The Escape

Haffner Interrupted

The next morning, Haffner woke up late, to hear Benji in conversation outside his door.

Perhaps it was a bad dream. He tried to wake up further.

He couldn't. The dream was real.

— Me, Benji used to say, to his friends, his admirers, I have the greatest breasts of anyone I know. If I were a woman, said Benji, I'd want me. I mean yeah. I mean absolutely.

Yes, Benji was huge.

The hugeness had caused so many miniature aspects of Benji. It was, for example, one reason why he hadn't really had girlfriends. His emotions were distractedly doodled with shyness. Self-consciousness possessed him. This was also a reason why Benjamin was beauty-obsessed. He was always a sucker for the grand beauty. When it came to female beauty, his standards were strict. And finally, the size was why he had been forced to teach himself survival through wit.

— You want to know something? Benji said to our mutual friend Ezekiel: Ezekiel, known as Zeek.

— They look at my penis in the urinals, continued Benjamin, and they can't see it. It's like I'm pissing from my belly, you know?

— You shouldn't be too hard on yourself, said Zeek. It's not so bad. I mean, you're not circumcised, are you?

— No, said Benji.

— So you've never tried to masturbate when you're circumcised? said Zeek.

— How could I try it? said Benji.

— So then. The thing is this, said Zeek. It needs a lot of Vaseline.

— Vaseline? asked Benji.

— Or something similar, said Zeek.

— I don't need Vaseline, said Benjamin.

— But you're not circumcised, said Zeek.

— Yes, I know, said Benjamin. I told you that.

In the grey dawns after parties, we would sit out in the garden and talk: while in the living rooms, the bedrooms, the girls dozed in each other's arms, the junkies talked to themselves.

The issue of circumcision used to worry Benjamin. Once, Benjamin had talked to a girl whom he dearly wanted to kiss. As so often in the imperfectly Jewish life of Benjamin, the conversation had turned to penises, and their foreskins. She really did think, she said, that circumcised penises were preferable. They lasted longer, she smiled at him. And Benjamin, with his yarmulke, his deep knowledge of archaic law, wondered if by this she meant to flirt with him. It was possible. Come on, kid, it was possible, he said grimly, to himself. Even if, as only he knew, her hope was utterly misguided. He had to be honest. Sadly, Benjamin admitted to the intact nature of his penis, its shroud of flesh: its headscarf. It was the only way in which Esther had resisted Esmond's Orthodoxy: the practice of circumcision, she used to say, was barbaric. She couldn't countenance it for her darling son. But of course, Benji's girl then added, the circumcised penis had its own charm too. She looked at Benjamin. Confused, he looked back at her, and was quiet.

This was the boy whom Haffner could hear outside his room: while Haffner struggled to extricate himself from the placid dreams of his sleep, into the more unnatural dreams of Haffner's Alpine existence.

Haffner picked up the phone. He was sorry, said the receptionist to this newly bedraggled version of Haffner: his whitely blond hair awry, uncombed; his beard sprouting. Haffner asked him what he was sorry for: the receptionist explained that his grandson had said that his grandfather should be expecting him.

— No problem, said Haffner, exhausted. No problem.

And it was nearly lunchtime, added the receptionist, pedantically.

It could hardly get worse, thought Haffner. But then, as he struggled with the sheets, his shoes, the elongated dimensions of his washing routine in the bathroom, he was interrupted by the realisation that it was, in fact, worse. Benjamin, Haffner suddenly realised, was not talking to himself. Though why he had thought the boy would be talking to himself, he didn't know. No, there wasn't just Benjamin. There was also Frau Tummel. They were engaged in conversation outside his door.

And why not? thought Haffner, in dismal jubilation. Why wouldn't Frau Tummel be here as well?

It was as if the farce of his life were repeating itself, just on a diminishing scale. The interruptions of the real — the unwelcome real — which had marked his life continued even here, when Haffner was nowhere.

In the corridor, Frau Tummel was telling Benjamin that such devotion to a grandfather was rare in his generation. It was admirable, she said.

— Uhhuh, said Benjamin.

He had just arrived from the airport. And as he made himself known to reception, he had been interrupted by this woman whose appearance Benjamin felt he knew all too well, from the mothers of his schoolfriends: she was stern, and extravagant, simultaneously. When she discovered who Benjamin was, she was delighted, she said. She was ravished. She knew his grandfather, she assured him, very well. She was just on her way to see him.

He would never understand what the women still saw in his grandfather, thought Benjamin, resigned. No, he wouldn't even try. There was no point. It was part of the whole mystery of sex: a mystery which he felt was way beyond him. Though why the mystery of sex was not by now beyond his grandfather seemed an injustice too cosmic to be contemplated.

Frau Tummel asked him if he was here for a holiday as well, like his grandfather. He replied that sort of. Yes? she said. He was more here on business, said Benji. Like his grandfather.

He really did look very like his grandfather, she said. Absolutely handsome.

Benjamin simpered.

If only, thought Benjamin, she were about thirty years younger. It was always like this. If only women said this whom Benjamin thought of as girls.

Frau Tummel thought that he must admire his grandfather very much. And Benjamin replied ruefully that he could be quite different at home. Frau Tummel queried this. No, said Benjamin: it was true.

In the window, the Alpine mountains were blankly beautiful.

Well, said Frau Tummel, she had to admit that maybe there was something in what he was saying. Herr Haffner had his complications. This she would admit. But that, she said flirtatiously, smiling at Benjamin, was, after all, the signature of a man! She had no idea, said Benjamin sadly, how difficult he could be. Difficult didn't cover it.

But he did not expand on this to Frau Tummel. No, Benji was loyal. He did not tell her what he was now remembering — how once they had discovered Haffner on the island of Malta. He was with a dancer from a cruise ship. Another time, in Florence, Haffner simply wandered off; and was found two days later, in a bar on the south side of the river.

She could not believe it was true, said Frau Tummel. She had not seen this difficulty in Herr Haffner. Herr Haffner, she would at least accept, was a man with his own sense of himself, said Frau Tummel. That was one of the problems, agreed Benjamin. But there were others.

Benjamin was an expert on his grandfather. Observations of his grandfather had formed his education. Once, he had idolised him. Now, perhaps, his idolisation had become inverted: a strange form of love, which was inseparable from dislike.

Haffner opened his door.

— You're here? said Haffner to Benji. How?

— Surprised? asked Benji.

— Not really, said Haffner.

It was true. Nothing surprised him when it came to the decisions of his grandson, the wayward passions to which he was subject.

— Shouldn't you be in school? asked Haffner. Shouldn't you be learning something? The cultivation of forelocks? The possibility of prayer?

— You see? said Benjamin to Frau Tummel.

Anyway, said Benjamin: he had told him. Haffner questioned this.

— On the phone? said Benjamin, with his American fall and rise.

— You never told me, said Haffner.

They paused, in this silence of disagreement.

— Are you really wearing that? said Benjamin.

Yes, said Haffner, he was: refusing to explain this unusual wardrobe choice of pink hiking T-shirt and his familiar sky-blue tracksuit.

There was another pause.

— It is so wonderful, the devotion! exclaimed Frau Tummel, beaming on Haffner.

Haffner looked at her, then at Benji. He could do, thought Haffner, curtly, with losing some of that weight. But there it was. He had always been spoiled: by Esther, and then by Livia. Who always cooked the kid steak. Who made hand-cut, hand-fried fries: a treat which Haffner, in fifty years of marriage, never got for himself.

— You had breakfast? Haffner asked his grandson.

— On the plane, said Benji. Plane food.

— Hungry? asked Haffner.

— I'm hungry, said Benjamin.

Haffner's appetites were catholic. Benji's appetite had been for food. Now, unknown to Haffner, he was concerned to broaden the range of his appetites. But it was his appetite for food on which Haffner and his grandson had forged their friendship.

— You know what's happening in the cricket? asked Haffner.

— No, said Benjamin.

— Blowing a gale? said Haffner, cryptically, with an intimate smile.

Benjamin looked embarrassed. And this saddened Haffner. Mutely, he went in search of the long-lost time when Haffner had taught Benjamin his favourite routine from the movies — dialogue which they had then so often recited by heart — where a man stranded in a mountain hotel phones home to find out the cricket score.

Now Haffner had to quote to himself, in silence, the next lines in his adored dialogue — You don't know? You can't be in England and not know the test score — grimly thinking as he did so that it was only natural that this was how his century should end: with everyone having lost their sense of humour.

— I will leave you two boys together, said Frau Tummel.

She would meet Haffner back here, she said to Haffner: to talk. For a moment, she looked darkly at Haffner. And then, smiling more benignly at Benjamin, she left.

Haffner turned to Benjamin, and he sighed.

Precocious, in the heyday of his teenage years, Benjamin had listened to the hip hop from New York, the ragga from Jamaica. His favourite thing was the Los Angeles hip-hop artist, the modern saint: 2pac. Everyone loved 2pac, true. But in this love, Benji was unusual. He didn't care about the drugs, nor the women. Nor about the gold and diamante T round 2pac's neck, a cartoon crucifix. No, for Benjamin, 2pac was an example of pure romance. His favourite song — which he played on repeat — was 2pac's elegy 'Life Goes On'. Have a party at his funeral, let every rapper rock it, sang 2pac, rapped 2pac. Let the hos that he used to know from way before kiss him from his head to his toe. Give him a paper and pen so he could write about his life of sin, a couple of bottles of gin in case he didn't get in.

The swagger had Benji entranced.

He'd be lying, continued 2pac, if he told him that he never thought of death. My nigger, they were the last ones left. But life went on.

It was so cool, thought Benjamin. Once, he tried to explain this to Haffner. Haffner tried to listen. This presented some problems: practical (the fitting of the earphones, the working of the portable CD player); and aesthetic (the understanding of this noise as music, rather than noise).

As a teenager, Benji's ideal habitat was the urban sprawl of Los Angeles: the gang warfare, the misogyny. He spent his life in thrall to the foreign, in thrall to images to which he had no right.

This was the younger Benji — the boy whom Haffner still admired.

A hint of the devastating problem which was to ensue occurred when Benjamin, aged fifteen, decided that, while everyone else went on holiday with their youth groups to Israel — to meet girls, and sleep on beaches — instead he wanted to stay in a Buddhist monastery. This monastery was located in the countryside outside London: in Hertfordshire. It was his spiritual goal. He arrived with a smuggled packet of cigarettes, and a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. For Benji, at fifteen, was a rebel, and philosopher. But when he was confronted by the bell at five the next morning, the meditation for two hours before breakfast, the unidentified and unidentifiable breakfast itself, the work in the fields, by the afternoon he was too depressed to carry on. He couldn't even tell the men apart from the women. He went into the room of the Head Monk and asked to leave. The Head Monk looked at him. He implored him, having made the important break from the temptations of the city, to persevere in his difficult task. The worst was over, he said. But Benji was not so persuaded. There was a skull on the Head Monk's desk; and Benji did not want to be confronted by memento mori. He could not tell, in fact, why it was he was here at all. He had simply liked the idea of it — a man above the temptations of beaches, and girls.

