“THOSE GIRLS ARE total dykes,” insists the Viking, now better known to Mundy by his kennel name of Peter the Great. Peter is a pacifist from Stuttgart. He came to Berlin to escape military service. His rich parents are whispered to be Sympis, members of the guilt-ridden higher bourgeoisie who secretly give succor to those bent on their destruction.
“A lost cause,” Sasha, taken up with larger matters of revolutionary strategy, distractedly agrees. “Don’t waste your stupid time on them, Teddy. Freaks, the pair of them.”
They are speaking of Legal Judith and Legal Karen, so named because they are studying jurisprudence. The fact that they happen to be the two most desirable females in the squat only adds to their offense. Sexual choice for women, in the opinion of the two great liberators, does not include refusing to go to bed with important male activists. Take a look at the sackcloth skirts they wear, for God’s sake, Peter urges. And those mannish shoes like army boots, where do they think they’re marching to? And the way they put their hair up in messy buns and slop around the squat like a couple of lovesick Burghers of Calais! Peter claims they take out one law book from the library at a time so that they have something to read together in bed. Karen moves her finger along the line, he says, Judith does the words.
The only person they consort with apart from one another is Mundy’s erstwhile inquisitor, the Greek Christina, who is suspected of sharing their sexual predilections. Mundy has never previously encountered the phenomenon of lesbianism, but has to concede that all known evidence supports the rumor. The two women refuse to shower communally. From the day they arrived in the squat they insisted on having their own room, and fitted a padlock to the door with a sign saying FUCK OFF. It’s still there. Mundy has been to see it. Any further proof he should require, let him try his luck and see what he gets apart from a broken jaw, says Peter.
Yet for all these doom-laden prognostications, Legal Judith is imposing grave strains on Mundy’s vows of Isherwood detachment. Her efforts to disguise her beauty are futile. Where Karen hunches her shoulders and acts grumpy, Judith is wispy and ethereal. At protest meetings Karen snarls like a bulldog, but Judith in anger merely shakes her golden head. Yet as soon as the meeting’s over, there they are again: Legal Judith and Legal Karen, nicely brought-up North German girls, received in Berlin’s best radical drawing rooms, strolling hand in hand along the shores of Lesbos.
So forget her, Mundy orders himself each time he catches his hopes rising. Those straight looks she gives you during English conversation lessons are because you’re weird and tall and Oxford. Our verbal flirtations—of Judith’s contrivance, admittedly—are opportunities for her to try out her English on you, nothing more.
“Did I speak that sentence accurately, Teddy?” she will ask, with a smile to melt glaciers.
“Marvelous, Judith! Not a syllable out of joint.”
“Joint?”
“Out of place. Slip of the tongue. You’re immaculate. Official.”
“But do I suffer from an American accent, Teddy? If I do, you will please immediately correct me.”
“Not a hint of one, scout’s honor! English to the core. Fact,” Mundy blurts in the agony of his frustration.
And the blue metallic eyes not believing him, but staying on him like a child’s till he says it all to her again the way children need you to. “Thank you, Teddy. Then I wish you a pleasant day. Not a nice day, for that would be American. Yes?”
“Absolutely right. You too, Judith. And you, Karen.”
Because she’s never alone, naturally. Legal Karen is sitting right there at her side, tessellating with her, learning about glottal stops with her, breathing out with her as they try to say go away without the fricative bump in the middle. Or so things stand until a day comes when without warning it is tacitly acknowledged that Legal Karen has left the squat, whereabouts unknown. At first she is reported sick, then she is visiting her dying mother until someone remembers that both her parents were killed on the last day of the war. But after a raid by police on a nearby cooperative, a different rumor starts the rounds. Legal Karen has become illegal, meaning she has followed the sainted Ulrike Meinhof on her journey underground. Ulrike our moral angel, our leading leftist, high priestess of the Alternative Life, the movement’s Joan of Arc in all matters of courage and integrity, who has recently announced to the radical world that shooting may begin. It is also rumored that Christina has accompanied her, in one stroke depriving Judith of her life’s companion and the squat of half its income. But for Mundy it is the sight of Judith drifting like Ophelia down the corridors of the commune that is too much to bear. All the more surprising, therefore, when one evening she lays a frail hand on his upper arm and inquires whether he would care to accompany her on a sleepwalk.
