But Haffner was still not ready to consider the problem of Goldfaden.
One time, having finished the classic novel I had told him to read, Haffner told me that it had prompted certain thoughts. Think about it: the novel of education was lost on the young. It was the old who were the true protagonists. It was the old, thought Haffner, who deserved the love stories. Return, Monsieur Stendhal! Let yourself go, Mr Dickens! Feast on Haffner! Write a sentimental education for the very old, the absolute advanced.
But no one would.
It was a pity, because Haffner was a folk hero. These were the stories I grew up with – about Haffner. He was a man of legend: his anecdotes were endless. Like this, his final story.
Because there it was, once more, the lust – extravagant: like a sprinkler in the rose garden of Haffner’s suburban home, automatically turning itself on to soak the lawn already soaked with rain.
9
Niko was now spread on the bed, his legs twitching. His eyes were shut. Zinka was poised, leaning over his face. His mouth was blindly searching – a kitten – for her breasts.
Then Haffner swayed and chimed against the hangers.
Niko was stilled. Haffner was stilled, his heart an amplification. Only Zinka continued as if nothing had happened. She tended to Niko; she asked him to carry on. And Haffner stood and listened to his heart as if he were only an outsider – as if he were the minicab driver waiting outside a nightclub, in the dawn, in the East End of London, or the Meatpacking District of New York, listening to the deep bass rhythm through the guarded doors while swapping two Marlboros for two much stronger and harsher cigarettes illegally imported from Iran.
To Haffner’s slow relief, he noticed that slowly Niko was slowly distracted, slowly.
He really should have been somewhere else, thought Haffner. He should have been with Frau Tummel. Or, even more morally, he should have been in his own room, in his own bed, asleep, with his head slipping off the bolster’s irritating cylinder – before returning once again, the next morning, to the Town Hall and its endless offices, where the subcommittees sat, the subcommittees which included the Committee on Spatial Planning. The Committee over which Haffner was here to exercise his charm. Yes, he should have been performing his role as a family man. But Haffner, somehow, still preferred this wardrobe with a view.
Livia’s own erotic style, he remembered, watching Zinka, had been subtler. She would meet him in the foyer of the municipal pool in Golders Green, having just performed a synchronised swimming routine, and Haffner would say to her, laughing, that she was his emissary in the world of women. He would beg her to tell him what she saw, in the changing rooms. Livia sat him down. She touched him with the tips of her fingers absently resting on his penis through the button fly of his trousers, for this was how gentlemen dressed, and she told him about the girls in their changing room, the ones who shaved the hair between their legs into neater triangles, the ones who stood there, naked, pretending nobody could see, a festival of women. And Haffner would ask her not to stop, not to stop, and Livia would say that she wasn’t stopping, dear heart: she wasn’t stopping.
Then Zinka and Niko came to their own conclusion.
Haffner relaxed, relieved. He was beginning, he realised, to be too preoccupied by the practical difficulties of this display. Now that it was over, he began to long for his own bed. But Niko, to Haffner’s irritation, seemed to be in a languid state of abandon. He wanted to lie there; he wanted Zinka to rest in his arms.
This was not, thought Haffner, at all what he had been led to expect.
And Haffner waited, in a wardrobe, while a couple held each other: amorous.
Oh Haffner had stamina! So often, in the bedroom, Haffner surpassed everyone’s expectation. So many people thought they knew him! As if anyone could really know him. But Haffner would often argue that in this matter of Haffner’s monstrosity one could draw some distinctions. He wasn’t, for example, a monster like Caligula. The incest didn’t move Haffner. Whereas Caligula used to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn. And very possibly his mother. And his brothers. His mother and his brothers and his aunts.
Haffner was the generalissimo of hyperbole. Unlike a real generalissimo, however, he had to perform the hyperbole himself.
My poor Haffner: his own shill.
