Absolute Friends (4 page)

Urging his Volkswagen Beetle over the hump between Mad Ludwig's golden gates, Mundy turns onto the road to Murnau. Like its owner, the car is no longer in its first youth. Its engine wheezes, tired wipers have etched half-moons on its windshield. A homemade sticker on the back, written by Mundy in German, reads _The Driver of This Car Has No Further Territorial Claims in Arabia.__ He crosses two small intersections without mishap and as promised encounters a blue Audi with a Munich registration pulling out of the lay-by ahead of him with a silhouetted Sasha in his beret crouched at the wheel.

For fifteen kilometers by the unreliable gauge of the Volkswagen Mundy clings to the Audi's tail. The road sinks, enters forest and divides. Without signaling, Sasha takes a left fork and Mundy in his Volkswagen scrambles after him. Avenues of black trees lead downward to a lake. Which lake? According to Sasha, the only thing Mundy has in common with Leon Trotsky is what the great man called topographical cretinism. At a parking sign the Audi descends a ramp and skids to a halt. Mundy does the same, glancing in his mirror to see what, if anything, comes after him, or what went by slowly without stopping: nothing. Sasha with a shopping bag in his hand is scurrying unevenly down a flight of paved steps.

Sasha believes that before he was born he lacked oxygen in the womb.

A jingle-jangle of fairground music is coming up the path. Fairy lights are twinkling through the trees. A village festival is in progress and Sasha is heading towards it. Scared of losing him, Mundy closes the gap. With Sasha fifteen yards in front they plunge into an inferno of roistering humanity. A merry-go-round belches honky-tonk, a matador on a hay cart undulates before a cardboard bull while crooning in broad Silesian about _amor.__ Beer-sodden revelers, oblivious to the war, blow feathered snakes at each other. Nobody is out of place here, not Sasha, not me. Everyone's a citizen for a day and Sasha hasn't forgotten his skills either.

Over a loudspeaker, the _Grossadmiral__ of a flag-bedecked steamer is ordering stragglers to forget their troubles and report _immediately__ for the romantic cruise. A rocket bursts above the lake. Colored stars cascade onto the water. Incoming or outgoing? Ask Bush and Blair, our two great war leaders, neither of whom has seen a shot fired in anger.

Sasha has vanished. Mundy looks up and to his relief sees him hauling himself and his shopping bag heavenward by way of a spiral iron staircase attached to an Edwardian villa painted in horizontal stripes. His strides are frantic. They always were. It's the way he ducks his head each time he lunges with the right leg. Is the bag heavy? No, but Sasha is careful to nurse it as he negotiates the curves. A bomb perhaps? Not Sasha, never.

After another casual look round for whoever else may be coming to the party, Mundy climbs after him. MINIMUM LET ONE WEEK, a painted sign warns him. A _week?__ Who needs a week? These games finished fourteen years ago. He glances down. Nobody is coming up after him. The front door of each apartment as he works his way up is painted mauve and lit by fluorescent strip. At a half-landing a hollow-faced woman in a Sherpa coat and gloves is fumbling in her handbag. He gives her a breathless _grüss Gott.__ She ignores him or she's deaf. Take your gloves off, woman, and maybe you'll find it. Still climbing, he glances wistfully back at her as if she were dry land. She's lost her door key! She's locked her grandchild in her flat. Go back downstairs, help her. Do your Sir Galahad act, then go home to Zara and Mustafa and Mo.

He keeps climbing. The staircase turns another corner. On mountaintops around him eternal snow-pastures bask under a half-moon. Below him the lake, the fair, the din--and still no followers that he's aware of. And before him a last mauve door, ajar. He pushes it. It opens a foot but he sees only pitch darkness. He starts to call out _Sasha!__ but the memory of the beret restrains him.

He listens and hears nothing except the noise of the fair. He steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him. In the half-darkness, he sees Sasha standing crookedly to attention with the shopping bag at his feet. His arms are as straight to his sides as he can get them and his thumbs pressed forward in the best tradition of a Communist Party functionary on parade. But the Schiller face, the fiery eyes, the eager, forward-leaning stance, even in the flickering dusk, have never appeared so vivid or alert.

"You talk a lot of bullshit these days, I would say, Teddy," he remarks.

The same smothered Saxon accent, Mundy records. The same pedantic, razoredged voice, three sizes too big for him. The same instant power of reproach.

"Your philological excursions are bullshit, your portrait of Mad Ludwig is bullshit. Ludwig was a fascist bastard. So was Bismarck. And so are you, or you would have answered my letters."

But by then they are hastening towards each other for the long-delayed embrace.

