The Escape

Haffner Harmonic

The next morning — as the sun rose over the conifers, gilding the distant snows — Haffner woke up, raised his aching face and saw his battered suitcase: wrapped in creased and blotched cellophane, swaddled in blue adhesive tape, slashed by a diagonal tear which, according to the man who had delivered it — reception told him — could not be explained, and for which the airline admitted no responsibility.

In another era, perhaps Haffner would have instituted various legal battles. He would have written to the chairman and demanded compensation: donations to his designated charities. But not now. Haffner was no longer so proud of his property. He only felt a warm relief, as he abandoned his golfing trousers and tracksuits, and replaced the image in the mirror with a more familiar Haffner, in his brown tweed suit, his checked twill shirt, a muted tie: the handkerchief which Cesare had bought him in the Milan arcades stuffed with elegant negligence in his pocket.

Then he put on his glasses, and was fearful at his suddenly precise reflection. A livid stain was spreading across one cheek. A gummed splinter gelled in the tear duct of his right eye.

The reflection, however, perturbed him less than the pain within. His body seemed exhausted: he was shivering, worried Haffner, and his pulse was erratic. He felt for his clammy forehead: it seemed hot.

His first step, thought Haffner, in the life of this renovated, broken-down version of Haffner, should be breakfast. Then he should find Benjamin, and admit that perhaps Benji had been right all along. Though would he still believe that for a brief hour Haffner had been successful? Perhaps not, thought Haffner: perhaps not.

The dining room, by now, at this late stage of the morning, was empty. Haffner moved slowly along its buffet: with its sacks of grains and cereals, the contraption — which resembled no toaster Haffner had seen — for toasting bread, from which each slice emerged with its black insignia: a franking machine. All of these Haffner ignored. He took a croissant from some imitation of the rustic panier, and poured himself a coffee from the dregs of three silver Thermoses.

Haffner felt sick.

With flakes of croissant caught in the fibres of his tie, Haffner wandered out into the hotel's lounge: where the windows looked on to the mountains: their blues and greens and mauves. The absolute blue of the sky. It suddenly made sense to bespectacled Haffner now: this perfect view. He made for the bookshelves, but Haffner, whose flesh was sad, had read all the books he could. Humming to himself, he moved on to the miniature but eclectic collection of CDs — on a shelf, beside a book of mountain views, and a guidebook to the mountain walks, in French, from four years ago. And Anne of Green Gables in Spanish, and Volumes I and II of the History of Nottingham from the 1930s — but not the crowning Volume III.

Without expecting much, Haffner ejected someone else's CD featuring the classics of reggae from the 1970s, slid his own random choice into the waiting machine, and pressed play.

And Haffner discovered that he was in the orchestra stalls at the opera house.

As he gazed in the darkness, while fairies disported themselves on stage, Haffner was distracted by the surprise which had persisted, throughout the ballet's first half, at the smallness of Pfeffer's shilling tip to the cloakroom attendant in Rules, where they had eaten their theatre supper. In Haffner's opinion, no largesse was too much for the everyday retainers. So Pfeffer baffled him. But then Pfeffer often baffled him. Beside him, in the darkness, Pfeffer was holding opera glasses to his eyebrows like some marine instrument. They seemed to be directed at the mechanics of the flies.

Their respective wives were watching the ballet intently.

Haffner tried to settle into his velvet chair. He had accepted patiently this proposed outing, to celebrate Livia's birthday, to the Royal Ballet. It hadn't fit Haffner's idea of entertainment. But when he saw Bottom shrugging away his sorrow with a neat bend of his legs, Haffner began to enjoy himself. These people had humour, after all. While Livia watched beside him, on edge, transported — plucking at the plush velvet with her fingernails.

This theme recurred in Haffner's life. Twenty years later, in the living room of his daughter's house, he heard Benjamin trying to sight-read the same melodies: the cover of the score was worn like blotting paper. And in Benji's clumsy chords, Haffner rediscovered the sad emotion he had felt for the actor playing Bottom — the pirouettes, the tender holds! — in his massive ass's head. The sadness seemed to make sense to him now.

For what else was it as you lumbered across a room, towards the body of a woman, the prong of your penis straining to beat you in the race to touch her? It was farcical, always.

In the lounge of the hotel there was a curved bar made of vertical strips of pine, a collection of sofas, a box of board games. Into one sofa sank Haffner, as he played to himself, in the morning, the nocturne from Mendelssohn's ballet.

The horns, softly, their own echo, lay on the bed of the violins.

And as they did so, Haffner made a loop, descending from the childhood of Benji, back through Livia's birthday, to where this theme had first emerged. It was Haffner's theme tune. His first ever delicate kiss had occurred to this accompaniment, the music played with the film he had watched at the Ionic Picture Theatre, after which Hazel had allowed him to kiss her cheek.

In the window, outside, on the hotel veranda, he could see a woman emptying her rucksack — polyester in primary colours — of its crumbs, its lost cellophane wrappers from drinks straws, its crumpled tickets, its creased promotional leaflets to the most inauthentic restaurants.

Haffner contemplated the peaceful scene. There was no one in the lounge. Only Haffner. Everyone else was out walking, or swimming, or lying beside the pools. Or being cured of whatever they wanted to be cured of. But Haffner, instead, was lost in his persistent sense of floating, unattached.

Yes, checked Haffner, as if feeling in a pocket for his passport, the feeling was still there. Haffner was free.

As the soft nocturne continued, Haffner mooched among the CDs. He rejected showtunes from the movies; he rejected a selection of fados from the backstreets of Lisbon. And then, to his excitement, he found the Cole Porter songbook, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

If Haffner had an ideal musical form, it was the wordless harmonies of Duke Ellington's scat. But if there had to be words, then he wanted them to be Cole Porter's, with Ella's accent. She sang the songs so precisely, so simply. She confessed to her audience, as she had confessed to Haffner, that time in Ronnie Scott's, that ev'ry time they said goodbye, she died a little. And now, as he read the liner notes, he noticed the weird old-fashioned elision. Ev'ry! He'd only noticed the poetic quality of Cole Porter's title now, after — what was it? Sixty years? He rather liked it.

He was in the mood for preserving outmoded things.

— Benjamin! said Haffner, delighted.

Benjamin paused, and pointed a finger at his cheek, like a tearful harlequin.

— You've got a huge bruise on your cheek, said Benji.

Haffner asked him if he knew this one. Benjamin repeated his sentence; Haffner repeated his. Benjamin replied that no, not really. It was kind of not what he listened to, really. Then he should listen, said Haffner, raising a hand. As for the bruise — as for the bruise: the bruise was nothing, said Haffner.

Together they listened to Ella Fitzgerald explain to her silent audience how ev'ry time they said goodbye, she wondered why the gods above her thought so little of her that they allowed her lover to go. And then, once more, the strings came in, a trampoline for her voice.

— I'm not sure I like it, said Benji.

— How can you not like it, said Haffner, when it's true?

