It was amazing, thought Haffner, how you settled down to a life: truly amazing. The chaps in the front were machine-gunned, killed in hand-to-hand fighting. And yet soon this seemed like a facon de vivre. His job as the second in command was to take up all the rations and things. And there was really only one way, which the Germans knew about: an alley.
Haffner paused. He considered himself. What could he tell her about Haffner's war? It seemed indescribable.
He remembered the yard in a town outside Alexandria, where he had enjoyed the greatest shrimp of his life, its flesh a white fluff inside the charred shelclass="underline" there was a concrete reservoir, and a wind pump pumping water into it, clacking as it turned, casting a flickering shadow on the house.
This was all he could really tell her.
The problem about catastrophe, he had learned from the silences in his conversations with Papa, and then had learned for himself, from the silences in his own conversations with other people, was the incomprehension. There was the incomprehension of those who had seen nothing; and then there was the incomprehension of those who had seen everything.
Everyone persisted in the safety of flippancy. But maybe the flippancy was right.
At home, when the war was over, Livia would ask him why he was so private. She used to ask him this as if it were a fault, remembered Haffner — only idly noticing the fact that Frau Tummel was suddenly talking with animation to her husband. Livia expected Haffner to behave like a hero — to revel in his war stories. But Haffner never felt like a hero; not when he was being heroic. It had only bred in him a certain humour: a wit which could enjoy the gags of the emperors, like the one who, when a man asked for extension of his sick leave, ordered that this man should have his throat cut — for if the medicine had taken so long to work, then the man needed to be bled. With this humour, Haffner preserved his version of privacy. Livia used to upbraid him for his gaucheness at parties. He was always ready for his tete-a-tetes, she said. So why could he not be charming when there was more than one person present? And Haffner tried to explain that he had never been one for parties: for all the social whirl.
But maybe it was more of a problem that after the war Haffner's sense of humour had been replaced with something no one, really, wanted to know.
In Rome, Haffner had admired the triumphal column on which was carved a panel displaying a German baby being screamingly torn away from the arms of its mother by a stern Roman soldier. But most of all, he admired the Roman talent for the comic. Because — wrote a scholar in a booklet which Cesare bought and then translated out loud for Haffner, over a coffee in Piazza Navona — although a modern viewer might see this panel as deeply affecting, for the Romans it would have been amusing. It would have been sitcom.
And maybe Haffner and his Romans had it right. A war as a farce: this doesn't seem to me to be so implausible — with its mismatched exits and entrances, and its grandly outflanked speeches.
No, he hadn't told Livia about certain things. So he was hardly going to be able to do it here, thought Haffner, with a girl he hardly knew.
His anecdotes faded away.
But then Zinka said that her friend, she too had been in a war: the recent war. Haffner nodded. She once told Zinka that she had seen such a horrible thing: she had seen one of her neighbours with his mouth propped open with a piece of wood. Then they made him swallow sewage water. This was the woman who loved her.
— She committed suicide, said Zinka, thoughtfully.
— Who? said Haffner.
— That woman, said Zinka.
— The lesbian? asked Haffner.
— Yes, said Zinka.
— In what way? said Haffner.
— Drinking pills, said Zinka.
— It's easier, said Haffner.
The conversation paused.
This wasn't something that she told people, said Zinka. But she would tell Haffner.
This struck Haffner as strange, but he was feeling so unsure of what was happening that he decided to let this thought go. So intent was he on constructing his own escape, his desertion from his duty, he didn't consider that, for Zinka, Haffner could represent an escape too.
There was one time, said Zinka, when she was walking down the street in Zagreb. And some soldiers were outside an embassy. And she was with her friend. As they approached, the soldiers began to raise their rifles. This was true.
He didn't doubt it, said Haffner.
And this was what she had never forgotten, said Zinka. They were shouting that they were nothing: they were only walking home. And eventually, of course, as he could see, nothing happened. But at the moment when it seemed possible the soldiers would shoot, said Zinka, she stepped behind her friend. And although immediately she stepped back out, level with her, she could never forget this moment of self-betrayal.
There was a pause.
And at this moment, Haffner — timeless — felt everything returning to him.
The beach at Anzio strewn with bodies, as if everyone were sunbathing.
But most of all, in the series of women who had graced the life of Haffner, here, at its zenith, there was Zinka — for whom he felt such absolute adoration. Yes, at this moment, thought Haffner, extravagant through nostalgia, ignorant of Zinka, he could have endured anything, if only she would love him. Even if there was, I feel, little left for Haffner to endure. Yes, this was Haffner's ideology now. Maybe it could even borrow a slogan. Love me as little as you like — this was Haffner: but just love me as long as you can.
For Haffner believed in coincidence — he saw his life as a system of signs. He scanned each new acquaintance for the meaning they were trying to figure in the everlasting life of Haffner. So here, in his finale, he could only see in Zinka a kindred spirit, the twin for whom he had been searching all his life. The twin whom Haffner tried to align as closely as possible to himself.
— Oh but that was nothing, said Haffner.
There were so many ways, he said, that you could feel ashamed. Not just the obvious betrayal. In Anzio, he said, at night, they had to leave the bodies on the beach: it was too dangerous to go back for anyone. So Haffner had to lie there. And a boy was calling, quietly: Mama Mama Mama.
— Mama Mama Mama, said Haffner.
All he wanted, said Haffner, was for this boy to bloody shut up.
It was only some years later that he realised how much he was like his father — when Esther reminded him of the story her grandfather had once told her. He described to her the wailing you could hear from no-man's-land, at night. At this point, he recalled, Papa would begin to shout. Because Papa was still angry at the disparity between this wailing and the official British telegrams, informing the anguished families that their heroes had died instantly, from a bullet in the heart.