“Sleepwalk, Judith? My God! Walk anywhere with you!” He is going to add sleep anywhere with you too, but changes his mind in time. “Sure that’s what you mean? What’s the German, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She gives it. Nachtwandlung. “It is an action of political importance, also completely secret. It is to force Berliners to confront their fascist past. You are willing?”
“Will Sasha be there?”
“Unfortunately he will be in Cologne consulting certain professors. Also he is not appropriate on a bicycle.”
Loyal Mundy hastens to protest. “Sasha’s fine on a bicycle. You should see him. Goes like a hare.”
Judith does not relent.
It is by now early spring, but the weather doesn’t know this. Flurries of wet snow pursue him through the darkness as he makes his way to a derelict schoolhouse close to the canal. Peter the Great and his girlfriend Magda are there ahead of him. So are a Swede called Torkil and a Bavarian Amazon called Hilde. On Judith’s orders, each conspirator has supplied himself with one flashlight, one can of crimson spray paint and one can of waterglass, a mysterious solution that allegedly etches itself so deeply into glass that to remove it you must remove the whole window. Peter the Great, as the appointed quartermaster, has furnished a stolen bicycle for each combatant. Mundy wears three of his father’s shirts, a scarf and an old anorak. His flashlight and waterglass and paint are in his knapsack. Torkil and Peter the Great have brought balaclava helmets. Hilde sports a Chairman Mao face mask. Placing herself before a city plan, Judith briefs her troops in crisp North German accents. She has thrown aside her sackcloth in favor of a fisherman’s sweater and extremely long white woollen tights. If she is wearing a skirt, it is not in evidence.
Our targets for tonight are the former houses, ministries and headquarters of the Third Reich, presently masquerading as innocuous buildings, she announces. The aim of our operation is educational. It is to redress the amnesia of the city’s bourgeoisie by indicating the function of each building during the Nazi period. Past experience has proved that the West Berlin pigs are incensed by such markings, and mount special actions to replace windows and eradicate the graffiti. We shall therefore be scoring a double victory: against the bourgeois love of property, and the efforts of the Pig System to deny its Nazi past. Prime objectives—she indicates them on the map—will include Tiergartenstrasse 4, home of the Euthanasia Program, and afterwards Adolf Eichmann’s offices in the Kurfürstenstrasse, now all but removed to make way for a spanking new hotel; also Heinrich Himmler’s headquarters on the corner of the Wilhelmstrasse and the Prinz Albrechtstrasse, now unfortunately a victim of the Berlin Wall, but we’ll do whatever we can in the circumstances.
Subject to operational considerations, we shall also attack the marshaling points where Berlin’s Jews were assembled for transportation to the death camps, including Grunewald railway station which still has the very ramps built for the job, and the old military courthouse with its entrance in the Witzlebenstrasse where the gallant few who plotted against Hitler are proudly commemorated, in contrast to the millions who supported him to the hilt and are conveniently forgotten. Our inscription at the Schlosspark will address this injustice.
The possibility of riding out to Wannsee, where Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jews was agreed upon, has also been discussed, but prevailing weather conditions are against it. Wannsee will therefore be the target of a separate action. Tonight’s secondary objectives will however include the city’s much-admired lampposts, originally designed by Hitler’s personal architect, Albert Speer. Peter will have the responsibility of pasting them with leaflets exhorting all good Nazis to rally to the American genocide in Vietnam.
