THE ASPIRING STUDENT of the German soul who steps off the interzonal train into the vibrant Berlin air possesses six of his late father’s shirts that are too short for him in the sleeve but mysteriously not in the tail, one hundred pounds sterling, and fifty-six deutschmarks that a weeping Ilse has discovered in a drawer. The grant that kept him just below water at Oxford, he has been advised too late, is not available for study overseas.
“Sasha who, Sasha where, for God’s sake?” he yells at her on the platform of Waterloo station while Ilse, wracked by Magyar remorse, decides for the umpteenth time to change her mind and jump aboard with him, except she hasn’t brought her passport.
“Tell him I sent you,” she implores him as the train mercifully pulls out. “Give him my letter. He is a graduate but democratic. Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha,” which to Mundy sounds about as convincing as everybody in Bombay knows Gupta.
It is 1969, Beatlemania is no longer at its zenith, but nobody has told Mundy. In addition to a monkish mop of brown hair that flops over his ears and bothers his eyes, he sports his father’s webbing knapsack to denote the rootless wanderer he intends to become now that life has lost its meaning for him. Behind him lies the wreckage of a great love, ahead of him the model of Christopher Isherwood, illusionless diarist of Berlin at the crossroads. Like Isherwood, he will expect nothing of life but life itself. He will be a camera with a broken heart. And if by some remote chance it should turn out that he can love again—but Ilse has obviously put paid to that—well, just maybe, in some sleazy café where beautiful women in cloche hats drink absinthe and sing huskily of disenchantment, he will find his Sally Bowles. Is he an anarchist? It will depend. To be an anarchist one must have a glimmer of hope. For our recently anointed misanthrope, nihilism is closer to the mark. So why then, he might wonder, this spring in my stride as I venture forth in search of Sasha, the Great Militant? Why this sense of arriving in a fresher, jollier world, when all is so demonstrably lost?
“Go to Kreuzberg,” Ilse is howling after him, as he waves his last tragic farewells from the carriage window. “Ask for him there! And look after him, Teddy,” she commands as a peremptory afterthought which he has no time to explore before the train conveys him on the next stage of his life.
Kreuzberg is not Oxford, Mundy observes with relief.
No kind lady in blue curls from the University Delegacy of Lodgings is on hand with mimeographed lists of addresses where he must behave himself. Priced out of the better parts of town, West Berlin’s unruly students have set themselves up in bombed-out factories, abandoned railway stations and tenement blocks too close to the Wall for the sensibilities of property developers. The Turkish shantytowns of asbestos and corrugated iron, so reminiscent of Mundy’s childhood, sell neither academic books nor squash rackets, but figs, copper saucepans, halva, leather sandals and strings of plastic yellow ducks. The scents of jeera, charcoal and roasting lamb are a welcome-home to Pakistan’s lost son. The handbills and graffiti on the walls and windows of the communes do not proclaim college productions of the plays of minor Elizabethan dramatists, but pour invective on the Shah, the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, President Lyndon Johnson and the Napalm Culture of U.S. Imperialist Aggression in Vietnam.
Yet Ilse’s advice is not misplaced. Bit by bit, in cafés, impromptu clubs, at street corners where students lounge, smoke and rebel, the name Sasha raises the odd smile, rings a distant bell. Sasha? You mean Sasha the Great Rouser—that Sasha? Well now, we have a problem here, you see. We don’t give just anybody our addresses these days. The Schweinesystem has long ears. Best leave your name with Students for Democratic Socialism and see if he wants to get in touch with you.
Schweinesystem, Mundy the new boy repeats to himself. Remember that phrase. The Pig System. Does he feel a momentary wave of resentment against Ilse for launching him into the eye of the radical storm with no charts or instruments? Perhaps. But evening is drawing in, his path is set and despite his state of mourning he has a great appetite to begin his new life.
“Try Anita, Commune Six,” a somnolent revolutionary advises him, in a clamorous cellar dense with pot smoke and Vietcong flags.
“Maybe Brigitte can tell you where he is,” another suggests, over the strains of a girl guitarist in a Palestinian keffiyeh giving her rendering of Joan Baez. A child sits at her feet, a big man in a sombrero at her side.
In a bullet-pocked former factory as high as Paddington railway station hang likenesses of Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. A portrait of the late Che Guevara is draped in black bunting. Hand-daubed slogans on bedsheets warn Mundy that It Is Forbidden to Forbid, urge him to Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible, Accept No Gods or Masters. Strewn across the floor like survivors from a shipwreck, students doze, smoke, breast-feed babies, play rock music, fondle and harangue each other. Anita? Left, oh, hours ago, says one advisor. Brigitte? Try Commune Two and fuck America, says another. When he asks to use a lavatory, a tender Swede escorts him to a line of six, each with its door smashed in.
