few years?
All right, thanks to the Herr Pastor, the Professor adopted him as his favorite son, and for love of his old chum gave him a head start in the family business. But that doesn’t include a free pass to roam the Stasi’s archives at will, cherry-picking whatever he reckons will do most damage to his employers.
Mundy’s British delegation of medievalists is traveling independently to Gdansk. Tomorrow he will field them as they land. Sipping his Bloody Mary in the departure lounge, or seated in the half-empty plane and staring out of the window at a white nothing, he pieces together as much as he knows of the pilgrim Sasha’s progress over the last decade. The picture is far from complete. Sasha does not take gracefully to being questioned about how he obtains his information. Perhaps his prickliness conceals a certain shame.
In the beginning was the anger. That much Sasha admits.
And the source of Sasha’s anger was the revelation that he had been lured across the border under false pretenses and had been hating his father for the wrong reasons.
And after the anger, hatred.
Hatred of the malodorous and heartless bureaucracy that by its size and weight squeezed the very breath out of its citizenry in the name of democracy.
Of the police state that posed as the cradle of liberty. Of its craven subservience to Moscow.
Above all, of its systematic, wholesale betrayal of the sacred socialist dream.
And with the anger and the hatred came the cunning. Sasha was a prisoner in a bourgeois fascist state posing as a workers’ paradise. To prevail against his captors he would use their own perfidious weapons. He would dissemble, lie and ingratiate himself. To strike at the very source of their unlawful power, he would steal what they loved most: their secrets.
His plan at the outset was modest.
He would bear witness.
He would steal their secrets and make of them an archive for posterity.
Working entirely alone, he would make sure that the lies, deceptions and hypocrisies that were being perpetrated all round him by the Nazis in red shirts could not be hidden from later generations.
And that was all. The sole beneficiaries of his endeavors would be future German historians. That was the limit of his ambition.
The only question was how to achieve it. For enlightenment he availed himself of the Stasi library and consulted the leading authorities on guerrilla warfare. To float on the enemy’s current . . . to conceal yourself among his hordes . . . to use the enemy’s weight to bring him down.
Following his incarceration in the White Hotel, Sasha passed weeks of unlikely recuperation lounging around the Professor’s house in Potsdam, walking the Professor’s German shepherds in the People’s Park, weeding the Professor’s flowerbeds, chauffeuring his wife when she went shopping. For yes, the Professor, who was not after all homosexual, possessed a wife, a veritable dragon of a wife, whose single merit in Sasha’s eyes was that she detested her husband.
But not even she can restrain the Professor from exercising his self-appointed role of Sasha’s patron, power broker and protector. If Sasha promised to behave himself like a true comrade—the Professor’s words—and guarded his tongue, and was respectful at all times to other highly placed protectors of the state, the Professor would undertake to guide his footsteps to the light. For the Professor—it is a point he is never tired of repeating—loved Sasha’s father like a brother, and possessed no son of his own.
And Sasha gritted his teeth and promised. He behaved himself. He took other wives shopping as well as the Professor’s. He carried their shopping up to their apartments for them, and sometimes all the way into the bedroom. Sasha never boasted about his conquests. Discretion was his watchword. But like a bartered bride, he put a metaphorical handkerchief in his mouth, and did not cry out in his repugnance. In the People’s Paradise, compliant silence was everything.
“Did you get any fun out of it, or was it all strictly business?” Mundy inquires, as the two of them stroll in one of Leningrad’s parks.
Sasha rounds on him in fury. “Go down to the Smolny docks, please, Teddy,” he snaps, flinging an arm towards the bleak gray outlines of ships and cranes. “Pick up a ten-ruble whore, and ask her whether it’s fun or strictly business.”
Under the Professor’s auspices, Sasha the favored son acquired a tiny one-room apartment all his own, and was admitted to the lowest rungs of the Stasi’s ladder of beings. By the time of his initiation he had mastered, as best his crabby body allowed, the official Party walk. With it went the official Party expression—a nonlook, delivered with the chin raised, to the pavement fifteen yards ahead of him. He wore it as he wheeled the coffee trolley down the disinfected corridors of the Professor’s linoleum empire, and set china cups on the desks of state protectors too elevated to acknowledge his existence.
