Haffner wasn’t into sex, after all, for the family. The children were the mistake. He was in it for all the exorbitant extras.
No, not for Haffner – the normal curves, the pedestrian features. His desire was seduced by an imperfectly shaved armpit, or a tanning forearm with its swatch of sweat. That was the principle of Haffner’s mythology. Haffner, an admirer of the classics. So what if this now made him laughable, or ridiculous, or – in the newly moralistic vocabulary of Benji, his Orthodox and religious grandson – sleazy? As if there should be closure on dirtiness. As if there should ever be, thought Haffner, any shame in one’s lust. Or any more shame than anyone else’s. If he could have extended the epic of Haffner’s lust for another lifetime, then he would have done it.
In this, he would confess, he differed from Goldfaden. Goldfaden would have preferred a happy ending. He was into the One, not the Many. In New York once, in a place below Houston, Goldfaden had told him that some woman – Haffner couldn’t remember her name, some secretary he’d been dealing with in Princeton, or Cambridge – was the kind of woman you’d take by force when the world fell apart. Not like his wife, said Goldfaden: nothing like Cynthia. Then he had downed his single malt and ordered another. At the time, helpful Haffner’s contribution to the list of such ultimate women was Evelyn Laye, the star of stage and screen. The most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, when she accompanied her husband to his training camp in Hampshire, in 1939. They arrived in a silver Wolseley 14/16. Goldfaden, however, had contradicted Haffner’s choice of Evelyn Laye. As he contradicted so many of Haffner’s opinions. She was passable, Goldfaden argued, but it wasn’t what he had in mind. And Haffner wondered – as now, so many years later, he watched while Niko stretched Zinka’s slim legs apart, displaying the indented hollows inside her thighs, the tatooed mermaid’s head protruding from her panties – whether Goldfaden would have agreed that in Zinka he had finally found this kind of woman: the unattainable, the one who would be worth any kind of immorality. If Goldfaden was still alive. He didn’t know. He didn’t, to be honest, really care. Why, after all, would you want anyone when the world fell apart? It was typical of Goldfaden: this macho exaggeration.
But Haffner no longer had Goldfaden. Which was a story in itself. He no longer had anyone to use as his silent audience.
This solitude made Haffner melancholy.
The ethos of Raphael Haffner – as businessman, raconteur, wit, jazzman, reader – was simple: no experience could be more pleasurable than its telling. The description was always to be preferred to the reality. Yet here it was: his finale – and there was no one there to listen. In the absence of this audience, in Haffner’s history, anything had been known to take its place; anything could be spoken to in Haffner’s intimate yell: himself, his ghosts, his absent mentors, even – why not? – the more neutral and natural spectators, like the roses in his garden, or the bright impassive sun.
He looked at Zinka, who suddenly crouched in front of Niko, with her back to Haffner, and allowed her hand to be elaborate on Niko’s penis.
As defeats went, thought Haffner, it was pretty comprehensive. Even Papa never got himself as messed up as this.
Was it too late for him to change? To undergo one final metamorphosis? I am not what I am! That was Haffner’s constant wish, his mantra. He was a man replete with mantras. He would not act his age, or his Age. He would not be what others made of him.
And yet; and yet.
The thing was, said a friend of Livia’s once, thirty years ago, in the green room of a theatre on St Martin’s Lane, making smoke rings dissolve in the smoky air – a habit which always reminded Livia of her father. The thing was, he was always saying that he wanted to disappear.
She was an actress. He wanted this actress, very much. Once, in their bedroom with Livia before a party, he had seen her undress; and although asked to turn away had still fleetingly seen the lavish shapeless bush between her legs. With such memories was Haffner continually oppressed. It wasn’t new. With such memories did Haffner distress himself. But he couldn’t prevent the thought that if she’d undressed in front of him like that, then it was unlikely that she looked on him with any erotic interest – only a calm and uninterested friendliness.
Yes, she continued, he was always saying how he’d prefer to live his life unnoticed, free from the demands of other people.
—But let me tell you something, Raphael, said Livia’s friend. You don’t need to disappear.
