Absolute Friends (11 page)

"Did I speak that sentence accurately, Teddy?" she will ask, with a smile to melt glaciers.

"marvellous, 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.

"_Sleep__walk, Judith? My God! Walk _any__where 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.