Haffner corrected Ordynski.
—Not yet, he sadly said.
He was the recorder on the grandest scale of all the ways in which life was unjust to him. These ways were mainly physical. And maybe Haffner was right: maybe this was one way of living healthily – minutely to record a list of all the unfair weaknesses he endured: a heart murmur, an attack of asthma, exploratory tests on his kidneys and aorta in an effort to discover the causes of Haffner’s exorbitant blood pressure. Then the possible cancers, the lingering viruses. If this made him a hypochondriac, so be it. So what if he was still alive? It didn’t prove the irrelevance of his symptoms. It didn’t prove that one day they wouldn’t unfurl themselves into truths.
What no one seemed to understand, he used to tell his daughter, as they watched Benjamin play cricket, on some sports ground in the bucolic environs of London – before Benjamin developed his intellectual difficulties with the idea of sport – was how the imagination of disaster was such a burden. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It was no joke, living with illness in the way that Haffner lived with it. It was debilitating. Churchill, in Marrakech, got through his pneumonia on pills. He knew that. But that was Churchill. And Esther had simply got up, silently, straightened the creases in her slacks, and gone to buy herself a tea.
And as he mournfully watched the distant image of his grandson perform the neat parallelogram of a forward defensive stroke, Haffner considered the sad truth that his fears were never believed. Haffner was always alert to the way a life became a system of signs. It didn’t seem unreasonable to Haffner. Greater men than Haffner, he reminded the now imaginary Esther, had been caught in the trap of a justified paranoia. Wasn’t it well known, thought Haffner, that an emperor, of all people, was the most miserable of men – since only his actual assassination could convince the people that the manifold conspiracies against his life were real? This was one resemblance of Haffner to the emperors. Only Haffner’s death would convince his family that he had been right all along.
In the mercurial water, this death seemed finally imminent. Frau Tummel had swum back. Such a kitten he was, to dislike the joys of water! And angrily Haffner had gestured at Frau Tummel – a gesture which was meant to signify absolute irritation, but because this gesture meant that he let go of the jetty, he suddenly found himself underwater, then hoisted by Frau Tummel in an ungainly manner back towards a pole which he grabbed at, gratefully, spouting water like a respiring whale.
Frau Tummel asked after him, but Haffner could not speak. Breathing heavily, he looked across the lawns. On the edge of the park, there was what to Haffner seemed another park. This one was an area of tarmac, for children’s games. Yearningly – because Haffner adored all games – he imagined the roundabout, the swings, the rocking horses with their bellies pierced by springs. The springs beneath one swaying horse were creaking in the wind: as if, thought Haffner, the horse were neighing.
This playground seemed a refuge to Haffner.
Frau Tummel had plunged underwater, to tug at his legs, pulling him away from the safety of the jetty, into the abysmal open water. There was sun as well, true, but the sun was no help to him now. The rain was coming down, thought Haffner, really quite hard.
Behind the hills arc’d a fuzzy rainbow.
—You are so Englishman! said Frau Tummel. Enjoy yourself, my love. Express your feelings!
He couldn’t help thinking that Frau Tummel was angry with him. No other explanation seemed plausible for her oppressive joyfulness. Swimming wasn’t how Haffner expressed himself. When he wanted to express himself, he turned to his clarinet.
He wouldn’t do it, he told Frau Tummel. He wouldn’t swim. He was finished. And he raised himself gradually out of the water, the sheen streaming off him in the pale beginning sunlight.
5
And as he stands there, rubbing at his body with a towel which seemed of an unnaturally limited size, gathering his clothes about him, I feel a little sad that Haffner’s moments of self-expression should be so absolutely historical. Let Haffner be allowed his chapter of jazz!
For he played his clarinet with abandon, in the suburbs of north London. Dutifully, he studied Benny Goodman’s exercises for the modern player: the complex intervals of his jazz arpeggios. The greatest melody of all time, thought Haffner, was ‘Begin the Beguine’, as rendered by the genius Artie Shaw. For its outlandish, unhummable length. Its reckless shape which defied all normal ideas of the proper lifespan of a melody. That was self-expression. But self-expression, so often, was banned for Haffner. Gently, Livia would beg him to think of the neighbours. And Haffner would reply that he was thinking about the neighbours: it was a generous gift, this performance by Haffner of ‘Begin the Beguine’.