Then she paused; blew out a final smoke ring; scribbled her cigarette out in an ashtray celebrating the natural beauty of Normandy; looked at Livia.
—Because no one, she said, is ever looking for you.
How Haffner had tried to smile, as if he didn’t care about her jibe! How Haffner continued to try to smile, whenever this conversation returned to him.
Maybe, he thought, she was right: maybe that was the story of his life, of his century.
And now it was ending – Haffner’s twentieth century. What had Haffner done with the twentieth century? He enjoyed measuring himself like this, against the grand categories. But that depended, perhaps, on another question. What had the twentieth century done with him?
6
The era in which Haffner’s last story took place was an interregnum: a pause. The British empire was over. The Hapsburg empire was over. Over, too, was the Communist empire. All the ideologies were over. But it was not yet the time of full aromatherapy, the era of celebrity: of chakras, and pressure points. It was after the era of the spa as a path to health, and before the era of the spa as a path to beauty. It was not an era at all.
Everything was almost over. And maybe that was how it should be. The more over things were, the better. You no longer needed to be troubled by the constant conjuring with tenses.
In this hiatus, in the final year of the twentieth century, entered Raphael Haffner.
The hotel where Haffner was staying defined itself as a mountain escape. It had the normal look. It was all white – with a roof that rose in waves of red tile and green louvred shutters on all three floors, each storey narrower than the one below. The top storey resembled a little summerhouse with a tiny structure made of iron shutters on the roof, like an observation post or a weather station with instruments inside and barometers outside. On top of it all, at the very peak, a red weathercock turned in the wind. Every window on every floor had a balcony entered through a set of French doors. Behind the hotel rose the traces of conifered paths, ascending to a distant summit; in front of it, pooled the lake, with its reflections. Beside this lake, on the edge of the town, there was a park, with gravel diagonals, and a view of a distant factory.
Once, the town had been the main location for the holidays of the Central European rich. This was where Livia’s family had spent their summers, out of Trieste. They had gone so far, in 1936, as to purchase a villa, with hot and cold water, on the outskirts of the town. In this town, said Livia’s father, he felt happy. It had style. The restaurants were replete with waiters – replete, in their turn, with eyebrow. Then, in the summer of 1939, when she was seventeen, Livia and her younger brother, Cesare, had not come to the mountains, but instead had made their way to London. And they had never come back. Seven years later, in a hotel dining room in Honfleur, where Haffner had taken her for the honeymoon which the war had prevented, she described to Haffner, entranced by the glamour, the dining rooms of her past. Crisp mitres of napkins sat in state on the tables. The guests were served not spa food but the classics of their heritage: schnitzel Holstein, and minestrone. The Béarnaise sauce was served in a silver boat, its lip warped into a moue. There was the clearest chicken soup with the lightest dumplings.
And now, when this place belonged to another country, here was Haffner, her husband: alone – to claim the villa, to claim an inheritance which was not his.
The hotel still served the food of Livia’s memory. This place was timeless: it was the end of history. The customer could still order steak Diane, be
ef Wellington – arranged on vast circles of china, with a thin gold ring inscribing its circumference. Even Haffner knew this wasn’t chic, but he wasn’t after the chic. He just wanted an escape. An escape from what, however, Haffner could not say.
No, Haffner could never disappear.
In 1974, in the last year of his New York life, when Barbra – who was twenty-nine, worked in the Wall Street office as his secretary and smoked Dunhills which she kept in a cigarette holder, triple facts which made her desirable to Haffner as he passed middle age – asked him why it was he still went faithfully back every night to his wife, he could not answer. It didn’t have to be like that, she said. With irritation, as he looked at Barbra, the steep curve between her breasts, he remembered his snooker table in the annexe at home, its blue baize built over by Livia’s castles of unread books. He knew that the next morning he would be there, at home: with his breakfast of Corn Chex, morosely reading the Peanuts cartoons. He knew this, and did not want to know it. So often, he wanted to give up, and elope from his history. The problem was in finding the right elopee. He only had Haffner. And Haffner wasn’t enough.
