“YOU ARE TIRED, Teddy?” asks the ponderous, ginger-headed Lothar, ordering up another round of pilsners.
“Oh, just a bit stretched, Lothar, nothing terminal,” Mundy confesses. “We did a lot of dancing today,” he adds, to overappreciative laughter.
“Tired but happy,” Frau Doktor Bahr suggests primly from the head of the table, and her young neighbor, the intellectual Horst, seconds this.
Sasha says nothing. He sits, chin in hand, frowning into the middle distance. He has pulled his beret low over his brow, perhaps for irony. It’s their second evening together, so Mundy is familiar with the pecking order. Lothar is Sasha’s minder. Horst, the blond intellectual, is Lothar’s minder. The stern Frau Doktor Bahr from the East German Embassy here in Prague is minding all three of them. And all four of them are minding Ted Mundy.
The third day of the Prague Festival of Dance has just ended. They are sitting in the cellar bar of a conference hotel at the edge of town, a Soviet-style monster of glass and steel, but the cellar is supposed to re-create Hapsburg times, with fat stone pillars and frescoes of knights and maidens. A few late drinkers sit at other tables, a few girls drink cola out of straws, still hoping to catch a foreigner. In a far corner a middle-aged couple are drinking tea, and they have been drinking the same tea in the same tender way for half an hour.
You’ll be followed and that’s par for the course, Edward. It will be professional surveillance, so the important thing for you is not to be aware of it. They’ll shake out your room, so don’t be too tidy or they’ll think you’re playing games with them. If they make eye contact with you by mistake, best to smile vaguely and tell yourself you bumped into them at a party somewhere. Your most convincing weapon is your innocence. With me?
With you, Nick.
In the last seventy-two hours Mundy has sat through bone-wearying displays of sword dancing, folk dancing, tribal dancing, country dancing and Morris dancing. He has clapped his hands off for Cossacks, Georgians, Palestinians doing the dabke, and numberless enactments of scenes from Swan Lake, Coppélia and Nutcracker in a packed baroque theater with no ventilation. He has drunk warm white wine in half a dozen national tents, and in the British tent he has bantered with the usual good chaps and dutiful wives, including a chubby first secretary with circular spectacles who says he once opened the batting for Harrow and Mundy bowled him out first ball, which is the agreed recognition signal. He has been plagued by loudspeaker systems that don’t work, scenery going to the wrong theater and stars refusing to perform because there is no hot water in their hotel. And betweenwhiles he has grudgingly allowed himself to be wooed by Sasha and his outriders. Last night they wanted him to go with them to a private party in town and when Mundy declined, saying he must tend his flock, Lothar suggested a nightclub. Mundy declined that too.
Make the buggers sweat for you, Edward. The only reason they’ve come to Prague is to get inside your knickers. But you don’t know that. You don’t know anything except Sasha’s your old buddy. You’re mixed up, unhappy, drinking a bit, a loner. You’re all over them one minute and cagey the next. That’s the way Sasha’s sold you to them, and that’s who he wants you to be.
Thus Nick Amory, Ted Mundy’s drama coach, at the Edinburgh School of Deportment, relaying the stage directions of Sasha our Producer.
Lothar is trying to draw Mundy out, assisted by Frau Doktor Bahr. They tried to draw him out last night, at this same table and at this same hour, and in the same contrived atmosphere of weary geniality. In the low moments of his drinking curve, Mundy has been monosyllabic. In high moments he has regaled them with embroidered tales of his anticolonial past and, to the huge amusement of his audience and his own secret shame, Ayah’s enormous bottom. He has described the horrors of a bourgeois English education and let slip the magic name of Dr. Hugo Mandelbaum, the man who first got him thinking, but nobody has taken him up on it. They won’t, of course. They’re spies.
“So what do you think about England’s great lurch to the right, Teddy? Does Mrs. Thatcher’s brand of belligerent capitalism alarm you a little, or are you a natural friend of the free market economy?”
The question is so cumbersome, and Lothar’s archness so insinuating, that Mundy disdains a reasoned reply.
“Not a lurch, old boy. Not even a twitch, actually. They’ve changed the name on the shop front, and that’s about all that’s happened.”
Frau Doktor Bahr manages her banalities better. “But if America is going to the right, and Britain also, and the right is gaining ground all over Western Europe, don’t you shudder a little for the future of world peace?”
Horst, who fancies himself an expert on all things British, needs to parade his knowledge.
“Could the mine closures lead to actual revolution, Teddy?—somewhat on the lines of the hunger marches of the thirties maybe, then spinning totally out of control? Can you give us a few tips about how the British man in the street is reacting at the moment?”
They are getting nowhere, and must be aware of it. Mundy is yawning and Lothar is about to order up another round of drinks when Sasha emerges like a jack-in-the-box from his stupor.
“Teddy.”
“What?”
“This is total bullshit, actually.”
“What is?”
“Have you brought your bicycle?”
“Of course I haven’t.”
Suddenly Sasha is standing, hands wide, appealing to all of them. “He’s a cyclist, didn’t you know? He’s crazy. You know what this crazy man did in West Berlin? We rode bicycles round the streets. We spray-painted the old Nazi houses, then rode like hell to get away from the pigs. And I had to go with him—me, with my legs, on a bloody bicycle!—to look after him. Teddy organized it all. He was a genius. Weren’t you, Teddy? Are you trying to pretend you have forgotten?”
