The Escape

Haffner Gastronomic

The meals of Haffner and Benjamin were epic. In this gargantuan size, they expressed their love. They went to Bodean's on Poland Street and sucked at the burned ends and ribs of cows — which jutted out forlornly, and unevenly, like organ pipes. They were experts in the cuts of steak: both convinced that the aged hanger steaks of New York were the greatest of them all. Then there were the deep-fried marvels of Japan: the chicken katsu, endowed with its cloudy pot of barbecue sauce. Candy undid them: not the ordinary treats, but the strange, gourmet sugar of internationally local cuisines: nougat, glace cherries, marzipan fruits, baklava. They invented festivals of junk food: on one famous occasion, they had walked down Oxford Street, eating at every branch of American burger chain they could find. But there was more. This more was the Chinese food.

There was nothing, said Benjamin, more Jewish than this — Haffner's passion for Chinese food. Nothing more emphasised, said Benjamin, his genetic roots to the scattered race.

Haffner looked at him, amazed: his own grandson, with the same weird theory of Chinese food as Goldfaden. Or perhaps he was misremembering. This was, after all, possible.

Underneath a red paper lantern, Benjamin's cheeks were carmine — incandescent. On his face shone a glaze of sweat, echoing the lacquer on the slices of pork belly which lay, unguent, on their bed of shredded iceberg lettuce set before Haffner.

— You ordered the crispy beef, said Benji.

— Yes, I ordered the beef, said Haffner. Of course I ordered the beef. Wait a minute.

Benjamin swivelled round. Or, he swivelled as much as his bulk would allow: an imperfect barn owl.

He saw no one who could help him. He turned back to Haffner.

They continued to argue over whether Haffner should keep his appointment with Niko. Haffner thought it was obvious; Benjamin thought it was less obvious. But he couldn't see, said Haffner, what he had to lose. Could Benjamin explain this to him? He wasn't so proud that he would refuse someone else's help.

It was the principle, said Benjamin. He didn't know these people. How could he trust them?

What kind of principle was that? replied Haffner. It was fear, that was all. And they were hardly, said Haffner, going to rob him — and he exhibited his Nike T-shirt; his flared turquoise tracksuit trouser.

Benji swivelled round once more: he still saw no one who could help him.

Sighing, he turned back, and introduced a new topic of conversation.

What, he wanted to know, did Haffner know about hip hop?

— Hip hop? queried Haffner.

— Hip hop, confirmed Benjamin. But not the West Coast hip hop, nor the East Coast hip hop. Instead, his new thing was South Coast: the hip hop of urban and immigrant France.

In this way, Benji combined a former craze, his craze for hip hop, with his new — and, he believed, ultimate — craze for love. In Tel Aviv, he had been introduced by the girl who had deflowered him to the classics of French hip hop: the angry banlieusards in the angry banlieues.

This was, after all, why he had come to the spa town. Benjamin was in love. He was in love, and was here to receive advice from Haffner.

So he talked about hip hop. To Benji, this seemed logical.

As he ate, Benjamin described the curious fact that his two favourite songs, at this moment, were both about terror: the French hip-hop song called 'Darkness', and the French hip-hop song called 'Mourir 1000 fois', with its dark first line: in which the rapper told his terrified audience about his fears of death, in which the chorus simply stated that existence was punishment. They entranced Benji with their myth of the grand: the imagination of disaster. This was why he so loved the rappers from Marseilles: a city he had never been to; a city which, if he were honest, scared him with its reputation for the brutal.

Everything in Benjamin's life now seemed so fraught with significance. As if, thought Benji, he could destroy his whole life with one wrong decision.

He hazarded this to Haffner. Haffner thought it was unlikely that a life could be destroyed. It would take more than one wrong decision for that. Then he reached for the giant bottle of beer in front of him, and poured an accidentally overfoaming glass.

The restaurant advertised itself as Chinese. In its provenance, the food perhaps tended more towards the Vietnamese than the Chinese. There were moments when it was nothing but Thai. But no one here was concerned with the detail of origins: not the sullen Slavic waiters, the absent owners. Haffner, however, didn't care. So long as the effect was Oriental, then Haffner was happy. It possessed an aquarium in which melancholic fish hid themselves beneath mossy banks, munching sand. It seemed Oriental enough for Haffner.

In this setting, Haffner sat and listened to his grandson: his anxious grandson. He was, thought Haffner, the kind of kid who was so vulnerable to women that he'd probably get aroused just by the naked mannequins in shop windows, their robotic defenceless arms. Their invisible nipples and missing pubic hair, like some statue of Venus found beneath the tarmac of a Roman street.

But I think that Haffner could have gone further than this. There was so much to worry about, when considering the character of Benji.

Benji was the solitary only child. At fourteen he threw up in a girl's toilet after an evening of drinking whisky and was pleased at the suavity of his aim until he found out the next day that they had found sick everywhere. He used to listen to Liverpool matches on his clock radio in the dark under his Tottenham Hotspur duvet, for he was fickle. The first girl he kissed frightened him. Aged nine, he used to rehearse cricket strokes with a cricket stump and a practice golf ball in his bedroom, while listening to the classic ballad 'Take My Breath Away' on repeat. Like Haffner, the songs were always his downfall. He listened to 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' when Esmond drove him to the cricket matches.

Nothing in Benjamin's early youth had poise, or cool. Instead of cool, the miniature Benjamin hoarded Haffner's anecdotes. The stories of Haffner formed Benji's inheritance.

He treasured a portable Joe Davis snooker table — made on the Gray's Inn Road, in London, and guaranteed to add a touch of fun to family occasions — which he had found in Haffner's loft. One ball, the pink, was still in the centre right pocket, slung in the netting. It nestled there, solidly. Benjamin studied the faint lines printed on the baize. There were shiny trails of turquoise chalk. There was a line horizontally printed across the table, a little below the top. From this, a semicircle arched and settled. It reminded Benjamin of a soccer pitch. It was like a magnified penalty area. But this was not why Benji loved it. Its instructions, glued to the wooden underframe, were signed, in facsimile, by the great Joe Davis himself. From then on, in bed, with his clock radio beside him, its incensed digital digits flipping luminously and silently, Benjamin would read about Thurston's Billiards Hall in Leicester Square. Because he was romanced. For Haffner was Joe Davis's banker, in the 1950s. One day Joe Davis was in South Africa, at a hotel. He was resting. He was having some time off snooker. But then some guy challenged Joe Davis to a game. This man didn't know Joe Davis was Joe Davis. He thought he was just an ordinary person. It was, Haffner would remind his grandson, before the days of television. Joe Davis tried to refuse. He didn't want to play snooker, on his holiday. But the man was insistent. So Joe Davis played snooker. Naturally, he played with exquisite grace. And his challenger was amazed.

— What are you: Joe Davis or something? he said.

And Joe Davis paused.

— No, he said, but I know the man who sleeps with his missus.

Yes, Benji loved his grandfather: his grand grandfather. He was a romantic. And the romance was all inherited from Haffner.

So Benjamin found himself here: in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of a spa town, in the centre of Europe. And because he was here, he could ask Haffner anything.

— Is it true, said Benji, that you once gave away the Mercedes to someone else?

— No, said Haffner. No, it isn't.

— OK, said Benjamin.

He returned to the more familiar ground.

— This food is good, said Benji: piercing the inflated curve of a chicken dumpling with a chopstick. I mean it's exquisite.

Haffner queried this; the food, he thought, verged on the inedible: like every cuisine in this town. But for a moment Haffner loved him — his progeny with the marvellous appetite.

The problem was, Benji told Haffner, how did he know that this wasn't a craze? Because he was prone to crazes, he knew this. It was just that this didn't feel like a craze. It felt true. What else did he feel but love, thought Benji, when looking at the curve of his girl's breasts, matched yearningly by the imitative curve of his penis in his briefs? But, continued Benjamin, even if it was true, how important was this, in the end? It was only desire. It wasn't everything. So maybe he should return to his summer school, and forget all about her.

Haffner raised an eyebrow.

And he considered how, in the more ordered nineteenth century, the ordinary family judgement was the father on the son. This was how Haffner's life had begun — with Solomon Haffner in judgement. Now that the twentieth century was ending, however, it turned out that there could be something different: the judgement of the grandfather on the grandson. But instead of judging him for his lack of restraint, it was the lack of chutzpah which Haffner found wanting in his descendant. He would have to educate him into courage.

— Let me tell you my story about Palestine, said Haffner.

— No, I know this story, said Benji.

— I haven't started, said Haffner.

— Your Jewish story? said Benjamin.

— I will tell you again, said Haffner.

Having missed the major battle of the war in North Africa, then serving in the liberation of Italy, Haffner had been posted to Palestine. He was twenty-four at the time, he reminded Benji. He was — how old was Benjamin? He was about the same age as Benji was now. In fact, Jerusalem was the setting for his twenty-fourth birthday, on which day he announced he was going to drink twenty-four pink gins. And he did.

His battalion was ordered to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews: or, more precisely, between the Arabs and the crazy Russian Zionist Jews.

His people! As if those crazies were his people! What did Haffner have to do with the Orthodox, the serious — complete with dyed sidelocks and dyed caftans, the fringes of their prayer shawls ragged around their waists? In Palestine, Haffner had learned one of his very first truths. To be bohemian you had to be an absolute insider. It was the recent immigrants, the suddenly displaced, who most believed in nations and in boundaries. The ones who believed in a people at all.

Benjamin threw a wasabi pea up into the air and, to his profound satisfaction, caught it in the maw of his mouth.

Haffner ignored him.

It turned out, however, that in the eyes of the British war cabinet the crazies were Haffner's people. All members of the Jewish faith, commissioned or uncommisioned, were to leave the battalion in Palestine and travel to Cairo in the next forty-eight hours. This was the order. And yes, Haffner would concede, if discussing the matter with a benign historian, at that time the Jewish underground was conducting tactics not dissimilar to those of the IRA — but the order utterly devastated him. He had been with his battalion for nearly five years and fought through the Battle of Anzio, the only battle — he would remind this now less benign historian — in the World War which, like the Great War, had been fought in the trenches, and here he was to be kicked out because of his faith. He wouldn't stand for it. His faith, not his race. This was the important distinction. Even if Haffner still had a faith at all, which was doubtful.

Haffner was the senior Jewish member of the battalion, so he called all ranks together: about thirty of them. All felt as Haffner did, with one exception. Whose name now eluded him. Haffner went to see the CO, who took him that evening to see the divisional commander in his HQ at Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa. He was a Canadian, who afterwards became Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

At this point in the story, Haffner would put on an accent which he assumed was Canadian (it was not).

