The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  These thoughts returned to Haffner, sentimental, in the Alpine rain, observing the different gold of a Central European desk light.

  4

  He knew this was all very wrong, said Frau Tummel.

  —Oh I don’t know, said Haffner, airily.

  She had decided that she really must cheer up. She must not be so down. She must not show him this face of hers.

  What he did to her, what he made her feel: was wrong, said Frau Tummel. He was a bad man, she said – tapping him on the nose: a disgruntled, startled puppy. He was a bad man.

  She may have been delicious, thought Haffner, sadly – with her joyful breasts, her trembling thighs – but her concerns were not his concerns. It was undeniable. The flirting surely could have possessed slightly more élan. But Frau Tummel didn’t want sophistication. Frau Tummel’s thing was love. She went for the serious. And Haffner was not in the mood for love; or the serious. Or maybe I should say: he didn’t go for love now, with her. With Frau Tummel he would have liked, instead, to be delirious with appetite.

  The love was all for Zinka.

  —Yes, yes, said Haffner. You told me that.

  And maybe this was not fair. Maybe this wasn’t accurate to the difficulty Frau Tummel was feeling.

  Did he know, she asked him, how lucky they were?

  —How lucky? queried Haffner.

  Yes, how lucky they were, repeated Frau Tummel.

  He looked at her. She stepped forward, let the belt of her bathrobe undo itself, pushed it off her shoulders, on to the floor. Then she unbuttoned her nightgown to her breasts, and pulled it down over her shoulders. Now, therefore, she was naked – except, to Haffner’s surprise, for her bra. The bra saddened him; it added to her pathos. Like the bathrobe, it was dotted with stitched pink roses.

  In this bra, Haffner confronted the problem of love.

  Haffner was not all barbarian, not all the time. He was helpful. He tried to please. Weakly, not wanting to sadden her, he wondered if they should order some champagne.

  Stricken, he watched Frau Tummel smile.

  —Oh, said Frau Tummel, it is a good life, is it not?

  Haffner’s deepest wish was to possess the total independence of a mad imperator; a classical god. But the stern line of Haffner’s cruelty was always complicated by the kink of his kindness.

  Frau Tummel leaned across the bed, on to her stomach, and picked up the phone. She talked to reception as she lay there, her legs kicking in the air. It was such a girlish gesture, this kicking in the air.

  While somewhere else – but where? Dubrovnik? La Rochelle? – a younger Livia opened the wardrobe in their hotel room so that the mirror reflected the bed on which she flung herself, face down, thus able to be ravaged from behind by her marauder, the angel Raphael, while simultaneously watching her angel rear devastatingly above her.

  But where? Dover, in 1949!

  Haffner leaned forward, and spread Frau Tummel’s legs apart: revealing their symmetrical Rorschach stain – like a picture of a butterfly once solemnly presented to him by his grandson, Benjamin, constructed by pressing one half of the paper over the other – already stained with Benji’s idea of a butterfly’s smudged if multicoloured pattern. Haffner began to lick her, gently, as she tried to finish the call. And as he licked her, as he parted her, she started to invent more and more food. They would have champagne, she said, yes – and also caviar. And blini. And a Russian salad. And pickled cucumbers. And oh, she said. No, oh, she said. She was fine. She was very well. If they could bring everything in, if they could just come up and put everything in her room. If they could bring it up. If they could bring it up. And put it in. Then she put the phone down, and revelled in the pleasure of Haffner’s flesh.

  If he was touching her like this, then of course it was love. No one except her husband had ever touched her in this way. Not even her husband had touched her in this way.

  Too soon, the room service arrived. She gathered herself back into the bathrobe. Haffner, in his dishevelled tracksuit, tipped the waiter, wondering if he could induce him to stay, deciding that he couldn’t.

  —You aren’t angry with me? she asked.

  But why, asked Haffner, would he be angry?

  But it was so complicated. She was sorry. She was sorry for being so complicated. But he had to understand. She had a husband.

  Haffner understood.

  He must think it was like Romeo and Juliet, she said.

  Haffner did not reply: he had no idea how he could reply.

  —You know, she said, I am not. This is not me. But it is difficult to hide the secrets of the heart.

  —Hide what? said Haffner, appalled.

  —Raphael! said Frau Tummel. You are too much.

  And Haffner considered the extraordinary way in which a life repeated itself. For Livia had used this phrase for him. Just once. Or a phrase resembling this phrase. Maybe he was too much for her, she said. Maybe in the end he was too much even for her. And when he had tried to tell Livia, this was in 1982, the night of his triumphant dinner for the Institute of Bankers, that all he wanted was her, she turned away. They were sitting in the kitchen. She was in a nightgown which Haffner had never liked – being made of a blue towelling, which tended to make her look, he argued, unattractive: he never wanted the cosy, the comfortable, only the erotic. That was one form, he now considered, of his immaturity. So maybe everyone had him right. He could understand it. He was too much for himself.