“Personal privacy, comrade, that’s a bourgeois barrier to communal integration,” the Swede explains in earnest English. “Better that men and women piss together than bomb Vietnamese kids. . . . Sasha?” he repeats, after Mundy has courteously declined his advances. “Maybe you find him at the Troglodyte Club, except they call it the Shaven Cat these days.” He detaches a cigarette paper from its packet and, using Mundy’s back to press on, draws a map.
The map leads Mundy to a canal. With the knapsack slapping his hip, he sets off along the towpath. Sentry towers, then a patrol boat bristling with guns, glide past him. Ours or theirs? It is immaterial. They are nobody’s. They are part of the great impasse he is here to unblock. He turns into a cobbled side street and stops dead. A twenty-foot-high cinder-block wall with a crown of barbed-wire thorns and a sickly halo of floodlights bars his way. At first he refuses to recognize it. You’re a fantasy, a film set, a construction site. Two West Berlin policemen call him over.
“Draft dodger?”
“English,” he replies, showing his passport.
They take him to the light, examine his passport, then his face.
“Ever seen the Berlin Wall before?”
“No.”
“Well look at it now, then go to bed, Englishman. And stay out of trouble.”
He retraces his steps and finds a side road. On a rusted iron door, amid Picasso peace doves and BAN THE BOMB signs, a hairless cat on two legs brandishes its penis. Inside, music and argument combine in a single feral roar.
“Try the Peace Center, comrade, top floor,” a beautiful girl advises him, cupping her hands.
“Where’s the Peace Center?”
“Upstairs, arsehole.”
He climbs, his feet clanging on the tile steps. It’s close on midnight. At each floor a fresh tableau of liberation is revealed to him. On the first, students and babies lounge in a Sunday school ring while a stern woman harangues them on the crippling effect of parents. On the second, a postcoital quiet reigns over bundles of intertwined bodies. Support the Neutron Bomb! a handmade poster urges them. Kills your mother-in-law! Doesn’t harm your TV set! On the third, Mundy is thrilled to see some sort of theater workshop is in progress. On the fourth, shaggy Septembrists pummel typewriters, confer, feed paper into hand presses and bark orders into radio telephones.
He has reached the top floor. A ladder rises to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. He emerges in an attic lit by a builder’s inspection light. A passage like the entrance to a mineshaft leads from it. At its end, two men and two women are bowed over a candlelit table strewn with maps and beer bottles. One girl is black-haired and grim-faced, the other fair and large-boned. The nearer man is as tall as Mundy: a Viking with a golden beard and mop of yellow hair bound in a pirate’s headscarf. The other man is short, vivid and dark-eyed, with uneven, spindly shoulders that are too narrow for his head. He wears a black Basque beret drawn dead level across his pale brow, and he is Sasha. How does Mundy know this? Because all along, he realizes, he has known intuitively that Ilse was talking about someone as small as herself.
Too diffident to intrude, he hovers at the opening to the mineshaft, clutching her letter in his hand. He hears fragments of war talk, all Sasha’s. The voice is stronger than the body and carries naturally. It is accompanied by imperious gestures of the hands and forearms. . . . Don’t let the pigs cram us into side streets, hear me? . . . Stand up to them in the open, where the cameras can see what they do to us . . . Mundy is already deciding to tiptoe back down the ladder and make his entrance another time when the party breaks up. The black-haired girl folds up the maps. The Viking rises and stretches. The blond girl hugs him to her by his buttocks. Sasha stands too, but is no taller than when he was sitting. As Mundy steps forward to present himself, the others move instinctively to shield the little emperor at their center.
“Good evening. I’m Ted Mundy. I’ve got a letter for you from Ilse,” he says in his best head prefect’s voice. And when he receives no answering light of recognition from the wide, dark eyes: “Ilse the Hungarian student of political philosophy. She was here last summer and had the pleasure of meeting you.”
Perhaps it is Mundy’s politeness that catches them off balance, for there is a moment of shared suspicion among them. Who is he, this courtly English arsehole with the Beatle haircut? The tall Viking is first to respond. Placing himself between Mundy and the rest of them, he accepts the envelope on Sasha’s behalf and subjects it to a quick examination. Ilse has stuck down the flap with tape. Her peremptory scrawl of Private, Strictly Personal! twice underlined, is a clear claim to intimacy. The Viking hands the envelope to Sasha, who rips it open and extracts two blotchy pages of Ilse’s densely packed handwriting, with afterthoughts charging up the margins. He reads the first few lines, turns to the back page to find the signature. Then he smiles, first to himself, and then at Mundy. And this time it’s Mundy who is taken off balance, because the wide dark eyes are so brilliant and the smile is so young.
“Well, well. Ilse!” he muses. “That’s quite a girl, yes?”—slipping her letter into the side pocket of his threadbare lumber jacket.
“One can really say that,” Mundy agrees in his best High German.
“Hungarian”—as if to remind himself. “And you are Teddy.”
