"It's Christmas, isn't it? The fucking family feast. You're supposed to be at home."

"We haven't _got__ families. We've got dead parents and no brothers and sisters. I tried to wake you up, but you told me to fuck off."

Sasha has still not raised his head. The bowl contains red berries. He is preparing some kind of sauce.

"What's the meat?"

"Venison. Do you wish me to take it back to the shop and change it for your eternal fucking Wiener schnitzel?"

"Venison's fine. Bambi for Christmas. Is that whiskey you're drinking, by any chance?"

"Probably."

Mundy chatters but Sasha will not be humored. Over dinner, trying to jolly him along, Mundy rashly relates the tale of his aristocratic mother who turned out to be an Irish nursemaid. He selects a merry tone, designed to assure his listener that he has long ago come to terms with an amusing byway of family history. Sasha hears him out with ill-concealed impatience.

"Why do you tell me this bullshit? Do you wish me to shed tears for you because you are not a lord?"

"Of course not. I thought you might laugh."

"I am interested only in your personal liberation. There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed."

"All right. What about _your__ dead parents? What did _you__ have to overcome in order to arrive at the perfect state in which we find you?"

Is the taboo of Sasha's family history to be broken? Apparently so, for the Schiller head is giving a succession of tight nods as if overcoming its reservations one by one. And Mundy notices how the deep-set eyes have aged somehow, and appear to absorb the candlelight rather than reflect it.

"Very well. You are my friend and I trust you. Despite your ridiculous preoccupations with duchesses and housemaids."

"Thank you."

"My late father is not quite as late or as dead as I would wish him to be. If we are to judge him by normal medical criteria, he is in fact offensively alive."

Either Mundy has the wit to stay silent, or he is too bemused to speak.

"He did not assault a brother officer. He has not succumbed to drink, though periodically he tries. He is a religious and political _Wendehals__--a turncoat whose existence is so intolerable to me that even today, when I am forced to think of him, I can only bring myself to refer to him as the Herr Pastor, never _Father.__ You look bored."

"I'm anything but bored! Everyone told me your private life was holy ground. How could I imagine it was _this__ holy?"

"From his earliest childhood the Herr Pastor believed unquestioningly in God. His parents were religious but he was superreligious, a puritanical Lutheran fanatic of the most incorrigible sort, born 1910. When Our Dear Fuhrer came to power"--his invariable term for Hitler--"the Herr Pastor was already an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party, twenty-three years old and recently ordained. His faith in Our Dear Fuhrer was even greater than his faith in God. Hitler would work magic. He would give Germany back its dignity, burn the Versailles Treaty, get rid of our Communists and Jews and build an Aryan heaven on earth. You are really not bored?"

"How can you ask? I'm riveted!"

"But not so riveted that you will rush out and tell your ten best friends that after all I have a father, I hope. The Herr Pastor and his fellow Nazi Lutherans called themselves Deutsche Christen. How he survived the last years of the war is unclear to me, since to this day he refuses to discuss such matters. At some desperate moment he was sent to the Russian front and captured. That the Russians didn't shoot him is a dereliction of good sense that I have long held against them. Instead they sent him to prison in Siberia, and by the time he was released and returned to East Germany, Herr Pastor the Christian Nazi had become Herr Pastor the Christian Bolshevik. As a consequence of this conversion the East German Lutheran Church gave him a job curing Communist souls in Leipzig. I will confess to you that I greatly resented his return from captivity. He had no right to take my mother from me. He was a stranger, a violator. Other children had no father: why should I have one? This broken little coward of a man, sniffing a lot, preaching himself up to twice his size, with the words of Jesus and Lenin, was repulsive to me. To please my poor mother I was obliged to declare myself a convert. It is true that there were times when I was confused by the bond between the two deities, but since they both had beards it was possible to assume a symbiosis. In 1960, however, God was good enough to appear to the Herr Pastor in a dream and order him to take his family and everything he owned to the West while there was time. So we put our Bibles in our pockets and fled over the sector border, leaving Lenin behind."

"Did you have brothers and sisters? This is _really__ appalling, Sasha."

"An elder brother whom my parents greatly preferred to me. He died."

"At what age?"

"Sixteen."

"What of?"

"Pneumonia, complicated by respiratory problems. A long, slow dying. I envied Rolf because he was our mother's favourite, and loved him because he was a good brother to me. For seven months I visited him every day in the hospital and was present at his end. It was not a vigil I remember with pleasure."

"I'm sure not." He risks it. "So what happened to your body?"

"It appears that I was conceived while the Herr Pastor was on home leave, and subsequently born in a ditch while my mother was attempting to escape from the Russian advance. Her later information, probably inaccurate, was that I was deprived of oxygen in the womb. What my mother was deprived of, I can only imagine. It was not a salubrious ditch." He resumes. "The Herr Pastor made the spiritual transition from East to West with his customary agility. Having caught the eye of a Missouri missionary organization of dubious connections, he was flown to St. Louis for a course of religious instruction. He graduated summa cum laude and returned to West Germany an ardent Christian conservative of the seventeenth century and a devotee of free market Christian capitalism. Appropriately, a curacy was found for him in the old Nazi stamping ground of Schleswig-Holstein, where every Sunday, to the enchantment of his congregation, he may be heard singing the praises of Martin Luther and Wall Street from the pulpit."