He had always loved this song for the frankness of its melancholy: its admission of being defeated by love. Perhaps this was the real America of Haffner — not so much the happy improvisation, as the stoic openness about pain. The acceptance of vulnerability was what moved Haffner now. He loved the Ella of this song, just as he had been charmed by his meetings with the innovative businessmen in the early seventies: the gunslingers, the white sharks. Sometimes, he had dealings with James Ling: the man who regarded the portfolio as a work of art, providing an escape from real life, and all its attendant risks. With his theory that one could diminish the risk of disaster by betting on everything. Patiently, over the years, Haffner had listened to their jargon — derivatives, risk arbitrage, hedge funds — all of them trying to pretend that these new ideas could diminish risk. And Haffner had listened to them, unconvinced — amazed by their ability to invent the idea of the rational bubble. So frank an oxymoron! So fragile a hope!

But Benjamin, this morning, was euphoric with optimism.

— Have you fixed things? Because I think I'm going to go back, said Benjamin.

— To bed? queried Haffner.

— Home, said Benjamin.

— To that summer school? said Haffner, looking down the song titles.

Benjamin said nothing.

— But this one, said Haffner to himself, is the real marvel.

— No, said Benjamin. I'm going back to her.

At this point, Haffner noticed something.

— You're in the same clothes as last night, said Haffner. You brought nothing else?

— I'm in the same clothes, said Benjamin. And then he grinned. To which Haffner offered a happily sceptical eyebrow.

— When did you arrive? said Haffner. Yesterday? I've hardly seen you.

Haffner had converted him. The legend of Haffner had now created the legend of Benji. For this would always be Benji's great story: the story of how he abandoned the practice of his religion, having slept with two girls in one week: in Tel Aviv, and then an Alpine spa town. Even if Haffner, in the mountains, had a finale all of his own. His story was all about the dismantling of his legend: the sudden zest for abandonment.

And, sultry in the mountainous morning, Ella began again to sing Cole Porter's classic: 'Begin the Beguine'.

— You're going to leave your school? asked Haffner.

— But have you fixed things? said Benji. I won't go if you still need me.

And Haffner considered this.

— No, he said.

— You haven't fixed things? said Benji.

— I don't need you, said Haffner.

— But no, began Benji.

— You ever heard of Artie Shaw? said Haffner, holding up the liner notes. Eight wives. Now let me tell you something, old boy.

But before he could continue Benjamin's education in the art of jazz, before he could continue to praise Benji for his liberation, before he could go on to explain that in fact uxorious panache wasn't what had made Artie Shaw remarkable — that in fact Artie Shaw's talent was his extension of the clarinet's upper range — there was an interruption.

Frau Tummel, clasping Herr Tummel's hand — like exhausted Olympic victors — appeared at the door of the hotel lounge. Like the overcrowded lounge at the end of a Parisian farce, an English murder mystery. Behind the Tummels, there was a man who was wearing his name pinned to his chest.

— He is here, announced Frau Tummel.

— Who? said Haffner.

— You, said Herr Tummel and Frau Tummel, in concert.

He had at least, thought Haffner, brought them back together. If this was the only good he had accomplished in this spa town, it wasn't nothing. Surely someone should acknowledge that?

The man with his name on his chest was the manager of the hotel. It was a pleasure to meet him, said Haffner, welcoming him with a handshake. This handshake was declined with a gentle cough, a gentle incline of the head.

Benjamin busied himself with the neat arrangement of a pile of magazines, dating from two years ago, concerning the niceties of couture.

Then the manager began his speech. He regretted to say it, he said, and he was sure that everything could be explained — just as, he added with what he imagined must seem an engaging twinkle, a teacher had once told him that everything, yes, must have an explanation, a rational explanation. So: he regretted the situation, but there it was.

Haffner watched him, silently.

Benjamin, in an attempt at disappearance, debated within himself the eternal oppositions: between the one-piece and the bikini; the bronzing or the elegance; the virgin or the whore.

So. There had been accusations. There had been comments raised to him of a personal nature, concerning Mr Haffner.

Haffner began to read the songbook's liner notes, with scholarly exactitude.

Yes, continued the manager, these allegations involved Haffner and a member of staff.

Haffner discovered with surprised satisfaction that the record — Haffner's vocabulary was not always modern — not only included Ella's renditions of Cole Porter, but also included a selection of live recordings: so that here, even here, in the least smoky and least cool environs of a spa town high in the backward Alps, Haffner could listen to Ella's improvisation of 'Mack the Knife' — an improvisation she delivered at the jazz festival in Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera with Duke Ellington in 1966. Which Haffner himself had annoyingly missed. An improvisation, he then found out, which was in fact a staged version, since it went back to 1960 in Berlin, where Ella had first improvised these new lines to a song she couldn't remember.

Of course this could all be settled amicably, said the manager. He just needed to be aware of the facts. The facts as they had been made known to him by this lady here beside him. But he was sure that, perhaps, there had been a mistake.

— Present the evidence, said Haffner, simply.

Then he selected a new track, and pressed play. Because now he was truly bohemian: which is to say, he was bored.

Frau Tummel looked away, distressed.

— I'm sorry? said the manager.

He would of course have to determine the full facts, said the manager, raising his voice over the beginning big band. But naturally if this were true, he was afraid that naturally the young lady in question would have to be let go by the hotel.

— The evidence! shouted Haffner.

Furious, he turned away to the window, with his arms folded, and considered how he was going to save Zinka. It seemed unlikely. But Haffner wanted to try. For even if the world were a trap for Haffner, he saw no reason why it should be a trap for anyone else. Other people, he thought, could be done with being caught up in the farce of Haffner.

In other words, he no longer wanted to be Mack the Knife. It had always seemed to Haffner to be universal: this song which had begun in London, been rewritten in Berlin, then transatlantically re-rewritten by Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and finally Ella and Duke. This universal ballad used to seem a statement of the universal facts as Haffner knew them.

But now, Haffner was less sure.

For Macheath was the perfect criminal. With Mack the Knife, anything was possible: on the Thames, a body was found; or there you were, in Soho, and a woman was discovered, raped;

or in the City of London, on a Sunday morning, there on the sidewalk was a body oozing life, and someone was sneaking round the corner.

This was how the song had gone, in Europe. Mack was the emperor of crime: the rewrite of a man like Tiberius, who made his guests drink lavish vats of wine, then tied a cord around their penises, so that their bladders burst. That was the usual story of how humans liked to be animals. But now that Ella sang it, something new occurred. Suddenly, realised Ella, the chorus had disappeared: and so that great singer, with her own bravado, had made up her own words.

Just like 'Begin the Beguine', the song had a way of extending itself. It went the distance. It possessed a final flourish of pure happiness.

For oh Bobby Darin, and Louis Armstrong, they made a record, ooh what a record, of this song, she sang. And now Ella, Ella and her fella, they were making a wreck, a wreck, such a wreck of the same old song. Oh yes yes yes yes they'd sung it, yes yes yes yes they'd swung it, they had swung Mack, they'd swung old Mack in town — for those people there, there, at the jazz festival, they were gonna sing, they were gonna swing, they were gonna add one more chorus.

And the Duke took over, with his big band.