Judith will ride point, Teddy and Torkil will make up the second echelon, Peter and Hilde will keep up the rear. Magda will hang back, watch out for pigs and engage them in diversionary tactics if they attempt to foil the operation. Laughter. Magda is pretty and shameless. To earn money without compromising her revolutionary principles, she is proud to hire herself out as an occasional prostitute. She is also considering bearing the child of an infertile petit bourgeois couple as a means of furthering her studies.
The team sets off, Mundy shooting ahead by mistake on account of his long legs, then braking to let Judith overtake him, which she does at full tilt. Head down, white backside lifted to the sky, she races past him whistling the “International.” He gives chase, discipline is abandoned, hoots of merriment follow him through the freezing air, the “International” becomes their battle cry. Fair hair flowing free as she jives to the rhythm of her singing, Judith embellishes one shopwindow, and Mundy her comrade-in-arms another. A message is passed breathlessly down the line: pigs approaching at forty degrees. The rear guard peels away but Judith goes on writing, first in German and afterwards, for the benefit of our British and American readers, in English. Mundy, her self-appointed bodyguard, watches over her while she calmly pursues her work. After hot pursuit through cobbled back alleys the team regroups, heads are counted and Peter the Great produces a welcome thermos of bourgeois mulled wine before they advance on their next target. Orange streaks of dawn are appearing through the swirling snow-clouds as the victorious troops return exhausted to their squat. Alight with cold and the exultation of the hunt, Mundy escorts Judith to her door.
“Wondered whether you’d like a spot more English conversation, if you’re not too tired,” he proposes airily, only to watch the door, with its injunction to fuck off, close softly in his face.
For an age he lies wakefully on his bed. Sasha was right, damn him: even when she’s left high and dry, Judith is a lost cause. In his frustration he is visited first by Ilse, then by Mrs. McKechnie in her see-through black chiffon. He brushes them wearily away. Next comes Legal Judith herself, with her fountain of fair hair tumbling over her shoulders and otherwise stark naked. “Teddy, Teddy, I require you to wake up, please,” she is saying, as she rocks his shoulder with increasing impatience. I’ll bet you do, he thinks sourly. He tries opening his eyes and closing them again, but the mirage is still there despite the unpleasing morning light. Irritably he throws out an arm and meets not, as he is expecting, empty air, but Legal Judith’s extremely naked bum. His first thought, idiotically, is that, like Christina and Legal Karen, she is on the run and needs a place to hide.
“What’s happened? Have the police come?” he asks, in English since it is their lingua franca.
“Why? Would you prefer to make love to the police?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Do you have an engagement today? Perhaps with another girl?”
“No. I haven’t. Nothing at all. I haven’t got another girl.”
“We shall take time, please. You are my first man. Are you discouraged by this information? You are too English perhaps? Too respectable?”
“Of course I’m not. I mean, I’m not discouraged by this information. I’m not respectable at all.”
“Then we are fortunate. It was necessary to wait till everyone was asleep before I came to you. This is for security. Afterwards you will please not tell anybody that we have made love, otherwise all the men in the commune will demand to make love to me, which would not be convenient. You agree to this condition?”
“I agree. I agree to everything. You’re not here. I’m asleep. Nothing’s happening. I’ll keep everything under my hat.”
“Your hat?”
Thus does Ted Mundy, the complete infant for sex, become the triumphant lover of Legal Judith, total dyke.
The intensity of their lovemaking unites them as a single rebel force. Their first passions slaked, they transfer themselves to Judith’s lair. The FUCK OFF sign remains, but by evening of the same day the bedroom has become their love nest. Her insistence on security, and speaking only English even in their extreme moments, ensures that they inhabit a sphere apart from other terrestrials. He knows nothing of her, nor she of him. To ask the banal questions would be to commit the mortal sin of conformity. Only now and then does an answer slip unbidden through the lines.
She is not yet eingebläut but is confident that once the spring marches begin she will be.
