She said it, he thought, as if she were in shock.
—It’ll be OK, said Haffner. He knew this was not adequate. But there was nothing, he felt, he could say.
Naturally, said Frau Tummel, she would have to consider whether to report the girl. It was only right. This seemed unnecessary, said Haffner. No, said Frau Tummel. It was only right. She had to consider what was right. Would there be anything he could do, said Haffner, to persuade her otherwise? Frau Tummel looked at him. She told him that no, there was not.
And she turned and left, theatrically slamming the door. Or, theatrically trying to slam the door: but the door, on its stiff spring-delay, braked, and softly, slowing, slowly, softly closed itself, in silence.
But what else had she expected? He was a monster, absolutely. A chimera, a griffin: a rabid centaur. Nor was this the first appearance of Haffner’s multiple personality, his capacity for metamorphosis.
5
The night when Haffner proposed to Livia – just before Haffner was due to ship out – he had gone with some friends to the French Pub in Soho. And at that time he did not realise that the man behind the bar, with the Gallic twin-twirled moustache, was Victor Berlemont, the father of Gaston – Gaston, who after his retirement from the French Pub would play golf with Haffner twenty years later, in the other bohemia of Hendon. A man who understood the problematic species of herbs. With a Pernod in his hand – the first time Haffner had ever drunk this strange and continental liquor – he had talked to a girl about the higher things. Many times, Haffner had considered the uneasy fluctuations of one’s sense of beauty. In wartime, he discovered, one could find beautiful most women you met. Because you needed beauty, for the desire to feel rational. Whereas the desire you felt in a war wasn’t rational, and there was no beauty. She didn’t believe, the girl in the French Pub had told him, that adultery was wrong. It was, let us say, a short story: to the side of the novel. He did not quite understand the analogy; he knew, however, what she meant. But that girl and her analogies dissolved into memory – the steep amphitheatre of Haffner’s memory which he looked down on from the great height of his longevity, perched on his seat in the gods, looking down at the rabid lions, the dying Christians.
Haffner had left, and gone to meet Livia at the statue of Eros.
It was always like that, he thought. He wanted to be bohemian, and the bohemian eluded him. He had kissed the girl in the French Pub, and then left, before anything else might happen.
He took Livia for a meal on Shaftesbury Avenue. Then they had gone to some film: of which Haffner only remembered that a man spent a lot of time driving. This was, Haffner remembered, the main reason, it seemed, there had been for making a film: the mania for cars. It was so cool to drive that all any one in Britain wanted to see, all any one in Los Angeles wanted to film, was a man getting in and out of a car. And also, remembered Haffner, smoking a pipe. In and out of a car while smoking a pipe. That was cinema. Afterwards, they were in a taxi round the back of Leicester Square. They were taking Livia home. And did Livia know, asked Haffner, how dangerous it would be for him over there, soon, at the front? Livia made Haffner aware that she did. But perhaps, he continued – wishing he could not remember how the girl in the French Pub had kissed him, the thick dry texture of her lipstick, with its waxy faded rose perfume, like the greasepaint of his recent brief theatrical career, which she then reapplied, open-mouthed, after they had kissed, while Haffner watched the taut ellipse of her mouth – Livia did not quite appreciate the magnitude of the danger. The danger Haffner would be in, over there, at the front.
Haffner touched her on the cheek. He was twenty-two. She was twenty. It was very possible, he said, that he would never see her again. He might never come home. So would she, he said – looking down, bashful – consent to make him happy? It would mean so much to him, he said, to know that someone cared. Livia looked at him: and, as she used to tell Benjamin, and everyone else, for ever after, she did not know what else she could do. It seemed rude to say no. So she said yes and – feeling very fast – cuddled him up, and kissed him.
As Haffner silently and helplessly compared her nervous, gentle, motionless kiss to the inspired kiss of a girl four hours earlier, whose name he would never know.