Haffner, at the window, hummed along. And Benjamin, amazed at his grandfather's odd insouciance, amazed that one more time his grandfather was being accused of monstrous fidelity to pursuing love, went out on to the veranda. The prickly hair between Anastasia's legs returned to him, in the memory of his lips, his soft thick hands. It made him happy. While the manager, having been engaged in theatrical conversation, at this point left the hotel lounge with a final severe glance at Haffner: sweeping away in a flounce of Tummels.

It must, thought Haffner, have been Frau Tummel's doing: this catastrophe. And he could see why: always, the wives wanted to reassert their dignity: the sanctity of their marriage. Betraying Zinka was simply Frau Tummel's way of doing this. He couldn't blame her. What else was Haffner doing himself — if not trying to reassert the sanctity of his marriage?

No, Haffner wasn't hurt by Frau Tummel's malice: the melodrama of everyone's feelings. He was really done with all the theatre now. Because this was the point when Ella's scat began: the scat she had learned from Duke — the scat which Haffner admired. Twice she used it to push once more through, into a new repeat of the chorus. And then once more. And then finally again she sang: could they go with one, just one, one more? And oh they had swung it, yes they had swung it, they had swung old Mack, they'd swung old Mack for you. And once again they'd like to know, to let them know they were through.

And as the applause died down a voice said: You're the Lady — a voice which may well have come from the audience but which Haffner had always imagined, for Haffner liked his heroes to be friends, to be the voice of the admiring Duke himself.

Frau Tummel returned in the doorway. She called his name.

But Haffner was done with the romance of others. From the window, he walked across the room. As Frau Tummel motioned to speak, he held out a silencing palm. Instead, Haffner returned to the masterpieces of classical music.

Randomly, he chose a melody from the era of grand opera.

Oh but everyone knows the famous music where the music soars above the circumstances: like the beautiful aria sung by an unfaithful woman who is in love, without knowing it, with an unfaithful man. Or the song which is sung for a girl who is about to die beside her lover, immured in a tomb — music which somehow, as the master said, manages to leave behind the true circumstances of the singing, that two people were being buried alive; they would die together or (what was even worse) one after the other they would die from asphyxiation or hunger. Then the horrendous process of disintegration would set in until only two skeletons would remain, two inanimate objects quite unaffected by the presence or absence of the other. And yet, while all this was true, they continued to sing the most ethereal of melodies.

This is one version of music. It was the version which Frau Tummel believed in. Just as she believed in the eternal power of the feelings. But, for Haffner, music offered no lofty and irrefutable soothing enhancement to life's unadorned and crude ugliness. He did not believe in music's triumphant power of transfiguration.

He stood and stared at Frau Tummel, who stared sadly back. In this final meeting of Haffner and Frau Tummel, a gorgeous melody enveloped them. Unknown to both of them, a woman sang about her sad realisation, that the sincerity of passion is no argument against the corresponding truth of its comic portability. When a new god arrives — sang this woman, in a desert — we surrender.

Everyone moves from God to God.

But then, Haffner already knew this. He could have comforted Frau Tummel without the music. Think about it! Haffner could have said — if he had wanted to care for Frau Tummel in her romantic distress, sad at Haffner's betrayal, the speed of his feelings. Their liaison may have been brief, but it was still longer than many other more celebrated love stories. And the tempo of a love story's demise was no argument against it being a love story. The plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes just one night. In that night, so many couples swap over. The plot of Romeo and Juliet takes less than a week. Three days and three nights were all that was needed for a fairy tale. Three days and three nights were all that was needed for a fairy tale. In relative terms, the love of Frau Tummel and Haffner was endless.

And I think that it is possible to add one further comforting thought for Frau Tummel. There is a link, perhaps, between the transience of passion and the irony of the love songs. In the same way that a passion is always so much more fleeting than it believes itself to be, so a passion is always bestowed on an inappropriate object. But just because a passion might be bestowed on an inadequate object doesn't mean that the passion isn't real.

Everyone was on their desert island, waiting to be rescued by another god. It was true of Frau Tummel; it had been true of Haffner too.

Haffner auf Naxos!

Was Haffner laughable? Perhaps. But no more laughable than anyone else in love. To go for a young woman at seventy-eight was simply to add to the comedy of passion the comedy of the object.

The manager reappeared, with Viko.

— Yes, said Viko, looking bored.

That was the same man. Absolutely, improvised Viko. He had seen him kiss her too. Well then, said the manager. There seemed nothing more to say. He was sorry, but the matter seemed unambiguous.

Haffner had thought that a spa town would be a paradise of liberation. In his imagination, it was a bohemian idyll. And maybe it had been like this, for him, in some secret way. But the overt facts were disappointing. The morality of this place was so depressingly limited: a bourgeois, Communist morality — unoriginal even in its rules.

Haffner looked down, at his suit, at his shoes; at the tie which had been unaccountably crumpled by some customs official in Boston or Tehran. It seemed an adequate outfit for his own banishment.

There would be no need to let the girl go, he said. Instead, he would leave himself. He trusted that this would end the matter. The girl had done nothing wrong. He was sorry if he had behaved in an unbecoming manner.

This was really not what he had in mind, said the manager.

But no, Haffner halted him. It was the only just solution. He was sorry for the inconvenience.

And in the halo of his grandeur, Haffner nodded goodbye to Frau Tummel, to Viko, to the manager of his hotel, and strode out on to the veranda — where Benjamin was standing, looking out at the sky and its clouds, considering the phenomenon of Haffner.

— I am leaving in protest, said Haffner. This is a scandal. I will find another hotel.

— It's always like this, said Benjamin. It's kind of amazing. Everywhere you go, there's a crisis.

Haffner tried to protest. Once again, he had been the victim of an extraordinary set of circumstances. Benjamin said he had no idea.

Haffner changed the subject.

— So you're leaving as well, said Haffner.

— I'm really not sure now, said Benji.

— Come now, said Haffner.

— But Mama, said Benji.

— We will manage her, said Haffner.

And Benji, newly criminal, smiled.

— But you're sure you can handle this business? said Benji.

— It's paperwork, said Haffner.

He put his hand on Benji's shoulder, in his manly gesture of camaraderie.

— I always stick up for you, said Benjamin, looking out at the sun and the sky. Always.

And he broke off. He tried again.

— Even when she left, said Benjamin, — I still defended you.

And Haffner contemplated, for a moment, in an access of irritability at this kid's sincere demonstration of love, telling Benjamin the truth. For a moment, he imagined the conversation where he revealed, here, to Benjamin, and so to his family as well, the story of Livia with Goldfaden. How Livia had left Haffner not because she was enraged by Haffner's minor infidelities, not because of his refusal to take the art of ballet nor the religions of his forefathers seriously, but because she had been in love with another man. And then Haffner could have continued, and explained that the reason why Livia then lived for two years, the last two years of her life, on her own, in her flat in Golders Green, was not because she had so taken against the selfishness of Haffner that she had finally decided to abandon him, as her family believed, but because Goldfaden, when confronted by Livia's proposal that they could finally live together, now that his wife was gone, had gently but irreparably told her that this was a very bad idea. He was quite happy as he was. He couldn't understand what had come over her. There was no need for such theatrics, he had said.