Mundy’s hand is rising to hide a rueful smile. “Of course I haven’t. Don’t be bloody silly. Best fun we ever had,” he asserts, determinedly sharing the willful distortion of history.
Sasha’s toughest job will be getting you on your own, Amory is saying. He’ll work on it but you’re going to have to help him. You’re a restless sod, remember? Always wanting to go for a walk, run round the park, jump on a bike.
“Teddy. We have a date tomorrow,” Sasha is announcing excitedly. “Three o’clock outside the hotel. In Berlin we did nighttime. Here we do daytime.”
“Sasha. Honestly. For God’s sake. I’ve got a hundred and six neurotic British artists to worry about. I can’t make three o’clock or any other o’clock. You know that.”
“Artists survive. We don’t. We get out of town, the two of us. I steal the bicycles, you bring the whiskey. We talk about God and the world, like the old days. Fuck it.”
“Sasha—listen to me.”
“What?”
Mundy is pleading now. He’s the one person at the table who isn’t smiling. “I’ve got modern ballet all afternoon. And I’ve got the British Embassy reception in the evening and mad dancers round the clock. I can’t just —”
“You are being a total arsehole as usual. Modern ballet is pretentious shit. Skip the ballet, I’ll get you back to town in time for the Queen. Don’t argue.”
Sasha has carried the company. Frau Doktor Bahr is beaming her blessing, Lothar is chuckling, Horst is saying he will come too, but Lothar is wagging his finger in an avuncular way and saying these boys deserve a bit of time on their own.
And the great thing about bicycles, Edward, is they’re hell on wheels to follow.
Hotel rooms are not sanctuaries, Edward. They’re glass boxes. They’re where they watch you and search you and listen to you and smell you.
And marriage is not a sanctuary either, or not for the British Council has-been, closet radical and resentful failed writer who haunts the basements of the arts bureaucracy. His phone calls to Kate must reflect this. First thing this morning he filled in a laborious application form at hotel reception: foreign number to be called, foreign party to be spoken to, purpose of foreign call, proposed duration of foreign call, practically the content of the foreign call in advance—which strikes him as pretty bloody silly, seeing that they’ll all be listening in, and ready to cut him off if the talk gets dirty. Crouched on the bed, with the silent phone beside him, he discovers he is shivering. When the phone finally rings it screams so loud he imagines it’s about to commit suicide by hurling itself off the bed. Speaking into the mouthpiece, he notices that his voice is higher and slower. Kate notices it too, and wonders whether he is ill.
“No fine, really. Just a bit danced out. Miranda’s being an absolute bitch, as usual.”
Miranda his boss, the regional supervisor. He asks after the baby. It’s kicking, she says. Jolly hard too: maybe one day he’ll play football for Doncaster. Maybe one day she will, he agrees in a lackluster voice, but the joke, like Mundy, sounds flat. And how are all the drama kings and queens of St. Pancras? he asks. They’re all fine, thank you, she replies, irritated by his low spirits. And has Ted met anyone nice, she asks pointedly, or done anything amusing?
Well. Not really.
You don’t mention Sasha to her EVER, Amory is saying. Sasha belongs to your secret heart. Maybe you’ve got a crush on him, maybe you want to keep him to yourself. Maybe you’re already thinking exactly what they hope you’re thinking: that you want to jump over the Wall and sign up with them.
Mundy rings off and sits at the table, head in hands. He is acting “Christ, life is awful”—but it is. He loves Kate. He loves his family-in-the-making.
I’m doing this so that our unborn child and other people’s unborn children will be able to sleep at night, he tells himself with one voice.
He goes to bed and doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t expect to.
Five a.m. Cheer up. There’s hope just around the corner. In a couple of hours our first ballerina of the day will be throwing her tutu out of her crib because her hair dryer doesn’t work.
For Mundy, Sasha has obtained a giant-sized English policeman’s black bicycle complete with a basket in front of the upright handlebars. For himself, a child’s version of the same thing. Side by side they ride between tramlines to a suburban railway station at the edge of town. Sasha wears his beret, Mundy an anorak over his one good suit, and his trousers tucked into his socks. The day is beautiful, the city brave and careworn, its Hapsburg glory crumbling in the sun. There are few cars. The people walk warily, not looking at one another. At the station the two friends board a three-coach local train. Sasha insists they sit in the guard’s van with their bicycles. The straw reeks of cow manure. Sasha is still wearing his beret. He unbuttons his jacket to show Mundy a tape recorder in the inside pocket. Mundy nods, to say I understand. Sasha makes small talk. Mundy does the same: Berlin, girls, old times, old friends. The train stops at every lamppost. They are entering deep countryside. The recorder is voice-activated. Its pin light goes out when things are quiet.
At a village with an unpronounceable name they unload their bicycles onto the platform. With Mundy practically freewheeling and Sasha pedaling for all he is worth they bump down an unpaved road past horse-drawn carts and flat fields dotted with red barns. Only the occasional motor-tricycle or truck overtakes them. They draw up at the roadside for Sasha to consult a map. A straight yellow track makes an avenue between tall fir trees. They advance in single file, Sasha in his beret leading. They enter a clearing pocked with mining grottoes overgrown with moss, sawn logs and bits of ancient brickwork. Large bearded irises nod in the breeze. Dismounting, Sasha wheels his bicycle up and down the mounds until he finds one that he likes, lays the bicycle in the grass and waits for Mundy to do the same. Reaching inside his jacket, Sasha extracts the tape recorder and holds it in his palm. His small talk acquires a sneering and impatient edge.