Two hours later, Esther had arrived to take him home.

He had at least learned something, Benjamin told everyone. He'd discovered how deeply he believed in food.

And Haffner loved him for this. The boy was independent! He understood how much more important the senses were than a sense of the serious. But the let-down came soon afterwards. Benji, after all, was in a crisis of faith. He had gone through hip hop, drugs and Buddhism. And now he returned to the most basic, the least loved. Benjamin returned to the religion of his forefathers: a lineage which began with his father, if one missed out his grandfather.

That was why, at university, he spent his vacations in the Promised Land. That was why, after university, he had entered the summer school of a rabbinical seminary.

But then, Benjamin's Jewishness, like all his other crazes, was really a form of romance. He wanted a past: he wanted a past which was more torn apart by history than the history of his happy family.

In Tel Aviv, Benjamin had met a girl who came from a family of Jewish-Algerian intellectuals. Somewhere in the Sahara, she said, there was a tribe which bore her surname. Benji wished that this girl's past were his. He didn't know what he might do with it — but he was sure that this was the missing piece of Benjamin's jigsaw, lost in another jigsaw box, abandoned underneath a sofa.

His forefathers! Who else was more like Benjamin than Haffner? Like his grandfather before him, Benji was a sucker for bohemia.

Haffner, however, only saw in Benjamin an exponent of the Law. He was constantly depressed by the cowl of seriousness with which Benjamin so often insulated himself: the easy tristesse of history which enticed him.

This judgement was true, in a way. Benjamin dearly wanted the reassuring safety of the righteous, the morally certain. But this was no reason, perhaps, to dislike him, to think that he was prim. He wanted order because he was so often overtaken by compulsions he could not understand.

His first craze was soccer. On the white gloss of his bedroom cupboards, whose moulding was painted dark blue, in imitation of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer strip, Benjamin had arranged stickers produced by Panini for the 1986 World Cup. His favourite stickers were the Brazilians — with their pineapple T-shirts, their one-word names (Socrates!), their impossible hair. Benjamin had arranged Brazil, and Paraguay, and England, gently overlapping, following the blue line of gloss along his cupboards.

Benjamin, in the youth of his youth, didn't have ripped-out pictures of film stars, or porn stars, on his ceiling. No nipples, or even bikinis, in black and white or colour, were visible in his room. True, he did possess one photocopy of a pornographic image. This picture had been given to him, as a special favour, by Ezekiel. A girl with thick, if indistinctly printed, nipples was raising a sailor-suit top towards her chin. A sailor's hat was cocked, coquettish, on her white-blonde permed hair. How innocent he was! In Benjamin's special dreams, he would touch her nipples, curiously — like tuning a radio. But this image was not public. He had simply tucked his pornographic possession, neatly folded, between pages 305 and 306 of his book which contained 1001 facts about the French Revolution, with its glossy laminated boards.

Instead of sex, Benjamin had crazes. There had been the soccer, then the drugs, and the hip hop, and the Buddhism. Then the Orthodox Jewishness. And now, finally, Benji had been disturbed by the true sexual furore — inspired by his Jewish and Algerian and French girl in Tel Aviv. With this girl, finally, Benjamin had lost his virginity. She was hairless between the legs, except for a black tuft, so that when he touched her all he felt was a slick softness. He nearly swooned. For this, thought Benji, was love.

It wasn't love, of course. Over various phone calls, Zeek tried to explain this to him. But Benji didn't care. Instead, he simply retreated into the burrow of his feelings. He told Zeek what he had not told her: that when he left her, the next morning, after they had slept together, in the taxi, he wrote in the dawn, on the back of a receipt, that this was true desire, a true passion. And passions were so rare.

This was why Benjamin was here, in the spa town. He needed an escape from the summer school, the regalia of his religion — and he needed to talk to the man who was his only authority when it came to women. The man who was his — faulty, despaired-of — authority as an adult.

But I think there was a further complication. Benji was here because he wanted permission to leave the summer school: he wanted to replace his respect for his religion with a more freestyle interest in his girl. This was true. But in his amatory crisis the family's inheritance had therefore acquired more significance than it might, perhaps, have had. For Benjamin felt guilty at his wish to abandon his religion. The villa was therefore his chance for redress: his chance to show his family and forefathers that he had not abandoned them entirely.

The villa was an excuse.

Which was, perhaps, one way in which Benji differed from his grandfather.

He should really stop looking at women like that, said Benjamin. Haffner said he would look where he liked. And believe him, he wasn't looking. Benjamin said that it just wasn't right.

Again, the lethargy which Haffner felt when contemplating his adventure with Frau Tummel transformed into something so much more protective. So much more like love. Such sadness which Haffner felt for the bodies of women! Such sadness which transformed into a pity of the flesh!

She was, said Haffner, a very handsome woman.

— Whatever! exclaimed Benjamin. Whatever.

Benji was here for business. So skip the breakfast, said Benji, skip the lunch: surprising even himself. They were going to sort this whole thing with the villa today. It was why he was here.

He knew, as he said this, that his motives were mixed. He knew how much he was fleeing from his summer school. He knew what a convenient excuse the story of the family villa was to him. But surely, thought Benji, the fact that he was in panicking flight should not mean he could not solve a practical problem. At least the villa was a problem whose solution was obvious.

— Not so simple, said Haffner.

— It's simple, said Benjamin.

— Believe me, said Haffner. If anything were simple, this isn't it.

Would the young not give this up? wondered Haffner. When would they learn to talk precisely? He wanted to be done with trying to bring them up. Or, maybe more precisely, he wanted to educate them out of their attempts to bring him up.

Why did no one want to believe him when he said that he had done all he could? But then, he was forced to concede, it was hardly surprising: this scepticism, this doubt in Haffner. He could understand the disappointment. As if Haffner were the omnipotent yet constantly underachieving god of the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews.

— I don't think you realise, said Haffner, sitting with Pfeffer, on Haffner's return to London, when the family had first discovered the existence of Barbra, the problems of living with a beautiful woman. I mean an apparition. You think it's easy?

— I don't think anything, said Pfeffer. Well maybe. I think it's easy living with the woman you love.

But no, said Haffner. Pfeffer, with his utter confidence, could never understand the problems of living with such a woman as Livia. The endless problems of self-worth. Think about it, he urged Pfeffer. You woke up every day with this noble profile. You looked across at the elegance of her face and it destroyed you. It was no way to treat a man: to emphasise the bags under his eyes, the marbled skin. It wasn't a sexual success. It was a crisis.

Pfeffer raised a philosophic eyebrow.

He wasn't blaming him, Pfeffer had said, but it didn't look good. That was all he was saying.

Only Pfeffer had tried to disabuse him of his guilt, only Pfeffer — with his retractable gold Biros and pots made for him by his children — pots of beaten bronze with enamel detailing, and mahogany lids. And maybe this was a surprise. Only Pfeffer, the family man, tried to persuade Haffner that his guilt remained unproven.

They had been to school together, at prep school. Pfeffer was the man Haffner's father wanted him to be, or as close to it as possible — ever since Haffner betrayed his family by refusing to enter the family law firm. Pfeffer was a libel lawyer. He knew the secrets of showbiz. Which meant, thought Haffner, that he knew the secrets of everything, since everything was showbiz. Pfeffer lived in St John's Wood, in the largest apartment known to Haffner, with drawing rooms, and living rooms, and multiple bathrooms with multiple basins. A redundant triumph of the plural. It had always amazed Haffner, the sleek animal adaptability of these humans he grew up with: how Pfeffer, the kid he had known since prep school, who was so docile, who wore grey flannel shorts when everyone else had understood the only cool thing was trousers, could morph into this maven of luxury, silken in his deskchair. A chair in which he wallowed, his small hands neat and hairless on his blotter — whose corners were curtailed by leather bands, into an octagon.

But I don't feel like sketching Pfeffer's form. He can remain there, an outline in black, transparent against all the background colours — like some minor figure in a painting by Dufy.

Haffner was unshaven; he was in a summer suit. Beside him was a plate of biscuits brought to him by Pfeffer's secretary, a secretary whom Haffner always suspected of harbouring designs on Pfeffer. He was wearing the panama which Livia hated. It came rolled up in a metal tube. He liked to think it made him rakish.

But hey, Pfeffer added. He was the last person to be advising anyone on a marriage. What was he meant to do? His wife was in therapy. His daughter was in love with some Greek entrepreneur. Or possibly a Turk. How was Pfeffer an expert in the family? He was as much a natural family man as Artie Shaw. Or Goebbels.

And Haffner had to admit, at that moment, that he loved Pfeffer, whose idea of fun was crossword puzzles, Scrabble, memory games. The man who saw the world as a perpetual acrostic. He spent his conversations, Haffner remembered, reconfiguring each sentence backwards. Otherwise, he told Haffner, it could become boring for him. This produced no obvious vacancy in his expression, or concentration. Sometimes, just backwards was not enough. Sometimes, he had to reverse according to gaps of two or three. He was toying with implementing logarithms.

He just thought, he said, that Haffner should explain what was going on.

But what could anyone else know about the marriage of Haffner and Livia? It was a world with only two inhabitants.

When the time was coming for war, but they didn't know when, Haffner and Livia had a code — for Haffner, like every soldier, was banned from giving any prior information about his movements. He had a rich and rather unpleasant uncle, called Uncle Jonas. And the code was that if Uncle Jonas were very fit and well, everything was fine. If the prospects for Haffner to be mobilised were doubtful, then his health was not too good: and then the time came when Haffner knew he was to go abroad, and he said that he was sorry to tell her, darling, but Uncle Jonas had passed away. He was at Basingstoke at this time, in a telephone booth. It was April, and curiously cold. They had embarked from the docks in the west of Scotland. He didn't quite know where. He didn't really know what a dock was, if he were honest.

A marriage, thought Haffner, was the invention of a code.

No one knew the secrets of a marriage: maybe this was true. Just as Haffner didn't know the secrets of his grandson, the conundrum of his grandson, standing there in front of him: confused, like his grandfather, by the monstrous state of love.

Haffner Banished

The villa which belonged to Livia's family was out on the outskirts of the town, above a slope which ran down to the river. Across from its veranda was the range of snowy mountains.

In 1929, the universal crash had meant that her father took a loan from his cousin's bank in Trieste. Seven years later, his talent for money had been so adroitly employed that he had earned enough to buy this villa.

Here, Livia used to argue with her father: a nationalist when considering the Italian state, an anti-nationalist when considering the Zionist cause. He was a businessman who imported coal from Britain. Through the quiet rise of wealth, the steady progress of business, he wanted his nation to be great again.

Her father had become a Fascist after fighting in the Great War. Then, in 1922, leaving behind his daughter in her blankets and her cradle, leaving behind his pregnant wife, her father had taken part in Mussolini's March on Rome: his pedestrian coup. Her mother had cut out clippings from the newspapers. They featured grand vocative apostrophes (O Rome!) written in a rhetoric which even then seemed obscure (O ship launched toward World Empire that emerges from the flux of time!). She kept them in an album for her husband. He believed in Italy. It was a refuge — his family's final escape from the misery of politics.

