Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

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

From this search, however, Haffner was sidetracked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Shul? said Haffner.

— Shul, said Benjamin.

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

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

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

Haffner rarely went to synagogue.

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

And Haffner had riposted with his own.

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

— Tell me, Raphael, said the Reverend Levine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My hero of assimilation! My hero of lightness!

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

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

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

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