“So you are content with your lot, Teddy,” he says, watching the pin light flicker. “That is good news, I would say. You have a mortgage, a wife and a petit bourgeois in the pipeline, and you are leaving the revolution for the rest of us to fight. There was a time when we despised such people. Now you are one of them.”
Mundy the ham actor is quick to spot his cue: “That’s not a fair description of who I am, Sasha, and you know it!” he protests angrily.
“Then what are you?” Sasha demands, unyielding. “Tell me what you are, for once, not what you are not!”
“I am who I always was,” Mundy retorts hotly, as the tape turns in its window. “No more and no less. What you see isn’t always what you get. Not with you, not with me. Not even with your bloody Communist Party.”
It’s a radio play. Mundy’s lines sound to him like bad improvisation, but Sasha seems content with them. The pin light is out, the tape has stopped turning, but as a precaution Sasha ejects it, drops it into one pocket and the recorder into another. Only then does he tear off his beret, let out a great cathartic cry of “Teddy!” and fling up his arms for the unequal embrace.
The ethics of the Edinburgh School of Deportment now require Mundy to ask a number of routine questions of his field agent before they settle down to the business of the day, and Mundy the natural has them waiting in his head:
What is the cover for this meeting?
What is the fallback if we are interrupted?
Do you have any immediate anxieties?
When shall we next meet?
Are you sitting comfortably, or do you see people you recognize, and did they follow you here?
But the School of Deportment can go hang. Sasha’s uncensored monologue is sweeping such mundane considerations aside. He is glaring across the lumpy clearing into the distant blue pines, seeing nothing. Confession and revelation pour from him in a stream of outrage and despair.
“In the months and years after you were removed from West Berlin I entered a total darkness. What use were a few burning cars and broken windows? Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes but by the liberal guilt of the affluent. In my personal turmoil I considered the miserable alternatives available to me. According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany was by now the arsenal and craven ally in the world war that appeared inevitable. As to the intelligent exploiters, they were too busy making profits and driving Mercedes cars to avail themselves of the opportunities we had created for them. In the same period the Herr Pastor also rose to rank and influence among the fascistic elite of Schleswig-Holstein. From the politics of the pulpit, he had moved to the politics of the pseudo-liberal ballot box. He joined secret right-wing societies and was admitted to certain very select Masonic committees. There was talk of putting him into Parliament in Bonn. His success inflamed my hatred of fascism. His American-inspired adoration of the God of Wealth goaded me to the point of dementia. My future, if I was to remain in American-owned West Germany, was a desert of compromise and frustration.
“If we are to build a better world than this, I asked myself, where do we turn, whose actions do we support, how do we frustrate the endless march of capitalist-imperialist aggression? You know I have the Lutheran curse. Conviction without action has no meaning for me. Yet what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? I spent much time considering the example of my good friend Teddy. You became my virtue. Imagine. Like you, I had no conscious faith, but if I acted, then the faith would surely follow. After that, I would believe because I had acted. Perhaps that is how faith is born, I thought: by action and not by contemplation. It was worth a try. Anything was better than stasis. You had sacrificed yourself for me without thought of reward. My seducers—you have met one—were wise enough to appeal to me in the same terms. No inducement would have persuaded me. But offer me a long stony path with a single light shining at the end of it, and throw in the opportunity to reverse the hypocrisies of the Herr Pastor, and perhaps I shall listen to you.”
He has left the mound and is hobbling impatiently round it with his strange, uneven stride, stepping over the bicycles, gesturing with open hands while he talks, clamping his elbows to his sides as if there is no room to raise them. He is describing covert meetings in apartments in West Berlin, furtive border crossings to safe houses in the East, and solitary lost weekends in the Kreuzberg attic while he struggles to reach his great decision, and his erstwhile comrades slip away to permanent confinement in the open prisons of materialism.
“By the end of many days and nights of deliberation and with the aid of my tireless and by no means stupid seducers, not to mention a good few bottles of vodka, I had reduced my dilemma to two simplistic questions. I described them to you in my letters. Question one: Who is the ultimate class enemy? Answer, unhesitatingly, American military and corporate imperialism. Question two: How do we realistically oppose this enemy? Is it by relying on the enemy to destroy himself, but only after he has destroyed the world? Or is it by swallowing our objections to certain negative tendencies on the part of international communism and allying ourselves with the one great socialist movement that, for all its blemishes, is capable of bringing the victory?” A long silence, which Mundy does not feel inclined to interrupt. Theory, as Sasha has observed, was never his thing. “Do you know why my name is Sasha?”
“No.”
“Because it is the Russian abbreviation of Alexander. When the Herr Pastor brought me to the West, he wished for reasons of respectability to rechristen me Alexander. I refused. By keeping my name Sasha, I was able to demonstrate to myself that I had left my heart in the East. One night, after many hours of discussion with my seducers, I agreed to make the same demonstration with my feet.”
“The Professor?”
“Was one of them,” Sasha confirms.
“Professor what of?”
“Corruption,” Sasha snaps.
“Why did they want you so badly?” This is not Amory asking, this is Mundy wanting to know how they both got here. “Why did you matter to them so much? Why go to all this trouble, just for Sasha?”
