— And what happened? asked Haffner.
He fell asleep, said Niko. It was freezing, all the enemy was there, close to them, and he fell asleep. He was snoring. And this, said Niko, was Haffner. The man asleep.
— I fought in two wars, said Niko. And I fired shots in anger, I can tell you.
In the difficult silence which followed Niko's portrait of Haffner, Viko proposed that they should go somewhere else to celebrate.
There was a place near here, agreed Niko: with such girls! Then he paused. He began to smile. In his lightness of spirit, Haffner said he would also, of course, pay for the drinks. First, however, Haffner downed a final vodka. He placed the glass back on the brittle bar towel. Then he drank another final vodka. His heart accelerated. And Haffner, searching for coins in his wallet, which emerged, scissored between two figures, leaned into the sense of flight — as into the exhilaration of a speeding curve.
He knew what Niko meant. The problem had always been to distinguish whether one was wasting one's life or truly living it. This was the conundrum inherited from Solomon, his father. But the anguish of Haffner's life had therefore been in identifying which was which: the two so often hid within each other.
Libertine man! This was all Haffner had ever wanted to be. Yet now, he was beginning to think, it had always been a mirage. Although it might have looked like waste — his life in the quiet suburbs — although it had so often seemed a waste to Haffner, in fact that life was everything. Renouncing a woman, after all, can be a form of heroism; this is famous. And winning her may be a form of discipline.
The war was everywhere.
And Haffner, thought Haffner, had finally proved equal to this war — as he contemplated his finale up here in the mountains, with Zinka in the foreground, Frau Tummel in the background, and Benjamin a shadow in the distance. This piece of paper in his pocket, thought Haffner, constituted an undeniable achievement. So Haffner rejected Niko's accusation. Haffner was exultant!
In recovering Livia's villa, Haffner saw his reconciliation.
A chorus of trumpeting putti, Viko and Niko and Haffner raised their ultimate vodkas, downed the glasses on the wet surface of the bar counter, then on they went, happy, to the next whisky bar.
Haffner had always liked the imaginary travel books: the voyages to the centre of the earth, the voyages under the sea. There were the Sciapods, one-footed, but whose one tremendous foot served as a sunshade in the desert; or the Cynocephali, with the heads of dogs and a language which resembled barking. His favourite, given to him by Livia as a Christmas present, was an illustrated edition of the adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac — the comical man with the grandiose nose, who imagined a trip to the moon. But all these mythical journeys could only lead their heroes home. And Haffner was moved to realise that this was also true of him — even now, when Livia was dead. The marriage was endless.
— It kind of baffles me, sometimes, how you sleep at night, Pfeffer once said, as they sat in the Overseas Bankers' Club in Lothbury: amazed how Haffner could lie beside the wronged form of Livia.
Haffner dropped a chunk of sugar into his coffee, observing the brief spawn of bubbles on the black surface.
With Pfeffer, the family man, when trying to defend his sexual record, Haffner had then developed a theory of the wife and the mistress. Really, said Haffner, people didn't understand: the wife was safe. The really vulnerable were the other women. Pfeffer queried this. Haffner was always good, he observed, at misplacing his tenderness. His sense of what was important and what was not had never been a thing of moral beauty.
Haffner's argument had never convinced Haffner, let alone Pfeffer. Now, however, Haffner was beginning to wonder if he had been right all along. He couldn't remember the other women. They meant nothing to him. It was sad to admit this, but it was true. Whatever Barbra was doing now, Haffner didn't care. Whereas Livia was different. Livia was everything.
And me, I might add something else.
It is still the same Promised Land, it is still the same story, whether we talk of Moses and his Promised Land, or Odysseus and his Ithaca; or Haffner and this villa in the centre of Europe. And in a version of the story of Odysseus, which I once read, when Odysseus finally arrived safely home in Ithaca, he found himself utterly disappointed. And yet, wrote the author, whose name I have forgotten, what did he want of Ithaca? What else did it really offer him, if not precisely that journey home?
Just as Haffner stepped out into the midsummer night — the longest night of the year, the longest night of Haffner's life — but did not see before him the deserted nocturnal retail village, but instead entered the noblest park, and stood there observing a spreading oak tree, under which a long-lost version of Haffner sat with his beloved wife. Around them, deer munched. They were in Gloucestershire, or Warwickshire: ensconced in England. A fox was a red blur in the dark of a blackberry bush. And this lost but momentarily recovered Haffner lay watching the yellow-green where the sun lit the leaves; the black-green where it didn't.
Haffner Defeated
The club which Haffner was speeding towards in Niko's car was located down a side street, pretending to be a milk bar. So went its name. It opened on to the street via a metal door. When this door was opened, the clubber walked down some steps to a checkpoint where a girl waited behind a table, branding you with an ink stamp, before letting you turn left, down a further flight of stairs, further underground, into the club itself.
In the first room, there was the bar, and a selection of chairs. In the second, there was a room where two girls were DJing. On the wall was projected a selection of childhood images: though from whose childhood, no one knew. In the final room, the kids were dancing; when the DJs finished, a live set began. Tonight, it was an electro band from Hungary who were pretending they were from New York: singing their lyrics in a filmic version of American. They screamed at their appreciative crowd, drinking vodka and Coke from plastic cups; drinking beer from bottles; drinking shots of absinthe from a cache of plastic espresso cups stolen from a hospital canteen.
Into this underground came Haffner: the back of his hand — freckled, brown-spotted — now stamped with an extra red stain, so prompting Haffner to the thought of all the major crimes he could have committed, but had not. Yes, Haffner descended into the night, as he contrived to answer his phone, into which he shouted to Benji that yes everything had gone smoothly, that yes it was very loud, he was in a club, called Milk Bar, or maybe it was a milk bar, he had no idea: and then he lost reception; and the collar on his shirt seeped with sweat, and his lungs filled with the smoke of 250 cigarettes, lit from each other by the manic youth of Europe.
It was an inferno. But to Haffner, triumphantly still reminding himself that Livia's villa was soon to be his, it seemed a blessed paradiso.