Even if this escape was a politics too.

Cesare was duly made to join the youth movements. He wore the uniform, scowling. In retaliation, he decided that when he grew up he would be a Communist. If, that is, he ever grew up. As for Livia, she also wore her black pleated skirts, white pique blouse, long white stockings, her black cape and beret. This was her Fascist youth.

Her father believed in discipline. Neither Cesare nor Livia was allowed to rest a wrist on the table when they were eating. She was told to hold two napkins under her armpits, so that she might achieve the correct deportment. His ideas of order were immutable.

She was too melancholic, her father told her, when they argued. Always on the dark side of the moon. She didn't have a positive concept of the reality of life. In reply, she would quote the Romantics to him. What else was this life but a failure? It lacked beauty. She looked forward to the one radiant light, bathed in which humanity would come together in perfect union.

In the cafe in the main square, Livia, when she was sixteen, had been asked to dance by a man whose eyebrows and teeth she distrusted. She had looked at Mama. And Mama had nodded her head. Her mother had never done this before. Normally, every dance was forbidden to Livia. And when she asked her mother, afterwards, why she had made her dance with that horrible man, Mama had simply said that it was because she had to: the man was a director of the secret police.

When Livia told Haffner this story, one day in 1953, he smiled at her. And did she, he wanted to know, tread on the man's toes?

— Naturalmente, said Livia. And she kissed him, her mischievous boy.

There had been a swing on the cherry tree outside the villa, stranded on an island of grass in the drive. They used to go looking for mushrooms and blackberries. In the early summer they would go to the seaside, on the Adriatic. And in August they would come up here into the mountains. That was their life.

And once, when the Buffalo Bill circus arrived in the town, Livia's mother told her that this would be the greatest night of her life. But when she told Haffner about this, forty years later, as they passed a sign for a travelling circus on the outskirts of London, following some visit to see their grandson, she did not remember the trapeze, nor the spectacle: all that had remained with her was an inarticulate concern for the living conditions of the elephants.

This, then, was what Haffner was now due to inherit: the occluded history of Livia.

— If you had only not been so impatient, said the Head of the Committee on Spatial Planning, perhaps I help you. Not now. Now the matter is closed.

— What do you mean closed? said Haffner.

— You think this is not something I understand? said his opponent. This is something I perfectly understand.

— Really? said Haffner.

— Aggressing my staff, said the Head of the Committee.

To Haffner's surprise, within ten minutes of entering the building, they had secured an interview with the Head of the Committee on Spatial Planning. It had been to his surprise, but also to his mild irritation, giving as it did an unfortunately fluent appearance to Benjamin of the Committee's workings. This irritation, however, had been mollified when they discovered that the Head of the Committee, having dismissed Isabella as unnecessary, spoke an English which was accurate but so heavily accented that they found it difficult to follow him.

This linguistic confusion, however, was possibly irrelevant. The case, it appeared, was closed.

— First place, said the Head of the Committee, you come here earlier, much earlier. Now the window is over. Occasion gone. Doubly, I cannot do nothing for you.

— So that's it? said Haffner, banished from his estates.

— I will make to you a concession, said the Head of the Committee.

— A concession? asked Haffner, eagerly.

— Yes, said the man. I am sorry for you, I really am. But my hands are tired.

— I'm sorry? said Haffner.

— Yes, said the Head of the Committee. Tired. It is a pity for you.

— That's your concession? said Haffner. In what way does that represent a concession?

— He means confession, said Benjamin.

— What? said Haffner.

There was no goodwill. Haffner knew that. But he hoped to be surprised. And so often he was duly let down.

He indicated to the Head of the Committee that he strongly intended to pursue the matter further. In Haffner's experience of offices, this phrase was usually potent. For Haffner's threats were real. It seemed less potent now.

The Head of the Committee was blowing away the flakes of an eraser, which he had been vigorously rubbing against a mistake in his calligraphy. It was music to his ears, he said. Music to his ears. And never, thought Haffner, would he trust a man again who used this phrase. All his sense of style was outraged.

But nothing in this room was stylish.

It was situated on the first floor of a building which once housed Hapsburg bureaucrats, and had then been gutted to service the administration of Communist aristocrats. From its ground-floor windows lolled the coiled tubes of the air-conditioning units, like elephant trunks. The office looked out on to a garden, with a sparse alley of plane trees which were sickly with dust, their leaves patchy with psoriasis. A poster on the wall implored Haffner not to smoke.

Haffner had no intention of smoking. Instead, he chose escalation. His last descendant beside him, fighting for his lineage, Haffner chose defiance. Yes, Haffner began to plead and rage, while beneath the stern poster — a man palming away a proffered packet of cigarettes — the Head of the Committee smoked from his collection of Marlboro Reds: ten of them in a bleak row.

— How can we have a conversation, cried Haffner, reasonably, when there is no goodwill? What kind of justice is this?

In the corner of the office, there was a bucket of soapy water: a souffle of foam disintegrating above its rim.

— Judge you? said the Head of the Committee. What else do you expect?

Once more Haffner fought against the prejudices of the ages.

After all, insinuated the Head of the Committee, it had taken him a very long time, no? To bring this suit? When it didn't seem so difficult. Haffner conceded this point. Perhaps he now thought there was money in it, said the Head of the Committee. Given his backdrop. To which Haffner replied that he didn't understand. Did he mean his British backdrop? Background?

— No, said the Head of the Committee.

But, he added, it was obvious that he was not from Britain. Haffner asked him what he meant. One only needed to look, said the Head of the Committee. Just one's eyes.

He understood. Yes, Haffner understood. Blond and blue-eyed among the Jews: and Jewish to everyone else. But just because he understood didn't mean he wasn't bewildered. Haffner wasn't used to fighting the prejudices of Central Europe. He had grown up happily in the pleasures of north London. He wasn't used to regarding himself as part of a race, rather than a nation. He was just a Haffner, not a Jewish Haffner. As he had tried to tell his driver, on their way from Haifa to Cairo — but that was another story. As he continued to try to tell various taxi drivers and financial wives, in London and New York. The cricketing taxi drivers of New York and the intellectual financial wives of London. The pattern of it, perhaps, should have made him pause. But Haffner rarely paused.

Just as he should perhaps have paused on the fact that he still possessed a News Letter to the Forces, dated Chanukah 5705, which he kept, he always said, not for its ethical stance but because on the back of this sheet of paper were adverts for Elco watches, from Hatton Garden; the Grodzinski chain of modern bakeries; and Lloyd Rakusen's Delicious Wheaten Crackers. He went for its nostalgia, maintained Haffner. He did not preserve it because this newsletter announced the triple burden of the continuing fight against the menace of Fascism and Nazism, the effort to rescue as many as they could of the remnants of their brethren left in Europe, and the refusal to relinquish one iota of their just claims to Eretz Israel as the Land of Israel belonging to the People of Israel. But I am not so sure. Maybe Haffner had never quite resolved the problem of his loyalties.

Was he saying, said Haffner, pounding the desk, like the grandest businessman of all time, that this Committee was refusing to help him because he and his wife were Jewish? Was that the missing word? And as he did so he believed that surely now this man would retreat: surely this man would not have the temerity to disagree with Haffner. But no, even now this man preserved his calm. Of course, he said, he had not said that. He was merely observing.

But Haffner was unbowed. As Benjamin glowed with mortified pride beside him, Haffner gave a speech. He was noted for his speeches, and Haffner gave the speech that he had always dreamed of making: where the audience quails beneath the shaking fist, the pointing finger; where the righteous man can demand of the wicked man that the truth be finally told.

— These are the things you always say, said the Head of the Committee. That everyone is against you.

— Me? said Haffner. I just met you.

— Not just you, he said. All of you. That you are always prosecuted.

— Persecuted, corrected Haffner, haughty.

The secretaries, Haffner fancied, were crowding at the door. One, perhaps, was being hoisted by a sturdy palm to the rim of the door, where a crack allowed the earnest spectator to get a glimpse of Haffner in his finale: rising now, pushing back his chair, and demanding that the Head of the Committee offer him an explanation.

— Let me put a question for you, said the Head of the Committee. You think you have nothing to do with us? You think you can take what you want?

Haffner wondered what he was asking him. Was he now to take on the guilt of the entire Soviet empire? Because he and his wife were Jewish? Were the very Communists who had stolen his wife's home now to be seen as Haffner's fault?

This was Haffner's twentieth century — where the history of London was also the history of Warsaw; and the history of Tel Aviv was also the history of Paris. And so on, and so on: in the endless history of the geography. All the separate national histories were universal, if you looked from far enough away. So how could Haffner escape?

The Head of the Committee motioned to a man who was no doubt an assistant, an apparatchik — who had been sitting in the shadows of this vast room all along — to show these gentlemen out. He was sorry, but he really must cut short their appointment. Naturally, he said, a decision would come in due course.

Unexpectedly, as he rose passionate from his chair, Haffner discovered that he was leaving with a sense of triumph. A sense of triumph accompanied by a worry that he had rather lost the upper hand, by making such a scene — but a triumph, nevertheless, that he had been so free with his fury. He had reached a place of poetry.

He was hoping so much, thought Haffner, that Livia was watching. He had never believed in ghosts before. They had seemed gothically unnecessary. But now they seemed the only just solution to the difficult problem of death.

For Haffner was furious with loyalty. His history was Livia's too. He couldn't deny it. He had thought for so long that this villa was just a chore. And it was a chore. But it meant more to him than that. It was suddenly, he understood, all to do with Livia.

And Livia, he thought, would appreciate this fight for her cosmopolitan history. She would appreciate, above all, Haffner's un-orthodox methods. For, as he confided to an astonished and worried Benjamin, he had another plan as well. To Benjamin he offered an edited version of his conversation with Niko. He perhaps exaggerated Niko's authority. He did not mention the locale where he had conducted these negotiations. But Benjamin still protested. Was he going to do something so illegal? No, Benji couldn't believe it. He mustn't do anything of the sort.

They paused outside the entrace to a jazz cafe in a garden — its walls graffiti'd with red and black unicorns: the arpeggios scaling the heights of the trees. They considered it; they walked on.

Maybe all of Benjamin's anxiety was his fault, thought Haffner. Maybe this was the natural consequence of Haffner: he had bequeathed accidentally to his grandson this exorbitant need for rules. In Benji's wish to be the opposite of his grandfather. Walking towards the hotel with Benjamin — as, still feeling exhausted, after two dramatic nights, Haffner dreamed of a possible nap, since exhaustion was becoming his natural state — he wondered if it was somehow in opposition to the ghost of Haffner that Benji had inherited this absolute anxiety about the feelings of others: a total timidity.

And it seemed that Haffner was right.

Only when they reached the doors to the hotel did Benjamin finally begin to talk about the fact that Benji was now in love. Yes, he said, he had met a girl whose gorgeousness transcended everything of which Benji had thought the world capable. But, wondered Benji, could he really know she liked him?

— Have you kissed this girl? said Haffner.

