No, thought Haffner, observing the children. Some things were irreversible. The entropy of Haffner! Not everything could be recuperated. Like Haffner's gilded youth. For how can a man be young, when he is old? He knew enough of the Bible to know that this was difficult.
As Morton would have said, do the math.
Only on the last day in Cairo, in 1946, did Haffner write to Livia as his wife. Throughout their engagement and the early years of their marriage, throughout the war, he had referred to her as his darling girl, his sweetheart. Only now, in the last letter he would write to her from the war, when he was coming home, did Haffner address her as his very darling wife.
— I only pray that you will find me a better man than when I left you and that I will fulfil all your dreams, he wrote. I believe that we can do tremendous things together and that with our lives, with our happiness, we can make others happy. And that is what I think life is for, the real purpose behind it all. So Haffner wrote to Livia, the night before he sailed back to England, in 1946.
— Bless you, my beloved girl, wrote Raphael Haffner, keep you safe always.
PART FOUR
Haffner Gastronomic
The meals of Haffner and Benjamin were epic. In this gargantuan size, they expressed their love. They went to Bodean's on Poland Street and sucked at the burned ends and ribs of cows — which jutted out forlornly, and unevenly, like organ pipes. They were experts in the cuts of steak: both convinced that the aged hanger steaks of New York were the greatest of them all. Then there were the deep-fried marvels of Japan: the chicken katsu, endowed with its cloudy pot of barbecue sauce. Candy undid them: not the ordinary treats, but the strange, gourmet sugar of internationally local cuisines: nougat, glace cherries, marzipan fruits, baklava. They invented festivals of junk food: on one famous occasion, they had walked down Oxford Street, eating at every branch of American burger chain they could find. But there was more. This more was the Chinese food.
There was nothing, said Benjamin, more Jewish than this — Haffner's passion for Chinese food. Nothing more emphasised, said Benjamin, his genetic roots to the scattered race.
Haffner looked at him, amazed: his own grandson, with the same weird theory of Chinese food as Goldfaden. Or perhaps he was misremembering. This was, after all, possible.
Underneath a red paper lantern, Benjamin's cheeks were carmine — incandescent. On his face shone a glaze of sweat, echoing the lacquer on the slices of pork belly which lay, unguent, on their bed of shredded iceberg lettuce set before Haffner.
— You ordered the crispy beef, said Benji.
— Yes, I ordered the beef, said Haffner. Of course I ordered the beef. Wait a minute.
Benjamin swivelled round. Or, he swivelled as much as his bulk would allow: an imperfect barn owl.
He saw no one who could help him. He turned back to Haffner.
They continued to argue over whether Haffner should keep his appointment with Niko. Haffner thought it was obvious; Benjamin thought it was less obvious. But he couldn't see, said Haffner, what he had to lose. Could Benjamin explain this to him? He wasn't so proud that he would refuse someone else's help.
It was the principle, said Benjamin. He didn't know these people. How could he trust them?
What kind of principle was that? replied Haffner. It was fear, that was all. And they were hardly, said Haffner, going to rob him — and he exhibited his Nike T-shirt; his flared turquoise tracksuit trouser.
Benji swivelled round once more: he still saw no one who could help him.
Sighing, he turned back, and introduced a new topic of conversation.
What, he wanted to know, did Haffner know about hip hop?
— Hip hop? queried Haffner.
— Hip hop, confirmed Benjamin. But not the West Coast hip hop, nor the East Coast hip hop. Instead, his new thing was South Coast: the hip hop of urban and immigrant France.
In this way, Benji combined a former craze, his craze for hip hop, with his new — and, he believed, ultimate — craze for love. In Tel Aviv, he had been introduced by the girl who had deflowered him to the classics of French hip hop: the angry banlieusards in the angry banlieues.
This was, after all, why he had come to the spa town. Benjamin was in love. He was in love, and was here to receive advice from Haffner.
So he talked about hip hop. To Benji, this seemed logical.
As he ate, Benjamin described the curious fact that his two favourite songs, at this moment, were both about terror: the French hip-hop song called 'Darkness', and the French hip-hop song called 'Mourir 1000 fois', with its dark first line: in which the rapper told his terrified audience about his fears of death, in which the chorus simply stated that existence was punishment. They entranced Benji with their myth of the grand: the imagination of disaster. This was why he so loved the rappers from Marseilles: a city he had never been to; a city which, if he were honest, scared him with its reputation for the brutal.
Everything in Benjamin's life now seemed so fraught with significance. As if, thought Benji, he could destroy his whole life with one wrong decision.
He hazarded this to Haffner. Haffner thought it was unlikely that a life could be destroyed. It would take more than one wrong decision for that. Then he reached for the giant bottle of beer in front of him, and poured an accidentally overfoaming glass.
The restaurant advertised itself as Chinese. In its provenance, the food perhaps tended more towards the Vietnamese than the Chinese. There were moments when it was nothing but Thai. But no one here was concerned with the detail of origins: not the sullen Slavic waiters, the absent owners. Haffner, however, didn't care. So long as the effect was Oriental, then Haffner was happy. It possessed an aquarium in which melancholic fish hid themselves beneath mossy banks, munching sand. It seemed Oriental enough for Haffner.
In this setting, Haffner sat and listened to his grandson: his anxious grandson. He was, thought Haffner, the kind of kid who was so vulnerable to women that he'd probably get aroused just by the naked mannequins in shop windows, their robotic defenceless arms. Their invisible nipples and missing pubic hair, like some statue of Venus found beneath the tarmac of a Roman street.
But I think that Haffner could have gone further than this. There was so much to worry about, when considering the character of Benji.
Benji was the solitary only child. At fourteen he threw up in a girl's toilet after an evening of drinking whisky and was pleased at the suavity of his aim until he found out the next day that they had found sick everywhere. He used to listen to Liverpool matches on his clock radio in the dark under his Tottenham Hotspur duvet, for he was fickle. The first girl he kissed frightened him. Aged nine, he used to rehearse cricket strokes with a cricket stump and a practice golf ball in his bedroom, while listening to the classic ballad 'Take My Breath Away' on repeat. Like Haffner, the songs were always his downfall. He listened to 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' when Esmond drove him to the cricket matches.
Nothing in Benjamin's early youth had poise, or cool. Instead of cool, the miniature Benjamin hoarded Haffner's anecdotes. The stories of Haffner formed Benji's inheritance.