"Father."

Mundy allows time for the Major to muster his thoughts. They are seated in the conservatory of the Surrey villa and as usual it is raining. Rain shades the blue pines in the neglected garden, seeps down the rusted frames of the French windows and pings onto the cracked tile floor. Flighty Mrs. McKechnie is on home leave in Aberdeen. It is midafternoon and the Major is enjoying an interval of lucidity between the last of the lunch hour and the first of the evening. A scrofulous retriever farts and mutters in a basket at his feet. Panes of glass are missing from the conservatory, but this is all to the good since the Major has developed a horror of enclosure. In accordance with new regimental orders no doors or windows to the house may be locked. If the bastards want him, he likes to insist to his diminished audience at the Golden Swan, they know where they can find him; and he indicates the cherrywood walking stick which is now his constant companion.

"You're set on it, are you, boy? This German thing you're up to?"--drawing shrewdly on his Burma.

"I think so, thank you, sir."

Major and retriever reflect on this. It's the Major who speaks first.

"Still some decent regiments out there, you know. Not everything's gone to the devil."

"All the same, sir."

Another prolonged delay.

"Reckon the Hun will come at us again, do you? Twenty years since the last show. Twenty years since the show before that. They're about due for another, I grant you."

A further period of rumination follows, until the Major suddenly brightens.

"Well, there we are then, boy. Blame your mother."

Not for the first time in recent months, Mundy fears for his father's sanity. My dead mother responsible for the next war with the Germans? How can this be, sir?

"That woman could pick up languages the way you and I pick up this glass. Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Telegu, Tamil, German."

Mundy is astonished. "German?"

"And French. Wrote it, spoke it, sang it. Mynah bird ear. All the Stanhopes had it."

Mundy is gratified to hear this. Thanks to Dr. Mandelbaum, he has for some while been privy to the classified information that the German language has beauty, poetry, music, logic and unlikely humor, as well as a romantic soul incomprehensible to anyone who can't decode it. Short of a KEEP OUT sign on its door, it possesses everything a nineteen-year-old Steppenwolf in search of a cultural safe haven could decently ask. But now it has genealogy as well. Any further doubts he may have are quickly dispelled by fate. Without Dr. Mandelbaum he would never have plumped for German. Without German he would never have signed up for weekly tutorials on Bishop Wulfila's translation of the Bible into Gothic. And if he hadn't signed up for Wulfila, he would never have found himself, on the third day of his first term at university, sitting buttock-to-buttock on a chintz sofa in North Oxford with a diminutive polyglot Hungarian spitfire called Ilse who takes upon herself the task of leading a motherless six-foot-four virgin to the sexual light. Ilse's interest in Wulfila, like Mundy's, is an accident of life. After an academic safari through Europe, she has descended on Oxford to expand her understanding of the roots of contemporary anarchism. Wulfila wormed his way into her syllabus.

Summoned at darkest night to the Surrey villa, a bereft Mundy cradles his father's sweated head and watches him spew out the remaining fragments of his wretched life while Mrs. McKechnie treats herself to a ciggy on the landing. Other mourners at the funeral include a fellow alcoholic who is also a solicitor, an unpaid bookmaker, the landlord of the Golden Swan and a handful of its regulars. Mrs. McKechnie, still firmly twenty-nine, stands to attention at the open graveside, every inch the courageous Scottish widow. It is summer and she is wearing a black chiffon dress. A languid breeze presses it against her, revealing a pair of fine breasts and a frank outline of her remaining assets. Masking her mouth with her Order of Service, she murmurs to Mundy from so close that he can feel her lips fluttering the little hairs inside his ear.

"Look at what you might have had if you'd asked nicely," she says in her mocking Aberdonian brogue, and to his outrage brushes her hand across his crotch.

Safely back in his college rooms, a trembling Mundy takes stock of his humble patrimony: one red-and-white carved ivory chess set, much damaged; one army-issue khaki knapsack containing six handmade shirts by Ranken & Company Limited, Est. Calcutta 1770, By Appointment to HM King George V, with branches in Delhi, Madras, Lahore and Murree; one pewter hip flask, much dented, for sitting under neem trees at sundown; one tin penknife, Burmas for the use of; one truncated ceremonial Gurkha kukri engraved _To a Gallant Friend;__ one multigenerational tweed jacket with no maker's attribution; one copy of _Selected Readings from the Works of Rudyard Kipling,__ foxed and much thumbed; and one heavy leather suitcase with brass corners, found hidden or forgotten beneath a sea of empty bottles in the Major's bedroom wardrobe.

