The Escape: A Novel Page 16

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

  9

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

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

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

  Pfeffer raised a philosophic eyebrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Haffner Banished

  1

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

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

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

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

  Even if this escape was a politics too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2

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

  —What do you mean closed? said Haffner.

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

  —Really? said Haffner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —A concession? asked Haffner, eagerly.

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

  —I’m sorry? said Haffner.

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

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

  —He means confession, said Benjamin.

  —What? said Haffner.

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

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

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

  But nothing in this room was stylish.

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

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

  3

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

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

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

  Once more Haffner fought against the prejudices of the ages.

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

  —No, said the Head of the Committee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —Me? said Haffner. I just met you.

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

  —Persecuted, corrected Haffner, haughty.

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

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

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

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

  4

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

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

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

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

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