— Uhhuh, said Benjamin.
He had just arrived from the airport. And as he made himself known to reception, he had been interrupted by this woman whose appearance Benjamin felt he knew all too well, from the mothers of his schoolfriends: she was stern, and extravagant, simultaneously. When she discovered who Benjamin was, she was delighted, she said. She was ravished. She knew his grandfather, she assured him, very well. She was just on her way to see him.
He would never understand what the women still saw in his grandfather, thought Benjamin, resigned. No, he wouldn't even try. There was no point. It was part of the whole mystery of sex: a mystery which he felt was way beyond him. Though why the mystery of sex was not by now beyond his grandfather seemed an injustice too cosmic to be contemplated.
Frau Tummel asked him if he was here for a holiday as well, like his grandfather. He replied that sort of. Yes? she said. He was more here on business, said Benji. Like his grandfather.
He really did look very like his grandfather, she said. Absolutely handsome.
Benjamin simpered.
If only, thought Benjamin, she were about thirty years younger. It was always like this. If only women said this whom Benjamin thought of as girls.
Frau Tummel thought that he must admire his grandfather very much. And Benjamin replied ruefully that he could be quite different at home. Frau Tummel queried this. No, said Benjamin: it was true.
In the window, the Alpine mountains were blankly beautiful.
Well, said Frau Tummel, she had to admit that maybe there was something in what he was saying. Herr Haffner had his complications. This she would admit. But that, she said flirtatiously, smiling at Benjamin, was, after all, the signature of a man! She had no idea, said Benjamin sadly, how difficult he could be. Difficult didn't cover it.
But he did not expand on this to Frau Tummel. No, Benji was loyal. He did not tell her what he was now remembering — how once they had discovered Haffner on the island of Malta. He was with a dancer from a cruise ship. Another time, in Florence, Haffner simply wandered off; and was found two days later, in a bar on the south side of the river.
She could not believe it was true, said Frau Tummel. She had not seen this difficulty in Herr Haffner. Herr Haffner, she would at least accept, was a man with his own sense of himself, said Frau Tummel. That was one of the problems, agreed Benjamin. But there were others.
Benjamin was an expert on his grandfather. Observations of his grandfather had formed his education. Once, he had idolised him. Now, perhaps, his idolisation had become inverted: a strange form of love, which was inseparable from dislike.
Haffner opened his door.
— You're here? said Haffner to Benji. How?
— Surprised? asked Benji.
— Not really, said Haffner.
It was true. Nothing surprised him when it came to the decisions of his grandson, the wayward passions to which he was subject.
— Shouldn't you be in school? asked Haffner. Shouldn't you be learning something? The cultivation of forelocks? The possibility of prayer?
— You see? said Benjamin to Frau Tummel.
Anyway, said Benjamin: he had told him. Haffner questioned this.
— On the phone? said Benjamin, with his American fall and rise.
— You never told me, said Haffner.
They paused, in this silence of disagreement.
— Are you really wearing that? said Benjamin.
Yes, said Haffner, he was: refusing to explain this unusual wardrobe choice of pink hiking T-shirt and his familiar sky-blue tracksuit.
There was another pause.
— It is so wonderful, the devotion! exclaimed Frau Tummel, beaming on Haffner.
Haffner looked at her, then at Benji. He could do, thought Haffner, curtly, with losing some of that weight. But there it was. He had always been spoiled: by Esther, and then by Livia. Who always cooked the kid steak. Who made hand-cut, hand-fried fries: a treat which Haffner, in fifty years of marriage, never got for himself.
— You had breakfast? Haffner asked his grandson.
— On the plane, said Benji. Plane food.
— Hungry? asked Haffner.
— I'm hungry, said Benjamin.
Haffner's appetites were catholic. Benji's appetite had been for food. Now, unknown to Haffner, he was concerned to broaden the range of his appetites. But it was his appetite for food on which Haffner and his grandson had forged their friendship.
— You know what's happening in the cricket? asked Haffner.
— No, said Benjamin.
— Blowing a gale? said Haffner, cryptically, with an intimate smile.
Benjamin looked embarrassed. And this saddened Haffner. Mutely, he went in search of the long-lost time when Haffner had taught Benjamin his favourite routine from the movies — dialogue which they had then so often recited by heart — where a man stranded in a mountain hotel phones home to find out the cricket score.
Now Haffner had to quote to himself, in silence, the next lines in his adored dialogue — You don't know? You can't be in England and not know the test score — grimly thinking as he did so that it was only natural that this was how his century should end: with everyone having lost their sense of humour.
— I will leave you two boys together, said Frau Tummel.
She would meet Haffner back here, she said to Haffner: to talk. For a moment, she looked darkly at Haffner. And then, smiling more benignly at Benjamin, she left.
Haffner turned to Benjamin, and he sighed.
Precocious, in the heyday of his teenage years, Benjamin had listened to the hip hop from New York, the ragga from Jamaica. His favourite thing was the Los Angeles hip-hop artist, the modern saint: 2pac. Everyone loved 2pac, true. But in this love, Benji was unusual. He didn't care about the drugs, nor the women. Nor about the gold and diamante T round 2pac's neck, a cartoon crucifix. No, for Benjamin, 2pac was an example of pure romance. His favourite song — which he played on repeat — was 2pac's elegy 'Life Goes On'. Have a party at his funeral, let every rapper rock it, sang 2pac, rapped 2pac. Let the hos that he used to know from way before kiss him from his head to his toe. Give him a paper and pen so he could write about his life of sin, a couple of bottles of gin in case he didn't get in.
The swagger had Benji entranced.
He'd be lying, continued 2pac, if he told him that he never thought of death. My nigger, they were the last ones left. But life went on.
It was so cool, thought Benjamin. Once, he tried to explain this to Haffner. Haffner tried to listen. This presented some problems: practical (the fitting of the earphones, the working of the portable CD player); and aesthetic (the understanding of this noise as music, rather than noise).
As a teenager, Benji's ideal habitat was the urban sprawl of Los Angeles: the gang warfare, the misogyny. He spent his life in thrall to the foreign, in thrall to images to which he had no right.
This was the younger Benji — the boy whom Haffner still admired.
A hint of the devastating problem which was to ensue occurred when Benjamin, aged fifteen, decided that, while everyone else went on holiday with their youth groups to Israel — to meet girls, and sleep on beaches — instead he wanted to stay in a Buddhist monastery. This monastery was located in the countryside outside London: in Hertfordshire. It was his spiritual goal. He arrived with a smuggled packet of cigarettes, and a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. For Benji, at fifteen, was a rebel, and philosopher. But when he was confronted by the bell at five the next morning, the meditation for two hours before breakfast, the unidentified and unidentifiable breakfast itself, the work in the fields, by the afternoon he was too depressed to carry on. He couldn't even tell the men apart from the women. He went into the room of the Head Monk and asked to leave. The Head Monk looked at him. He implored him, having made the important break from the temptations of the city, to persevere in his difficult task. The worst was over, he said. But Benji was not so persuaded. There was a skull on the Head Monk's desk; and Benji did not want to be confronted by memento mori. He could not tell, in fact, why it was he was here at all. He had simply liked the idea of it — a man above the temptations of beaches, and girls.