Padlocked.

No key.

For several days he keeps the suitcase under his bed. He is the sole possessor of its destiny, the only person in the entire world who knows of its existence. Will he be mountainously rich? Has he inherited British American Tobacco? Is he the sole owner of the secrets of the vanished Stanhopes? With a hacksaw borrowed from the college butler he spends an evening trying to cut his way through the padlock. In desperation he lays the suitcase on his bed, draws the ceremonial kukri from its scabbard and, in thrall to its power, makes a perfect circular incision in the lid. Drawing back the flap, he smells Murree at sunset and the sweat on Rani's neck as she crouches at his side peering into the rock pool.

Official army files, British, Indian, Pakistani.

Faded parchments appointing Arthur Henry George Mundy to the rank and condition of second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain in this regiment, then a lesser regiment, then the one below it.

One yellowed, hand-printed playbill of the Peshawar Players' production of _Snow White,__ featuring E. A. Mundy in the role of Dopey.

Letters from unhappy bank managers concerning "mess bills and sundry other debts that can no longer be covered by this account."

Beautifully handwritten protocol of a court-martial convened in Murree in September 1956, signed Warrant Officer J.R. Singh, Court Clerk. Statements of witnesses, statement of Prisoner's Friend, Judgment of this Court. The prisoner confesses his crime, no defense offered. Statement by Prisoner's Friend: _Major Mundy was drunk. He went berserk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions and throws himself on the mercy of the court.__ Not so fast. Sorry is not enough. What actions? Mercy for what?

_Summary of evidence, submitted in writing to the court but not read out.__ It is alleged by the prosecution and agreed by the accused that Major Mundy while refreshing himself in the officers' mess _took exception to certain words spoken in flippant jest by one Captain Gray, an honorable British technical officer on temporary attachment from Lahore. Seizing said respected captain by the collars of his uniform in a manner totally contrary to good order and military discipline, he three times head-butted him with great accuracy causing extensive facial bleeding, kneed him purposefully in the groin and, resisting the efforts of his perturbed comrades to restrain him, dragged the captain onto the veranda and administered such a horrendous rain of blows with his fists and feet as might have gravely endangered the captain's very life and being, let alone jeopardized his marital prospects and distinguished military career.__ Of the words spoken by the captain in flippant jest, there is so far no clue. Since the prisoner does not offer them in mitigation, the court sees no purpose in repeating them. _He was drunk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions.__ End of defense, end of career. End of everything. Except the mystery.

One fat buff folder with pockets, the word FILE inked in the Major's hand. Why? Would you write BOOK on a book? Yes, you probably would. Mundy spills the contents of the folder onto his frayed eiderdown. One sepia photograph, quarto size, on presentation cardboard mount with gilt surround. An Anglo-Indian family and its many servants cluster in a rigid group on the steps of a multiturreted colonial mansion set in the foothills of upper India amid formal lawns and shrubberies. Union Jacks fly from every pinnacle. At the center of the group stands an arrogant white man in stiff collars, next to him his arrogant unsmiling white wife in twinset and pleated skirt. Their two small white boys stand either side of them, wearing Eton suits. Either side of the boys stand white children and adults of varying ages. They can be aunts, uncles and cousins. On the step below them stand the uniformed servants of the household, color-coded for precedence, the whitest at the center, darkest at the edges. The printed caption reads: _The Stanhope Family at Home, Victory in Europe Day, 1945. GOD SAVE THE KING.__ Conscious that he is in the presence of the Maternal Spirit, Mundy takes the photograph to his bedside light, tipping it this way and that while he scans the ranks of the female members of the family for the tall polyglot Anglo-Irish aristocrat who will turn out to be his mother. He is looking particularly for marks of dignity and erudition. He sees fierce-eyed matrons. He sees dowager ladies long past childbearing age. He sees scowling adolescents with puppy fat and plaits. But he sees no potential mother. About to set the photograph aside he turns it over to discover a single scrawl of brown handwriting, not the Major's. It is the hand of a semiliterate girl--perhaps one of the scowling adolescents--blobbed and reckless in its excitement. _Here's me with me eyes shut, tippical!!__ No signature, but the exuberance is infectious. Returning to the photograph, Mundy examines the group for a pair of shut eyes, English or Indian. But too many are shut on account of the sun. He lays the photograph faceup on the eiderdown and rummages among the other offerings in the folder and selects, at random but not quite, a wad of handwritten letters bound in string. He turns the photograph facedown again and makes the match. The writer of the letters is also the writer of the illiterate inscription on the back of the photograph. Dealing the letters onto the eiderdown, Mundy counts off six. The longest is eight unnumbered sides. All are scrawls, all are painfully, atrociously spelled. Marks of dignity and erudition are conspicuously absent. The earliest start _My dearest__ or _Oh Arthur,__ but the tone quickly deteriorates: _Arthur, bloody hell, for the love of God listen to me!__ _The bastad that done this to me is the same barstad that your Nell gave herself willing and week to, your Gods judgmint on me, Arthur, don't bloody deny it. If I go home ruined my dad will kill me. I'll be a scarlit whore with an illigitment to feed they'll give me to the nuns and take me baby I've heard what they make you do for repintince. If I stay in India its me with the halfcarst prostutes in the market God help me I'd rather drown meself in the Ganges. Confessions not safe here, nothing is, that dirty bogger Father M'Graw would as soon tell Lady Stanhope as put his hand up your skirt and that Housekeeper stayring at me belly like I've stolen the lunch off her. Are you pregnant by any chance, Nurse Nellie? God help me Mrs. Ormrod whatever makes you think such a thing, it's all the good food you're feeding us in the servants hall. But how long will she believe that pray Arthur when I'm six months gone and still swelling? And me playing the Holy Virgin Mary in the staffside Christmas tablo for Christs sakes, Arthur! But it wasn't the Holy Spirit done it to me, was it? It was you!__ _THEYRE FOCKIN TWINS ARTHUR I CAN FEEL THEIR BLOODY HARTS GOING HEAR ME!__ Mundy needs a magnifying glass. He borrows it from a first-year student on his staircase who collects postage stamps.

