The Escape

Haffner Enraged

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.

Yes, here Haffner was: in what he only knew as Bohemia. It wasn't Bohemia, of course. But Haffner's idea of geography, like his idea of history, was eclectic. It had been taught to him by his Uncle Ernie. Uncle Ernie! — who ran a brewery business and whose hatred of women developed intricate disguises, so that once, from Nice, he sent a postcard to the young Haffner describing how Mrs Jay had once more collared him for a dance, but thank goodness this time she didn't have her monkey with her. Haffner always wondered if this monkey were real, or allegorical. Uncle Ernie's theory of Europe was simple: there was England, there was France, and then began Bohemia — a land which stretched from Gdansk to Vienna, from Strasbourg to Odessa. A minute version of Haffner tried to query this, but was rebuffed. So although Bohemia had disappeared in 1918, before the era of Haffner, it was now Haffner's central country: wherever Haffner was in Europe, that place became Bohemia.

He couldn't really say that the architecture of this town was truly modern. It was, he thought, as he left the club, a place which seemed unobtrusively to have opted for excess. What might have been a palace or at least the grandest of condos rose proudly in the sunlight. Over the porch curved a glass shell, with strutted ribs, a petal of glass: on either side of it were twin balconies, made of iron: these balconies were furious with detail. Curlicues of foliage melted into each other, in black mazes, twisted into dripping florets and stems — like the rose bushes Haffner had so coveted, in Pfeffer's garden. Pfeffer, Haffner's schoolfriend, was a lawyer in the City. His rose bushes were all tended by a gardener — and yet it was Pfeffer whose picture was found in the horticultural journals, Pfeffer who wrote in with exquisite botanical notes describing impossible species; Pfeffer who sentimentally named each of his new breeds with the name of one of his grandchildren. Above these railings, the brickwork was scrolled and crenellated. The facades had terracotta highlights, small statues which carried flaming torches in an upstretched hand, dead goddesses, proud heroes. The entire classical corpus. And the walls of the Town Hall's foyer bore bas-reliefs, mosaics. Industry Leading the Spirit of the People. The Triumph of the Working Man. The Fecundity of the New Woman.

No, nothing here was modern. But then, Haffner's twin domains — the islands of Manhattan and the City of London — weren't modern either. Everywhere was decorated in the junk of the Hapsburg nineteenth century. The junk was inescapable.

On his arrival, Haffner had come to the Town Hall, and been given a variety of forms to be filled out. These confused him, but Haffner persevered. Yes, Haffner had tried to do the dutiful, the proper thing. He had never planned on his private imbroglio. He had just thought that the legal process would be a formality: his last duty to the dead, which he could be done with in one day. For it had been Haffner who had placated his rivals at J.P. Morgan with artfully capped and collared contracts; Haffner who had perfected the art of the butterfly spread. These residential forms, he thought, could therefore not be beyond him. They simply involved him proving that he was who he was; and that Livia had been who she had been; and the house was what it was. With these forms neatly completed, he came back, to be told that the only person in the building who could translate for him was away. She was having a hernia operation. Two days later, by this time embroiled with Frau Tummel, and touched by Zinka, he had returned once more, greeted his oddly healthy translator, handed in the forms, and been told that the process was still in its initial stages.

Now, then, for the fourth time, he ascended the stairs, slowly, and entered the building. A security guard, sitting inside a plastic box, with a dog asleep at his feet, acknowledged him with a movement of one eyebrow. Haffner waved at this man, cheerily. For one should always be good to the staff. You never knew when they might become useful. He had been taught this by his first ever superior at Warburg's, in the Long Bar at Slaters in the welcome spring of 1947: and Haffner had never forgotten. The bellboy, the receptionist, the driver: Haffner knew them all by name. Even if, so often, he reflected, Haffner got it wrong: the temping busboy, the relief lift attendant. .

Haffner's goal was the Committee on Spatial Planning. The room which contained the secretaries to the Committee on Spatial Planning was adorned by no painting, no mirror, no poster. Its walls were bare, except for a cork noticeboard, pinned with reminders of rota systems, memos about departmental protocol. A handwritten invitation to a party from two months ago was beginning to curl at the bottom: a stalled wave.

The single window seemed to offer a view of nothing: a back garden, a washing line. Just as on the tenement roofs below Grand Street the washing used to hang there like the urban signal for surrender. Haffner would look out over the shining city: at the World Trade Center, and its ancestor, the Chrysler, all his beloved monuments. The feats of prowess! The tricks of engineering! He looked out and basked in that new capital of speed.

But was the villa worth it? This was the question which Haffner still pursued. After all, the villa didn't belong to them: not any more. Long before the death of Livia's father and mother, in Buchenwald, in 1944, it had been transferred to the Nazi authorities. A German family had lived there for two years, until the Soviets arrived, and instituted their Communist utopia. The villa was then occupied by a functionary in the department of education. His soul was bucolic. He had relandscaped the gardens. Then, following the events of perestroika, and all its unintended consequences, the new democratic regime had auctioned it, and it was bought by a Czech microchip company — who used it as a vacation cottage for their favoured, bonus-earning employees. And now, following the policy of reappropriation, the villa was legally to be returned to Livia's family.

None of this, thought Haffner, explained why the villa was worth his protracted effort. The history of this century, in Haffner's opinion, was rarely an adequate explanation. Instead, the private history of his century seemed more relevant. Haffner knew the concealed grievances of his family. He didn't believe that Esther really wanted this villa: not for herself. No, it wasn't about the villa. Haffner was here as a symbol. His daughter's constant theme was that Haffner should pay for his mistakes: the carelessness of his parenting; the flippancy in his friendships; the breakdown of his marriage. Just once, as Esther put it, he would act unselfishly.

Yes, thought Haffner sadly: it was always about Haffner. And the judgement on Haffner was simple: Haffner had failed.

Livia had not shared this mournful disappointment in Haffner. Her moments of reproach occurred more unexpectedly, there where Haffner felt most safe. Like the time when she rebuked both Haffner and her brother — in the seclusion of a booth in Sheekey's, watched over by a black-and-white scene from a drawing-room farce — after a night out in theatreland. She was unconvinced by Haffner's lack of commitment to an omnipotent God. No, she said, as Cesare tried to talk, let her finish. This was not because she was an Orthodox believer. She was simply unconvinced by Raphael's refusal to believe that this world could not be the only world. But then, Cesare defended him, he thought that Raphael was very right to be unconvinced by their inherited God — that bearded legal system. Here, he accidentally dropped a piece of bread under the table. Together, both Haffner and Cesare motioned to pick it up. They bent; they paused: they left it to its fate. No, continued Cesare, he had always preferred a certain Jewish renegade, Spinoza (-Who?

said Haffner; Spinoza, repeated Cesare, refusing all explication), who had observed that humans were mistaken if they thought that God was a superman, an elongated version of your average Joe. Absolutely! agreed Haffner. He couldn't agree more — rebending down to recover the bread, avoiding Livia's unimpressed gaze — thus hearing from between the stockinged calves of Livia, the trousered calves of Cesare, how there was no more reason to believe in such a myth, in Cesare's opinion, than there was to believe that God's form was that of a benign and bearded anteater, or a trident-wielding koala.

With this koala still perched on a branch of his mind, chewing on a eucalyptus leaf and resembling uncannily the koala which the young Benjamin had adored until its polyester fur lost all its shine and volume, Haffner went to a guichet. He loped over in a now stilted imitation of the walk which had marked the heyday of Haffner: suave, indolent, assured. Or all the other adjectives to which Haffner had aspired. He was told that he needed a ticket, with a number. Haffner questioned this. He pointed out that he was the only customer in the room. He asserted that no one had minded before. But no, said the woman: he still needed a ticket. He went to the red plastic box on the wall, which was sticking its tongue out, and extracted a ticket; sat down, and waited. He waited for ten minutes. No one else came in. Finally, his number was called. He returned to the guichet. At this point, he was told that if he had to speak in English, then they must wait for the interpreter. And so Haffner sat down again.

Such vacancy of waiting rooms! When Haffner wanted something done, it had been done. The fluency of the West — this was Haffner's expectation. He came from a world of anxious secretaries, divine stenographers. Not for him the sullen service, the dejected functionaries. The office as a place of pleasure — this was Haffner's norm. He sighed. He tried to read the notices. The notices gave nothing away.

With a heartbeat of flickering anticipation, Haffner saw a man come in: he was tall, and he looked tired. His air was Slavic. Perhaps, thought Haffner, this was his interpreter. The man began to talk in an incomprehensible language, then switched to Italian, then switched, to Haffner's relief, into English. His name was Pawel, he said. He was not an interpreter. Like Haffner, he was here as an applicant. He was here because his wife had — he was here to manage his wife's estate. Haffner nodded. In a way which he hoped indicated a funereal solidarity.

Together, they sat in silence.

Finally, Haffner's interpreter entered the room. Her name was Isabella. She was blonde. Her legs were long. Perhaps not the longest that Haffner had ever seen — in the matter of women only, he was not given to hyperbole — but they were extensive. She looked at Haffner, looked at the woman framed in the guichet like the image of the most venerated saint, and then nodded. Haffner moved over to the window. A relay involving sentences by Haffner and Isabella tried to reach the infinitely receding finish line of the woman in the guichet. Haffner was told that if he wished to discover information on the stages of the Committee's deliberation, he was at the wrong guichet. The room he needed was two doors down, across the corridor.

Haffner smiled encouragingly to Isabella.

They entered the new office. An anglepoise lamp, without a bulb, was folded in on itself. A woman was filing her nails with slow long strokes. Another woman was staring at what looked like absent space, but which was really the image of her daughter, playing trom-bone, who did not practise enough, and who therefore was unlikely to succeed in the brass competition in four days' time.

The lassitude of the ages spread its stain through Haffner's soul. He went up to the woman who was staring into space. As he spoke, she began to categorise papers into nine piles on her desk.

He began with what he considered to be a minuscule request.

Haffner wondered if at least it might be possible for a visit to be arranged inside the villa, even if the process were not yet fully complete. He had only, as it happened, seen photographs.

The woman then spoke in what seemed to Haffner to be a paragraph. A long, eventful, dense paragraph. He looked inquisitively, hopefully, at his translator.

— No, said the interpreter.

Haffner sighed.

There followed a much shorter sentence from the woman inside the guichet.

— Perhaps we could do this without a bribe, but maybe you don't need the stress, said the interpreter, interpreting.

There was a pause. They looked at Haffner. In this pause, the trio considered how corrupt this Haffner might be.

Haffner's moral code belonged to the previous century — to the tsarist world of his great-grandfathers. His ideal was his great-great-grandfather: the emigrant — off the boat in the north of England, at a seaport no destitute Lithuanian cared or knew about. A miracle of survival, of charming strategy. Which was to be found also, he had to admit, in the history of Goldfaden and his family — unintentionally escaped from Warsaw in May 1940, their only possessions being two trunks of holiday clothes. For Goldfaden had only avoided the terror of the Ghetto because he had been in London with his family, to celebrate his sister's marriage. Strategic corruption, then, was Haffner's ideal: not the guarded lavishness of Haffner's parents, or the slick luxury of his contemporaries.

No, Haffner had no problem with the bribes. It was all a matter of survival. But in this case, he doubted if a bribe was worth the effort. He doubted if this woman really did possess the power she tried to flaunt.

And so, as often happened in Haffner's life, he accepted the facts and tried to re-create them according to Haffner's version of reality: he tried to discover an ally. He had never been hampered by the British ethos of the queue — its hopeful stance, its doleful allegiance to the scarcity, the want. He very much doubted, he used to say, if there was anyone who couldn't be corrupted. He went for friends: the deep connection. In Isabella he saw this possible ally in his route to justice. He offered to buy her a coffee. She looked at him. Resolutely, he did not look at her legs. And she said yes. Why not?

— Just five minutes, said Haffner, to the woman inside the guichet.

There had been many stories of Haffner. According to Haffner, this was because events conspired to ruin him. His innocence was always unimpeachable. But perhaps this was not so true. Was Haffner not to blame for the series of amatory notes sent to the rabbi's wife, which culminated in her flight to his house and the much talked about scene with Livia, who talked her through the crisis, and sent her home? Was it not Haffner who had spontaneously suggested an orgy in the London office after a retirement party — before swiftly and unobtrusively absenting himself? He couldn't deny it. All the facts of his legend were true.

She was so sorry, said Isabella. This was her country! So what could they do? He was Jewish, yes? And his wife as well. Such terrible suffering the Jews had faced. She felt very close to the Jews. She understood. She felt, she said, very close to every people that had suffered. For so many others had suffered too. This Haffner had to understand. Her people had also suffered so very terribly.

Once more, the horrified angel of history had come to roost on Haffner's shoulder: its wings gently flapping.

No, she said, it was true. Her grandmother was put into a cattle truck and taken to Siberia. Did Haffner know of this? Her grandmother saw a woman give birth to a child and then throw it over the side of the truck. These were horrors. Was he going to deny this?

Haffner was not going to deny it.

Her grandmother, she continued, had started smoking to make herself less hungry. She was hungry every day, in this Russian state. As if her country ever had anything to do with Russia! How she hated the idea of Eastern Europe — an invention of the West. This was the kind of tragedy her people had suffered. And no one cared.

— Well let's be precise here, said Haffner.

Like everyone else, she wanted to burden him with a past which was not his.

So, wearily, Haffner sat down to talk. But Haffner had not understood. He thought she wanted to deny the Jews their suffering. He thought she wanted to subject it to some diminuendo. All his life, he had tried to give this up — the talk of Jews and those who hated them. It belonged to a place which Haffner did not want to visit. It belonged to the conversations of his relatives. But now here he was, trapped: in the former Hapsburg empire, the former Soviet empire: high in the Alps, deep in the problem of grievances: and Haffner, if he had to, would fight.

— I don't know why, said Haffner, we need to be talking about the Jews.

— But I am not, said Isabella.

— Yes, said Haffner. You are. I know this is what you are saying.

— But I am not, said Isabella.

And she was right.

I should say this now, in this chapter on Haffner's inheritance: Haffner was not Jewish in the way that other people were Jewish. He was a minor sect of one. He always said that he never really cared about his religion at all. If Haffner had been an intellectual, if Haffner had been Goldfaden, the ever so fucking verbal Goldfaden, then perhaps he would have tried to explain his sympathy for the half-Jews, the non-Jewish Jews. Haffner could even see the worth of the self-hating Jew. It didn't seem reprehensible to Haffner. It had a rationale: the refusal to be burdened by the past of other people. But he wasn't an intellectual. This wasn't his way. He just knew that he only found amusing the attempts by the Orthodox communities of London to re-create a shtetl. When it was decided, late in Haffner's life, to re-create an eruv in the suburbs of north London, Haffner found this deeply comical — with Esther, as they walked to the car, having lunched at some new and disappointing Chinese eatery, Haffner sarcastically pointed out the string hung from lamp posts, a dejected line which sagged like the bunting at the saddest village fete, in the rain, in the centre of England, in the absent summer. He was bored by his friends who kept kosher, by the women who married and then developed a religious side, by the friends who wanted to visit historic synagogues, or remnants of ghettos, on their otherwise bourgeois summer holidays. Schmaltz! All of it! They weren't for him, the Jewish museums — with their nineteenth-century oil paintings of Torah scribes; the postcards thrown from moving trains, with the saddest phrases (We must always think of the good things in life) underlined. He wouldn't let it sadden him. It was not, he thought, his heritage: this European disaster.