This was why she had left, and not come back. She would not admit that she had been humiliated.

But Haffner would never tell Benji this. He would never tell anyone. No one would ever know about her defeat. He loved Livia with all the passion he was capable of; with an overwhelming care for her secrecy.

And maybe, I now think, as I watch Haffner stand there, that is how to truly be a libertine: to accept the libertinism of others.

For a final time, Haffner looked at the hotel's private landscape, the giant mountains, the infinite sky; then he patted Benji's shoulder again.

— You're a pal, he said.

And Haffner left the hotel.

Haffner Fugitive

Haffner stepped out into the midsummer afternoon, carrying his suitcase. It still trailed rags of cellophane.

The question was, thought Haffner, what he was to do next. Some form of shelter seemed imperative.

Wearily, Haffner made the long walk across the park, into the town, in search of a new hotel. The square was empty. The square was metaphysical. It was a Platonic form of sun. He passed a sports shop with a crate of plastic balls outside, printed with pictures of more leathery, more professional balls; he passed a patisserie with trays of greaseproof paper in the window. On a cafe terrace, a woman was pushing a folding chair flat with a pensive knee. On and on went Haffner, homeless in the heat. He was ancient. Everywhere was ancient: the imprinted gas vents were fossils in the pavements.

He couldn't stay just anywhere. He had his standards, his distastes. One hotel Haffner rejected because of the canaries kept behind the counter; another he rejected because of its incorporation of a nightclub.

So Haffner continued to walk, past the former medical institute, past the baths for men and the baths for women, and then, ahead of him, was the Metropole Cinema: its sign in handwritten squiggles of pink neon.

In general, if Haffner were forced to discuss the matter, he felt disappointed by the film industry. He did not feel the pictures had, as a rule, distinguished themselves. First the films were American. And these, Haffner had admired. Once, he had been Jayne Mansfield's banker: and she was a very handsome woman. Then there was a fashion for the French, which — as Haffner would inform the dinner party, the work colleague — left him cold. He never understood them: with their inexplicable cuts, their disdain for plot. Then Italian, then Japanese. Now they were God knows what. They were Mexican. But whatever their provenance, it really didn't matter, because one thing was sure: the new cinemas, with their speaker systems, were too loud for Haffner.

But Haffner, today, was tired. He wanted succour. At this point, Haffner would take anything.

He looked at the posters in front of the cinema. He recognised nothing; or no one. The language — as always, written in the language which for ease of reference Haffner was calling Bohemian — escaped him. The faces were foreign too. But Haffner didn't really want the film. He wanted the cinema instead: the rich festooned interior, the air conditioning and the darkness and the popcorn. He wanted peace.

So Haffner made his tentative way in.

In the foyer, a depressed salesgirl stood behind a stall which offered multicoloured packets of multicoloured chocolate. This combination tempted him. He bought two bars of chocolate. Then he approached the cloakroom. He lifted up his destroyed suitcase. The girl behind the counter looked at him.

— Is possible? asked Haffner, in his best imitation of foreign English.

She continued to look at him. Then she tore off a perforated ticket, and pushed it flat on the counter towards Haffner, letting it come to rest beside her magazine, which boasted of its proximity to the lives of the stars. Haffner heaved his suitcase up on to the counter, where a protruding plastic wheel caught the pages of her magazine, a circumstance which for a moment Haffner did not notice. As he pushed the suitcase across, he heard, to his alarm, a tearing sound, identical to the sound of glossy paper ripped.

She put the suitcase in a corner.

And Haffner turned round, to discover his interpreter from the Town Hall: Isabella.

— Is you, she said, pleased with this chance meeting.

— Is me, said Haffner.

— So how are things? she asked him. All good?

— Kind of, said Haffner.

— You will be glad to go home, stated Isabella.

Haffner considered this. He said nothing.

Isabella asked him where he was from, in Britain, and Haffner replied that he was from London. Isabella, she told him, had been to London herself. It was many years ago. She stayed at a hotel near Westminster. She told him its name.

— I don't know it, said Haffner.

— He knew it? asked Isabella.

He felt for his forehead. Now he was sweating profusely. He wasn't well: he wasn't himself.

— I don't know it, said Haffner.

And Isabella paused, lost in memories of bygone times.

Sweating, craving rest, Haffner excused himself, turned round, and — refusing the usher — entered the auditorium.

He realised that the reason for the usher's reluctance to let Haffner in — bearing though he did bars of chocolate and tickets, all the normal signifiers of an ordinary spectator — was that the film had started almost twenty minutes earlier. And perhaps, thought Haffner, if he had arrived at the beginning, then maybe he could have followed the plot. Now, it seemed unlikely.

Ahead of him, gigantic, loomed the dead.

He didn't really know, poor Haffner, why he was there. But then, the question of what he was doing anywhere had been posed so deeply to Haffner in the last few days that now he was tired of it. Happy, he settled into his bewilderment.

The film, it turned out, was in French, with subtitles; but Haffner no more understood the subtitles than he understood French.

One thing, at least, was clear. It was a war story. At first, he thought it took place in his war. Gradually he realised that it was taking place in his father's war: the Great War. Often wrongly called a World War. Whereas it was to be distinguished from Haffner's War, which was a truly World War. Though Haffner was increasingly unsure of both the greatness and the world.

Bereft of language, Haffner watched the slapstick. It seemed a reliable guide. Like so many war stories, this film was about escape. Happily, he watched as the prisoners propped a chair against the door, hooked a blanket over the blank window, prised up a floorboard. The alarm system was a tin can pierced by a string.

These escapes repeated themselves.

While, in the occasional background of an occasional shot, Haffner recognised what was left of his youth: sunlight, a horse passing by — its hooves and white ankles — watched by a slumped bored sentry.

How important could a man's life get? wondered Haffner. At what point would it ever become symbolic, or cosmic? Haffner was beginning to get a pretty shrewd idea. He was beginning to understand the abysmal length of the odds.

On the screen, the boredom continued. The prisoners tried to amuse themselves with amateur theatricals. They dressed up as girls, in stockings and heels. And Haffner with approving assent noted the silence, the deep hollowed silence as the prettiest kid emerged on stage in his chemise and stockings and hairband. The parody of the wife you hadn't seen for the last three years. The parody which broke the obvious rule: you couldn't think about sex, not in a war. But you only thought about sex. The last thing you needed was the reminder. And then a singing comedian came up on stage, who could neither sing nor make his audience laugh: a vampire, backlit, in white tie and tails.

And this was Haffner's past. He knew it intimately. The boredom was Haffner's domain — an infinite suspension. One had always lived, during the war, under the illusion that everything would be over very soon. Whereas now Haffner wondered whether both victory and defeat were for ever deferred. Although Haffner could not have said why — because one was endlessly defeated, or simply because the war was never over.

In the life of Raphael Haffner, maybe a truth became obvious: the great illusion — the true schmaltz — was always the illusion of victory.

Above him glowed the tired and blissful face of a French actor, licking his way along the rim of a cigarette paper: a harmonica. And although Haffner was almost happy here, in this cinema, after the initial coolness, the initial comfort of the velvet and the chocolate, he was still finding it difficult to focus.

