Absolute Friends Read Online Free PDF Page B

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