Haffner had no sympathy for the manias of the twentieth century. The grand era of decolonisation; the century of splinter groups. All the crazed ethnicity. Was this such a triumph for the human spirit? It seemed to Haffner that it was a distinct defeat. All Haffner wanted was the conservative; the inherited; the right.

But the twentieth century was all he had.

And at this point I must describe a final loop in this aspect of Haffner's character. He disliked the burden of a tragic heritage. He wished to live in a world free of this kind of inherited loyalty. But if anyone else, who was not Jewish, tried to agree with Haffner, he rebelled. No one else, he thought, had the right to criticise.

This was one of the marks of Haffner. Disloyal among his friends; and loyal among his enemies.

And so once more, in his exile, against his instincts, Haffner was becoming more Jewish than he wanted to be. Hyper-English among the Jews, this was Haffner — the blond and blue-eyed boy. But Jewish with everyone else.

As he prepared to defend his people, to argue the case of his embattled race, in a trance of passionate and unnecessary boredom, Haffner's phone rang. Hopefully, he looked at it, wishing for a respite from the history of Europe. For a brief moment, before remembering that this was impossible, he imagined it might be Zinka. But it was Europe all over again.

Once more, he heard the voice of Benjamin: the disappointment of Haffner's old age: as Haffner was the disappointment of Benjamin's youth.

— Poppa, said a voice which emanated from a payphone in some Tel Aviv hall of residence.

The recent mystery of Benjamin still confused Haffner. Each time Benji called, he said he wouldn't call again. And then he called again. And maybe if Haffner had only paused to consider this, then he might have seen the mute obviousness of Benjamin's behaviour: the slapstick of his reticence. He might have seen that Benjamin was in a crisis of his own. But Haffner was rarely good at that kind of thinking. He tended to believe that everyone said what they wanted. Just as, he maintained, he always said what he wanted. So it did not occur to him to wonder whether Benjamin might have more personal reasons for calling Haffner, the family's legendary immoralist. No, he did not imagine, for instance, ensconced as he was in his own romantic crisis, that Benjamin could be in a romantic crisis as well. Since Haffner never chose to believe in his own mysteries, why should he be forced to believe in the mysteries of others?

— Call me back, said Haffner, swiftly. I'm busy.

The voice of Benjamin swooned into silence.

And Haffner, in the unexpected glory of his triumph in so peremptorily dismissing Benjamin, returned to Isabella. He couldn't understand it. Yes, let him change the conversation for just one moment. He had now been to this office four, perhaps five times. And no one seemed interested. Did they realise they had a legal duty? Had they no respect for the law?

Isabella replied that there was no reason to raise his voice.

He demanded that they stop this conversation, he said to Isabella, and that they go back in. She would smoke one final cigarette, said Isabella. And Haffner loped away: to fume.

This pause lasted for as long as Haffner could contain himself, while staring at Isabella, angrily, with Isabella staring back. The pause, therefore, was short. He walked over to her again.

Why, he enquired, did she have to care so much about the past? It wasn't difficult, after all — remembering the past. It hardly needed to be an obligation.

You didn't need to remind Haffner about remembrance. He couldn't help it. So many of the atrocities were his. But why then should Haffner remember them? What use was the guilt? Since when, he asked Isabella, was suffering the criterion of a life? Why not the charm? Why not the fun?

— This country! sighed Isabella.

The smoke on her cigarette, noted Haffner, listlessly, was being redundantly echoed by its imperfect twin, the smoke from a distant chimney.

What kind of civilisation was it, she asked Haffner — who had no answer, just as he so rarely had answers to the absolute questions — where a girl was scared to go to church? Where a girl was told never to tell her friends that her family went to church? Because if they heard about it, they would send her family away. What kind of civilisation? This was reality, she said. This was real.

Could he have a cigarette? he asked. Moodily, Isabella extracted one. She lit it behind Haffner's hand. He inhaled: and felt sick.

It was the first cigarette he had smoked for twenty years. That seemed right. Smiling, therefore, in this moment of complicity, Haffner tried to create a truce.

Isabella pressed her cigarette out against the wall with her thumb: the butt bent. They went back into the cool of the building, and its humidified air.

This time, Haffner received a new answer.

There was, they had ascertained, a problem which no one had quite anticipated. He had not given them all the information required. Haffner paused them here. He could assure them, he said, that all the necessary information had been supplied, on more than one occasion. Perhaps, they said. But they needed to be sure. And Haffner was then asked where his wife had been born. He replied that he had given them this information already. Nevertheless, they said. Nevertheless what? said Haffner to Isabella, who declined to reply or to translate. If he gave this information again, thought Haffner, he gave it only to show how generous he could be. He wasn't one to bear grudges.

It turned out that, as they had feared, they could not help him at all.

His wife, you see, said Isabella, his late wife was a citizen not of this country but of Italy. He understood? So it was very difficult. They understood. But it was very difficult.

He had come, he pointed out, a very long way. They appreciated this, said Isabella, but their hands were tied. It was a problem of citizenship.

Were they serious? said Haffner. Isabella replied that absolutely. She was very sorry, she added. These were the ways of the world.

But did they understand, Haffner wondered, that the question of ownership was completely separate from whatever problem of citizenship they wanted to invent?

Isabella asked him to slow down. Could he please repeat himself?

Haffner, in his fury, awkwardly leaned into the guichet: an avenging, unsteady god.

He had no intention, he announced, of repeating himself to these people. He had had enough.

— Everyone is very sorry, said Isabella.

— It's not happening today? Haffner asked her.

— Today, no. I do not think so, she said.

— I just wanted to know, said Haffner, coldly.

As the gambler who plays cards, knowing they are rigged — the deal-box with its top-sight-tell, the coffee mill, the loaded dice — yet still believing in the efficacy of his luck, so Haffner confronted the miniature conflicts which the century placed in his path. That one had lost before the game had started was no reason not to play. And after all: surely he was still owed one great win: one absolute and effervescent triumph? He believed in it as other people believed in the more likely cascade of the slot machines: a parallel line of green apples, with jaunty stems.

— I am so sorry, said Isabella: melancholy for all the exiled and dispossessed.

Haffner only wanted a triumph. This was true. In the full panoply of his Jewishness, he had now experienced a moment of conversion. He wasn't doing this for Esther. Now, he was going to recover this villa in a gesture of piety. Yes, Haffner's triumph now consisted in his vision of the villa. And he knew his record when it came to obtaining triumphs. They proved, so often, beyond Haffner's talent. But Haffner, thought Haffner, was ready for the fight.

No wonder, thought Haffner, the emperors all went manic. He sympathised; he understood their frustration at reality's recalcitrance. No wonder they amused themselves with killing sprees.

In the Lives of the Caesars, the only ones who interested him were the monsters: Caligula, Tiberius, Nero. He liked the overreachers. How could you choose between them? If pressed, however, maybe Haffner would have gone for the god Caligula — who was happy to do it with anyone, male or female, active or passive. Caligula, continued Haffner, talking to himself, was famous for the comprehensiveness of his taste. He would give dinners to which he invited all the noble couples: the couples of the blood. This story in particular commanded Haffner's respect. It displayed a grand disregard for the niceties of public opinion. The wives would have to process up and down, passing a couch on which lay — untroubled by its stains, its cheap upholstery — the emperor Caligula. If one of them tried to avoid his gaze, he lifted up her chin. Like an animal. When the moment seemed right, he would send for one of them, and then the happy couple would retire. On their return, he would talk about her performance; mentioning a flaw here, a perfection there. He listed the movements for which she had no talent.

That, concluded Haffner, was the moment when Caligula rightly deserved his deification.

Perhaps he thought he only meant to shock. But Haffner was never coarse. If he shocked the general public, it was always because of a sincere misalignment in relation to the orthodox. So that even though I am not sure, as he said it, how much Haffner believed in this, it contained — perhaps unknown to Haffner — its own inverted logic, which was Haffner's deepest unexplored motif. He didn't really admire Caligula for the purity of his cruelty: he might have wanted his audience to think this, but Haffner was rarely sincere to his audience. No, Caligula was to be admired for his publicity. Haffner loved him, if he loved him, for the lack of shame.

No one understood the emperors. No one saw how humble they were — free from the deeper vanity of concealing one's own vanity — like Haffner before his family, refusing the illusion of maturity.

Haffner Soothed

As Haffner arrived back at the hotel, intent on his newly discovered decisiveness, like an infant intent on the helium balloon clutched in a tight hand, a man emerged from an inner sanctum behind the reception desk. He was in a bright white T-shirt and blue tracksuit with silken sheen — his upper lip stained by a black and inadequate moustache. This was his masseur! the receptionist told Haffner, excitedly.

Haffner eyed his masseur, utterly indifferent. The helium balloon of his decisiveness floated up into the empty air.

Haffner allowed himself to be led downstairs, to the candlelit, scented day spa: and there, prone on the massage table, his face ensconced in its padded lasso — wrapped in tissue paper, to absorb the unguents of Haffner — he lay down.

As he did so, a montage of previous Haffners lay down with him.

There were the Kodaks of Haffner reclining on towelled beds in his sports clubs, then the black-and-white photos of his white body on a black bench in his army barracks. But the film stopped on the image of him in New York, at the Russian Bath House on Avenue B. He used to go there with Morton. The steam secluded them. They would sit there: heating up — on the steps of the sauna, as if awaiting some spectral performance, some senatorial oratory. Cleansed, they would go to a bar in the Village — the name escaped Haffner's stuttering memory. Not often, but sometimes. And, in this bar, they would continue their discussion of the Jews and the Blacks. This was why Haffner settled on this image, as he relaxed from his struggle in the committee rooms. He was het up with the century's usual argument. But there it was. Haffner loved the Blacks, and Morton loved the Jews. Enough of this! Haffner would say. Enough of this sectarian rubbish. The race was unimportant. He could go further: there were people with charm, and people without. That was the only division one ever needed to contemplate.

Maybe to him, Morton replied. Maybe to him.

Morton put down his bottle of beer. It rested there, in front of Haffner's tired eyes. A bubble stretched, a condom, over its rim.

He didn't understand, said Haffner. He didn't get what Morton was implying.

— You've made it, said Morton. So you're cool.

— I'm cool, said Haffner.

— Not literally, said Morton. I'd never say you were cool in the real sense of this word. No. But yeah, you're cool. You've won your fight. So you don't care.

Haffner wondered if this was fair. Certainly, he could see the accusation's force. Catholic only in his hatred of all Protestants, all splinter groups — to which Haffner preferred the international art of business: an art to which he felt a strong allegiance, an art of which his central principle had been his insistence, in the wreckage of 1950s Europe, that one could not capitalise, as it were, if an economy wanted to remain national. The future was international. That was all he believed. He warmed to cosmopolitans, like Cesare.

— Is he Jewish? Haffner had asked Livia once, about an acquaintance at their tennis club.

— Oh, interrupted Cesare. Did you not know that the whole concept of the non-Jew is strictly inapplicable?

He had always admired Cesare. Always been fond of him. Cesare, in Haffner's opinion, lived up to his name.

— I mean it, continued Cesare. Every time I meet someone new, I discover they are Jewish. It's true what they say: the Jews are everywhere. It's a problem for the anti-Semites. Everyone hates the Jews; but then everyone is a Jew. It's a dilemma.

And Haffner called that fine.

In his padded lasso, Haffner began to talk to his masseur. His name, it turned out, was Viko. It was really Viktor, he said: but everyone called him Viko.

— Niko? said Haffner.

— Viko, said Viko.

As if he were Niko's twin.

— Your name, it is like you are Hugh Hefner! said the masseur, delighted.

— You think you're the first person to make that joke? said Haffner, grimly.

— You know him? asked the masseur, undeterred. Relation?

It had been an exhausting morning, a very stressful morning, said Haffner. He could feel it, said Viko. There was much tension in him. But Haffner, as he always did, chose to turn the conversation away from his internal tensions.

He supposed, Haffner therefore observed, that it was a very difficult thing, to live in this country after the Communists had wrecked everything. And before Viko could reply, Haffner began to tell him a story about the Communists, which was a story about his brother-in-law: Cesare.

But maybe this was still a way of Haffner talking about Haffner.

Cesare, after the war, and his degree at Cambridge, had eventually decided to return to Italy, where he worked for the next two decades as a professor in sociology. The anecdote might interest Viko, said Haffner — raising himself up, patted back down. He was a Communist, Cesare: a Party man. But to understand this story, one also had to understand, said Haffner — talking into his lasso, to Viko's bright new trainers — that this man had a cold streak. He was hard. But there it was. In Italy, he began an affair with a girl whose name, Haffner tended to think, was Simonetta. Perhaps Simonetta. When it began, she was twenty-five. So Cesare must have been in his forties, in his fifties.

And Haffner suddenly noticed how this disparity in age, which had always struck him as tinged with a Hollywood seediness, was nothing when compared to the disparity between his age and Zinka's.

For Cesare, he said to Viko, it was everything he wanted. This girl of his wore leather; she rode a Honda bike. She was an assistant lecturer at the university. Could anything be more alluring? At the time, Cesare was editing a journal of revolutionary sociology. He made Simonetta his deputy editor. Cesare was a man of the world, said Haffner. A Communist, yes: but a Communist who loved the shops in the Quadrilatero d'Oro. A Communist who bought himself handstitched shirts, or shoes made from a single piece of leather. He loved his life. He was happy.

Then this girl wanted a baby. It made Cesare pause.

— I would love one, he said, absolutely love one. But first I must divorce my wife.

Dutifully, Viko chuckled.

In revenge, continued Haffner, unbeknown to Cesare, she stopped taking the Pill, and got pregnant. But Cesare didn't care about this difficulty. He simply got her sacked from her deputy editorship of the journal; and also from her job at the university. But then, a year later, when Cesare was in the process of manoeuvring for the university rectorship, the Italian Communist Party issued a list of approved yet not affiliated intellectuals. These were the kosher ones, though not confirmed. Cesare was duly admitted as being ideologically pure. But Simonetta campaigned. Using her contacts in the women's section of the Communist Party, she held meetings, she published denouncements.

Of all the intellectuals duly nominated by the Communists, said Haffner, only Cesare failed in his bid for election.

But the greatest moment of all, he concluded, was when Cesare told this story to his mentor at the university in Rome — who, on being told by a mournful Cesare the full dossier of the facts over a lavish dinner at a restaurant in a side street off the Spanish Steps, asked him if this was really how it would be from now on. Were they, said his mentor, to be ruled now by their mistresses?

Haffner! So sure that he was charming! So intent on making conversation — even though, of course, Viko was not interested in his anecdotes about Communism. He didn't care about Haffner's urbane distaste for all the politics.