And just occasionally, when Sasha held open the door of a limousine for a great protector, or delivered a package to a comrade’s sumptuous villa, a hand would grasp his arm confidingly and a voice would murmur, “Welcome home, Sasha. Your father was a great man.”
Such words were balm to his ears. They told him he was one of them, and refueled the fires of his secret anger.
Did Sasha ever advance inside the Stasi? Mundy used to wonder. And if he did, to what rank, office, and when?
It is a question that after all these years Sasha still brushes irritably aside. And when London’s analysts from time to time dig out their Stasi orders of battle in search of him, his name does not feature among the distinguished section heads, nor even in the lowest categories of archivist or clerk.
“Promotion, Teddy, I would say, is in inverse proportion to knowledge,” he pontificates. “The butler knows more than the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor knows more than the Queen. I know more than all of them.”
Sasha does not advance, he entrenches, which in a spy is probably a better way to go. Since his aim is not power but knowledge, he devotes himself to the systematic acquisition of menial responsibilities, keys, combination numbers and protectors’ wives. Put together, they make a traitor’s kingdom. What Mundy Two pretends to do in the virtual world, Sasha does in the real one.
A secure storeroom is to be established for files that are out of action but not yet officially dead? But of course, Comrade Counselor! Yours to command, Comrade Counselor! Three bags full, Comrade Counselor!
An immediate destruction program is to be implemented for certain sensitive material that should have been got rid of months ago? No problem, Comrade Counselor! Sasha will give up his free weekend so that state protectors burdened with heavier responsibilities than his own may take their well-deserved ease.
The Frau Oberst is expecting an important visitor from Moscow and has nobody to mow her lawn for her? The Frau Oberst’s grass need not wait another minute. Sasha is standing brushed and shiny on her doorstep with a mower and an able-bodied serf!
Yet how can all this take place, Mundy asks himself repeatedly over the years, in such an immense, all-powerful and vigilant state security system as the Stasi? Is not the Stasi a model of legendary Prussian efficiency, of the sort that accounts for every ball bearing, stub of pencil and gold tooth?
Under London’s promptings, the long-suffering Mundy has put the question to Sasha in a dozen different ways, and always received the same answer: in a mammoth bureaucracy obsessed with its own secrecy, the fault lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from the top, stand at the bottom and look up.
Sasha’s entrenchment quickly yielded unexpected prizes. One of the earliest was an old safe, locked and apparently disused, that stood inside the antechamber to the office of the Professor’s prodigiously overweight female first assistant, a Sasha conquest. Its only perceptible function was to act as a table for a vase of plastic flowers with which she brightened her drab surroundings. She said the safe had long been empty and, when Sasha accidentally on purpose banged his coffee trolley into it, it rang reassuringly hollow. Undertaking a discreet search of the sump of her enormous handbag one night, he came upon an orphan key with a label on it. The safe became his treasure chest, the deniable storehouse for his expanding crock of gold.
In the absence of a fellow underling on holiday, Sasha was given custody of a storeroom full of obsolete operational equipment awaiting shipment to a Third World ally in the common struggle against the imperialist enemy. By the time the colleague returned, Sasha was unofficial owner of a subminiature camera, a user’s handbook and two family-sized cartons of subminiature film cartridges. Henceforth, instead of attempting to smuggle his stolen documents out of the building, Sasha could photograph them and then destroy them or, if needful, return them to their rightful homes. Smuggling out subminiature film cartridges presented no problem unless he was intimately searched. By tacit edict, the Professor’s chosen son is not subjected to this indignity.
“Any qualms I had about the life expectation of my undeveloped films were put to rest by the handbook,” Sasha recalls drily. “First I should seal the cartridges in a condom, then I should bury the condom in a tub of ice cream. Comrades operating in conditions where no refrigerators, ice cream, electricity or condoms are available should presumably consult a different handbook.”
For his memoranda of conversations overheard, he availed himself of the same technique.
“I committed my thoughts to paper in the comfort of my apartment. I photographed the paper with my thirty-five millimeter domestic camera. I then burned the paper and added the undeveloped film to my collection.”