That wasn't the question, said Benjamin. The question was: did she want him to do this again? She seemed so cool. It was, said Haffner, an easy question to answer. He should simply see what happened next. He should kiss her again. What harm could that do? And Benjamin replied that, well, he just didn't know how much he wanted the burden of it. He didn't know if he wanted the relationship. And if he didn't want that, then he thought it was better to do nothing.

Which made him more mature than Haffner, thought Haffner. It was not a position he had so far reached himself.

— That's fine of you, said Haffner. That's very fine.

He didn't know that Benji was not quite telling him the truth. He did not know that Benji was not quite telling himself the truth. Benji's struggle against his senses was Benji's mute interior.

He needed to sleep, said Haffner. He needed to lie down, old boy. And Benji, in a gentle gesture of goodbye, kissed him on the forehead.

Innocence and experience! But which was which? The old young or the young old? Haffner wept for the things he thought he would no longer have; Benjamin for the things he thought he would never have. Both of them possessed their own comedy.

Both of them were banished.

When Livia was ill once, long before the end of their marriage, she had promised Haffner that if she died, she would come back and talk to him. He would know of the existence of an afterlife from the fact of this return; or the fact of a non-return. When she finally died and she did not, as Haffner hoped, come back to comfort him, he was not so astonished. After all, they had rarely seen each other in the two years preceding her death. Then a graver thought began to trouble him — that this was no proof of a lack of afterlife; it was only proof that she had not been able to come back. He was haunted by this idea of her trying to communicate with him, pressed to his ear, to his eyes, and Haffner unable to hear her, unable to see her. Or then an even graver and more plausible interpretation presented itself: it was only proof that she had not wanted to come back. She had decided against it.

He had mourned alone in the empty house, like the tearful queen mourning that schmuck Aeneas, as she gazed at her abandoned couch.

In the summer of 1938 — when Haffner was away, playing for the Old Boys cricket team of his school — Livia's father was reading, in silence, the Manifesto of the Racist Scientists. In the dining room, Cesare, who was sixteen, and believed in the greatness of his talent, was engaged on his great ceiling painting: The Dream, he said, of Europa. It featured three semi-nude women. No one was convinced of the mythological provenance: no one believed that the seriousness of the gods could compensate for Cesare's shaky technique. The pipe in his father's mouth was making him grin as he let the smoke dissolve in slow small clouds: a few smoke rings disappearing into other smoke rings. Outside, someone was beating a rug on the sill of the steps. And Livia's father was reading that Jews, according to the ninth section of the manifesto, did not belong to the Italian race.

He laid his pipe down.

At first, Livia's father, an honourable Fascist, was one of the discriminati: those discriminated from discrimination. Very soon, however, it was all over. His clients were forbidden to trade with him; his salesmen were banned from negotiating for his list. He decided to send his children to Britain, to stay with friends of his in the paint industry. They required a passport and a transit visa through France. He went to the Fascist chief of police — whose wedding anniversary he had recently celebrated at a small dinner party in town — and he said to him: either he arranged this, or he would break the law. He would buy the papers on the black market. Surely the police chief didn't want him to break the law?

The Fascist chief of police agreed that he should not break the law. So Cesare and Livia went to Britain.

Haffner still owned a photograph of Livia's mother — taken in 1915, to give to her fiance when he went to war — dressed in a Japanese kimono. Her father owned a black Fascist fez with a silken fringe. Indignantly, he would tell her the shameful story of the Dreyfus case — from the time when Europe was imperial. And yet, on the other hand, the blue-and-white collection boxes for the nascent state of Israel: these he ignored. As if it was nothing to do with him. There was no need, he argued — unlike, perhaps, in racist France — for such drastic measures.

Yes, Livia's father believed in order. It was possible, he thought, for there to be an end of history: a utopia. But Italy, Livia wanted to say, was still Europe. Nowhere was safe from the stupidity of inheritance.

But he believed in the nineteenth century, and its bourgeoisie. The year before, in 1937, Ettore Ovazza — who was Fascist, and Jewish, and saw no contradiction in this position — wrote his reply to Paolo Orano's pamphlet which had maintained that in fact these positions were indeed contradictory. Livia's father had agreed with Ovazza. If one wanted to express one's sympathy with one's suffering fellow Jews in Germany, this didn't mean one wanted to found a second Fatherland, in the contested lands of Palestine. No, this was precisely what it meant to him to be Italian. Italy was the Fatherland for which so many of the purest heroes of Jewish blood had died.

Later, Livia always used to berate her dead and absent father. Why hadn't he understood? Why hadn't they all left sooner? And Haffner would always reply that it was difficult to leave. Who knew when the right time was to flee? It was so difficult, abandoning the things you loved. It was difficult enough, said Haffner, abandoning the things you hated.

Haffner Delinquent

In his bedroom, finally, Haffner drifted into what he hoped would be the greatest of all restorative sleeps.

For a moment this was true. Then he was transformed into a baby Haffner, playing with the other children while in the next room sat Frau Tummel, taking tea, with all the other adults. Although, when he considered this, some minutes later, when Haffner had been woken up, it struck him as unusual: for Frau Tummel was nearly thirty years his junior. So what was his unconscious doing?

But really, Haffner wasn't often worried by his unconscious: nightly, his dreams were delinquent, involving all life forms, all birds of prey. He had grown used to ignoring the signs. He no more wanted Frau Tummel to mother him than he wanted Zinka to be his daughter.

Enough of the family! Let the eternal couples unite!

But Haffner was only thinking this because, as he was playing on the floor of his imaginary playpen, there came a knock at the door: this knock was then repeated. And when Haffner finally dragged his body — with patches of sweat on his back, scored creases on his cheek — to the door, he found the real Frau Tummel, who wished so urgently to speak with him.

So many things had been running through her head, said Frau Tummel. So many sad thoughts. Haffner murmured: as he had always murmured when confronted by the sadness of women. To see him there, talking with that woman: to see him with that girl. She knew that she was imagining things. And Haffner assured her that yes, absolutely: she was imagining things. What relationship could Haffner have with a girl so young? It was ridiculous.

— Yes, agreed Frau Tummel: ridiculous.

This disturbed Haffner's vanity.

Perhaps she understood, said Frau Tummel. It was as if Haffner would not trust himself, she said. What was wrong, she said, with the passion? Why always run away from it?

There was nothing, thought Haffner, that he could say to this. It seemed so obviously true, in the abstract. As a statement it had its accuracy. But not to his friendship with Frau Tummel. Only to his friendship with Zinka.

And he stood there, rummaging through his brain, like a man searching in his pockets, in his bag, for the ticket which might finally allow him entrance to the airplane which will take him away from all this misery, but finding nothing: just three coins, a key, an obediently switched-off cell phone — none of which, when proffered in a gesture of goodwill, convince the air hostess that he possesses the authority to board the plane and leave.

In this pause, Frau Tummel lit a cigarette: she only managed to light half its tip. She inhaled deeply, until the whole circumference fiercely glowed.

She appeared to change the subject. What a wonderful grandson Benjamin must be, she said: what a solace — as she busied herself with tidying Haffner's bedroom, opening the curtains, neatly folding his tracksuit jacket: its arms pinned behind itself — a straitjacket.

Perhaps, thought Haffner, he was not so wrong to dream of Frau Tummel as his mother. She represented all the domestic he had ever known, a sinful heaven of supervision. And Haffner liked to feel that he was supervised. It was how he had lived in the family home — where at Pesach the cockney maid fell into the dining room, closely followed by the cook, who had been listening in amazed curiosity at the door: a door which had been flung open by Papa in hopeful if theatrical expectation of Elijah.

But surely, thought Haffner, he wasn't here, in exile, banished, to find a second version of a mother. It couldn't be that. Haffner was here to find a house, not a family: not a mother or a wife.

Yet Haffner was still so easily won over by those who tried to care for him. Those who sacrificed themselves for Haffner! Like Barbra, the delight of his New York years, who used to keep a selection of his clothes freshly ironed in her wardrobe. The secret of a marriage? Haffner once argued with Morton. He wanted to know the secret of a marriage? You had to find someone who agreed to be the slave. Somebody had to give up. That was the only solution. Two people in love with their pride, then everything was over. Maybe not immediately, but in the end. The only successful marriages involved someone giving up on their life.

He did not tell Morton who, in the marriage of Livia and Haffner, was the masochist, and who was not.

But it wasn't just marriage. It seemed, thought Haffner, to be the secret of everything. At a certain point, you just gave up on the infantile wish to be an emperor. You stopped complaining that people were changing their clothes beside your marble statue, or carrying a coin stamped with your counterfeit face into a bathroom, or a brothel. Those were the crazy edicts of Augustus. And Haffner, now, was beyond them.

Frau Tummel stubbed her cigarette, half smoked, into Haffner's ceramic ashtray, engraved with a view of a mountain whose name Haffner did not know. Then, slowly, Frau Tummel began to undress.

— We don't want to talk, after all, she said.

What was the point in all these arguments? They loved each other; that was all that mattered. Her husband, he was talking to her all day. His health, it was so up and down. He planned walks in the mountains which he would never take. And to think that she was contemplating leaving him! So much strain she was under! But what could she do?

She wanted the sex. And this might have suited Haffner, but the sex was wasted on him, because she wanted to make the sex love. It wasn't that he couldn't have the two together at any point, but with Frau Tummel it was impossible. He didn't love her. The dramatics bored him. With Frau Tummel, he just wanted the purity of pure dirt. The kind of dirt Frau Tummel could have been into as well, with her lavish breasts, the tired lilt of her belly, if only she had been less in love.

She reclined: as normal, her bra still on.

— There might be no more beauty, said Frau Tummel, observing herself, but there can be a little grace.

And although this forgivable vanity touched Haffner with a remote tenderness, he still felt nothing. Yes, at this point, Haffner suddenly discovered that not only did he not love her, but he didn't even want her. It struck him as strange.

Would he put her on her stomach? Frau Tummel asked him.

He wished he could; he wished that he wanted to do this for Frau Tummel; but he could not see his way to it. Kneeling on the bed, he toyed with her bra. She looked up at him, breathing heavily.

Then there was a knock at the door.

Saved! thought Haffner. Saved!

He dreamed of the receptionist, of Viko, of the waiter in the dining room: joyfully, he considered how it could only be someone who was here to help him, to release him from this agony of politesse and sadness.

No voice came. Haffner asked who it was. Still no one replied. Frau Tummel looked at him: startled.

— My husband! she exclaimed, in a whisper.

To his surprise, Haffner discovered that he was enjoying himself. The male competition of it appealed to him. Anything, so long as Frau Tummel was returned to her own life: a life which had no place for Raphael Haffner.

Did she think so? he whispered back to her. She was sure. Who else could it be? It could be anyone, he argued. Absolutely anyone from the hotel. Or even Benjamin, he argued. Whispering, she shouted at him that this was no time for argument. It was obvious who it was. They needed a plan.

Haffner had no plan. Haffner had no plan.

They looked around the room: at the desk, the window, the elegant armchair, the veranda and its view, the door to the bathroom.

Five seconds later, Haffner confidently opened the door, to discover Zinka: in her sunglasses — twin beige lenses, flat against the hollowed angles of her cheeks.