She expects, like Trotsky and Bakunin, to spend the rest of her life as a professional revolutionary, probably half of it in prison or Siberia.
She sees frozen exile, hard labor and privation as necessary stages on her path to radical perfection.
She is studying law because law is the enemy of natural justice and she wishes to know her enemy. A lawyer is always an arsehole, she proclaims contentedly, quoting a favored guru. Mundy finds nothing inconsistent in her selecting a profession populated by arseholes.
She is impatient to sweep away all repressive social structures and believes that only by ceaseless struggle will the movement succeed in forcing the Pig System to abandon its mask of liberal democracy and reveal its true face.
The exact form of the forthcoming struggle was, however, the stumbling block between herself and Karen. Like Karen, Judith accepts the thesis of Régis Debray and Che Guevara that if the proletariat is not ready or mature, then the revolutionary vanguard must put itself in the place of the masses. She also agrees that in such a situation, the avant-garde acquires the right to act on behalf of the deficient proletariat. What is at issue between them is method. Or, as Judith puts it, method and morality.
“If I am putting sand into a pig’s petrol tank, do you consider this action to be morally acceptable, or not morally acceptable?” she demands to know.
“Acceptable. Absolutely. Just what pigs deserve,” Mundy assures her gallantly.
The debate is taking place as usual in Judith’s bed. Spring has announced itself. Sunshine is streaming through the window and the lovers are entwined in its rays. Mundy has spread her long gold hair over his face like a veil. Her voice comes to him through a dreamy haze.
“But if it is a hand grenade I am putting into a pig’s petrol tank, is this still morally acceptable, or is it morally unacceptable?”
Mundy doesn’t recoil, but even in his state of permanent ecstasy he misses a beat and sits up before replying. “Well, no, actually,” he says, taken aback that the English for hand grenade should trip so lightly from his loved one’s lips. “Emphatically un. No go. Not in the petrol tank, not anywhere. Motion not carried. Ask Sasha. He agrees.”
“To Karen such a hand grenade is not only morally acceptable, it is desirable. Against tyranny and lies, all methods are for Karen legitimate. To kill an oppressor is to perform a human service. It is to protect the oppressed. This is logical. A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no airplane. We should not have bourgeois Hemmungen.”
“Inhibitions,” Mundy translates obligingly, doing his best to ignore the didactic edge that has entered her voice.
“Karen subscribes completely to the words of Frantz Fanon that violence exercised by the oppressed is invariably legitimate,” she adds as a defiant afterthought.
“Well, I don’t,” Mundy retorts, flopping back onto the bed. “And neither does Sasha,” he adds, as if that clinches the matter.
A long silence follows.
“You wish to know something, Teddy?”
“What, my love?”
“You are a totally insular, imperialistic English arsehole.”
See it as just another fixture, Mundy urges himself as he once again dons his father’s shirts, this time by way of body armor. Demos are mock battles, never the real thing. Everybody knows where they’re going to happen, and when and why. Nobody gets seriously hurt. Well, not unless they ask for it. Not even on a field day.
And I mean, for heaven’s sake, how many times have I stood shoulder to shoulder with Ilse, except that her shoulder came up to my elbow, and jostled along in jam-packed crowds all the way down Whitehall, with policemen marching close on either side of us in order not to have to use their truncheons? And what happened? A few knocks here and there, the odd kick in the ribs, but nothing half as bad as being an overgrown, underpowered rugby forward versus Downside away. It is true that, by an act of divine malice or mercy, he’s never sure which, he was not among those present at the great Grosvenor Square march. But he’s demo’d here in Berlin, he’s occupied university buildings, participated in sit-ins, manned barricades and, thanks to his prowess as a fast bowler, earned his colors as a prodigious thrower of stink bombs and rocks, usually at armored police vans, thereby delaying the advance of fascism by at least a hundredth of a second.