“You think I didn’t ask them?” His mood is black again. “You think I am so vain that I believe I take the whole world with me when I cross one shitty frontier? At first they flattered me. To win over such a great intellect as mine would signify a notable moral victory for the forces of progress. I told them that was bullshit. I was a left-wing minor West German academic with no chance of acceptance by a major university. I was no sort of victory for anybody. Then they admitted me to what they blushingly described as their little secret. My defection would frustrate the counterrevolutionary activities of the increasingly influential Herr Pastor and his fascistic fellow conspirators in Schleswig-Holstein. Millions of American dollars were being siphoned through church channels into the coffers of anti-Communist agitators in North Germany. Local newspapers, radio and television were being infiltrated by capitalistic subversives and spies. For the Herr Pastor’s only son to return freely and publicly to his democratic homeland would strike a blow against the imperialist saboteurs and undermine the Herr Pastor’s standing. It might even cause the CIA to withdraw some of its covert funding of West German counterrevolutionary elements. I will not conceal from you that this argument compelled me more than any other.” He draws to an abrupt halt and fixes Mundy with an imploring stare. “You understand that there is nobody on God’s earth with whom I can share this story apart from you? That all the rest of them are enemy, to a man, to a woman—liars, frauds, informants, living in permanent duplicity, as I am?”
“Yes. I believe I do.”
“I was not so foolish as to expect a warm welcome from the GDR. Our family had committed the crime of fleeing the republic. My seducers knew I was not a Communist by conviction and I anticipated—they had prepared me for it—a humbling period of reeducation. What future I had after that could only be resolved by time. At best, an honorable place in the great anticapitalist struggle. At the least, a quiet Rousseau life, perhaps on a collective farm. Why are you laughing?”
Mundy isn’t, but he has allowed himself a small smile, forgetting for a moment that jokes about Sasha are in bad taste. “I don’t see you milking cows, that’s all. Not even on a collective farm.”
“It is immaterial. All that matters is, in a fit of culpable lunacy that I shall regret for the remainder of my life, I boarded the S-bahn to the Friedrichstrasse station and, on the advice of my seducers, surrendered myself to the East German frontier guards.”
He stops speaking. It is prayer time. His fine hands have found each other and are clasped beneath his chin. His devout gaze is directed away from the clearing and sightlessly upward.
“Whores,” he whispers.
“Frontier guards?”
“Defectors. All of us. While we are fresh, we are handed round and used. When our tricks are known and we are past our prime, we are tossed onto the rubbish heap. For the first weeks after my arrival I was accommodated in a pleasant apartment on the outskirts of Potsdam, and subjected to searching but benign questions about my life, my memories of my childhood in East Germany and the Herr Pastor’s return from imprisonment in the Soviet Union.”
“By the Professor?”
“And by his underlings. At their request, I composed an impassioned statement designed to cause the maximum consternation among the fascists and conspirators of the Herr Pastor’s inner circle. I took great satisfaction in this task. I proclaimed the futility of anarchism in the face of modern realities, and my unbounded joy at returning to the bosom of the GDR. ‘Anarchism destroys but communism builds,’ I wrote. It was my hope, if not yet my conviction. But I had acted. Faith would follow. I also voiced my contempt for those members of the West German Lutheran movement who, while posing as messengers of Christ, accepted Judas-money from their spy-masters in America. My statement, I was assured, had found wide circulation in the Western media. Professor Wolfgang himself went so far as to declare it a world sensation, though I was shown no evidence to prove this.
“I had been led to believe, before crossing over, that immediately upon my arrival in East Berlin I would be the occasion of an international press conference. Also at the request of my hosts, I posed for a photographer and did my best to appear as happy and reconciled as was possible in the circumstances. Photographs of me were taken on the steps of the apartment house in Leipzig where I had grown up, in order to provide pictorial evidence that the erring son had returned to his socialist roots. But I waited in vain for my press conference, and when I questioned the Professor during one of his rare visits to the apartment, he was evasive. Press conferences were a matter of timing, he said. Perhaps the moment was past and my statement, together with the photographs, had done the job. I asked again: Where has my statement appeared, please? In Spiegel? Stern? Welt? Tagesspiegel? Berliner Morgenpost? He replied curtly that he was not a student of reactionary disinformation and advised me to be more modest. I told him, which was the truth, that I listened daily to West German and West Berlin radio news broadcasts and had heard not a word anywhere of my defection. He replied that if I chose to immerse myself in fascist propaganda, it was unlikely that I would attain a positive understanding of Marxism-Leninism.
“A week later, I was transferred to a secure encampment in remote countryside close to the Polish border. It was a limbo, part refuge for political vagrants, part penitentiary, part interrogation center. Above all it was a place where you are sent in order to be forgotten. We called it the White Hotel. I would not award it many stars for excellence. You have heard of an East German prison called the U-boat, Teddy?”
“Afraid not.” He has long ceased to be surprised by Sasha’s switches of mood.
“The U-boat is a revered feature of our East German gulag. Three of my fellow guests at the White Hotel spoke enthusiastically of its facilities. Its official title is Hohenschönhausen prison in East Berlin. It was built by the considerate Soviet secret police in 1945. To keep the inmates alert, the architecture provides that they should stand, not lie. To keep them clean the cells are flooded with icy water up to the inmates’ chests, and for their entertainment penetrating sounds are played at varying volume through loudspeakers. You have heard of the Red Ox?”
No, Mundy has not heard of the Red Ox either.
