The secretaries, Haffner fancied, were crowding at the door. One, perhaps, was being hoisted by a sturdy palm to the rim of the door, where a crack allowed the earnest spectator to get a glimpse of Haffner in his finale: rising now, pushing back his chair, and demanding that the Head of the Committee offer him an explanation.
— Let me put a question for you, said the Head of the Committee. You think you have nothing to do with us? You think you can take what you want?
Haffner wondered what he was asking him. Was he now to take on the guilt of the entire Soviet empire? Because he and his wife were Jewish? Were the very Communists who had stolen his wife's home now to be seen as Haffner's fault?
This was Haffner's twentieth century — where the history of London was also the history of Warsaw; and the history of Tel Aviv was also the history of Paris. And so on, and so on: in the endless history of the geography. All the separate national histories were universal, if you looked from far enough away. So how could Haffner escape?
The Head of the Committee motioned to a man who was no doubt an assistant, an apparatchik — who had been sitting in the shadows of this vast room all along — to show these gentlemen out. He was sorry, but he really must cut short their appointment. Naturally, he said, a decision would come in due course.
Unexpectedly, as he rose passionate from his chair, Haffner discovered that he was leaving with a sense of triumph. A sense of triumph accompanied by a worry that he had rather lost the upper hand, by making such a scene — but a triumph, nevertheless, that he had been so free with his fury. He had reached a place of poetry.
He was hoping so much, thought Haffner, that Livia was watching. He had never believed in ghosts before. They had seemed gothically unnecessary. But now they seemed the only just solution to the difficult problem of death.
For Haffner was furious with loyalty. His history was Livia's too. He couldn't deny it. He had thought for so long that this villa was just a chore. And it was a chore. But it meant more to him than that. It was suddenly, he understood, all to do with Livia.
And Livia, he thought, would appreciate this fight for her cosmopolitan history. She would appreciate, above all, Haffner's un-orthodox methods. For, as he confided to an astonished and worried Benjamin, he had another plan as well. To Benjamin he offered an edited version of his conversation with Niko. He perhaps exaggerated Niko's authority. He did not mention the locale where he had conducted these negotiations. But Benjamin still protested. Was he going to do something so illegal? No, Benji couldn't believe it. He mustn't do anything of the sort.
They paused outside the entrace to a jazz cafe in a garden — its walls graffiti'd with red and black unicorns: the arpeggios scaling the heights of the trees. They considered it; they walked on.
Maybe all of Benjamin's anxiety was his fault, thought Haffner. Maybe this was the natural consequence of Haffner: he had bequeathed accidentally to his grandson this exorbitant need for rules. In Benji's wish to be the opposite of his grandfather. Walking towards the hotel with Benjamin — as, still feeling exhausted, after two dramatic nights, Haffner dreamed of a possible nap, since exhaustion was becoming his natural state — he wondered if it was somehow in opposition to the ghost of Haffner that Benji had inherited this absolute anxiety about the feelings of others: a total timidity.
And it seemed that Haffner was right.
Only when they reached the doors to the hotel did Benjamin finally begin to talk about the fact that Benji was now in love. Yes, he said, he had met a girl whose gorgeousness transcended everything of which Benji had thought the world capable. But, wondered Benji, could he really know she liked him?
— Have you kissed this girl? said Haffner.
That wasn't the question, said Benjamin. The question was: did she want him to do this again? She seemed so cool. It was, said Haffner, an easy question to answer. He should simply see what happened next. He should kiss her again. What harm could that do? And Benjamin replied that, well, he just didn't know how much he wanted the burden of it. He didn't know if he wanted the relationship. And if he didn't want that, then he thought it was better to do nothing.
Which made him more mature than Haffner, thought Haffner. It was not a position he had so far reached himself.
— That's fine of you, said Haffner. That's very fine.
He didn't know that Benji was not quite telling him the truth. He did not know that Benji was not quite telling himself the truth. Benji's struggle against his senses was Benji's mute interior.
He needed to sleep, said Haffner. He needed to lie down, old boy. And Benji, in a gentle gesture of goodbye, kissed him on the forehead.
Innocence and experience! But which was which? The old young or the young old? Haffner wept for the things he thought he would no longer have; Benjamin for the things he thought he would never have. Both of them possessed their own comedy.
Both of them were banished.
When Livia was ill once, long before the end of their marriage, she had promised Haffner that if she died, she would come back and talk to him. He would know of the existence of an afterlife from the fact of this return; or the fact of a non-return. When she finally died and she did not, as Haffner hoped, come back to comfort him, he was not so astonished. After all, they had rarely seen each other in the two years preceding her death. Then a graver thought began to trouble him — that this was no proof of a lack of afterlife; it was only proof that she had not been able to come back. He was haunted by this idea of her trying to communicate with him, pressed to his ear, to his eyes, and Haffner unable to hear her, unable to see her. Or then an even graver and more plausible interpretation presented itself: it was only proof that she had not wanted to come back. She had decided against it.
He had mourned alone in the empty house, like the tearful queen mourning that schmuck Aeneas, as she gazed at her abandoned couch.
In the summer of 1938 — when Haffner was away, playing for the Old Boys cricket team of his school — Livia's father was reading, in silence, the Manifesto of the Racist Scientists. In the dining room, Cesare, who was sixteen, and believed in the greatness of his talent, was engaged on his great ceiling painting: The Dream, he said, of Europa. It featured three semi-nude women. No one was convinced of the mythological provenance: no one believed that the seriousness of the gods could compensate for Cesare's shaky technique. The pipe in his father's mouth was making him grin as he let the smoke dissolve in slow small clouds: a few smoke rings disappearing into other smoke rings. Outside, someone was beating a rug on the sill of the steps. And Livia's father was reading that Jews, according to the ninth section of the manifesto, did not belong to the Italian race.
He laid his pipe down.
At first, Livia's father, an honourable Fascist, was one of the discriminati: those discriminated from discrimination. Very soon, however, it was all over. His clients were forbidden to trade with him; his salesmen were banned from negotiating for his list. He decided to send his children to Britain, to stay with friends of his in the paint industry. They required a passport and a transit visa through France. He went to the Fascist chief of police — whose wedding anniversary he had recently celebrated at a small dinner party in town — and he said to him: either he arranged this, or he would break the law. He would buy the papers on the black market. Surely the police chief didn't want him to break the law?
The Fascist chief of police agreed that he should not break the law. So Cesare and Livia went to Britain.