— Well, Haffner, I'm a Canadian, and if I were asked to fire on my boys in Montreal, I'd refuse.

— But, Haffner replied, in his own voice, I do not regard the Jews here as my boys. I'm an Englishman and my faith is Jewish.

Benji continued to scan the empty restaurant for a waiter to bring the beef: crispy, shredded. Or the approximation to crispy shredded beef which Benjamin had hoped to see in the fried ripped beef offered to him by the menu's translation: in haphazard italics, and assorted brackets.

— It's a good story, said Benjamin.

— The divisional commander, said Haffner.

— You should do the clubs, said Benji, grinning. I'm amazed you haven't.

The divisional commander, said Haffner, gave him permission to go and see the C.-in-C., Middle East Forces, in Cairo. So Haffner went with his driver, Private Holmes. They travelled 600 miles in twenty-four hours. Across the only little metal road in the desert to Cairo. Put up in a hotel to wait the pleasure. Etc. His driver had sunstroke and went into hospital. But the C.-in-C. had been sent to deal with the Communist threat in Greece. So Haffner was seen by his deputy, who sympathised, but there was nothing he could do. It was a cabinet decision.

A cabinet decision, emphasised Haffner. This was in about November 1945. In June, the war in Europe had come to an end. It was now three years since he had last seen his wife, just after their wedding. For the early married life of Haffner and Livia was an absence: a hiatus. And here he was being questioned about his Jewish loyalty: his Eastern heritage.

— No really, like Lenny Bruce, said Benjamin.

Haffner's East!

Looking back on Haffner, he was so clear to himself — it was like he was made of the most transparent glass. He had always wanted to mean something: to reach the grandeur of the world-historical. Like all the characters in the grand novels: the American novels which Esther used to give as Christmas presents to Haffner, to further his education. But the problem wasn't Haffner, he was discovering: the problem was the world-historical. Not even the world-historical was world-historical. The instances of everything, Haffner thought, had turned out to be so much smaller than one expected. The magnificence was so much more minute than one expected.

He had gone to school with the man who later married the Prime Minister. He remembered her, from the days watching her son play cricket. Once, in the 1970s, before she became the party leader, he danced with her at a dinner at the Criterion. She was really very brilliant.

Haffner emptied his glass of its pale beer. He felt a little blurred, a little faded — a faded Haffner which dissolved even further as the tape in the restaurant came round to one of his favourite songs, in one of his favourite incarnations.

— You know this song? cried Haffner.

— No, said Benjamin.

— Then listen! said Haffner.

And Haffner floated away: forwards, into the past.

For when they began the beguine — according to Cole Porter, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, as listened to by Haffner as he tried to educate his grandson — the sound of that beguine brought back the sound of music so tender; it brought back the night of tropical splendour; it brought back a memory evergreen. And then Ella's voice went higher. She was with him once more under the stars, and down by the shore an orchestra was playing, and even the palms seemed to be swaying when they began the beguine.

He had heard this song with Livia, sung by Ella, in Ronnie Scott's on Frith Street: and the shadow of the double bass's scroll on the white backing screen was a seahorse behind the Lady. She was in a gold lame dress.

But you couldn't go back. This was the meaning of the song. But precisely because one couldn't go back, thought Haffner, was why one wanted to go back. Precisely because one had lost everything.

Yes, weakened, exhausted, melancholy, Haffner was beginning to revise his ideas of sin. It was so hard, he was finding, not to regret certain aspects of one's life, now that one considered one's life carefully.

And so the reason why Haffner so loved this song now, here in a Chinese and Slavic restaurant, was that it allowed you the romance of resurrection, of recuperation. It allowed you the dream.

For, against all expectation, the rhythm moved into a different beat; so that, as Ella's voice rose, she changed her rhythm against the beat — as she begged them not to begin the beguine; as she begged the orchestra to let the love which was once a fire remain an ember. And then again, in a contradiction which Haffner had always cherished (-Listen to this! he cried to Benji. Listen to this!), Ella with as much sad abandon contradicted herself, with the same push against the beat, the same refusal to give in to the obvious rhythm: that yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play till the stars that were there before return above them, till whoever it was who she loved might whisper to her once more, darling, that he loved her — and the song softened. And they would suddenly know, as she quietened down, what heaven they were in — she quietened to a becalmed softness — when they began the beguine.

— Yeah, it's cool, said Benjamin.

Haffner didn't know what to say. He was lost, in contemplation of his past.

Finally, Haffner spoke.

— You finished? he asked Benjamin. You full?

— I don't finish when I feel full, said Benjamin proudly. What kind of person finishes when they're full? Me, I finish when I hate myself. That's the treasured moment.

And as Benjamin said this, more dishes arrived: chicken in a black bean sauce; chicken with lemon. Then finally another porcelain plate, chased with fake Chinese scenes: on which cubes of beef were shivering. Then two more decanters of beer.

In a reverent silence, Benji's mind considered Haffner's ideas of loyalty. Oh Benji wanted so much to lose his loyalty! He wanted so much to leave his religion behind. He imagined himself in the backstreets of Paris, the docks of Marseilles, and it entranced him. But he found this subject difficult. The guilt distressed him. So, in defence against himself, Benji tried to talk himself out of his new temptations.

— I don't get this, said Benji.

— You don't get what? asked Haffner.

— I don't see why it's more cosmopolitan to be anti-Zionist, said Benji. It just means you feel more nationalist about Britain.

— Don't be clever, said Haffner.

Gluttonous, still perplexed by Haffner's ideas of loyalty, Benji continued to reach for the black bean chicken with his chopsticks: trembling in the air, like dowsers. Haffner continued too. On one thing were Haffner and Benjamin agreed: the absolute superiority of MSG — that glorious chemical. They adored its sweet and savoury slather — and there it was, unctuous, before them.

Through the prism of his newly sexual nature, Benjamin considered the problem of fidelity. Perhaps, he thought, there was something in what Haffner said. Maybe it was true that it was better to refuse one's own nation. And I think that I should repeat that Benji had inherited from Haffner the love of romance. So he liked the grander, political structure which Haffner's theory offered him when he considered his current predicament, more than the crudely sexual structure in which it was housed at the moment. It was nothing to do with the girl! Nothing to do with the smell of her, which Benji had caressed with his nostrils all the next day, and night, refusing to wash. Nothing to do with the wet warmth of her mouth on his penis. All of Benji's urges, he thought, were simply desires to be free. They were all about his new refusal to be faithful to irrelevant ideals.

It did seem possible.

— So then, said Haffner. Time to go.

— You can't, said Benjamin.

— I am, said Haffner. I'm meeting this man, and I'm meeting him now.

Had Benjamin, wondered Haffner, any better ideas? No, thought Benjamin. He didn't. He only knew that he had barely begun the conversation he wanted to have. He had barely begun at all.

If he wanted, said Haffner, if he was really worried, then Benjamin could call him. Haffner promised to keep his phone on. And then Haffner, replete with a final spring roll, having laid down his chopsticks on their concertina of wrapper, and given Benjamin a selection of banknotes to pay for the meal — a meal in which Benjamin settled to the last dishes, as if to the last supper — ventured back out into the fading day.

And as he walked, he hummed. In the tropical night, the beguine washed over him.

Raphael Haffner was drunk.

Haffner Drunk

In the driveway of the hotel, Niko was in his car — now wearing a pair of outlandish tinted glasses — waiting for Haffner.

The sky was fading, elaborating its golden cloths. And all its other traditional effects.

— Yes we have it, he said. I have found your man.

Haffner peered into the car. There was a plastic bag full of Coke cans in the footwell behind the driver's seat. A packet of cigarettes was protruding from the open glove compartment. The radio, to Haffner's antiquarian delight, was only a radio — without even the empty slit for a cassette.

Niko's jacket had the word death stitched gothically at the back of its collar. He took it off, and threw it on to the back seat — so revealing a T-shirt which said Godless Motherfucker.

This was the company Haffner now kept. He decided that he rather liked it.

— You saw my girl, yes? said Niko chirpily, bending to slurp at the keyhole of a newly opened can of Coke.

— Yes, said Haffner, deciding that it would be best if he stopped the sentence there.

— Uhhuh, uhhuh, said Niko.

To this, Haffner maintained his politic silence.

— You like potato chips? said Niko: trying to begin a conversation as they drove off.

Niko, the athlete, was always snacking. He offered Haffner an angled tube.

— No, said Haffner: feeling drunk, and sick.

Their destination was a billiards and pool hall — on the opposite edge of the town to Benjamin's utopian Chinese restaurant, in an industrial complex — on the second floor of what appeared to have been intended as an office block. On the ground floor were a hair-dresser supply shop — whose windows were hung with posters displaying the moustaches and side-partings of another era — and a shop selling carpet to the outfitters of mid-range business premises. Each window of the billiards hall was blacked out.

Their contact was already there. To Haffner's disturbed surprise, he discovered that he recognised this contact.

— I'm sorry, he said to Niko. I don't think I got his name.

— Viko, said Niko, pointing to his misprinted double.

— Ah yes, of course, said Haffner.

And Haffner gazed over at his masseur.

Haffner wondered if this would be awkward. All that was needed, he concluded, if the man could indeed do what he said he could do, was a brisk, businesslike demeanour.

He looked around: at the wall lamps, visored by green eyeshades; at a bar of chocolate on a table, its foil wrapper partially unwrapped, exposing its ridged segments — like a terrapin, or grenade.

He had hoped for something more; he had hoped for a man in a suit, with a briefcase and moustache. He had certainly hoped for a stranger. A powerful, authoritative stranger. If Haffner had ever had to imagine how this kind of business might be done, difficult as it may have been, he would have been able to be precise about the clothes. It most certainly would not have featured this man's obvious pleasure in contemporary sportswear.

As if, conceded Haffner, Haffner could talk: this man without a wardrobe.

Viko was a drifter; a man of travels. His career had taken him along the fabled European coasts: from Juan-les-Pins to San Remo, from Dubrovnik to Biarritz. His trade was that of the hotelier. Wherever he went, he found work in the spas of luxury retreats, the reception desks of grand hotels. In this trade, he had grown sleek. He had also become expert in the wiles of the world. Not for Viko, the moral life. He preferred corruption, blackmail: the free flow of information.

He kept himself to himself, this was how Viko put it. It was not quite how his colleagues put it. They knew him as rather more sinister: a fixer; a man who was protected, and who could, in his turn, offer protection to others. His ethics were those of the favour. He dispensed largesse. In return, he received the loyalty of chambermaids, office assistants, waiters, car-wash attendants. Often no one knew where Viko was: his movements were uncertain. His apartment was always blandly comfortable: on the walls, posters of Renaissance gods, and cubist still lifes.