Haffner could understand the icons of the Orthodox Church, with their mournful expressions: the deep sadness of distance inscribed in their high cheekbones, almond eyes, the nose which Haffner always found alluring: dense with bone, its line an asymmetrical quiver.

Perhaps it was true that he had momentarily abandoned the quest for Zinka in his quest for the villa. He would admit so much. But that was no argument against the sincerity of his desire. The true desire, as Haffner was discovering — as Haffner had so often discovered — was returning. Just as it had returned when he first met Barbra, in his office on a twilit morning in November in Manhattan: a story which Haffner cherished. Just as it had recovered when he had met a woman called Olga, in an executive box at the World Series, who said she was with the Dow Jones, and who so wanted to write about his career, who would appreciate just a few moments with him in private: a story which Haffner, when questioned by his colleagues, had always denied.

Zinka stood there in front of him. She had just come because she had a message from Niko. That he would meet Haffner in the car park: after dinner. It was OK with Haffner? He understood? It was OK, said Haffner.

— So OK, she said.

Haffner did not shut the door. She noticed this. She did not move.

She observed that they seemed to get along. And Haffner agreed. So she had nothing to do now, she said: she was just here to tell him the message.

Haffner thanked her. He told her to thank Niko.

— Maybe, said Zinka, I can come in?

Panicking, considering Frau Tummel in the bathroom, a recording booth, Haffner asked her if she wanted to get a coffee. It seemed the better option: to lock Frau Tummel in, rather than let her hear who was now replacing her — in Haffner's room, in Haffner's desire. But Zinka said that no, why did they need to go anywhere else? He wasn't sure, said Haffner, if he had the facilities for making coffee.

— But whatever, said Zinka, elongating past him. And Haffner paused, anguished by indecision.

But, too late, Zinka had walked towards the window, where her silhouette asked him if she might change into her yoga things in Haffner's room. There was no way, thought Haffner, in which he could answer this with anything approaching the correct decorum. So Haffner only nodded. And as, delirious, he nodded, Haffner considered Frau Tummel, in the bathroom. Transfixed in the fluorescent light. He considered this in a different delirium to the delirium with which he looked at Zinka: a delirium of pensive concern.

Somehow, he considered, without him meaning it to happen, his actions became cruel in their effects.

And Haffner was not cruel. The emperors, of course, were not like him. The great dictators enjoyed their torture: but it was never Haffner's way — to throw a party for a father, to make his son's execution go that much more sociably.

Haffner looked at the wood of the bathroom door. It was probably just a veneer, thought Haffner: not a solid oak, or trusty beech. Harshly, he judged its inadequate soundproofing. He cursed this country. He cursed the former Communist empire for its inadequate provision of workmanship. Then he cursed the nascent capitalist transition.

On the other hand, if Frau Tummel could hear everything, thought Haffner, could hear that Zinka's was not the voice of her husband, then why had she not come out? This seemed reasonable.

Oh Haffner! He hadn't considered the depth of Frau Tummel's pride. Nor the intricacy of her sadness.

Zinka lay there, in no apparent rush to dress herself in the tracksuit and vest which formed her sportswear. She lay against the bolster, in a T-shirt, and socks, and panties. She took an apple from the bowl of fruit placed with professional love beside his bed each morning, bit a slim curve out of it, then put it back, on the table. It wobbled; then came to rest. She looked at Haffner.

She hooked a finger under the gusset of her panties. They looked at each other. Then Zinka withdrew her finger, let her gusset move back into place.

In Haffner's memory, this happened with an infinite languor. This was only, perhaps, because the speed of Haffner's thought was now subject to a steep acceleration.

She must like him, thought Haffner. In some way, she must like him. Haffner, after all, did not believe in the maliciousness of reality. This talent allowed him to discover so much solace where other people only saw benightedness, the end of civilisation.

Zinka asked him if he wanted to watch her touch herself.

No, thought Haffner, trying to reason, considering Frau Tummel, considering Benjamin, considering the villa which had led him into this ever more miniature trap: no, if against his better judgement the world was turning itself into a succession of traps, then what did Haffner care? The obvious reasons were there: the many ways in which Zinka might be thinking of repayment. Or she might be acting for reasons which would always remain inscrutable to Haffner. The reasons were beyond him.

And this, I think, was where the story of the villa began to truly become the story of Haffner's finale: at this point, he began to enter a world where all the usual values seemed reversed: a small gymnasium of moral backflips, with the joyful ideas walking on their hands.

He couldn't remember if any woman had ever asked him this at any other point in his history. It startled him with its poise. Usually, the women seemed to expect Haffner to do the action: Haffner was the highest executive, the producer there to give permission to the director in his folding and eponymous chair, with all the lights off and the crew observing him, expectantly, surrounded by vacant lots where the streetlights flickered in their high anxiety. He looked at Zinka. Frau Tummel, sweating, weeping, did not occur to him, not any more. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to see Zinka touch herself.

Again, Haffner nodded.

Then Zinka flipped over on to her stomach. This was not the position which Haffner had expected: his improvised imagination had been more orthodox, more pornographic. But at this point he was not burdened with the responsibilities of the critic.

Then, he realised, there was a small problem involved in Haffner's own position.

Haffner considered sitting down. He worried this might seem too formal. It might seem rehearsed. So he stood: in the appearance of the casual. As if it were nothing more than an ordinary conversation, this exchange between a hotel guest and his spa assistant.

Standing by his desk, at the foot of the bed, Haffner could see her moving her fingers, the red fingertips emerging where she lay.

And that, Haffner suddenly realised, was it. There was nothing more to see. This moved him. It was, he thought, more intimate like this. He would see nothing, not even her face. Everything was in the noises, the small moans and inhalations, the slow exhalations. Her face was squashed against the pillow. The intimacy was musical. Entranced, Haffner stared.

She rested a cheek on the bedraggled sheet, to look back at him. Her cheek was red, as if she were blushing.

Outside, unknown to Haffner, the sun maintained its fixed decline.

Distractedly, Haffner saw once more the Lives of the Caesars, there on his bedside table. Even if this was not quite despotic, it was the closest he had really come, thought Haffner, to feeling imperial. This was Dacia, and Dalmatia. He could understand the euphoria.

No wonder they set about erecting columns, thought Haffner: the camels and the trumpets. No wonder they wanted to parade their spoils, in triumph — the chariots drawn by panthers on their padded paws. No arch, no column, was grand enough to commemorate the few grand moments of desire in a life, the even fewer moments of possession.

Yes, there had been twelve Caesars: and now here was the thirteenth — Haffner Augustus: whose image, if there were any justice in this world, should be carved on a marble tomb, its panels chased with Haffner in profile, leading his jungly train — the leopards, the chubby satyrs — to some screwed-up festival of Bacchus.

The lamps, in their shades, observed Haffner, delinquent.

And Haffner forgot himself. All the characters of his recent history — Frau Tummel, Niko, Benjamin — dissolved like the swoon of a television's closedown. There was only Haffner, in his second best tracksuit: and this figure in front of him, a resting contortionist.

For Haffner was beginning to understand.

That people tended to make other people up, that friendships tended to be formed between two imaginary people: Haffner knew this. What struck him as more poignant and more touching in the friendship of Zinka and Haffner was that it was so much less imaginary than he might ever have predicted. In ways which rather tended to be beyond him, Haffner seemed to offer her some kind of playfulness. And this version of Haffner, he thought, was the truest, the most profound.

When Esther was very young, she used to play with Haffner and their schnauzer. Livia would be in the kitchen, or the garden. In this way, the three of them formed a diminishing series: for Esther would only play so long as Haffner was there, a minor role. Just as Haffner was only happy when he knew that Livia was there, somewhere close, if out of sight. With Haffner in attendance, occasionally called on to settle some argument, or adjudicate some game, Esther played with her seven imaginary friends, while pensively chewing on the blonde curling tips of her hair.

Haffner wondered whether this resemblance perturbed him — between his daughter playing and a girl on his bed. He concluded that it did not. At that moment, he realised, he would accept whatever conditions were imposed, whatever distortions might be demanded. He would do anything: just so long as he could be there, in the sunlit room, with Zinka.

He was interrupted momentarily from this glow of happiness by Zinka reaching a conclusion which Haffner only wished might be a little softer, a little less of a crescendo. And then there was a pause in which the world, sadly, began to right itself. Finally, Zinka sighed, began to move, and then turned round and sat there, on the bed, looking at him, a leg tucked under her waist: a seductive yogi.

She should probably go, said Zinka: Haffner agreed that yes, she probably should. So, then, she said. And he sat down, by the desk, marvelling — a vague state which meant that her dressing and smiling at Haffner, then leaving the room, then the door shutting with its slow delayed click all seemed to happen in a miracle of speed, without Haffner noticing.

She was the only woman he had ever met — apart from Livia, apart from Livia — marked by such self-possession.

But Haffner had no time to consider the line of his life: its line of beauty. Out of the bathroom, in an adagio of sadness, emerged the judgement of Haffner.

Haffner Guilty

As in the horror films of Haffner's silent youth, the door to the bathroom swung open, and no one emerged. There was silence: except, thought Haffner, for the liquid, aquatic soundtrack of the bathroom. Then Haffner understood that he was listening to the profound whisper of Frau Tummel's exhalations, the soughing of her inhalations. She had been standing there, staring into the mirror, her profile against the door. For a perturbed exalted moment, Haffner wondered if what he could hear was maybe the after-effect of a simultaneous Tummelian orgasm: still transcendent, cascading.

It was not.

Frau Tummel emerged from her oubliette. She made hungrily for her handbag and discovered her package of cigarettes. She lit one, then relaxed into the usual minimalist rhythm, standing at the window, grinning against the light. To the mountains, the unending sky, she said that she had never been so much made mock of. She was a wife, she was a mother. Everything she had, she had offered to Haffner. And this was how he treated her. He had let her say so many things. He had told her so many untruths.

He was like a boy, she said. This monster of immaturity! Even an adolescent would be more careful with love.

— But, argued Haffner, standing uneasily in the middle of the room.

At this point in his intricate reasoning, Frau Tummel interrupted.

She could not understand it. Was he rational? When he had done what he had just done? This man who had just shut her in a bathroom, while he entertained a woman in a way which she, Frau Tummel, could not explain. No, she could not understand it. A man who was dressed, as ever, in a variant on the shell suit.

Haffner only wanted to say, he began again. Again, he was forced to pause.

And although I am Haffner's historian, I can observe Frau Tummel too. He only wanted to mock her, she thought. He must have staged the whole thing. She was feeling so suddenly desolate. Now, she had no one. It was clear enough, she thought, that Haffner would never want her in the way that she wanted him to want her; and yet she did not want her husband, not quite, in the way that she wanted to want him either — a man who was so delicate, so unlike the ideal of Frau Tummel's youth.

Why, she said, must there be so much vulgarity with Haffner? Why this obscenity? Her voice accelerated into the upper registers. What beauty was there in his behaviour? Why the dirt, Raphael? Why this dirt?