"Sasha, this is truly terrible. Terrible and fantastic. Can we go up to Schleswig-Holstein and listen to him?"

"Never. I have disowned him totally. As far as my comrades are concerned he is totally dead. It is the one point on which the Herr Pastor and I have found common ground. He does not wish to acknowledge an atheist radical militant for a son, and I do not wish to acknowledge an aggressive hypocritical religious turncoat for a father. That is why, with the Herr Pastor's collusion, I have 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, Gottingen, Frankfurt, Tubingen, Saarbrucken, 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 at the very least one of Sasha's tirades against the repressive tolerance of pseudo-liberalism, or the cancer of military-industrial colonialism. "Tomatoes, stink bombs, thunder flashes--Uzi machine guns, perhaps?"

"We intend to _reveal the social genesis of human knowledge,__" Sasha replies, stuffing bread and sausage into his mouth before he hurries off to a meeting.

"What's that when it's at home?" Mundy asks, slipping into his familiar role of test audience.

"Man's preternatural state, his ur-state. Day One is already too late. We must begin on Day Zero. That is the entire point."

"You're going to have to spell this one out for me," Mundy warns, brows appropriately puckered. And the notion is indeed surprising to Mundy, since Sasha has until now insisted that they must deal with harsh political realities rather than fancy visions of Utopia.

"As a first stage, we shall wipe the human slate clean. We shall detoxify the brain, cleanse it of its prejudices, inhibitions and inherited appetites. We shall purge it of everything old and rotten"--another chunk of sausage--"Americanism, greed, class, envy, racism, bourgeois sentimentality, hatred, aggression, superstition and the craving for property and power."

"And enter _what__ exactly?"

"I fail to understand your question."

"It's simple enough. You've wiped my slate clean. I'm pure, I'm not American, racist, bourgeois or materialistic. I've got no bad thoughts left, no bad inherited instincts. What do I get in return, apart from a policeman's boot in the balls?"

Standing impatiently at the door, Sasha has ceased to take kindly to this inquisition. "You get what is needful to a harmonious society and nothing more. Brotherly love, natural sharing, mutual respect. Napoleon was right. You English are totally materialistic."

All the same, it is a theory of which Mundy hears no more.

4.

"THOSE GIRLS ARE total dykes," insists the Viking, now better known to Mundy by his kennel name of Peter the Great. Peter is a pacifist from Stuttgart. He came to Berlin to escape military service. His rich parents are whispered to be _Sympis,__ members of the guilt-ridden higher bourgeoisie who secretly give succor to those bent on their destruction.

"A lost cause," Sasha, taken up with larger matters of revolutionary strategy, distractedly agrees. "Don't waste your stupid time on them, Teddy. Freaks, the pair of them."

They are speaking of Legal Judith and Legal Karen, so named because they are studying jurisprudence. The fact that they happen to be the two most desirable females in the squat only adds to their offense. Sexual choice for women, in the opinion of the two great liberators, does not include refusing to go to bed with important male activists. Take a look at the sackcloth skirts they wear, for God's sake, Peter urges. And those mannish shoes like army boots, where do they think they're marching to? And the way they put their hair up in messy buns and slop around the squat like a couple of lovesick Burghers of Calais! Peter claims they take out one law book from the library at a time so that they have something to read together in bed. Karen moves her finger along the line, he says, Judith does the words.

The only person they consort with apart from one another is Mundy's erstwhile inquisitor, the Greek Christina, who is suspected of sharing their sexual predilections. Mundy has never previously encountered the phenomenon of lesbianism, but has to concede that all known evidence supports the rumor. The two women refuse to shower communally. From the day they arrived in the squat they insisted on having their own room, and fitted a padlock to the door with a sign saying FUCK OFF. It's still there. Mundy has been to see it. Any further proof he should require, let him try his luck and see what he gets apart from a broken jaw, says Peter.

Yet for all these doom-laden prognostications, Legal Judith is imposing grave strains on Mundy's vows of Isherwood detachment. Her efforts to disguise her beauty are futile. Where Karen hunches her shoulders and acts grumpy, Judith is wispy and ethereal. At protest meetings Karen snarls like a bulldog, but Judith in anger merely shakes her golden head. Yet as soon as the meeting's over, there they are again: Legal Judith and Legal Karen, nicely brought-up North German girls, received in Berlin's best radical drawing rooms, strolling hand in hand along the shores of Lesbos.

So forget her, Mundy orders himself each time he catches his hopes rising. Those straight looks she gives you during English conversation lessons are because you're weird and tall and Oxford. Our verbal flirtations--of Judith's contrivance, admittedly--are opportunities for her to try out her English on you, nothing more.

"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 Kurfurstenstrasse, 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 _eingeblaut__ 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.