The anecdote, therefore, did not receive the applause which Haffner thought it was due. A little shocked, perhaps, he tried another conclusion.

That, said Haffner, was the best he could say for Communism. But before Haffner could gratify himself with a murmured smile — as he remembered Cesare ruefully saying that the whole adventure had at least produced one benefit, because his wife, having found out, had finally made him a free man — Haffner felt a moment of alarm. It felt to Haffner's worried senses that Viko might be going too far.

The range of Haffner's body available to massage seemed to be becoming more expansive.

Haffner was lying on his stomach: a warm towel over his back. He was naked. At first, he had toyed with the idea of wearing the briefs he usually swam in. But then had thought that really he should not care. They were hardly the most comfortable of items. The important thing, he always thought, was a comprehensive massage. As if he needed to be worried about his modesty! No, not here, not with a man.

But now, he felt Viko let his hands splay and drift with the oil further up his thighs. At first, as Haffner chatted, he had interpreted this as invigorating. Then he began to wonder. But he was too confused to make a sign, to tense his thigh muscles in the ordinary mute gesture of irritation. He could not be sure how European this was — how much to do with the health spa, and how much to do with something else entirely.

His penis was trapped there, under his thigh, its squashed head protruding under his testicles.

And then he felt the man's hand flicker on to the head of his penis. He really could not be sure if this were still an accident. These accidents, felt Haffner, were becoming so much less accidental than he had first imagined.

He was rarely successful in his active search for what he considered to be bohemian. Whenever Haffer metamorphosed into the bohemian, it tended to be the result of someone else's choice. He strayed into it. He had understood the streets in Soho — but he had never felt quite at home on Wardour Street, or Frith Street. He went to the French House sometimes. But not the Colony Room, not the Gargoyle Club. Never had the wisecracking hostess Muriel Belcher eyed him from behind the bar, admiringly, as he went promiscuous with a male prostitute who came from the satellite towns around Glasgow. Nor had he drunk with Francis Bacon, vomiting into the gutter, each supporting the other's bent body, wildly applauding.

No, thought Haffner: bohemia, when it came to Haffner, always came in such strangely bourgeois costumes: a moustached man in a tracksuit, say, surrounded by candles.

This confusion was one instinct which he had inherited from Papa. Early on in Haffner's career, in Haffner's marriage, they had sat in the rose garden, in the pale sunshine, a police siren tumescing and detumescing in the background, and Papa had expounded on life. The thing was, a man could either waste his life or live his life. And in the end it was better to live it than to waste it. Did he understand this? Haffner answered that he thought he did. But what was wasting, and what was living? Was it Livia, or not Livia? A marriage, or not a marriage? It was hardly as if Papa had been an expert in distinguishing the living from the wasting — in knowing what was a place of safety, and what was a place of harm. In Haffner's opinion, these terms had a habit of turning themselves upside down. He seemed isolated in this uncertainty. The only other person who shared his bewilderment, in the end, was Livia herself. More often, it led to arguments like the one which had occurred the day of Livia's funeral: sitting in his kitchen with his daughter and her husband, Esmond.

He was, Esther told him, simply impossible. Haffner tried to disagree. She interrupted him. He was impossible. Like an infant. Haffner did not try to disagree.

He cared for nothing, said Esther. And angrily Haffner had replied that in fact it was he, her father, who was the only person in this family to think about other people. Yes, let him speak.

No one was more conceited than Haffner, said his daughter. No one cared more about himself. Did he know what Mama used to say? She had married a Greek god, and had left a Roman emperor. A monster of ego.

— Humble! roared Haffner. I am the humblest person I know.

No one could think what to say next. The chutzpah of it dazzled them. So no one spoke. Haffner simply glared at Esmond. Esmond silently glared back.

It amazed him, thought Haffner, how vanquished this man was: the absolute son-in-law.

Esmond wore the steel rectangular spectacles sported by fundamentalist spokesmen and the vice presidents of Midwestern software companies; but Esmond was neither a vice president nor a fundamentalist.

He admired Esmond for only one thing, did Haffner: his hair. This, he conceded, was splendid — the way it flowed and oozed, a miracle of liquidity. But nothing else. Not the liberal moral certainties; nor the obsession with football borrowed from the newspapers. Yet this was the man who had made Haffner's daughter into a meek provider: who had seduced her into the temptations of Orthodoxy. This was the man who had made his grandson rabbinical.

He still saw no reason, said Esmond, why that other woman should have presumed to come. Barbra, Haffner interrupted, was a very dear friend. Esmond ignored this statement. If that was what Haffner wanted, then he was welcome to continue this friendship, he said. He looked at Esther. She was arranging the cutlery in front of her — which had been laid for a breakfast no one, now, except Haffner, would eat: the rustic basket of pains au chocolat before him, the snorting coffee machine on the counter behind him. But there was no reason, Esmond said, for them to have to witness this. He saw no reason why they should have to deal with Haffner's, with his — but Esmond had no word for Haffner's delinquency.

And for a moment, Haffner, on his massage bed, felt a rare tenderness for Esmond. He understood the difficulty — since this was how Haffner had felt too, when trying to contemplate the moral life of Papa.

History, thought Haffner, was simply a playground of repetition. It really did amaze him how limited were its motifs.

Hurt as Haffner was by Papa's reckless behaviour, with the women, and the money, he tried to understand his impulses. Papa was terrified of waste. It was the only lesson he had ever learned; the only one he could ever impart. Haffner thought he understood, therefore, why his father had acted with such theatrical self-pity when selling off the only other inheritance with which Haffner had been involved. Papa had been the greatest collector of cricketana the world had ever seen: he bought engravings, handkerchiefs printed with the laws of the game, mugs, memoirs, the technical manuals. In cricket, Papa found his reason for being. It made him safe. He compiled bibliographies, small monographs on centenary tankards. Haffner had inherited this love — a love he had passed on to Benjamin, his grandson and heir. Then, before Papa died, in what Haffner regarded with tacit admiration as an act of grand malevolence, but which was interpreted by everyone else as an act of petty and vindictive spite, he auctioned the entire collection. So that in the course of Haffner's life, in random provincial museums, he would observe a small typewritten card marked neatly in a bottom corner with his ancestral name.

When Haffner's mother died, no one expected his father to be sad. Only Haffner. It didn't amaze Haffner to receive a noble letter from his father in which Solomon told him that had he never known his wife, that grief would have been even greater than the grief he now felt at this temporary separation imposed on them. And maybe this was not so wrong. Maybe this was the only way in which Solomon Haffner could have loved his wife, in this exorbitant way — writing to posterity. Whereas Haffner's love for his mother had been different. It was all nostalgic. Whenever he remembered her, it was only as an idyll.

But then maybe every idyll is remembered: maybe memory is a condition of the idyllic.

So Haffner had sat there, his father's letter beside him, and remembered how his mother used to lay the lemon meringue pie on the stone floor of the larder, so that it could set.

The previous section, dear reader, as Haffner is lost in his memories, is a way of describing Raphael Haffner asleep.

For although to Haffner's dismay his penis had begun to burgeon towards Viko's hand, thus creating, in Haffner's opinion, a situation of the utmost delicacy, he couldn't think what to do. The solutions seemed absent. Previously, when faced by situations which disturbed him, Haffner had consulted his mental library of exempla. So now, desperate, with his face down, Haffner tried to consider his mentors. But, once more, the external forces which tended to disrupt the straight line of Haffner's life overtook him.

Worried, Haffner fell asleep. He relaxed. He drifted into a place of absence, emptiness. Drifting further, his legs spread slightly more apart, in a gesture which was unmistakably flirtatious, thought Viko.

Viko was used to these situations. They occurred often, in his candlelit basement. They followed an ordinary pattern.

Viko, poised above Haffner's back, couldn't see that Haffner's eyes were closed. He assumed that the greater deepness of Haffner's breathing meant only one thing: the masseur's skill at finding individual ways to please the gratified client. He continued to move his hands around Haffner's thighs, the tops of his thighs, brushing his penis and testicles with slow abandon. All the signs were there. The fact that Haffner had made no protest; the fact that he had positioned his penis deliberately so that its tip was softly available to Viko's touch; the fact that now he was even moving his legs apart to allow the masseur easier access: these were the ordinary, done thing.

His fingers ran up and down the shaft of Haffner's penis. As Haffner slept, Viko touched him, slid his hand in such a way that Haffner half woke, aroused, descending into thoughts of Livia: the only woman who had ever touched his penis so deftly. Who, even before their wedding in the Abbey Road Synagogue, as Haffner never tired of remembering, slipped her hand beneath the tightness of his waistband, just as she had done before: a gesture which remained the erotic zenith of Haffner's marriage.

Haffner's wedding! At this zenith, while Haffner remains there, happily asleep, with his penis in a stranger's hand, I am suddenly reminded of another Haffnerian story.

Haffner used to tell his stories in the car, while he was driving. Haffner drove like they drive in the ancient movies: inexplicably watching his passenger, and not the road. Between rows of parked cars, Haffner drove — as if before a pre-recorded backdrop — courageously oblivious to the malice of wing mirrors.

And, one night, Haffner told me the story of his wedding.

The service had been taken by his rabbi: the Reverend Ephraim Levine. The kindest man in the world, said Haffner. A very fine man. Who in fact, strange as it may seem, became the legal guardian of every Jewish refugee to London from Germany before the war. But that was another story. Yes, that was another story, which involved the story Haffner preferred to forget: of a girl upstairs in a locked bathroom, young Raphael adding up his batting average in the dining room with a pencil stub, its end wrinkled where he sucked it. Whereas a story Haffner always remembered was his father leaving the wedding service and asking for theological guidance.

— Ephie, why do we have two days for Rosh Hashanah?

And the Reverend Ephraim Levine looked at him and said:

— Solly, why do we have five days for Ascot?

It was very fine, said Haffner. Very fine. He was the wittiest of men. You never knew what to expect. And after the wedding, after his mother had by mistake drunk the wine which was meant for the bride, thus causing a dumbshow, a hiatus in the service, there was a tea dance at the Rembrandt Hotel, in Knightsbridge. Haffner's padre from his unit shared a taxi to the reception with the Reverend Levine. And did I know, Haffner asked, what the padre had said to him, astonished, when they returned to the unit? The padre took him aside. The things he had been told, the padre confided in Haffner, afterwards, refusing to enlarge this statement with detail. The things the Reverend Levine had told him. He had been shocked, said the padre: absolutely shocked.

And now, I think, I know what Haffner liked in this anecdote. He liked the revelation that all men were men of this world. Because every story, for Haffner, was the same.

Haffner was an admirer of the classics. He went to the classics for the higher gossip. Haffner, humble Haffner, wanted to understand how everything declined and fell. The history of the classical era was the history of decadence. Curious, Haffner read of Nero and his monstrous appetite — which overruled his reason so comprehensively that Nero devised a pretty game. He was released from a den, dressed in the skins of wild animals, and would then gnaw at the penises and exposed pubic bushes of servile men and women who had been bound naked to stakes. Haffner appreciated the underlying philosophy. For, in the vocabulary of Solomon Haffner, the patriarch of Haffner, to live one's life was the same thing, in the end, as wasting it. This was what the stories taught the gentle reader. Just as the classical, in the end, wasn't really classical: it led for ever to the Goths, to the Picts and the Saxons, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths: all the savage barbarians. The classical only existed in retrospect, when everything was over. You couldn't separate the classic from the decadent. No, the defeat might seem to come from nowhere, but really there was no escape from it: because it was visible, really, all along, from the beginning. So every story was a story of defeat. Even the stories about the victories.

Yes, I think now, as I contemplate the stories of Haffner, this seems true. Victory is only a series of slow defeats. Defeats so slow that for a moment they could seem like a victory.

Or maybe it was only true of Haffner. Maybe this was only the principle of Haffner's exorbitant life.

For this was how the farce of Haffner's finale continued. As Viko tended to Haffner's penis, Haffner's phone began to ring, pulsing where it lay — the shrill twin to his penis which was pulsing, contentedly, in Viko's hand. Blearily, his heart pounding with an ill heaviness in his chest, he raised his head and — a gecko — stared at Viko.

Haffner never did anything wrong — not willingly. It was just he was so often trapped by forces which were beyond him. But no one believed him.

The degree to which this scene seemed his fault was debatable. Perhaps Haffner, in some way, was guilty. Usually, the guilt came from women. The list of the women who felt disappointed by Haffner was one which Haffner usually preferred to ignore. At its head, there was Barbra, who had given up, she said, so much for him: but then there were all the others — Cynthia, with freckled hands; Joan, who only drank champagne; Hyacinth, who cried whenever Haffner called her; and Pilar, who was happily married, she said, happily married. But Haffner would never join this resigned lament. When it came to guilt, Haffner was immune.

This wasn't to say he regretted nothing. Not at all. Naturally, there were things he regretted. Regret was the territory. But regret, he wanted to assure the absent gods, the cartoon gods, was not responsibility.

Once more, he tried to convince the world that the world was a menace for Haffner. Hazily, he explained to Viko that he had just dropped off there. He had no idea, really. To which Viko, a professional of politesse, simply replied that but of course.

There was a pause of awkwardness.

— I should take this, said Haffner — pointing to the telephone: relieved in relation to the masseur; depressed in relation to the fact that, once more, it was Benjamin.

— This is the third time I'm calling you, said Benjamin.

— Really? said Haffner.

— I'm just saying, said Benjamin. You could at least be polite.

— I don't think, Benjamin, said Haffner, that you should be lecturing others on how to live their lives.

Haffner's opinion of Benjamin had once been more forgiving. When Benji had been into sports, Haffner had adored him.

Like Haffner before him, Benji was a goalkeeper. Haffner would watch him from the touchline, in the Jewish soccer leagues. Benji possessed poise. He had the weight. He was noted for his bravery. As colossal boys jinked and trampled towards him, Benjamin didn't hang back. He didn't remain stymied on the goal line. No, he closed down the angle. He tumbled down at their dangerous feet. Haffner applauded. Benjamin pretended not to be pleased. Mimicking the great goalkeepers of the past, he pretended to care only about his team. Having gathered the ball, he would ferociously bowl it to a free player on the wing, or kick it back into the opposing half. With the back of his gloved hand, Benjamin would smear the mud across his sweating forehead. Then, silhouetted at the far end of the pitch, in splendid isolation, Benjamin leaned against a goalpost. He observed the flow of play. He lined up the fingers of his padded gloves on each hand, as if in prayer.

At the weekends, when Benji was meant to be learning the piano, studying some piece by Mendelssohn, with a bordered cream cover, Haffner read the paper. In the adjoining study — called so boyishly and pathetically his den — Esmond looked at X-rays in his lightbox. As soon as Esmond wandered away, then Haffner began with the weighty discussion of sports.

Then, a few years later, a change occurred. Or not so much a change in Benji's character: just a change in the objects of its affection. The reasons for this affection had always been the same. There he was, on the outskirts of London, in the northern suburbs, and Benjamin discovered drugs. Not the terrifying, working-class drugs: not the crack and the glue and the marker pens. Instead, he discovered the recreational drugs, the ones with intellectual pedigree. Benjamin discovered the lure of cool. It upset Haffner, but he coped. It was, at least, a pastime he could understand. Now, even that had changed too. Now, for reasons which Haffner could not understand — in fact, he did not believe there was any actual reason — Benjamin had adopted his race's religion. He had adopted it, said Haffner, with a vengeance. And this vengeance, thought Haffner, was continuing.

