Any Human Heart (56 page)

[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. Thus it was that in the summer of 1977 I travelled surprisingly widely (by bus) throughout the British Isles in my capacity as member of the SPK’s Working Circle — Direct Action. After Oldham I went to Clydeside, after Clydeside I was on the pavement opposite Downing Street for five days. Striking dye-stampers in Swansea, fishermen in Stonehaven, sweatshops in Brick Lane — I was there. You may even have seen glimpses of me on the television news or in the background of newspaper photographs: the tall elderly man in the dark suit and tie, wielding the SPK placard, being jostled by policemen, shouting abuse at Margaret Thatcher, jeering at scabs in buses. In between times I sold
The Situation
and lived my simple but now committed life, shuttling between Turpentine Lane, the public library, the Cornwallis and the Park Café. I no longer complained about my lot — I felt I was doing something at last.]

I’m in the Cornwallis this evening enjoying a half pint of Extra Strength lager and a small schooner of Bristol Cream sherry (for any impoverished, committed boozer this combination will work wonders, I guarantee — you don’t want to drink another drop of alcohol and you sleep like a baby) when, to my genuine astonishment, John Vivian comes in.

He sits down opposite me, looking dark-eyed and agitated. I have to say the mood of the Napier Street Mob has changed these last few weeks. Ian Halliday has gone away, Tina hardly speaks and Anna seems close to tears all the time. I think Vivian may have started an affair with Anna — anyway, I believe ‘strung out’ is the correct term to describe their demeanour. The last issue of
The Situation
had shrunk to four pages — more of a pamphlet than a newspaper — and half of it was an incoherent editorial by Vivian about ‘Isolation Torture in West Germany’. Most of the rest was a badly translated article written by Ulrike Meinhof in 1969. I made the point that this issue was going to be almost impossible to sell on the streets of London and Tina Brownwell screamed at me, calling me a fifth-columnist and a scab. Luckily for everyone some German industrialist was kidnapped on Monday
⁶
and the event managed to raise enough interest for me to sell over a hundred copies.

Now Vivian leans towards me and offers me a cigarette (no thanks) and another drink (no thanks) and asks me if he can have my newspaper money now. It’s back at my flat, I say. I was going to bring it along tomorrow as usual. I need it now, he says.

So Vivian comes back to Turpentine Lane with me but won’t follow me inside. I fetch the money and hand it over, asking for a receipt. ‘Still that shopkeeper mentality, eh, Mountstuart?’ he says, with a thin smile. But he signs my docket all the same and strides off into the night. It must be drugs: I think they use the newspaper money to buy drugs.

Maybe I’m wrong. Vivian was his usual cool sardonic self when I picked up the new issue today (which was still on the thin side, still largely devoted to the doings of the radical left in West Germany). There was no sign of Anna or Tina. Unusually, Vivian offered me a drink, a whisky, which I decided to accept this time. We had a peculiar conversation.

ME: So — what was your college at Cambridge?
VIVIAN: Gonville and Caius. Why?
ME: I was at Oxford. Jesus College.
VIVIAN: Look at us, Mountstuart, the flower of the nation. You were reading English, no doubt.
ME: History, actually.
VIVIAN: What do you think about what’s going on in Germany?
ME: I think it’s complete madness. Delusion. Violence isn’t going to change a thing.
VIVIAN: Wrong. Anyway, it’s not violence. It’s counter-violence. Big difference.
ME: If you say so.
VIVIAN: You ever been in prison, Mountstuart?
ME: Yes.
VIVIAN: So have I. I spent thirty-six hours locked up in a cell in Cambridge police station. That’s violence for you. I was making a legal protest against fascist generals in Greece and the state took my freedom away from me.
ME: I spent two years in solitary confinement in Switzerland, 1944-5. I was fighting for my country.
VIVIAN: Two years? Christ…

That shut him up for a while. He topped up our drinks.

VIVIAN: Do you like travelling?
ME: Don’t mind a spot of travelling.
VIVIAN: Well, do you fancy a little trip abroad?

Vivian was very circumspect as he outlined the itinerary. Everything would be paid for by the SPK, all I had to do was to take the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and go to a town near Hamburg, called Waldbach. There I was to book into a small hotel called the Gasthaus Kesselring, where I would be contacted by someone. Then new instructions would be given to me. Every evening I was to call Napier Street at 6 o’clock and report in, but I was to speak only to Vivian himself. Our password would be ‘Mogadishu’. I was to say nothing unless the person to whom I said the word ‘Mogadishu’ repeated it. Only you and I know this password, Vivian said, that way our conversations will be secure.