Haffner Jewish
1
Because Haffner was now in a state of introspection; because his attempt to find Zinka, to warn her about the rages of Frau Tummel, had stalled when, as he leaned casually against the counter at reception, a man sporting a slicked quiff, with a paper rose in his lapel, smiled blankly at him and assured him that Zinka had left the hotel that day; because in any case Frau Tummel was unlikely to draw the hotel’s attention to her surveillance of Haffner’s bedroom: because of all these reasons, Haffner went walking again. His intention was to sit and reflect on the villa. He was due to meet Niko that evening, in their clandestine arrangement. Before that, he was eating supper with Benjamin. So Haffner now had two intentions. He wanted to sit and reflect, and check that his quest for the villa was being as slickly maintained as possible. And to do this, he intended to find a coffee: the blackest, most acrid, most Mediterranean coffee.
From this search, however, Haffner was sidetracked.
He didn’t always know why he did things. He didn’t know why, now, he had wandered into a church: first blinded by the darkness, then gradually seeing the light. A shrine on his left was an exhibition of car crash photos: for those who had survived miraculous suffering. A shrine on his right was an exhibition of baby photos, toddlers, foetal scans. The shrine of the miracle births. Haffner sat in a pew, his back straight, his knees aching, and looked up at the crucified God. He looked back down. A woman in a headscarf was shepherding seven bags of shopping. She bent low to worship her Lord.
Just as Livia had bent her head, when she crouched there, on all fours, waiting for the entrance of Haffner. Because she liked to see it, she said. She liked to watch him moving, between her legs.
Haffner looked up. He looked back down. The only prayers he knew were Jewish prayers, and so he tried to say them.
The Jews were, in the end, his people. If Haffner had a people.
Perhaps, then, this was not the digression it appeared to Haffner. Perhaps this was just another way for Haffner to consider his commitment to Livia’s inheritance.
—Shema, Yisrael, he said, the Lord our God.
And then he could not remember anything else. Because the way up is the way down and the way left is the way right. He was in a church, and he was Jewishly praying. Did this matter? Was this the sort of action which damned a soul for all eternity? Haffner had no idea.
2
When Livia had died, Benjamin had taken Haffner aside. As if Benjamin were the grandfather. Perhaps, thought Benjamin, Haffner might find solace if he went to shul?
—Shul? said Haffner.
—Shul, said Benjamin.
—Since when, said Haffner, did you give up on the English language?
Haffner disliked the modern trend for Yiddish. It wasn’t some recovered purity of the blood that Haffner cared about: instead Haffner preferred the distinctions of the English language, was learned in the difference between a parvenu and an arriviste, a cad and a bounder.
On the other hand, the linguistics did not exhaust his irritation at Benjamin’s suggestion.
Haffner rarely went to synagogue.
—You want to leave the synagogue? the Reverend Levine had said to him. Be my guest. I don’t mind which synagogue you don’t go to.
And Haffner had riposted with his own.
—Come on, said Haffner, winningly. What is the definition of a British Jew?
—Tell me, Raphael, said the Reverend Levine.
—A person, said Haffner, who instead of no longer going to church, no longer goes to synagogue.
Once, he had felt more allegiance to his religion. At school, he hadn’t eaten the bacon, just the eggs; and when there was an exchange, and some German boys came over, he didn’t want t
o speak to them: he had resented them being there. Yet he also went to chapel once a day, and twice on Sundays. He could have, naturally, been excused, but he still went.
—The thing about you, Benji had said to him, during one of their political discussions, is that you’re so English. You’re lukewarm.
—You’re English too, said Haffner. Don’t you be forgetting you’re English.
—I’m not, said Benji. Well, I’m not English like you’re English. Just as in New York, when Morton persisted in his absolute belief that race was where it was at. That history was where it was at. That no one could be sincere if they tried to deny the world-importance of politics.
In this way, Haffner floated above the Atlantic Ocean, neither European nor American.
During the war, he had disturbed his Jewish friends – particularly Silberman, that comical Jewish soldier – with his unabashed hatred of the Stern Gang: the Zionist Jewish terrorists. With disdain, Haffner quoted from their newspaper, The Front, where the crazies argued, crazily, in Haffner’s considered opinion, that neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition could negate the use of terror as a means of battle.
