Then, he realised, there was a small problem involved in Haffner's own position.
Haffner considered sitting down. He worried this might seem too formal. It might seem rehearsed. So he stood: in the appearance of the casual. As if it were nothing more than an ordinary conversation, this exchange between a hotel guest and his spa assistant.
Standing by his desk, at the foot of the bed, Haffner could see her moving her fingers, the red fingertips emerging where she lay.
And that, Haffner suddenly realised, was it. There was nothing more to see. This moved him. It was, he thought, more intimate like this. He would see nothing, not even her face. Everything was in the noises, the small moans and inhalations, the slow exhalations. Her face was squashed against the pillow. The intimacy was musical. Entranced, Haffner stared.
She rested a cheek on the bedraggled sheet, to look back at him. Her cheek was red, as if she were blushing.
Outside, unknown to Haffner, the sun maintained its fixed decline.
Distractedly, Haffner saw once more the Lives of the Caesars, there on his bedside table. Even if this was not quite despotic, it was the closest he had really come, thought Haffner, to feeling imperial. This was Dacia, and Dalmatia. He could understand the euphoria.
No wonder they set about erecting columns, thought Haffner: the camels and the trumpets. No wonder they wanted to parade their spoils, in triumph — the chariots drawn by panthers on their padded paws. No arch, no column, was grand enough to commemorate the few grand moments of desire in a life, the even fewer moments of possession.
Yes, there had been twelve Caesars: and now here was the thirteenth — Haffner Augustus: whose image, if there were any justice in this world, should be carved on a marble tomb, its panels chased with Haffner in profile, leading his jungly train — the leopards, the chubby satyrs — to some screwed-up festival of Bacchus.
The lamps, in their shades, observed Haffner, delinquent.
And Haffner forgot himself. All the characters of his recent history — Frau Tummel, Niko, Benjamin — dissolved like the swoon of a television's closedown. There was only Haffner, in his second best tracksuit: and this figure in front of him, a resting contortionist.
For Haffner was beginning to understand.
That people tended to make other people up, that friendships tended to be formed between two imaginary people: Haffner knew this. What struck him as more poignant and more touching in the friendship of Zinka and Haffner was that it was so much less imaginary than he might ever have predicted. In ways which rather tended to be beyond him, Haffner seemed to offer her some kind of playfulness. And this version of Haffner, he thought, was the truest, the most profound.
When Esther was very young, she used to play with Haffner and their schnauzer. Livia would be in the kitchen, or the garden. In this way, the three of them formed a diminishing series: for Esther would only play so long as Haffner was there, a minor role. Just as Haffner was only happy when he knew that Livia was there, somewhere close, if out of sight. With Haffner in attendance, occasionally called on to settle some argument, or adjudicate some game, Esther played with her seven imaginary friends, while pensively chewing on the blonde curling tips of her hair.
Haffner wondered whether this resemblance perturbed him — between his daughter playing and a girl on his bed. He concluded that it did not. At that moment, he realised, he would accept whatever conditions were imposed, whatever distortions might be demanded. He would do anything: just so long as he could be there, in the sunlit room, with Zinka.
He was interrupted momentarily from this glow of happiness by Zinka reaching a conclusion which Haffner only wished might be a little softer, a little less of a crescendo. And then there was a pause in which the world, sadly, began to right itself. Finally, Zinka sighed, began to move, and then turned round and sat there, on the bed, looking at him, a leg tucked under her waist: a seductive yogi.
She should probably go, said Zinka: Haffner agreed that yes, she probably should. So, then, she said. And he sat down, by the desk, marvelling — a vague state which meant that her dressing and smiling at Haffner, then leaving the room, then the door shutting with its slow delayed click all seemed to happen in a miracle of speed, without Haffner noticing.
She was the only woman he had ever met — apart from Livia, apart from Livia — marked by such self-possession.
But Haffner had no time to consider the line of his life: its line of beauty. Out of the bathroom, in an adagio of sadness, emerged the judgement of Haffner.
Haffner Guilty
As in the horror films of Haffner's silent youth, the door to the bathroom swung open, and no one emerged. There was silence: except, thought Haffner, for the liquid, aquatic soundtrack of the bathroom. Then Haffner understood that he was listening to the profound whisper of Frau Tummel's exhalations, the soughing of her inhalations. She had been standing there, staring into the mirror, her profile against the door. For a perturbed exalted moment, Haffner wondered if what he could hear was maybe the after-effect of a simultaneous Tummelian orgasm: still transcendent, cascading.
It was not.
Frau Tummel emerged from her oubliette. She made hungrily for her handbag and discovered her package of cigarettes. She lit one, then relaxed into the usual minimalist rhythm, standing at the window, grinning against the light. To the mountains, the unending sky, she said that she had never been so much made mock of. She was a wife, she was a mother. Everything she had, she had offered to Haffner. And this was how he treated her. He had let her say so many things. He had told her so many untruths.
He was like a boy, she said. This monster of immaturity! Even an adolescent would be more careful with love.
— But, argued Haffner, standing uneasily in the middle of the room.
At this point in his intricate reasoning, Frau Tummel interrupted.
She could not understand it. Was he rational? When he had done what he had just done? This man who had just shut her in a bathroom, while he entertained a woman in a way which she, Frau Tummel, could not explain. No, she could not understand it. A man who was dressed, as ever, in a variant on the shell suit.
Haffner only wanted to say, he began again. Again, he was forced to pause.
And although I am Haffner's historian, I can observe Frau Tummel too. He only wanted to mock her, she thought. He must have staged the whole thing. She was feeling so suddenly desolate. Now, she had no one. It was clear enough, she thought, that Haffner would never want her in the way that she wanted him to want her; and yet she did not want her husband, not quite, in the way that she wanted to want him either — a man who was so delicate, so unlike the ideal of Frau Tummel's youth.
Why, she said, must there be so much vulgarity with Haffner? Why this obscenity? Her voice accelerated into the upper registers. What beauty was there in his behaviour? Why the dirt, Raphael? Why this dirt?
And Haffner, still in the cloud of happiness produced by Zinka — illuminated, looking down on the pitiful world of humans — did not know what to say.
But of course, continued Frau Tummel, let everything descend to his level. Because he didn't understand the higher emotions. Haffner tried to remonstrate with her. When, said Haffner, had he ever? Whereas for her, continued Frau Tummel, fool that she was, it was a fantasy: of course, it was just a romance. If that was how he wanted to describe something eternal, something real.