‘Mogadishu in Somalia?’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Has a nice ring to it.’

‘So we could say I’m on Operation Mogadishu, then?’

‘If it makes you happy to think of it that way, Mountstuart, then indeed you are.’

We sat and drank some more. I asked Vivian what this was all about. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Mountstuart, he said. We were both becoming a little pissed as we neared the bottom of the bottle. What do you believe in, John? I asked him. I believe in fighting fascism in all its forms, he said. That’s an evasion, a catch-all, I said, and fundamentally meaningless. Then I told him about Faustino Angel Peredes — my friend the Spanish Anarchist who had died in Barcelona in 1937 — and the credo we had evolved between us on the Aragón front that year. I let all these names and dates drop with full self-consciousness, wanting him to weigh up the implicit experience, the lived-life therein. Our credo of two hates and three loves: hatred of injustice, hatred of privilege, love of life, love of humanity, love of beauty. Vivian looked at me, sadly, and poured out the last of the whisky for himself, and said: ‘You really are an old unreconstructed tosser, aren’t you?’

I came home this evening to find two envelopes had been pushed through my letter box. The first one contained £100, cash, a train ticket from Waterloo to Waldbach and confirmation that a room had been booked for me at the Gasthaus Kesselring from Saturday onward. The other envelope contained $2,000 in $50 bills and a note to say that my contact in Waldbach would tell me whom to give it to. I am to leave early on Saturday morning — it seems Operation Mogadishu is underway. It may appear strange to make this observation, especially at my age, but I find myself tense with excitement and almost schoolboy anticipation. I could be back at Abbey about to go on a night exercise.

Waldbach is a small town set on two sides of a slow meandering river (I forget its name). On the southern side of the town is a semi-ruined castle and a few steep-roofed timbered houses clustered around it. North of the river is the new town (largely post-war dominated by the functional buildings of a large teacher-training college). This was where the Gasthaus Kesselring was situated. I had a room at the rear with a view of a garage and a cinema. I arrived after midnight on Saturday and went straight to bed.

On Sunday I explored the castle and lunched in the small square at its foot. I dined in the Gasthaus restaurant and read my book in the residents’ lounge (a biography of John O’Hara — very underrated writer). On Monday, I repeated the process, but instead of reading my book went to the cinema to see a badly dubbed film called
Three Days of the Condor
⁷
— which seemed to be excellent, as far as I could understand what was going on.

I made sure to call Napier Street at 6.00 (there had been no reply the previous night).

‘Hello?’ a man’s voice said.

‘Mogadishu.’

‘Hello?’

‘Mogadishu.’

Someone else picked up. ‘Is that you, Logan?’

It was Anna. ‘Yes. Could I speak to John, please?’

‘Where are you? Are you all right?’

‘Absolutely fine.’

Vivian came to the phone.

‘Mogadishu.’

‘Hi, Mountstuart. Everything fine?’

I hung up, then rang back two minutes later.

‘What the fuck are you playing at, Mountstuart?’

‘Mogadishu.’

‘All right. Mogadishu, Mogadishu, Mogadishu.’ ‘There’s no point in establishing a security procedure if you ignore it.’

‘Anna was standing beside me. I couldn’t start spouting “Mogadishu” all over the place.’

‘Shall we change the password?’

‘No, no, no. Any news?’

‘No sign of the contact.’

‘That’s odd. Well, hang on in there.’

On Tuesday I trudged across the bridge that led to the castle, but I couldn’t stand another tour, and instead settled myself at the café with my book and ordered a beer and sandwich. It was a chilly day so I sat inside — the place was more or less empty.

Then two girls came in and sat down. I sensed they were staring at me and having some sort of whispered discussion. Both of them had badly dyed hair — one blonde, one carroty red. Eventually I looked over and smiled — it seemed to make their minds up and they took seats at my table.

‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ the blonde one whispered harshly at me.

‘We’ve been sitting in that fucking railway station for two days,’ said Carrot-top.