— It's not me, said Benjamin. I'm not lecturing anyone.

— You tell me this, said Haffner. Is it really a way to live your life, to do what you're doing out there? With your missiles and your lunatics.

He hadn't phoned, said Benjamin, to have this conversation. He wasn't having this conversation. They'd had this conversation.

— Are you ever going to tell me how things are going? said Benji. Are things fixed yet?

— No, said Haffner. They're not.

— I really think, said Benjamin, if you're having so many problems, then I should come and see if I can help.

Haffner considered Frau Tummel, and Zinka, and felt alarmed.

He couldn't bear it. Youth, he thought, was the spirit of the petit bourgeois. Of course, thought Haffner, the young needed their myth of adolescence, their myth of '68 — of course they needed the romantic movements. Without the romantic movements, the young would have to see themselves for what they were: always the most punitive, the most envious, the quickest to judge. So Haffner, as he lay prone, on the massage table, opted to ignore Benjamin's proposal of a friendly visit. Instead, Haffner asked Benji if he'd ever heard of the celebrated Peter Ustinov. Benjamin said that he hadn't.

— He's never heard of Peter Ustinov! said Haffner: possibly to Viko, but almost definitely to himself.

— Now, let me tell you something, continued Haffner. Peter Ustinov possessed a quality which is in very short supply nowadays. In very short supply.

— And what's that? asked Benjamin.

— Charm, said Haffner. Now listen, old chap, I have to go.

— This is ridiculous, said Benjamin, and continued the conversation: in which he told Haffner that he could get a flight that day. He really thought he should. He could be with him by tomorrow. But Haffner never heard this conversation, nor Benjamin's frustrated squawk when he realised that Haffner was no longer listening, because he had hung up.

Haffner turned to the masseur. Suddenly, he felt naked. But he felt calm.

— Thank you, said Haffner.

— Mais merci, smiled the masseur.

— Absolutely, said Haffner.

A change seemed to happen within Viko: a ripple, a sigh. He turned away. He seemed to be smiling to himself. Haffner questioned him on this. He denied that he was smiling.

Sitting on the table, Haffner gave Viko all the money in his wallet. It was not much. It seemed ungrateful.

Not for the first time, Haffner felt overtaken by an exhaustion. He looked at the chair beside the massage table, at the arms of his tracksuit top, helplessly hanging down. Clutching his towel to his waist, Haffner gathered up his clothes — a hunchback. And then Haffner — who so wanted sleep, and rest — shyly shuffled out of Viko's salon.

There could be courage in retreat. Think, pacific reader, about Napoleon. The wars of Napoleon led to a million bushels of bones being taken from the plains of Waterloo, Austerlitz and Leipzig, then shipped to Hull, there to be sent to Yorkshire bone-grinders and converted into fertiliser for farmers. Haffner knew this. But he also knew the greatest bon mot ever, when Napoleon, recounting to the Polish ambassador the story of his retreat from Moscow on a sledge, observed that from the sublime to the ridiculous was only a step. No experience, after all, could not be transfigured by the telling. No retreat, therefore, was always shameful.

Yes, to Haffner, who admired the war books, the manuals on strategy, Napoleon was not so much the emperor of Europe, but more an expert on an empire's inevitable decline and fall.

Many years ago, on the French Riviera, when he was there for the jazz festival at Juan-les-Pins, Haffner had seen a waistcoat of Napoleon's, worn in exile on St Helena: it had charmed Haffner with its miniature size. Everything he loved in Napoleon was embodied in this waistcoat: he understood the littleness of things. Napoleon: the man who, at the Battle of Borodino, stayed in and issued orders from his tent. Yes, that man knew about the tactics of withdrawal: just as Bradman, another of Haffner's imaginary mentors, when faced with batting on a disintegrating wet pitch at Melbourne, in 1937, sent in his batting order entirely reversed, so that by the time Bradman went in at number seven the pitch had dried out, and he made a double century and won the match. That was the action of a true genius of victory: a man who was an expert in the mechanics of timing, a connoisseur of retreat.

With these reflections, Haffner returned to the hoped-for safety of his room, where he discovered a chambermaid, in an abattoir of her own devising: surrounded by the intestines of the Hoover cabling; the wet towels on the floor, like tripe.

And so Haffner, homeless, retreated further: he turned round and walked away, searching for somewhere to sleep.

Haffner Timeless

Haffner went out on to the veranda. Finally alone, Haffner lay in a lounger and looked at the mountains. He saw nothing which might interest him. Should he go so far as to say that he was exhausted? Yes, Haffner was exhausted. The sun was softening. And Haffner only wanted rest. For what a night it had been! What a morning! In the distance, the dogs in the village were yelping. He willed them to be quiet. Just as he had often willed Livia's pets to be silent: the moody schnauzer, the bulimic borzoi.

A tree was leafing through itself, anxiously.

Into a doze went Haffner. He drifted and looped as if through a dream of an endless sky. In his sleep he could rest and then fall, fall further, rest and then fall. His doze was a dream of diving.

Peace for Haffner! Let him rest!

While Haffner falls asleep in the midst of the afternoon, maybe I should let him be — reclining in my invisible deckchair, my imaginary lounger.

Haffner's sense of time was often subject to odd absences. Now that he was older, his time spans had lengthened. Benji, for instance, felt grand when he thought in terms of months. Haffner was used to thinking in decades: the decades seemed more accurate to the nature of the facts. They were the more useful unit of measurement. But here, in the mountains, these problems with time involved new proportions entirely. At moments, and this was one of them, he could not tell how long he had been in this spa town, in this hotel. Everything up here had become timeless. The usual coordinates were lost.

At what point had Haffner been innocent? Haffner, who could still remember with more vividness than he experienced many other things how on his eighteenth birthday, during the Scarborough Cricket Festival in 1938, Papa had invited the greatest opening batsman in England, Herbert Sutcliffe — a Yorkshireman, and a professional — to dine with his wife in the Grand Hotel. He was the first professional ever to be invited to dine, during the Cricket Festival, at the Grand Hotel. Before Papa's invitation, it had been strictly reserved for the amateurs. But Papa could not be denied. For Papa believed in cricket more than he believed in class. So into the dining room of the Grand Hotel walked Papa, followed by his wife and son, behind whom came Herbert Sutcliffe, with his wife, Emmy. Haffner danced the Lambeth Walk with Emmy. And around nine months later Sutcliffe phoned up to ask Solomon Haffner if he remembered that evening in the Grand Hotel, and Emmy and the champagne?

— Well today, said Herbert Sutcliffe, Emmy presented me with a son. And Sutcliffe started to laugh.

This was how Haffner's soul functioned — through these anecdotes which everyone else had forgotten, which no one else had noticed: like the ballet of electrified shrugs and ripples given off by the fringe of a beach umbrella, on a terrace, at midday, while everyone lies there sunbathing, with their eyes closed against the light.

There were two methods for the historian to record the history of Haffner. The obvious way was to follow the chronology: the annals of Haffner. But then there was the more philosophic way, which happened to coincide with the way Haffner really thought about it: with events overlapping, grouping themselves into themes. In his privacy, suspended in the fluid of his memories, Haffner approached the philosophical himself: a medium of total objectivity.

So it was only right, perhaps, that he should perform his finale up here, in the mountains, where everything seemed turned upside down: in the endless light of midsummer. Up here, as Haffner would have read if he had begun the novel beside his bed — but he had not, because he cared too much about the lives of the Caesars — life is only serious down below. Up here, all the being ill, all the dying and recuperating, all the endless and serious work at the spa was just weightless: life was just another way of wasting time.

He was not who he was! Not an aged patriarch. No, Haffner was so much younger than he looked — and he looked younger than he was. With Morton, as they sat and steamed, he used to turn the conversation to the women: at what point, he asked Morton, did he think they would lose their right to try it on with the women? At what point did Morton think the lust would leave the body of Raphael Haffner? Morton only looked at him, with an infinite amused pity in his eyes. He pointed out that one thing he loved Haffner for, indeed he would go so far as to say it was definitely what he loved him for, was that Haffner always thought there was so much more to Haffner than anyone else ever thought. He had the arrogance of potential. He was a romantic, said Morton.

It didn't seem so unreasonable. What was down was up, and what was up was down: so that Haffner, who boyishly soared above the hills in his usual dream of flight — the sky turned underwater, with dolphins in the trees — was really this aged Haffner, in a lounger, as the sun declined and the clouds bunched and pooled together, while Zinka — the dream of Haffner's youth — approached his horizontal form, accompanied by Niko.

Haffner was never left alone by the world for long.

Zinka nudged him, then nudged him again, until he spluttered himself awake. With depression, he realised that he was still so very tired. With elation, he realised he was looking at Zinka.

And then, to Haffner's startled gaze, Zinka said to him, with a grin, that this man of hers was refusing to chaperone her that night. It was always like this with him — impossible. Haffner nodded, slowly. He tried to understand his role in the conversation; but he could not.

So, said Zinka: he knew what he could do. Haffner smiled, benignly. Think about it, bonza. Haffner tried. He still could not.

He could ask her to dinner himself, said Zinka. Haffner looked at Niko. His face betrayed no expression. He shrugged. Haffner looked at Zinka. Was it dinner time? he asked her, wonderingly. She tenderly smiled.

Was this a dream? thought Haffner. He could not tell. Carefully, Haffner considered his options. His adagio was over. This seemed obvious. There would never be a period, he worried, when adagio would exist again. His options seemed limited to one.

Prestissimo, Haffner said yes.

The maitre d' ushered Haffner to his table, where Haffner's bottle of wine from the night before was settled in a shallow silver salver, the cork stuffed in at a jaunty angle. Swiftly, declining to express his inner smile, his inner shock at seeing Haffner so publicly tend to Zinka, he then gathered an extra chair.

Haffner began to talk to the waiter, offering Zinka an aquavit. No, she interrupted. It would be better if she took care of this.

He must, for instance, try the cuisines of the region. And Haffner, as she conversed with the serious waiter, the marvelling waiter, took the opportunity to wonder about this continuation of his syncopated adventure with Zinka.

There had been the incident of the wardrobe, then the incident of the lake. Neither of these episodes, he thought, had enabled Haffner's true charm to shine. But now, here she was — opposite him in the elegance of a dining room. This was Haffner's more usual backdrop. He considered Zinka: in the residual glow of his amazement. The persistent, grand desire for her disturbed him. And yet, he sadly considered, he could not think for a moment that Zinka desired him. He possessed no liberating craziness about his erotic attraction. He knew that Zinka represented the unattainable. Even if, he wanted to add, there had been the improvised escapade with the wardrobe. This, surely, was not without some kind of wordless flirtation? Although, he corrected himself, it could so easily have not involved any wordless flirtation. She had been talking to him about his wife, all the melancholy reasons why he was here, in this spa town where everyone, she said, was so unhappy. Haffner was drinking some kind of grappa. And, as normal with the women, Haffner asked the intimate questions: because he was always intent, with women, on understanding their hidden sadnesses, the depth of their secrets. Which he perhaps inherited from all the imprecise conversations with Mama. And Zinka told him about her love life, and together in this conversation they knitted and clothed a rag doll of Zinka — unfulfilled, sarcastic, mischievous. So it had seemed somehow natural for her to lean in and propose — in English so accented and asyntactical that Haffner worried he had utterly misunderstood — that Haffner should conceal himself in a wardrobe and see how brutishly Niko treated her. If he wanted. And Raphael Haffner very much wanted indeed.

No, thought Haffner, the episode was not about him. And there he paused, because he had no wish to spoil this image of the two of them there — dining together: this image of the old and the young entranced. He didn't want to do anything which might disturb this dream of Haffner.

He discovered that Zinka was already involved in conversation. In Zagreb, she told him, she had trained as a ballet dancer. This he knew. Evenings, she used to practise trapeze. The trapeze was what she really loved.

Haffner mentioned that all the same he thought he would order an aquavit for himself.

Patiently, she explained to Haffner the various terms — the French vocabulary: the croix, or crucifix; the grenouilles, or candlesticks; the soleil avant, which in English was the skinner; the chutes, the drops. The tour du monde. And then the important sorties — as you extricated yourself from the tangle of movement.

Haffner, concealing his excitement at this vision, these outlined movements, asked her if it weren't dangerous. Zinka said no. Not at all, on the flying trapeze? Haffner had always imagined. .

— Not the flying trapeze, said Zinka. Just trapeze. There was a pause.

— I was on the stage once, said Haffner.

It was towards the beginning of the war, in 1939 or '40. In Haffner's battalion there were many actors. Since he was in a London regiment. Many famous actors. And one day the actors said that they ought to get the whole battalion together and put on a variety show. Did she understand? She thought so. And they put it up to the second lieutenant — who went on, added Haffner, to become a very eminent newspaper editor, as it happened — who agreed, and so they put on this show which couldn't have been put on at the Palladium. No. There was Max Miller, and. And. No, Haffner had forgotten.

— How can you be a name-dropper, wondered Haffner, if you can't remember anyone's names?

He looked out of the windows at the sky: out of the grand windows at the grand sky.

There was Enid Stamp Taylor, Renee Houston, Oliver Wakefield, Guy Middleton, Stanley Holloway, Hugh 'Tam' Williams. These names probably meant nothing to anyone now. These chaps were putting on their own little sketch. And one of them, who was a well-known producer, Wallace Douglas, fell ill and Guy Middleton came up to Haffner and said that Wallace Douglas was unwell and he wanted Haffner to take his part.

Should Haffner tell this story?

In this sketch Middleton was a colonel and Haffner was a subaltern. And all that happened was that Middleton would ask Haffner where he had got his breeches. And all Haffner had to reply was that he had got them in a shop in the Strand, sir.

No, thought Haffner. He should not.

He was so old, so woebegone, thought Zinka. She felt a tenderness for him. Tenderly, she tried to retrieve the conversation.

— You were in the war? asked Zinka.

— I was in the war, said Haffner. Of course. Everyone was.

He paused. He looked at her.

Zinka was wearing a grey boiler short-suit, with black tights and rouge noir fingernails. Her hair was brown and her eyes were blue. The style was beyond Haffner: he had no idea, any longer, whether this was a style at all. He no longer cared. She was so utterly and completely beautiful, thought Haffner. So absolute in her body.

Then Zinka took hold of his hands, and looked at his palms.

Haffner, amazed, asked her if she was reading his palm. Meditatively, ignoring Haffner's scepticism, Zinka said that he was intelligent.

— Unintelligent? misheard Haffner, depressed.

He shouldn't have been shocked. The women he wanted were so often unhurt by a feminine self-hatred. Instead, they were happily confident in describing how Haffner could fail.

— Intelligent, repeated Zinka.

A paper flower of relief unfolded itself in the solution of Haffner's soul. He smiled at her, as she continued to read from his hand. But, she added, sombrely, he was unlucky.