“Well, Ted actually.”
“From Oxford.”
“Yes.”
“Her lover?” It’s a straight question. “We are all lovers here,” he adds, to laughter.
“I was until a few weeks ago.”
“A few weeks! That’s a lifetime in Berlin! You are English?”
“Yes. Well, not completely. Foreign born, but English bred. Oh, and she sends you a bottle of Scotch. She remembers you liked it.”
“Scotch! What a memory, my God! A woman’s memory will hang us all. What are you doing in Berlin, Teddy? Are you a revolutionary tourist?”
Mundy is pondering his reply when the black-haired girl with the grim face cuts in ahead of him. “He means, do you sincerely wish to take part in our movement, or are you here for the purposes of human zoology?” she demands, in a foreign accent he can’t place.
“I took part in Oxford. Why not here?”
“Because here is not Oxford,” she snaps. “Here we have an Auschwitz generation. In Oxford you do not. In Berlin we can lean out of the window and shout ‘Nazi swine,’ and if the arsehole on the pavement is more than forty years old we shall be right.”
“What are you proposing to study here in Berlin, Teddy?” Sasha inquires, in a softer tone.
“Germanistic.”
The dark-haired girl takes immediate exception to this. “Then you will have to be lucky, comrade. The professors who teach that archaic shit are so scared they won’t come out of their bunkers. And the twenty-year-old stooges they send us are so scared they sign up with us.”
Now it’s the turn of the blond girl beside her. “Have you any money, comrade?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
“You are without money? Then you are a worthless human being! How will you eat cutlet every day? How will you buy a new hat?”
“Work, I suppose,” says Mundy, trying his best as a good fellow to share their unfamiliar brand of humor.
“For the Pig System?”
The girl with the dark hair is back. She wears it pushed behind her ears. She has a strong, slightly crooked jaw. “What is the purpose of our revolution, comrade?”
Mundy has not expected a viva voce, but six months of Ilse and her friends have not left him unprepared. “To oppose the Vietnam War by all means . . . To arrest the spread of military imperialism . . . To reject the consumer state . . . To challenge the nostrums of the bourgeoisie . . . To awaken it, and educate it. To create a new and fair society . . . and to oppose all irrational authority.”
“Irrational? What is rational authority? All authority is irrational, arsehole. Do you have parents?”
“No.”
“Do you share the opinion of Marcuse that logical positivism is a load of shit?”
“I’m not really a philosopher, I’m afraid.”
“In a state of unfreedom, nobody has a liberated consciousness. Do you accept this?”
“It seems to make pretty good sense.”
“It is the only sense, arsehole. In Berlin the student masses are in permanent movement against the forces of counterrevolution. The city of the Spartacists and the capital of the Third Reich has rediscovered its revolutionary destiny. Have you read Horkheimer? If you have not read Horkheimer’s Twilight, you are ridiculous.”
“Ask him whether he is eingebläut,” the blond girl suggests, using a word Mundy has never heard before—at which everyone laughs except Sasha who, having observed this exchange in quick-eyed silence, decides to come to Mundy’s rescue.
“Okay, comrades. He’s a nice fellow. Let’s leave him alone. Maybe we all meet later at the Republican Club.”
Watched by Sasha, one after the other of his aides descends the ladder. Finally he lowers the trapdoor on them, locks it, and to Mundy’s surprise reaches up and claps a hand on his shoulder.
“You have that whiskey with you, Teddy?”
“In my bag.”
“Don’t mind Christina. Greek women have too much mouth. The day she has an orgasm, she won’t speak another word.” He is opening a small door low in the wainscoting. “And everyone’s an arsehole here. It’s a term of affection, like comrade. The revolution doesn’t like circumlocutions.”
Is Sasha smiling as he says this? Mundy can’t tell. “What does eingebläut mean?”
“She was asking whether you have had your first beating from the pigs. She wants you to have nice blue bruises from their truncheons.”
Stooping double, Mundy follows Sasha into a long, cavernous chamber that at first sight resembles the belly of a ship. Two skylights appear high above him, and slowly fill with stars. Sasha removes his beret and reveals a revolutionist’s mop of untamed hair. He strikes a match and lights a lantern. As its flame rises, Mundy makes out a bombé desk with brass inlay, and on it heaps of pamphlets and a typewriter. An iron double bedstead strewn with worn-out cushions of satin and brocade stands along one wall. And on the floor, like stepping-stones, stacks of books.
“Stolen for the revolution,” Sasha explains, waving a hand at them. “Nobody reads them, nobody knows the titles. All they know is, intellectual property belongs to the masses, not to bloodsucking publishers and booksellers. Last week we held a competition. Whoever brings the most books has struck the biggest blow against petit bourgeois morality. Have you eaten anything today?”
“Not much.”
“Not much being English for nothing? Then eat.”