"Sorry, Sammy, something I need to look at a bit closer."

"At fucking midnight?"

"At any fucking time," says Mundy.

He has focused his attention on the lower step and is searching for a tall girl in nurse's uniform with her eyes closed, and she isn't hard to spot. She's a sunny, overgrown child with a head of black curls and her Irish eyes clamped shut exactly the way she says they are, and if Mundy ever wore a nursemaid's drag and a black wig and squeezed up his eyes against the Indian sun, this is what he'd look like, because she's the same age as I am now, and the same height, he thinks. And she's got the same damn-fool all-weather grin I'm wearing while I gawp at her through the magnifying glass, which is the closest I will ever be to her.

Or hang on, he thinks.

Maybe you're smiling out of shyness because you're too tall.

And there's something of the wild spirit about you too, now I come to look at you more closely.

Something spontaneous and trusting and joyful, like a tall, white Rani full-grown.

Something that is actually a great deal more to my taste than the stuck-up, tight-arsed aristocrat of dignity and erudition that I've had shoved down my throat from the day I was old enough to be lied to.

Personal and Confidential to Yourself Dear Captain Mundy, I am directed by Lady Stanhope to draw your attention to your obligations to the person of Miss Nellie O'Connor, a nursemaid in Her Ladyship's employ. Her Ladyship asks me to advise you that if Miss O'Connor's position is not promptly regulated in a manner befitting an officer and gentleman, she will have no alternative but to apprise your Regimental Colonel Commanding.

Yours faithfully, Private Secretary to Lady Stanhope One marriage certificate, signed by the Anglican Vicar of Delhi in what looks like rather a rush.

One death certificate, signed three months later.

One birth certificate, signed the same day: Edward Arthur Mundy is hereby welcomed to the world. He was born, to his surprise, not in Murree but in Lahore, where both his mother and his baby sister were certified dead.

Mundy deftly completes the equation. The nature of Captain Gray's words spoken in flippant jest is no longer in question. _Mundy? Mundy? Aren't you the fellow who put the Stanhope nursemaid in the family way?__ By providing no cause to have them repeated in court, the Major secured an embargo on them. But only in court. The secretary's letter may have been personal and confidential to the Major--but so it was to the entire strength of the Stanhope household and its outstations. His head still buzzing with images of the berserk Major raining blows on luckless Captain Gray, Mundy searches his heart for the appropriate rage, anger and recrimination that he tells himself he should be mustering, but all he can feel is a helpless pity for two inarticulate souls trapped in the conventional cages of their time.

Why did he lie to me for all those years?

Because he knew he wasn't enough.

Because he thought she wasn't.

Because he was sorry and guilty.

Because he wanted me to have the dignity.

It's called love.