And all right, Berlin isn’t Hyde Park, it isn’t Whitehall. It’s less sporty, a rougher deal. And all right, the odds aren’t exactly evenly distributed, what with one team all geared up with guns, truncheons, handcuffs, shields, helmets, gas masks, tear gas, water cannon and busloads of reinforcements round the corner; and the other side with—well, come to think of it—not very much at all, beyond boxes of rotting tomatoes and bad eggs, a few heaps of rocks, a lot of pretty girls and a shining message for mankind.
But I mean, we’re all civilized—well, aren’t we? Even on Sasha’s special day: Sasha our charismatic orator, our coming man for the leader’s throne, our Quasimodo of the social genesis of knowledge, who according to the prevailing pot-talk could fill the Aula with the girls he’s screwed. For this same Sasha—quoting information covertly obtained by the ubiquitous Magda while in bed with a policeman—has today been singled out for particular attention, which is why Mundy, Judith, Peter the Great and other members of his supporters’ club are rallied to him on the university steps. It is also why the pigs themselves have turned out in such spectacular numbers to acquaint themselves in greater detail with the doctrines of the Frankfurt School before politely inviting Sasha to step into a grüne Minna, which is what Germans call a Black Maria, and ride with them to the nearest police station, where he will be requested with due respect for his constitutional rights under the Basic Law to make a voluntary statement listing names and addresses of his comrades and their plans to cause mayhem and rapine in the highly inflammable half-city of West Berlin, and generally return the world to where it was before it succumbed to the multiple diseases of fascism, capitalism, militarism, consumerism, Nazism, Coca-Colonization, imperialism and pseudo-democracy.
Exactly these topics are Sasha’s text for today’s sermon on the hallowed lawn of the Free University, and the sight of the police cordon as it closes round him inspires him to develop his themes to their extremity. He has poured scorn and hatred on America for the carpet-bombing of Vietnam’s cities, the poisoning of her crops and napalming of her jungles. He has called for the Nuremberg Tribunal to be reconvened, and the fascist-imperialist American leadership arraigned before it on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has accused the morally degenerate American lackeys of the so-called government in Bonn of sanitizing Germany’s Nazi past with consumerism, and turning the Auschwitz generation into a flock of fat sheep with nothing in their heads but new refrigerators, TV sets and Mercedes cars. He has railed against the Shah and his CIA-backed secret police, the Savak, and spread himself on the subject of the American-sponsored Greek colonels and the “American puppet state of Israel.” He has listed America’s wars of aggression, from Hiroshima through Korea by way of Central America, South America and Africa to Vietnam. He has sent fraternal greetings to our fellow activists in Paris, Rome and Madrid and saluted America’s courageous students of Berkeley and Washington, D.C., “who blazed the trail we are all now marching.” He has lashed out at a mob of infuriated rightists who are yelling at him to shut his big mouth and get on with his studies.
“Shut our mouths?” he yells at them. “You who were silent under the Nazi tyranny are telling us we should be silent under yours? We are good children! We have learned our lessons too well! From you, arseholes! From our silent Nazi parents! And we can promise you this. The children of the Auschwitz generation will never, NEVER be silent!”
He is raised on a soapbox of Mundy’s manufacture in order to say this. Mundy has run it up on Faisal’s workbench at the back of the café. Judith stands at Mundy’s side wearing a fireman’s helmet and a keffiyeh bound across her lower face. Her Chairman Mao jacket is bulked out with Mundy’s cricket pullover. But her best-kept secret is the peerless body that she keeps hidden under all the shapeless tat, and it is a secret that Mundy shares with her. He knows it better than his own, every fold and contour of it. Each cry of indignant pleasure that he draws from her is a cry from his own heart. In politics as in lovemaking she is never content until they have crossed together into the wild borderlands of anarchy.