“The Red Ox is situated in the ancient town of Halle. It is the U-boat’s sister establishment. Its mission is to provide constructive therapy for political malcontents, and to rebuild their Party awareness. Our White Hotel in East Prussia boasted several of its graduates. One, I remember, was a musician. His awareness had been so thoroughly rebuilt that he was unable to pick up his spoon to feed himself. You may say that after a few months of the White Hotel, the last of my misplaced illusions about the nature of the German Democratic Paradise had been forcibly expunged. I was learning to detest its monstrous bureaucracy and thinly disguised fascism with an ardent but secret passion. One day, without explanation, I was ordered to pack my possessions together and present myself at the guardhouse. I will admit that I had not always been a model guest. My unexplained isolation, my horizonless existence, and the horror stories told by other detainees, had not improved my manners. Neither had the wearisome interrogations about my opinions on every stray subject—political, philosophical and sexual. When I asked our distinguished hotel manager where I was being taken, he told me, ‘Somewhere that will teach you to keep your fucking mouth shut.’ The five-hour drive inside a wire cage fitted into the back of a builder’s van did not prepare me for what lay ahead.”
He stares straight ahead of him, then, like a puppet whose strings are let go, flops to Mundy’s side on the grassy mound.
“Teddy, you bastard,” he whispers. “Let us for God’s sake have some of your whiskey!”
Mundy has forgotten all about the whiskey. Unearthing his father’s pewter flask from the recesses of his anorak, he hands it first to Sasha, then takes a pull himself. Sasha resumes his story. His expression is fearful. He seems afraid he will lose a friend’s respect.
“Professor Wolfgang has a nice garden,” he announces. He has drawn up his spindly knees and is resting his forearms on them. “And Potsdam is a beautiful town. You have seen those old Prussian houses where the Hohenzollerns used to put their officials?”
Mundy may have done, but only on the bus drive from Weimar, when his interest in nineteenth-century architecture was limited.
“So many roses. We sat in his garden. He gave me tea and cake, then a glass of the finest Obstler. He was apologetic for having abandoned me, and complimentary about my behavior in stressful circumstances. I had acquitted myself excellently before my interrogators, he said. They had formed a high opinion of my sincerity. Since I had more than once advised my interrogators to go fuck themselves, you may imagine that I wondered where this was leading. He asked me if I wished to take a bath after my long drive. I replied that since I had been treated like a dog, it might be more appropriate if I jumped into the river. He said I had my father’s sense of humor. I answered that this was scarcely a compliment, since the Herr Pastor was an arsehole and I had never in my life seen him laugh.
“‘Oh, you have him wrong, Sasha. I believe your father has a famous sense of humor,’ he replied. ‘He merely keeps it to himself. The best jokes in life are surely those that we can laugh at when we are alone. Don’t you think so?’
“I did not. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and told him. He then asked me whether I ever considered making up my quarrel with my father, if only for my mother’s sake. I replied that at no time in my life had such a thought occurred to me. It was my conviction that the Herr Pastor did not qualify as an object of filial affection. To the contrary, I said, he represented everything that was opportunistic, reactionary and politically amoral in society. I should add that, by this stage, the Professor had ceased to impress me intellectually. When I demanded to know at what point according to his Marxist beliefs he expected the East German state to wither away and a state of true socialism to begin, he replied with Moscow’s stock answer that, for as long as the socialist revolution was menaced by the forces of reaction, such a possibility was remote.” Sasha passes a hand through his cropped black hair as if to assure himself that the beret is not in place. “It was, however, no longer the subject of our discussion that was interesting me. It was his manner. It was the insinuation—manifested by the favors he was lavishing on me, the Obstler, the garden, and the civilized nature of our conversation—that, in ways I could sense but not define, I belonged to him by right. There was a bond between us, known to him but not to me. It was like a bond of family. In my confusion, I went so far as to speculate whether my host was homosexual, and intended to force his attentions on me. It was in the same light that I interpreted his mysterious tolerance towards the Herr Pastor. By intruding upon my filial feelings, I reasoned, he was by implication offering himself as a father substitute, and ultimately as my protector and lover. My suspicions were misplaced. The explanation for the Professor’s intimacy was far more terrible.”
He stops. Has he run out of breath—or courage? Mundy ventures not a word, but there must be comfort in his silence, for gradually Sasha rallies.
“It was soon clear to me that the Herr Pastor was to be the only material topic of our conversation in the garden. In the White Hotel I had touched no alcohol, except for one experience of Château Moonshine, which nearly killed me. Now the Professor was plying me with fine Obstler, and simultaneously with insinuating questions about the Herr Pastor. I would go so far as to say respectful. He referred to my father’s little ways. Did my father drink? How should I know? I replied, I hadn’t seen him for almost twenty years. Did I remember my father talking politics in the home? Here in the GDR before he fled the republic, for example? Or afterwards in West Germany when he came back from his indoctrination course in America? Did my father ever quarrel with my poor mother? Did he have other women, sleep with colleagues’ wives? Did my father take drugs, visit brothels, gamble on racehorses? Why was the Professor interrogating me like this about a father I didn’t know?”
Not the Herr Pastor anymore, Mundy records. My father. Sasha has no defenses left. He must face his father as a man, no longer as a concept.
“Dusk fell and we went indoors. The furnishings were not exactly proletarian: imperial-style furniture, fine paintings, everything of the best. ‘Any fool can be uncomfortable,’ he said. ‘There is nothing in the Communist Manifesto that forbids a little luxury to those who have deserved it. Why should the devil wear all the best suits?’ In a dining room with an ornate ceiling we were served roast chicken and Western wines by docile orderlies. When the orderlies retired, the Professor took me to the drawing room and beckoned me to sit beside him on the sofa, thus immediately reviving my fears regarding his sexuality. He explained that what he had to say to me was extremely secret, and that while his house was regularly swept for microphones, no word of our conversation must be overheard by the staff. He told me also that I should listen to him in complete silence, and reserve whatever comment I might have until he had finished. I can give you his exact words, since they are branded on my memory.”
