Yes, the whole vocabulary of flight is puritanical. So every act of desertion is also an act of hedonism.
And maybe the deep reason for this is that no one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap. The trap is the image of life's seriousness.
Haffner, however, my hero, did not believe that life was serious. He didn't believe that one must necessarily be faithful to the ordinary, inevitable tragedy of a life. If one could be faithless to anything, Haffner always hoped, surely it would be to one's own past?
But, however much I admire the hope, I am not so sure that this kind of infidelity is possible. And there, in the church, nor was Haffner. Because the story of Eli now made Haffner remember another story which he preferred to keep to himself: how under the patronage of the Reverend Levine, the appointed guardian of Jewish refugees from Germany, a girl stayed in the Haffners' house, in 1938. He didn't remember very much about her: he couldn't remember her name. He knew very little, but he believed that she took her own life. Not when she was staying with them, but eventually.
She must have been about twenty. He didn't remember even trying to talk to her. She must have been with them a very short time, thought Haffner. She was extremely unhappy. Perhaps they couldn't cope with her. Yes, in his mind, he heard that she had taken her own life. But his mind was a bit hazy. He hadn't got involved — but he knew that there was somebody there, upstairs, in the spare room. She was always asleep. He had no idea how it had been organised.
This was what it was to be Jewish in Britain. The East was always making its demands on you: the grief of its history entered your life and so it became your own. You were always being forced back: beyond the pale.
He couldn't remember that girl's name.
He was not sinfuclass="underline" he refused all ideas of sin. But if Haffner had ever sinned, thought Haffner, then this forgetting was it.
In the dark church Haffner called on God:
— You are the Lord my God, Haffner exclaimed, in silence, in the darkness of this church, and I am a clod of dirt and a worm; dust of the ground and a vessel of shame.
But Haffner didn't need his God for such lavish repentance. The women were enough.
Haffner had used the infidelities within his marriage as the Orthodox used the eruv. They were exercises in invention; the riches of self-blame. His interior life was festooned with sagging squares of string, marking out the permitted areas within the forbidden world. He believed in marriage like the Orthodox believed in God. It was a territory for permitting the unpermitted.
And for testing the soul of Haffner.
Livia had been expert at the put-down. She was, in Haffner's language, a strong woman. This trait had endeared her to him. At the official dinners, the unofficial suppers, Haffner bore with pleased and happy grace her talent to resist Haffner's charm, believing that this public scepticism served to illustrate his moral grandeur, his lack of vanity. It was not an unusual moment in his life when, on the night of the dinner for the City Branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982, he came into her dressing room while she was in her underwear — blue lace, white frills — and with a crooked finger, its nail tipped with a varnish whose colour Haffner would never be able to name, she pointed out to him the direction of the door. And in his socks he turned around and left.
Retrospectively, however, this moment had acquired a unique weight. For that, thought Haffner, was when he understood that his marriage had in fact been governed by forces which he did not understand or control. That night, after Haffner's speech, after the speeches reciprocating Haffner's speech, as they were driving home in Haffner's Saab — with Livia driving, because Haffner was utterly drunk — Haffner quizzed her on the significance of why he had found her sitting outside the venue, the Butchers' Hall; why he had found her sitting there with Goldfaden, sharing a cigarette while the meat-market traffic began revving and chirring around them and the rinsing smell of meat gusted and retreated: yes, why had he found them there, sitting peaceably, with Goldfaden cupping her hand as he lit her cigarette? And at the time Haffner had not so much minded about the fact that he had never seen her smoking; nor that it was a habit she had excoriated in Haffner: he minded about the casual way in which Goldfaden touched her hand.
Calmly, without malice, Livia had simply told Haffner that it was not as if he could really lecture her. It was not as if he could condemn what she had done, and would continue to do.
Drunk, silenced, Haffner considered this. And what he wanted to say was that the two were incomparable: because when it came to women, Haffner had only ever got whoever came along. They loved him, true — but Haffner never really loved them back. He just amazed them with the strength of his devotion: a devotion which was indistinguishable from the fear that they would leave him. Even if no one did leave Haffner. Whereas Livia had something else. Livia, it seemed, had love.
— Do you love him? asked Haffner.
And Livia, braking gently at the traffic light by the Hampstead pond, said that yes of course: naturally, she said — and she touched Haffner, gently, on the cheek. So Haffner asked her what they were going to do about it now, to which Livia simply replied that she saw no reason to do anything.
Livia didn't believe in an escape.
She parked the car in the drive, went into the house, and Haffner sat there: listening to the rose bushes' gentle crackle in the wind. Just as now, years later, Haffner sat in a church and surveyed the wondrous mistakes of his life: his infidelity to his wife, his infidelity to his race. Or, to put it another way, his infidelity to the women he had slept with — to Barbra, to Pilar and Joan and Laure and all the other names he now could not remember — his infidelity to his nation.
All the nebulous fairies of his history and his politics, dissolving, now, on a midsummer night, in the middle of nowhere.
He was such a klutz, thought Haffner. Then he translated himself out of Goldfaden's language. He was a fool.
It was fitting, really, that one of Goldfaden's favourite party tricks was his riff on the word dope. As Goldfaden would explain to you, it was the trickiest word in the language: on the American side, it came from the Dutch for sauce, so meaning any kind of goo, lubricant, liquid, liquor, and hence any kind of narcotic, drug, medicine, adulterating agent, and hence, through the racetracks, and their need to know the inside dope, all esoteric lore, all arcana. And there it met, at its apex, the British derivation, from dupe, meaning the gull, the fool, the absolutely-in-the-dark: and where else were we, Goldfaden would conclude, if not always in the dark, drugged by lack of knowledge, unaware of the systems which eluded us and which invaded us at every moment? This word dope was the real thing which bound the British and Americans together: this was the real Atlantic Ocean.
But at this point, with this word dope, Haffner had gone as far as he could in the business of self-discussion. Because everything was obvious to him now. Everything had always been to do with Livia. And Haffner had never noticed.
It was so evident, so infinite in its evidence, that Haffner had never known.
Haffner stood up: he turned to go — making for the Chinese restaurant where he was meant to eat with Benjamin. In front of the church, where the baroque facade hid the brick barn of a nave, a line of floats was parked, each decorated with a tableau vivant. All the actors in these tableaux were children. Surrounding them, the adults of the town were taking photographs. Saint Peter was scratching the side of his nose with a translucent wafer, while another boy in white shirt and black trousers kneeled before him, on a plush velvet cusion, with his eyes escaping through the trickle of his fingers.