Then came a golden Friday evening when Sasha was going about his weekly chore of logging visa applications from citizens of nonsocialist countries who wished to enter the GDR on official business. Staring up at him were the unmistakable features of Mundy, Edward Arthur, born Lahore, Pakistan, husband of Kate née Andrews, occupation British Council traveling representative. And attached to it, the information thrown up by Stasi Central Records:
1968-69: member Oxford University Socialist Club and Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR, peace activist, various marches . . . while a student of the Free University of Berlin (West) engaged in anticapitalist, pro-peace demonstrations . . . suffered severe beating at hands of West Berlin police . . . later deported from West Berlin for riotous and anarchistic tendencies (West Berlin police report, source CESAR).
Sasha’s breathless account of what he did next will resound in Mundy’s memory forevermore. They are crouched in a bar in Dresden during a conference of international agrarians.
“At the sight of your not very beautiful face, Teddy, I experienced a revelation comparable to that of Archimedes. My undeveloped films need not after all spend a thousand years frozen into condoms. On the Monday morning when I took your visa application to the Professor, my hand was shaking. The Professor observed this. How could he not? It had been shaking all weekend. ‘Sasha,’ he asked me. ‘Why is your hand shaking?’
“‘Comrade Professor,’ I replied, ‘on Friday evening providence delivered me the opportunity I have been dreaming of. With your wise help I believe I am at last able to repay the trust you have invested in me, and assume an active role in the struggle against those who wish to frustrate the advance of socialism. I beg you, comrade: Please, as my patron, as the lifelong counselor and friend of my heroic father, grant me this chance to prove that I am worthy of him. The Englishman Mundy is an incurable bourgeois but he cares for the human condition and makes radical if incorrect perceptions, as his record shows. If you allow me to develop him aggressively under your incomparable guidance, I swear you will not be disappointed.’”
“And you didn’t mind?” Mundy asks diffidently.
“Mind what?”—Sasha, combative as ever.
“Well—that I was going to be passing your information to the hated capitalists of the West?”
“You are being ridiculous, Teddy. We must fight all evil where we find it. One evil does not justify another, or negate another. As I told you already, if I could also spy on America, I would happily do so.”
The stewardess is telling Mundy to fasten his seat belt. The plane is about to land at Gdansk for his forty-ninth meeting with his secret sharer.
Ted Mundy is these days a seasoned conference animal. Drop him blindfolded into any people-packed exhibition tent or congress hall on the East European circuit, give him a few seconds to sniff the tobacco fumes and deodorant and listen to the babble, and he could tell you to the hour which day it was in the five-day rhythm, who of the usual tribe of cultural minders and officials from which countries had shown up, and whether a joint closing statement was likely to paper over the cracks, or were we going to be looking at another bunch of dissenting minority reports and snide speeches at the farewell dinner?
An important variable is the state of hostilities in the Cold War. If the political atmosphere is tense, delegates will be hunting anxiously for common ground. If relaxed, cathartic verbal mudslinging is likely to break out, resolving itself in frenzied sexual couplings between adversaries who an hour earlier were threatening to tear each other to pieces.
But tonight, the third of the Gdansk Medieval Archaeologists’ get-togethers, the atmosphere is unlike any he has ever known: rascally, joyous, rebellious and end of term. The conference hotel is a many-gabled Edwardian pile set among sand dunes on the Baltic shore. On the front steps, under the eyes of powerless policemen, students are pressing samizdats on arriving delegates. The bar is a glass conservatory that runs along the seaward side. If Mundy looks between the talking heads, he can see the sea’s black horizon and the lights of distant ships. The medievalists to his surprise have turned out to be a sparky lot. Their Polish hosts are delirious with their own irreverence, and the glorious names of Lech Walesa and Solidarity are on every tongue. A black-and-white television set and several radios provide competing news flashes. Chants of Gorby! Gorby! Gorby! break out periodically round the room.
“If Gorbachev is meaning what he is saying,” a young professor from Lodz is yelling in English to his counterpart from Sofia, “where will such reforms end, please? Who will restore devils back to box of Pandora? Where please will be one-party state, if right of choice will be officially exercised?”
And if the wild talk of the delegates tells one side of the story, the apprehensive faces of their hapless minders tell the other. With heresies like these springing up all round them, should they side with the heretics or denounce them to their superiors? They will of course do both.