Some saw in his love of jazz songs an irrevocable flippancy. He had no respect, Goldfaden used to say, for authority. It was quite extraordinary. But Haffner wasn’t so sure that this was true. His authorities were simply different from those of other people. Esmond tried to find authority in his wife; his grandson found it in his rabbi. Other people depended on their manager, their marriage-guidance counsellors. Haffner found it in jazz. He took what he could. How strange was it anyway to listen to Cole Porter? Had anyone else come up with better descriptions of the heart’s affections? Not Shakespeare, as his daughter argued; not the writer of the Psalms, as Benjamin now argued.
Every time we say goodbye, I die a little. That was all it took for Haffner to shiver with emotion.
There was a stringent division in the record collection which Haffner shared with Livia. Haffner owned the jazz. Livia admired her opera singers, her great conductors. She was the one who owned the cumbersome box sets – the collected symphonies, the complete quartets. As an encouraging birthday present, she had given Haffner Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. He had tried to listen, but he had to confess that he saw no interest in it. Not even with such a title. No, if Haffner tried to improve himself, he preferred to read. That was his chosen domain of education. Whereas when it came to music, he preferred the songwriters: Arlen, Gershwin, Mercer. The songs from the era when Haffner was young: the songs from before the era when Haffner was young.
According to the liner notes on the record Haffner loved most – of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter – the qualities which made Porter great were Knowledge, Spunk, Individuality, Originality, Realism, Restraint, Rascality. Haffner had no problem with this list. Its last term, however, was a problem for Haffner’s idea of the aesthetic. The last quality on the liner notes was Maturity. And Haffner could do without maturity. As if that was an ideal. The greatest education possible, thought Haffner, would not lead its citizens into an age of responsibility, but instead would escalate them to the rarefied heights of dazzling, starlit, spangled immaturity.
6
He was saying goodbye, said Haffner to Frau Tummel: and then he turned away.
—Raphael, said Frau Tummel.
Haffner turned back.
But Frau Tummel did not say anything. She smiled at him, in a way which she hoped was happy. And Haffner, once more, turned away.
He had finally become his father. The man who drifted away. It had never been his aim. He had done his best to avoid becoming Papa. At least, for instance, it had only been the one wife for Haffner. He had that over him. But still, all the motifs were there.
His father had been the quietest man he ever knew. One finger was missing, due to an accident in the Great War, for which Papa never offered an explanation. A photograph survived somewhere – in a box in some attic, acrid with asbestos – of Solomon Haffner, smiling as he held a grenade in his muddy hand: like the proud cultivator of a prize marrow at a provincial gardening show. But Solomon never talked. So Haffner had been forced to imagine the reasons for his missing finger: chewed off in hunger, blown away by a bullet, poisoned to the root by acid. The word for his father, said his mother, was destroyed. Some of Papa had been destroyed. Raphael had to understand this. She said this to Haffner when yet another cook was sittin
g in the hall, waiting to be interviewed, since her predecessor, along with several others, had condescended to treat Solomon Haffner in ways which went beyond the normal domestic duties of domestics. She only hoped (oh Mama!) that Raphael would not behave in this way when he was a man.
And as if the powers governing Haffner wished to demonstrate how comprehensively he could be entrapped, Haffner’s phone went – stowed in his tracksuit pocket. The voice of his grandson asked him if things were fixed yet. Had he managed to get any further?
Really, thought Haffner, Mama had been correct all along. It wasn’t right, for Haffner to be adult. The duties were beyond him.
At the moment, the twenty-three-year-old Benjamin was in Israel, somewhere near Tel Aviv. He was at a summer school in a rabbinical seminary, where he was educating himself about the history of his people. His people and their invented traditions. As Haffner argued. In Tel Aviv, in his self-imposed isolation, Benjamin had taken on – for reasons which were obscure to his grandfather – the burden of his family’s disappointment in Haffner. Every day, he had called Haffner: wondering when the matter would be fixed. Because no one understood, said Benjamin, why it was taking so long. He couldn’t understand it himself. He really thought, he said, that Haffner should at least be explaining what was going on.