— Unlucky? repeated Haffner.

— Well, said Zinka, trying to reconsider. Yes. Unlucky. I am sorry. I tell things as they are.

Haffner looked round, in an effort to find comfort in the view. But the view had disappeared. All that was visible was human. There, as usual, were the usual diners. At the table by the opposite window sat Frau Tummel, and her husband. They sat silently, in their marriage of silence. So Haffner turned back to Zinka.

— You do not wish you were eating with her? said Zinka.

— Her? said Haffner. No no.

— I am glad, said Zinka.

He knew his place in the art of love: the comic figure, for ever grasping after the women who fled him. Just like Silenus, whose comically old flesh concealed the youth of the lust within.

He tended to see himself in poses. This was true. But I saw him as something else. Like the hero of every legend — you had to gnaw on him, like on a bone, to discover the richness, the inner meaning. So I preferred my private image. Haffner was his own matrioshka: concealing within himself the other, diminutive dolls of Haffner's infinite possibility.

Zinka used to live in a village with her grandmother. Haffner considered if he could think of any questions about this arrangement. He paused. So, asked Haffner, were her parents dead? Not at all, replied Zinka. She described their characters for him. Her mother was hysterical. Her father was calm. That was all he needed to know. Haffner paused again. In this pause, Zinka asked if he believed in God. Did she? asked Haffner, avoiding the question. She replied that she believed in an energy. And Haffner? He did not believe, said Haffner.

— I will tell you what you are, said Zinka. You are realistic, but also a dreamer. I think you are easy to melancholy. Is this true?

— Oh it's true, said Haffner.

— Yes, said Zinka. Now you tell me about myself.

— Oh, said Haffner. I think you are: I think you are tough, but you are not as tough as you want to be. Something softer there.

— Oh, said Zinka, you are fifty per cent true. No. No, you are much closer. Too close perhaps.

Haffner wondered what he was really doing here.

— I have no regrets, said Zinka. People have to live the moment.

Haffner murmured something indistinct.

And because Zinka seemed suddenly sad, Haffner asked her, delicately, if she were sad. Yes, she replied, she was sad. But she did not want to talk about it.

— My country, it is destroyed, said Zinka. The baddest country in Europe.

But Haffner had seen worse.

The light outside, as usual, still persisted. It was as if the light went on for ever. In this light, Haffner looked down at his plate. He had to confess, the food here distressed him. He had never been one for the Jewish food, the food of Eastern Europe. He preferred nouvelle cuisine to the heaviness of starch. In a sauce of sour cream and oil lay a dumpling, stuffed with pork. Haffner considered if at this late stage he should return to keeping kosher. It seemed desirable. The dumpling outdid him. First, it had been fried. This fried dumpling had then, surmised Haffner, been boiled. Nothing else could have created this texture, of the softest rubber. He did not understand it. In the sauce of sour cream and oil, small moments of bacon were visible.

In what way, thought Haffner, could this hotel be said to care about health? What was the point of the massages, the waters, the sauna?

He looked across at Frau Tummel. She was staring at him, angrily; and Herr Tummel was staring at his wife. He also seemed to be angry.

There had been a woman in love with her in Zagreb, Zinka was telling him. Did he understand this? He did, he assured her, he did. But why should she seem so proud of this fact, thought Haffner. It wasn't so strange, to fall in love. It just needed, in the end, someone else to be there. Oh Zinka was so tired of love, she said. And Haffner raised an eyebrow: a self-interested, altruistic eyebrow. He mentioned, for instance, Niko. Yes, she said: but Haffner knew Niko too. That boy. She was not sure he understood her. But no. She did not want to talk about this.

— No? said Haffner.

He began to worry that she wanted to mention the wardrobe, and all the pleasures which Haffner had seen. On this subject, he worried, he had no conversation.

No, she said. There were things it was good not to talk about. The matters of the heart. It was complicated. He did not want to hear this. Haffner tried to assure her that he did.

— No, she said. Not now.

The sex scene which was not a sex scene: this was the recent story of Niko and Zinka. The idyllic scene in the hotel room had been only theatre, after all. They were absent from each other. They coupled only in disguise, in the dark.

How could Haffner know this? Was it Haffner's fault, dear reader, if he did not know the inner history of Zinka?

No, Haffner wasn't free. Unlike the transparent and liberated reader, he couldn't be everywhere, like the bright encompassing air.

For these were the nights of Zinka. The concrete balcony to her apartment was covered by an advert, a scrim hung down ten floors from the roof. The scrim was printed with a woman on a cell phone, in some countryside, surrounded by birds. On Zinka's balcony, therefore, the reverse of a savage, eight-foot swallow looked in on her — observing the television in its mahogany hutch; a garden chair, for ever folded, in a corner; the reproductions of Impressionist paintings, from the era when leisure was invented. In the apartment block opposite hers, the forgetful cleaner — who returned home on the buses, disliking the organic smell of her shoes, the chemical smell of her hands — would leave random lights on, illuminating the darkness for the potential spectator. But there were no other spectators. Except for Zinka's books — an illustrated translation of Pushkin, a novel in Russian by Dovlatov, a history of ballet — which looked down on her and Niko in their bed.

And Niko would touch Zinka's thigh, gently — which began their new game. In response to Niko's roughness, Zinka now never gave him permission. He could do what he wanted, she said: just so long as he expected her to do nothing.

And so, sadly, Niko did.

Perhaps this, then, was one reason for her silence. Perhaps this was one reason why she said to Haffner that she didn't want to talk about herself. Instead, she wanted him to tell her about Haffner's war.

And she looked up at Haffner.

So Haffner began where he always began, with the long night of Haffner's spring in Italy: in the foothills around Anzio. Haffner got there on Valentine's Day. They were in the woods, on the flat ground, and the Germans, with the Ukrainians, were on the Alban Hills outside Rome. So they could see everything. There was nowhere you could escape. Everything was bound to hit something. The Germans had one wonderful gun — an 80 mm. Much better than anything the British had. They were sending over these great big heavies called Anzio Annies. Going for the docks. But it was much worse when they came over at night with the cluster bombs. On the whole, said Haffner, the British were very well dug in. But just about the time that Haffner got there, on Valentine's Day, was when the Germans made their one last big effort. They couldn't use their armour in that sort of mud. He didn't know it at the time. He didn't realise that those four or five days were the Germans' last chance to push the British and the Americans into the sea. They put everything into it. The noise, said Haffner. The noise. Their artillery was very good. The British had some destroyers outside the docks who were firing as well. And years later, on holiday in Madeira with his wife, he met a naval chap, who said: it was him. He was helping them. So there it was. Things got better when they began to see their own planes.

It was amazing, thought Haffner, how you settled down to a life: truly amazing. The chaps in the front were machine-gunned, killed in hand-to-hand fighting. And yet soon this seemed like a facon de vivre. His job as the second in command was to take up all the rations and things. And there was really only one way, which the Germans knew about: an alley.

Haffner paused. He considered himself. What could he tell her about Haffner's war? It seemed indescribable.

He remembered the yard in a town outside Alexandria, where he had enjoyed the greatest shrimp of his life, its flesh a white fluff inside the charred shell: there was a concrete reservoir, and a wind pump pumping water into it, clacking as it turned, casting a flickering shadow on the house.

This was all he could really tell her.

The problem about catastrophe, he had learned from the silences in his conversations with Papa, and then had learned for himself, from the silences in his own conversations with other people, was the incomprehension. There was the incomprehension of those who had seen nothing; and then there was the incomprehension of those who had seen everything.

Everyone persisted in the safety of flippancy. But maybe the flippancy was right.

At home, when the war was over, Livia would ask him why he was so private. She used to ask him this as if it were a fault, remembered Haffner — only idly noticing the fact that Frau Tummel was suddenly talking with animation to her husband. Livia expected Haffner to behave like a hero — to revel in his war stories. But Haffner never felt like a hero; not when he was being heroic. It had only bred in him a certain humour: a wit which could enjoy the gags of the emperors, like the one who, when a man asked for extension of his sick leave, ordered that this man should have his throat cut — for if the medicine had taken so long to work, then the man needed to be bled. With this humour, Haffner preserved his version of privacy. Livia used to upbraid him for his gaucheness at parties. He was always ready for his tete-a-tetes, she said. So why could he not be charming when there was more than one person present? And Haffner tried to explain that he had never been one for parties: for all the social whirl.

But maybe it was more of a problem that after the war Haffner's sense of humour had been replaced with something no one, really, wanted to know.

In Rome, Haffner had admired the triumphal column on which was carved a panel displaying a German baby being screamingly torn away from the arms of its mother by a stern Roman soldier. But most of all, he admired the Roman talent for the comic. Because — wrote a scholar in a booklet which Cesare bought and then translated out loud for Haffner, over a coffee in Piazza Navona — although a modern viewer might see this panel as deeply affecting, for the Romans it would have been amusing. It would have been sitcom.

And maybe Haffner and his Romans had it right. A war as a farce: this doesn't seem to me to be so implausible — with its mismatched exits and entrances, and its grandly outflanked speeches.

No, he hadn't told Livia about certain things. So he was hardly going to be able to do it here, thought Haffner, with a girl he hardly knew.

His anecdotes faded away.

But then Zinka said that her friend, she too had been in a war: the recent war. Haffner nodded. She once told Zinka that she had seen such a horrible thing: she had seen one of her neighbours with his mouth propped open with a piece of wood. Then they made him swallow sewage water. This was the woman who loved her.

— She committed suicide, said Zinka, thoughtfully.

— Who? said Haffner.

— That woman, said Zinka.

— The lesbian? asked Haffner.

— Yes, said Zinka.

— In what way? said Haffner.

— Drinking pills, said Zinka.

— It's easier, said Haffner.

The conversation paused.

This wasn't something that she told people, said Zinka. But she would tell Haffner.

This struck Haffner as strange, but he was feeling so unsure of what was happening that he decided to let this thought go. So intent was he on constructing his own escape, his desertion from his duty, he didn't consider that, for Zinka, Haffner could represent an escape too.

There was one time, said Zinka, when she was walking down the street in Zagreb. And some soldiers were outside an embassy. And she was with her friend. As they approached, the soldiers began to raise their rifles. This was true.

He didn't doubt it, said Haffner.

And this was what she had never forgotten, said Zinka. They were shouting that they were nothing: they were only walking home. And eventually, of course, as he could see, nothing happened. But at the moment when it seemed possible the soldiers would shoot, said Zinka, she stepped behind her friend. And although immediately she stepped back out, level with her, she could never forget this moment of self-betrayal.

There was a pause.

And at this moment, Haffner — timeless — felt everything returning to him.

The beach at Anzio strewn with bodies, as if everyone were sunbathing.

But most of all, in the series of women who had graced the life of Haffner, here, at its zenith, there was Zinka — for whom he felt such absolute adoration. Yes, at this moment, thought Haffner, extravagant through nostalgia, ignorant of Zinka, he could have endured anything, if only she would love him. Even if there was, I feel, little left for Haffner to endure. Yes, this was Haffner's ideology now. Maybe it could even borrow a slogan. Love me as little as you like — this was Haffner: but just love me as long as you can.

For Haffner believed in coincidence — he saw his life as a system of signs. He scanned each new acquaintance for the meaning they were trying to figure in the everlasting life of Haffner. So here, in his finale, he could only see in Zinka a kindred spirit, the twin for whom he had been searching all his life. The twin whom Haffner tried to align as closely as possible to himself.

— Oh but that was nothing, said Haffner.

There were so many ways, he said, that you could feel ashamed. Not just the obvious betrayal. In Anzio, he said, at night, they had to leave the bodies on the beach: it was too dangerous to go back for anyone. So Haffner had to lie there. And a boy was calling, quietly: Mama Mama Mama.

— Mama Mama Mama, said Haffner.

All he wanted, said Haffner, was for this boy to bloody shut up.

It was only some years later that he realised how much he was like his father — when Esther reminded him of the story her grandfather had once told her. He described to her the wailing you could hear from no-man's-land, at night. At this point, he recalled, Papa would begin to shout. Because Papa was still angry at the disparity between this wailing and the official British telegrams, informing the anguished families that their heroes had died instantly, from a bullet in the heart.

— Sometimes, Haffner said to Zinka, one has conversations which are impossible with one's wife.

— But you're not married, said Zinka. Your wife, she is dead.

— It's the principle, he said.

And Haffner smiled.

— She's still alive in spirit, said Haffner.

And Zinka smiled too.

And in the sudden pause of their understanding, Haffner could still not prevent himself remembering the first time he had used this line about impossible conversations. It was one of his ordinary lines: in the Travelodge, at the business convention. Each time he used it, even now, even though he could remember all the times he had used it insincerely, he believed in it as true.

As if to celebrate this moment of Haffner's glory, the small jazz band serenading the hotel's residents began a melody from the oeuvre of Haffner's hero, Artie Shaw; and, cushioned by this melody, Frau Tummel descended on him, as if from the highest clouds.

Haffner looked to Zinka. Zinka looked away, staring at the indifferent mountains, as if finding in their indifference some kind of solace.

Frau Tummel was simply here, she said, to have the smallest word with Haffner. She beamed at Zinka. She did not want to interrupt.

He was all ears, said Haffner. She was sorry? said Frau Tummel. He was listening, said Haffner.

But this was not entirely true. The melody began to bother Haffner. He couldn't remember the title. Even as Frau Tummel stood in front of him. It suddenly seemed important. And maybe this wasn't just a ruse of Haffner's. For his only dates left were the songs. The songs in which dead people sang about their immortal love. As soon as he heard a song, then everything came back to him. With the songs, he could happily wallow in the wreckage of Haffner.

She just wanted to check that they still had their arrangement for the next day, said Frau Tummel. And Haffner nodded: a toy dog.

That was wonderful, exclaimed Frau Tummel. Because if he didn't want to, then he only needed to say.

It was a conversation Haffner was practised in. Of course he wanted to see her, he said, fluent and abstract with flattery.

In that case, said Frau Tummel, she would leave them be. Or perhaps, she added, she could take a glass of aquavit with them — glancing over at her husband making pencilled notes in his guidebook.

Zinka sighed. Haffner was silent. Encouraged, Frau Tummel motioned to the distant waiter. She pointed to Haffner's glass of aquavit. She mimed her desire for another. Then no, she reconsidered: she called the waiter over and ordered a glass of dry white wine.

— The aquavit, she explained to Haffner and Zinka, it is not for me.

She smiled, at Zinka, who did not smile back.

Frau Tummel, thought Haffner, was the absolute bourgeois. She embodied strength: the statuesque matronly repression. There was nothing, thought Haffner, which Frau Tummel could not sublimate. And perhaps this, if he were honest with himself, was also why Frau Tummel so appealed to him. He liked the effort of her strength. Her strength enchanted him. Yes, he realised, for Frau Tummel he felt a spreading tenderness, welling under Haffner's soul, like a bruise.

Frau Tummel was talking about her husband. She was playing the part of the wife. One never knew, she said, how much one was doing the right thing.