Mundy has so far seen little of Sasha. An embrace, a couple of waves, a promise to grab a drink together. After the ecstatic reunions of the early years, good sense has dictated that they scale down their demonstrations of mutual affection. Neither the intellectual Horst nor the gruesome Lothar is in attendance. They were replaced six months ago by the spectral and unsmiling Manfred. Tomorrow, the last full day, pretty Wendy from our embassy in Warsaw will pop up to press the flesh of the British contingent—not forgetting, of course, the flesh of Ted Mundy, the Council’s evergreen representative. But it’s a press, nothing more. Mundy has an eye for Wendy and Wendy has an eye for him. But between them stands the iron prohibition of the Edinburgh School of Deportment: no sex in the workplace. Nick Amory, to whom Mundy has rashly confessed his interest, puts it less delicately.
“There are plenty of good ways to commit hara-kiri in your job, Edward, but getting your rocks off in Badland is undoubtedly the best. Wendy is a part-timer,” he adds, by way of further warning. “She’s married to a diplomat, she has two children, and she spies to pay the mortgage.”
A bunch of medievalists have joined together in a rendering of the “Marseillaise.” An abundant Swedish woman with a deep décolleté is conducting. A drunken Pole is playing the piano beautifully. Sasha, fresh from a round of fringe parties, his eyes radiant beneath his beret, is entering at the far end of the bar, slapping backs, shaking hands, embracing anyone within his limited range. On his heels comes spectral Manfred.
Sasha needs a walk on the sand to clear his head. A warm spring wind is rattling off the sea. Ships’ lights are strung the length of the horizon. Peaceful fishing boats, or the Soviet Sixth Fleet? It no longer seems to matter. A full moon lights the dunes in black and white. The deep sand is negotiable, but liable to sudden descents. More than once, Sasha is obliged to grab Mundy’s arm to save himself from falling, and he’s not always successful. On one occasion, as Mundy hauls him to his feet, he feels something soft fall into his jacket pocket.
“I think you have a bad throat, Teddy,” he hears Sasha say severely. “Maybe with these excellent Communist lozenges you will sing better.”
In return, Mundy passes Sasha a chrome hip flask made in England and remade in the Professor’s workshops, then stuffed with fabrications made in Bedford Square and photographed by Mundy Two. A hundred yards behind them, the gloomy sentinel Manfred stands hands in pockets at the water’s edge, staring out to sea.
“The Professor is terrified,” Sasha whispers excitedly below the rattle of the wind. “Fear! Fear! His eyes are like marbles, never resting!”
“Why? What does he think will happen?”
“Nothing. That is why he is terrified. Since all is illusion and propaganda, what can go wrong? The Professor’s Great Director himself returned only yesterday from Moscow with the firmest assurances that nothing whatever is happening. Now can you imagine how afraid he is?”
“Well, I only hope he’s right,” says Mundy doubtfully, concerned that Sasha’s high hopes will once more be dashed. “Just remember Hungary ’fifty-six and Czecho ’sixty-eight and a couple of other times when they put the clock back.” He is quoting Amory, who is quoting his masters: Don’t let him grab at straws, Edward. Gorbachev may be changing the window, but he’s not selling the store.
But Sasha will not be discouraged.
“There must be two Germanys, Teddy. Two is a minimum. I love Germany so much I wish there were ten. Tell this to your Mr. Arnold.”
“I think I told him a few times already.”
“There must be no annexation of the GDR by the Federal Republic. As a first condition of constructive coexistence, the two Germanys must expel their foreign occupiers, the Russians and the Americans.”
“Sasha, listen to me, will you? ‘Her Majesty’s Government believes that German reunification should only take place as part of an overall European settlement.’ That’s the official line, and it’s been that way for the last forty years. Unofficially it’s stronger: Who needs a united Germany? Thatcher doesn’t, Mitterrand doesn’t, a lot of Germans don’t, West as well as East. And America doesn’t care.”
Sasha might not have heard him. “As soon as the occupiers have departed, each Germany will call free and fair elections,” he continues breathlessly. “A key issue in both will be the creation of an unaligned bloc at the heart of Europe. A federation of the two separate Germanys is only possible if there is total disarmament on both sides. With that achieved, we shall offer alliances to Poland and France on the same terms. After so many wars and divisions, Central Europe will become the crucible of peace.” He stumbles and collects himself. “No Anschluss by the Federal Republic, Teddy. No Grossdeutschland under the domination of either superpower. Then we can finally drink to peace.”