The brass-cornered suitcase has one more trick up its sleeve: an ancient leather-bound box embossed with a gold crest containing a Pakistani War Office citation dated six months after the birth of the infant Mundy. By directing the operations of his platoon with reckless disregard for his own safety and firing his Bren gun from the hip, Major Arthur Henry George Mundy emptied twenty saddles and is hereby appointed an honorary bearer of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor. The medal, if it was ever struck, is missing, presumed sold for drink.

Dawn has broken. With tears streaming down his cheeks at last, Mundy pins the citation to the wall above his bed and next to it the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes and their minions, and hammers them both home with his shoe.

Ilse's radical principles like her eager little body are unappeasable, and Mundy in the flush of his initiation can be forgiven for not spotting the difference. Why should he care that he knows even less about Mikhail Bakunin than he does about the parts of the female anatomy? Ilse is giving him the crash course in both, and it would be downright impolite to accept the one without the other. If she rails against the state as an instrument of tyranny, Mundy passionately agrees with her, though the state is about the last thing on his mind. If she lisps of _individualization,__ extols the _rehabilitation of the I__ and _the supremacy of the individual,__ and promises to cut Mundy free of his submissive self, he implores her to do exactly that. That she talks in the same breath of radical collectivism disturbs him not at all. He will make the bridge. If she reads aloud from Laing and Cooper, while he dozes temporarily sated on her naked belly, a nod of appreciation can scarcely be accounted hardship. And if making love appeals to her more than making war--for in her spare moments away from anarchism and individualism Ilse is also an evangelizing pacifist--he will hang up his musket for her any day, just as long as her impatient little heels keep hammering his rump on the coconut matting of her anchorite's horse trailer in St. Hugh's--gentleman callers tolerated between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m. for Earl Grey tea and Marmite sandwiches with the door open. And what more soothing, in the afterglow of lust temporarily assuaged, than the shared vision of a social paradise ordered by the free agreement of all component groups?

Yet none of this should imply that Ted Mundy is not by predisposition committed to the New Jerusalem that Ilse has revealed to him. In her starry radicalism he has found not only echoes of the venerable Dr. Mandelbaum, but evidence of his own vague stirrings of revolt against most of the things that England means to him. Her just causes are his by adoption. He's a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example. He's a frozen child who is beginning to thaw out. Occasionally, trotting off to a lecture or library, he will brush up against a former schoolmate in sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and polished brown toe caps. Awkward exchanges pass before each hurries on his way. _Christ, that fellow Mundy,__ he imagines them thinking, _gone completely off the rails.__ And they're right. Pretty much, he has. He belongs neither to the Gridiron nor the Bullingdon, the Canning nor the Union. At raucous if dismally attended political meetings he relishes his tussles with the hated rightists. His height notwithstanding, his favored position away from Ilse's arms is perching cross-legged with his knees up by his ears in the cramped rooms of left-leaning dons while he listens to the gospel according to Thoreau, Hegel, Marx and Lukacs.

That he is not persuaded by intellectual argument, that he hears it as music he can't play rather than the iron logic it professes to be, is neither here nor there. He is undaunted by belonging to a tiny band of gallant comrades. When Ilse marches, Mundy the great joiner puts his whole good self where her loyalties are, boarding the coach with her at Gloucester Green at daybreak equipped with the Mars bars she likes, and the carefully wrapped egg-and-cress sandwiches from the market, and a thermos of tinned tomato soup, all stowed for her in the Major's army-issue knapsack. Shoulder to shoulder and often hand in hand, they march to protest against Harold Wilson's support of the Vietnam War, and--since they are robbed of the chance to dissent through the parliamentary process--proclaim themselves members of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. They march to Trafalgar Square to protest against apartheid and issue passionate declarations of support for American students burning their draft cards. They cluster in Hyde Park, are politely dispersed by the police, and feel vindicated if a little hangdog. Yet hundreds of Vietnamese are dying every day, bombed, burned and thrown out of helicopters in the name of democracy, and Mundy's heart is with them, and so is Ilse's.

To protest the seizure of power in Athens by the CIA-backed Greek colonels and the torture and killing of unnumbered Greek leftists, they linger vainly outside London's Claridge's Hotel where the colonels are believed to be residing during a furtive visit to Britain. None emerges to receive their jeers. Undaunted, they repair to the Greek Embassy in London under banners reading _Save Greece Now.__ Their most satisfying moment comes when an attache leans out of a hotel window and shouts, "In Greece, we would shoot you!" Safely back in Oxford, they still feel the wind of that imaginary bullet.