Zinka turned in the direction of the wardrobe. Usually, she wore her hair sternly in a pony tail. But now she let it drift out, on to her shoulders. And Haffner looked away. Because, he thought, he loved her. He looked back again. Because, he thought, he loved her.
No, there was no escape. And because this is true, then maybe in my turn I should not always allow Haffner the luxury of language.
He was burdened by what he thought was love. But therefore he did not express it in this way. No, trapped by his temptations, Haffner simply sighed.
—Ouf, he exhaled, in his wardrobe. Ouf: ouf.
7
In this vacant hotel room to which Zinka had lured Niko, Zinka had arranged things so that she was facing the mirror which hung above the bed. Behind her, stood Haffner – in the wardrobe. Before her, sat Niko, his legs and his testicles dangling over the edge of the bed. His foot protruded close to Haffner’s lair. One of his toenails, Haffner noted, was blackened – the badge of Niko’s fitness, of the dogged distances he jogged every day.
But Haffner felt no grievance at the disparity between their bodies. He had perspective. This was one reason to love him. He had the sense of humour I admired. It wasn’t just that it was possible to imagine that what was higher could derive always and only from what was lower – in the words of another old master. No, one could go further. And so it was also possible to imagine that – given the polarity and, more importantly, the ludicrousness of the world – everything derived from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory was made up exclusively of beatings.
This defeat, therefore, could be a victory too. It seemed unlikely, perhaps, but Haffner rarely wanted to be burdened with the problems of probability. Haffner found perks everywhere.
Niko’s face was now smothered by the dark nipples of his girlfriend. He was blinded by her body. He therefore couldn’t see that, in the mirror, she was looking at the wardrobe, where Haffner was looking at her. Her lips were parted. She was smiling at him: at the invisible Haffner she knew was lurking there, having first splashed a tangle of coat hangers hurriedly into a drawer. Haffner happily smiled back. Then he stopped himself. It felt obscurely comical for a man to be smiling when concealed in a wardrobe. So, shyly, Haffner looked away. He gazed at her thin back instead, gently imprinted with vertebrae.
A thought arrived to Haffner. Was this it? he considered. Was this love?
When he was seventeen – so Haffner once told me, when we were both drunk on vodka cokes, at a golden-wedding party themed for no obvious reason to gangster films of the American 1970s – Haffner had gone to sleep each night imagining the girl he would meet, who would be his perfect girl. This was very important, he said. She would be a woman of the world, attractive, with a hint of something more, if I knew what he meant. I knew what he meant: he wanted the urban, he wanted a vision of cool. And, he told me, he continued to do this – even after the advent of his wife (and his girlfriends, his collection of lovers). Even there, in this spa town, at seventy-eight, he still calmed himself to sleep imagining this girl who would be so infinitely charmed by him. But now, something had changed.
As of now, this girl was simply Zinka.
This was not, of course, what Haffner was meant to be thinking. But then Haffner had a talent for not thinking the orthodox thoughts.
It wasn’t enough that Haffner was failing to accomplish the bureaucratic task, which was why he was here, in this spa town: to oversee the legal restoration to his family of the villa – appropriated first by the Nazis, then by the Communists, and finally by nationalist capitalists – which now, in the absence of any other surviving relative, belonged theoretically to Haffner and his descendants. No, even here, in the centre of Europe, he had managed to complicate matters even more mythologically. In addition he had already managed to concoct this unusual story with Zinka. Not content with this, he had also managed to concoct another more ordinary story: an affair with a married woman, staying at the hotel. Her name was Frau Tummel. She said that she adored him; and one aspect of Frau Tummel’s soul was its sincerity.
Haffner, however, at this moment, didn’t care about Frau Tummel’s soul. He knew that he was meant to have been with her – regarding a sad sunset. But Zinka’s sudden plan had possessed an overwhelming power of persuasion.
He was not a good man. He didn’t need to be told. The jury wasn’t out on Haffner’s ethics. The case was closed. As a businessman, he had tended to the risky; as a husband, to the unfaithful. He hadn’t really cared about his duties as a father or a grandfather. He cared about himself.
How fluently Haffner could self-lacerate! Then again: how easily Haffner could be distracted from his tribunal.