— Perhaps, said Frau Tummel, I am not the right woman for him.

— Come now, said Haffner. Of course you are!

And perhaps if he had thought more precisely or extensively he might have decided that this was not exactly the right tone; that seduced as he may have been by Frau Tummel's calm he should still have understood its fragility. He should still have expected that his pity was not what Frau Tummel wanted.

He really didn't need to talk to her like this, she said. It was hardly elegant. To this accusation, Haffner made some kind of noise. In this noise, he hoped to register a charming protestation. Frau Tummel regarded him. He was useless, she observed.

— No denying it! said Haffner, cheekily. He opened out his arms in a happy gesture of surrender.

And in her irritation at Haffner's refusal to offer her even the most minimal affection, Frau Tummel informed Haffner that she really should be returning to her husband, and so rose swiftly from her chair, thus colliding with the waiter who — as if he and Frau Tummel were a carefully rehearsed double act, a famous pair of clowns — tipped the wine gently over Zinka, as if in benediction.

Frau Tummel, in a flurry of mortification, tried to apologise to Zinka, who waved her irritably away, pressing her napkin to her top. Haffner looked out of the window, at the sunset, at the inexpertly murdered sky.

He scanned the horizon — like isolated Crusoe, with the craziest beard, wishing for a rescue which he never, now, expected.

Haffner was timeless. Perhaps this moment where Haffner scanned the horizon was one small proof. As he watched, he wondered to himself how far this scene was his fault. He searched the scene for hidden motives. And as he did so, all the previous allegations against Haffner fluently returned to him — trapped on his stage, in his follow spot, the ripples of a sequinned backdrop behind him, facing the disdain of his miniature audience: one couple waiting for another act, the manager himself, the confused splinter group of a stag party, one baffled drunk soldier on leave. In Haffner's lone state, Frau Tummel multiplied into the other women — like Barbra, or Esther — who had found Haffner so disappointing.

His efforts were rarely enough, thought Haffner — as he stood up with a superfluous napkin which he held out to Zinka, who did not see it, occupied as she was in preventing Frau Tummel from offering advice, while wiping off the sticky sheen of alcohol from her skin. It was so often the same, he thought — picking up his own glass, correcting himself, putting it gently down: like the confrontation with Livia, after the Allied liberation of Rome, who was wild with jealousy, having been sent a photo of the Colosseum.

It was not the usual tourist cliche.

In the centre of the photo was a jeep, on which an Allied soldier was sitting, at the wheel: a white carnation was a badge in his beret. A suntanned woman in a navy dress, with large sunglasses up on her blonde hair, was showing something to this Allied officer, which was making him contentedly smile. While beside them an assortment of elegantly coiffed, sunglassed Italians were clapping.

Haffner had always denied that this was Haffner.

The photo had been sent to Livia — whom Haffner had at that time not seen for two years, not since he had been mobilised straight after their marriage in 1942 — by a so-called friend of hers who had seen it in the newspapers. She was jealous, said Haffner. She was mad with jealousy. It was a spiteful thing to do.

It was true that there was some ambiguity. The man in the photograph was looking down, in profile: so there was room for doubt. And this doubt also left room for Haffner to escape the accusations. When, fifty years later, Benjamin discovered this photograph too, going through a pile of Haffner's things, Haffner repeated his excuses again. Why then, thought Benji, had Haffner kept this photograph for fifty years, if it wasn't of him? Why would you preserve the triumph of another man?

But I thought I knew. I tried to tell Benji; but Benji was unconvinced. For I was the only one who believed in Haffner's innocence.

This photograph marked Haffner's jazz. His ultimate in pure freedom. It represented every moment in which Haffner had escaped, momentarily, from the observing world.

Like the riffs he had heard played on Artie Shaw's masterpiece 'Nightmare', in the rundown clubs of the Via Margutta. At some point, after all, you lost your moral compass. This was true. But it was difficult to know where. The borders of the bourgeoisie and bohemia were so hard to identify — like the manic jazz tune of Artie Shaw's which was now returning to Haffner, as he sat there in the dining room, flanked by two gilt mirrors so that an infinite regress of Haffners looked with joyful affection at Zinka: her wet hair slicked to one side, like all the androgynous fashions of Haffner's century: the flappers and the nouvelle vague, the movida after Franco, the perverse and civilised dolce vita of the Fascists and the Communists in Rome.

Zinka stood up, and said that he could follow her. And Haffner, who wanted no fuss in his public life, who wanted no attention to be drawn to him, followed mutely after Zinka, nodding adieu to Frau Tummel.

The air above Zinka smelled of florals and herbs: the intoxicating warm forest contained in the wine she had been doused in. Safely alone, in the hotel foyer, she contemplated her ruined hair, the map of stains forming on her dress. And Zinka said to Haffner that perhaps he could escort her to his room, so that she could wash.

Oh Zinka! Haffner would have bathed her himself. He would have prepared baths of asses' milk, vials of perfumes. He was an old man still piqued by lust, by love. Of this, Haffner had no illusions.

He had so often believed in the counterlife, the myth of Haffner's excess. A Haffner untrammelled by his marriage, his Atlantic existence. Haffner unencumbered! Like the most distant tropical sunset, reached by regal Concorde, supersonic — its front wheel propped under its chin, like the solid goatee of a monumental pharaoh. But his escapes were always so fleeting. A night with a girl, a night at the opera: these were Haffner's Cinco de Mayo; his risorgimento: the Parisian evenements of Haffner's savage uprising.

These were the new life which Haffner dreamed of — but it always needed, he felt, someone to take him there. And no one, in the end, had really wanted to go.

So maybe, Haffner thought, he understood. The problem had been that he always wanted an elopee. Which meant that the problem, really, was Haffner. He could conjure with time as much as he liked, but the anecdotes only proved one thing. They were a strip cartoon which always involved the same dogged character: a Haffneriad. For the metamorphoses which lust invented in Haffner were never permanent. The glimpses of other Haffners — Haffner the New Yorker, Haffner the Roman, Haffner the free — did not transform him: just like Silberman, in Palestine, in 1944. Haffner had been told to do something with a couple of the other Jewish soldiers in his platoon. Surely something could be done to tone them down? Which Haffner contested. For nothing could be done with Silberman — disguised as a non-Jew with his clever costume of yarmulke, tefillin, and the extraordinary rapidity with which he entered arguments in Hebrew at roadside cafes frequented only by Russian Zionists and the occasional Zionist mule. Now, fifty years too late, Haffner had some sympathy for Silberman: disguised only in the guise of himself.

Haffner Roman

After Haffner had located the key — with its tasselled mane — Zinka immediately made for Haffner's bathroom. She went in, slammed the door. From within the bathroom, then came the sound of running water.

Haffner sat on the edge of the bed; took off his shoes; discovered the Lives of the Caesars, in paperback, underneath the scalloped valance; placed the book on the bedside table, beside his edition of Gibbon; and he sighed.

Three eras, he decided, marked any possible grandeur he might have ever had, the eras when he was most true to himself: there was the war; then the glorious 1970s; and maybe, he considered, now. At this coda to his life — as if his life had been extended, in a moment of grace, just slightly too long.

Zinka had a mole on her left cheek, tusked with twin hairs. It was the same mole, with the same tusks of hair, as the one which had belonged to a girl whom Haffner had met when the war in North Africa was over. This was 1942, or thereabouts. The regiment had gone to Bone, a lovely little place. And there it was, somehow, that he had met a lovely Jewish family who gave two or three of them a dinner. Haffner often wondered what happened to those nice people in North Africa, after the war was over. He always remembered the girl, with the darkest skin Haffner had ever seen, playing 'Invitation to the Waltz' on the piano. The next day the family arranged for them to be called up to read a portion of the Torah at the synagogue.

An echo in the bathroom, Zinka asked him if he wanted to come in.

He didn't think that this was his right — this openness which women so often displayed towards him. He never felt so confident as that. It was why the women loved him: his inherent modesty. He knew that this was happening by a grace which was beyond him.

Joyful, as he stepped into the bathroom, on stockinged feet, he paused at his window — where the sky was now one single shade of red, like a colour sample.

And Haffner was transported.

For just as the sky was now a painting of paint, to Haffner's distracted eyes, so he remembered how, in 1973, he had seen an exhibition of pure colour: at MoMA in New York. The exhibition was of paintings which were simply called Colors. The trip, on this Sunday afternoon, was Livia's idea. Haffner, always eager to discover new maps of his cultural ignorance, happily agreed.

Thin slabs of colour were laid next to each other: like in a paint catalogue. There seemed no genius, thought Haffner, no sublime. It was the absence of hyperbole — but precisely at this point Haffner found himself warming to this painting. Yes, this — so Haffner once told me — was the only art which he had ever liked. Livia had expected him to act with his normal grumpy chutzpah in the face of the masterpieces of modernism. But Haffner was transfixed. He was transfigured.

Long after Livia had left him for the cafeteria, where she sat with a filter coffee and three shrugs of sugar, Haffner still stood there, gazing into colour.

Such freedom! Although Haffner also enjoyed trying to trace the patterns in the grid — trying to work out if the repetitions of the yellow or the red could be predicted. He wasn't sure they could. So he let his eyes go endless.

Livia had disliked this abstract art: this most abstract of abstract art. It seemed emotionless, she thought. It was cold. This was what she told Haffner in the leather nook of a banquette at the Plaza, in the Oak Room. It had nothing to do with the real world. And Haffner had discovered a tirade within himself: that what the fuck did she care about the real world; that as far as Haffner was concerned there was no such thing as the real world; that this painting — to which, he reminded her, she herself had taken him, it wasn't Haffner's idea — this painting was as real as anything else; that in fact it seemed to Haffner an accurate portrayal of the real world in its clarity, its order; that quite frankly he saw little difference between the world which Livia called real and the world of colour in the grid on a wall at MoMA.

In the colours, Haffner found something he loved. He didn't understand it. But he knew that he admired it. This world beyond the world: where everything was pure.

There in her bath, Zinka was a vision of bubbles. Haffner knew the word for this. It was a fantasia. The vision of Walt Disney, the master of cartoons.

From the costume of her bubbles, Zinka said that first he must blindfold himself. Haffner queried this. Yes, she said. If he wanted to stay. He could take that stocking from over there. Haffner looked: a sliver of black pantyhose was slumped under her dress. He looked back at her. She nodded. That was the condition, she said.

These were the trials, thought Haffner. He was happy with the trials. Yes, for pleasure, Haffner could undergo anything.

With clumsy hands, Haffner tied the stocking limply over his eyes: a robber baron. But Haffner didn't care. He could still see: cloudy, in black and white. The peep shows of his maturity.

Haffner transformed by lust! Haffner crowned with the head of an ass!

If Haffner wanted, she said, he could now come and help to wash her. Would he like that? If he wanted, he could take that sponge and wash her back. Just so long as he was careful.

The fragrances from the water overtook Haffner. He stood over her. He wished he could have seen more. There her outline was, like the coyest vision of Hollywood, submerged by infinite foam. Her hair was done up in a hazy bun. One hand was leaning over the rim of the bath. She was looking up at him.

She told him to tighten the stocking. Haffner obeyed.

Then he took off his jacket, pushed the cuffs of his sweatshirt up — a bad imitation of his father, whose billowing sleeves were always secured with two silver bands, like the neat cuffs for napkins. He took a sponge, and dunked it: then expressed the water in warm rivulets over the curve of her back, with its peeling patches of foam.

An incubus, Haffner hunkered over Zinka. Perhaps this was another image which Haffner thought he should have minded. Haffner, however, never minded the embarrassments in his pursuit of pleasure. The embarrassments were just the acknowledged debt one owed.

Just below the disintegrating level of foam, he could see — through the thin blindfold — the momentary beginning of Zinka's breasts. He could see the side of her left breast, but the slope was something else. Pretending not to look, he tried to notice as much as he could: to preserve it for the playground of his memory, while Zinka told him that he was being very kind. He was quite the gentleman.

Haffner wondered how long he could maintain a courtly conversation with a woman while blindfolded with her stocking. Its scent was odd: a mixture of must and shoe leather and the faintest last echo of her perfume.

Yes really, she said. He was a civilised man, and she liked that.

She flattered him. As Haffner had been flattered all his life, by the women. The women loved to flatter him: they loved to exercise his ego. He was cosseted. Not every woman, obviously. Not, most importantly, Livia. But the women Haffner went for in his secret life, his private life, were images of his mother. They told him how wonderful he was. They wrapped presents for him, surprises. On his sixtieth birthday, a woman for whom Haffner had only the most vestigial of passions privately presented him with a giant trunk of presents: sixty, each wrapped inside the other. A present of presents for the birthday boy. But maybe Livia had praised him like this, at the beginning. Maybe she simply got tired of his demands for flattery: or simply realised the untruth of all her praise — the practised way in which he enticed her with his vulnerability.

But there was another explanation. Her love was quieter because it was more true. Unlike everyone else, she trusted in Haffner's love. She would never, she once whispered to him, be loved by anyone else in the way that Haffner loved her. So how could she refuse him?

Zinka looked at Haffner's hand on her shoulder, drowning it in droplets. It was a girlish hand, she said. And Haffner wondered if at this late stage in his life he should waste himself in exercising his vanity on this kind of phrase. He decided that he had no choice. How could he invert the habits of a lifetime? He was not up to it.

So Haffner felt silently annoyed, silently exercised on behalf of his masculine hands.

Zinka asked if he were satisfied. He repeated the word to her: a question. Was he happy? she asked. But of course, replied Haffner, with a delirious grin. Then he paused. But maybe. Maybe what?

she asked him. No, it was nothing, said Haffner. But he had to tell her, said Zinka. Well then, maybe, Haffner wondered, he might be allowed to kiss her.

Now that, said Zinka, would be a very improper request. And Haffner, downcast, agreed. But, he added, contemplating how far down the path of humiliation Haffner might be prepared to walk, it would make him very happy.

He discovered that the path of humiliation had unexpectedly scenic views.

For although Zinka eventually said, from the depths of her silence, that yes, he could kiss her, it was not the kiss which Haffner was expecting.

She raised her left knee so that it rose from the water, crested with scintillating foam.

— You may kiss me on the knee, said Zinka.

Haffner considered Zinka's knee. At its tip, there was a small scar, translucent. A blurred and miniature map of France.

His own knees hurt him, cramped there on the bathroom tiles. He tried to ignore this. He bent his head to Zinka, hoping to see beyond the clouding bubbles: to the dark crevices of Zinka. He could not.

And Haffner kissed her.

His mouth filled with a froth of foam. It gilded his upper lip with a stray moustache. It embittered his mouth with chemicals.

How pleasurable was this? Haffner asked himself. Was it enough? For her part, Zinka thought it was. But Haffner wanted to lick her until her true smell returned: the delicious bare smell of her skin. Not the sterility of artificial foam. He asked if he could kiss her again. She said no. She was going to wash now. It was time for him to go back into the bedroom.

Haffner tried to stand up. He could not. Like some immovable sphinx, with buried paws. He could only turn his head away. He tried to explain this to Zinka, with the utmost maintenance of his dignity. In that case, said Zinka, she would just get out and dry herself. He must not look, she said. He promised this? Haffner promised. He turned his head.