In the winter term, it's true, Mundy takes time out to stage a German-language production of Buchner's _Woyzeck,__ but its radical sentiments are impeccable. And in the summer, if a little sheepishly, he plays valiant cricket for his college and would have a high time drinking with the boys if he didn't remind himself of his allegiances.

Ilse's parents live in Hendon, in a semidetached villa with a green roof and plaster dwarfs fishing in the garden pond. Her father is a Marxist surgeon with a wide Slav brow and fuzzy hair, her mother a pacifist psychotherapist and disciple of Rudolf Steiner. Never in his life has Mundy met such an intelligent, broad-minded couple. Inspired by their example, he wakes up in his rooms one morning seized with a determination to propose marriage to their daughter. The case for doing so strikes him as overwhelming. Bored out of her wits by what she perceives as half-baked British protest, Ilse has for some while been hankering for a campus where students go the whole hog, such as Paris, Berkeley or Milan. Her choice, after much soul-searching, has fallen on the Free University of Berlin, crucible of the new world order, and Mundy has pledged himself to accompany her there for his year abroad.

And what more natural, he argues, than to go as man and wife?

The timing of his proposal is not 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 _Minnesanger,__ 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 cafe 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 observes with relief.

No kind lady in blue curls from the University Delegacy of Lodgings is on hand with mimeographed lists of addresses where he must behave himself. Priced out of the better parts of town, West Berlin's unruly students have set themselves up in bombed-out factories, abandoned railway stations and tenement blocks too close to the Wall for the sensibilities of property developers. The Turkish shantytowns of asbestos and corrugated iron, so reminiscent of Mundy's childhood, sell neither academic books nor squash rackets, but figs, copper saucepans, halva, leather sandals and strings of plastic yellow ducks. The scents of jeera, charcoal and roasting lamb are a welcome-home to Pakistan's lost son. The handbills and graffiti on the walls and windows of the communes do not proclaim college productions of the plays of minor Elizabethan dramatists, but pour invective on the Shah, the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, President Lyndon Johnson and the Napalm Culture of U. S. Imperialist Aggression in Vietnam.

Yet Ilse's advice is not misplaced. Bit by bit, in cafes, impromptu clubs, at street corners where students lounge, smoke and rebel, the name Sasha raises the odd smile, rings a distant bell. Sasha? You mean Sasha the Great Rouser--_that__ Sasha? Well now, we have a problem here, you see. We don't give just anybody our addresses these days. The Schweinesystem has long ears. Best leave your name with Students for Democratic Socialism and see if he wants to get in touch with you.

Schweinesystem, Mundy the new boy repeats to himself. Remember that phrase. The Pig System. Does he feel a momentary wave of resentment against Ilse for launching him into the eye of the radical storm with no charts or instruments? Perhaps. But evening is drawing in, his path is set and despite his state of mourning he has a great appetite to begin his new life.

"Try Anita, Commune Six," a somnolent revolutionary advises him, in a clamorous cellar dense with pot smoke and Vietcong flags.

"Maybe Brigitte can tell you where he is," another suggests, over the strains of a girl guitarist in a Palestinian keffiyeh giving her rendering of Joan Baez. A child sits at her feet, a big man in a sombrero at her side.

In a bullet-pocked former factory as high as Paddington railway station hang likenesses of Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. A portrait of the late Che Guevara is draped in black bunting. Hand-daubed slogans on bedsheets warn Mundy that _It Is Forbidden to Forbid,__ urge him to _Be Realistic,__ _Demand the Impossible, Accept No Gods or Masters.__ Strewn across the floor like survivors from a shipwreck, students doze, smoke, breast-feed babies, play rock music, fondle and harangue each other. Anita? Left, oh, hours ago, says one advisor. Brigitte? Try Commune Two and fuck America, says another. When he asks to use a lavatory, a tender Swede escorts him to a line of six, each with its door smashed in.

"Personal privacy, comrade, that's a bourgeois barrier to communal integration," the Swede explains in earnest English. "Better that men and women piss together than bomb Vietnamese kids.... Sasha?" he repeats, after Mundy has courteously declined his advances. "Maybe you find him at the Troglodyte Club, except they call it the Shaven Cat these days." He detaches a cigarette paper from its packet and, using Mundy's back to press on, draws a map.