Suddenly, absolutely nothing is happening. Or nothing Mundy is aware of. It is as if film and soundtrack have stopped simultaneously, then started up again. Sasha is still speechifying from his soapbox, but the extras are screaming. Rings of armed police are tightening round the protesters, the beating of truncheons on shields has become thunderous, the first tear gas canisters have gone off, which doesn’t bother the police, because very sensibly they’ve put on their masks. Amid the mist of smoke and water cannon, students are escaping in all directions, howling and whining from the gas. Mundy’s ears, nose and throat are dissolving with the heat, tears are blinding him but he knows better than to wipe them away. Jets of water are crashing into his face, he sees flying truncheons and hears horses’ hooves clattering on the cobble and the childlike whimpering of the wounded. In the scrum of yelling, punching bodies round him, there is only one player showing any class, and that’s Legal Judith. To his amazement, she has produced a family-sized baseball bat from inside her Mao jacket and, ignoring Sasha’s exhortations to passive resistance, whacks a young policeman so hard on the side of his new helmet that it falls into his hands like a gift from heaven as he sinks smiling stupidly to his knees. “Teddy, du gibst bitte Acht auf Sasha!” she advises Mundy politely, speaking for once the delicious language of Thomas Mann rather than the English of their passion. Then she vanishes under a snake-heap of brown-and-blue uniforms and there is no way on earth he can reach her. The last he sees of her she has swapped her fireman’s hat for a cap of blood, but her exhortation is burning in his ears: Teddy, you will kindly take care of Sasha, and he remembers that Ilse made the same request of him, and that he has made the same request of himself.
The water cannon are being wheeled up but the two armies are now so intermingled that the pigs are reluctant to drench their own, and Sasha is still yelling out his message from his soapbox. The pigs are within truncheon range of him, a very fat sergeant screams, “Get me this shit-faced poison dwarf!” and Mundy is doing what he never dreamed of doing, and if he had planned it he would never have done it. The son of Major Arthur Mundy, holder of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor, emptier of twenty saddles, is charging the enemy. But it is Sasha, not a Bren gun, he is holding in his arms. Blindly obedient to Legal Judith’s command as well as his own good impulses, he has whisked Sasha from his soapbox and slung him across his shoulders. He has Sasha’s thrashing feet in one arm and flailing hands in another and he is wading through the enemy tear gas and the mass of howling, bleeding bodies, not feeling the truncheons that rain on him and not hearing anything except Sasha’s bitching and complaining—Let me down, you arsehole, run, get out of here, the pigs will kill you—until the sun comes out and Mundy is lighter by an entire millstone because by now he has carried out Judith’s orders to the best of his ability, and Sasha has slipped from his shoulders and hightailed it across the open square, and it is Mundy, not Sasha, who sits in the police van with his hands cuffed to a bar above his head while two policemen take turns to beat the living daylights out of him: Ted Mundy is being eingebläut, and he doesn’t need Sasha’s translation to tell him what it means.
It was never afterwards easy for Mundy to document what followed. There was the van, there was the police station. There was the cell that smelled of the things cells are supposed to smell of: excreta, salt tears, vomit and, from time to time, warm blood. For a while he shared it with a bald-headed Pole who proclaimed himself a multiple murderer, rolled his eyes a lot and giggled. In the interrogation room there was no Pole. It was the private domain of Mundy and the same two policemen who had given him his first beating in the van, and were now giving him another under the mistaken impression that he was Peter the Great with his beard shaved off, pretending to be a British subject. He possessed a perfectly good student’s card they could have looked at, even if it had the wrong address on it, not to mention a British passport, but unfortunately he had left them back in the attic for fear of losing them in the fray. He offered to go and fetch them, but obviously he couldn’t tell his inquisitors where to find them for themselves because to do so would have been to point them straight at Sasha and the illegal squat. His stubbornness on this point drove them to new heights of fury. They stopped listening to him and whaled into him for the hell of it: groin, kidneys, soles of the feet, groin again, but for cosmetic purposes leaving the face relatively intact, though ultimately not as intact as any of them might have wished. Periodically he dropped off. Periodically they carted him back to his cell while they had a rest. How many times this happened was always a blur to him, just as the sudden end of it all, and the ambulance ride to the British military hospital, were blurs. He had an impression of blue lights that flashed inside his head instead of in the street where they belonged, and of clean bedsheets that smelled of disinfectant. And of a glistening ward presided over by a children’s nursemaid with a silver-plated stopwatch pinned to her white linen bosom.