And Haffner, still in the cloud of happiness produced by Zinka — illuminated, looking down on the pitiful world of humans — did not know what to say.

But of course, continued Frau Tummel, let everything descend to his level. Because he didn't understand the higher emotions. Haffner tried to remonstrate with her. When, said Haffner, had he ever? Whereas for her, continued Frau Tummel, fool that she was, it was a fantasy: of course, it was just a romance. If that was how he wanted to describe something eternal, something real.

— You! said Frau Tummel. In your tracksuit.

This point seemed incontrovertible.

— You want, she said, to be with this girl? This teenager? It disgusts me.

Once, this accusation would have seemed just to Haffner, perhaps: but not now. Up here, in the mountains, he had discovered a delighted sense of flippancy: yes, up here, he really could dispense with thinking in terms of the up or the down. As if the healthy were really ill. Or the old were really young.

So what could he say to soothe her? She wanted love to be a refuge: the desert island. But Haffner never thought that anywhere was safe; nowhere was truly deserted. Not even a marriage. It was, he thought, impossible to desert into another country, across the border, in the blue dawn.

It wasn't Haffner's fault, after all, if the moments of love and the moments of sex so rarely coincided.

— So, said Frau Tummel. So.

Haffner wondered what that meant. He wondered if he could ask.

It was always the same, said Frau Tummel. Men would always say they were in love, when all they wanted was the body of a woman; whereas for a woman, said Frau Tummel, it was absolutely opposite. He came from an outside place. But what could this man in front of her know about a true woman?

— But I never said I loved you, said Haffner.

And then he immediately regretted this moment of pointless truth. Suddenly, Frau Tummel stalled in the headlong pursuit of her anger. But then, perhaps this was what she had expected all along: this brutal Haffner.

It didn't mean, however, that Frau Tummel was not in love. It only confirmed her in her feelings all the more. The suffering was no contradiction. It couldn't be love, thought Frau Tummel, without the suffering. It came upon you, unbidden.

She waited for Haffner to say something kind, to tell her that of course he loved her. But Haffner simply stood there, deserted by his politesse: maimed by sincerity.

He refused to agree, said Haffner, with her theory. No, love was not a compulsion. The suffering was not necessary. It was just imagination, he told her. Everyone, said Haffner, chooses if they want to fall in love.

And as he said it, he wasn't sure if it was true. It didn't seem true of his love for Zinka. It had never been true of his love for Livia.

Let me be my own author! This was Haffner's cry. He wanted to be the one who invented his own stories as he went along. Except he hadn't then; and he couldn't now.

No, there was nothing masculine about Haffner's desire for Zinka: it did not obey the usual categories of Haffner: pursuit, and then seduction. Instead, it represented a happy passivity, content with whatever it might get.

Perhaps Zinka understood this. She wanted a man who was beyond the normal aggression. She wanted, really, an escape from the men. Whereas Frau Tummel — who craved the masculine — did not.

If Haffner were only allowed to exist in one sentence, it would be this: he was a desire that had outlived its usefulness.

And maybe this was the universal law of the empires: the law of decadence. That was the secret history of history. The very quality that led to an empire was the reason why that very empire would no longer be able to sustain itself. No contemporary, in the words of the great historian, could discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. He was talking about the Roman empire. But he could have been talking about Haffner. The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. And so the minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level; everyone sunk into the languid indifference of private life.

Not survival of the fittest, then, but the deeper truth: survival of the weakest. Haffner had been so intent on the pursuit of women. He had always been kind to his desires. And now this very taste for possession had led to his transformation into the greatest of fantasists — the most elegant and whimsical of imaginative artists. Because the desire was still there, but Haffner was no longer in control of where he might act these desires out.

And this reminds me of one story from a more decadent empire than our own.

The emperor Elagabalus was emperor when the empire was disintegrating. As if that wasn't obvious. His reputation as a voluptuary was awesome. It might be possible, recorded Elagabalus's historian, that his vices and follies had been exaggerated; had been adorned in the imagination of his narrators. But even if one only believed those excesses which were performed in public, and attested to by many witnesses, they would still surpass the records of human infamy. Of these excesses, the one which I most admire is the way in which Elagabalus — the instigator of a coup — loved to dress up in women's clothes. He preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and distributed the honours of the empire among his male lovers, including one man who was invested with the authority of the emperor — or, as Elagabalus insisted on being known, the empress's husband.

Laughable, maybe — but man! What possessions one could enter into, when dispossessed to this extent!

Perhaps, said Frau Tummel, he simply lacked soul.

This was more than Haffner had expected. Perhaps, she continued, the spirit was beyond him. She was sure that he didn't even know how to cross himself. No, said Haffner, he didn't. This, said a demonstrative Frau Tummel, is how you do it.

Was it only Haffner, he wondered, who was constantly available for education?

Like this? he wondered. No, that was wrong, she said. The forehead first? queried Haffner. The forehead was not important, said Frau Tummel. The forehead was nothing. Why was he worrying about the forehead?

Then there was another knock at the door.

— Don't answer it! cried Frau Tummel.

— Why not? said Haffner, flinging open the door, to reveal a boy bearing a tray.

It was reception, he said. They were sending Haffner complimentary refreshment.

— Why? said Haffner.

— A gift, said the boy.

— From whom? said Haffner.

— I don't know, said the boy.

And he placed on the table an inaccurate planetarium: a galaxy of white chocolates, with seven half-moons of cinnamon biscuits.

Frau Tummel looked at Haffner.

— You mock me, she said.

And, for a moment, he wanted to enfold her in his arms and tell her no, he did not mock her at all.

He was truly a monster, she told him. What right did he think he had?

He could admit, as she said this, that there were ways of finding Haffner guilty. Therefore, maybe it was right that, more and more, his life resembled some bizarre form of punishment, some gonzo idea of karma. But Haffner wasn't one to be abused by ideas of sin. The devil, like all the other gods, was one invention among many, in Haffner's improvised theology: the gods were just decoration; scribbled marginalia. The gods were doodling. He preferred to form the categories himself. If Haffner were pressed, he preferred the more charming and likeable others: the demigods. The infinite fairies: the 33,000 gods of the pagan religions. These were the gods he might have called on when he felt that he was sinning. But the prospect was unlikely, He doubted that, if the gods existed, their concern would be the soul of Raphael Haffner.

— I said I loved you, said Frau Tummel.

She said it, he thought, as if she were in shock.

— It'll be OK, said Haffner. He knew this was not adequate. But there was nothing, he felt, he could say.

Naturally, said Frau Tummel, she would have to consider whether to report the girl. It was only right. This seemed unnecessary, said Haffner. No, said Frau Tummel. It was only right. She had to consider what was right. Would there be anything he could do, said Haffner, to persuade her otherwise? Frau Tummel looked at him. She told him that no, there was not.

And she turned and left, theatrically slamming the door. Or, theatrically trying to slam the door: but the door, on its stiff spring-delay, braked, and softly, slowing, slowly, softly closed itself, in silence.

But what else had she expected? He was a monster, absolutely. A chimera, a griffin: a rabid centaur. Nor was this the first appearance of Haffner's multiple personality, his capacity for metamorphosis.

The night when Haffner proposed to Livia — just before Haffner was due to ship out — he had gone with some friends to the French Pub in Soho. And at that time he did not realise that the man behind the bar, with the Gallic twin-twirled moustache, was Victor Berlemont, the father of Gaston — Gaston, who after his retirement from the French Pub would play golf with Haffner twenty years later, in the other bohemia of Hendon. A man who understood the problematic species of herbs. With a Pernod in his hand — the first time Haffner had ever drunk this strange and continental liquor — he had talked to a girl about the higher things. Many times, Haffner had considered the uneasy fluctuations of one's sense of beauty. In wartime, he discovered, one could find beautiful most women you met. Because you needed beauty, for the desire to feel rational. Whereas the desire you felt in a war wasn't rational, and there was no beauty. She didn't believe, the girl in the French Pub had told him, that adultery was wrong. It was, let us say, a short story: to the side of the novel. He did not quite understand the analogy; he knew, however, what she meant. But that girl and her analogies dissolved into memory — the steep amphitheatre of Haffner's memory which he looked down on from the great height of his longevity, perched on his seat in the gods, looking down at the rabid lions, the dying Christians.

Haffner had left, and gone to meet Livia at the statue of Eros.

It was always like that, he thought. He wanted to be bohemian, and the bohemian eluded him. He had kissed the girl in the French Pub, and then left, before anything else might happen.

He took Livia for a meal on Shaftesbury Avenue. Then they had gone to some film: of which Haffner only remembered that a man spent a lot of time driving. This was, Haffner remembered, the main reason, it seemed, there had been for making a film: the mania for cars. It was so cool to drive that all any one in Britain wanted to see, all any one in Los Angeles wanted to film, was a man getting in and out of a car. And also, remembered Haffner, smoking a pipe. In and out of a car while smoking a pipe. That was cinema. Afterwards, they were in a taxi round the back of Leicester Square. They were taking Livia home. And did Livia know, asked Haffner, how dangerous it would be for him over there, soon, at the front? Livia made Haffner aware that she did. But perhaps, he continued — wishing he could not remember how the girl in the French Pub had kissed him, the thick dry texture of her lipstick, with its waxy faded rose perfume, like the greasepaint of his recent brief theatrical career, which she then reapplied, open-mouthed, after they had kissed, while Haffner watched the taut ellipse of her mouth — Livia did not quite appreciate the magnitude of the danger. The danger Haffner would be in, over there, at the front.

Haffner touched her on the cheek. He was twenty-two. She was twenty. It was very possible, he said, that he would never see her again. He might never come home. So would she, he said — looking down, bashful — consent to make him happy? It would mean so much to him, he said, to know that someone cared. Livia looked at him: and, as she used to tell Benjamin, and everyone else, for ever after, she did not know what else she could do. It seemed rude to say no. So she said yes and — feeling very fast — cuddled him up, and kissed him.

As Haffner silently and helplessly compared her nervous, gentle, motionless kiss to the inspired kiss of a girl four hours earlier, whose name he would never know.

Haffner Jewish

Because Haffner was now in a state of introspection; because his attempt to find Zinka, to warn her about the rages of Frau Tummel, had stalled when, as he leaned casually against the counter at reception, a man sporting a slicked quiff, with a paper rose in his lapel, smiled blankly at him and assured him that Zinka had left the hotel that day; because in any case Frau Tummel was unlikely to draw the hotel's attention to her surveillance of Haffner's bedroom: because of all these reasons, Haffner went walking again. His intention was to sit and reflect on the villa. He was due to meet Niko that evening, in their clandestine arrangement. Before that, he was eating supper with Benjamin. So Haffner now had two intentions. He wanted to sit and reflect, and check that his quest for the villa was being as slickly maintained as possible. And to do this, he intended to find a coffee: the blackest, most acrid, most Mediterranean coffee.

From this search, however, Haffner was sidetracked.

