From the costume of her bubbles, Zinka said that first he must blindfold himself. Haffner queried this. Yes, she said. If he wanted to stay. He could take that stocking from over there. Haffner looked: a sliver of black pantyhose was slumped under her dress. He looked back at her. She nodded. That was the condition, she said.
These were the trials, thought Haffner. He was happy with the trials. Yes, for pleasure, Haffner could undergo anything.
With clumsy hands, Haffner tied the stocking limply over his eyes: a robber baron. But Haffner didn't care. He could still see: cloudy, in black and white. The peep shows of his maturity.
Haffner transformed by lust! Haffner crowned with the head of an ass!
If Haffner wanted, she said, he could now come and help to wash her. Would he like that? If he wanted, he could take that sponge and wash her back. Just so long as he was careful.
The fragrances from the water overtook Haffner. He stood over her. He wished he could have seen more. There her outline was, like the coyest vision of Hollywood, submerged by infinite foam. Her hair was done up in a hazy bun. One hand was leaning over the rim of the bath. She was looking up at him.
She told him to tighten the stocking. Haffner obeyed.
Then he took off his jacket, pushed the cuffs of his sweatshirt up — a bad imitation of his father, whose billowing sleeves were always secured with two silver bands, like the neat cuffs for napkins. He took a sponge, and dunked it: then expressed the water in warm rivulets over the curve of her back, with its peeling patches of foam.
An incubus, Haffner hunkered over Zinka. Perhaps this was another image which Haffner thought he should have minded. Haffner, however, never minded the embarrassments in his pursuit of pleasure. The embarrassments were just the acknowledged debt one owed.
Just below the disintegrating level of foam, he could see — through the thin blindfold — the momentary beginning of Zinka's breasts. He could see the side of her left breast, but the slope was something else. Pretending not to look, he tried to notice as much as he could: to preserve it for the playground of his memory, while Zinka told him that he was being very kind. He was quite the gentleman.
Haffner wondered how long he could maintain a courtly conversation with a woman while blindfolded with her stocking. Its scent was odd: a mixture of must and shoe leather and the faintest last echo of her perfume.
Yes really, she said. He was a civilised man, and she liked that.
She flattered him. As Haffner had been flattered all his life, by the women. The women loved to flatter him: they loved to exercise his ego. He was cosseted. Not every woman, obviously. Not, most importantly, Livia. But the women Haffner went for in his secret life, his private life, were images of his mother. They told him how wonderful he was. They wrapped presents for him, surprises. On his sixtieth birthday, a woman for whom Haffner had only the most vestigial of passions privately presented him with a giant trunk of presents: sixty, each wrapped inside the other. A present of presents for the birthday boy. But maybe Livia had praised him like this, at the beginning. Maybe she simply got tired of his demands for flattery: or simply realised the untruth of all her praise — the practised way in which he enticed her with his vulnerability.
But there was another explanation. Her love was quieter because it was more true. Unlike everyone else, she trusted in Haffner's love. She would never, she once whispered to him, be loved by anyone else in the way that Haffner loved her. So how could she refuse him?
Zinka looked at Haffner's hand on her shoulder, drowning it in droplets. It was a girlish hand, she said. And Haffner wondered if at this late stage in his life he should waste himself in exercising his vanity on this kind of phrase. He decided that he had no choice. How could he invert the habits of a lifetime? He was not up to it.
So Haffner felt silently annoyed, silently exercised on behalf of his masculine hands.
Zinka asked if he were satisfied. He repeated the word to her: a question. Was he happy? she asked. But of course, replied Haffner, with a delirious grin. Then he paused. But maybe. Maybe what?
she asked him. No, it was nothing, said Haffner. But he had to tell her, said Zinka. Well then, maybe, Haffner wondered, he might be allowed to kiss her.
Now that, said Zinka, would be a very improper request. And Haffner, downcast, agreed. But, he added, contemplating how far down the path of humiliation Haffner might be prepared to walk, it would make him very happy.
He discovered that the path of humiliation had unexpectedly scenic views.
For although Zinka eventually said, from the depths of her silence, that yes, he could kiss her, it was not the kiss which Haffner was expecting.
She raised her left knee so that it rose from the water, crested with scintillating foam.
— You may kiss me on the knee, said Zinka.
Haffner considered Zinka's knee. At its tip, there was a small scar, translucent. A blurred and miniature map of France.
His own knees hurt him, cramped there on the bathroom tiles. He tried to ignore this. He bent his head to Zinka, hoping to see beyond the clouding bubbles: to the dark crevices of Zinka. He could not.
And Haffner kissed her.
His mouth filled with a froth of foam. It gilded his upper lip with a stray moustache. It embittered his mouth with chemicals.
How pleasurable was this? Haffner asked himself. Was it enough? For her part, Zinka thought it was. But Haffner wanted to lick her until her true smell returned: the delicious bare smell of her skin. Not the sterility of artificial foam. He asked if he could kiss her again. She said no. She was going to wash now. It was time for him to go back into the bedroom.
Haffner tried to stand up. He could not. Like some immovable sphinx, with buried paws. He could only turn his head away. He tried to explain this to Zinka, with the utmost maintenance of his dignity. In that case, said Zinka, she would just get out and dry herself. He must not look, she said. He promised this? Haffner promised. He turned his head.
There was a surge of water beside him. He tried to wrench the stocking away. Too late, he gazed at Zinka, with her back to him, wrapping herself in the softness of Haffner's towels: a Roman matron, in her flowing toga.
Sourly, he tasted the foam in his mouth. There was no doubt, thought Haffner, that his dignity was in danger. And yet, he was discovering, he seemed curiously avid for this degradation. It seemed, this ruin of Haffner, to be a kind of triumph too.
This wasn't a new motif in the life of Raphael Haffner.
In Rome, after the liberation, while Haffner waited for an infinitely postponed decision on his regiment's movements, he used to go up to the Pincio Gardens, and smoke his traded cigarettes, dropping the butts in the sand. Even up there, the smell from the sewage was heavy. The cigarettes, among other things, were Haffner's improvised pomander.
The light up there was pulverised; it was dust. The Tiber below Haffner was sluggish mud. A breeze made the leaves on the poplars silver themselves. Their pollen floated whitely on to the ground.
And Haffner looked down on the ruined, eternal city. It was the ruins, considered Haffner, which were precisely what was eternal.
Yes, this seemed to be Haffner's pattern.
Up from Anzio, before they reached Rome, they had ended up sleeping in the grounds of Ninfa. At that time, Haffner had not been horticultural. He had not admired the romantic unkempt wilderness. Kept awake by mosquitoes, Haffner instead found himself oppressed by the death of kings.
The gardens of Ninfa were built on the ruins of Ninfa — a town which had been sacked by its neighbours in the thirteenth century. The basilica had once held the coronation of a pope: now it was a dismantled heap of stones. Then, in the twentieth century, the town had been made into a true romantic garden: a meditation on the ruins of time. But Haffner had been troubled. There was no romance for him in ruins. They made him sad. Although this sympathy could so easily have been a more inward form of sympathy: Haffner's empathy for himself. In these cities' destruction, he only saw the futility of Haffner. The hollowness of Haffner.