“Mundy? Mundy? Not related to a little shit called Major Arthur Mundy, are we, ex-Indian Army? Can’t be,” the chief medical officer asks suspiciously, peering down at the bandaged length of him.
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“Don’t be afraid, old boy. Count yourself bloody lucky is all I can say. How many fingers am I holding up? Well done. Jolly good.”
He is lying in the ship’s cabin, but without the comfort of the Major’s Burmas. He is crouched beside Rani at the rock pool, but can’t stand up. He has his head in a handbasin and is clutching the taps in the school washroom while the prefects take it in turns to beat him for his lack of Christian reverence. He is out of bounds, a plague case. The sight of him could be infectious. He’s an untouchable, and there’s a stenciled notice hanging just the other side of his door to prove it:
AUTHORIZED MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY
Or as Judith would say, fuck off. In earnest of this, there is also a red-capped military police sergeant to watch over his well-being. The sergeant makes his feelings clear on the first occasion Mundy is strong enough to shuffle down the corridor to pee.
“We’d have put the manners on you if we’d had you, son,” he assures him. “You’d be bloody dead, and grateful for it.”
A British official comes to visit. He is Mr. Amory, and brings a printed card to say so: Mr. Nicholas Amory, Vice Consul, the British High Commission, Berlin. He is only a few years older than Mundy and, for an unredeemed bourgeois Englishman of the oppressive classes, disconcertingly agreeable. He wears a good tweed suit but is shaggy in a reassuring way. His suede shoes are particularly disgraceful. The Major’s knapsack dangles from his nicely tailored shoulder.
“Whoever sent you these grapes, Edward?” he inquires, fingering them and grinning.
“The Berlin police.”
“Did they, by Jove? And the chrysanthemums?”
“The Berlin police.”
“Well, I think that’s mighty handsome of them, don’t you, given the strain the poor chaps are under these days?”—laying the knapsack at the foot of Mundy’s bed. “This is the front line, you know. Nobody can be blamed for losing their rag now and then. Specially when they’re provoked by a bunch of state-funded students who don’t know their radical arses from their elbows—any more than you do, I suspect.” He has pulled up a chair and is studying Mundy’s face critically in close-up. “Who’s your nice friend, Edward?”
“Which one?”
“The little twerp who came storming into our office like the bloody SS,” he replies, helping himself to a grape. “Jumped the queue, slammed your passport on the reception desk and barked at our German clerk to secure your immediate release from the West Berlin police, or else. Then barged out again before anyone could take his name and address. The poor clerk was scared out of his wits. A submerged Saxon accent, he said. Audible but not ridiculous. Only a Saxon would be such an oaf. Do you have a lot of chums like that, Edward? Angry East Germans who won’t leave their names?”
“No.”
“How long have you been in Berlin?”
“Nine months.”
“Living where?”
“My grant ran out.”
“Living where?”
“In Charlottenburg.”
“Someone told me Kreuzberg.”
No answer.
“You should have come and signed the book. Distressed British students are what we do best.”
“I wasn’t distressed.”
“Well, you are now. You bowled for the public schools, didn’t you?”
“A couple of times.”
“We’ve got quite a decent side here. Too late now. Pity. What’s his name, as a matter of interest?”
“Whose?”
“Your short-arsed Saxon knight with a hobble. His ugly face struck our clerk as familiar. Thought he might have seen it in the papers.”
“I don’t know.”