Sasha pushes Mundy towards an ancient leather armchair and sets down two empty tumblers, a chunk of sausage and a loaf of bread. His bony left shoulder rides higher than its companion. His right foot trails as he darts around. Mundy unfastens the buckles of his knapsack, extricates Ilse’s bottle of St. Hugh’s Buttery Scotch whiskey from the Major’s shirts and pours two shots. Sasha perches opposite him on a wooden stool, pulls on a pair of spectacles with thick black frames and settles to a purposeful examination of Ilse’s letter while Mundy cuts himself a slice of bread and sausage.
“Teddy will never let you down,” he announces, reading aloud. “That’s a quite subjective judgment, I would say. What’s it supposed to mean? That I’m going to invest my confidence in you? Why should she make that assumption?”
No answer springs to Mundy’s mind but Sasha doesn’t seem to need one. His German has a regional accent of some kind, but Mundy is not yet equipped to place it.
“What did she tell you about me?”
“Not much. You were a graduate but democratic. Everybody knows you.”
Sasha doesn’t appear to hear this. “A good companion, loyal in all circumstances, a stranger to deceit . . . belongs to no group—am I supposed to admire you for that? In his head a bourgeois, but has a socialist heart. Maybe with a capitalist soul and a Communist prick you’ll be complete. Why does she write to me like this?” A thought occurs to him. “Did she walk out on you, by any chance?”
“Pretty much,” Mundy concedes.
“Now we’re getting to the bottom of it. She walked out on you so she feels guilty—and what’s this? I don’t believe it. He wanted me to marry him. Are you crazy?”
“Why not?” Mundy says sheepishly.
“The question is why, not why not. Is it your English practice to marry every girl you sleep with a few times? We had that here in Germany once. It was a disaster.”
No longer sure how he is expected to reply, Mundy takes another mouthful of sausage and washes it down with a swig of whiskey while Sasha returns to the letter.
“Teddy loves peace as much as we do, but he’s a good soldier. Jesus Christ. What does she mean by that? That Teddy obeys orders without questioning them? You shoot whoever you’re told to shoot? That’s not a virtue, that’s grounds for criminal proceedings. Ilse should pick her compliments more carefully.”
Mundy grunts, partly in agreement, partly in embarrassment.
“So why does she say you’re a good soldier?” Sasha insists. “Good soldier like I’m a good democrat? Or does she mean you’re a great hero in bed?”
“I don’t think so,” says the complete infant for sex.
But Sasha won’t leave the point alone. “Did you fight somebody for her? Why are you a good soldier?”
“It’s a phrase. We went on demos together. I took care of her. I play sports a bit. What the hell?” He is standing, his bag slung over his shoulder. “Thanks for the whiskey.”
“We haven’t finished it.”
“She sent it to you, not me.”
“But you brought it. You didn’t keep it, you didn’t drink it. You were a good soldier. Where do you propose to sleep tonight?”
“I’ll find somewhere.”
“Wait. Stop. Put your stupid bag down.”
Compelled by the insistence in Sasha’s voice, Mundy pauses, but doesn’t quite put down the bag. Sasha tosses the letter aside and stares at him for a while.
“Tell me something truthful, no bullshit, okay? We get a little paranoid here. Who sent you?”
“Ilse.”
“Nobody else? No pigs, spies, newspapers, clever people? This town is full of clever people.”
“I’m not one of them.”
“You’re who she says you are. Is that what you’re telling me? A political tyro, reading Germanistic, a good soldier with a socialist heart, or whatever the hell? That’s the whole story?”
“Yes.”
“And you always tell the truth.”
“Mostly.”
“But you’re queer.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Me neither. So what do we do?”
Looking down on Sasha, puzzling how to reply, Mundy is again struck by his host’s fragility. It’s as if every bone in his body has been broken and stuck back the wrong way.
Sasha takes a pull of whiskey and, without looking at Mundy, hands him the glass to drink from. “Okay,” he says reluctantly.
Okay what? Mundy wonders.
“Put that fucking bag down.”
Mundy does.
“There’s a girl I like, okay? Sometimes she visits me up here. She may come tonight. She’s young. Bourgeois. Shy, like you. If she shows up, you sleep on the roof. If it’s raining, I’ll lend you a tarpaulin. That’s how shy she is. Okay? If necessary I do the same for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe I need a good soldier. Maybe you do. What the fuck?” He takes back the glass, drains it, and refills it from the bottle, which seems too big for his wrist. “And if she doesn’t show up, you sleep down here. I’ve got a spare bed. A field bed. I don’t tell that to everyone. We can put it the other end of the room. And tomorrow I get you a desk for your Germanistic, we put it over there under the window. That way you get daylight. If you fart too much, if I don’t like you after all, I ask you nicely to fuck off. Okay?” He goes straight on, not bothering with Mundy’s answer. “And in the morning I put you up for selection to the commune. We have a discussion, then a formal vote, it’s all bullshit. Maybe you get a couple of questions from Christina about your bourgeois origins. She’s the biggest bourgeois of us all. Her father’s a Greek shipowner who loves the colonels and pays for half the food here.” He takes another pull of whiskey, and again hands the glass to Mundy. “Some squats are legal. This one isn’t. We don’t like Nazi landlords. When you register with the university, you don’t give this address, we provide you with a nice letter from a guy in Charlottenburg. He says you live with him, which isn’t true, you’re a good Lutheran boy, which isn’t true, you’re in bed alone every night at ten o’clock, you marry everyone you fuck.”