Mundy is still searching for a soothing answer when Sasha seizes his arm in both hands and stares imploringly up at him. His words come in gulps. His whole body is shaking. “No Fourth Reich, Teddy. Not before there is disengagement on both sides. Until then, the two halves stay sovereign and separate. Yes? Say yes!”
Sadly, almost wearily, Mundy shakes his head. “We’re talking about something that isn’t happening,” he says, kindly but emphatically. “The glacier’s moving, but it’s not melting.”
“Is this the ridiculous Mr. Arnold you are quoting again?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Give him my greetings and tell him he’s an arsehole. Now take me indoors and get me drunk.”
Mundy and Kate have agreed to talk the whole thing through as adults. After eleven years, that’s the least they owe each other, says Kate. Mundy will take a day off work and make a special trip to Doncaster, Kate has looked up the trains for him. She will meet him with the car, they’ll drive to the Troutstream for lunch, which is out of town and private and, unless Mundy’s tastes have changed recently, they both like trout. The last thing either of them needs, she says, is to bump into local press people, or worse still someone from local party headquarters. Quite why she should be so nervous of being caught in flagrante with her husband is obscure to Mundy, but he takes her word for it.
And when they’ve had their talk, and agreed guidelines, she says, it would be nice if Ted came back to the house in time to kick a ball about with Jake in the garden, and perhaps Philip will drop by casually for a drink, as he often does, to talk party policy. And, when Philip sees the game going on, he can join in, says Kate. That way, Jake can see for himself that there’s no atmosphere. Things may have changed a little, but we’re all good friends together and Jake is our first priority. He will have two happy homes instead of one, which is something that rationally, in the long term, he’ll learn to accept. Because the one thing we’re all totally agreed about, says Kate, is that there will be no tug-of-war for Jake’s affections.
In fact, so much is agreed in advance by the time Mundy boards the train at King’s Cross that he can’t help wondering whether—with all Eastern Europe on the boil and Sasha needing to report twice as often as Mundy can get to him—his journey is strictly necessary. But to his surprise it is. Mulling it all over on the train, he realizes that he agrees without reservation to everything she wants.
Adamantly. Passionately.
Jake’s love for his mother is more important to him than any love in the world. He will do anything to preserve it.
And as soon as he climbs into the car, that’s what he tells her. As ever a useless negotiator in his own interest, he begs her, beseeches her, to allow him to take the entire blame for the failure of the marriage on his own shoulders. If keeping a low profile for the first few months of the separation will help, he’ll keep one. If kicking a ball about in the back garden with the Labor Party’s latest apostle of the New Direction is going to convince Jake that his mother has made a sound career choice, Mundy will kick it till he drops. And that isn’t altruism. That’s survival. His own as much as Jake’s. No wonder that even before they sit down to lunch, Mundy feels more postcoital than postmarital.
“We’re doing it really well,” Kate assures him over the avocado and crab starter. “I just wish other people could be so civilized.”
“Me too,” says Mundy heartily.
They talk about Jake’s schooling. In Jake’s case only, Kate is half decided to waive her objection to private schools. Jake’s turbulent nature is crying out for individual attention. She has discussed this with Philip, of course, and with her constituency, and everyone’s agreed that provided it’s a special need, and there’s no obvious local alternative, and no unfortunate publicity, they can live with it. Mundy detests private schools but assures her that, if Jake really wants it, he’ll come up with the fees.
“I’m just so sorry about the Council,” she says, over her trout with almonds and green salad. “It really upsets me, how little they seem to appreciate you.”
“Oh, don’t blame the poor old Council,” Mundy exclaims gallantly. “They’ve been good to me in their own way. It’s not their fault.”
“If you’d just been able to stand up for yourself.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” says Mundy wearily, in their old spirit of togetherness.
They talk about what Kate refers to as access, which to Mundy has a different connotation, but he quickly readjusts.
“Philip’s got a book coming out in the spring,” she tells him over apple crumble and custard.
“Super. Marvelous.”
“Nonfiction, of course.”
“Of course.”
They talk grounds—or Kate does. As a prospective parliamentary candidate she obviously can’t consider admitting to adultery. If Ted thinks he should go that route, she’ll have no option but to drag up mental cruelty and desertion. How about settling for irretrievable breakdown?