2

THE SWIRLING RIVER that winds from Mundy's birth to Sasha's reincarnation at the Linderhof has its source not in the shires of England but in the accursed mountain ranges and ravines of the Hindu Kush that under three centuries of British colonial administration became the North-West Frontier Province.

"This young sahib of mine you see here," the retired major of infantry who was Mundy's father would announce in the private bar of the Golden Swan in Weybridge to anybody unfortunate enough not to have heard the story before, or who had heard it a dozen times but was too courteous to say, "is by way of being a bit of an historical _rarity,__ aren't you, boy, aren't you?"

And, slipping an affectionate arm round the adolescent Mundy's shoulder, would muss his hair before turning him to the light for ease of scrutiny. The Major is small, fiery and impassioned. His gestures, even in love, are never less than pugilistic. His son is a beanstalk, already taller than his father by a head.

"And I'll tell you for _why__ young Edward here is a rarity, if you'll permit me, sir," he would continue, gathering steam as he addresses all the sirs within range, and the ladies too, for they still have an eye for him, and he for them. "On the morning my bearer reported to me that the memsahib was about to do me the honor of presenting me with a child--this very child here, sir--a perfectly _normal__ Indian sun was rising over the regimental infirmary."

A stage pause, of the sort Mundy too will one day learn to make, as the Major's glass also mystically rises and his head dips to greet it.

"_However,__ sir," he would resume. "However. By the time this same young man deigned to appear on parade"--swinging accusingly round to Mundy now, but the fierce blue gaze as doting as ever--"without your topee, sir, fourteen days confined to barracks, as we used to say!--that sun up there wasn't Indian anymore. It belonged to the self-governing Dominion of Pakistan. Didn't it, boy? Didn't it?"

At which the boy will most likely blush, and stammer out something like, "Well, so you _tell__ me, Father," which would be enough to earn him a kindly laugh, and for the Major just possibly another drink on someone else's tab, and an opportunity to point the moral of his tale.

"Madame History a very fickle lady, sir"--in the telegramese later inherited by his son. "You can march for her day and night. Sweat your guts out for her. Shit, shine, shave, shampoo for her. Doesn't make a blind bit o' difference. The day she doesn't want you--_out.__ Dismiss. Scrap heap. Enough said." A fresh glass is by now making its ascent. "Your good health, sir. Generous man. To the Queen-Emperor. God bless her. Coupled with the name of the Punjabi fighting man. Finest soldier ever lived, bar none. Provided he is led, sir. There's the rub."

And a ginger beer for the young sahib if he's lucky, while the Major in a fit of emotion whisks a khaki handkerchief from the sleeve of his frayed military sports jacket and, having first hammered his fussy little mustache with it, dabs his cheeks before returning it to base.

The Major had cause for his tears. The day of Pakistan's birth, as the Golden Swan's customers know all too well, robbed him not only of his career, but also of his wife who, having taken one exhausted look at her overdue and overlong son had, like the Empire, expired.

"That woman, sir--" It is the evening watering hour, and the Major is waxing sentimental. "Only one word to describe her: _quality.__ First time I saw her, she was in her riding clothes, out for a dawn canter with a couple of bearers. Done five Hot Weathers in the plains and looked as though she'd come straight from eating strawberries and cream at Cheltenham Ladies' College. Knew her fauna and flora better than her bearers did. And she'd be with us here to this day, God bless her, if that arsehole of a regimental doctor had been halfway sober. To her memory, sir. The late Mrs. Mundy. Forward march." His tearful eye settles on his son, whose presence he appears momentarily to have forgotten. "Young Edward," he explains. "Opens the bowling for his school. How old are you, boy?"

And the boy, waiting to take his father home, admits to sixteen.

The Major, however, as he will assure you, did not buckle under the tragedy of his double loss. He stayed on, sir. He endured. Widowed, a baby son to look after, Raj collapsing round his ears, you might think he'd do what the other buggers did: lower the Union Jack, sound the Last Post and sail home to obscurity. Not the Major, sir. No, thank you. He would rather slop out his Punjabis' shithouses than kiss the arse of some limp-wristed war profiteer in Civvy Street, thank you.

"I summoned my _derzi.__ I said to my _derzi,__ '_Derzi,__ you will unstitch the major's crowns on my khaki drills, and you will replace them with the crescent moon of Pakistan--_juldi.__' And I pledged my services--for as long as they were appreciated--to the finest body of fighting men in the world bar none, _provided"__--his index finger stabs the air in dramatic warning--"provided, sir, that they are _led.__ There's the rub."