Which is how Mundy learns that he is to become Sasha’s roommate.
A golden age has unexpectedly dawned in Ted Mundy’s life. He has a home, he has a friend, both new concepts to him. He is part of a brave new family determined to rebuild the world. An occasional night of exile under the stars is no hardship to a soldier’s son serving at the front line of the revolution. He is not offended when a red ribbon round the attic doorhandle advises him that his general is not receiving. While Sasha’s dealings with women are swift and purposeful, Mundy remains true to his vow of abstinence. Occasionally he is obliged to exchange a platonic word or two with one of the squat’s indecently high proportion of beautiful girls, but that is only because within hours of his admission he is gallantly providing free conversation lessons in English three times a week to any fellow communard so inclined.
And the salamander is living in the flames. Dr. Mandelbaum would be proud of him. The awareness of being in a combat zone, the knowledge that any moment he may be summoned to join his fellow partisans at the barricade, the nightlong debates on how the world’s rotten wood can be swept away and the new growth planted act on him like a constant stimulant. If Mundy arrived in Berlin a greenhorn, under the guidance of Sasha and the comrades he becomes an eager inheritor of the movement’s noble history. The names of its heroes and villains are soon as familiar to him as those of great cricketers.
It was the Iranian exile Bahman Nirumand, on the eve of the Shah of Iran’s visit to West Berlin, who informed a packed student audience in the Free University’s Auditorium Maximum of the true awfulness of the Shah’s American-backed regime.
It was Benno Ohnesorg who demonstrated against the Shah’s visit to the city and was, on the very next day, shot through the head by a plainclothes police inspector outside the West Berlin Opera House.
It was Benno’s funeral, and the denial of all wrongdoing by the police and the mayor, that drove the students to greater militancy and sped the rise of Rudi Dutschke, founder of the students’ Extra-Parliamentary Opposition.
It was the fascistic rhetoric of the press baron Axel Springer and his odious Bild Zeitung that incited a deranged workman with far-right fantasies to shoot down Rudi Dutschke in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. Dutschke survived for a time. Martin Luther King, shot the same month, did not.
He knows the dates and places of the great sit-ins and bloody confrontations of the recent past. He knows that the student revolt is raging across the world on a thousand battlefields, and that the students of America have been as brave as any, and as savagely put down.
He knows that the finest publication in the world is Konkret, founded by the movement’s high priestess, the immaculate Ulrike Meinhof. Germany’s two great revolutionary writers of the moment are called Langhans and Teufel.
So many brothers and sisters everywhere! So many comrades who share the dream! Even if the dream itself is not yet entirely clear to him, but he’s getting there, wherever there is.
So a life begins. First thing in the morning the chaste English boarding-school boy and as yet unbruised recruit to the cause of world liberation springs from his field bed while Sasha sleeps off the night’s great arguments. After a communal shower enlivened by girls he studiously ignores, he takes his turn in the squat’s cookhouse chopping stolen sausages and vegetables for the day’s soup then hurries out to pound West Berlin’s precious parks and open spaces, trawl the libraries and attend whatever lectures have survived the student body’s edict against fascistic indoctrination. Later in the day, he will offer himself as an apprentice at the print-shop to help run off salient passages from the works of the fashionable revolutionaries and, packing them into the Major’s knapsack, stand bravely at street corners foisting them on the passing bourgeoisie on their way home to unawakened lives.
And this isn’t just a matter of handing out free newspapers. This is risky work. Not only does the Berlin bourgeoisie refuse to awaken, but it has had enough of students to last it several generations. Less than twenty-five years after Hitler, the good citizens are not pleased to see their streets seething with riot police with truncheons, and mobs of foul-mouthed radicals hurling rocks at them. State-funded Berlin students exempted from conscription should pay their fees, obey, study and shut up. They should not smash glass, advocate copulation in public, cause traffic jams and insult our American saviors. More than one good citizen’s fist is raised at him. More than one old lady of the Auschwitz generation screams into his face to take his stupid pamphlets nach drüben where they can be used as toilet paper—she means over the Wall to East Germany—or makes a grab for his long hair, but he’s too tall for her. More than one taxi driver from the forces of reaction bumps his cab over the curb, sending Mundy scampering for cover and his wares flying over the street. But the good soldier is not fazed. Or not for long. Come evening of the same day, as soon as he has finished his conversation lessons, he can as likely be found relaxing over a beer at the Shaven Cat or the Republican Club, or enjoying Turkish coffee and an arrack in one of Kreuzberg’s many ramshackle cafés, where the aspiring novelist likes to spread his notebook and indulge his Isherwood persona.