Irretrievable breakdown sounds great, says Mundy.
“You have got someone, haven’t you, Ted?” Kate demands a little sharply. “I mean, you can’t have been sitting in London all these years with nobody.”
Pretty much, that’s exactly what Mundy has been doing, but he is too polite to admit it. They agree it’s wiser not to discuss money. Kate will find herself a lawyer. Ted should do the same.
A lawyer is always an arsehole.
“And I thought we’d wait till after Philip’s new job has been confirmed, if it’s all right by you,” says Kate over a terminal coffee.
“To get married?” Mundy asks.
“To get divorced.”
Mundy calls for the bill and pays it out of Amory’s brown envelope. What with the rain and everything, they agree it’s probably not the right evening for soccer with Philip. On the other hand, Mundy wants to see Jake more than he’s ever wanted to see anyone in his life, so he says maybe he’ll just come back home and give him a game of checkers or something, then grab a taxi to the station.
They arrive at the house and, while Kate puts on a kettle, Mundy waits in the sitting room feeling like an insurance salesman and peering at the places where he would put flowers if he were still resident, and at the clumsy arrangement of the furniture that wouldn’t take five minutes to fix if Jake just gave him a hand. And he reflects that he possesses too many of the domestic concerns that Kate manages perfectly well without, but then Kate grew up with a family whereas Mundy was always trying to invent one. His thoughts are still running in this direction when the front door flies open and Jake marches into the room accompanied by his friend Lorna. Without a word he storms past his father, switches on the television and crashes onto the sofa with Lorna at his side.
“What are you doing back from school so early?” Mundy asks suspiciously.
“Sent,” says Jake defiantly, without turning his head from the screen.
“Why? What have you done?”
“Teacher says we’re to watch history in the making,” Lorna explains smugly.
“So we’re watching it, anything wrong with that? What’s for tea, Mum?” says Jake.
Teacher is right. History is indeed being made. The children watch, Mundy watches. Even Kate, who doesn’t regard foreign policy as an election winner, watches from the kitchen doorway. The Berlin Wall is coming down, and hippies from both sides are jumping about on what’s left of it. Hippies from the West have long hair, Mundy notices in his numb state. Newly liberated hippies from the East still wear it short.
At midnight Mundy’s train delivers him to King’s Cross. From a phone box he calls the emergency number. Amory’s voice tells him to leave his message now. Mundy says he hasn’t got one, he’s just wondering whether there’s anything he should be doing. He means, he’s frightened stiff for Sasha, but is too well trained to say so. He gets an answer of sorts when he arrives at Estelle Road, but it was left on the machine six hours ago. “No squash tomorrow, Edward. Courts are being renovated. Sit tight and take lots of water with it. Tschüss.” He switches on the television.
My Berlin.
My Wall.
My crowds vandalizing it.
My crowds storming Stasi headquarters.
My friend locked inside, waiting to be mistaken for the enemy.
Thousands of Stasi files being flung into the streets.
Wait till you read mine: Ted Mundy, Stasi secret agent, British traitor.
At 6 a.m. he goes to a phone box in Constantine Road and again calls the emergency number. Where does it ring? In the Wool Factory? Who’s bothering to deceive the Stasi anymore? At Amory’s home—where’s that? He leaves another meaningless message.
Back in Estelle Road, he lies in the bath listening to North German radio. He shaves with enormous concentration, cooks himself a celebratory breakfast but has no appetite for it and leaves the bacon on the doorstep for nextdoor’s cat. Desperate for exercise, he sets off for the Heath but ends up in Bedford Square. His front-door key works, but when he presses the bell to the inner bailey, no nice English girl wearing her father’s signet ring welcomes him aboard. In an unscripted fit of frustration, he gives the door a violent shake, then hammers on it, which sets off an alarm bell. A blue light is flashing in the porch as he steps outside and the din of the bell is deafening.
From a public telephone in Tottenham Court Road tube station he again calls the emergency number and this time gets Amory live. In the background he hears Germans shouting and assumes his call has been patched through to Berlin.
“What the fuck do you think you were doing at the Factory?” Amory demands.
“Where is he?” Mundy says.
“Disappeared from our screens. Not at his office, not at his apartment.”
“How d’you know?”