And there also, mercifully, the bell will ring for last orders, and the boy will slip a trained hand beneath his father's arm and march him home to Number Two, The Vale to finish up last night's curry.

But Mundy's provenance is not as easily defined as these barroom reminiscences suggest. The Major, so lavish with the larger brushstrokes, is reticent when it comes to detail, with the result that Mundy's memories of his infancy are a succession of camps, barracks, depots and hill stations that accelerates as the Major's fortunes dwindle. One day the proud son of Empire rules supreme over a whitewashed cantonment complete with red-ochred club, polo, swimming pool, children's games and Christmas plays, including a historic production of _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs__ in which he stars as Dopey. The next, he is running barefoot down the mud streets of a half-empty settlement miles from any town, with bullock carts instead of motor cars, a corrugated iron cinema for a club, and Christmas pudding served in a regimental institute green with mold.

Few possessions survive so many moves. The Major's tiger skins, his military chests and treasured ivory carvings are all posted missing. Even his late wife's memory has been stolen, her diaries, letters and a box of precious family jewelry: that thieving bastard of a stationmaster at Lahore, the Major will have him flogged, and every one of his rascally _chaprassis__ with him! He makes the vow one night in his cups after Mundy has driven him over the edge with his persistent damn-fool questioning. "Her _grave,__ boy? I'll tell you where her bloody grave is! Gone! Smashed to bits by rampaging tribesmen! Not a stone left standing! All we've got of her is _here!__" And he drives his tiny fist against his breast, and pours himself another _chota peg.__ "That woman had class you wouldn't believe, boy. I can see her every time I look at you. Anglo-Irish nobility. Vast estates, razed to the ground in the Troubles. First the Irish, now the bloody Dervishes. Entire clan dead or scattered to the winds."

They come to rest in the garrison hill town of Murree. While the Major vegetates in a mud-brick barrack hut smoking Craven A for his throat's sake and growling over pay imprests, sick lists and leave rosters, the boy Mundy is consigned to the care of a very fat Madrasi ayah who came north with independence, and has no name but Ayah, and recites rhymes with him in English and Punjabi, and surreptitiously teaches him holy sayings from the Koran, and tells him of a god called Allah who loves justice and all the peoples of the world and their prophets, even Christians and Hindus, but most of all, she says, he loves children. It is only most unwillingly, after much pressing on Mundy's part, that she admits to possessing no husband, children, parents, sisters or brothers left alive. "They are all dead now, Edward. They are with Allah, every one. It is all you need to know. Go to sleep."

Murdered in the great massacres that came of the Partition, she admits under interrogation. Murdered by Hindus. Murdered at railway stations, in mosques and marketplaces.

"How did you stay alive, Ayah?"

"It was the will of God. You are my blessing. Go to sleep now."

Come evening, to a chorus of goats, jackals, bugles and the insistent twanging of Punjabi drums, the Major will also contemplate mortality, under a neem tree at the river's edge, puffing at cheroots that he calls Burmas and cuts into lengths with a tin penknife. Intermittently he refreshes himself from a pewter hip flask while his overgrown son splashes with his native peers and, acting out the never-ending tales of adult slaughter all around them, plays Hindus versus Muslims and takes turns at being dead. Forty years on, Mundy has only to close his eyes to feel the magic cooling of the air that comes with sundown, and smell the scents that leap out of the sudden dusk, or watch the dawn rise over foothills glistening green from the monsoon, or hear the catcalls of his playmates give way to the muezzin and the nocturnal bellows of his father berating that damned boy of mine who killed his mother--_Well, didn't you, boy, didn't you? Come here__ juldi _when I order you, boy!__ But the boy declines, _juldi__ or otherwise, preferring to let Ayah clutch him to her flank until the drink has done its work.

Now and then, the boy must endure a birthday, and from the moment it appears on his horizon he succumbs to a variety of illnesses: stomach cramps, feverish headaches, Delhi belly, the onset of malaria, or fears that he has been bitten by a poisonous bat. But the day still comes round, the kitchen wallahs prepare a fearsome curry and make a great cake with _Many Happy Returns to Edward__ on it, but no other children are invited, the shutters are closed, the dining table is laid for three, candles are lit and the servants stand silently round the wall while the Major in full mess kit and decorations plays the same Irish ballads on the gramophone again and again, and Mundy wonders how much of his curry he can get away with not eating. Solemnly he blows out his candles, cuts three slices of his birthday cake and lays one on his mother's plate. If the Major is half sober, father and son will do silent combat with a red-and-white ivory chess set brought out for feast days. The games have no conclusion. They are put aside for tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.