But there are times when, for all his determined good spirits, Mundy is infected by the unreality of the divided city, its gallows humor and doomed atmosphere of unassured survival. Surrounded by angers that are new and often alien to him, he does wonder in his lowest moments whether his comrades are in fact searchers and puzzlers like himself, drawing their strength from the presumed convictions of their neighbors rather than from their own hearts, and whether, in his quest for the larger truths of life, he has after all ended up living in what Dr. Mandelbaum called a bubble. Clutching his end of a banner at a street demonstration, protesting the latest act of despotism by the terrified university authorities, or waiting manfully at the barricades for a police charge that fails to materialize, the expatriate son of a British army major does occasionally ask himself which war he is fighting: the last one or the next.
Yet his search for connection continues. There is an evening when, inspired by the benign weather and an arrack, he improvises a game of cricket for the many Turkish children hanging around the shanties. A dust-patch serves as a playing field, a stack of empty beer cans makes a wicket. Mundy grabs a handsaw and a plank from Faisal, the proprietor of his favorite café, and hacks out a bat. No Rani steps out of the evening sunlight to greet him, but the shouts of encouragement and despair, the skimming faces and olive limbs lift his heart. The Kreuzberg cricket club is born.
On restless safaris in the shadow of the Wall, he seeks out foreign sightseers and regales them with inspiring tales of escape. Should a factual episode elude him, then he will invent one, and feel rewarded by their gratitude. And if these remedies are not enough to rescue his occasionally flagging spirits, there is Sasha to come home to.
At first they are wary of each other. Like a couple who have rushed to the altar without benefit of courtship, each is inclined to fall back until he sees what he’s got. Is Mundy really the good soldier Sasha took him for? Is Sasha really the limping, charismatic firebrand who needs Mundy’s protection? Though they share the same territory, they live their lives in parallel, only overlapping at mutually agreeable moments. Of Sasha’s personal background, Mundy knows next to nothing, and the word around the squat is that the subject is taboo. He is of Saxon Lutheran origin, an East German refugee, an avowed enemy of all religion and like Mundy an orphan—though he has this last from hearsay only. That is all that need be known. It is not till Christmas Eve, or as the Germans have it, Holy Evening, that they experience one of those moments of mutual self-revelation from which there can be no retreat.
Already by December 23 the squat is three-quarters empty as communards abandon principle and slink home to celebrate in the bosom of their reactionary families. Those who have nowhere to go remain behind like uncollected children in a boarding school. Heavy snow is falling, and Kreuzberg is a sentimental dream of Yule. Waking early the next day, Mundy is exhilarated to see the attic skylights above him whited over, but when he calls this to Sasha’s attention he receives only a groan and the injunction to fuck off. Undaunted, he flings on all the clothes he possesses and wades down to the Turkish settlement to build a snowman and cook kebabs with Faisal and the kids from the cricket club. Returning to the attic at dusk, he finds the radio playing carols and Sasha looking like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, wearing his beret and an apron, and stooped over a mixing bowl.
The desk is set as a dinner table for two. An Advent candle burns at its center beside a bottle of Christina’s father’s Greek wine. More candles are balanced on the piles of stolen books. An unpromising chunk of red meat sits on a wooden board.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Sasha demands, without lifting his eyes from his work.
“Walking. Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Christmas, isn’t it? The fucking family feast. You’re supposed to be at home.”
“We haven’t got families. We’ve got dead parents and no brothers and sisters. I tried to wake you up, but you told me to fuck off.”
Sasha has still not raised his head. The bowl contains red berries. He is preparing some kind of sauce.
“What’s the meat?”
“Venison. Do you wish me to take it back to the shop and change it for your eternal fucking Wiener schnitzel?”
“Venison’s fine. Bambi for Christmas. Is that whiskey you’re drinking, by any chance?”
“Probably.”
Mundy chatters but Sasha will not be humored. Over dinner, trying to jolly him along, Mundy rashly relates the tale of his aristocratic mother who turned out to be an Irish nursemaid. He selects a merry tone, designed to assure his listener that he has long ago come to terms with an amusing byway of family history. Sasha hears him out with ill-concealed impatience.
“Why do you tell me this bullshit? Do you wish me to shed tears for you because you are not a lord?”
“Of course not. I thought you might laugh.”
“I am interested only in your personal liberation. There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.”
“All right. What about your dead parents? What did you have to overcome in order to arrive at the perfect state in which we find you?”
