Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Here, in this church, Haffner tried to disappear from view. As he always tried to do. And he could not.

He was an aristocrat. Could no one understand this? Bourgeois, true, but an aristocrat! He had class. Even as they tried to force him into the Jewish working classes: the ordinary ranks of the Jews. The dispossessed; the heartbroken. No, Haffner had nothing to do with the Yiddish in London. Koyfts a heft! they used to cry, in the streets where Haffner was trying to find a cup of tea, after his cricket coaching in the East End. His cousins had set up the first ever mixed Jewish and Christian social club for boys in the East End locale of Bethnal Green, a club whose cricket team Haffner had coached to victory that same summer, the year before he went away to fight in the British army. Buy a pamphlet! they cried, crowding round Haffner, with their Yiddish literary magazines, their Zionist cris de coeur .

Buy, thought Haffner, a fucking pamphlet yourself.

It had seemed so funny then. It seemed less funny now.

The aristocracy of Haffner was not a metaphor. A cousin on his mother's side was a viscount.

Yes, Haffner had history.

As a young man, Haffner's viscount had been moved by the plight of the underdog, the abandoned masses in their ghettos. He would go with his father — a liberal politician, a man of principle — to the dilapidated areas out to the east of London, where the less fortunate Jewish people lived, with their impoverished tailoring, cabinet-making, matchbox-making, fur-pulling. Then they would go to the park, to take a stroll, or a ride. The disparity between these two experiences moved the young politician: he wanted to do good. He was so moved that the syntax in his diary became impassioned, inverted. What are they, dull, short-visioned, who see not the ground shaking beneath their very feet — wrote the young liberal — and angry voices, quiet, marvellously refraining yet, that are soon to rise, in ever-swelling clamour? Later on, when he retired from public life, Haffner's viscount devoted his time to the writing of philosophy. He was, he said, a meliorist. He believed that, with only a small adjustment in our thinking, we would see that this world could indeed become the best of all possible worlds.

Whenever the business of imagining this thing called history came up in Haffner's life — on rare occasions, perhaps when rereading Churchill, or arguing with his grandson, or listening to the stories of Livia's family — he imagined history as a straight line. The line of gravity. The all-encompassing horizontal — its horizon — to which all bodies descended.

It was Haffner's viscount who had argued for the Jewish right of return to Palestine: the Arabs could not forbid the Jews to come back, he had argued, since the Jews were a people whose connection with the country long antedated their own — and especially as it had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years. There could be no question, he had told the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, that the best thing for the land would be for it to be reclaimed by the Jews.

He was not dogmatic, however. The rights of the immigrants did not cancel out the rights of the natives: no, the arrival of the Jews must never be marked by hardship, expropriation, injustice of any kind for the people now in the land, whose forebears had tilled the soil and dwelled in the towns for a thousand years.

The viscount possessed the optimism of the romantic.

As the first ever High Commissioner of Palestine, the viscount had sent rare stamps to his philatelic king, painted with Churchill (whose paintings, he noted, were avowedly crude, but nonetheless effective, especially in colouring) and played tennis with Lord Balfour himself. Whose idea — along with that genius Weizmann — the whole country had been in the first place. And it was the viscount who was one half of the most famous anecdote about this country which they still called Palestine. When his predecessor, Chief Administrator Bols, was about to leave office, wrote the viscount, he asked the incoming commissioner to sign a receipt. The viscount asked for what. For Palestine, said Bols. But, replied the viscount, he couldn't do that. He couldn't mean it seriously. Certainly he did, said Major Bols. He had it typed out here. And he produced a slip of paper — Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, KCB: one Palestine, complete — with the date and a space for the viscount's signature. The viscount still demurred, but Bols insisted, so he signed; adding, however, the initials which used often to appear on commercial documents — E & OE, meaning Errors and Omissions Excepted. And Bols had this piece of paper framed, he was so pleased with it.

And when the viscount finally left the country, to further pursue his career back in Britain, he took with him a vision. In his memoir of his time in Palestine, he recorded the wide roads, bordered by little white single-storeyed houses, well spaced out, with creepers over their porches; around them, little gardens of flowers and patches of vegetables, with fields of waving corn and young plantations of trees beyond; groups of men and women in working-clothes, smiling girls and beautiful, healthy, white-dressed children; overhead, the cloudless blue sky. That, he said, was the vision with which he had left.

It wasn't Haffner's vision. Haffner thought it was schmaltz.

But it was with pride that, towards the end of 1942, he had learned in the newspapers of the viscount's speech in the Lords, on the reading of the declaration against German extermination of the Jews. This was not an occasion on which they were expressing sorrow and sympathy to sufferers from some terrible catastrophe due unavoidably to flood or earthquake, or some other convulsion of nature, the viscount had said. These dreadful events were an outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty on the part of human beings. Hear hear, the Lords had murmured. And Haffner with them, in Egypt. Absolutely.

Authority like this was what Haffner was destined for, thought Haffner. It was his inheritance: the natural deference shown to the political classes, the happy comforts of the Finanzbourgeoisie . A class to which he naturally belonged, thought happy Haffner, confirmed in this belief by the speech in the newspaper just as much as he was by his first ever deal — at Anzio, when he persuaded some desperate American, a friend of Morton's, just for a cheap bottle of whisky, to part with his regulation, all-terrain, multi-gear jeep.

The viscount, however, had still been moved by the ghettos. Whereas Haffner felt more distance from the Jewish underclass. The stories from the ghettos distressed him but they were not his. Partly, this was from a sense that as a cossetted Londoner he could hardly adopt the tragedies of people he never knew. A position which seems calmly moral, precisely modest, to me. But there was also a more complicated distance. The person Haffner knew best, whose stories were ghetto stories, was Goldfaden. With Livia, thought Haffner jealously, Goldfaden possessed a tragic European past. So this meant, I think, that Haffner sometimes exaggerated his haughtiness in regard to history. For Haffner was not without his own sense of racial possessiveness. In Haffner's opinion, there was no reason for the working classes, for the Blacks and the Chinese, to avail themselves of this word ghetto . It was a Jewish possession. No one else had suffered like the Jews had suffered. No one else had been persecuted with such universal thoroughness.

In Venice, on holiday with Esther and her family, in the early 1980s, Haffner and Livia wandered away from San Marco: they ended up in what had been, Livia informed him, reading from a guidebook, the original ghetto (-From the sixteenth century! she exclaimed). In the bleak hot sunlight, no one was moving. On the seventh floor of a tenement building, some washing was strung on runners. A wireless was talking to itself.