There was a surge of water beside him. He tried to wrench the stocking away. Too late, he gazed at Zinka, with her back to him, wrapping herself in the softness of Haffner's towels: a Roman matron, in her flowing toga.

Sourly, he tasted the foam in his mouth. There was no doubt, thought Haffner, that his dignity was in danger. And yet, he was discovering, he seemed curiously avid for this degradation. It seemed, this ruin of Haffner, to be a kind of triumph too.

This wasn't a new motif in the life of Raphael Haffner.

In Rome, after the liberation, while Haffner waited for an infinitely postponed decision on his regiment's movements, he used to go up to the Pincio Gardens, and smoke his traded cigarettes, dropping the butts in the sand. Even up there, the smell from the sewage was heavy. The cigarettes, among other things, were Haffner's improvised pomander.

The light up there was pulverised; it was dust. The Tiber below Haffner was sluggish mud. A breeze made the leaves on the poplars silver themselves. Their pollen floated whitely on to the ground.

And Haffner looked down on the ruined, eternal city. It was the ruins, considered Haffner, which were precisely what was eternal.

Yes, this seemed to be Haffner's pattern.

Up from Anzio, before they reached Rome, they had ended up sleeping in the grounds of Ninfa. At that time, Haffner had not been horticultural. He had not admired the romantic unkempt wilderness. Kept awake by mosquitoes, Haffner instead found himself oppressed by the death of kings.

The gardens of Ninfa were built on the ruins of Ninfa — a town which had been sacked by its neighbours in the thirteenth century. The basilica had once held the coronation of a pope: now it was a dismantled heap of stones. Then, in the twentieth century, the town had been made into a true romantic garden: a meditation on the ruins of time. But Haffner had been troubled. There was no romance for him in ruins. They made him sad. Although this sympathy could so easily have been a more inward form of sympathy: Haffner's empathy for himself. In these cities' destruction, he only saw the futility of Haffner. The hollowness of Haffner.

— I will be remembered, he once told me, for my after-dinner speeches.

And then he paused.

— But that's worth nothing, he said.

And then Haffner smiled, glorious in the knowledge of his defeat.

Awkwardly, Haffner unfolded himself upright, via the rim of the bath, then the rim of the basin. He looked around — at the emptying swirl of the water, the deliquescent towels on the soaked mat. His masculine cologne was sitting on the shelf, its bottle embossed with a white tear of toothpaste foam. The toothpaste itself lay there, its tail twisted like a comma — like a fortune-telling miracle fish: its red plastic curled into the sign for passion, for jealousy, for sadness. The scenes of pleasure usually ended up this wasted, like the hotel in Venice where Haffner and the girl who had chosen him from his perch at the bar proceeded to order a feast of room service, one bottle and dish at a time, delighted by the maid's growing confusion between curiosity and distaste.

You should be happy for the things you get, Mama had said. No man should think he could have more than the Lord intended. So Haffner was humble. For at least the worship of women was a brave and noble aim.

Methodically, he laid out the full range of his medicines, in preparation for the night ahead. They included pills to combat the intensity of his blood pressure, pills to lower the ratio of bad cholesterol to good, antidepressants. Then the more soothing medicines: the ones to relieve Haffner's body of pain; the ones to make him sleep.

He picked up the wet towels, scented with Zinka's body. Then she appeared in the doorway.

Did he want to walk her home? asked a clothed and beautiful version of Zinka. To which a reduced version of Haffner wailed in response that the idea that he should ever be parted from her oppressed him with an absolute melancholy. If this miniature Haffner were to be allowed to rule reality, they would never be parted.

So Haffner said yes; and went out with his chaperone into the midsummer night.

Haffner Buoyant

To kiss a girl's knee, while on one's own knees, might have seemed, to the outside observer, a little pitiable, thought Haffner. To the outside observer, it might well have seemed to indicate some incipient breakdown. But Haffner tended to disagree. He admired the effects. The sound and light. The softly spattered fireworks above the ruined chateau: the fading and luminous palm fronds, thistles, water lilies in the sky.

For Haffner was in love.

They had left the lake behind; and the park, with its watchful factories. In what looked, to Haffner's bourgeois eye, like a shanty town, a tzigane was carrying a blue gas canister and a gold can of beer, following the dug-out route of a possible but phantom pipeline. Then they found themselves in another, less private park. It was a shortcut, said Zinka. At the centre of this park was a boating lake, embossed with a fountain, a fraying plume of foam. The rowing boats by the side of the lake crossed their arms neatly; the pedalos were chained together, clopping. Yes, there they were, at midnight: with the monuments to the source of the river; the monument to the unknown soldier. All the angels in stone, their wings in imitation of the earthly wings of pigeons.

Haffner's knees, aching from their bathtime antics, made walking difficult for Haffner. As they passed a sinuous bench, he asked if they could sit down, just for a moment.

— Not yet, she said. Not yet.

He was so old. And Zinka was so young. These facts were undeniable. But Haffner did not care. He looked at her, she smiled and Haffner did not care if this girl were using him; if she looked on him as an old fool. He was an old fool. There was no shame in that.

— How old am I? asked Zinka.

— Thirty? hazarded Haffner, baffled utterly.

— So old? said Zinka, disappointed.

— I was wrong? asked Haffner.

— A little, said Zinka.

And she, beckoning to tired Haffner, began to climb some small and artificial hill. Wincing, Haffner followed her. They sat for a while, to ease Haffner's legs, in the bandstand. But no band could stand this bandstand — thought Haffner. Dejectedly he regarded the signs of a struggle, a flight in haste: two condoms; a cigarette packet and its scattered assortment of butts, some blushing with lipstick, some not; a bottle of beer, without any beer. He looked out over the landscape.

From this point, perched on an artificial mound, Haffner saw the fields outside the city; the yellow rape fields, now blue in the dark, against which were dabbed the cypresses' black Japanese brushmarks.

From here, Zinka told him, she was fine. She was just in that apartment block — the one he could see, on the other side of the park. Haffner slowly nodded. She kissed him goodbye on his cheek.

Around him clouded his life: its particles — as usual — suspended, motionless. He hardly knew where he was: or to whom he belonged.

But no, just right now, I'm not quite in the mood for Haffner, and his confusions. Instead, I am into the different confusions of Zinka.

For Haffner suspected that to Zinka it was simply a matter of the usual story: an old man being used by a young girl. But this, I think, was not fair to the complicated romance of Zinka.

He was, thought Zinka, the first man she had ever met who enjoyed it when she teased him. He did not mind when one praised him for the smallness of his hands. He did not mind when you asked him to follow you, when you refused him the kisses you knew he wanted from you.

To Zinka, Haffner represented freedom. He had a politesse which she admired. This would have seemed unlikely to the women who had known the previous incarnations of Haffner: the forgetter of birthdays and anniversaries, the man incapable of returning a phone call. But maybe Zinka was not so wrong.

In front of her apartment block there was a water feature which she had never seen working: in its trough lay a ready-made of garbage. So she looked up instead, at the giant advert covering her balcony: the manic woman, the manic birds.

He didn't need his pride. This, she thought, was why she liked him. At last, she had discovered a relationship which could be improvised by Zinka.

And as Zinka went into the kitchen, to find some food — emerging with a packet of crisps — above her hovered the moon, the clouds in a cirrus formation which watched over the buildings with their scaffolding, their satellite dishes and air-conditioning units, the adverts (Heineken: Meet You There), the raised blinds and the shut blinds: all the domestic paraphernalia.

She turned back the two folding doors to the television. She switched on some form of American TV. A baseball star was showing the camera crew round his house. They were approaching the bedroom.

He was going to say, thought Zinka, that this was where the magic happened.

She reached in the packet for some crisps; her fingers emerged empty, but dandruff 'd with salt.

— This is where the magic happens, said the baseball star.

And Zinka marvelled, silently, looking out at the suburbs by night, through the advert's gauze: wishing she could have told someone. First, she thought of Niko. But she wasn't sure Niko would understand any humour, let alone hers. And then she thought of Haffner.

And there she paused.

On the packet of her paprika crisps, a slice of potato with arms and legs beckoned to her with delirious eyes.

Alone in the midsummer night, Haffner had wandered off towards the hotel — on a road marked only by stray houses, then a Service Auto, beside a shop which seemed to sell the million varieties of cigarette, displayed behind glass cases, like extinct species of insect. Then a pizza place. And then a strip joint.

The twenty-four-hour bar (Service Non-stop!) into which Haffner descended, down a steep flight of stairs, was apparently in its busiest period. A group of possibly Polish truckers and a couple of policemen off duty made up the front row. Behind them, amphitheatrically, were ranged an assortment of men.

Haffner, however, wasn't here for the men.

He watched the women extend their legs around a stainless steel pole. He observed the way their breasts fell forward, elongated pyramids, as they leaned over — touching their toes in some strange imitation of an eighties aerobics routine, without the pink leg warmers, the turquoise sweatbands.

Then, in the crowd, Haffner recognised Niko: Zinka's boyfriend. He felt a descending qualm, a chime inside his chest. Niko gestured to him, warmly. He wanted him, it seemed, to join Niko's group. Haffner wondered about this.

He decided he had no choice.

— You all speak English? said Haffner to Niko.

— Of course we speak English. Fuck you, said Niko.

— That's a good accent you've got, said Haffner.

— Merci, said Niko.

It was the world of men.

— This man, said Niko, he look after my mad girl tonight. She bored you?

— No no, said Haffner, brightly.

— Yes, she bored you, said Niko. It's OK. We all understand. And everyone, including wistful Haffner, laughed.

— You want to play a trust game? said Niko. It is what we are doing. You can zip the person next to you — zip zip. Only zap the person across from you.

— No, said Haffner.

— Zap, said Niko.

— You mean zip, said Haffner.

— Yes, said Niko.

— Can we stop this? asked Haffner.

On stage, a girl was now entirely naked, apart from a pair of translucent platform heels, on which she was balancing with a grace and ease which charmed old Haffner's heart. But not Niko's. She lacked flair, he argued. If, however, Haffner wanted her. . He indicated that he had not finished his sentence. Haffner, however, was beyond the innuendos now. The masculine, and its zest for the tight-lipped, no longer charmed him.

He sadly nodded no.

— This is what you are here for? asked Niko.

Wearily, Haffner explained that, in fact, it was not why he was here. Or not officially. Nor primarily. Haffner was in this town to secure his heritage, his inheritance. He was here to do honour to his wife.

Angrily, he began a tirade against the state. He could not understand it. The bureaucracy bewildered him. It demeaned the human spirit. Why did no one seem to care? What, he asked Niko, did you have to do in this country to get anything done? He only wanted what was his due. He was hardly demanding the moon.

— You know, said Niko, I like you.

— I like you too, said Haffner.

— Yes, I like you, said Niko, then wandered off, leaving Haffner with Niko's friends, who did not seem to share his pure love of Haffner.

Ignored, listening to Niko's friends talk freely about him in a language he could not understand, Haffner sat and watched the women. If these men wanted to mock him, then so be it. He could do abasement. The silent pattern of his life had been delicately training him, thought Haffner, for these moments of humiliation. Like the time when he came home to discover that his father had sold all his bar mitzvah presents, arguing that they only took up space in the house, declining to discuss the possibility that he was going to use the money for some selfish gain. Yes, Raphael Haffner was used to the destruction of his hopes.

Then Niko came back.

— You want this place? said Niko. Maybe we can do this for you. But it costs.

— I'm sorry? said Haffner.

— You want this place? said Niko.

— I don't understand, said Haffner.

He understood, of course, that Niko had a proposal. It wasn't the deal which was beyond him. It was the fact that Niko seemed to think he could effect such a deal: this was beyond the limits of Haffner's scepticism.

— Simple, said Niko.

He began to explain. It all depended on knowing the right people; and Niko knew the right man. It was not so difficult. It all depended on the right things getting into the right hands.

— You are not from here, said Niko.

This was just the way things were. Everyone knew how this worked. Either you could go through the ordinary ways of doing things, or you could enter the speed road. It was just a question of speed. Then the papers could get handed over, and the villa would belong to Haffner. The wheels would be oiled.

— No questions ask, said Niko.

There was a pause. In this pause, Haffner considered the perfect bodies of imperfect women.

— I am your patron, said Niko.

— Cash? asked Haffner, suspicious.

— Cash, said Niko. You crazy or what?

Niko didn't really understand, he said, why Haffner needed any more detail at all. He only needed to know this. If he was so impatient.

— I'm not impatient, said Haffner.

If he were so impatient, said Niko, then things could be worked out. He had seen this problem before. He knew how to fix it.

Haffner had to understand, said Niko, that it was still the same people in charge. Yes, Niko knew what had happened. Haffner's papers would be sitting there, ignored, in someone's office. Just waiting for a reason to be dealt with.

— Let me think about it, said Haffner.

And as he tried to balance his doubts as to Niko's efficacy — his general untrustworthiness, the danger of relying too much on a man whom he had spied on only the night before, and whose girlfriend had so recently been soaping herself in Haffner's bath — against the obvious benefit of having, as he used to say, a man on the ground, Haffner excused himself: desperate to find a toilet, a cubicle where Haffner could think.

But reality continued to pursue him. He took a few steps, into a corridor which bore graffiti, torn posters, an exhibition of faulty plumbing. Then all the lights went out.

And Haffner was in the dark.

Practical, Haffner told himself that he mustn't get this wrong: he didn't want to lose his way. To his surprise, in a basement, in a bar, in a wasteland, he found himself wishing he had the practical wisdom of Frau Tummel. He stopped. He considered this thought.

To whom was Haffner loyal? It seemed unsolvable. There seemed so many ways for Haffner to demonstrate his disloyalty. Livia, the obvious candidate, was so fluently replaced by all her avatars, her rivals.

In the dark, Haffner edged his way along the wall — his hand extended, palm flat: directing invisible traffic. Distant whoops of masculine joy reached him from the main area, whoops which were tinged, now, for Haffner, with a poignancy. It seemed unlikely he would ever see humans again. Then suddenly the wall gave way, as it transformed itself into a door. Haffner peered into the black. Soothing plashings from what he thought could be urinals echoed throughout the room. Was this a bathroom? wondered Haffner. He could not be sure. It might have been, for instance, the hideout of the janitor.

Then he discovered one tiled wall. It decided Haffner on the question of a bathroom. Where else did one find ceramic? He ignored, for instance, the possibilities of storerooms, the opportunities of kitchens. Facing this wall, Haffner stood, unbuttoned his fly, and began the lengthy process of unburdening himself — telling himself that, after all, it wasn't as if Haffner disliked the dark. Bourgeois he may have been, but Haffner wasn't spoiled. He started working at Warburg's in the winter of 1946: the nightmarish winter, when the electrics failed and everyone in the City worked by candlelight. The clerks sat with their feet encased in typewriter covers stuffed with newspaper — gigantic and ineffectual slippers, improvised snowshoes. That spring, the streets were still a mess of rubble sprouting woodland plants — ragwort, groundsel. The dark had nothing on Haffner.