“We’ve looked, that’s how. What do you think we’ve been doing? We’ve checked his flat and frightened his neighbors. The consensus is, he saw the way the wind was blowing and got out before he was clubbed down in the street or whatever the hell’s going on.”
“Let me look for him.”
“Marvelous. Do that. Bring your guitar and come and sing outside the prisons till he hears your golden voice. We’ve got your passport in case you’ve forgotten. Ted?”
“What?”
“We care about him too, all right? So stop making a martyr of yourself.”
It’s a full five months before Sasha’s letter arrives. How Mundy passed them is afterwards unclear to him. Soccer afternoons with Jake in Doncaster. Soccer afternoons with Jake and Philip. Ghastly threesome dinners with Philip and Kate which Jake refuses to attend. Dismal weekends with Jake alone in London. Films Jake needs to see and Mundy loathes. Spring walks on the Heath with Jake trailing two paces behind. Hanging around the British Council as the blessed day of Early Retirement by Mutual Consent draws near.
The same old handwriting. Blue airmail paper. Postmarked Husum, North Germany, and addressed to Estelle Road, NW3. How the hell did he know my address? Of course—I put it in my visa application a thousand years ago. He wonders why Husum is familiar to him. Of course—Theodor Storm, author of The Rider on the White Horse. Dr. Mandelbaum read it to me.
Dear Teddy,
I have reserved two luxurious suites in your name at the Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg for the night of the 18th. Bring everything you possess in the world, but come alone. I wish neither to say hullo nor goodbye to Mr. Arnold, who can go fuck himself. I came to Husum in order to confirm that the Herr Pastor is truly buried. I regret so much that he is not alive to witness the exalting sight of Our Dear Führer annexing East Germany by means of God’s Almighty Deutschmark.
Your brother-in-Christ,
Sasha
* * *
Sasha has lost weight, though he had little enough to lose. The Western superspy is folded like a starved child into the corner of a winged chair big enough for three of him.
“It was force of nature,” Mundy insists, wishing he didn’t sound so apologetic. “It was all there, banked up, ready to happen. Once the Wall was down, there was no stopping the process. You can’t blame anyone.”
“I blame them, thank you, Teddy. I blame Kohl, Reagan, Thatcher and your duplicitous Mr. Arnold, who gave me false promises.”
“He gave you nothing of the kind. He told you the truth as he found it.”
“Then in his profession, he should know that the truth as he finds it is always a lie.”
They fall quiet again, but the Rhine is never quiet. Though it is nighttime, chains of barges charge ceaselessly past the windows, and by their din they could as well be passing through the room. Mundy and Sasha are sitting in darkness, but the Rhine is never dark. The sodium lamps that line the towpath shine upward onto the oval ceiling. The lights of the pleasure boats flit at will across the pilastered walls. On Mundy’s arrival, Sasha led him to the window and gave him the tour: Across the river from us, Teddy, you will see the mountaintop hotel where your revered prime minister Neville Chamberlain resided while he was giving half of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. In this hotel where we are sitting—I dare think these very rooms—Our Dear Führer and his retinue consented to receive Mr. Chamberlain’s generous gift. How the Führer would have adored to be with us here tonight, Teddy! East Germany annexed, Grossdeutschland reunited, the Red Peril put to rest. And tomorrow the world.
“I have messages for you from Mr. Arnold,” Mundy says. “Shall I convey them to you?”
“Please do.”
“Within reason, it’s whatever you want. Resettlement, a new identity, you’ve only to say. Apparently you told them at the beginning that you didn’t want money. They’re not expecting to hold you to that.”
“They are the soul of generosity.”
“They’d like to meet you and talk your future through with you. I’ve got a passport for you in my pocket and a couple of tickets for tomorrow morning’s flight to London. If you don’t want to go to them, they’ll come to wherever you’re prepared to meet them.”
“I am overwhelmed. But why are they so anxious for my welfare when I am a spent force?”
“Maybe they have a sense of honor. Maybe they don’t like to think of you wandering round like a zombie after all you’ve done for them. Or maybe they don’t want to read your memoirs.”