He looked at the audience instead. It was sparse. The usual collection of misfits, the bedraggled loners: the geeks, the academics.

Then Haffner noticed a tall lean angular neck, with a crest of hair, and seemed to recognise it. Was that Pawel? He couldn't tell. Pawel from the Committee waiting room: Haffner's exposed twin.

Haffner tried to get his attention — coughing, leaning forward — but Pawel simply sat there, entranced in the picture. And then, in Haffner's bored scan of the audience, his heart jolted.

Was that Zinka sitting a few rows ahead of him, diagonally across? He could not be sure. But before he could try to look closer, there sat down, late, a woman whose face was darkly hidden from Haffner, but whose scent clouded towards him: the delicious mixture of perfume and sweat. He had a thing for the imperfectly adorned, did Haffner. For the sorrow and the pity. But not now. Now he only wanted her to move.

He was going mad, he knew this. As if suddenly, in this backstreet backwater cinema, everyone he knew would have gathered, for Haffner's finale.

Concentrate! Concentrate!

And Haffner settled back into his seat, begrudging the cheapness of the velveteen, the dead springs inside.

He was oddly adrift from everything he knew. Haffner, now, had no one. Not even the troubles of his heart. No, not even the women troubled Haffner's thoughts.

On their holidays, Livia always had her little ritual. Happy at their escape, she used to ask him how far they were from the West End — the bright theatres — snug in her couchette above him, as they sped through the mountains of Italy to Venice, or Lake Como. Their daughter, with her husband and their son, was in the adjacent compartment. And the rain fell, wriggling in jerky zigzags down the pane. Against the wall was pinned a bulging net for Haffner's book and glasses. Yes, thought Haffner. She was always intent on putting distance between them and the rest of their known world. So how far was he now from London? He tried to imagine the distances. And in this way, making this calculation, in the full emergence from his chrysalis, Haffner fell asleep.

But maybe, to understand the full happiness of Haffner, I should contrast it with another metamorphosis: for Benjamin had undergone his own metamorphosis, his conversion to a world of pleasure. But this conversion had not led to a happiness impervious to fear.

In his room, the twin buds of his earphones in his ear, he was once more listening to his favourite hip-hop song of the moment, called 'Darkness'. And as he listened, he brooded, darkly.

The song called 'Darkness' was by Saian Supa Crew, rappers from Marseilles. It opened with a sample from the most romantic song: 'Anyone Who Had a Heart' — with an abrupt drum roll and first faint orchestrated crackle, like the oldest radio in the world. And then, almost simultaneously, began the wistful violins. But the words — oh the words — Benji could not understand them. The rap, apart from one moment which he was sure mentioned the metro, eluded him. All he could recite, without understanding, was the chorus.

Ho, c'est le darkness, recited Benji, grandly: adieu a l'allegresse, c'est le darkness, c'est Loch Ness, c'est le madness, la lumiere se baisse.

The first time he heard the song was in Tel Aviv, in the apartment of the girl whom he once hoped would become his girlfriend. Or, more precisely, whom he once hoped would let him see her naked. He wasn't ambitious. She shrugged a nonchalant record from its sleeve and made it frantic. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a cream block of flats in the most modern version of Paris, with a patchy sky and burnt-out cars.

Since then, he had listened to this song called 'Darkness' over and over. And he still did not know precisely what it meant. But to him it was so beautiful — with its plush American romantic violins, crackling with nostalgia, and sarcastic clever French rhymes (rhymes whose meaning he did not understand). It seemed so poignant with poise, so world-weary with sadness.

Luxuriously, therefore, romantic, Benji contemplated his fears.

It wasn't the first time. Three years earlier, Benji had been stricken by a vision of his death, in some club in an industrial part of northwest London: for the first time in his life he had not only taken a tab of LSD but had added, recklessly, a pill as well. So Benji could soon be found sitting on his own, carefully near the accident and emergency room, feeling sick, and terrified, as hippies with matted dreadlocks bent forward to leeringly if kindly ask about his health. He had decided that he would not go into the emergency room until it was absolutely necessary. He was mortified by appearances. This tendency to be mortified was adding to his panic, since all too easily he could imagine the headlines in the newspapers the next morning: the school photo, the tearful parents, the charity established in his memory. It would have to be him, the amateur who died after taking a pointless and accidental overdose: the bourgeois boy adrift in the world of cool.

The great screw-up: this was Benji's constant anxiety. He always went in fear of doing or saying the minute thing which would place everything in the greatest danger.

Really, thought Benji, there was no need to understand the words of this, his favourite song. He knew what it was about. True, the moments of incomprehension were everywhere. He was not convinced, for instance, that in the chorus of one of their songs, a hip group of French hip-hoppers, whether from the graffiti'd banlieue of Paris or the graffiti'd suburbs of Marseilles, could really be saying c'est Loch Ness. Maybe Loch Ness, with its monstrous Scottish depths, connoted darkness to a group of French hip-hoppers, but this seemed hopeful and unconvincing. This seemed his provincial, unlikely mishearing. But then, what did this mistake really matter?

He knew what this song was about. The song was about the fear.

The voices were all he needed, because the voices were grave, and delicate: they were, for him, the meaning. The meaning of this song was in the collage of serious, careful voices, trying to resist the melancholy romantic violins.

Because they couldn't. No one could resist the romance, he thought: as he contemplated the screwed-up mess which was the life of Benjamin.

When Haffner woke up in his uncomfortable velvet seat, he discovered the black-and-white outlines of a new prison for the characters on the silver screen: a grander, more feudal kind of prison. It was some kind of schloss — with pines and stones, and Gothically written signs warning against escape. The scene took place by night. And this time a man with a French accent and a man with a German accent were talking to each other in English: a fact which led Haffner to wonder if he was still dreaming.

— Have you really gone insane? said the man speaking with a German accent.

— I am perfectly sane, said the man speaking with a French accent.

He really couldn't be sure, thought Haffner, at what point any of this had been a dream. From the moment he met Zinka until now. From the moment he met Livia until now. With depressed accuracy, however, he felt compelled to admit that no moment of his life could really be excused or explained by a theory of unreality.

The German and the Frenchman continued their elegant debate in English.

— It's damn nice of you, Raffenstein, but it's impossible, said the Frenchman.

And with that, he began to climb, while the Germans trained a searchlight on him, like a music hall artiste: the famous actor in his follow spot. As, presumed Haffner, he was. In another version of the world entirely. And when Haffner then saw the man halt, arch his back, and stumble; when he saw the Frenchman on his deathbed, tended to by the German who had shot him, he wished he could believe it. He wished he could be moved. But partly there was the problem that he could hardly be moved by a film he had barely seen, and barely understood; and also there was a deeper reason.

Haffner didn't care about nobility. He didn't care about the soul. Just the beauty of escape.

All of Haffner's dreams of escape were suddenly incandescent. He sat there. And when the house lights came up — revealing to Haffner's placid eye the empty drinks cartons, packets of sweets, the crisp cellophane from cigarettes — and the credits rolled, he sat there while the small audience filed out, checking the footwells for coats, for wallets, for all the human belongings. The man he thought was Pawel was just conceivably Pawel: he could not be sure.