—Your mother put you up to this? said Haffner.
Benjamin assured him that this wasn’t true. He was only, he was only trying to understand what was going on.
Everyone was tired of the grandfathers. Everyone was bored with the everlasting males. This seemed fair.
Was it possible that Haffner wasn’t the father of his child? He envied his brother-in-law, Cesare, who had lived his life only for himself, unencumbered. Cesare’s lone state had always worried Livia. It had never worried Haffner. Or there were those other men, the cuckolds, with their blissful state of non-paternity. He could see the point of that as well. Oh Haffner so wanted to desert! It was just, he never had a clear idea of what he would desert for: no, he was not a natural elopee. Haffner had never joined the truant train of Bacchus – Bacchus, with his gang of heartbreakers, his absconding crew. Always, the final disappearance had been beyond him.
7
The first time he had heard the music of Artie Shaw was in his training camp in Hampshire, listening to the wireless with Evelyn Laye. She had expressed admiration. So, quickly, Haffner became a connoisseur; he developed a taste for the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the music of Hoagy Carmichael. Haffner loved the USA – that land of opportunity, of the Ritz, and razzmatazz. One night, waiting to find out what to do next at Anzio, when the options seemed decidedly limited, Haffner chatted to a black man in a US cavalry unit. His name was Morton. He was Haffner’s double; his twin. They spent the night amusing themselves by coming up with the names of the great women songwriters: Kay Swift, of course; and Alice Wrubel. The geniuses for the standards.
But Morton was now dead too. Like everyone else whom Haffner loved, including Haffner’s wife.
Haffner walked home, to the hotel. In the distant landscape, there were concrete buildings. These were the buildings of the Socialist renaissance. Their facades were stained concrete and patched glass. There was no ornament. A small sports complex, with its dank swimming pool and dark sauna. A home for the mentally ill. And out on the absolute edge of the town, where the motorway began, were the beginnings of the capitalist renaissance: the warehouses and their associates: the strip club, the pool hall, the strangely Chinese restaurant.
It was hard to see the attraction of this spa town. It was melancholy: chlorinated, salty, sulphuric. It wasn’t the spa town which Haffner had imagined. It wasn’t for Haffner. He wished he were anywhere else but here. He’d rather, quite frankly, be in a provincial town in Britain, standing at a bar where coked-up girls drank Malibu through fluorescent plastic straws. Haffner’s image of the sanatorium had been a lustful, tubercular hothouse. That was surely what it had been like, in the era of the Great War – before Haffner had even been born. The stories Livia had reported! Of docile and female patients, their legs akimbo in stirrups. The women would invent symptoms, just so they could be treated by the stern philandering doctors, there, on the examination table. They would lay themselves out, tense specimens to be relaxed and galvanised by massage. Or even, wondered Haffner, they would begin to enjoy the tenderness of the speculum. Because it was very possible, Haffner had once been told, by a girl whom he believed was flirting with him, that one could climax through these examinations: it had once been very embarrassing for her, but the nurse assured her it was entirely normal. A fact which, when relayed idly to Livia, received only an abrupt refutation.
On Livia, Haffner paused.
She used to refute him, often. She was Haffner’s educator. This seemed like Haffner’s ideal of marriage. Without her, he was adrift. But adrift as he was, now that she was absent, he could still admit that not even in Haffner’s moral philosophy was it possible to argue that his attempt to secure her inheritance should have transformed itself into this Haffnerian farce: the bored affair with a married woman; the excited affair with a girl who was half a century younger than him. In neither of which, thought Haffner, did Haffner seem to be in control. No, it rather seemed to be Haffner on the massage table, supine: Haffner himself in stirrups.
A cold remorse flowed through him. Today, he thought, would be the day he finished this business of Livia’s villa. Let his grandson be proud of Haffner! He would go back to that committee room, he would try once more. No one would vanquish Raphael Haffner.
And so he strode in his damp sportswear through the hotel’s uniform gardens. The electric doors of the entrance hissed open, and Haffner hurried in, only to be called back by the receptionist. He hadn’t, presumably, forgotten about his early massage?