Another long silence, another infuriating new direction. Sasha has set down his whiskey and picked up a mint chocolate. He is fastidiously peeling the silver paper from it with his fingertips. “I was in Paris, that much is certain,” he recalls, in the practical tones of someone attempting to reconstruct an accident. “I have a label from Paris attached to my suitcase.” He selects an edge of chocolate and nibbles at it. “And in Rome I was undoubtedly a night porter. Now that’s a profession for retired spies. To watch over the world while it’s asleep. To sleep while it goes to the devil.”
“I think we can do better than night porter for you.”
“And from Rome, I must have taken a train to Paris and from Paris to Hamburg, and from Hamburg to Husum where, despite my ragged appearance, I persuaded a taxi driver to take me to the house of the late Herr Pastor. The front door was opened by my mother. She had a cold chicken waiting for me in the refrigerator and a bed warmed for me upstairs. We may therefore deduce that I had telephoned her in the course of my travels and advised her of my intention to visit her.”
“Sounds a reasonable enough thing to have done.”
“I have read that there are primitive tribes who believe that someone must die in order for someone else to be born. My mother’s renaissance confirms this theory. She nursed me day and night with considerable skill for four weeks. I was impressed.” An anchor chain shrieks and drowns. A ship’s horn laments its passing. “But what will become of you, Teddy? Is Mr. Arnold equally openhanded with his countrymen? How about footman to the Queen?”
“They’re talking of buying me a partnership in a language school. We’re discussing it.”
“Here in Germany?”
“Probably.”
“Teaching German to the Germans? It’s high time. One half speaks Amideutsch, the other Stasideutsch. Please begin your work as soon as possible.”
“English actually.”
“Ah, of course. The language of our masters. Very wise. Has your marriage failed?”
“Why should it have done?”
“Because otherwise you would have retreated to the bosom of your family.”
If Sasha is hoping to goad Mundy, he has succeeded.
“So we’re bereft,” he snaps. “Great. Washed up. Two Cold War bums on the skids. Is that who we are, Sasha? Is it? So let’s have a bloody good cry about it. Let’s go all passive and self-pitying and agree there’s no hope for anyone. Is that what we’re here to do?”
“It is my mother’s wish that I escort her back to Neubrandenburg, where she was born. There is an establishment for the elderly with which she has been in correspondence. Mr. Arnold will please pay the fees until her death, which cannot be far off.” He takes a card from his pocket and lays it on the table. The Ursuline Convent of St. Julia, Mundy reads. “Mr. Arnold’s money may be tainted, but the Herr Pastor’s is untouchable and will be given to the wretched of the earth. I wish you to come with me, Teddy.”
The river traffic is so loud at this moment that Mundy does not immediately catch Sasha’s last words. Then he sees that he has sprung to his feet and is standing before him.
“What the hell are you talking about, Sasha?”
“Your luggage is still packed. So is mine. We have only to pay the bill and go. First we take my mother to Neubrandenburg. She’s a nice woman. Good manners. You want to share her with me, I won’t be jealous. Then we go.”
“Where to?”
“Away from the Fourth Reich. Somewhere there’s hope at last.”
“Where would that be?”
“Wherever hope’s the only thing they can afford. You think the war’s over because a bunch of old Nazis in East Germany have traded Lenin for Coca-Cola? Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place? It will pick it dry.”
“So what are you proposing to do about it?”
“Resist it, Teddy. What else is there to do?”
Mundy doesn’t answer. Sasha is holding up his suitcase. In the darkness it looks larger than he is, but Mundy doesn’t move to help or stop him. He remains seated while he runs through a list of extraneous bits and pieces that all of a sudden are very important to him. Jake wants to go glacier skiing in May. Kate wants Estelle Road back. She’s proposing to base in London and commute to her constituency so that Philip can be closer to the seat of power. Maybe I should find a crash course somewhere, get myself a degree in something. Amid all the honking and hooting from the river, he doesn’t even hear the door close.
And still Mundy remains there, slumped in his armchair, methodically working his way through a glass of nearly neat Scotch, listening to the clatter of a world he is no longer part of, savoring the emptiness of his existence, wondering what’s left of him now that his past has walked out on him, and how much of him is usable, if any of him is, or is it better to write off the whole mess and start again?
Wondering also who he was when he did all that stuff he’ll never do again. The deceiving and pretending—in the name of what? The Steel Coffin and the army greatcoat on the autobahn—for whom?
Wondering whether what he did was worth a busted marriage and a busted career and a child I daren’t look in the eye.
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.