The girl he thought was Zinka turned out to be a teenage boy.

And Haffner, left behind in the cinema, considered how, on the one hand, there was the myth of the escape. Everyone understood the need for this myth. But maybe the need was explained by another wish: the safety of a refuge.

He had always assumed that he would go back home, to London, when the paperwork on the villa was completed. It wasn't as if he was here as an exile. But then, anything could become an exile, if it became impossible to go back.

And Haffner considered this spa town.

In Haffner's mind, his vision of Livia's villa was now merging with his vision of the cottage in the film, a cottage where the Frenchman had conducted some form of love affair with a lonely woman on her farm. The husband, presumed Haffner, must have been away, at the war. This cottage represented some kind of idyll. And now Haffner was wondering if he was beginning to understand the need for this cottage, he understood the need for a refuge. It was the deeper meaning of every escape. Just as he now understood how deeply he missed the girl who had stayed with them, in 1939: the girl whom none of them could understand, who took her own life. She was looking for a refuge, and she had not found it. And just as how — if one discovered the most minute version of Haffner, the slimmest, most concentrated fraction of Haffner — in some way, he thought, he understood what their marriage had represented to Livia. It might have seemed inconceivable to the outside observer, but to her it was a place of safety. For she knew he would never leave her. Haffner mimed the act of leaving, but he never would.

He had always believed that there would always be another girl; just as he had always believed that he would always have another city. However much he might have made mistakes, however unsure he may have been that he had made the right decision, he could always start over again. But now, he thought, he didn't.

And me, I might put it more sadly. I might use the words of the poet — the poet of a disappeared empire — who once said that in the way a man destroys his life here, in this little corner, so he has destroyed it everywhere else. But Haffner's pessimism was more euphoric. The problem had always been in finding the right elopee. But surely the elopee was obvious. It was always only Livia. If he added up his women, he decided, he had only ever had two: Livia, and then everyone else. Yes, thought Haffner. He had always seen everything in terms of repetition. And now it turned out that there was such a thing as a singularity. And love proved it.

The trompe l'oeil of the ending! The false bottom of the ending!

Could he manage one more? wondered Haffner. He thought he could. Let him swing it one last time.

His century was over, and all Haffner wanted to take from it was the memory of Livia. He only wanted, now, to assert his constant fidelity.

Why did he need to go back, when the paperwork was completed? Why couldn't he, thought Haffner, live there in the villa — surrounded by the history of Livia? And in the excitement of his decision, Haffner wanted to see the villa, now — the villa which he had not thought he ever wanted to visit. He wanted to pay homage to Cesare's famous ceiling — executed in the dining room when he was sixteen, when he still believed in his destiny as a great European painter. Homeless, he wanted to observe what would be Haffner's final home.

Haffner marched out into the foyer. The window to the cloakroom was shut. At the ticket booth, he pointed to the cloakroom. The woman in the ticket booth shrugged, helplessly. Haffner mimed, like a monkey, the heaviness of twin suitcases, invisibly weighing down his arms.

— No no, said the girl.

— No? said Haffner.

The girl said a word which Haffner did not understand. She turned to the calendar behind her on the wall, one half of which was a series of mountain views, underwritten by romantic poetry; the other half of which was a grid with numbers. She pointed to one square, containing one number.

And finally Haffner understood that he would only be able to recapture his belongings the next day.

With a renewed sense of triumph, therefore — since what more could he now lose? — the untold story of Haffner reached its conclusion. He would go to look at the villa, unencumbered by his possessions. And eventually he would live up here, in this spa, in this place of his escape: in the solitude of their infinite marriage: its absolute irrelevant immortal secrets.

For this, thought Haffner, was the true version of Haffner — a husband.

In a bar out on North Beach once, in San Francisco, he had talked to the barman about DiMaggio. DiMaggio, said the guy behind the bar, had been a regular. And the barman confided in him that when Joe was dying, he used to say that it was no sadness to him. At least, he said, it would maybe give him another chance with Marilyn.

It had shocked Haffner then. Now, however, it seemed bleakly accurate. It seemed adequate to the facts.

Always, he had wanted out, thought Haffner. And now he didn't.

Haffner Mortal

As the twilight began, the subtlest twilight, Haffner walked up the long road towards the villa. He tended to his memories of Livia. It was his triumph, his procession through the city's streets: with his conquered slaves before him — and his personal freedman behind him, whispering that Haffner was mortal.

And that former slave, for now, is me.

Yes, the conjuring with tenses was now all over. For Haffner had indeed caught a cold two mornings ago, when he swam in the lake with Frau Tummel: finally, the symptoms were for real. And in two weeks' time this cold would develop into a virulent form of pneumonia, which would be imperfectly treated, here, in the Alps, by a junior doctor whose concentration was distracted by his concern to keep calling his girlfriend and assure her that he loved her, stricken as he was by his lone moment of infidelity, an impulsive regretted kiss at a soiree after a conference; so that by the time Haffner was flown home to London — successful, true, in his legal pursuit of the villa — he would have already suffered a stroke. And in that weakened, muted state, began the long dying of Haffner.

It wasn't the defeat he had intended, or predicted: like everyone's defeat. It was just the one that Haffner got.

But at this moment, Haffner was still happy in the bliss of his escape. Up the hill he walked, out of the town, into the depleted suburbs: his natural habitat.

On reaching the drive which led to the house, however, he was struck by a problem. What Haffner had not considered, in his moment of emotion, was the legal problem. He did not own this property, obviously. He knew this. The company who used it as a holiday home still owned it. It now struck him that he had no idea how he might explain why it was that he was here: a bedraggled ancient madman with a bruise above his eye and around his cheek.

For a moment, his bravado disappeared. A homesickness overtook him. In Benjamin's bedroom, which had already not existed for years, he began to describe to Benjamin, in his bunk bed, how easy it was for Santa Claus to fly: he was buoyant, said Haffner. He simply floated.

In this cloud, Haffner stopped at the gate of the house. Perhaps, thought Haffner, no one was there. It could be standing empty.

Haffner paused.

He was here, thought Haffner, so he would brave it. And Haffner walked across the grass, and opened a door.

Haffner found himself in the kitchen: bare, lined with white tiles. A spiral iron staircase seemed to lead to all the other floors. Haffner stood at the base of the stairs, listening. He could hear nothing. So Haffner ascended and found himself in a corridor — covered in grey wallpaper, with brown stains, like stock market graphs, rising from the skirting — which led to the roofed veranda. Haffner knew about this veranda. On this veranda, Livia's father used to sit, watching each Alpine sunset. It used to have wooden floors, with zigzagging parquet. Now, the floor was lino; and the view had been glassed in. It seemed to be a dining room: two Formica tables were lined up against each other. On one of them, there was a plate with a slick of butter flattened on its rim.