Haffner didn’t care about birth or name or nation. He was not a stickler for such things. He was amused when Hersch Lauterpacht – Goldfaden’s new friend – told him, many years after it happened, over dinner, that his nomination to the International Court of Justice had initially been blocked by the Attorney General, on the grounds that a British representative should both be and be seen to be thoroughly British, whereas Lauterpacht could not help the fact that he did not qualify in this way either by birth, by name or by education. Yes, how they had laughed, at Simpson’s on the Strand, in 1980. How he had chuckled at this idea that they should in any way be seen as European.
My hero of assimilation! My hero of lightness!
Or so Haffner would have liked his story to be written. But it was not entirely true.
Haffner still treasured his family’s stories from the shtetl. Or, more precisely, he treasured the story of their escape. How the final branch of the Haffner family tree to reach England had docked in Sunderland, in the midst of the nineteenth century, with Haffner’s great-grandfather, a two-month-old baby, in a box. This was the family romance: the line of the Haffners had only survived the Lithuanian pogroms because of the silence and courage of great-grandfather Haffner, whose name was Isaac – the perfect silent baby. But, thought Haffner, where was the logic in this story? If one needed to hide the baby, surely one would have needed to hide oneself as well? And the chances of a baby remaining silent during a customs investigation, tight in a box, seemed highly unlikely. So in what way would this ruse dupe an anti-Semite, in Prussia, with his sideburns and the plume of his helmet, the beige snuff stains on the crook of his thumb? But there it was: this story, invented or not, was the beginning of the Haffners’ career in polite society. This silent infant generated the family law firm – which Haffner had refused – the house in north London, the servants, the cricket matches, the endless lawn-tennis lessons.
And his mother, his minuscule mother, who fasted every Yom Kippur: who stood on the steps of their synagogue in St John’s Wood, asking Raphael to hold her, because she was dizzy.
Haffner thought that with these memories he was avoiding the pressing issue of the villa, the pressing issue of the women who had so invaded his stay here in the mountains. But there was passion in Haffner’s indecision. He wanted to be a flâneur: he wanted to pretend that he had no engagements, no responsibilities. This ideal Haffner would idle through his memories – flick through them as through the pages of an outdated women’s magazine, in the dentist’s waiting room, while sitting beside an abandoned playpen made of multicoloured plastic. But this Haffner did not exist. No, the real Haffner was, as always, in the middle of things.
Here, in this church, Haffner tried to disappear from view. As he always tried to do. And he could not.
He was an aristocrat. Could no one understand this? Bourgeois, true, but an aristocrat! He had class. Even as they tried to force him into the Jewish working classes: the ordinary ranks of the Jews. The dispossessed; the heartbroken. No, Haffner had nothing to do with the Yiddish in London. Koyfts a heft! they used to cry, in the streets where Haffner was trying to find a cup of tea, after his cricket coaching in the East End. His cousins had set up the first ever mixed Jewish and Christian social club for boys in the East End locale of Bethnal Green, a club whose cricket team Haffner had coached to victory that same summer, the year before he went away to fight in the British army. Buy a pamphlet! they cried, crowding round Haffner, with their Yiddish literary magazines, their Zionist cris de coeur.
Buy, thought Haffner, a fucking pamphlet yourself.
It had seemed so funny then. It seemed less funny now.
3
The aristocracy of Haffner was not a metaphor. A cousin on his mother’s side was a viscount.
Yes, Haffner had history.