Yes, out of his uniform — out of the shorts and cotton sports shirt, the tennis shoes — Viko was transformed. No longer the man who pampered the pampered rich. Now, he was in power.

Viko walked up to Haffner and Niko, nodded, then walked past them to the bar. But the barman was not there. He was taking the garbage out. Viko waited. He turned from the bar and reapproached them.

— How are you, my friend? said Viko to Niko. You are like Elton John, no?

Viko was wearing a T-shirt which did not conceal the fact that his forearms and upper arms were plaited with muscle, like challah bread. He put imaginary binoculars to his face. He grinned, behind his binoculars, scanning the limited horizon.

— In those glasses.

Niko smiled. He looked at Haffner. Haffner smiled at Viko, nervously.

The label of Viko's shirt, which lolled over the collar, was still pierced by its plastic hammerhead tag.

The billiards and pool hall in which they found themselves was reminiscent of an idealised gentlemen's club, from the nineteenth-century colonies. It was a vision of the past, where the players — dressed in waistcoats and bow ties — were meant to tend, like waiters, to the table. Portraits of forgotten stars, like imaginary aristocrats, were hung beneath lamps which bequeathed luminous rectangles to the aristocrats' foreheads, as if they were sweating. Each photograph was scribbled with an illegible imitation of a signature: as if the sign for a signature was its very illegibility.

Niko said that he would just go into the bathroom. Viko said he would be with them in one minute. First he had this little matter — they understood? He gestured over to a table, where an argument was taking place. They understood. So Viko wandered back over to the tables and took up his position, a little way off, on a bar stool; while Haffner waited on a banquette for Niko to return.

Haffner listened to the argument: like every argument, its intonations were universal.

He did not know the precise details: he did not know that a man was telling his teenage son that he was not showing any respect to Viko.

— When you were my age, he said. When you. When I was. There was a pause.

— You're me, right, said the man.

On his bar stool, Viko lit a cigarette: aloof from the argument, in his ivory tower.

He was forty-two, said the anonymous father, and he had never said fuck in front of his mother. Never. Look, he loved him more than his bird loved him. He respected him. And he didn't need to go round saying things which weren't respectful. If he didn't show any respect.

— Him, if he wants to, said the man, pointing at Viko, he can have anyone killed.

And how was Haffner also to know, as he listened to this incomprehensible argument, that Niko was, at that moment, bending as if in solicitude over the tank of a toilet, inhaling a gram of cocaine which he had first neatly heaped in a thin straggling line? It wasn't Haffner's normal world. As he looked around, sipping the first of the vodkas which the barman brought him, he was simply trying to understand why there seemed to be such a lack of urgency; such a lack of businesslike flair. He wanted to be done with this. The urgent need to do what he had to do and secure this villa for Livia still possessed him, even in his drunken state. He wanted to be true to a domestic idyll. He wanted to be successful and in bed. But Haffner, in his finale, was fated so rarely to be in bed when he wanted, with whom he wanted.

He felt for the phone, bulging in his tracksuit top.

Niko propped himself on the patch of yellow foam under the ripped velour of the banquette, on which Haffner's hand had been resting.

— You want to play? said Niko. You like billiards? Why not? If we played a little game, for a bet?

— Really? said Haffner.

— Why not? said Niko. Why not?

Haffner was drunk. And he was good at billiards. After all, he had been Joe Davis's banker. Haffner, as the legend had often said, was a natural.

Along the walls of the billiards and snooker hall, a range of cues was propped — like an armoury. Haffner prised one out from its tight little omega, and rolled it on the empty and unlit surface of a dark unoccupied table. It drifted in an unprofessional curve. Haffner prised out another. The black butt of this cue was slightly sticky. He rolled this one also — noting its warp, its bias and slide.

He walked back to his table; asked if Niko wanted to break. Niko rested his cue, upright, against the table.

— You break, he said.

Haffner settled over the table, fervently. He jabbed the white, but somehow swerved his arm so the tip of the cue slid and tapped the white on top, then bounced beside it on the thin green baize.

— That's not a good shot no, said Niko.

— No, said Haffner.

— Listen, said Niko. You must keep your arm straight — no, yes, out, yes, better. Now try.

— But it's your turn, said Haffner.

— No no, said Niko. You go, you go.

Haffner recovered his form with an in-off red. He played gracefully, impressively. He relaxed into his talent. Intently — doing this for Livia, thinking of Livia, the tenderness he felt for the rashes she had been prone to, her skin weeping like honeycomb — he did not look at Niko during a series of fourteen in-offs. And then he missed.

— Come into my office, said Viko: he was standing beside their table, his arms wide, smiling.

Neatly, he sat down on a bench.

— So sorry, said Viko, nodding over in apology to the now becalmed and darkened table. A drink? he added.

A deal among men: this, at least, was a world which Haffner could understand. On his bench, as in the most masculine of steak houses, Haffner leaned forward, in the way that he had always done: the clasp of his palms dropped against his lap.

A genie, Niko returned with three bottles of beer — the flare of his nostrils, inside, was a glowing coral. He picked up his cue, scratched the turquoise block of chalk, with its shallow indentation, across its tip. He puffed the puff of chalk away. Then settled to his work.

And Viko outlined the situation. Haffner wanted the villa. The Committee was proving difficult. Haffner was interested in speeding the process up. This, so far, was what Viko understood. Haffner praised his grasp of the situation. And Viko, continued Viko: he was known as a man of honour. He liked to help his friends. And Haffner was a friend?

Haffner was a friend.

He thought he was, said Viko. So. Viko had done his research; he had asked various questions: he had made Haffner's situation known.

This was very kind, said Haffner.

Niko had been playing a monotonous series of in-off reds. He lifted his head from the table. What, he asked, did Haffner want the upper limit to be? Haffner wondered if 100 would be appropriate. Niko played another long in-off red.

And Viko therefore thought that, with the document he was now offering to Haffner, Haffner would find it ever so much easier to bring the matter to a close. He unfolded a square of paper from his pocket, and laid it in front of Haffner. Haffner tried to read it. As he expected, it was not in a language he knew.

This was what? he queried. It was the necessary authentication from the authorities, said Viko. It was the proof that the family of his wife were the rightful owners of the property.

— The deeds? asked Haffner.

— Not quite, said Viko. But this was all he needed.

Haffner had never imagined the world of corruption to work with such elegance, such dispatch. If only he had understood this sooner, in his career, he thought. He might have saved himself so many hours of work.

From the bar, they could hear a miniature ice-hockey match, on a miniature television, being brought to its conclusion. Niko paused: he strained to watch.

— You prefer which games? asked Niko, still straining.

— The game of cricket, said Haffner.

— Yes, the English game, said Niko, relaxing back into the real world.

From his cueing position, Niko wondered if Haffner could explain the game of cricket. Haffner thought this was unlikely. But it was true: he liked the higher games. The higher English games. Like cricket, and croquet. The games with intricate rulebooks.

— Or soccer, of course, said Haffner, in an effort to lower himself to the universal level, looking at his incomprehensible document with lavish pride.

— This is my game, said Niko. The penalties! This I love. The lottery. The goalkeeper's fear.

But no, Haffner said, putting his folded document down beside his beer, careful to avoid the ornamental water features on the scratched and sticky shelf. Not at all. The goalkeeper was never afraid of the penalty, said Haffner. The goalkeeper was in love with the penalty.

— You kill me, said Niko.

Hear him out, said Haffner. Hear a man out. What the goalkeeper didn't want was the difficult cross, the perfectly weighted through-ball. These were the tests of skill and psychology: the undramatic moments.

— Possible, said Niko. Possible.

The real dilemma for the goalkeeper, continued Haffner, was whether or not to leave his area. That was the moral crux of goal-keeping — to know when to curb one's courage. But the penalty was pure theatre. The goalkeeper, finished Haffner, in a penalty, could never be defeated.

— Interesting, said Niko, still watching the television. You like Barthez?

— Barthez? said Haffner. A showman. Just a showman. Never rated him. Now Banks, however, now there was a goalkeeper.

— Who? said Viko, bored.

With Niko's next shot, the red ball quivered against the angled upper jaw of a centre pocket, and settled there, unpotted. The white dribbled towards it and, miraculously, stopped — on the lower jaw of the same centre pocket.

— It's amazing what can happen, said Niko, meditatively, on this twelve-by-six-foot table. Then he smiled at Haffner, as if for appreciation.

There only remained, therefore, said Haffner, with decorum — trying to return the matter to his hoped-for conclusion — the matter of: and then he broke off, as he had always broken off before, when negotiating with clients. He understood?

Viko understood: he had consulted with Niko, he said. They were friends. Haffner nodded. They wanted to do this as friends. Haffner nodded again. They would therefore only charge him for the merest expenses. With a small extra compensation. For a third time Haffner solemnly nodded his assent, with gravitas. With gravitas, Viko named his price.

In this way these deals were done.

Haffner, in conclusion, nodded his agreement. In response, Viko stood to offer Haffner the manly theatrics of a less reserved hug.

Haffner looked at his phone, and considered calling Benji — to boast of his success.

— You want another drink? said Niko. Sure you do!

He decided that Benji could wait.

— So, said Niko.

They walked back to the bar, and sat down on the ripped banquette. There was also, he added, the question of his money too. Haffner looked at him, sad that matters should have turned so predictably filmic: with all the usual minor sins. He thought that had been taken care of, mentioned Haffner.

— For the bet? said Niko.

Had that been a real bet? asked Haffner. He had no idea that Niko had been serious.

Niko looked at the old man in front of him, and placed a paternal hand on Haffner's boyish shoulder. Could Niko talk about Haffner? Would he permit this? Haffner said he could. Sometimes, Niko worried, Haffner didn't seem to take things seriously which he should have taken seriously. Like, he pointed out, how Haffner had behaved in the club the night before. Whereas Niko, now Niko took things seriously. But then, Niko had been in a war. In fact, Niko had fought in two wars. Against the Muslims. And let him maybe tell this story. Once, Niko was on the border, in the mountains. They were laying an ambush. It was very cold in the mountains. And Niko's friend, he had been to America. In America, he had bought a special suit, with wiring inside. It was like an electric blanket? But there was no internal power supply to this suit. There was no battery. So they were at the front, in the mountains. And his friend did not bring so many of his clothes. Instead, he brought his suit, and also a car battery. So. They got to their position. He put his suit on, and then he wired it up to the battery.

— And what happened? asked Haffner.

He fell asleep, said Niko. It was freezing, all the enemy was there, close to them, and he fell asleep. He was snoring. And this, said Niko, was Haffner. The man asleep.

— I fought in two wars, said Niko. And I fired shots in anger, I can tell you.