Amory seems quietly amused by this. He consults the disgraceful suede shoes. “Well, well. Question is, Edward, what are we going to do with you?”
Mundy has no suggestions. He is wondering whether Amory is one of the prefects who beat him in the washroom.
“You could raise a stink, I suppose. Call in six lawyers. We can give you a list. The coppers would press charges of their own, of course. Causing a breach of the peace, for openers. Abusing your status as a foreign guest, which the judges won’t like. Registering yourself under a false address. We’d do our best for you, naturally. Feed you french bread through the bars. Did you say something?”
Mundy hasn’t said a word, Amory can beat him as much as he likes.
“As far as the police are concerned, you’re simply a case of mistaken identity. If you’d been the right person, they’d have been highly commended. They say some mad Polish murderer did it to you. Is that possible?”
“No.”
“However, they are prepared to cut a deal, if we are. They won’t throw the book at you, and you won’t press charges for any little mishap that may or may not have occurred while you were in the nick. And we will save our British blushes at this delicate time of international crisis by smuggling you out of Berlin disguised as a Nubian slave. Done?”
The night nurse is as big as Ayah, but she tells no stories about the Prophet Mohammed.
He arrives as a doctor, the way clever heroes do in movies: at crack of dawn while the sergeant’s man is dozing in the sentry’s chair, and Mundy is lying on his back sending messages to Judith. The white medical coat has three pips on each shoulder and is several sizes too big for him. A stethoscope dangles haplessly round his neck, and a pair of enormous surgical galoshes cover his fraying sneakers. The whole of West Berlin must have been looking out for a shit-faced poison dwarf, but that hasn’t stopped him, he’s resourceful. He’s wriggled or talked his way past the sentries at the gate, and once inside the hospital he’s made a beeline for the orderlies’ room and forced a locker. There is a yellowy sickness round his eyes. His forelock is too young for him, his revolutionist’s scowl replaced by deep uncertainty. The rest of him is smaller and more crumpled than ever.
“Teddy, I am without words. What you did for me—saving my life, no less—this was the gesture of a friend I do not deserve. How can I repay you? Nobody has ever performed such an absurd act of sacrifice on my behalf. You are English, and for you, all life is a silly accident. But I am German, and for me, if it has no logic it is meaningless.”
Lakes have formed in the brown eyes. His oversized voice is husky inside the little chest. His words sound carefully prepared.
“How’s Judith?” Mundy asks.
“Judith? Legal Judith?” He seems to have difficulty remembering the name. “Judith, ah well, she is in good form, thank you, Teddy, yes. Affected, as we all are, by this outrage but, as you would expect of her, not bowed. She suffered a small head wound, she breathed too much gas. She is eingebläut like you, but she is recovered. And she asks to be remembered to you”—as if that settles the matter—“warmly remembered to you, Teddy. She admires you for what you did.”
“Where is she?”
“In the squat. A small bandage for the first few days. Then nothing.”
The nothing, and the silence that follows it, prompt Mundy to pull a humorless grin. “To the girl who has got nozzings on,” he intones idiotically in English, quoting a line of doggerel the Major was fond of reciting in his cups. “She knows they’re throwing me out, does she?” he asks.
“Judith? Of course. A totally unconstitutional act. The lawyer in her is outraged. Her immediate instinct was to go to the courts. I had to use all my persuasive powers to convince her that your legal position here is not as strong as she would wish.”
“But you managed.”
“Only with great difficulty. Like many women, Judith does not take kindly to arguments of expediency. However, you would be proud of her, Teddy. Thanks to you, she is completely liberated.”
After that, as good friends may, Sasha sits at Mundy’s bedside, holding his friend’s wrist rather than his smashed-up hand but somehow contriving not to look Mundy in the eye. Mundy lies staring at him, Sasha sits staring at the wall, until Mundy out of politeness finally pretends to be asleep. Sasha leaves and the door seems to close twice: once on Sasha and once on the completely liberated Judith.