When he emerged, the lights were still not on. Now, however, a selection of torches had been discovered, and lighters, and solitary candles. A man was savagely strumming an acoustic guitar.

— Like a refugee camp? Niko breathed into Haffner's startled ear.

Haffner stared at him.

— So wonderful, no? said Niko.

Haffner looked around. In chiaroscuro, a girl was holding a flash-light above her head, like a handheld shower. In the sway of its light, she was dancing. As the light swayed, her breasts swayed with it. Another girl was on all fours, while a man mimicked the act of whipping her: his whip ascending in flourishes, an undulant lasso. The shadows made momentary blindfolds on the man's face; or the girls acquired sudden grimaces, as if from the painted masks of Venice, which Haffner had looked at, in wonder, in 1952, at the carnival with Livia — while she began to cry beside him, describing the carnivals she had seen before the war. Which seemed so long ago, she said. And already, at this point, Haffner had considered if he could ever leave Livia — because this was how he tested all his affections, by imagining him leaving them behind — and had realised that, for him, it was unimaginable. She was the only person he would never leave.

— Vodka? asked Niko.

— Perhaps not, said Haffner.

— Maybe you prefer tea? asked Niko. It is more British?

— A double vodka, said Haffner.

Returning with a plastic cup awash with vodka, Niko asked Haffner if he knew that they had all survived radiation. Or survived as much as they could. Oh yes, many years ago, when they were children, a factory had blown up a hundred kilometres south of here, but the distance was nothing, said Niko. The radiation was everywhere, all over the countryside.

— The motherfuckers, they killed us. Fucked us, said Niko.

His sister, he told Haffner, was born with only four fingers on her left hand. He moved closer to Haffner. He understood this? Only four fingers. On her left hand.

Unwillingly, Haffner inhaled the alcohol of Niko's breath. He drank a gulp of vodka, for equilibrium.

Haffner, said Haffner, understood.

It wasn't as if Haffner hadn't seen the horrors: he had seen the rule book torture — the forced standing for twenty-four hours, so that the prisoner's ankles swelled up, blisters developed on the soles of the feet, the kidneys shut down. In one village in Italy, the soldiers had just gone mad. They dressed up in women's clothes. They hung clothes in the trees. They went through the houses. Soon, there was nothing left to eat. Once, on the edge of the desert, they came across a food truck, carrying fruit. The people inside were crushed. Haffner and his unit stopped. They wiped the fuel and blood off, and started to eat the peaches, the heavy grapes. They hadn't eaten for a day. There was a girl there who had a dress but no legs. This was one of the women to whom Haffner felt closest. At a checkpoint in Syria, a kid was in an abandoned truck, cowering. He went to help her. He picked her up. Her head slumped off the neck on to his arm, heavy, like a pumpkin.

It wasn't then that Haffner threw up. It was ten minutes later, after he had buried her. After he had buried her just there, by the side of the road — because what fool would wander off to find a place to bury the dead? Just as what fool went off to seek his necessary privacy if he wanted to shit? The sniper fire on the way out; the friendly fire on the way back. Instead, you squatted there, in front of everyone, discussing the imaginary world of sports.

And Haffner discovered in this moment with Niko its secret twin, which already existed in the story of Haffner.

In another blackout, the universal blackout of 1977 — the summer Haffner came back to New York after being away for three years — he had argued with Goldfaden about sport. They were in Chinatown. Goldfaden had just outlined his theory that genetically the Jewish race was programmed to adore Chinese food. And Haffner felt no urge to disagree. He was happy. Before him, sat a plate of crispy shredded beef: a pile of orange twigs — which was Haffner's most reliable delight.

Then the lights went out. And Haffner found the conversation turning to sports.

It was escapism, said Goldfaden. There was nothing wrong with this, he wanted to add. He believed that everyone, at some time, needed a way of escaping. For Goldfaden, it was love. For Haffner, it was sports. Where, then, was the argument?

The argument, thought Haffner, was precisely in this idea that anything could be imaginary. Nothing was imaginary. This was Haffner's idea. So often accused of being divorced from real life, Haffner always maintained that — on the contrary — he would love to be divorced from real life, but the divorce was impossible. There was no counterlife.

As waiters began to scurry round for candles, Haffner talked.

The accusation of escapism was not a new one. Normally, however, this was seen as a bad thing. Esther used to accuse him of a lack of seriousness. Sport wasn't, said Esther, real life. She asked her new husband to agree with her. And Esmond did. But Haffner now maintained, in front of Goldfaden, in the dark, that there was no difference between a sport and real life: how, he wondered, could there be? In what way was real life suspended by the act of kicking a football, that would not mean that the act of sipping a coffee also represented a suspension of real life? The theory was ridiculous. What escapism was it to be battered by emotion, scarred by defeat, elated in victory? In Haffner's opinion, this proved a further and deeper truth: there was no such thing as escapism. No, never. How could you escape? Where did Goldfaden think he could go?

Well, said Goldfaden: he supposed he was much more of a romantic than Haffner.

Did he really want to talk about football? said Haffner, ignoring this comparison. Because he could. The Norwegians, for instance, who refused to play Nazi football. So the quislings watched each other in desolate stadiums. How was that not real life? So OK, said Goldfaden. But Haffner wasn't finished. Let us not, said Haffner, forget the Viennese genius Matthias Sindelar, known as The Wafer, who was said to have brains in his legs, and many unexpected ideas occurred to them while they were running. For instance, said Haffner, there was the last ever match between Austria and Germany, a month after the Nazis had annexed Austria in 1938. Everyone knew that Sindelar had been told not to score. For the whole first half, therefore, he pushed the ball a little wide of each post, sarcastically. And then, in the second half, he couldn't stop himself: so Sindelar scored. And then another man scored a free kick, thus sealing the game, and Sindelar, because he had ideas in his legs, went to celebrate by dancing in front of the Nazi directors' box.

That, said Haffner, was sport. It could never be an escape from life. Life was everywhere.

No, there was no such thing as a counterlife, Haffner wanted to argue. Just as there was no such thing as a real metamorphosis. In the end, you only had yourself to work with. Wherever you went, it was still you.

While around them, the city of New York was looted. Though whether this proved or disproved Haffner, in his imaginary nostalgic lecture hall, he didn't know.

He carried on looking at the girls. In Italy they had called them segnorini — the girls who went with the Allied soldiers: they mispronounced them, a l'inglese.

When she bent down, you could see the neat fur between her legs.

Behind him, the light of a candle flickered. A girl was standing beside him. She was tall, she had straight black hair, she was what the world would consider the pornographic ideal. Whatever her breasts were made of, Haffner liked it. She told Haffner her name. He could not hear it. She told him again. She thanked him for buying her a drink. He raised an eyebrow. Behind her, Niko raised a glass, gaily.

— You have a drink? she asked Haffner.

Haffner had a drink.

— So, she said, you are good to go.

He couldn't deny it. Like one of Benji's wind-up toys, which could unleash its skittering movements wherever it was placed: on the neat chevrons of blond parquet in a country-house museum or the linoleum of a kitchen floor — with damp stains, starry splashes of coffee, and one irrevocably non-matching square of concrete, where the lino had given out.

The girl who now thought of herself as Haffner's — or who thought of Haffner as her own — led him into what seemed a cave, or tunnel. It ventured into the underground. She told Haffner to sit — on a crate, or possibly an upturned bucket. It was difficult to tell. Haffner only knew that it had some kind of rim. It hurt him.

Haffner had never been into the pornography, nor the pubs to which his City friends used to go: where angry women undressed and despised their spectators. All his pleasure was more traditional. He disliked the obscenity of modern film, the sexual glee of modern literature. There were things which shouldn't be written down, said Haffner. There were certain forms to be observed. Pleasure was all about privacy, he thought: the burden of the boudoir.

And even if I disagreed, I still agreed with Haffner's motive — it wasn't from primness that he thought this, but from a wish to preserve the erotic as a secret which one kept from other people. This didn't seem unreasonable.

But now, in this unstaged intimacy, Haffner could still not discover in himself any obvious erotic surge. He should have done, he knew this. And perhaps, even recently, he would have done — but no longer. Now, Haffner was more in love with love.

This love was partly visible in the way his thoughts were tending to Zinka, in her bubble bath. But it was also visible in the way Haffner kept thinking of Livia. He sat on an upturned crate or bucket and told himself that he should simply do this so that Niko would still admire him. Because Niko was his ally. Niko was the friend who would restore Haffner to his heritage.

In his blackout basement, Haffner conversed urbanely with his girl. Her name, she told him, was Katya. A nice name, Haffner assured her. It was not her real name, she replied. Who needed real names? Not in here. Tonight, she said, she wanted sex, and she wanted vodka. And she had the vodka already, she said — raising the smudged plastic glass to Haffner's worried gaze. So only one thing was missing.

As usual, the god Priapus harried Haffner: with his cloven hooves, his staff entangled in ivy. His entire being a pulsing penis.

An arm was twined around Haffner's neck. He felt his lips being kissed. Then he realised that the small bikini top which Katya had been wearing was now slipping, weightless, on to his arm, then on to the floor — where it rested, invisible, unknown to Haffner, on his foot. She lifted a candle to her torso: her breasts were there, in the magical light. Katya told him that he could touch. If he were gentle.

He belonged to an older world. The older he got, the more he believed in it. Here, in the centre of Europe, in a town which was so nearly modern, and yet had been already so melancholically superseded by other fashions, Haffner believed in romance: the candlelit dinner, the car ride home, the kiss on the cheek. This routine to be repeated, with variations.

He tried to explain to Katya that he really did not want to touch her. If she didn't mind. He wondered if perhaps they should rejoin the others.

But he was in such a rush, said Katya, sadly. Did she not please him?

He tried to look for Niko, and could see nobody. He was alone with her, in this back room. Of course, he replied, she pleased him.

Visually, it was inarguable.

Then he felt her press her breasts against him. Softly they gave against the protrusion of Haffner's nose. The rough nipples rubbed against the harsher roughness of Haffner's cheeks.

But no, it wasn't Haffner's thing. He tried to explain this to her. Really, she had been very kind, but he ought to be going. And to his unsurprised dismay, Katya seemed to feel wronged by his explanations. Angrily, she upbraided him. Never, she said, had she met such a man.

Helpless Haffner bent his head.

Did he think she really wanted him? she asked Haffner. Dumbly, Haffner shook his head. Did he think that this was her idea of love?

— You're nodding when you're not supposed to be nodding, she said.

— Ah yes, said Haffner.

— You're still doing it, she said.

They were everywhere, thought Haffner: the experts in what was real; the people who wanted to begin, or complete, his education.

Look at him! said Katya. The man was dressed in a cagoule. She could not understand how stupid he was.

And Haffner wanted to assure her that he was capable of stupidity so gigantic that she would hardly comprehend it.

Maybe, thought Haffner, he was going off sex. Once, a Texan friend of his had told him a Dallas proverb. Every time you find yourself not thinking about sex, so ran the proverb, then your mind is wandering. And this had been Haffner's philosophy, in so far as the man could have a philosophy.

My squalid Don Quixote: avid for the higher things. The higher things which Haffner looked for in the lower things: in the lust, and the vanity, and the shame.

The point was, said Katya, that she at least needed to be paid.

It was the second time that day, considered Haffner, amazed — emptying the pockets of his cagoule, presenting her with all the notes he found — when he had paid for sexual services he had never wanted. But Haffner was flexible.

He should never forget his favourite item of vocabulary. When he was in Brazil, when they were leaving the theatre, laughing to themselves at the disconcerted policemen, his counterpart in the Rio bank had tried to explain how one survived in these great times. You could do it, sure, by going underground and becoming a hero. But then you died. Or you could do it by offering up your politics to whatever came along. You preserved yourself through sacrificing your ideals. They had a word for this, he said. It was trampolin-ability. And this immediately became Haffner's favourite word. He could trampoline. Yes, this seemed possible.

To trampoline: the only form of maturity which Haffner ever recognised.

Rising back into the air, buoyant against gravity, Haffner made for the exit — where Niko was waiting for him. Was Niko not good to him? asked Niko. Haffner replied that Niko was very very good to him. So what, asked Niko, did Haffner think?

Haffner promised him that yes: why not? If Niko thought he could help. He didn't see why not. And Niko said that this was very good. He had perhaps said this before, but he liked Haffner very much. Now then: the practicals. He knew the snooker club? Of course, said Haffner, he didn't know the snooker club. Well then, said Niko. Well then. They would sort something out. Niko himself would take him there.

Whatever suited him, said Haffner, simply wanting to end the evening: and he walked out into the benighted dawn.

And carelessly, without thinking, the hand of fate or the world-soul nearly placed a man in a bowler hat, Haffner's twin, his arms by his side, like a sentry, at the end of Haffner's day, as Haffner turned the corner into the town's main square. But luckily this world-soul managed to arrange it so that Haffner changed his mind, did not proceed briskly back home, but lingered, looking in the window of a shop which sold domestic cleaning products, ironing boards, Hoovers, dog baskets, plastic and multicoloured clothes pegs; then the window of an adjoining lingerie shop in which was fixed a row of disembodied and cocked legs, like the Platonic ideal of a cancan.

Finally, Haffner reached the hotel. He ignored the greeting of the woken receptionist — clutching a paperback and a serrated freshly burning plastic cup of coffee — walked into the lift, and pressed the wrong button, so that when he turned as normal to the left and tried to move his key in the lock, it would not work. Finally, after three minutes, he realised his mistake — oblivious to the scene he had left behind the door: a man in pyjamas, wielding an umbrella; a woman whimpering in the bed; a marriage teetering.

Haffner went to sleep, dressed in the tracksuit which now doubled as his pyjamas. Commas of white chest hair nestled in the gap above the jacket's open zip. He wanted to talk to Livia. He wanted to tell her about that conversation he had had in Chinatown, twenty years earlier, with Goldfaden. The conversation about sports. And she would turn to him, sleepy in her velvet nightgown, and tell him that of course Goldfaden was wrong. He knew that. For Livia, like Haffner, understood the majesty of sport.

Yes, it was Livia who had watched the 1980 Wimbledon tennis final with Haffner one weekend, in the early morning, in Florida — where they had gone for a summer break: featuring the American kid with the curls, and the Swedish man with the blue-eyed stare. And it was Livia who had pointed out to Haffner the obvious symbolism of the fight: the two versions of machismo. And which one, did Haffner think, was him? He thought, he said, that he was possibly the kid with the curls. And which one, asked Livia, did he think that she would go for?

The likeable kid with the curls? asked Haffner, hopefully.

No, unfortunately for Haffner, Livia's preference was instead for the resourceful and quiet man: whose machismo needed no theatricality. Even though as she said it Livia kissed him on the cheek, and grinned at him. And Haffner was glad that as he looked at her blouse — one button wrongly fastened so that the fabric bunched out and Haffner could see the beginning of a breast, the lace florets of her bra — his lust was unabated.

But Haffner's audience was gone. So Haffner lay there, on his left side, then shifted, to give solace to his heart, so placating the superstitious aspect of his soul. The aspect of his soul which believed in a soul at all.