In the difficult silence which followed Niko's portrait of Haffner, Viko proposed that they should go somewhere else to celebrate.

There was a place near here, agreed Niko: with such girls! Then he paused. He began to smile. In his lightness of spirit, Haffner said he would also, of course, pay for the drinks. First, however, Haffner downed a final vodka. He placed the glass back on the brittle bar towel. Then he drank another final vodka. His heart accelerated. And Haffner, searching for coins in his wallet, which emerged, scissored between two figures, leaned into the sense of flight — as into the exhilaration of a speeding curve.

He knew what Niko meant. The problem had always been to distinguish whether one was wasting one's life or truly living it. This was the conundrum inherited from Solomon, his father. But the anguish of Haffner's life had therefore been in identifying which was which: the two so often hid within each other.

Libertine man! This was all Haffner had ever wanted to be. Yet now, he was beginning to think, it had always been a mirage. Although it might have looked like waste — his life in the quiet suburbs — although it had so often seemed a waste to Haffner, in fact that life was everything. Renouncing a woman, after all, can be a form of heroism; this is famous. And winning her may be a form of discipline.

The war was everywhere.

And Haffner, thought Haffner, had finally proved equal to this war — as he contemplated his finale up here in the mountains, with Zinka in the foreground, Frau Tummel in the background, and Benjamin a shadow in the distance. This piece of paper in his pocket, thought Haffner, constituted an undeniable achievement. So Haffner rejected Niko's accusation. Haffner was exultant!

In recovering Livia's villa, Haffner saw his reconciliation.

A chorus of trumpeting putti, Viko and Niko and Haffner raised their ultimate vodkas, downed the glasses on the wet surface of the bar counter, then on they went, happy, to the next whisky bar.

Haffner had always liked the imaginary travel books: the voyages to the centre of the earth, the voyages under the sea. There were the Sciapods, one-footed, but whose one tremendous foot served as a sunshade in the desert; or the Cynocephali, with the heads of dogs and a language which resembled barking. His favourite, given to him by Livia as a Christmas present, was an illustrated edition of the adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac — the comical man with the grandiose nose, who imagined a trip to the moon. But all these mythical journeys could only lead their heroes home. And Haffner was moved to realise that this was also true of him — even now, when Livia was dead. The marriage was endless.

— It kind of baffles me, sometimes, how you sleep at night, Pfeffer once said, as they sat in the Overseas Bankers' Club in Lothbury: amazed how Haffner could lie beside the wronged form of Livia.

Haffner dropped a chunk of sugar into his coffee, observing the brief spawn of bubbles on the black surface.

With Pfeffer, the family man, when trying to defend his sexual record, Haffner had then developed a theory of the wife and the mistress. Really, said Haffner, people didn't understand: the wife was safe. The really vulnerable were the other women. Pfeffer queried this. Haffner was always good, he observed, at misplacing his tenderness. His sense of what was important and what was not had never been a thing of moral beauty.

Haffner's argument had never convinced Haffner, let alone Pfeffer. Now, however, Haffner was beginning to wonder if he had been right all along. He couldn't remember the other women. They meant nothing to him. It was sad to admit this, but it was true. Whatever Barbra was doing now, Haffner didn't care. Whereas Livia was different. Livia was everything.

And me, I might add something else.

It is still the same Promised Land, it is still the same story, whether we talk of Moses and his Promised Land, or Odysseus and his Ithaca; or Haffner and this villa in the centre of Europe. And in a version of the story of Odysseus, which I once read, when Odysseus finally arrived safely home in Ithaca, he found himself utterly disappointed. And yet, wrote the author, whose name I have forgotten, what did he want of Ithaca? What else did it really offer him, if not precisely that journey home?

Just as Haffner stepped out into the midsummer night — the longest night of the year, the longest night of Haffner's life — but did not see before him the deserted nocturnal retail village, but instead entered the noblest park, and stood there observing a spreading oak tree, under which a long-lost version of Haffner sat with his beloved wife. Around them, deer munched. They were in Gloucestershire, or Warwickshire: ensconced in England. A fox was a red blur in the dark of a blackberry bush. And this lost but momentarily recovered Haffner lay watching the yellow-green where the sun lit the leaves; the black-green where it didn't.

Haffner Defeated

The club which Haffner was speeding towards in Niko's car was located down a side street, pretending to be a milk bar. So went its name. It opened on to the street via a metal door. When this door was opened, the clubber walked down some steps to a checkpoint where a girl waited behind a table, branding you with an ink stamp, before letting you turn left, down a further flight of stairs, further underground, into the club itself.

In the first room, there was the bar, and a selection of chairs. In the second, there was a room where two girls were DJing. On the wall was projected a selection of childhood images: though from whose childhood, no one knew. In the final room, the kids were dancing; when the DJs finished, a live set began. Tonight, it was an electro band from Hungary who were pretending they were from New York: singing their lyrics in a filmic version of American. They screamed at their appreciative crowd, drinking vodka and Coke from plastic cups; drinking beer from bottles; drinking shots of absinthe from a cache of plastic espresso cups stolen from a hospital canteen.

Into this underground came Haffner: the back of his hand — freckled, brown-spotted — now stamped with an extra red stain, so prompting Haffner to the thought of all the major crimes he could have committed, but had not. Yes, Haffner descended into the night, as he contrived to answer his phone, into which he shouted to Benji that yes everything had gone smoothly, that yes it was very loud, he was in a club, called Milk Bar, or maybe it was a milk bar, he had no idea: and then he lost reception; and the collar on his shirt seeped with sweat, and his lungs filled with the smoke of 250 cigarettes, lit from each other by the manic youth of Europe.

It was an inferno. But to Haffner, triumphantly still reminding himself that Livia's villa was soon to be his, it seemed a blessed paradiso.

Inside, alone for a moment in the middle room, Haffner looked around. Behind Haffner, a boy was cycling along a mountain path. His path wobbled with the trembling grip of the super-8 camera which was working so hard to preserve his balance for eternity. A girl who was more real, in sunglasses and a bracelet made of pink plastic paperclips, was watching this film, intently, while shifting her feet to the beat from the DJs behind her. The boy continued pedalling, now observed by an ecstatic parent in mint-green sunglasses, encouraged by the severed hand of the camera operator.

Was this what the kids were up to? wondered Haffner. Their mania for nostalgia took them this far? This farrago of the sentimental. The kids observing the kids. Whereas all Haffner had wanted, as a boy, was the adult. He had wanted to wear a tie, to wear a suit. The two girls DJing were drinking from the same pink straw in the same glass of Coke. Although Haffner rightly doubted if it contained only Coke.

In this setting, his tracksuit, he thought, was more appropriate than he had imagined. Around him there seemed to be no dress code, no fashion which Haffner could recognise. The laws were gone.

So much posturing at the infantile! But now that he was old, Haffner rather applauded this resistance to the adult: the spirit of the flippant. The bare midriffs; the obvious bra straps; the visible panties. Everything in fluorescent colours. He warmed to this; as he warmed to everything which seemed unimpressed with the adult world. The nostalgia, perhaps not. But the infantile, this the older, less mature Haffner could admire.

Viko was offering to buy Haffner a drink. Haffner looked round. He suddenly realised that Niko was gone. With a depressed shrug, Haffner assented. He watched Viko lean against the bar, a man at ease. And Haffner tried to understand what was meant to happen next. He had hoped to avoid this, the time alone with his masseur. Their business relationship had been maintained with surprising ease, thought Haffner. This still did not resolve the question of where they stood more privately: what conclusion had been drawn after Haffner's curtailed massage. The problem was how seriously Viko thought that Haffner had taken it. Preferably, their relationship would have ended in the fog of its ambiguity — stranded, on a mountain top, with the night coming on, and only the cowbells for company.

Viko returned with the drinks. They chinked glasses, plasticly. Then Viko moved closer to him.

Viko, of course, didn't want Haffner. He only thought that Haffner wanted him. If there were more ways to make money from Haffner, then Viko was happy to explore those ways. He was a man of mode. The older men went for the younger men: this was the story of Viko's life. They offered you money to let them touch you; or watch you. So went the ways of the Riviera.

Haffner placed a palm on Viko's chest, girlishly: in a cute gesture of rebuff. Viko looked at it. He removed Haffner's palm, and held it tight.

He was drunk, Haffner. He was gone. He was there, at the crest of his ascent — in the glory of his absolute inspiration: just before it transformed itself, as if nothing had happened, into the absolute descent.

The descent of the grandfather, however, was being deftly matched by the ascent of the grandson. Even if, at the moment, this ballet was suffering from problems with timing. Oblivious to his future ascent, Benjamin was depressed. He was standing at a corner of the bar: trying to lean forward enough so that the deep folds of his T-shirt could hang down in a perpendicular line. For Benji's body in these clubs became a pastoral: the hillocks of his breasts, the trilling streamlets of sweat which ran between them.

This was not the kind of club in which Benjamin had ever felt happy. His grandfather's phone call, however, had disturbed him. So here he was, in his excited fear, and he felt alarmed. Packed as the club was with assured and sexual girls, it presented multiple temptations to Benji's soul. The temptation of lust, naturally, but also the darker temptations: of self-pity, and self-disgust.

His reaction to this state, before his Orthodox training, used to be a prolonged session at the bar, followed by a session of manic dancing. And it was to this practice, haunted by his recent erotic memories, worried for the safety of his grandfather, that Benjamin, against his moral code, returned.

His yarmulke was now stuffed, shyly, in the pocket of his jeans.

How many of his beliefs, considered Benji sadly, were really just romances? It seemed so very likely that his moral code was a romance too. It was all too possible. Benji wanted to be there in the Jewish East End: with Fatty the Yid, the fixer, handing out betting slips in Bethnal Green. Could he have told you why? Wasn't it obvious? These people had cool. On one street there would be Jewish Friendly Societies, for Benjamin's relatives, newly emerged from Lithuania; and a house which concealed a miniature synagogue, whose ceiling would be azure with gold stars, and below which, on the walls, would be engraved in gilt the names of its benefactors — the Rothschilds, the Goldsmids, the Mocattas, the Montagues. Had Benjamin not been born too late, what a member he would have made of the Bilu Group, of Hovevei Zion! A group which he had once admired for the sarcastic praise they had bestowed on their nation for having woken from the false dream of Assimilation. Now, thank God, thou art awakened from thy slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened thee from thy slothful slumber. No, thought Benjamin, this was the melancholy truth. In his identification with the marginalised, the bereft, he had been wowed by the romance of belonging to an elite. Because the persecuted could be an elite, of this he had no doubt.

