Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

In this ghetto, Haffner and Livia discussed their recurrent story of the Ghetto: the story of Goldfaden's uncle, Eli, who was now a cameraman in LA.

Eli had not been on the family holiday in London with the Goldfadens. So he was left behind in Warsaw. Before the war, he had been a member of the Bund, the General Jewish Labour Union. He believed in a strange combination of the Yiddish language and culture, and secular Jewish nationalism. Like Livia's father, and Haffner, he was not a Zionist. Unlike them, he expressed this Yiddishly, through his devotion to doyigkeyt , to hereness. His family lived on Sienna Street, near the Jewish quarter. And Eli, Goldfaden used to tell Livia, as they reminisced about Europe — while Haffner glanced at the diary pieces about his financial rivals in the evening papers — Eli was so earnest in his devotion to learning that he even read the novels which were serialised in the newspapers. A man should be prepared, thought Eli. Nothing was alien to him.

In Warsaw, before the revolt in the Ghetto, and before the uprising in the city, but when everything still was bleak, Eli had been told to go with his parents to the main square. This seemed reasonable. Or, at least, not unreasonable. In the square, they were told to walk in single file to the train station, where a train was waiting at each platform. They had asked the rabbi if this seemed advisable. The rabbi, after long deliberation, thought that the best thing to do was obey those in power. Could they really wish them harm? And this, said Goldfaden, was where his cousin became heroic. He came to a decision. No one had ever heard again from those who had got on the trains to the east. Eli knew this. Therefore, concluded Eli, he would run. So what if he were shot in the back, his kidneys torn inside him? He would prefer to stage his own death, rather than sleepwalk into it. And so he ran, and managed to hide out in the rubble of a destroyed apartment block.

Here, in the ghetto in Venice, just before Haffner had retired, Livia had praised Eli once more. But Haffner, this time, had paused. Then he had asked her: what about the others? She had asked him what he meant. They paused and looked at a dark canal. What about the others, the ones the man had left behind? said Haffner. What about his parents? And Livia had replied that they all died. Naturally, they had died. The moral value of Eli's act seemed to Haffner to be complicated by this. He had chosen to abandon his friends. And maybe this was fine, maybe this was unremarkable, but Haffner thought that, at the very least, it was a complication.

She should have known, said Livia, that Haffner would be difficult.

Yes, said Haffner, Haffner would be difficult. Why shouldn't he be difficult?

And perhaps Haffner was right, even if he was only accidentally right, by transforming Eli's story into a story of Haffner: a compromise.

Haffner saw in this anecdote the grand bravery of refusing to act in the way you were supposed to act. In Haffner's rewrite, Eli's escape from the Ghetto was also a desertion.

According to Livia, the story of Eli was not a story of a desertion, because a desertion was morally bad. An escape, however, was morally good. But I am not so sure that the two can be so easily divided. People call a flight an escape, only after having been forced to give up the idea that it is moral to remain in a bad situation. So often, people think that if one person is suffering, then everyone else should suffer too. In these cases, if someone takes flight, then their escape is just a desertion.

Yes, the whole vocabulary of flight is puritanical. So every act of desertion is also an act of hedonism.

And maybe the deep reason for this is that no one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap. The trap is the image of life's seriousness.

Haffner, however, my hero, did not believe that life was serious. He didn't believe that one must necessarily be faithful to the ordinary, inevitable tragedy of a life. If one could be faithless to anything, Haffner always hoped, surely it would be to one's own past?

But, however much I admire the hope, I am not so sure that this kind of infidelity is possible. And there, in the church, nor was Haffner. Because the story of Eli now made Haffner remember another story which he preferred to keep to himself: how under the patronage of the Reverend Levine, the appointed guardian of Jewish refugees from Germany, a girl stayed in the Haffners' house, in 1938. He didn't remember very much about her: he couldn't remember her name. He knew very little, but he believed that she took her own life. Not when she was staying with them, but eventually.

She must have been about twenty. He didn't remember even trying to talk to her. She must have been with them a very short time, thought Haffner. She was extremely unhappy. Perhaps they couldn't cope with her. Yes, in his mind, he heard that she had taken her own life. But his mind was a bit hazy. He hadn't got involved — but he knew that there was somebody there, upstairs, in the spare room. She was always asleep. He had no idea how it had been organised.

This was what it was to be Jewish in Britain. The East was always making its demands on you: the grief of its history entered your life and so it became your own. You were always being forced back: beyond the pale.

He couldn't remember that girl's name.

He was not sinful: he refused all ideas of sin. But if Haffner had ever sinned, thought Haffner, then this forgetting was it.

In the dark church Haffner called on God:

— You are the Lord my God, Haffner exclaimed, in silence, in the darkness of this church, and I am a clod of dirt and a worm; dust of the ground and a vessel of shame.

But Haffner didn't need his God for such lavish repentance. The women were enough.

Haffner had used the infidelities within his marriage as the Orthodox used the eruv. They were exercises in invention; the riches of self-blame. His interior life was festooned with sagging squares of string, marking out the permitted areas within the forbidden world. He believed in marriage like the Orthodox believed in God. It was a territory for permitting the unpermitted.

And for testing the soul of Haffner.

Livia had been expert at the put-down. She was, in Haffner's language, a strong woman. This trait had endeared her to him. At the official dinners, the unofficial suppers, Haffner bore with pleased and happy grace her talent to resist Haffner's charm, believing that this public scepticism served to illustrate his moral grandeur, his lack of vanity. It was not an unusual moment in his life when, on the night of the dinner for the City Branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982, he came into her dressing room while she was in her underwear — blue lace, white frills — and with a crooked finger, its nail tipped with a varnish whose colour Haffner would never be able to name, she pointed out to him the direction of the door. And in his socks he turned around and left.

Retrospectively, however, this moment had acquired a unique weight. For that, thought Haffner, was when he understood that his marriage had in fact been governed by forces which he did not understand or control. That night, after Haffner's speech, after the speeches reciprocating Haffner's speech, as they were driving home in Haffner's Saab — with Livia driving, because Haffner was utterly drunk — Haffner quizzed her on the significance of why he had found her sitting outside the venue, the Butchers' Hall; why he had found her sitting there with Goldfaden, sharing a cigarette while the meat-market traffic began revving and chirring around them and the rinsing smell of meat gusted and retreated: yes, why had he found them there, sitting peaceably, with Goldfaden cupping her hand as he lit her cigarette? And at the time Haffner had not so much minded about the fact that he had never seen her smoking; nor that it was a habit she had excoriated in Haffner: he minded about the casual way in which Goldfaden touched her hand.