Two hours later, Esther had arrived to take him home.
He had at least learned something, Benjamin told everyone. He'd discovered how deeply he believed in food.
And Haffner loved him for this. The boy was independent! He understood how much more important the senses were than a sense of the serious. But the let-down came soon afterwards. Benji, after all, was in a crisis of faith. He had gone through hip hop, drugs and Buddhism. And now he returned to the most basic, the least loved. Benjamin returned to the religion of his forefathers: a lineage which began with his father, if one missed out his grandfather.
That was why, at university, he spent his vacations in the Promised Land. That was why, after university, he had entered the summer school of a rabbinical seminary.
But then, Benjamin's Jewishness, like all his other crazes, was really a form of romance. He wanted a past: he wanted a past which was more torn apart by history than the history of his happy family.
In Tel Aviv, Benjamin had met a girl who came from a family of Jewish-Algerian intellectuals. Somewhere in the Sahara, she said, there was a tribe which bore her surname. Benji wished that this girl's past were his. He didn't know what he might do with it — but he was sure that this was the missing piece of Benjamin's jigsaw, lost in another jigsaw box, abandoned underneath a sofa.
His forefathers! Who else was more like Benjamin than Haffner? Like his grandfather before him, Benji was a sucker for bohemia.
Haffner, however, only saw in Benjamin an exponent of the Law. He was constantly depressed by the cowl of seriousness with which Benjamin so often insulated himself: the easy tristesse of history which enticed him.
This judgement was true, in a way. Benjamin dearly wanted the reassuring safety of the righteous, the morally certain. But this was no reason, perhaps, to dislike him, to think that he was prim. He wanted order because he was so often overtaken by compulsions he could not understand.
His first craze was soccer. On the white gloss of his bedroom cupboards, whose moulding was painted dark blue, in imitation of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer strip, Benjamin had arranged stickers produced by Panini for the 1986 World Cup. His favourite stickers were the Brazilians — with their pineapple T-shirts, their one-word names (Socrates!), their impossible hair. Benjamin had arranged Brazil, and Paraguay, and England, gently overlapping, following the blue line of gloss along his cupboards.
Benjamin, in the youth of his youth, didn't have ripped-out pictures of film stars, or porn stars, on his ceiling. No nipples, or even bikinis, in black and white or colour, were visible in his room. True, he did possess one photocopy of a pornographic image. This picture had been given to him, as a special favour, by Ezekiel. A girl with thick, if indistinctly printed, nipples was raising a sailor-suit top towards her chin. A sailor's hat was cocked, coquettish, on her white-blonde permed hair. How innocent he was! In Benjamin's special dreams, he would touch her nipples, curiously — like tuning a radio. But this image was not public. He had simply tucked his pornographic possession, neatly folded, between pages 305 and 306 of his book which contained 1001 facts about the French Revolution, with its glossy laminated boards.
Instead of sex, Benjamin had crazes. There had been the soccer, then the drugs, and the hip hop, and the Buddhism. Then the Orthodox Jewishness. And now, finally, Benji had been disturbed by the true sexual furore — inspired by his Jewish and Algerian and French girl in Tel Aviv. With this girl, finally, Benjamin had lost his virginity. She was hairless between the legs, except for a black tuft, so that when he touched her all he felt was a slick softness. He nearly swooned. For this, thought Benji, was love.
It wasn't love, of course. Over various phone calls, Zeek tried to explain this to him. But Benji didn't care. Instead, he simply retreated into the burrow of his feelings. He told Zeek what he had not told her: that when he left her, the next morning, after they had slept together, in the taxi, he wrote in the dawn, on the back of a receipt, that this was true desire, a true passion. And passions were so rare.
This was why Benjamin was here, in the spa town. He needed an escape from the summer school, the regalia of his religion — and he needed to talk to the man who was his only authority when it came to women. The man who was his — faulty, despaired-of — authority as an adult.
But I think there was a further complication. Benji was here because he wanted permission to leave the summer schooclass="underline" he wanted to replace his respect for his religion with a more freestyle interest in his girl. This was true. But in his amatory crisis the family's inheritance had therefore acquired more significance than it might, perhaps, have had. For Benjamin felt guilty at his wish to abandon his religion. The villa was therefore his chance for redress: his chance to show his family and forefathers that he had not abandoned them entirely.
The villa was an excuse.
Which was, perhaps, one way in which Benji differed from his grandfather.
He should really stop looking at women like that, said Benjamin. Haffner said he would look where he liked. And believe him, he wasn't looking. Benjamin said that it just wasn't right.
Again, the lethargy which Haffner felt when contemplating his adventure with Frau Tummel transformed into something so much more protective. So much more like love. Such sadness which Haffner felt for the bodies of women! Such sadness which transformed into a pity of the flesh!
She was, said Haffner, a very handsome woman.
— Whatever! exclaimed Benjamin. Whatever.
Benji was here for business. So skip the breakfast, said Benji, skip the lunch: surprising even himself. They were going to sort this whole thing with the villa today. It was why he was here.
He knew, as he said this, that his motives were mixed. He knew how much he was fleeing from his summer school. He knew what a convenient excuse the story of the family villa was to him. But surely, thought Benji, the fact that he was in panicking flight should not mean he could not solve a practical problem. At least the villa was a problem whose solution was obvious.
— Not so simple, said Haffner.
— It's simple, said Benjamin.
— Believe me, said Haffner. If anything were simple, this isn't it.
Would the young not give this up? wondered Haffner. When would they learn to talk precisely? He wanted to be done with trying to bring them up. Or, maybe more precisely, he wanted to educate them out of their attempts to bring him up.
Why did no one want to believe him when he said that he had done all he could? But then, he was forced to concede, it was hardly surprising: this scepticism, this doubt in Haffner. He could understand the disappointment. As if Haffner were the omnipotent yet constantly underachieving god of the Christians and the Muslims and the Jews.
— I don't think you realise, said Haffner, sitting with Pfeffer, on Haffner's return to London, when the family had first discovered the existence of Barbra, the problems of living with a beautiful woman. I mean an apparition. You think it's easy?