Is the taboo of Sasha’s family history to be broken? Apparently so, for the Schiller head is giving a succession of tight nods as if overcoming its reservations one by one. And Mundy notices how the deep-set eyes have aged somehow, and appear to absorb the candlelight rather than reflect it.
“Very well. You are my friend and I trust you. Despite your ridiculous preoccupations with duchesses and housemaids.”
“Thank you.”
“My late father is not quite as late or as dead as I would wish him to be. If we are to judge him by normal medical criteria, he is in fact offensively alive.”
Either Mundy has the wit to stay silent, or he is too bemused to speak.
“He did not assault a brother officer. He has not succumbed to drink, though periodically he tries. He is a religious and political Wendehals—a turncoat whose existence is so intolerable to me that even today, when I am forced to think of him, I can only bring myself to refer to him as the Herr Pastor, never Father. You look bored.”
“I’m anything but bored! Everyone told me your private life was holy ground. How could I imagine it was this holy?”
“From his earliest childhood the Herr Pastor believed unquestioningly in God. His parents were religious but he was superreligious, a puritanical Lutheran fanatic of the most incorrigible sort, born 1910. When Our Dear Führer came to power”—his invariable term for Hitler—“the Herr Pastor was already an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party, twenty-three years old and recently ordained. His faith in Our Dear Führer was even greater than his faith in God. Hitler would work magic. He would give Germany back its dignity, burn the Versailles Treaty, get rid of our Communists and Jews and build an Aryan heaven on earth. You are really not bored?”
“How can you ask? I’m riveted!”
“But not so riveted that you will rush out and tell your ten best friends that after all I have a father, I hope. The Herr Pastor and his fellow Nazi Lutherans called themselves Deutsche Christen. How he survived the last years of the war is unclear to me, since to this day he refuses to discuss such matters. At some desperate moment he was sent to the Russian front and captured. That the Russians didn’t shoot him is a dereliction of good sense that I have long held against them. Instead they sent him to prison in Siberia, and by the time he was released and returned to East Germany, Herr Pastor the Christian Nazi had become Herr Pastor the Christian Bolshevik. As a consequence of this conversion the East German Lutheran Church gave him a job curing Communist souls in Leipzig. I will confess to you that I greatly resented his return from captivity. He had no right to take my mother from me. He was a stranger, a violator. Other children had no father: why should I have one? This broken little coward of a man, sniffing a lot, preaching himself up to twice his size, with the words of Jesus and Lenin, was repulsive to me. To please my poor mother I was obliged to declare myself a convert. It is true that there were times when I was confused by the bond between the two deities, but since they both had beards it was possible to assume a symbiosis. In 1960, however, God was good enough to appear to the Herr Pastor in a dream and order him to take his family and everything he owned to the West while there was time. So we put our Bibles in our pockets and fled over the sector border, leaving Lenin behind.”
“Did you have brothers and sisters? This is really appalling, Sasha.”
“An elder brother whom my parents greatly preferred to me. He died.”
“At what age?”
“Sixteen.”
“What of?”
“Pneumonia, complicated by respiratory problems. A long, slow dying. I envied Rolf because he was our mother’s favorite, and loved him because he was a good brother to me. For seven months I visited him every day in the hospital and was present at his end. It was not a vigil I remember with pleasure.”
“I’m sure not.” He risks it. “So what happened to your body?”
“It appears that I was conceived while the Herr Pastor was on home leave, and subsequently born in a ditch while my mother was attempting to escape from the Russian advance. Her later information, probably inaccurate, was that I was deprived of oxygen in the womb. What my mother was deprived of, I can only imagine. It was not a salubrious ditch.” He resumes. “The Herr Pastor made the spiritual transition from East to West with his customary agility. Having caught the eye of a Missouri missionary organization of dubious connections, he was flown to St. Louis for a course of religious instruction. He graduated summa cum laude and returned to West Germany an ardent Christian conservative of the seventeenth century and a devotee of free market Christian capitalism. Appropriately, a curacy was found for him in the old Nazi stamping ground of Schleswig-Holstein, where every Sunday, to the enchantment of his congregation, he may be heard singing the praises of Martin Luther and Wall Street from the pulpit.”
“Sasha, this is truly terrible. Terrible and fantastic. Can we go up to Schleswig-Holstein and listen to him?”
“Never. I have disowned him totally. As far as my comrades are concerned he is totally dead. It is the one point on which the Herr Pastor and I have found common ground. He does not wish to acknowledge an atheist radical militant for a son, and I do not wish to acknowledge an aggressive hypocritical religious turncoat for a father. That is why, with the Herr Pastor’s collusion, I have expunged him from my past. All I ask is that he will not die before I have a chance to tell him once more how much I hate him.”
“And your mother?”
“Lives but does not live. Unlike your Irish nursemaid, she did not have the good fortune to die in childbirth. She walks the fens of Schleswig-Holstein in a mist of grief and confusion for her children, and speaks constantly of taking her life. As a young mother she was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators.”