No one else, for instance, was so sure that the obvious comparison to Haffner was Caligula. It wasn’t so much Haffner’s monstrosity which troubled his family, but his absolute mundanity. Whenever his daughter, Esther, brought up the issue of his adultery, his bed tricks, she said he was banal. She would stand there, in her business suits, with their badly cut trousers; her silk blouse; the sleek blonde bob which Haffner regretted, taming as it did the cuteness of her curls. This belittling idea of hers had always unnerved Haffner. He felt a distant sense of pique. Surely, he would reason, unconvincingly, afterwards – to an unconvinced Haffner, or an unconvinced anonymous drinker, or the indignant husband of his daughter – the infidelity had contained infinite riches, if only you knew how to look? From one perspective, pure vanity: yes maybe. But from another – what gorgeous vistas! What passes, what valleys, what pastoral hillocks!
Was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, in a crescendo of impatience, as he waited for Niko and Zinka to leave, as Zinka paused in the doorway, looking back to the innocent wardrobe – was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, as he finally emerged, with being a man of feeling?
The classics were full of it. The loves of the gods were various. The loves of Jupiter, for instance, were a festival of costume change, of metamorphosis. He mated with Aegina as a flame, Asteria as an eagle, Persephone as a snake; with Leda he took the form of a swan, with Olympias a snake. To Semele he appeared as a blazing fire, to Io as a fog, to Danae as a shower of gold. When he first slept with Juno, his wife, he became a cuckoo. Alcmena and Callisto were won by his impersonations of humans. Yes, the loves of Jupiter were famous. They had heft.
With these stories Haffner sought consolation.
But, I have to add, in the many stories of Haffner, he was always only himself.
Haffner Amorous
1
Returning to his room, Haffner rounded a corner and passed a coiled roulade of fire hose pinned to the wall, as he happily imagined his bed and its crisp sheets, a single circle of chocolate laid out on one diagonal fold. And then he discovered the weeping monumental form of Frau Tummel.
For what was up was also down, and what seemed a victory, after all, was really a defeat: so Haffner’s happiness must always be subject to swift reversals.
Frau Tummel was in a cotton nightgown, with ruched lace at the breasts, and a cotton bathrobe stitched with pink tight roses. There, in front of his door, Haffner confronted her – outlandish in his sky-blue and pistachio ensemble. He looked around, to see if anyone else might be there. He felt burdened with concern: for Frau Tummel, and for himself. He didn’t want to explain why it was that he had returned to his room this late, in such exhaustion.
Frau Tummel raised her face, displaying the ravages of her mascara: a harlequin.
—What are you doing here? said Haffner, brightly.
—We had a rendezvous, she said.
—Come now, said Haffner, less brightly.
Maybe it was over, she said, sadly.
—Over? said a Haffner transformed into the sign for a smile: a single reclining parenthesis.
Yes, continued Frau Tummel. It would end with him leaving her. She knew this. And it was right. For sure. It was understandable.
He tried to reassure her. Of course he wasn’t going to leave! The idea of it! And Frau Tummel said that yes, she knew this. She knew he thought this was true. But how could he know this? There were so many complications. She really thought they needed to discuss this.
The sign for Haffner was no longer a supine parenthesis.
He knew what he was meant to say. He didn’t want to say it. He wanted to be alone; to go to slee
p. But Haffner had his code of honour. This was one aspect of his undoing. He was an admirer of the classics, and no man with a classical education could deny the wills of women. The classics taught one, he had decided, to trust in the pagan gods. Trust Cupid. Trust him in all his other guises, as cherubs, or as Eros. The men must always allow themselves to be led by the women. So he said what he was meant to say. He wondered if she would like to come into his room.
Frau Tummel raised her ravaged face: a joyful harlequin.
So ended, in one swift exchange, the swift moment of Haffner’s happiness.
2
The imbroglios seemed so fluently to come to Haffner.
He was here to claim his wife’s inheritance – therefore, naturally, he became involved with other women. This seemed to be the logic of his life.
They had met two weeks ago, on the second day of his stay, at the swimming-pool complex in the hotel’s basement. There were three pools – three adjacent water lilies, each attached to the other by a miniature set of steps. The smallest was a Jacuzzi – for the indolent, or the fat. In it could therefore be found Haffner, who was indolent, and Frau Tummel, who was fat.
The voice of Frau Tummel, he soon discovered, was husky, it was rasping. She had class. She wrapped herself in a towel to go and lie on a lounger outside, to smoke three rapid cigarettes, pinched in the contraption of her extravagant cigarette holder – which unfolded and then unfolded one more time, just when you thought it could not be extended further. Then she relapsed into the boiling Jacuzzi, to Haffner’s charmed curiosity.