He didn't always know why he did things. He didn't know why, now, he had wandered into a church: first blinded by the darkness, then gradually seeing the light. A shrine on his left was an exhibition of car crash photos: for those who had survived miraculous suffering. A shrine on his right was an exhibition of baby photos, toddlers, foetal scans. The shrine of the miracle births. Haffner sat in a pew, his back straight, his knees aching, and looked up at the crucified God. He looked back down. A woman in a headscarf was shepherding seven bags of shopping. She bent low to worship her Lord.

Just as Livia had bent her head, when she crouched there, on all fours, waiting for the entrance of Haffner. Because she liked to see it, she said. She liked to watch him moving, between her legs.

Haffner looked up. He looked back down. The only prayers he knew were Jewish prayers, and so he tried to say them.

The Jews were, in the end, his people. If Haffner had a people.

Perhaps, then, this was not the digression it appeared to Haffner. Perhaps this was just another way for Haffner to consider his commitment to Livia's inheritance.

— Shema, Yisrael, he said, the Lord our God.

And then he could not remember anything else. Because the way up is the way down and the way left is the way right. He was in a church, and he was Jewishly praying. Did this matter? Was this the sort of action which damned a soul for all eternity? Haffner had no idea.

When Livia had died, Benjamin had taken Haffner aside. As if Benjamin were the grandfather. Perhaps, thought Benjamin, Haffner might find solace if he went to shul?

— Shul? said Haffner.

— Shul, said Benjamin.

— Since when, said Haffner, did you give up on the English language?

Haffner disliked the modern trend for Yiddish. It wasn't some recovered purity of the blood that Haffner cared about: instead Haffner preferred the distinctions of the English language, was learned in the difference between a parvenu and an arriviste, a cad and a bounder.

On the other hand, the linguistics did not exhaust his irritation at Benjamin's suggestion.

Haffner rarely went to synagogue.

— You want to leave the synagogue? the Reverend Levine had said to him. Be my guest. I don't mind which synagogue you don't go to.

And Haffner had riposted with his own.

— Come on, said Haffner, winningly. What is the definition of a British Jew?

— Tell me, Raphael, said the Reverend Levine.

— A person, said Haffner, who instead of no longer going to church, no longer goes to synagogue.

Once, he had felt more allegiance to his religion. At school, he hadn't eaten the bacon, just the eggs; and when there was an exchange, and some German boys came over, he didn't want to speak to them: he had resented them being there. Yet he also went to chapel once a day, and twice on Sundays. He could have, naturally, been excused, but he still went.

— The thing about you, Benji had said to him, during one of their political discussions, is that you're so English. You're lukewarm.

— You're English too, said Haffner. Don't you be forgetting you're English.

— I'm not, said Benji. Well, I'm not English like you're English. Just as in New York, when Morton persisted in his absolute belief that race was where it was at. That history was where it was at. That no one could be sincere if they tried to deny the world-importance of politics.

In this way, Haffner floated above the Atlantic Ocean, neither European nor American.

During the war, he had disturbed his Jewish friends — particularly Silberman, that comical Jewish soldier — with his unabashed hatred of the Stern Gang: the Zionist Jewish terrorists. With disdain, Haffner quoted from their newspaper, The Front, where the crazies argued, crazily, in Haffner's considered opinion, that neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition could negate the use of terror as a means of battle.

Haffner didn't care about birth or name or nation. He was not a stickler for such things. He was amused when Hersch Lauterpacht — Goldfaden's new friend — told him, many years after it happened, over dinner, that his nomination to the International Court of Justice had initially been blocked by the Attorney General, on the grounds that a British representative should both be and be seen to be thoroughly British, whereas Lauterpacht could not help the fact that he did not qualify in this way either by birth, by name or by education. Yes, how they had laughed, at Simpson's on the Strand, in 1980. How he had chuckled at this idea that they should in any way be seen as European.

My hero of assimilation! My hero of lightness!

Or so Haffner would have liked his story to be written. But it was not entirely true.

Haffner still treasured his family's stories from the shtetl. Or, more precisely, he treasured the story of their escape. How the final branch of the Haffner family tree to reach England had docked in Sunderland, in the midst of the nineteenth century, with Haffner's great-grandfather, a two-month-old baby, in a box. This was the family romance: the line of the Haffners had only survived the Lithuanian pogroms because of the silence and courage of great-grandfather Haffner, whose name was Isaac — the perfect silent baby. But, thought Haffner, where was the logic in this story? If one needed to hide the baby, surely one would have needed to hide oneself as well? And the chances of a baby remaining silent during a customs investigation, tight in a box, seemed highly unlikely. So in what way would this ruse dupe an anti-Semite, in Prussia, with his sideburns and the plume of his helmet, the beige snuff stains on the crook of his thumb? But there it was: this story, invented or not, was the beginning of the Haffners' career in polite society. This silent infant generated the family law firm — which Haffner had refused — the house in north London, the servants, the cricket matches, the endless lawn-tennis lessons.

And his mother, his minuscule mother, who fasted every Yom Kippur: who stood on the steps of their synagogue in St John's Wood, asking Raphael to hold her, because she was dizzy.

Haffner thought that with these memories he was avoiding the pressing issue of the villa, the pressing issue of the women who had so invaded his stay here in the mountains. But there was passion in Haffner's indecision. He wanted to be a flaneur: he wanted to pretend that he had no engagements, no responsibilities. This ideal Haffner would idle through his memories — flick through them as through the pages of an outdated women's magazine, in the dentist's waiting room, while sitting beside an abandoned playpen made of multicoloured plastic. But this Haffner did not exist. No, the real Haffner was, as always, in the middle of things.

Here, in this church, Haffner tried to disappear from view. As he always tried to do. And he could not.

He was an aristocrat. Could no one understand this? Bourgeois, true, but an aristocrat! He had class. Even as they tried to force him into the Jewish working classes: the ordinary ranks of the Jews. The dispossessed; the heartbroken. No, Haffner had nothing to do with the Yiddish in London. Koyfts a heft! they used to cry, in the streets where Haffner was trying to find a cup of tea, after his cricket coaching in the East End. His cousins had set up the first ever mixed Jewish and Christian social club for boys in the East End locale of Bethnal Green, a club whose cricket team Haffner had coached to victory that same summer, the year before he went away to fight in the British army. Buy a pamphlet! they cried, crowding round Haffner, with their Yiddish literary magazines, their Zionist cris de coeur.

Buy, thought Haffner, a fucking pamphlet yourself.

It had seemed so funny then. It seemed less funny now.

The aristocracy of Haffner was not a metaphor. A cousin on his mother's side was a viscount.

Yes, Haffner had history.

As a young man, Haffner's viscount had been moved by the plight of the underdog, the abandoned masses in their ghettos. He would go with his father — a liberal politician, a man of principle — to the dilapidated areas out to the east of London, where the less fortunate Jewish people lived, with their impoverished tailoring, cabinet-making, matchbox-making, fur-pulling. Then they would go to the park, to take a stroll, or a ride. The disparity between these two experiences moved the young politician: he wanted to do good. He was so moved that the syntax in his diary became impassioned, inverted. What are they, dull, short-visioned, who see not the ground shaking beneath their very feet — wrote the young liberal — and angry voices, quiet, marvellously refraining yet, that are soon to rise, in ever-swelling clamour? Later on, when he retired from public life, Haffner's viscount devoted his time to the writing of philosophy. He was, he said, a meliorist. He believed that, with only a small adjustment in our thinking, we would see that this world could indeed become the best of all possible worlds.

Whenever the business of imagining this thing called history came up in Haffner's life — on rare occasions, perhaps when rereading Churchill, or arguing with his grandson, or listening to the stories of Livia's family — he imagined history as a straight line. The line of gravity. The all-encompassing horizontal — its horizon — to which all bodies descended.

It was Haffner's viscount who had argued for the Jewish right of return to Palestine: the Arabs could not forbid the Jews to come back, he had argued, since the Jews were a people whose connection with the country long antedated their own — and especially as it had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years. There could be no question, he had told the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, that the best thing for the land would be for it to be reclaimed by the Jews.

He was not dogmatic, however. The rights of the immigrants did not cancel out the rights of the natives: no, the arrival of the Jews must never be marked by hardship, expropriation, injustice of any kind for the people now in the land, whose forebears had tilled the soil and dwelled in the towns for a thousand years.

The viscount possessed the optimism of the romantic.

As the first ever High Commissioner of Palestine, the viscount had sent rare stamps to his philatelic king, painted with Churchill (whose paintings, he noted, were avowedly crude, but nonetheless effective, especially in colouring) and played tennis with Lord Balfour himself. Whose idea — along with that genius Weizmann — the whole country had been in the first place. And it was the viscount who was one half of the most famous anecdote about this country which they still called Palestine. When his predecessor, Chief Administrator Bols, was about to leave office, wrote the viscount, he asked the incoming commissioner to sign a receipt. The viscount asked for what. For Palestine, said Bols. But, replied the viscount, he couldn't do that. He couldn't mean it seriously. Certainly he did, said Major Bols. He had it typed out here. And he produced a slip of paper — Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, KCB: one Palestine, complete — with the date and a space for the viscount's signature. The viscount still demurred, but Bols insisted, so he signed; adding, however, the initials which used often to appear on commercial documents — E & OE, meaning Errors and Omissions Excepted. And Bols had this piece of paper framed, he was so pleased with it.

And when the viscount finally left the country, to further pursue his career back in Britain, he took with him a vision. In his memoir of his time in Palestine, he recorded the wide roads, bordered by little white single-storeyed houses, well spaced out, with creepers over their porches; around them, little gardens of flowers and patches of vegetables, with fields of waving corn and young plantations of trees beyond; groups of men and women in working-clothes, smiling girls and beautiful, healthy, white-dressed children; overhead, the cloudless blue sky. That, he said, was the vision with which he had left.

It wasn't Haffner's vision. Haffner thought it was schmaltz.

But it was with pride that, towards the end of 1942, he had learned in the newspapers of the viscount's speech in the Lords, on the reading of the declaration against German extermination of the Jews. This was not an occasion on which they were expressing sorrow and sympathy to sufferers from some terrible catastrophe due unavoidably to flood or earthquake, or some other convulsion of nature, the viscount had said. These dreadful events were an outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty on the part of human beings. Hear hear, the Lords had murmured. And Haffner with them, in Egypt. Absolutely.

Authority like this was what Haffner was destined for, thought Haffner. It was his inheritance: the natural deference shown to the political classes, the happy comforts of the Finanzbourgeoisie. A class to which he naturally belonged, thought happy Haffner, confirmed in this belief by the speech in the newspaper just as much as he was by his first ever deal — at Anzio, when he persuaded some desperate American, a friend of Morton's, just for a cheap bottle of whisky, to part with his regulation, all-terrain, multi-gear jeep.

The viscount, however, had still been moved by the ghettos. Whereas Haffner felt more distance from the Jewish underclass. The stories from the ghettos distressed him but they were not his. Partly, this was from a sense that as a cossetted Londoner he could hardly adopt the tragedies of people he never knew. A position which seems calmly moral, precisely modest, to me. But there was also a more complicated distance. The person Haffner knew best, whose stories were ghetto stories, was Goldfaden. With Livia, thought Haffner jealously, Goldfaden possessed a tragic European past. So this meant, I think, that Haffner sometimes exaggerated his haughtiness in regard to history. For Haffner was not without his own sense of racial possessiveness. In Haffner's opinion, there was no reason for the working classes, for the Blacks and the Chinese, to avail themselves of this word ghetto. It was a Jewish possession. No one else had suffered like the Jews had suffered. No one else had been persecuted with such universal thoroughness.