Inside him lay Benjamin's grand emotions: envy, anxiety, self-hatred, self-contradiction. There they were, in their plush velvet case — snug, like a cherished heirloom; a polished silver piccolo.

They seemed unnecessary now.

Beside him, sitting on the plastic pod of a stool, a girl began to talk to him. She didn't want to talk to him about the state of his soul, nor the state of world politics: the endless problems of minority peoples. She only wanted to ask him what his plans were that evening, what his girlfriend's name was. Benji sadly admitted that he had none: no plans, no girlfriend. She offered him a cigarette. Her name was Anastasia, she said. And when somehow Benjamin inveigled into the conversation a mention of his Jewish origins, she looked at him. There was a pause. This was it, he thought: the moment when everything became obvious.

— Uhhuh, she said. So anyway.

He looked at Anastasia. She was the tallest girl he had ever met; and although he could not help remembering the distracting features of the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, he also could not help feeling that in Anastasia he had discovered something so much more refined. She was wearing a black shift dress, black tights: and red high heels. Her hair was cut in some sort of slick bob. There was a plastic butterfly visible on her left, diminutive breast.

— You are American? asked Anastasia.

— British, said Benjamin.

— Is better, said Anastasia.

And at that moment, as she shifted her weight, so accidentally placing her thigh in warm proximity to Benjamin's podgy hand, Benjamin finally noticed Haffner, talking to a man. He stalled in a trance of indecision. And although this was why he was here — to protect his wayward grandfather — Benjamin did nothing. He did not excuse himself and go to offer Haffner his protection. He simply looked into Anastasia's eyes, smiled, lit a cigarette which she had offered him, and desperately, feeling sick, hoping that he would not regret this, tried to take up smoking.

The smoke here was mythical. It was its own clouding exaggeration — not just in the usual secret places: one's nostrils, the creases of clothes. Here, it hurt the cornea, the tonsils, the ganglia of one's lungs.

Politely, Haffner wondered if Viko could perhaps put out his cigarette. It was terribly hurting his eyes. In fact, he said, he really did feel very tired. He really thought that he might sadly have to excuse himself and end his evening here.

But Viko, by now, was dictatorial in his drunkenness: a Tamerlane. Barbaric, he looked at his cigarette, and looked at Haffner, vanquished. He could not believe it, he said. It was a cigarette. And now this man in front of him wanted it to be put out. For why? It wasn't, he pointed out, as if he was the only person smoking.

And he gave out a staccato mirthless laugh — a studio audience of one.

Uneasily, Haffner looked around, into the crowd: the extraordinary overspill of beauty in this basement amazed him with its grace. It contrasted with Haffner. It contrasted less with Viko. He looked back at him.

Viko continued to stare — the cigarette hanging limply from his lower lip.

There was nothing else for it, thought Haffner. Any conversation which might restore some poise, some grace, seemed impossible to him now. And he had done what he needed to do. So he was leaving, said Haffner. He was very grateful, but now he really must go.

And Haffner turned — to discover Niko, bearing Zinka as a trophy. Gently, with distracted distance, she bestowed her smile on Viko, and then Haffner. And Haffner stood there, confident that if Zinka stayed here for ever, then so would he. With a gesture of European politesse, Haffner kissed the raised paw of Zinka's hand. He stood there, happily smiling.

And suddenly, Viko understood.

Viko believed in desire being rewarded. He believed in the myth of the kept man. No shame attached to money. The sudden way in which Haffner had left the massage table, having solicited Viko's attention, had not been forgotten. It irked him. Especially because he had heard the rumours of Haffner's friendship with Zinka. Why should Viko be spurned? It was the more galling for being the more unjust. This, after all, was the man whose property claims would be made easier by Viko: from Haffner, Viko had expected money in instalments, he had expected cash.

In this sad way, Viko talked to himself. His monologue took place before an unseeing audience of Zinka and Haffner.

Haffner was telling Zinka the story of his nightlife: how he had known the former Prime Minister of his country, and in a bar in London he had danced with her and talked of world finance. And although the details of this conversation were inaudible to Viko, his rage was inventive enough to inflame itself just with its visionary gifts: observing Haffner's charmingly enfeebled touch on her arm, Zinka's dimpling smile.

It was incredible, said Viko. No one heard him. He said it again. It was utterly incredible. And he began to shout, in the language which Haffner did not understand. Spurned, Viko listed the million vices of Haffner. Ignoring Zinka's calming protestations, her anxious glances, Niko's confused scowl, he listed Haffner's lechery, his financial manoeuvres, his cowardice.

Haffner mildy asked what was happening. He seemed upset, observed Haffner. Zinka silenced him with an irritated flourish of her arm.

— You, said Viko, anxious to explain, jabbing at Haffner and Zinka and Niko in confused identification. You fuck her. His girl.

Haffner, full of justified smugness, tried to explain that this was not true, not at all. He really had to say that this was quite ridiculous. Viko refused his explanations. Everyone knew, he said. So Niko might as well know too. He glared at Zinka. Zinka lit a cigarette, and exhaled a plume of smoke in Viko's face, like the most classical of zephyrs.

The character of Niko was often inscrutable: so said his teachers, his mother; so said Zinka, the girl who tried to love him. It was difficult to predict. This difficulty was made more difficult by the various heaps of cocaine which Niko had inhaled that evening, the various drinks he had imbibed.

At first, he seemed only amused. He didn't care if Haffner had been trying to get more of his Zinka. Who wouldn't? said loyal Niko.

No, said Viko, doggedly, he didn't seem to understand.

While Haffner, as he listened to what he understood to be another attack on the soul of Haffner, realised that his feelings were oddly divided. It was true that he didn't want any violence; he didn't want a display of machismo. But on the other hand, he would have preferred Niko to be more worried, more ill at ease. At least violence would have demonstrated some form of sexual contest. Whereas Niko did not seem aware of any sexual contest.

So Haffner's pride debated with itself.

And, in this way, the ballet of Haffner and Benjamin began to find its synchronisation. For Benjamin was also considering the nature of his sexual pride. But not, however, with sadness. In the bathroom of this club — located in what seemed to be a makeshift plastic tunnel attached to the basement, reached through an emergency door — Benjamin was delirious with success.

— When you say obscenities in another language, it's only ever funny, said Benji. You can't do it. I mean, how do you say fuck me in your language?

She told him. He tried to repeat it. She started to giggle.

— You see? said Benji. I mean, say fuck me, in English.

— Fuck me, said Anastasia.

There was a pause.

— Oh no, said Benji, softly. Well maybe no. Maybe we could continue like that.

With no shiver of distaste, her hands were stroking the softness of his breasts; they were clasping the rings of fat which circled Benji, like a planet, and still she kissed him with abandon.

— Was that a practice sentence, or a real sentence? said Benjamin.

— Maybe both, said Anastasia.

And after they had kissed, Benji smiled at her.

— I haven't seen you smile that smile tonight. It is good, she said.

— I have a greater variety than that, said Benji, winningly.

Oh Benjamin's allegiances were all awry: they were jostled, irretrievably. He thought of the girl in Tel Aviv. Perhaps, he thought, he was not in love. Perhaps she was just a beginning. He didn't want to be what others made of him. Surely that was cool. No longer did he want to be defined by his loyalty: not to a race, and not even to his family. He wanted, thought Benjamin, to be himself.

— I want you so much, said Benjamin.

A sentence said with such ardent and charming sincerity, so in excess of Benji's pudgy demeanour, that Anastasia, helplessly, began to adoringly laugh.

It wasn't that Anastasia was cruel. She had simply become, by accident, the audience to an ordinary kind of comedy.

Himself! Benji wanted to be himself. So he exaggerated. And this is not so unusual. Maybe this is all the self is, really: whatever is most fervently displayed. It isn't difficult, to find this kind of story. It was, for instance, a theme in Benji's family itself.

In 1940, Cesare was interviewed by the British police — trying to ascertain his loyalty to Mussolini. In his defence, Cesare had not only proved to them in minute detail how he was a Marxist, a member of the Mazzini Garibaldi club; he had not only quoted to them the words of Garibaldi himself, imploring his acolytes to have faith in the immortal cause of liberty and humanity, because the history of the Italian working classes was a history of virtue and national glory — no, this was not enough for Cesare. To clinch his point he had stood on a chair and sung the Internationale, improvising an English translation. After the third verse, with three still to come, the British police allowed that perhaps they had been wrong in their suspicions concerning Cesare.

And when Cesare recounted this story, which was often, Haffner would riposte with the story of Bleichroder, Bismarck's Jewish banker, a hero of finance. An allegory for Haffner. For Bleichroder never managed to become Prussian, rather than Jewish. He tried, but he failed. He went for walks, Haffner would begin. And then Livia and Cesare would continue — in a ritual which they did not know was a ritual, since no one ever remembered that the precise same conversation happened at regular intervals which were not regular enough to prevent this amnesic repetition. So Cesare would tell his story of Cesare. Haffner would begin the riposte of Bleichroder. And Livia would finish, reminding Cesare, in case he didn't remember, how Bleichroder kept himself apart from the Jewish people, even in his weekend walks. On the promenades along the Siegesallee he walked on the western side: eschewing the east, with its Jewish crowds. And when asked why he walked on the other side, according to the police, added Haffner — yes yes, Livia would say, she knew this line: when asked why, Bleichroder answered that the eastern side smelled too much of garlic.

Benjamin, as he kissed Anastasia, and felt for her slim breasts, in the furore of his passion, was forming the final panel in this luminous family triptych. If his God could see him, he did not care. The neon light in this plastic cubicle did not disturb him, nor the seven empty beer bottles lined up, as if posed for some pop-art portrait, on a ledge. And Benji revelled in the sensation that in kissing Anastasia, on this night which he understood marked no high point in Benji's romantic life, no moment of deep conversion, still mindful of the girl whom he felt in love with, in Tel Aviv, he had made it impossible to return to the ways he used to think. In kissing Anastasia he had crossed over — through the looking glass, out the back of the wardrobe.

Haffner, however, found nothing new in this world. As Viko had elaborated the lays of Haffner, Zinka had led him out of the club. At the door, a group of girls were waiting for a taxi. He turned to Zinka, anxious to enquire quite if he really needed to leave.

No, there was nothing new for Haffner. He knew this place. It was suburbia. Like everywhere Haffner lived. The clapboard pavilion on an artificial lake, with a landscaped golf course arranged around it; the hotel with souvenirs kept in a glass cabinet in the foyer; homes which once belonged to writers now preserved as monuments, complete with shops which sold tea towels on which were stitched, in italics, quotes from these great writers; or which were instead knocked down and replaced by an apartment block which bore the great hero's name; or restaurants which advertised a return to the ethos of the nineteenth century, or advertised the cuisine of Italy, or China, even though they were staffed by white and disillusioned teenagers: all this was suburbia. And so was this youthful display he could now see outside the club, where girls in thin dresses gathered together to whisper and giggle while sporadic boys lit avoidant cigarettes, affecting to ignore them.