He wasn’t normally so devoted to swimming pools. He preferred the gyms – the exercise machines which prolonged to such a surprisingly toned extent the overlong life of Haffner. The gym was another place where we had fleetingly made conversation. Occasionally, I would happen on Haffner in the changing room: and, delighted, he maintained a naked conversation – our penises dolefully looking away – while I stood there on the bobbled tiles wishing I were not faced by the superior nature of Haffner’s so much older muscles. Although the gym was really a place of yearning for Haffner. It was, quite frankly, most often a place of rest. In the gym, a slothful primate, he could let his arms droop over the bars on the chest press. Below the slope of his T-shirt, his arms were white and darkly speckled, like a photocopy. From here, he could observe the varieties of breast movement – some solid in sports bras, others fragile, unsupported, tenderly visible. He developed a stare for this purpose, an alibi – heavy-lidded with exhaustion, hypnotically unfocused, unable to look away.
Frau Tummel worked in the perfume industry. She was here in this spa hotel with her husband – whose nerves, she told Haffner, were gone, whose blood pressure was abnormal. He spent his days on the veranda, looking at the silent mountains: sipping peppermint tea. It was, thought Haffner, the old old story: the loyal wife who was bored of her loyalty – the century’s normal story of a spa.
When Frau Tummel had gone, Haffner leaned back in the Jacuzzi, letting the movement of the bubbles absorb his concentration with their frantic foam – and then he padded off, leaving dark echoes of his feet on the floor’s lukewarm tiling. In one room, he discovered a table with flowers: gentian, violets. In another room there was a sauna, where a woman was lying, motionless, on the pine slats of the highest step. Haffner paused, considered not. And then he pushed open another door, and discovered Frau Tummel again, in the process of being massaged. She was lying on her front, on a towel monogrammed in stitched gold thread with the hotel’s invented crest. And in her shock she leaned up, so exposing to Haffner’s gaze the moles on her breasts, the beginnings of her pink areolae, cobbled with cold.
He apologised, and went outside. Twenty minutes later he apologised to her again, in the rest room, illuminated by low lighting, and inventively perfumed candles – tuberose, lily, pomegranate. They decided to go for a walk. They made for the peak of the mountain. Light shimmered on her hair. She was uninterested in Haffner’s ability to name the varieties of Alpine star, the daisies and the grasses – names he had culled from a colour-coded children’s botany book, the white flowers in one section, the pink in another, bought in a fit of nostalgia for Haffner’s earnest youth when buying chocolate in a tabac. She wanted to talk about love. She wanted to talk about her marriage, which entailed discussion of Haffner’s marriage. It involved so many sacrifices, did he not think? The conversation so absorbed them that soon she was back in the hotel with Haffner, sitting on his bed. This did not surprise Haffner. Nor was it surprising that, as she lit a final cigarette, then stubbed it out, Haffner discovered that, without realising, as he kissed her, he had gone too far. He had overstepped, or overreached.
Yes, because nothing in this world occurs without a backstory: and what is higher always derives from what is lower and every victory contains its own defeat.
That day, Frau Tummel’s feelings had been a little depleted. She had been demoralised by a fractious meeting with her husband’s doctor in the morning; and then by an unhappy phone call from her mother at lunchtime. The massage had been suggested by her husband – it would, he said, cheer her up. The casual flirting with Haffner was an improvised addition of her own. But nothing, thought Frau Tummel now, as she stubbed out her final cigarette, was improvised. Nothing was casual. Everything was fate.
Like Haffner, she saw signs everywhere.
She turned round, and Haffner kissed her. And Frau Tummel kissed him back – for he was the magical combination of clever and kind. He understood her. But at this point, her body overtook her.
Frau Tummel was fifty-five. Her periods, as she used to tell her girlfriends, in a spirit of European openness, were becoming more and more erratic. Her cycle was unpredictable. The night before, after an absence of three months, a period had begun. And so she did not want to have sex with Haffner. She did not even want to undress. He must not touch her. Gently, Frau Tummel tried to explain her feelings to Haffner.
She didn’t want to say, she said. He should not make her say.