His empty glass before him, Sasha is seated at his desk as stiffly as a condemned man. Watching him, listening to his self-ironies, Mundy experiences one of those surges of spiritual generosity that make all things clear to him. And so it is the undemonstrative English pragmatist rather than the anguished German seeker after life’s verities who fills their glasses and proposes a humble Christmas toast.
“Well, here’s to us, anyway,” he mumbles, with appropriate reserve. “Prosit. Happy Christmas and so on.”
Still frowning, Sasha lifts his glass and they drink to each other in the German way: raise your glass, look into the other fellow’s eyes, drink, raise it again, look again, allow a moment’s silence to put down your glass and dwell reverently upon the moment.
Relationships must deepen or die. In Mundy’s later remembering, that Christmas was the night when their relationship deepened, and found an unforced ease. Henceforth, Sasha pays no visit to the Republican Club or the Shaven Cat without tersely inquiring whether Mundy is coming along too. In student bars, on slow, unequal walks along frozen canal towpaths and riverbanks, Mundy plays Boswell to Sasha’s Johnson and Sancho Panza to his Quixote. When their commune becomes richer by a herd of stolen bourgeois bicycles, Sasha insists the two friends extend their horizons by exploring the outer limits of the half-city. The ever-willing Mundy prepares a picnic—chicken, bread, a bottle of red burgundy, all honestly bought from his earnings as a Berlin Wall tour guide. They set out, but Sasha insists they first push their bicycles a distance because he has something to discuss and it is best discussed on foot. They are safely out of sight of the squat before he says what it is.
“Come to think of it, actually, Teddy, I don’t believe I have ever ridden one of these fucking things,” he confesses with monumental casualness.
Fearing Sasha’s legs may not be equal to the job, and cursing himself for not having thought of this earlier, Mundy walks him to the Tiergarten and seeks out a gentle grass slope with no children looking on. He holds Sasha’s saddle, but Sasha smartly orders him to let go. Sasha falls, swears foully, struggles back up the slope, tries again, falls again, swears more foully still. But by the third descent he has learned to trim his uneven body so that he remains aloft, and a couple of hours later, flushed with pride, he is squatting in his greatcoat on a bench, eating chicken and with frosted breath dilating on the sayings of the great Marcuse.
But Christmas, as is usual in warfare, is only a temporary suspension of hostilities. No sooner has the snow melted than the tensions between the students and the city return to breaking point. It is incidental that every university in West Germany is crawling with unrest; that from Hamburg, Bremen, Göttingen, Frankfurt, Tübingen, Saarbrücken, Bochum and Bonn come stories of strikes, mass resignations of ruling professors and the triumphant advance of radical bodies. Berlin has larger, older and more vicious scores to settle than the whole lot of them put together. In the shadow of the approaching storm, Sasha makes a dash to Cologne, where rumor reports that a brilliant new theoretician is pushing out the borders of radical thought. By the time he returns, Mundy is braced for action, and in facetious mood.
“And did the Oracle pronounce on how men of peace should bear themselves in the forthcoming confrontation?” he inquires, expecting at the very least one of Sasha’s tirades against the repressive tolerance of pseudo-liberalism, or the cancer of military-industrial colonialism. “Tomatoes, stink bombs, thunder flashes—Uzi machine guns, perhaps?”
“We intend to reveal the social genesis of human knowledge,” Sasha replies, stuffing bread and sausage into his mouth before he hurries off to a meeting.
“What’s that when it’s at home?” Mundy asks, slipping into his familiar role of test audience.
“Man’s preternatural state, his ur-state. Day One is already too late. We must begin on Day Zero. That is the entire point.”
“You’re going to have to spell this one out for me,” Mundy warns, brows appropriately puckered. And the notion is indeed surprising to Mundy, since Sasha has until now insisted that they must deal with harsh political realities rather than fancy visions of Utopia.
“As a first stage, we shall wipe the human slate clean. We shall detoxify the brain, cleanse it of its prejudices, inhibitions and inherited appetites. We shall purge it of everything old and rotten”—another chunk of sausage—“Americanism, greed, class, envy, racism, bourgeois sentimentality, hatred, aggression, superstition and the craving for property and power.”
“And enter what exactly?”
“I fail to understand your question.”
“It’s simple enough. You’ve wiped my slate clean. I’m pure, I’m not American, racist, bourgeois or materialistic. I’ve got no bad thoughts left, no bad inherited instincts. What do I get in return, apart from a policeman’s boot in the balls?”
Standing impatiently at the door, Sasha has ceased to take kindly to this inquisition. “You get what is needful to a harmonious society and nothing more. Brotherly love, natural sharing, mutual respect. Napoleon was right. You English are totally materialistic.”
All the same, it is a theory of which Mundy hears no more.