Free Absolute Friends by John le Carré

perhaps as propitious as he imagines, but Mundy in the grip of a great plan is blind to tactic. He has turned in his weekly essay on the symbolic use of color by the early _Minnesänger,__ and feels master of the moment. Ilse on the other hand is worn out by two days of ineffectual marching in Glasgow in the company of a Scottish working-class history student named Fergus, who she claims is irredeemably homosexual. Her response to Mundy's declaration is muted, if not downright contemptuous. _Marriage?__ This was not one of the options they considered when they were debating Laing and Cooper. _Marriage?__ Like a real bourgeois marriage, he means? A _civil ceremony__ conducted by the _state?__ Or has Mundy so far regressed in his radical education that he covets the blessing of a religious institution? She stares at him, if not angrily, with profound gloom. She shrugs, and not with grace. She requires time to reflect on whether such an outlandish step can be reconciled with her principles.
    A day later, Mundy has his answer. A squat Hungarian angel wearing nothing but her socks stands feet splayed in the only corner of her anchorite's horse trailer where she can't be spotted from across the quad. Her pacifist-anarchist-humanist-radical philanthropy has run out. Her fists are clenched, tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.
    "You have completely bourgeois heart, Teddy!" she bawls in her charmingly accented English. And as an afterthought: "You wish stupid marriage and you are complete infant for sex!"
    3
    THE ASPIRING STUDENT of the German soul who steps off the interzonal train into the vibrant Berlin air possesses six of his late father's shirts that are too short for him in the sleeve but mysteriously not in the tail, one hundred pounds sterling, and fifty-six deutschmarks that a weeping Ilse has discovered in a drawer. The grant that kept him just below water at Oxford, he has been advised too late, is not available for study overseas.
    "Sasha _who,__ Sasha _where,__ for God's sake?" he yells at her on the platform of Waterloo station while Ilse, wracked by Magyar remorse, decides for the umpteenth time to change her mind and jump aboard with him, except she hasn't brought her passport.
    "Tell him I sent you," she implores him as the train mercifully pulls out. "Give him my letter. He is a graduate but democratic. Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha," which to Mundy sounds about as convincing as everybody in Bombay knows Gupta.
    It is 1969, Beatlemania is no longer at its zenith, but nobody has told Mundy. In addition to a monkish mop of brown hair that flops over his ears and bothers his eyes, he sports his father's webbing knapsack to denote the rootless wanderer he intends to become now that life has lost its meaning for him. Behind him lies the wreckage of a great love, ahead of him the model of Christopher Isherwood, illusionless diarist of Berlin at the crossroads. Like Isherwood, he will expect nothing of life but life itself. He will be a camera with a broken heart. And if by some remote chance it should turn out that he can love again--but Ilse has obviously put paid to that--well, just maybe, in some sleazy café where beautiful women in cloche hats drink absinthe and sing huskily of disenchantment, he will find his Sally Bowles. Is he an anarchist? It will depend. To be an anarchist one must have a glimmer of hope. For our recently anointed misanthrope, nihilism is closer to the mark. So why then, he might wonder, this spring in my stride as I venture forth in search of Sasha, the Great Militant? Why this sense of arriving in a fresher, jollier world, when all is so demonstrably lost?
    "Go to Kreuzberg," Ilse is howling after him, as he waves his last tragic farewells from the carriage window. "Ask for him there! _And look after him, Teddy,__" she commands as a peremptory afterthought which he has no time to explore before the train conveys him on the next stage of his life.
    Kreuzberg is not Oxford, Mundy