I explained that my instructions said nothing about meeting anyone at the railway station. I apologized and suggested buying them a drink as a peace offering and they had a couple of beers. They both spoke good English and smoked constantly.

‘I’m Mountstuart,’ I said.

‘Why are you so old?’ Blonde said. ‘Can’t they find any young people in England?’

‘No, no,’ Carrot said. ‘It’s very clever. Fucking clever, if you think about it. An old guy like him in his suit and overcoat. No one would think anything.’

‘Yeah…’ Blonde said. ‘I’m, ah, Ingeborg.’

‘And I’m Birgit — no, Petra,’ the redhead corrected herself guilelessly. They both tried not to laugh.

‘I believe you have instructions for me,’ I said.

‘No,’ Petra said. ‘I think you have something for us.’

‘I’d better make a telephone call’

I went to the telephone-cabin and somehow managed to make a reverse-charge call to Napier Street.

‘Will you accept a reverse-charge call from a Mr Logan Mountstuart?’

‘Certainly not,’ Tina Brownwell said and hung up.

I told Petra and Ingeborg they would have to meet me later that evening after I had made my 6 o’clock call to London and we arranged to rendezvous at a café-bar opposite the station.

I called Vivian at the appointed hour.

‘Mogadishu.’

‘Cut all that crap, Mountstuart, this isn’t the Boy Scouts.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘Yeah, yeah. What’s happening?’

‘They’ve made contact, but they’ve no instructions.’

‘Fucking Jesus Christ!’ Vivian railed on for a while. ‘Where is he? Can you put him on?’

‘Who?’

‘The contact.’

‘It’s a couple of girls, actually. I’m meeting them later.’

He said he would make some calls and try to sort matters out. I wandered up to the station and found Petra and Ingeborg sitting in the window of a blazingly bright cafeteria. We ordered some roast chicken and chips and drank beer. The girls smoked. Petra, I suspected from her colouring, was a blonde who had gone redhead. She had blue eyes and a sulky, pouting face sprinkled with many small moles. Ingeborg was a dark-haired girl who had turned peroxide blonde — thin-lipped, with restless brown eyes and a cleft in her chin.

We ate and chatted as if we were students on an exchange, meeting in the college refectory. They were curious about SPK and John Vivian. I gave them some evasive answers.

‘Did you know Ian?’ Petra asked.

‘Yes, a little.’

‘Poor Ian,’ Ingeborg said.

‘Why “Poor Ian”?’

‘He was shot by the pigs. They killed him, gunned him down.’
⁸

‘We must be talking about a different Ian,’ I said.

Petra looked at me. ‘Do you have a gun?’

‘Of course not.’

She opened her handbag and showed me what looked like an automatic pistol.

‘I too have one,’ Ingeborg said. ‘And here’s your instructions.’ It was the address of a hotel in Zurich: Hotel Horizont. Back to Switzerland.

I put this down in the interests of candour and what it may reveal about me and the situation I now found myself in. As soon as Petra had shown me her gun and Ingeborg had confessed she had one also I developed a keen sexual interest in these two grubby, neurotic girls. Rather than be alarmed by this turn of events I wanted to invite them back to the Gasthaus Kesselring and have sex with them. Is this the danger of the tawdry glamour of the self-appointed urban guerrilla? That somehow the ‘game’ always tends to obscure the brutal reality? I realized that ‘Operation Mogadishu’ was by now something far more sinister than I had ever envisaged, and yet I couldn’t take it seriously, I couldn’t believe these inefficient bickering girls with their bad dye-jobs posed any kind of threat. I was intrigued, beguiled, aroused. And then I have also to admit that after a moment’s reflection I was shocked at my own stupidity and naivety. What did I think I was doing on this cloak-and-dagger journey across Germany? Organizing some pan-European student demo? Delivering funds for a left-wing charitable organization? John Vivian’s bad-boy paranoia and cynicism had seemed nothing more than an attitude, an affectation, a way of appearing ‘cool’ — all with the aim, perhaps, of making it easier to attract pretty young women like Anna and Tina into his Napier Street lair. But I suddenly saw in that overlit
bahnhof
cafeteria the cold and ruthless consequences of this extremism — left or right, they all seemed in their rackety, accident-prone, haphazard way ultimately to involve some degree of violent confrontation and personal injury. The John Vivians of this world painted themselves into a political corner with their radicalism — and the only way out was with a gun or a bomb.