expunged him from my past. All I ask is that he will not die before I have a chance to tell him once more how much I hate him."
"And your mother?"
"Lives but does not live. Unlike your Irish nursemaid, she did not have the good fortune to die in childbirth. She walks the fens of Schleswig-Holstein in a mist of grief and confusion for her children, and speaks constantly of taking her life. As a young mother she was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators."
His empty glass before him, Sasha is seated at his desk as stiffly as a condemned man. Watching him, listening to his self-ironies, Mundy experiences one of those surges of spiritual generosity that make all things clear to him. And so it is the undemonstrative English pragmatist rather than the anguished German seeker after life's verities who fills their glasses and proposes a humble Christmas toast.
"Well, here's to us, anyway," he mumbles, with appropriate reserve. "_Prosit.__ Happy Christmas and so on."
Still frowning, Sasha lifts his glass and they drink to each other in the German way: raise your glass, look into the other fellow's eyes, drink, raise it again, look again, allow a moment's silence to put down your glass and dwell reverently upon the moment.
Relationships must deepen or die. In Mundy's later remembering, that Christmas was the night when their relationship deepened, and found an unforced ease. Henceforth, Sasha pays no visit to the Republican Club or the Shaven Cat without tersely inquiring whether Mundy is coming along too. In student bars, on slow, unequal walks along frozen canal towpaths and riverbanks, Mundy plays Boswell to Sasha's Johnson and Sancho Panza to his Quixote. When their commune becomes richer by a herd of stolen bourgeois bicycles, Sasha insists the two friends extend their horizons by exploring the outer limits of the half-city. The ever-willing Mundy prepares a picnic--chicken, bread, a bottle of red burgundy, all honestly bought from his earnings as a Berlin Wall tour guide. They set out, but Sasha insists they first push their bicycles a distance because he has something to discuss and it is best discussed on foot. They are safely out of sight of the squat before he says what it is.
"Come to think of it, actually, Teddy, I don't believe I have ever ridden one of these fucking things," he confesses with monumental casualness.
Fearing Sasha's legs may not be equal to the job, and cursing himself for not having thought of this earlier, Mundy walks him to the Tiergarten and seeks out a gentle grass slope with no children looking on. He holds Sasha's saddle, but Sasha smartly orders him to let go. Sasha falls, swears foully, struggles back up the slope, tries again, falls again, swears more foully still. But by the third descent he has learned to trim his uneven body so that he remains aloft, and a couple of hours later, flushed with pride, he is squatting in his greatcoat on a bench, eating chicken and with frosted breath dilating on the sayings of the great Marcuse.
But Christmas, as is usual in warfare, is only a temporary suspension of hostilities. No sooner has the snow melted than the tensions between the students and the city return to breaking point. It is incidental that every university in West Germany is crawling with unrest; that from Hamburg, Bremen, Göttingen, Frankfurt, Tübingen, Saarbrücken, Bochum and Bonn come stories of strikes, mass resignations of ruling professors and the triumphant advance of radical bodies. Berlin has larger, older and more vicious scores to settle than the whole lot of them put together. In the shadow of the approaching storm, Sasha makes a dash to Cologne, where rumor reports that a brilliant new theoretician is pushing out the borders of radical thought. By the time he returns, Mundy is braced for action, and in facetious mood.
"And did the Oracle pronounce on how men of peace should bear themselves in the forthcoming confrontation?" he inquires, expecting
"And your mother?"
"Lives but does not live. Unlike your Irish nursemaid, she did not have the good fortune to die in childbirth. She walks the fens of Schleswig-Holstein in a mist of grief and confusion for her children, and speaks constantly of taking her life. As a young mother she was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators."
His empty glass before him, Sasha is seated at his desk as stiffly as a condemned man. Watching him, listening to his self-ironies, Mundy experiences one of those surges of spiritual generosity that make all things clear to him. And so it is the undemonstrative English pragmatist rather than the anguished German seeker after life's verities who fills their glasses and proposes a humble Christmas toast.
"Well, here's to us, anyway," he mumbles, with appropriate reserve. "_Prosit.__ Happy Christmas and so on."
Still frowning, Sasha lifts his glass and they drink to each other in the German way: raise your glass, look into the other fellow's eyes, drink, raise it again, look again, allow a moment's silence to put down your glass and dwell reverently upon the moment.
Relationships must deepen or die. In Mundy's later remembering, that Christmas was the night when their relationship deepened, and found an unforced ease. Henceforth, Sasha pays no visit to the Republican Club or the Shaven Cat without tersely inquiring whether Mundy is coming along too. In student bars, on slow, unequal walks along frozen canal towpaths and riverbanks, Mundy plays Boswell to Sasha's Johnson and Sancho Panza to his Quixote. When their commune becomes richer by a herd of stolen bourgeois bicycles, Sasha insists the two friends extend their horizons by exploring the outer limits of the half-city. The ever-willing Mundy prepares a picnic--chicken, bread, a bottle of red burgundy, all honestly bought from his earnings as a Berlin Wall tour guide. They set out, but Sasha insists they first push their bicycles a distance because he has something to discuss and it is best discussed on foot. They are safely out of sight of the squat before he says what it is.
"Come to think of it, actually, Teddy, I don't believe I have ever ridden one of these fucking things," he confesses with monumental casualness.
Fearing Sasha's legs may not be equal to the job, and cursing himself for not having thought of this earlier, Mundy walks him to the Tiergarten and seeks out a gentle grass slope with no children looking on. He holds Sasha's saddle, but Sasha smartly orders him to let go. Sasha falls, swears foully, struggles back up the slope, tries again, falls again, swears more foully still. But by the third descent he has learned to trim his uneven body so that he remains aloft, and a couple of hours later, flushed with pride, he is squatting in his greatcoat on a bench, eating chicken and with frosted breath dilating on the sayings of the great Marcuse.
But Christmas, as is usual in warfare, is only a temporary suspension of hostilities. No sooner has the snow melted than the tensions between the students and the city return to breaking point. It is incidental that every university in West Germany is crawling with unrest; that from Hamburg, Bremen, Göttingen, Frankfurt, Tübingen, Saarbrücken, Bochum and Bonn come stories of strikes, mass resignations of ruling professors and the triumphant advance of radical bodies. Berlin has larger, older and more vicious scores to settle than the whole lot of them put together. In the shadow of the approaching storm, Sasha makes a dash to Cologne, where rumor reports that a brilliant new theoretician is pushing out the borders of radical thought. By the time he returns, Mundy is braced for action, and in facetious mood.
"And did the Oracle pronounce on how men of peace should bear themselves in the forthcoming confrontation?" he inquires, expecting
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