Haffner stood there. He looked down. Just like Uncle Eli, who — so Goldfaden told him — at one point in his late escape from Warsaw reached a wall: and there below him was a courting couple. They were sitting on a bench. A plane tree was growing in its wire netting beside them. The man was begging his girl to come inside with him, up to his apartment. It was just up there, he said. Her mother would never know. The girl was not so sure. And Eli had perched there, looking down on them, begging this girl silently to ignore her moral scruples, to go into the room. This resistance fighter, said Goldfaden, his slight jowls shaking with laughter — imploring her to give up her resistance!

Even now, Haffner found this amusing.

From the veranda, another door led into an empty room, containing just a photo of the President, and a plastic sign advertising the various ice creams to be found in a miniature freezer, there in the corner, humming to itself. So Haffner did not know that this, in fact, was the room which had once contained the grand brick fireplace beloved by Livia's mother, which had now been blocked up and plastered over. Nor did he know that Cesare's treasured ceiling, on which he had depicted The Dream of Europa, being squabbled over by two women who represented two continents, had been boarded over by another dropped ceiling, twenty years ago.

Everything was missing.

Upstairs, the bedrooms were filled with bunk beds; and more grey wallpaper. The bathroom which had been Livia's mother's personal project, obsessed as she was by all the conveniences of modern hygiene, with bidet, toilet, mirrors, handshower — all the delightful gadgets — had been replaced by a stone floor and three doleful showerheads, hanging their heads from the ceiling.

And when Haffner ascended, finally, into what had been the eaves, where Cesare kept his painting things and Livia kept her costumes from all the plays she had ever been in, there were now four small mansard rooms. Above each door there was a sign demanding that no one should smoke.

Haffner pushed one door open. Again, there was a bunk bed. A bra was resting on a chair. He turned to go, and as he turned he saw the notice which was on the back of every door, extending a most cordial welcome to this vacation home. Haffner was wished a wonderful stay. To guarantee order in the home, however, he was asked to observe some simple house rules. Sadly, Haffner read the times for meals, and the pickup of picnic lunches; the time for the afternoon rest period. During this time, Haffner was asked to refrain from playing the radio: instead, he should walk quietly on the stairs, and close doors quietly. In the immediate vicinity of the house, children were also required to play quietly. Lying on the beds in day clothes was not permitted. Requests and complaints should be addressed to the house manager.

All the ornament, all the marginalia and doodling were gone.

Unlike Solomon Haffner, his son believed in inheritance. The European museums always left Haffner sad. He saw no reason why a home should be given to the state. If Haffner had his way, if Haffner were a president, or a mayor, he would restore these ancestral homes to their rightful families. The pleasure of the chateau tour always eluded him. He could not help thinking of the dispossessed. This sensation returned to him now.

Yes, Haffner wished that he could bring everything back. He wished everything could be revised. In this, Haffner's last judgement, everything he had once consumed would be made whole again: the cigarettes would ravel themselves back into neat cylinders, the wines would loop back into their bottles; all the newspapers he had ever thrown away, all the detritus, would be restored in Haffner's sight. And finally the women. Everyone would be returned to him — resurrected: all the people he had loved. Because the problem with Haffner, really, was that he loved too many people. Thought Haffner.

He tugged at a venetian blind's toggle. It snapped up, like an aperture.

And Haffner, ignoring the landscape, remembered how, ten years earlier, when Morton was dying, he had gone to see him in Brooklyn. And because he couldn't think of anything which seemed in any way adequate to the monstrous fact of Morton's death, he tried, as he had so often tried to explain to Morton, the nature of a draw in cricket. It wasn't the simple matter of the scores being level. As always, this was where the foreigner became confused. But this time Haffner didn't bother with the detail. He didn't try to explain the technicalities: he just tried to explain its beauty. What it meant, he said, was that in cricket you could never be sure of victory or defeat: you could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and victory from the jaws of defeat. And this was wonderful. It meant, Haffner tried to explain, that there was no reason for the strong to win.

Morton's contribution to this had been to tell him a story.

Was it like this? said Morton.

Man, said Morton, Haffner didn't know what the British had missed, sitting outside Rome, waiting on the Americans. When they had gone into Rome, said Morton, it was crazy. And Morton then told him a secret. So there Morton was, in Rome, in bed with two girls. One of them was his girlfriend, the other one was not. They were simply trying to sleep. Because everything was a mess. He had no idea why they'd ended up in the same bed. And in the middle of the night, he turned to the girl who was not his girlfriend. For she undid him. She was so beautiful. And they kissed. He shivered with the memory of it. They kissed and kissed. He put his hand down her skirt. He felt her, there where her legs became so intricate with flesh. The soft cleft with the strong bone above it. And this was the great moment of his life, said Morton. Beyond anything he had ever felt with his adored wife. It was the moment of absolute excitement.

— And? said Haffner.

— And nothing, Morton said. Nothing happened. My girl woke up. So we both pretended to be asleep.

No doubt about it: Morton understood.

In the end, you had to get over the victories and the defeats.

— You know, said the celebrated movie star Hugh 'Tam' Williams, on the way to Aldershot in 1939 for their training, you're going to make it. You've got it in you. You have star quality. I can tell these things.

And Haffner had never forgotten this. Slick compliment it may have been, to pass the time in some station cafe more pleasantly, but Haffner believed he meant it.

He didn't need his wallet and its mute photograph album now. Haffner was quite happily his own mausoleum. The pictures came back to him so easily.

What had been Haffner's victories? The Athletics Cup in 1934. The Divisional Cricket Championship in Jerusalem in 1946. The presidency of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982.

But the real victory, thought Haffner, was elsewhere. It could take place anywhere: not just in the eternal cities, with the Colosseum for backdrop, or disporting in the Roman swimming pool, watched over by a Fascist eagle. And Haffner, remembering that night, when Rome was liberated, then thought of another swimming pool — in LA, where Goldfaden's Uncle Eli lived. He was having some kind of pool party. And Eli had begun to reminisce about the Ghetto in Warsaw. Of course, said Eli, after the third year people started reminiscing. It wasn't like this in the beginning, they used to say: then things were so much better.

With a bottle of beer in his hands, tipped with a crescent of lime, Haffner had guffawed.

In this humour, in this privacy, Haffner reckoned the true triumph might be found.

And then Cesare — who had wandered over, dressed neatly in his European and academic suit, refusing all West Coast dress codes — entered the conversation and reminded Haffner and Eli of a resistance fighter's great interview, twenty-five years after it was over, when he pointed out that the history of the Warsaw revolt wasn't going to be one for the military historians. The outcome had never been in doubt. It wasn't notable for its strategy. But if there was a school to study the human spirit, then it should be a major subject. The importance was the force shown by the Jewish kids, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers: and choose their own death. Was there, asked this hero, a standard which could measure that?

This man here, said Cesare, pointing at Haffner, he didn't want to be Jewish. He would never acknowledge, said Cesare, how much the Jews were hated. How much strength they had to be capable of. And Haffner, only wanting to locate Livia and go with her to the edge of the garden, to look out over the city, disagreed. It was true that he loved the image of the Jews as musclemen, the men of steel. But really what he admired was something else entirely. It wasn't Jewish — the revolt. This was Haffner's theory. It was a triumph of something much more universal.