As a young man, Haffner’s viscount had been moved by the plight of the underdog, the abandoned masses in their ghettos. He would go with his father – a liberal politician, a man of principle – to the dilapidated areas out to the east of London, where the less fortunate Jewish people lived, with their impoverished tailoring, cabinet-making, matchbox-making, fur-pulling. Then they would go to the park, to take a stroll, or a ride. The disparity between these two experiences moved the young politician: he wanted to do good. He was so moved that the syntax in his diary became impassioned, inverted. What are they, dull, short-visioned, who see not the ground shaking beneath their very feet – wrote the young liberal – and angry voices, quiet, marvellously refraining yet, that are soon to rise, in ever-swelling clamour? Later on, when he retired from public life, Haffner’s viscount devoted his time to the writing of philosophy. He was, he said, a meliorist. He believed that, with only a small adjustment in our thinking, we would see that this world could indeed become the best of all possible worlds.
Whenever the business of imagining this thing called history came up in Haffner’s life – on rare occasions, perhaps when rereading Churchill, or arguing with his grandson, or listening to the stories of Livia’s family – he imagined history as a straight line. The line of gravity. The all-encompassing horizontal – its horizon – to which all bodies descended.
It was Haffner’s viscount who had argued for the Jewish right of return to Palestine: the Arabs could not forbid the Jews to come back, he had argued, since the Jews were a people whose connection with the country long antedated their own – and especially as it had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years. There could be no question, he had told the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, that the best thing for the land would be for it to be reclaimed by the Jews.
He was not dogmatic, however. The rights of the immigrants did not cancel out the rights of the natives: no, the arrival of the Jews must never be marked by hardship, expropriation, injustice of any kind for the people now in the land, whose forebears had tilled the soil and dwelled in the towns for a thousand years.
The viscount possessed the optimism of the romantic.
As the first ever High Commissioner of Palestine, the viscount had sent rare stamps to his philatelic king, painted with Churchill (whose paintings, he noted, were avowedly crude, but nonetheless effective, especially in colouring) and played tennis with Lord Balfour himself. Whose idea – along with that genius Weizmann – the whole country had been in the first place. And it was the viscount who was one half of the most famous anecdote about this country which they still called Palestine. When his predecessor, Chief Administrator Bols, was about to leave office, wrote the viscount, he asked the incoming commissioner to sign a receipt. The viscount asked for what. For Palestine, said Bols. But, replied the viscount, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t mean it seriously. Certainly he did, said Major Bols. He had it typed out here. And he produced a slip of paper – Recei
ved from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, KCB: one Palestine, complete – with the date and a space for the viscount’s signature. The viscount still demurred, but Bols insisted, so he signed; adding, however, the initials which used often to appear on commercial documents – E & OE, meaning Errors and Omissions Excepted. And Bols had this piece of paper framed, he was so pleased with it.
And when the viscount finally left the country, to further pursue his career back in Britain, he took with him a vision. In his memoir of his time in Palestine, he recorded the wide roads, bordered by little white single-storeyed houses, well spaced out, with creepers over their porches; around them, little gardens of flowers and patches of vegetables, with fields of waving corn and young plantations of trees beyond; groups of men and women in working-clothes, smiling girls and beautiful, healthy, white-dressed children; overhead, the cloudless blue sky. That, he said, was the vision with which he had left.
It wasn’t Haffner’s vision. Haffner thought it was schmaltz.
But it was with pride that, towards the end of 1942, he had learned in the newspapers of the viscount’s speech in the Lords, on the reading of the declaration against German extermination of the Jews. This was not an occasion on which they were expressing sorrow and sympathy to sufferers from some terrible catastrophe due unavoidably to flood or earthquake, or some other convulsion of nature, the viscount had said. These dreadful events were an outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty on the part of human beings. Hear hear, the Lords had murmured. And Haffner with them, in Egypt. Absolutely.
Authority like this was what Haffner was destined for, thought Haffner. It was his inheritance: the natural deference shown to the political classes, the happy comforts of the Finanzbourgeoisie. A class to which he naturally belonged, thought happy Haffner, confirmed in this belief by the speech in the newspaper just as much as he was by his first ever deal – at Anzio, when he persuaded some desperate American, a friend of Morton’s, just for a cheap bottle of whisky, to part with his regulation, all-terrain, multi-gear jeep.
The Escape: A Novel Page 19