And so was the manifest violence.

In the dark street Haffner stopped with Zinka, anxious to prove that he was scared of nothing, a speech which he had barely begun when Niko emerged from the crowded steps and stood there, in the doorway.

Even at this point, Haffner refused to believe in violence: he refused to believe it was possible — for Haffner was surely invulnerable. He still refused to believe that his story could really be serious. So Haffner was surprised when Niko moved to where he stood with Zinka and then pushed him, in a way which Niko imagined was only gentle, a tender threat: an amused gesture of gentle reproach. It was all the violence Niko would ever offer this aged man. But, unprepared, an unbalanced Haffner swayed backwards and then, in his effort to overcompensate, swayed forwards.

And Haffner fell.

He lay there on the street, but still refused to be downcast, beneath the chemical sky, its wash of cloud — like the most perfunctory of watercolours in the window of a fine-arts dealer behind the British Museum, on a Sunday in November, when everything is closed. No, opined Haffner, bleeding, wasn't it Cole Porter who used to say that, as he lay beneath the horse which was crushing his legs to a pulp, he worked on the lyrics of 'At Long Last Love'? Surely Haffner too could discover a sprezzatura?

Above him, like warring and disporting gods, Zinka and Niko were shouting. He was impossible, she said. What, she asked him, was he thinking — to attack an old and defenceless man? While Niko was shouting back, arguing with the facts as he now saw them, that he had never meant to hurt him, of course he had never meant to hurt him. And, then again, who was she to put the blame on Niko? Perhaps she should hear what Viko had to say about this man now lying there beside them. But Viko, suddenly, had disappeared.

And Haffner remembered with a sensual pang how he had once woken on Viko's massage table, surrounded by the scents of candles, the cries of whales, the tenderness of towels, in what now seemed to be a for ever lost vision of safety.

Defeated, bloodied, Haffner stumbled his way back inside, to find the bathroom. Against the basin, a girl was being roughly kissed, on her breast a man's splayed hand, a starfish: a hand which she was lightly coaxing away.

Into a stall stumbled Haffner.

Adjacent to Haffner, unknown, in another cubicle, Benjamin was gasping with abandon, as he touched the girl between the legs, his hand a little trapped by the elastic of her underwear. He was in a modern heaven. Through the bathroom's thin walls he could hear the music, throbbing. The DJs had been replaced by the Hungarian band, featuring a girl who sang her American English songs in the highest voice Benji had ever heard: as if the world were house music.

While Haffner, oblivious, the end of all the modern, observed his ancient face, illuminated by one fluorescent tube. Behind him was a bucket with an indefinable mop drenched inside it. He should have known, he thought: this was how things tended to end up — with Haffner as a clown. He dabbled with the taps: they relinquished little water.

He had always wanted to be a libertine, but now he was something else. Just Haffner Silenus — a sidekick, so prone to fall over, so vulnerable to capture, so easy to wound: the same Haffner as he had become when Livia announced, two years before she died, that she was leaving him.

— Now? he said.

It didn't seem worth the effort. But yes, she said: she was finished. She was leaving him to live with Goldfaden. It was long enough after his wife's death. It was what they had always wanted to do.

And Haffner had looked at her amazed. He couldn't understand it. It was always Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. But there she was, announcing that she would be going to live with Goldfaden. And although Haffner pleaded on behalf of his love for her, his family, Livia was unmoved. It was what she wanted, she said. And just as now Haffner stared into a mirror, hyperbolically lit, so Haffner had gone into the downstairs bathroom — the toilet with its pink fringed bib at its base, a china cow-creamer whose back overflowed with pot-pourri — and stared at the clown before him. There he tried to be precise about what he was feeling; he tried to be composed. But he was only possessed by a gigantic feeling that he missed Livia, that he had perhaps been missing her for many years: and Haffner wanted her back. He wanted to recover things. So he emerged, from the bathroom, ready to plead and beg — but found that Livia had gone.

Whereas this time he emerged, with wild wet hair, and discovered that, as in the puzzles of his youth — Spot the difference, dear reader! Can you see it, kids? — the picture had been doctored. Where Livia had been absent, there now stood Zinka, her arms folded, leaning against the bathroom's plastic walls. She unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum, and offered it to Haffner: its dusty granular surface.

She was taking him home, she said. She would spend tonight with him.

It seemed true, thought Haffner. She did not seem to be one of Haffner's visions. In the words of the very old song, the dream was real.

And yet, the dream life of Haffner was troubled.

It did seem all too possible that the brief moment of his triumph in relation to the villa was now over. The ordinary rules would soon reassert themselves. He doubted if the deal with Niko and Viko was still on. This seemed even less likely if he chose to allow Zinka to spend the night with him. Presumably, he could return to Viko and Niko and offer them the agreed sum. Presumably, he could try. But their goodwill might well be lacking.

Was Haffner to blame for this sudden fiasco? It seemed possible to plead that he was not — not responsible, in the end, for Niko's rages, for Viko's pride. He consulted the shade of Livia: would she really have wanted him to play the coquette with another man, simply to ensure her inheritance?

He could imagine the shade of Livia smiling.

Then Haffner was interrupted in this vision by a strong sense of nausea. A shiver took possession of his body, then relinquished it.

Yes, this, thought Haffner, was his return to the everyday. All his ingenuity had failed him. The Committee would have to be wooed all over again. So Haffner only felt a tired disappointment.

And yet, he thought, in compensation he seemed to have Zinka, in this party dress, beside him. But Haffner realised that even his joy in her was tempered. On arrival at this club he had felt so confident, so victorious. If he had been told he would leave with Zinka, it would have only made him a happy Haffner. Yet now here he was, still burdened with the problem of the villa, walking slowly through the dark streets of a spa town so marked with Livia's memory. And whether Zinka was a digression or in fact some covert route to Livia, Haffner did not know.

He still felt confident of his innocence. He had tried to remain faithful to Livia, and he would continue to try. But he was a connoisseur of Haffner's ability to be defeated. That Haffner had done his best, he was coming to realise, sadly, didn't mean he wasn't still guilty.

In this unaccustomed melancholy, Haffner followed after Zinka: his halting walk now embellished by the iambic rhythm of a limp.

But I am not so sure that Haffner should have felt so divided. Perhaps there is no such thing as a digression.

Zinka, it's true, was thinking in the same way as Haffner. She thought that it was an unusual event in Haffner's life — this dejected progress through the empty streets. She was moved by Haffner's comical plight. And it moved her more because she assumed that this comedy was all her fault. There was no way this man could have previously suffered the indignity from which he was suffering now. She didn't realise that in this story, as in all of Haffner's stories, there were certain patterns, certain repeats. She didn't know that farce was Haffner's constant mode.

This form was not new in the life of Raphael Haffner. Free from his ordinary customs, let loose in the wild East, Haffner was just allowed to become even more Haffnerian than ever — his own exaggeration.

So that every zenith was also a nadir, as usual, and all victory consisted of beatings. And, as usual, while illuminated with desire for Zinka, Haffner didn't know that a bruise was beginning to develop around his eye and on his cheek, like a Riviera sunset, the backdrop to a promenade bordered with palm trees, illuminating the night in green explosions, accompanied by the muzak of the rhyming cicadas.

Haffner Translated

So, said Zinka, as they entered Haffner's bedroom. Here they were.

It seemed undeniable. Here they were, at Haffner's finale. But Haffner was worried that his body was going to prove unequal to this finale. He was quite sure that he was getting ill. True, he was drunk. It could be just the drink. But Haffner knew about his body: its breakdowns and malfunctions. And this feeling was unusual: the dizzy sweating ague of it. He felt for his palms. They were sweating. He brushed the hair which still remained to him down with the Brylcreem of his sweating hand. As if to simultaneously produce a suavely dry palm and a suavely plumed forelock.

He offered Zinka a smile.

Tonight, Zinka explained to him, there was only one rule. Haffner asked what it was. The rule, said Zinka, was that everything came from her. Everything was her decision.

She liked Haffner, this was true, and she felt for his bruised pathos. But this did not mean that this was going to be Haffner's evening.

And Haffner said yes, absolutely.

He had never been one for the fantasies of permission: the allowed and the disallowed. But if rules were going to be a condition of this night with Zinka, then he didn't care. He revelled in them. He would content himself with the little which he was offered. Whatever the modern age would give him. At no point could Haffner touch himself, said Zinka; at no point could he touch her without permission. If at any time he broke these rules, the night was over.

Let Haffner submit! Let Haffner be debased!

All his life, the erotic for Haffner had been a matter of apertures: all the exits and entrances. And now he discovered that the apertures were something, but the rest was something else. There was so much else to play with.

Zinka pushed him gently to the bed, where he slumped down: his head raised, expectantly, like a yawning sea lion.

— You will do what I tell you, said Zinka. Yes?

— Yes, said Haffner, meekly.

Zinka stood between his legs, bent her head, and told him to open his mouth — which Haffner obediently did — then she let her spit dribble out: a thread slowly fastening with its own weight, then falling, gathered in by harmless Haffner.

Zinka went into the bathroom, crowded with the male accoutrements of Haffner, bought from a chemist in the town — a shaving brush, the tube of shaving cream, doubly creased in a sine curve which a parsimonious History had borrowed from the smudged blackboards of Haffner's prep school. With the door still open, she crouched on the toilet. She beckoned to Haffner. From below her crotch came the whispering sound of her pissing.

She told Haffner to come closer. He tried to sit down, like the men in Oriental street scenes exhibited at the Academy: a neat bobbing squat. It hurt too much. Instead, he therefore watched her on his hands and knees. Crawling, Haffner approached her closely. He could see her stream — braided, splurging.

— You like this? Zinka asked him.

— I do, yes, said Haffner.

As if there was nothing of the bodily about her, no smell emerged from Zinka. And Haffner, as he waited there, on all fours, only felt an overwhelming happiness. He was in the paradise of women; an island of intimacy, like Gulliver among the giants — whose travels Haffner had read when he was ever so young, so much younger than he would ever be again, in a miniature, octavo, red-leather edition. The eighteenth-century disgust remained with him now. It was there in his stomach, in his nervous system. But also the erotics. Gulliver astride a giant nurse's nipple! Even now, he felt himself rise up in applause. The rough pitted areolae which little Gulliver observed; by which Gulliver was entranced and perturbed. And when Gulliver — or did he? was this just a mistake of Haffner's imagination? — went on to describe the gaping maw of her crotch, Haffner, the delinquent eight-year-old, was not stricken by disgust at the human animal. Instead, he was overtaken by an acrid pleasure. The minuscule Haffner longed for this closeness to the women: the fur and softness. What was small was large, and what was large was small. The world was just a trick of perspective. It all depended, he supposed, on how good you were at magnifying, or diminishing.