  He put his fingers to Frau Tummel’s lips. She began to kiss them. Each finger she curled into her mouth.

  What could really go wrong, thought Haffner, in a hotel, in a spa town? It seemed safe enough.

  But then he had to correct himself. He allowed his will to follow the wills of women. That was his classical principle. But he knew that this had its problems too. He freely admitted this. When the women were in love with him, then Haffner was no longer safe. This was one aspect of his education. It had happened with Barbra. It had happened before Barbra. And now, he worried, it was happening again.

  This was one aspect of his education. But Haffner would never learn.

  5

  Haffner acceptingly approached the women who approached him as if they were portents. They were Haffner’s irresistible fate.

  He didn’t, he once said – in a conversation which was now legendary in Haffner’s family, when confronted by Esther after Livia’s death with accusations of his truly infantile excesses – he didn’t want to regret anything. No, he didn’t see why he should be left with any regret. He said this without really thinking, as he said so many things. Or so argued Haffner afterwards – after it had become his definition. As if a man’s marriage, said Esther, triumphantly, with the absolute agreement of her family, should ever make him regret anything. Esther’s husband, Esmond, did not continue the conversation. And although it had passed into the annals of his family as the epitome of Haffner’s selfishness, as recounted to me once by Benjamin, I was not so convinced. Awkward he may have been, but Haffner was not malicious. And Benjamin, with his new-found devotion to his religion, his new-found devotion to the family, was not, I thought, a reliable moral guide: he had lost his imagination.

  Nor, I tried to say to Benjamin, had Livia ever been public with her disapproval. If she really disapproved. So maybe this should make us pause as well.

  One can be so rarely sure, Haffner once said to me, that what one has done is right. So maybe it was possible that in his self-defence Haffner was being truthful, rather than self-deceiving. He was simply being faithful to his refusal of self-denial; his absolute distrust of the philosophy on which it was based, the puritanical certainty.

  Which was one reason, surely, why Livia might love him. For Haffner’s absolute sense of humour.

  6

  Oh the comic pathos of dictators! Haffner’s sense of humour!

  Maybe they were never really given their moral due. More and more, as Haffner lay beside the swimming pool, or sat on a bench in fron
t of an Alpine view, he approved of the scandalous emperors. He couldn’t understand the world’s astonishment.

  Like Augustus, who had absolute faith, so wrote his historian, in certain premonitory signs. Once, when a palm tree pushed its way between the paving stones in front of his home he had it transplanted to the inner court beside his household gods, and lavished care on it. Just as Haffner found it difficult to reject the women who entered his sphere of orbit. Who could have the hubris to reject the artistry of chance? If Augustus didn’t, then why should Haffner? Even if it was unclear how much his meetings with women were to do with chance, rather than the machinations of Haffner’s will. But then again, Augustus could be a mentor here as well, since it was Augustus who justified his adulterous affairs as the necessary burden of an emperor – charged with knowing the secrets of his subjects, his closest advisers. Of course an emperor had to sleep with his counsellors’ wives! How else would he know what they were thinking? There was nothing in it for Augustus: his sexual life was all in service to the state.

  And in fact this was not a new discovery of Haffner’s. Perhaps he had forgotten, but the emperors had entered his moral universe before. Years ago, Livia had been reading about these Roman dictators. They were all in Dubrovnik, in the wilds of Europe, during one of Esther’s summer holidays. They lay underneath a parasol, moving their position in relation to it as the day wore on, a live performance of a sundial – and, to the shuffle of the sea, Livia read aloud to Haffner from the book which her brother had given her. A new translation. Haffner was slowly sunburning. And she had mischievously read out to Haffner the story of Tiberius – the man who had built a private sporting-house, where sexual extravagances were performed for his secret pleasure. Hundreds of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae – but what did spintriae mean? wondered Haffner: it must have been dirty; it must have been good, or the man would have translated it: no, said Livia, there was no footnote, nothing – would perform before Tiberius in groups of three, to excite his waning passion. Some aspects of his criminal obscenity were almost too vile to discuss, much less believe, read Livia. Imagine training little boys, whom he called his minnows, to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him! Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother’s breast suck at him – such a filthy old man he had become! So wrote his historian. But neither Livia nor Haffner was so prone to judgement.

  Filthy old man or not, they seemed to get Tiberius. The experimenter with pleasure: a pioneer of power – always minuscule before the infinite.

  A few years later, at the time of the Brazilian coup, they had been in São Paulo – some deal with a bank which didn’t work out. The deal, and the bank. With their host, who impressed Haffner with the beauty of his wife, and the cultural beauty of his life, they were sitting in a theatre, watching a classic of contemporary theatre. And even Haffner was amused when the police burst in, and called up everyone involved on stage. They took a programme and began to intone the names: the actors, the stage manager, the lighting designer. Dutifully, the arrested provocateurs lined up on stage. And finally, stated the policemen, confident in their authority, they demanded that the arch instigator, the impresario of this whole production should present himself to the police as well: a man with the unlikely Brazilian name of Bertolt Brecht. Everyone looked concernedly around. Mr Brecht appeared, they thought, to have disappeared.

