Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Together, they sat in silence.

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

Haffner smiled encouragingly to Isabella.

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

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

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

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

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

— No, said the interpreter.

Haffner sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haffner was not going to deny it.

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

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

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

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

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

— But I am not, said Isabella.

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

— But I am not, said Isabella.

And she was right.

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