Zinka came to an end. From his canine position, Haffner looked up at her, expectantly.

— Now you wipe, said Zinka.

Haffner tended to Zinka. He unrolled a small section of paper, then folded it into the most luxurious, downiest towel. He wanted to do the job with elegance: no one could ever accuse Haffner of not being a good sport.

— No. First with your mouth, she said. Your tongue.

It was for only a brief moment that Haffner paused in a qualm of indecision, before he bent his neck, uncomfortably, deliriously, and licked at Zinka's ferrous crotch. To his surprised disappointment, only a trace of her pale urine was detectable to Haffner's tongue: a sweetly sour herbaceous perfume.

— Now OK you stop, said Zinka.

Then he pushed the paper against her labia. He refolded. Pushed it again, a little harder. He dropped the paper between her legs, into the toilet bowl.

— So, said Zinka. We go through.

And Haffner followed her to the raised stage of his bed, where — earnest, dedicated — Zinka squatted over Haffner's face.

Zinka was hairless between the legs. Where the hair should have been, there was a brief tattoo: a mermaid easing herself against an invisible wave: sinuous, like Venus rising from her shell — a vision in dark green. And Haffner inhaled her.

Canine, Bacchic, Haffner thrived on the lower thrills: the women with their marine and sour aroma, the rotting rich smell of powdered roe, the ammonia rinds of cheeses. The spread of molecules in the still air was one of Haffner's most intense delights. They wafted and they drifted and they delighted him. He was undisgustable.

— You must not move, said Zinka. You move, I punish you.

Haffner wondered if this was serious. No one had ever said this to him before. Haffner had to admit that although he believed that Zinka possessed a charm he had never known in any other woman, it was true that he hardly knew her. He adored her, but she was unknown. He adored her because she was unknown. Unknown, and also young.

— Is this serious? asked Haffner, gaily.

In answer, Zinka pinched the twin wings of his nose together — their burst red cartilage poignant through the skin, like the surface of a butter bean — then pushed herself down on to his mouth. She was everywhere inside Haffner. His eyes goggled back at her, as she looked down, between her breasts.

— We do this how I like, no? said Zinka.

Haffner nodded. And she relaxed her grip on Haffner, flooding him with her delicate smell, a refined sweating bouquet.

Maybe it was better like this, thought Haffner. He began to accustom himself to the absolute relinquishment of choice. Who needed to see Haffner holding in his stomach? Or his almost hollow shins — a veteran Roman legionary, the skin rubbed to a sheen? In this relinquishment, Haffner found his revolution.

His life had been shadowed by the counter-culture, the underground — and however much he disapproved of their childish politics, he admired the chutzpah of the protestors and the fighters, the uprisers and the deserters. Once, in New York, Haffner had helped a kid into the foyer of Chase Manhattan to extricate himself from the riot police, with their bright Lego helmets. Most orderly in his life, most savage in his imaginings, Haffner read with indulgence about the European anarchists, with their colourful cryptic names: the Black Bloc, the Tute Bianche. The Yippies in particular had gladdened Haffner's heart — especially the day they strode into the New York Stock Exchange, quietened the black security men into meek submission with raucous accusations of anti-Semitism, then stood in the public gallery and rained down dollar bills on the dealers in their braces, their visors, their pinstriped bespoke suits. He felt less attached to the Parisian revolutionaries, whom Haffner had watched on the BBC — the students in the lofts of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, attaching posters to washing lines with clothes pegs, so they could dry in time to be glued all over the city: the garish fonts and pointing hands — Hypocrite reader! My double! My brother! — proclaiming their escape from all the bourgeois normality, their new creation of an idyllic island, a utopia.

And now Haffner was stranded on this island, in this utopia.

Zinka, without explaining to Haffner, skipped off him and ordered him to undress. And this, thought Haffner happily, might be the moment, the reward for all his courage. In his exuberance he undressed, ignoring his habitual neatness, letting the bunched pair of his socks roll anywhere, his shirt remain in its pool on the floor.

He didn't care what form his utopia might take. Any revolution would do. If he had to be, Haffner would be the Saint-Just of the hypermarket, Guevara of the guava. And if in fact his utopia were here, in a hotel bedroom in a spa town, then Haffner would not resist. No, thought Haffner, if this was it, then he would take his place.

Leaning over the side of the bed, Zinka picked up the tracksuit trousers, and sloppily drew them up, like a snake charmer, along with the pool of his T-shirt. The trousers served to tie up one of Haffner's hands behind him, to the bedhead; the T-shirt served for his other. And Haffner was tied to the bed.

Stoical in his pursuit of pleasure, the true classical epicure, it wasn't the first time Haffner had been involved in the bedbound business of knots. It had been a habit of Barbra, his American secretary, to need to be tied to the bed, before being smacked with a book, struck with a cane, spanked until her buttocks turned a chaste and virginal pink. She liked to lose control, in the most controlled way possible. In her apartment in Chelsea, Haffner employed his ingenuity — even, in a moment of inspiration, lassoing a rope that had been stashed in a canvas bag left behind by her hearty and mountaineering brother over an exposed joist, so that Barbra could be tied there, standing naked, her arms above her head, her breasts raised with the tension — breasts which Haffner struck lightly but woundingly with the edge of his belt. When her breasts were raised like this you could see the mole which was usually a deft stowaway underneath the left. No, Haffner never minded these contrivances: but they were not for him. Not even medicinally. In the Russian Bath House in New York, he never understood why Morton so enjoyed being whipped with switches, beaten with birch rods.

Here in Central Europe, however, the position was reversed. Haffner was the one who was tied. Lightly, it was true: with garish sportswear. But his power had still gone.

Haffner had abdicated.

Slowly, Zinka lowered her mouth to Haffner's chest. With her teeth she tugged at a nipple — its blunt miniature nub. To Haffner, this action still felt within the limits of the normal, or the possible. It hadn't yet gone beyond the border of the pleasurable. Then she continued to bite. And Haffner began to revise his definitions of pleasure. He wondered how far he could take this before she might draw blood. Nevertheless, he thought, nevertheless. His body took over — with its strange routes to enjoyment. Zinka began to bite the other nipple. As she did so, she dragged the sharp nails of her fingers over Haffner's delicate skin. Wildly, he felt his penis stir. She held his penis, tightly, painfully. It tried to stir some more.

Then Zinka began her game of teasing.

Stupendous, haughty, grand, the diminutive form of Zinka began its travails down the length of Haffner's body. She struck him; she bit him. Soon, he knew, his old body would become a palette of bruises — the yellows and browns of a landscape from the nineteenth-century French countryside, with cows, and sheep, and a misshapen cypress. She told him to close his eyes. He could feel her hover over him — her warmth and smell. With a calm hand, she rubbed her wetness on his eyelids, on his nose: a pensive Impressionist. And then she moved further down until she reached his penis, where she waited.

Oh Haffner was adrift! He was in a new ecstasy, confused beyond the obviousness of pain and pleasure. He began to whimper. As he made a sound, she hurt him. So that then Haffner lay still, silent, blinded: in the absolute perfection of his denuded state.

And this was it, he thought. It was the final liberation.

He had found a strange detachment — like the Zen-like kids in the sixties, on Wall Street, who used to tell him the world wasn't the way everyone said it was. Everything was perspective. The real object of the game, they told him, wasn't money: it was the playing of the game itself.

If Haffner had been a mystic, he could have found in this some kind of god. But Haffner was not given to the mystical. He preferred the reckless sensual. It seemed more rational.

In a fleeting, floating way, this reminded him.

Long ago, when Haffner was fitter and more beautiful, he had been having lunch with Livia, in Mayfair's Mirabelle. For reasons which were already obscure to them, they were arguing about the merits of the 1968 revolutions: the revolution in Prague, the riots in Paris, the protests in London, then the sit-ins in New York, which Haffner rather saw as pitiful imitations of the European originals.

But it wasn't just the Americans whom Haffner doubted. Even the Europeans, Haffner argued, couldn't be taken seriously. The kids with their posters! They were yearning for violence. And they hadn't seen what violence was. They couldn't understand it.

But Haffner had? asked Livia. Haffner had. Of course he had. She knew he had. And these kids wouldn't have been able to contemplate it. What about the one up the tree, the poet? Who on being asked to come down by a policeman replied that he wouldn't, and, on being asked by the policeman why, answered by saying that he would not come down because if he came down then the policeman would beat him. A pacifist revolutionary! But then: he was a poet. A master of theatricals. Like his friend, the theatre critic: who left the protests because his Berlutis were scuffed. No, Haffner, she had to concede, knew about violence. And so he was best placed to ask the following question. (At this point Livia, distractedly busying herself with the tea, scalded herself on the stainless-steel teapot, where a teabag was in agony.) The following question. Could she honestly say that any of these students, these playwrights, these children, were motivated by anything except a desire to be seen in the newspapers? Could she? He didn't think she could. However much they might dress it up as something else, however much they might turn it into street theatre, or whatever, it was still the same old story: the ancient desire for glamour, for someone to notice you.

Livia asked when he would ever stop being flippant. At what point would he learn to take things seriously? Haffner considered his petits fours; the black water which was offering itself as coffee. He was, he assured her, taking it seriously.

She could put it this way, said Livia, spooning the teabag on to a saucer, bleeding its brown ichor on to the china. Haffner looked at her, and realised, with a small shock, that her hair was now white. So, said Livia, Haffner saw everything as selfishness. This was nothing new. A gangster, he thought that everyone else had the ethics of the gangster too: she knew this. But what revolution would survive the accusation? What moment of human history? Everyone only cared about themselves. This was obvious! Less obvious was how much, said Livia, anyone should really care. So everyone — Robespierre, Brutus, Lenin, Mussolini — these were all men who wanted to be noticed. But maybe, said Livia, this wasn't the truth of Brutus. And Haffner had to concede — for he was a lover of the classics — that Livia wasn't absolutely wrong. He was always on Caesar's side, true. But even a Caesar was impeachable.

The revolutions happened — nourished by a healthy sense of melodrama. Who was Haffner to judge the revolutionaries? asked Livia. Who was Haffner to judge the people who didn't care about all the irrelevant emotions — the self-consciousness, the self-pity: the people who didn't care what others thought of them?

