Once, he had felt more allegiance to his religion. At school, he hadn't eaten the bacon, just the eggs; and when there was an exchange, and some German boys came over, he didn't want to speak to them: he had resented them being there. Yet he also went to chapel once a day, and twice on Sundays. He could have, naturally, been excused, but he still went.
— The thing about you, Benji had said to him, during one of their political discussions, is that you're so English. You're lukewarm.
— You're English too, said Haffner. Don't you be forgetting you're English.
— I'm not, said Benji. Well, I'm not English like you're English. Just as in New York, when Morton persisted in his absolute belief that race was where it was at. That history was where it was at. That no one could be sincere if they tried to deny the world-importance of politics.
In this way, Haffner floated above the Atlantic Ocean, neither European nor American.
During the war, he had disturbed his Jewish friends — particularly Silberman, that comical Jewish soldier — with his unabashed hatred of the Stern Gang: the Zionist Jewish terrorists. With disdain, Haffner quoted from their newspaper, The Front, where the crazies argued, crazily, in Haffner's considered opinion, that neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition could negate the use of terror as a means of battle.
Haffner didn't care about birth or name or nation. He was not a stickler for such things. He was amused when Hersch Lauterpacht — Goldfaden's new friend — told him, many years after it happened, over dinner, that his nomination to the International Court of Justice had initially been blocked by the Attorney General, on the grounds that a British representative should both be and be seen to be thoroughly British, whereas Lauterpacht could not help the fact that he did not qualify in this way either by birth, by name or by education. Yes, how they had laughed, at Simpson's on the Strand, in 1980. How he had chuckled at this idea that they should in any way be seen as European.
My hero of assimilation! My hero of lightness!
Or so Haffner would have liked his story to be written. But it was not entirely true.
Haffner still treasured his family's stories from the shtetl. Or, more precisely, he treasured the story of their escape. How the final branch of the Haffner family tree to reach England had docked in Sunderland, in the midst of the nineteenth century, with Haffner's great-grandfather, a two-month-old baby, in a box. This was the family romance: the line of the Haffners had only survived the Lithuanian pogroms because of the silence and courage of great-grandfather Haffner, whose name was Isaac — the perfect silent baby. But, thought Haffner, where was the logic in this story? If one needed to hide the baby, surely one would have needed to hide oneself as well? And the chances of a baby remaining silent during a customs investigation, tight in a box, seemed highly unlikely. So in what way would this ruse dupe an anti-Semite, in Prussia, with his sideburns and the plume of his helmet, the beige snuff stains on the crook of his thumb? But there it was: this story, invented or not, was the beginning of the Haffners' career in polite society. This silent infant generated the family law firm — which Haffner had refused — the house in north London, the servants, the cricket matches, the endless lawn-tennis lessons.
And his mother, his minuscule mother, who fasted every Yom Kippur: who stood on the steps of their synagogue in St John's Wood, asking Raphael to hold her, because she was dizzy.
Haffner thought that with these memories he was avoiding the pressing issue of the villa, the pressing issue of the women who had so invaded his stay here in the mountains. But there was passion in Haffner's indecision. He wanted to be a flaneur: he wanted to pretend that he had no engagements, no responsibilities. This ideal Haffner would idle through his memories — flick through them as through the pages of an outdated women's magazine, in the dentist's waiting room, while sitting beside an abandoned playpen made of multicoloured plastic. But this Haffner did not exist. No, the real Haffner was, as always, in the middle of things.
Here, in this church, Haffner tried to disappear from view. As he always tried to do. And he could not.
He was an aristocrat. Could no one understand this? Bourgeois, true, but an aristocrat! He had class. Even as they tried to force him into the Jewish working classes: the ordinary ranks of the Jews. The dispossessed; the heartbroken. No, Haffner had nothing to do with the Yiddish in London. Koyfts a heft! they used to cry, in the streets where Haffner was trying to find a cup of tea, after his cricket coaching in the East End. His cousins had set up the first ever mixed Jewish and Christian social club for boys in the East End locale of Bethnal Green, a club whose cricket team Haffner had coached to victory that same summer, the year before he went away to fight in the British army. Buy a pamphlet! they cried, crowding round Haffner, with their Yiddish literary magazines, their Zionist cris de coeur.
Buy, thought Haffner, a fucking pamphlet yourself.
It had seemed so funny then. It seemed less funny now.
The aristocracy of Haffner was not a metaphor. A cousin on his mother's side was a viscount.
Yes, Haffner had history.
As a young man, Haffner's viscount had been moved by the plight of the underdog, the abandoned masses in their ghettos. He would go with his father — a liberal politician, a man of principle — to the dilapidated areas out to the east of London, where the less fortunate Jewish people lived, with their impoverished tailoring, cabinet-making, matchbox-making, fur-pulling. Then they would go to the park, to take a stroll, or a ride. The disparity between these two experiences moved the young politician: he wanted to do good. He was so moved that the syntax in his diary became impassioned, inverted. What are they, dull, short-visioned, who see not the ground shaking beneath their very feet — wrote the young liberal — and angry voices, quiet, marvellously refraining yet, that are soon to rise, in ever-swelling clamour? Later on, when he retired from public life, Haffner's viscount devoted his time to the writing of philosophy. He was, he said, a meliorist. He believed that, with only a small adjustment in our thinking, we would see that this world could indeed become the best of all possible worlds.
Whenever the business of imagining this thing called history came up in Haffner's life — on rare occasions, perhaps when rereading Churchill, or arguing with his grandson, or listening to the stories of Livia's family — he imagined history as a straight line. The line of gravity. The all-encompassing horizontal — its horizon — to which all bodies descended.
It was Haffner's viscount who had argued for the Jewish right of return to Palestine: the Arabs could not forbid the Jews to come back, he had argued, since the Jews were a people whose connection with the country long antedated their own — and especially as it had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years. There could be no question, he had told the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, that the best thing for the land would be for it to be reclaimed by the Jews.
He was not dogmatic, however. The rights of the immigrants did not cancel out the rights of the natives: no, the arrival of the Jews must never be marked by hardship, expropriation, injustice of any kind for the people now in the land, whose forebears had tilled the soil and dwelled in the towns for a thousand years.
The viscount possessed the optimism of the romantic.
As the first ever High Commissioner of Palestine, the viscount had sent rare stamps to his philatelic king, painted with Churchill (whose paintings, he noted, were avowedly crude, but nonetheless effective, especially in colouring) and played tennis with Lord Balfour himself. Whose idea — along with that genius Weizmann — the whole country had been in the first place. And it was the viscount who was one half of the most famous anecdote about this country which they still called Palestine. When his predecessor, Chief Administrator Bols, was about to leave office, wrote the viscount, he asked the incoming commissioner to sign a receipt. The viscount asked for what. For Palestine, said Bols. But, replied the viscount, he couldn't do that. He couldn't mean it seriously. Certainly he did, said Major Bols. He had it typed out here. And he produced a slip of paper — Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, KCB: one Palestine, complete — with the date and a space for the viscount's signature. The viscount still demurred, but Bols insisted, so he signed; adding, however, the initials which used often to appear on commercial documents — E & OE, meaning Errors and Omissions Excepted. And Bols had this piece of paper framed, he was so pleased with it.