The map leads Mundy to a canal. With the knapsack slapping his hip, he sets off along the towpath. Sentry towers, then a patrol boat bristling with guns, glide past him. Ours or theirs? It is immaterial. They are nobody's. They are part of the great impasse he is here to unblock. He turns into a cobbled side street and stops dead. A twenty-foot-high cinder-block wall with a crown of barbed-wire thorns and a sickly halo of floodlights bars his way. At first he refuses to recognize it. You're a fantasy, a film set, a construction site. Two West Berlin policemen call him over.

"Draft dodger?"

"English," he replies, showing his passport.

They take him to the light, examine his passport, then his face.

"Ever seen the Berlin Wall before?"

"No."

"Well look at it now, then go to bed, Englishman. And stay out of trouble."

He retraces his steps and finds a side road. On a rusted iron door, amid Picasso peace doves and BAN THE BOMB signs, a hairless cat on two legs brandishes its penis. Inside, music and argument combine in a single feral roar.

"Try the Peace Center, comrade, top floor," a beautiful girl advises him, cupping her hands.

"Where's the Peace Center?"

"Upstairs, arsehole."

He climbs, his feet clanging on the tile steps. It's close on midnight. At each floor a fresh tableau of liberation is revealed to him. On the first, students and babies lounge in a Sunday school ring while a stern woman harangues them on the crippling effect of parents. On the second, a postcoital quiet reigns over bundles of intertwined bodies. _Support the Neutron Bomb!__ a handmade poster urges them. _Kills your mother-in-law! Doesn't harm your TV set!__ On the third, Mundy is thrilled to see some sort of theater workshop is in progress. On the fourth, shaggy Septembrists pummel typewriters, confer, feed paper into hand presses and bark orders into radio telephones.

He has reached the top floor. A ladder rises to an open trapdoor in the ceiling. He emerges in an attic lit by a builder's inspection light. A passage like the entrance to a mine shaft leads from it. At its end, two men and two women are bowed over a candlelit table strewn with maps and beer bottles. One girl is black-haired and grim-faced, the other fair and large-boned. The nearer man is as tall as Mundy: a Viking with a golden beard and mop of yellow hair bound in a pirate's headscarf. The other man is short, vivid and dark-eyed, with uneven, spindly shoulders that are too narrow for his head. He wears a black Basque beret drawn dead level across his pale brow, and he is Sasha. How does Mundy know this? Because all along, he realizes, he has known intuitively that Ilse was talking about someone as small as herself.

Too diffident to intrude, he hovers at the opening to the mineshaft, clutching her letter in his hand. He hears fragments of war talk, all Sasha's. The voice is stronger than the body and carries naturally. It is accompanied by imperious gestures of the hands and forearms.... _Don't let the pigs cram us into side streets, hear me?... Stand up to them in the open, where the cameras can see what they do to us...__ Mundy is already deciding to tiptoe back down the ladder and make his entrance another time when the party breaks up. The black-haired girl folds up the maps. The Viking rises and stretches. The blond girl hugs him to her by his buttocks. Sasha stands too, but is no taller than when he was sitting. As Mundy steps forward to present himself, the others move instinctively to shield the little emperor at their center.

"Good evening. I'm Ted Mundy. I've got a letter for you from Ilse," he says in his best head prefect's voice. And when he receives no answering light of recognition from the wide, dark eyes: "Ilse the Hungarian student of political philosophy. She was here last summer and had the pleasure of meeting you."

Perhaps it is Mundy's politeness that catches them off balance, for there is a moment of shared suspicion among them. Who is he, this courtly English arsehole with the Beatle haircut? The tall Viking is first to respond. Placing himself between Mundy and the rest of them, he accepts the envelope on Sasha's behalf and subjects it to a quick examination. Ilse has stuck down the flap with tape. Her peremptory scrawl of _Private, Strictly Personal!__ twice underlined, is a clear claim to intimacy. The Viking hands the envelope to Sasha, who rips it open and extracts two blotchy pages of Ilse's densely packed handwriting, with afterthoughts charging up the margins. He reads the first few lines, turns to the back page to find the signature. Then he smiles, first to himself, and then at Mundy. And this time it's Mundy who is taken off balance, because the wide dark eyes are so brilliant and the smile is so young.

"Well, well. _Ilse!__" he muses. "That's quite a girl, yes?"--slipping her letter into the side pocket of his threadbare lumber jacket.

"One can really say that," Mundy agrees in his best High German.

"Hungarian"--as if to remind himself. "And you are _Teddy.__"

"Well, Ted actually."

"From Oxford."