So long ago, Livia had said this to Haffner. Now, when she was dead, it occurred to him that perhaps he finally agreed. If she was right, then Haffner was finally behaving like a true revolutionary. Like the revolutionaries, he was untroubled by the usual emotions: the self-pity, the embarrassment. Here, in the East, in the remnants of Kakania, he no longer cared about social niceties. So a girl was treating him with absolute hauteur, and he was loving it? What did Haffner care? He was his only audience.

Solitary, realised Haffner, he was shameless.

Haffner's room still preserved the forms of the 1920s. As well as its view of the mountains, its Zarathustrian height, the room was also equipped with armchairs, an escritoire, and a marble fire surround, on which were two silver candlesticks, containing the unlit slim obelisks of two cream candles.

Haffner opened his eyes to see Zinka pluck a candle from its niche. This baffled him. Then she told him, lying there on his back, to raise his knees to his chest, so exposing himself to whatever Zinka might want to do to him.

It was a fantasy she had always had: to use a man as a woman.

Once, Zinka was talking to her friend, about love and its ramifications. Zinka's friend had explained how her husband's favourite thing was that she should perch there, behind him, and use a dildo on him, with its pink latex bobbles. Slavenka was happy to do this. She was a dutiful wife. But when Zinka asked her if she enjoyed it, if she found it sexy — because she thought it must be sexy, she envied Slavenka her exotic and fulfilling sex life — Slavenka sighed.

— Oh no, she said. It's so boring. I keep forgetting I'm doing it. It's like doing the ironing.

It wasn't how Zinka felt. The idea of it excited her. All her life, she had felt so managed, so in thrall. The idea of being the manager herself seemed so dense with possibility.

In an amazed trance of obedience, Haffner held his knees up. It felt so insubstantial, thought Haffner, that he could not rule out the possibility that this was all a dream. He rather hoped it might be. And as he raised his knees, Zinka noticed the creases which emerged on his stomach — as on a sofa, a clubman's Chesterfield. These creases, for Zinka, were tender with vulnerability. And this was what she wanted. To make the men unusual. To make them unprotected.

The unsure length of Haffner's penis was now being mimicked and outdone by the candle — slick with hand cream she had found in her handbag — grasped in Zinka's hand, like a light sabre.

There was no way, thought Haffner, that he could allow this indignity. But then again: why shouldn't he? It was his liberation. In it, he was prepared to entertain ideas for which he felt no natural wish to be an entertainer. It was not as if he hadn't done this to women himself. So why was it that he would blithely do to a woman — sure of their mutual pleasure, concerned to move with a more exaggerated tenderness — something he would not want a woman to do to him?

He had been content to let matters take their course when Zinka had entered his room that afternoon. In this way, Haffner meditated. Then, he had been moved by her pensive creativity. So why should he stop now?

The problems of philosophy were not, however, Haffner's primary concern. She let the thin candle, deftly coated in her hand cream, slip and settle slightly inside him. She watched him watch her. He could not see the oddity of it; he could not see this act's improbability — as it distended him, and enlarged him, beneath his tight testicles, as it made him wriggle and his stomach break out in sweat.

Then Zinka's other slippery hand became intricate around his penis, just as he had watched it elaborate itself on Niko's penis, two days ago: when his life, reflected Haffner, seemed so much simpler.

As she rested his rough, unpedicured feet on her soft shoulders, he felt moved to hazard the existence of a soul. Nothing else rendered his feelings explicable. And Haffner — Haffner cried out in his denuded, opened closeness to Zinka. They looked into each other's eyes and saw each other: illuminated.

Haffner's paradise! His translation to the supine, the passively cherubic!

She had begun by causing him pain. Now, gradually, she was gently moving the candle, back and forth, as she moved the skin on his penis, up and down, up and down, in front of her. She looked into his eyes and he looked back at her — comical, romantic. She didn't speak to him. Simply, they continued to look at each other, intently, while Zinka continued to make her motions inside Haffner. There was a blemish in one of her pupils.

And Haffner ascended.

With a burgeoning slow realisation, a shy astonishment, he could feel the slow progress of a climax he had not quite ever believed would be possible. Like the faintest music from a radio, playing in some car which pauses, behind an apartment block, as you lean out the window and enjoy a pensive cigarette, watching the unknown city below you, and then, when you think that no, you will never quite be able to make out the tune, that it will remain for ever just beyond you, the car turns a corner and with it you recognise with an unexpected glow of recollection the full volume of some hit made famous by the genius Django Reinhardt in the music halls of New York.

In this way, Haffner finally jolted his hips, and cried out.

Zinka scooped up Haffner's tepid liquid into an enticing paw. Then she told Haffner to open his mouth. Haffner opened. Then she tapped a fingertip on his tongue: a nymph tapping an aged demigod — asleep and drunk — with a finger stained with mulberry juice, to wake him and make him sing.

Haffner paused. Then Haffner swallowed.

And Zinka smiled at him. Plucking a tissue from beside the bed, she wiped the trickling semen from his belly — then flushed the heavy tissue discreetly away.

When Frau Tummel had left Haffner that afternoon, he had tried to argue that he was a libertine. Because he only cared about pleasure, he told her. This was why it would never work between them. And, furious, she had looked at him: her nostrils angrily flared.

— No, she said. No: you are too frightened.

The chutzpah of it had enraged him: because Haffner knew that it was true. For if Haffner were ever a libertine, it was never absolutely. He wasn't an absolute immoralist. He lacked the ruthlessness, the total selfishness.

But now, as he rested from Zinka's labours, he wanted to say that no, Frau Tummel was wrong. In some ways — the rhetorical ways — he wished that Frau Tummel could see him now. (He wished that Livia could see him now.) He wasn't too scared. He just hadn't wanted Frau Tummel enough. He just hadn't ever understood the ludicrous crazytalk of true desire.

Because, yes: desire is the ultimate in the improvised. This is the normal theory of desire. It was Zinka's — who was just about to explain to Haffner that now everything was over. But I am not so sure.

The difficult task is to improvise the seventeenth time. Or even, say, the second. It might have seemed so incandescent, one's impromptu smearing of chocolate mousse on the palpitating body of a woman — there where her flesh is most exposed. But if the next time one again moves doggedly to the refrigerator, then the prone and lovely woman will experience in her soul a tiny qualm.

The true libertines are the geniuses at repetition. Not the artists of the one-off, the improvised. Everyone can improvise. The true talent is in the persistence.

He woke up, to discover Zinka leaving.

He had drifted into what seemed like the deepest night of sleep, but which was in fact only a small moment; he had hardly closed his eyes. He looked down: his shrunken penis was sticky as an orchid bud.

— I have to go, she said.

— You could stay here with me, he said. Why not?

— I can't stay here, she said. I have to go home.

— But you can't let him make you, said Haffner.

— No one's making me, said Zinka.

Haffner looked woebegone. He felt worse than woebegone: he felt as if everything was over. Yet for a brief moment he had felt so utterly reborn. But then, who was Haffner kidding? How could a man be born, when he was old? What schlub was ever allowed the victory of a second chance?

— I mean, she said. Look at you. Look at me.

It was just a moment, she said. It wasn't love.

But, thought Haffner, he loved her. This seemed plausible. The speed of it was nothing for Haffner. It simply overwhelmed him with the evidence.

He knew, however, that he had thought that he had never thought like this before on previous occasions. The repetition, he had to admit, tended to produce a comical effect. So what was true? The feeling of uniqueness, or the feeling of a repeat?

And me, I do not know. Two answers seem possible, and only one can be true. Maybe Haffner was right to feel that he was always stuck in a repeat. He had always thought, every time he fell in love, that it had no precedent in the past. Just as a perplexed critic looks at a barbaric work of art, which seems to come from nowhere. And this was precisely why he repeated himself. He recognised nothing, because he forgot so much. And since he forgot so much, he always repeated himself. He always believed he was in love, when it was perhaps just another brief moment of desire. On the other hand, maybe the opposite was also possible. Every time he said he was in love, it was true. Every woman Haffner had loved had been unique. But he forgot so much, so lavishly. And the more he forgot, the more he tended to see each story as the same. Whereas, perhaps, no story was the same.

It is all a problem of perspective.

But whatever. Haffner, in however baffling a mess he found himself, was sure of this: the desire was nothing to do with Haffner. It wasn't a whim; it wasn't capricious. How could it be capricious if it was a compulsion? So maybe nothing was an imbroglio of one's own making. Maybe nothing was Haffner's fault. A new goddess appeared — that was all. And he surrendered.

Abandoned, Haffner began to argue with Zinka about the faithlessness of woman. He was aware that this was the opposite of what he had argued, a few hours earlier, to Frau Tummel: when he complained about the faithfulness of women. He was aware that he was beginning to resemble a character in the farces he had watched with Livia, in the 1960s, on Shaftesbury Avenue, the era when Haffner could still happily go to the theatre without being disappointed in the quality. But then, maybe this was fine. What else was farce but the way of understanding how quick one's ideas were, how soon their showers passed?

After all: this was why he liked Zinka. It was why he had loved Livia: he was always in search of the one who would leave him.

It had always been Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. First Livia had destroyed this illusion of Haffner. But he had been able still to preserve one place of hope: that in the one-night stands, the brief affairs, it was always Haffner who left, cold-hearted.

Now even this was not true. Now that it was happening to him he was enraged by the injustice of it. Could a person simply choose whether or not they would have sex with someone else? Surely, if you had done it once, you had an obligation to continue for ever?

Although, as Zinka tenderly kissed him on the forehead, and left his room — not looking back at Haffner, naked on the bed — he could not conceal from himself the thought that this new incarnation did possess a certain logic. Maybe, thought Haffner, in a haze of contradiction, it was possible to love someone without wanting them: not to be tired with the need for possession. It didn't seem so unlikely. To want to inhabit the mind and body of someone else. For desire may involve possession. But also it might mean the opposite desire: to be possessed.

In his bedroom, Haffner was translated.

There was no reason, therefore, to be angry at Zinka. There was no reason to be proud. So what if she had left him? She entranced him precisely because she had never belonged to him at all.

Just as no one, thought Haffner, would belong to him again.

Or to put it in a way more familiar to Haffner, in the words of a great comedian. . One day, this comedian, tired but happy, was walking down some street in Manhattan with his producer. The day's filming had gone well. Now they were off to some diner for a much needed salt beef sandwich, a much needed latke. Or whatever. As they sauntered down the street, two nuns, in wimples and solid shoes, walked towards them. And, solicitously, the great comedian took them aside, and very gently reminded them that he did apologise but they were in the wrong place. They had made a mistake. They weren't in this sketch.

In exactly the same way, what Haffner needed was the voice of a comedian, gently reminding him that now, regretfully, in the matter of Haffner, life was through.

Haffner, my hero, had outlived himself.