Such confusion! said Cesare. But it was only to be expected. This was the constant problem. You try to assimilate, and in fact you just lose everything: you lose your family, but you also can't make friends. You can neither go forwards nor backwards. Wasn't this right, Raphael?

Oh he had loved Cesare so much, thought Haffner. Cesare had courage. But even Cesare was not as courageous, thought Haffner, as he should have been. The deepest courage belonged to those who chose to withdraw. To be doubly rejected, encircled by rejections — by the Jews and the non-Jews — allowed you an absolute freedom.

Haffner didn't care if he was a contradiction, an impossible hybrid. After all, he liked the hybrids. The greatest piece of music in the world was Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, as improvised by the great Benny Goodman. Haffner went for such impossible beings: the sphinxes, the centaurs.

And maybe, I think, Haffner was right — as he stands there at the window of a dismal bedroom, which had once belonged to Livia. His century had been a century of metamorphoses. And at its centre was his greatest invention of all: the strange winged beast of Haffner's marriage.

In the darkening sky, the reticulate constellations were nets, hauling in Haffner.

He had left Frau Tummel behind. Zinka, it is true, troubled Haffner's thoughts: but gently, tenderly. She still eluded him. He could only think of her obscured: taking off her T-shirt, an arm making shadows of her face.

So, for one last time, I want to go in search of Zinka.

She was in her apartment, in front of her television: in the living room decorated with prints of haystacks, a cathedral facade disintegrating in the twilight. She sat there until the light went, then went to sleep. And then that night, as usual, Niko came home, and made for Zinka's bed, where Zinka was doing her best to form the letter S. Her bed was in fact a sofa. It disguised itself as a bed in the darkness of the night. Its covering was ribbed polyester, dyed grey. Niko tried to follow the breathing which made her chest ascend and descend, cleanly silhouetted in a sheet. He tried to synchronise his breathing to hers. In the same way, in the dark mornings, before school, when he was eight, and it was snowing, he had crept into bed beside his mother, and tried to match his breathing to hers. Someone once had told him that men's respiration was quicker than women's, which was why women lived longer. So he tried to calm his breathing down.

Very slowly, Niko then began to move.

He felt his usual combination of the erotic and the uncomfortably sad. As he laboured inside Zinka — as she lay on her stomach, her legs cramped in angles which he could not alter, which would not let him extend himself in the way which Niko might have liked — he tried to tell himself that although it was not the life of desire he had imagined, perhaps it was enough. Perhaps Niko was happy.

But he could not.

No, long after he had finished with Zinka, who was pretending to pretend to be asleep, Niko lay awake, watching the shapes of the books melt and blur against the wall, in the dark, in dawn's twilight — yes, long after his bleated, blurted defeat as he reared over her, stabbed in the back by his soft orgasm. While Zinka lay there, imagining all the other lives she could be living.

And then they fell asleep.

Haffner walked downstairs, and went on to the villa's enclosed veranda. He looked out into the landscape: where the colours were. Yes, there they were: pure, like the colours Haffner had seen in the museum in New York — more neatly arranged there, true, more vibrant, but with the same lightness, the same absence of any human mistake. They obeyed their own mute logic.

Haffner was horticultural. He knew about the breeds of roses: how they formed an ideal order, invisible to the human brain. His life had often led him to gardens. Like the gardens of Ninfa, near Rome. Or Haffner's own rose garden, where Solomon had taught him the two possibilities for a life: to live it, or to waste it. As if the choice were Haffner's.

The forest was a smudge of greens and blacks: a giant discarded palette. Through the trees, the sun was a precise gold disc pressed on to the horizon.

It was an industrial pastoral, with the sounds of the sibilant freeways in the distance: the twentieth century's automobiles and dryads, its fauns and chemical plants. He tried to hear the tune which had been playing at his first ever dance with Livia in Southwark. Naturally, he could not. He was not romantic enough for that. There was now just the sound of the wind in the trees, and the sound somewhere of the cattle bells — those bells, thought Haffner, which must so irritate the proud cow, reminded with every move of their ownership by others. Or maybe, thought Haffner, it was no more irritating to them than the weather. Maybe the bell was part of the bovine condition.

But before he could continue his meditation on the limits of a cow's perception, he was distracted by a bumble bee, hovering against the glass. And then another. And Haffner, in his exasperation and fever, began to wave the bees away: so that from a distance, from the position of the imaginary spectator, all that could be seen was Haffner, standing at the window, beating time to the grandest and most transparent orchestra.

And maybe, as he stands there, I should balance Haffner's faults and virtues. Perhaps this is the point to decide whether Haffner was a hero or a monster. But even if I could truly describe him now, as he looks out of the window, in his wife's villa, would that portrait equally apply to the soldier in Palestine, the husband in New York, the romantic in London?

He always saw himself in poses. And this series of receding Haffners could continue diminishing, into infinitely vanishing fractions.

I wanted to preserve the real Haffner. I wanted to resurrect him. The Haffner I actually knew was a man of reticent privacy. I only had the stories to work with. I only had my inventions. But whether they were true or not, Haffner was inescapable, in all the stories he gave rise to. .

And this was, perhaps, how history worked.

As an admirer of the classics, Haffner wanted to understand what caused the great empires' decline. I was more modern. I wanted to know how the emperors had turned into legends. But maybe both these questions possessed the same solution. The law of unintended consequence — the law which governs every empire's decline — was so definitive that every emperor became a legend: enveloped by their own defeat. No historian, after all, could ever know all the causes. So they had to write a legend. A legend is just a story which is missing most of its causes; a legend is just a feat of retrospective editing.

The more I knew of Haffner, the more real he became: this was true. And, simultaneously, Haffner disappeared.

Haffner walked away, down the steep road back into town, towards the spa, to find a hotel. In the same way as that classical king who, as the poet says, when deserted by the Macedonians did not behave like a king. Instead he threw away his golden robes, borrowed someone's everyday outfit, then left — like an actor who, once the play is over, changes back into his clothes and wanders away.

As he walked, he remembered Livia's funeral: how from the window he had seen the undertakers waiting outside, like paparazzi, for the body; and the organist, playing the funeral march as everyone shuffled away, finished with a comic trill, a final flourish, when he thought that everyone had gone — a squiggle of pure flippancy. Just as Haffner would have told her, afterwards, in the refuge of their bedroom, if it hadn't been Livia who had died.

Think about it, thought Haffner.

Exiled on St Helena, Napoleon continued to be chic. He cared about his waistcoats, the gold stitching of his shoes. Yes, it was unbelievable, but it was true. All the victors were masters of retreat. They cultivated retreat. Even Tiberius, the ruler of the world — a god with his giant pied-a-terre in Rome — preferred the quiet island of Capri.

But me, I might put it like this: there you are, dear reader, at the pool party, by the sea, in the sunlight, with the pine forest sighing behind you, and the blue sea sighing in front of you, ceaselessly bringing you tribute, while in the distance the dolphins show off the sheen of their backs; and then, from somewhere invisible, out of your field of vision, you hear a deep splash, a forsaken cry, and when you turn to look — there it is, the surface, settling in circular ripples, which enlarge, and then enlarge some more: until they enlarge into nothing.