  And what Haffner now remembered was how that night, in their hotel room, Livia had confessed that however much she found it funny, however much she had laughed with their hosts, with the audience, with the entire tropical night – deep in her worried thoughts was a regret. She still felt sorry for the deluded dictatorial policemen.

  The poor dictators! Even the dictators, after all, were the dupes of accident and defeat.

  7

  At this moment, for instance, Frau Tummel was trying, in the words of the comics, to offer Haffner pleasure. Perhaps this might not obviously seem like a defeat. But look closer, dear reader – look closer. Enter Haffner’s soul. Haffner was beginning to feel melancholy. Soft in Frau Tummel’s mouth, his penis had no point to it.

  If the ghost of Livia were looking down, at this moment, perhaps she would have found this funny, thought Haffner. And so could he. It was just another instance of the accidental.

  He touched Frau Tummel, gently, on her grey and golden hair – on the combed grey roots. Could he ask her, politely, he said, to stop doing what she was doing?

  Frau Tummel looked up, the head of his slumped penis slumped on the slump of her lower lip. A thin trail of saliva, unnoticed, connected the two. Haffner tried to be romantic: he tried to maintain the tone. She still loved her husband, he told her. She was being silly. But no, said Frau Tummel. It was over a long time ago. And she bent down, continuing to show her affection to Haffner. While Haffner despaired. His soft penis was not moving. It hung there: obeisant to the law of gravity.

  It wasn’t, obviously, the first time this kind of event had occurred. The despair was local. It had placed Haffner in a difficult social situation. On the one hand, it meant that he could not experience the pleasures he had previously experienced with Frau Tummel. But, on the other hand, he could not ask her to leave. His pride would not allow it. So he was trapped into a conversation – where Frau Tummel had the power. She pitied him; she pored over him; she looked after him. She stated the permanence of their love.

  His impotence had trapped Haffner in a conversation he wanted to be over. This sadness was creating so much more intimacy than he ever wanted. He tried to concentrate on images of the erotic: he tried to think about Zinka’s breasts. But Zinka eluded him. He remembered the way Livia had touched him, the first time, at the ponds on Hampstead Heath – her hand dipping under his briefs, under the curve of his tense strained penis, a hand which he delightedly and immediately made wet with his semen. Neither of them had spoken. She simply withdrew her hand, took out a handkerchief, wiped it gently – a gesture which for Haffner still seemed fraught with tenderness.

  And maybe that had been the moment when he decided to marry Livia: when he knew that he was in love. Just because it had happened so fast. All his triumphs, he began to think now, were just defeats reconfigured. Like the time he batted for five hours in Jerusalem, in 1946, thus securing an improbable draw on a pitch destroyed by three days of tropical rain.

  He looked at Frau Tummel. Frau Tummel was looking with tenderness at him: an absolute maternal tenderness. A tenderness which made Haffner afraid with its intimacy. And she bent down, kissed his penis, at its tip.

  —Whatever you want, she said. Whatever you want, I will do.

  He looked down at his drooping penis – once faithful in all his infidelities. Its defeat now should not, he reflected, have surprised him.

  —You can have me, said Frau Tummel, anywhere. If that will help. You can have me where my husband has not had me.

  Frau Tummel believed in the reality of their love. She believed that this love was truth. Frau Tummel was not a libertine: for her, the erotic was an aspect of love. She was a Christian woman. She had been brought up to trust and worship the instincts of her soul.

  Or was now not the right time for her little lamb? she wondered. Perhaps not, replied her little lamb. Perhaps not.

  —We must, said Frau Tummel, talk to my husband. It is the only right thing.

  She said this with no enjoyment, no glory. She had come here with her ill husband. She was a model wife. And she would leave with her life destroyed, she thought. She could not live without her husband, and now she could not leave without Haffner. To Haffner, however, it seemed so unnecessary. He talked about the need to take their time. He talked about the need not to injure the blossom of their love.

  The dawn was just beginning, in the window. There was a light sparse rain.

  But maybe it was possible, she added, for Haffner to forget. If he would only let
another woman into his life – to care for him, to be his companion.

  8

  Frau Tummel’s will was just another way in which the twentieth century was conspiring to entrap Haffner. Once more, he had entered Mitteleuropa. It was a place which had always amazed him. Its endless capacity for seriousness! The intellectual fervour! Whenever he thought about the Europeans, he became hysterical with exclamations. Ever since he discovered, through Cesare, that the Russians wrote to each other with exclamation marks, Haffner had liked this theatrical way of talking. The European vocative – addressing absent abstractions. Love! Death! Fame! Bohemia! Wherever Bohemia was. It was how he always thought about Cesare. Whom Haffner had loved. Of whom Haffner despaired.