Sasha closes his eyes for a moment, as if preparing himself for a leap into the blue. Then begins again, speaking as the Professor.
“‘As you may have gathered for yourself, my colleagues in state security are divided as to how we should regard you, which explains the regrettable inconsistencies in your treatment. You have been the football between two opposing teams and for this I offer you my personal apologies. But be assured that from now on, you are in safe hands. I shall now put to you a certain question but it is a rhetorical one. Which would you prefer to have for a father? A Wendehals, a false priest, a corrupt hypocrite who consorts with counterrevolutionary agitators, or a man so dedicated to an ideal, so committed to the great cause of the revolution and the highest principles of Leninism, that he is prepared to endure the contempt of his only son? The answer, Sasha, is obvious, so you need not provide it. Now I shall put a second question to you. If such a man, from the day of his providential incarceration in the Soviet Union, had been selected by the Party organs for a life of supreme self-sacrifice—and was now lying on his deathbed far behind the enemy’s lines—would you wish, as his only beloved son, to give him comfort in his last hours, or would you leave him to the mercy of those whose conspiratorial actions he has devoted his life to frustrating?’ It was as well that he had forbidden me to speak, because I was struck mute. I sat. I stared at him. I listened in a trance when he told me that he had known and loved my father for forty years, that it was always my father’s greatest wish that I should return to the GDR and take up his sword when it fell from his hand.”
He breaks off. His eyes widen in entreaty. “Forty years,” he repeats incredulously. “You know what that means, Teddy? They knew each other when they were both good Nazis together.” His voice recovers its strength. “I did not point out to the Professor that I had come to the GDR in the expectation of destroying my father, and that it was therefore a surprise to be asked to adulate him. Perhaps, after my intransigence in the White Hotel, I was learning to conceal my emotions. Nor did I say anything when the Professor explained to me that, though my father had long dreamed of dying in the Democratic Republic, the imperatives of his mission required him to remain in exile till the bitter end.” He assumes the Professor’s voice again. “‘The greatest joy of your beloved father’s life was your statement renouncing anarchism and embracing the party of social renewal and justice.’” Sasha seems to go to sleep for a moment, then starts awake, and becomes once more the Professor. “‘His delight at the photograph of his beloved son standing on the doorstep of his old apartment is not to be described. When it was shown to him by our trusted intermediary, your father was deeply moved. It was your father’s wish and also mine that there would be an occasion when we might smuggle you to his bedside so that you could clasp his hand, but this has been reluctantly overruled by the highest authority on security grounds. As a compromise it has been agreed that you will be informed of the truth concerning his life before it ends, and write him an appropriate letter from the heart. You will adopt a conciliatory and humble tone, begging his forgiveness and assuring him of your respect and admiration for his ideological integrity. Nothing less will lighten his passing.’
“I do not remember how I walked the short distance from the drawing room to the desk in his study where he provided me with the necessary writing paper and pen. My head was swimming with repulsive and simultaneous revelations. From the day of his incarceration in the Soviet Union—do you know what those words meant to me? That on his arrival in Russian prison camp my father at once became a stool pigeon and gained the protection of the politkommissars, who recruited him as their spy and trained him for the future use of East German State Security. That when he returned to the GDR and set up as a good priest in Leipzig, any member of his flock who had oppositional tendencies was tempted to confide them to him, not knowing he was a professional Judas. Until this moment I believed I had plumbed the depths of my father’s baseness. Now I realized I had been living in a fool’s paradise. If there was any single moment when I came face to face with the idiocy of my decision to throw in my lot with the Communist cause, it was this. If a desire for retribution has a moment of conception, this was when it occurred. I do not remember what words of sycophantic adoration I wrote through my secret tears of rage and hatred. I remember the Professor’s consoling hand on my shoulder as he informed me that I was henceforth the bearer of a considerable state secret. The Party, he said, was therefore faced with the choice of returning me to the White Hotel for an indefinite period, or permitting me to enter the portals of state security in a lowly capacity so that my movements could at all times be observed. In the short term, it was accepted that I would have some transient value as an authority on aspects of West Berlin’s disintegrating anarchist and Maoist groups. In the longer view, he hoped I would aspire to become a dedicated Chekist, exhibiting my father’s aptitude for conspiracy, and following in his footsteps. Such was the Professor’s ambition for me. Such was the course of action that, as my father’s most loyal friend and controller, he had personally urged upon his illustrious comrades. ‘Now it is up to you, Sasha,’ he told me, ‘to show them I was right.’ He assured me that my future path in the Stasi would be hard and long, and that much would depend on the extent to which I submitted my temperamental personality to the Party’s will. His final words were his most vile. ‘Always remember, Sasha, that henceforth you are the Comrade Professor’s favorite child.’”
Does the story end here? For the time being it seems so, for Sasha, volatile as ever, has looked at his watch and, with an exclamation, sprung to his feet.
“Teddy. We must be quick. They will waste no time.”
“To do what?” For now it is Mundy’s turn to lose his way.
“I must seduce you. Secure you for the cause of Peace and Progress. Not all at once, but from me a compelling overture, and from you a less than convincing rejection of my advances. And tonight you will be morose—it is arranged, yes?”
Yes, tonight it is arranged that I will be morose.