Mr Haffner, thought Haffner – who? Him? That schmuck could forget anything.
But Haffner was in a new era of maturity. He asked if the massage could wait. The receptionist thought that it could. So Haffner strode on, and returned to his room.
He stood there, looking in the mirror – contemplative at the sketchy portrait of Haffner. The diminutive slope of his belly seemed suddenly sad to him now: the fat, the mark of the human. His penis hung there, in its brief tuft of hair, so oblivious, thought Haffner sadly, to the history of its glories and disasters. The veins on his chest were turquoise behind his skin. Bruises, like passport stamps, lay on his shins and arms.
It seemed unlikely, he admitted, that Zinka could love him. But Haffner was not downcast. He was unmockable when it came to his body. And in this, truly, he was greater than Julius Caesar, who was so disturbed by his lack of hair that he combed the thin strands forward over his head. Which was one reason, and perhaps the most important, why Caesar, it was said, so coveted the laurel wreath.
Haffner was not vain. He dismissed the love Frau Tummel felt for him; he dismissed the love he might feel for Zinka. He was an emperor, a dictator.
Now, he had to deal with his inheritance.
PART TWO
Haffner Enraged
1
Haffner walked into town. At first, he proceeded through a suburban and universal neatness – past the front gardens embroidered with roses; the garbage cans topped with sedge hats; the open garages displaying workbenches and shelves of car accessories: the serried oblongs of oil cans – like the retrospective Manhattan skyline as one stands on the ferry, and the sun is everywhere, and everyone is in love. Haffner’s Saab 900 returned to him, isolated in the car show of his memory: the avant-garde slope of its trunk, the sky blue of its paintwork, the luminous orange quiver of its speedometer. A car which Livia had driven into their garden wall. Which Haffner had driven into the new glass frontage of an evangelical church. Thus continuing a grand family tradition, begun in 1922 when Papa crashed the new Mercedes, blaming first the wind conditions, then the road conditions, and finally an assortment of malevolent historical enemies, the most powerful of whom were the Bolsheviks.
> Two men walked past him, carrying a wardrobe, one of whose doors had fallen open, so exposing to the outside world a mirror which was now reflecting the unimpressed landscape, behind which disported the tremulous picturesque mountains.
A variety of apartment blocks arranged themselves around an absent centre. Then a road adorned with nothing: no building, no monument, not even slick patches of well-kept grass. Just dust and the sky and a view of a factory. This landscape then softened into more apartment blocks. By the side of the road was a cement mixer and its accompanying builder – in T-shirt, socks and jeans – who was slapping the soles of his trainers together to dislodge the dry mud, his arms flapping up and then down.
He really did have no idea why the family so insisted on reclaiming a villa in this benighted country. He hardly envisaged the family holidays, the relaxing weekend breaks. But then Haffner, having reached this obvious conclusion, could see the force of an obvious question. If this was the case, then why was Haffner here?
Haffner was disinclined, at this point, to undertake the self-examination. Already, too many people seemed to want to understand his motives. It didn’t need Haffner to enquire into them as well.
Instead, Haffner entered into the old town. Just off the main square, in the courtyard of a church, there was a kiosk topped with a cross, with lit candles for the dead. The air was weeping above the flames. A woman lit a small stub then changed her mind. She plucked then dabbed its wick, then selected the tallest, most powerful candle. Beside the church, set back in its railed-off enclosure, stood the Writers’ Club. It advertised coffee. Haffner wandered in. The Writers’ Club was also marked by candles, which lit the dining room, pointlessly illuminating the coffered dark ceiling, the mahogany sideboards. In the foyer were gilt candelabra, gripped in their mouths by silenced lions. At each corner of the room, there was a mirror; caryatids in the eaves of the roof, which displayed a peeling fresco of a fleshy muse, airborne in a toga. On the terrace, an emblematic writer was scribbling at a table, throwing away crumpled carnations of paper. On the table beside him, two slices of melon rind had been laid crossways over each other by an artistic vanished diner: an impromptu four-pointed crown.
The Escape: A Novel Page 6