Niko began to whimper, gently. Why, thought Haffner, in his cupboard, did Haffner have to be old? It was devastating; it was Sophoclean. How could this love for Zinka have arrived so late in his life? Yes, Haffner was lyrical. He understood the language of inspiration. Here it was. Yes, here it was. He was inflated: a Silenus raised from his stupor, made buoyant by a force which was beyond him, as he stood there, neatly framed by a hotel wardrobe.
8
I should pause on that adjective Sophoclean, that noun Silenus.
Haffner was an admirer of the classics.
He had always watched the television dons; he had listened to the radio intellectuals. And now, at this late stage, in his retirement, Haffner had embarked on a programme of enlightenment – a succession of evening classes. Even if he would learn nothing about himself, he still wanted to know everything about anything else. So there they were: the old and unemployed, the desperate to learn. Into this group came Haffner. In these classes, Haffner read history. That was his idea of the classic. Occasionally, after he had returned to London, until Haffner’s dying took over, I came with him. We grappled, in the introductions to the classics, with the concept of philosophic history. History which was ironic, clever, unimpressed.
The course on the Lives of the Caesars was Haffner’s late education. He listened to a man berate the Caesars for their immorality. What a lesson it was, said Errol – sitting behind a desk which was too small for him, being made for a lissom teenager, not a distended middle-aged man – what a lesson in vanity, in the way power corrupted. To which the group, all seated at miniature desks, solemnly assented. A poster on the wall displayed a range of fluorescent vegetables and their appropriate names in German. Then Haffner asked if he could say something. He understood that they had all been very moved by the book which was the subject of this course. And he would like to say that he had been the most moved of them all. He had been converted, he said: and now he fully understood the grandeur of the Romans. He hadn’t cared for them before, but now, said Haffner, reading about the glorious crimes of the emperors, he saw how truly great they really were.
At this
point, Haffner paused for the expected laugh. It did not come.
Blissfully, Haffner had roamed along the shelves of the hotel library, parsing its eccentric selection of the classics. Beside his bed, there was now an abridged edition of Edward Gibbon, underneath his copy of the Lives of the Caesars. By his lounger at the side of the pool, with its view of the snow-shrouded mountains, was a novel by Thomas Mann. He liked to stretch himself. Only after a week here had Haffner realised he was the only one who read. Everyone else favoured sleep; they favoured chatter. But Haffner respected those things over which he had no authority. Those things made him want to accrue their authority too. His will was all vicarious.
Haffner hadn’t been to university. His daughter had been, and his grandson, but not Haffner. He had been to war instead. But Haffner felt no insecurity. He had his own triumphs. It was Haffner, for instance, who had persuaded the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Emeritus Professor of Economic Theory at the LSE – Goldfaden, hero of the Brains Trust, doyen of the radio lecture – to be gathered in one unheard-of trio at the annual dinner of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers, in 1982. He wasn’t nobody.
And now he was a student of philosophic history. With this knowledge, he weighed up his biography: he studied the story of Livia, his wife; and Goldfaden, Haffner’s friend and counsellor. Goldfaden: the celebrity economist, famed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Goldfaden was a capitalist; but a capitalist who liked to tease. Where, Goldfaden would ask his baffled listeners, was the greatest monument to international esprit? Who had inherited the mantle of Isaac Leib Peretz, the Jewish cosmopolitan? The man who had once argued, at the beginning of the century, that it was a unique culture rather than its patrolled borders that guaranteed a nation its independent existence. True, maybe. But you couldn’t beat patrolled borders to help you sleep at night, thought Haffner. Couldn’t beat them. While Goldfaden carried on his party trick. They couldn’t guess? They couldn’t say which was the most cosmopolitan country on earth? The Soviet Union, of course! The greatest federation of nations this world had seen since the Roman empire. Communism! The highest stage of imperialism. What Jew wouldn’t love an empire? An empire, continued Goldfaden, was the greatest political system on earth – a confederation of states, blithe to the problems of ethnicity. The zenith of liberalism. But its era was now over; and Goldfaden mourned it. Or so he said, thought Haffner.
The Escape: A Novel Page 2