“And a little drunk?”
Also a little drunk, though not as drunk as I may appear.
Sasha takes the tape recorder from his pocket, then a fresh cassette, which he brandishes in Mundy’s face in warning. He slips the cassette into its housing, presses the start button, replaces the recorder in an inside pocket of his jacket, puts on his beret and with it the impassive scowl of the apparatchik who has submitted his temperamental personality to the Party’s will. His voice hardens and acquires a hectoring edge.
“Teddy, I will ask you this frankly. Are you telling me you have turned your back on everything we fought for together in Berlin? That you are leaving the revolution to take care of itself—undermining it even? That you are in love with your bank account, and your sweet little house, and you have put your social awareness to sleep? Okay: we didn’t change the world that time! We were kids, playing soldiers of the revolution. But what about joining the real revolution? Your country’s fallen under the spell of a fascistic warmonger—but you don’t give a fuck! You are the paid lackey of an antidemocratic propaganda machine—and you don’t give a fuck! Is this what you will be telling your petit bourgeois when it grows up? I didn’t give a fuck? We need you, Teddy! It makes me sick to watch you, for two nights already, how you flirt with us, show us one tit then put it back in your shirt, then show us the other one! Smirking while you sit there with the fence halfway up your arse!” His voice drops. “You know something else, Teddy? Shall I tell you something in very great confidence, just you and me and the rabbits? We’re not proud. We understand human nature. When it’s necessary we even pay people to listen to the voice of their political conscience.”
Everyone is charmed by the sight of a lanky Englishman on a bobby’s bicycle arriving at the British Embassy gates dressed in a dark suit and tie and cycle-clips. And Mundy, as always when he is called upon to do so, plays the part for all it’s worth. He sounds the silver bell on his handlebars as he weaves precariously between parking and departing cars, he yells, “Pardon me, madam,” to a diplomatic couple whom he narrowly misses scything down, he flings up an arm to assist the braking process, and gives a drayman’s “Whoa, there, girl!” as he brings his steed to a halt and takes up his place at the back of the ragged queue of fellow guests—Czech officials, British cultural representatives, dance masters and mistresses, organizers and performers. Shuffling his bike towards the sentry box, he chatters merrily with whomever he happens to be alongside, and when it’s his turn to show his passport and invitation card, he takes exaggerated umbrage at the suggestion that he might leave his bicycle in the street rather than inside the embassy compound.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, old boy! Your gallant citizens would pinch it in five minutes cold. Got a bike shed? Bike stand? Anywhere you say except on the roof. How about over there in the corner?”
He’s in luck. His protests have been heard by a member of the embassy staff who happens to be hovering at the opening of the tented walkway that leads to the front door.
“Problem?” he inquires blandly, taking a casual look at Mundy’s passport. He is the chubby man with circular spectacles who complained that Mundy had bowled him out first ball.
“Well, not really, officer,” says Mundy facetiously. “I just need somewhere to park my bike.”
“Here. Hand it over. I’ll shove it round the back. You’ll be going home on it, I take it?”
“Absolutely, if I’m sober. Got to get my deposit back.”
“Well, give me a yell when you decide it’s time to go. If I’m AWOL, ask for Giles. No troubles on the road?”
“None.”
He walks. This is how tarts feel. Who are you, what do you want and how much will you pay for me? He is in Prague on a perfect moonlit night, striding down cobbled alleys. He is drunk, but drunk to order. He could drink twice as much and not be drunk. His head is swirling, but from Sasha’s story, not from alcohol. He feels the weightlessness that he felt in Berlin on Christmas Eve when Sasha told him for the first time about the Herr Pastor. He feels the shame that comes on him when he encounters pains he can only imagine, never share. He is walking Sasha-style, one leg leading as he pounds unsteadily along. His head is everywhere, now with Kate at home, now with Sasha in his White Hotel. The streets are lit by wrought-iron lanterns. Dark shrouds of washing drift across them. The ornate houses are slatternly, their doorways barred, windows shuttered. The eloquent silence of the city accuses him, the atmosphere of quelled revolt is palpable. While we gallant students of Berlin were hoisting our red flags over the rooftops, you poor bastards were pulling yours down and getting crushed by Soviet tanks for your trouble.
Am I being followed? First assume it, then confirm it, then relax. Am I sufficiently morose, distraught? Am I wrestling with a great decision, angry with Sasha for putting me on the spot? He no longer knows which parts of him are pretending. Perhaps all of him is. Perhaps he has never been anything but pretended man. A natural. A naturally pretended man.
At the embassy reception he was also a natural, the soul of wit. The British Council should be proud of him, but he knows it isn’t. Then I’m sorry too, says Personnel, the fairy godmother he never had.
From the embassy, he has ridden the policeman’s bicycle triumphantly back to his hotel and left it in the forecourt for Sasha to reclaim. Did it feel different after Giles had removed its contents? Lighter? No, but I did. He has again telephoned Kate from his hotel room and this time he made a better job of it, even if in retrospect his end of the conversation sounds more like a letter home from school.
This city is more beautiful than you can imagine, darling . . . I just so wish you were here, darling . . . I never knew I liked watching dance so much, darling . . . Tell you what, I’ve had a brilliant idea!—it comes to him as he speaks. He hadn’t thought of it till now—When I get home, let’s take out a couple of those season tickets to the Royal Ballet. The Council might even come up with the cost. After all, it’s their fault I’ve become a dance junkie. Oh and to confirm: the Czechs are really super. It’s always the way, isn’t it, with people who have to make do on next to nothing? . . . And you too, darling. Deeply, truly . . . And our baby. Sleep well. Tschüss.