In Venice, on holiday with Esther and her family, in the early 1980s, Haffner and Livia wandered away from San Marco: they ended up in what had been, Livia informed him, reading from a guidebook, the original ghetto (-From the sixteenth century! she exclaimed). In the bleak hot sunlight, no one was moving. On the seventh floor of a tenement building, some washing was strung on runners. A wireless was talking to itself.

In this ghetto, Haffner and Livia discussed their recurrent story of the Ghetto: the story of Goldfaden's uncle, Eli, who was now a cameraman in LA.

Eli had not been on the family holiday in London with the Goldfadens. So he was left behind in Warsaw. Before the war, he had been a member of the Bund, the General Jewish Labour Union. He believed in a strange combination of the Yiddish language and culture, and secular Jewish nationalism. Like Livia's father, and Haffner, he was not a Zionist. Unlike them, he expressed this Yiddishly, through his devotion to doyigkeyt, to hereness. His family lived on Sienna Street, near the Jewish quarter. And Eli, Goldfaden used to tell Livia, as they reminisced about Europe — while Haffner glanced at the diary pieces about his financial rivals in the evening papers — Eli was so earnest in his devotion to learning that he even read the novels which were serialised in the newspapers. A man should be prepared, thought Eli. Nothing was alien to him.

In Warsaw, before the revolt in the Ghetto, and before the uprising in the city, but when everything still was bleak, Eli had been told to go with his parents to the main square. This seemed reasonable. Or, at least, not unreasonable. In the square, they were told to walk in single file to the train station, where a train was waiting at each platform. They had asked the rabbi if this seemed advisable. The rabbi, after long deliberation, thought that the best thing to do was obey those in power. Could they really wish them harm? And this, said Goldfaden, was where his cousin became heroic. He came to a decision. No one had ever heard again from those who had got on the trains to the east. Eli knew this. Therefore, concluded Eli, he would run. So what if he were shot in the back, his kidneys torn inside him? He would prefer to stage his own death, rather than sleepwalk into it. And so he ran, and managed to hide out in the rubble of a destroyed apartment block.

Here, in the ghetto in Venice, just before Haffner had retired, Livia had praised Eli once more. But Haffner, this time, had paused. Then he had asked her: what about the others? She had asked him what he meant. They paused and looked at a dark canal. What about the others, the ones the man had left behind? said Haffner. What about his parents? And Livia had replied that they all died. Naturally, they had died. The moral value of Eli's act seemed to Haffner to be complicated by this. He had chosen to abandon his friends. And maybe this was fine, maybe this was unremarkable, but Haffner thought that, at the very least, it was a complication.

She should have known, said Livia, that Haffner would be difficult.

Yes, said Haffner, Haffner would be difficult. Why shouldn't he be difficult?

And perhaps Haffner was right, even if he was only accidentally right, by transforming Eli's story into a story of Haffner: a compromise.

Haffner saw in this anecdote the grand bravery of refusing to act in the way you were supposed to act. In Haffner's rewrite, Eli's escape from the Ghetto was also a desertion.

According to Livia, the story of Eli was not a story of a desertion, because a desertion was morally bad. An escape, however, was morally good. But I am not so sure that the two can be so easily divided. People call a flight an escape, only after having been forced to give up the idea that it is moral to remain in a bad situation. So often, people think that if one person is suffering, then everyone else should suffer too. In these cases, if someone takes flight, then their escape is just a desertion.

Yes, the whole vocabulary of flight is puritanical. So every act of desertion is also an act of hedonism.

And maybe the deep reason for this is that no one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap. The trap is the image of life's seriousness.

Haffner, however, my hero, did not believe that life was serious. He didn't believe that one must necessarily be faithful to the ordinary, inevitable tragedy of a life. If one could be faithless to anything, Haffner always hoped, surely it would be to one's own past?

But, however much I admire the hope, I am not so sure that this kind of infidelity is possible. And there, in the church, nor was Haffner. Because the story of Eli now made Haffner remember another story which he preferred to keep to himself: how under the patronage of the Reverend Levine, the appointed guardian of Jewish refugees from Germany, a girl stayed in the Haffners' house, in 1938. He didn't remember very much about her: he couldn't remember her name. He knew very little, but he believed that she took her own life. Not when she was staying with them, but eventually.

She must have been about twenty. He didn't remember even trying to talk to her. She must have been with them a very short time, thought Haffner. She was extremely unhappy. Perhaps they couldn't cope with her. Yes, in his mind, he heard that she had taken her own life. But his mind was a bit hazy. He hadn't got involved — but he knew that there was somebody there, upstairs, in the spare room. She was always asleep. He had no idea how it had been organised.

This was what it was to be Jewish in Britain. The East was always making its demands on you: the grief of its history entered your life and so it became your own. You were always being forced back: beyond the pale.

He couldn't remember that girl's name.

He was not sinful: he refused all ideas of sin. But if Haffner had ever sinned, thought Haffner, then this forgetting was it.

In the dark church Haffner called on God:

— You are the Lord my God, Haffner exclaimed, in silence, in the darkness of this church, and I am a clod of dirt and a worm; dust of the ground and a vessel of shame.

But Haffner didn't need his God for such lavish repentance. The women were enough.

Haffner had used the infidelities within his marriage as the Orthodox used the eruv. They were exercises in invention; the riches of self-blame. His interior life was festooned with sagging squares of string, marking out the permitted areas within the forbidden world. He believed in marriage like the Orthodox believed in God. It was a territory for permitting the unpermitted.

And for testing the soul of Haffner.

Livia had been expert at the put-down. She was, in Haffner's language, a strong woman. This trait had endeared her to him. At the official dinners, the unofficial suppers, Haffner bore with pleased and happy grace her talent to resist Haffner's charm, believing that this public scepticism served to illustrate his moral grandeur, his lack of vanity. It was not an unusual moment in his life when, on the night of the dinner for the City Branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982, he came into her dressing room while she was in her underwear — blue lace, white frills — and with a crooked finger, its nail tipped with a varnish whose colour Haffner would never be able to name, she pointed out to him the direction of the door. And in his socks he turned around and left.

Retrospectively, however, this moment had acquired a unique weight. For that, thought Haffner, was when he understood that his marriage had in fact been governed by forces which he did not understand or control. That night, after Haffner's speech, after the speeches reciprocating Haffner's speech, as they were driving home in Haffner's Saab — with Livia driving, because Haffner was utterly drunk — Haffner quizzed her on the significance of why he had found her sitting outside the venue, the Butchers' Hall; why he had found her sitting there with Goldfaden, sharing a cigarette while the meat-market traffic began revving and chirring around them and the rinsing smell of meat gusted and retreated: yes, why had he found them there, sitting peaceably, with Goldfaden cupping her hand as he lit her cigarette? And at the time Haffner had not so much minded about the fact that he had never seen her smoking; nor that it was a habit she had excoriated in Haffner: he minded about the casual way in which Goldfaden touched her hand.

Calmly, without malice, Livia had simply told Haffner that it was not as if he could really lecture her. It was not as if he could condemn what she had done, and would continue to do.

Drunk, silenced, Haffner considered this. And what he wanted to say was that the two were incomparable: because when it came to women, Haffner had only ever got whoever came along. They loved him, true — but Haffner never really loved them back. He just amazed them with the strength of his devotion: a devotion which was indistinguishable from the fear that they would leave him. Even if no one did leave Haffner. Whereas Livia had something else. Livia, it seemed, had love.

— Do you love him? asked Haffner.

And Livia, braking gently at the traffic light by the Hampstead pond, said that yes of course: naturally, she said — and she touched Haffner, gently, on the cheek. So Haffner asked her what they were going to do about it now, to which Livia simply replied that she saw no reason to do anything.

Livia didn't believe in an escape.

She parked the car in the drive, went into the house, and Haffner sat there: listening to the rose bushes' gentle crackle in the wind. Just as now, years later, Haffner sat in a church and surveyed the wondrous mistakes of his life: his infidelity to his wife, his infidelity to his race. Or, to put it another way, his infidelity to the women he had slept with — to Barbra, to Pilar and Joan and Laure and all the other names he now could not remember — his infidelity to his nation.

All the nebulous fairies of his history and his politics, dissolving, now, on a midsummer night, in the middle of nowhere.

He was such a klutz, thought Haffner. Then he translated himself out of Goldfaden's language. He was a fool.

It was fitting, really, that one of Goldfaden's favourite party tricks was his riff on the word dope. As Goldfaden would explain to you, it was the trickiest word in the language: on the American side, it came from the Dutch for sauce, so meaning any kind of goo, lubricant, liquid, liquor, and hence any kind of narcotic, drug, medicine, adulterating agent, and hence, through the racetracks, and their need to know the inside dope, all esoteric lore, all arcana. And there it met, at its apex, the British derivation, from dupe, meaning the gull, the fool, the absolutely-in-the-dark: and where else were we, Goldfaden would conclude, if not always in the dark, drugged by lack of knowledge, unaware of the systems which eluded us and which invaded us at every moment? This word dope was the real thing which bound the British and Americans together: this was the real Atlantic Ocean.

But at this point, with this word dope, Haffner had gone as far as he could in the business of self-discussion. Because everything was obvious to him now. Everything had always been to do with Livia. And Haffner had never noticed.

It was so evident, so infinite in its evidence, that Haffner had never known.

Haffner stood up: he turned to go — making for the Chinese restaurant where he was meant to eat with Benjamin. In front of the church, where the baroque facade hid the brick barn of a nave, a line of floats was parked, each decorated with a tableau vivant. All the actors in these tableaux were children. Surrounding them, the adults of the town were taking photographs. Saint Peter was scratching the side of his nose with a translucent wafer, while another boy in white shirt and black trousers kneeled before him, on a plush velvet cusion, with his eyes escaping through the trickle of his fingers.

No, thought Haffner, observing the children. Some things were irreversible. The entropy of Haffner! Not everything could be recuperated. Like Haffner's gilded youth. For how can a man be young, when he is old? He knew enough of the Bible to know that this was difficult.

As Morton would have said, do the math.

Only on the last day in Cairo, in 1946, did Haffner write to Livia as his wife. Throughout their engagement and the early years of their marriage, throughout the war, he had referred to her as his darling girl, his sweetheart. Only now, in the last letter he would write to her from the war, when he was coming home, did Haffner address her as his very darling wife.

— I only pray that you will find me a better man than when I left you and that I will fulfil all your dreams, he wrote. I believe that we can do tremendous things together and that with our lives, with our happiness, we can make others happy. And that is what I think life is for, the real purpose behind it all. So Haffner wrote to Livia, the night before he sailed back to England, in 1946.

— Bless you, my beloved girl, wrote Raphael Haffner, keep you safe always.