And Haffner did not mind, he told her, gently. For he knew why – the constant coyness of unfaithful wives. So Haffner continued to kiss her. Through his trousers, hesitantly she touched the nub of his penis, blunted by his briefs.
Born with a different kind of soul to Haffner, Frau Tummel’s husband was repelled by her periods. Quickly they had developed an unspoken rule that they would never have sex at these times; nor would he even touch her. Frau Tummel was therefore amazed when Haffner was so undisgusted. Such elegance! Such delicacy! It even tempted her, for a moment, to relinquish her scruples. But no, she thought, gathering herself, she really shouldn’t.
Perhaps if she had slept with Haffner, she might not have been so moved. But she did not. So Frau Tummel could nurture her feelings, invulnerable to complication. On returning to her husband, she could wonder why it was she was so impatient with desire.
Haffner didn’t know how seriously Frau Tummel took her moment with Haffner. He thought this was what she did. He thought she had done this before. She would go so far, and then back off.
Frau Tummel, however, had never been unfaithful. She was not trained at it. The guilt of it confused and overtook her, the next morning, as she woke up beside her husband, cutely rumpled in a mess of pillow and pyjama.
The guilt of it confused and overtook her – Frau Tummel! who was fifty-five! but at fifty-five you can still, after all, be inexperienced – that this feeling she felt for Haffner must be love.
3
She didn’t know that love was always the beginning of Haffner’s downfall. She didn’t know that this was what Haffner was gloomily concluding, as he observed Frau Tummel’s weeping form, sipping a gin and tonic he had invented from the minibar.
Mainly, the love belonged to other people. Once, it had been Haffner’s.
When he was courting her, in the summer of 1939, Haffner used to take Livia dancing in metroland, the green and pleasant suburbs of north London. Since Haffner was a little perturbed by
this girl who had the glamour of a foreign accent, Italianate, a flutter, he tried to impress her with the gorgeousness of his dancing, for at that time Haffner – so Haffner said – had the finest pair of feet in north London. And in Highgate once they sat down after a dance, and looked at each other, while Haffner worried about the visibility of his erection, mummified in his underwear. They had been dancing a foxtrot. He crossed his legs, making sure that Livia could not see or know about it. But she knew. And it intrigued her. She sat there, and she wondered if Haffner would do anything so bold as try to kiss her. They had been courting for some time now. She had just turned eighteen. And she wondered if she would be interested if Haffner did indeed do something. Yes, she thought, she would. But it needed Haffner first. While Haffner, who was shy despite his fleet feet, his slick blond hair, decided that he could do nothing without her visible approval. And so Haffner and Livia sat together and neither touched nor talked.
Two weeks later, at a dance hall in Hendon, they argued about this.
She was sorry, concluded Livia, but it didn’t happen and if it didn’t happen then it couldn’t happen. Haffner asked if this had to be true. Yes, said Livia, it did. And she left Haffner outside, and went back in on the arm of another man. There was a small wart on the right-hand side of his neck, like a piece of gravel. So Haffner had nowhere to go. He walked away from home, towards the river, for an hour, into the dismal city. He reached the Gray’s Inn Road, then High Holborn, where the family law firm was, the family law firm which he was destined never to enter, and then wandered back, finding himself in Clerkenwell. This, he discovered, was a mistake. All the Italian shops made him even more nostalgic for his Livia. He passed Chiappa & Sons, the organ makers on Eyre Street Hill; the working men’s club – the Mazzini Garibaldi – where her brother, Cesare, would later sit and play morra: teased for his elegant accent, his neat small hands. In the cab shelter opposite Hatton Garden, by the Italian church, Haffner sat at a table beside an initial pool of gravy which he mopped up with the folded triangle of a napkin. He looked out the window. Up on Leather Lane, a jumper was caught in a tree. It settled, sodden, between a collection of branches. And as he gazed at this wrecked jumper, improbably in the branches of this silver birch, Haffner realised that it wasn’t a kiss he wanted: it wasn’t even the body of Livia. He wanted her for ever. He wanted to marry her. And so he concocted an imaginary conversation between an imaginary Haffner and an imaginary Livia, as he looked at the way the foggy rain made the occasional lamp outside a sieved and shimmering haze, a delicate gold.
The Escape: A Novel Page 3