He is being followed. He has assumed it, he has confirmed it, but he has not relaxed. Across the road from him, he has recognized the staid couple who were sitting in the corner of the bar last night. Behind him two dumpy men in baggy hats and raincoats are playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with him at thirty yards’ distance. Abandoning the tenets of the Edinburgh School of Deportment, he stops, squares himself, swings round, cups his hands to his mouth and screams blue murder at his pursuers.
“Get off my fucking back! Get out of my hair, all of you!” His voice ricochets up and down the street. Windows are slapping open, curtains are being cautiously parted. “Fuck off, you ridiculous little people. Now!” Then he plonks himself on a convenient Hapsburg bench and demonstratively folds his arms. “I’ve told you what to do, so now let’s see you do it!”
The footsteps behind him have stopped. The staid couple across the road have disappeared up a side street. In about half a minute they’ll be popping up pretending to be someone else. Great. Let’s all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we’ll find out who we are. A large car crawls into the square but he refuses to be interested in it. It rolls past him, stops, reverses. Let it. His arms are still folded. He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow’s dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.
The car has drawn up. He hears a door open. And stay open. He hears footsteps climbing towards him. The square is on a slope, and he is at the upper end of it, which is why there has to be a short climb, then a leveling out as the footsteps cross the cobbled platform and come to a halt a yard away. But Mundy is too fed up, too confused and put upon, to lift his head.
Fancy German shoes. Mushroom-colored leather with brogue toe caps. Brown trousers with cuffs. A hand descends on his shoulder and gently shakes it. A voice that he refuses to recognize speaks perfumed German English to him.
“Ted? Is it you? Ted?”
After a very long pause, Mundy agrees to look up and sees a parked black saloon at the curbside with Lothar at the wheel and Sasha in his beret peering at him from the rear seat. He looks higher and sees the elegant features of the silken-haired Professor as he gazes down on him with fatherly concern.
“Ted. My dear fellow. You remember me. Wolfgang. Thank God we found you. You look all in. I understand you had a jolly interesting conversation with Sasha this afternoon. This is not the behavior we expect from a disciple of the late, great Dr. Mandelbaum. Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and talk about God and the world?”
Mundy stares at him for a while in mystification. Gradually he lets the penny drop. “And why don’t you move your fucking shadow,” he suggests, and remains seated, his face buried in his hands, until the Professor, with Sasha’s assistance, carefully raises him to his feet and guides him to the car.
Traitors are opera stars, Edward. They have nervous breakdowns, crises of conscience and outrageous needs. The Wolfgangs of this world know that. If you don’t make it hard for them they’ll never believe you were worth buying.
A classic Cold War double-agent operation is taking its first cautious steps towards consummation. If the seduction is agonizingly slow, that is because Ted Mundy in his many parts turns out to be a master of prevarication.
At an international convention of Egyptologists in Bucharest he flourishes a tantalizing sample of the sort of material he thinks he might be able to provide: a top secret plan to disrupt a forthcoming World Federation of Trade Unions in Warsaw—but can he bear to deceive his colleagues? His tempters hasten to reassure him. In the service of the true democracy, they tell him, such scruples are misplaced.
At a book fair in Budapest he provides an enticing, if retrospective, overview of how anti-Communist disinformation is fed to the Third World press. But the risk he took still scares him. He’ll have to think about it. His tempters wonder aloud whether fifty thousand capitalist dollars will assist his thought processes.
At the Leningrad Festival of Peace and Song, exactly at the point where the Professor and his people dare to believe they have landed their fish, Mundy throws a convincing five-star tantrum about the proposed terms of his remuneration. What proof can they give him, when he shows up at the Bank Julius Bär in Geneva five years from now and utters the magic password, that the cashier will hand over the cash and not ring for the police? It takes a five-day seminar of international oncologists in Sofia to iron out the final details. A discreet but lavish dinner in the upper room of a grand hotel overlooking Lake Iskur marks the breakthrough.
Faking illness to Kate and his notional employers at the British Council, Mundy allows himself to be spirited from Sofia to East Berlin. In the Professor’s villa in Potsdam where Sasha was first told that his father the Herr Pastor was a Stasi spy, glasses are raised to the brilliant new agent at the heart of Britain’s subversive propaganda machine, and his recruiter, Sasha. Seated shoulder to shoulder at the center of the candlelit table, the two friends proudly listen as the Professor reads aloud a telegram of congratulation from his masters in Moscow.
Triumph on one side is matched by triumph on the other. In London a safe house in Bedford Square is acquired and a team assembled to perform the double duty of processing Sasha’s alpha double plus material and confecting disinformation ingenious and plausible—and alarming enough—to satisfy the paranoid appetites of Mundy’s masters for the next hundred years at least, since everybody on both sides knows that’s how long the Cold War’s going to last.
Insiders including Mundy learn to refer to the house as the Wool Factory, wool being the commodity that it proposes to pull over the Stasi’s eyes.
The effect of the twin victory upon Mundy himself is mixed. At the age of thirty-two, the pseudo-artist, pseudo-radical, pseudo-failure and pseudo everything else he accuses himself of being has finally discovered his natural art form. On the other hand, there are snags. The strains of running two successful careers within a single marriage are well known; the strains of running three, less so—particularly when one of them is a top secret mission vital to the security of your nation, rated alpha double plus and not discussable with your partner.