The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  Yes, here Haffner was: in what he only knew as Bohemia. It wasn’t Bohemia, of course. But Haffner’s idea of geography, like his idea of history, was eclectic. It had been taught to him by his Uncle Ernie. Uncle Ernie! – who ran a brewery business and whose hatred of women developed intricate disguises, so that once, from Nice, he sent a postcard to the young Haffner describing how Mrs Jay had once more collared him for a dance, but thank goodness this time she didn’t have her monkey with her. Haffner always wondered if this monkey were real, or allegorical. Uncle Ernie’s theory of Europe was simple: there was England, there was France, and then began Bohemia – a land which stretched from Gdansk to Vienna, from Strasbourg to Odessa. A minute version of Haffner tried to query this, but was rebuffed. So although Bohemia had disappeared in 1918, before the era of Haffner, it was now Haffner’s central country: wherever Haffner was in Europe, that place became Bohemia.

  He couldn’t really say that the architecture of this town was truly modern. It was, he thought, as he left the club, a place which seemed unobtrusively to have opted for excess. What might have been a palace or at least the grandest of condos rose proudly in the sunlight. Over the porch curved a glass shell, with strutted ribs, a petal of glass: on either side of it were twin balconies, made of iron: these balconies were furious with detail. Curlicues of foliage melted into each other, in black mazes, twisted into dripping florets and stems – like the rose bushes Haffner had so coveted, in Pfeffer’s garden. Pfeffer, Haffner’s schoolfriend, was a lawyer in the City. His rose bushes were all tended by a gardener – and yet it was Pfeffer whose picture was found in the horticultural journals, Pfeffer who wrote in with exquisite botanical notes describing impossible species; Pfeffer who sentimentally named each of his new breeds with the name of one of his grandchildren. Above these railings, the brickwork was scrolled and crenellated. The facades had terracotta highlights, small statues which carried flaming torches in an upstretched hand, dead goddesses, proud heroes. The entire classical corpus. And the walls of the Town Hall’s foyer bore bas-reliefs, mosaics. Industry Leading the Spirit of the People. The Triumph of the Working Man. The Fecundity of the New Woman.

  No, nothing here was modern. But then, Haffner’s twin domains – the islands of Manhattan and the City of London – weren’t modern either. Everywhere was decorated in the junk of the Hapsburg nineteenth century. The junk was inescapable.

  2

  On his arrival, Haffner had come to the Town Hall, and been given a variety of forms to be filled out. These confused him, but Haffner persevered. Yes, Haffner had tried to do the dutiful, the proper thing. He had never planned on his private imbroglio. He had just thought that the legal process would be a formality: his last duty to the dead, which he could be done with in one day. For it had been Haffner who had placated his rivals at J.P. Morgan with artfully capped and collared contracts; Haffner who had perfected the art of the butterfly spread. These residential forms, he thought, could therefore not be beyond him. They simply involved him proving that he was who he was; and that Livia had been who she had been; and the house was what it was. With these forms neatly completed, he came back, to be told that the only person in the building who could translate for him was away. She was having a hernia operation. Two days later, by this time embroiled with Frau Tummel, and touched by Zinka, he had returned once more, greeted his oddly healthy translator, handed in the forms, and been told that the process was still in its initial stages.

  Now, then, for the fourth time, he ascended the stairs, slowly, and entered the building. A security guard, sitting inside a plastic box, with a dog asleep at his feet, acknowledged him with a movement of one eyebrow. Haffner waved at this man, cheerily. For one should always be good to the staff. You never knew when they might become useful. He had been taught this by his first ever superior at Warburg’s, in the Long Bar at Slaters in the welcome spring of 1947: and Haffner had never forgotten. The bellboy, the receptionist, the driver: Haffner knew them all by name. Even if, so often, he reflected, Haffner got it wrong: the temping busboy, the relief lift attendant . . .

  Haffner’s goal was the Committee on Spatial Planning. The room which contained the secretaries to the Committee on Spatial Planning was adorned by no painting, no mirror, no poster. Its walls were bare, except for a cork noticeboard, pinned with reminders of rota systems, memos about departmental protocol. A handwritten invitation to a party from two months ago was beginning to curl at the bottom: a stalled wave.

  The single window seemed to offer a view of nothing: a back garden, a washing line. Just as on the tenement roofs below Grand Street the washing used to hang there like the urban signal for surrender. Haffner would look out over the shining city: at the World Trade Center, and its ancestor, the Chrysler, all his beloved monuments. The feats of prowess! The tricks of engineering! He looked out and basked in that new capital of speed.

  But was the villa worth it? This was the question which Haffner still pursued. After all, the villa didn’t belong to them: not any more. Long before the death of Livia’s father and mother, in Buchenwald, in 1944, it had been transferred to the Nazi authorities. A German family had lived there for two years, until the Soviets arrived, and instituted their Communist utopia. The villa was then occupied by a functionary in the department of education. His soul was bucolic. He had relandscaped the gardens. Then, following the events of perestroika, and all its unintended consequences, the new democratic regime had auctioned it, and it was bought by a Czech microchip company – who used it as a vacation cottage for their favoured, bonus-earning employees. And now, following the policy of reappropriation, the villa was legally to be returned to Livia’s family.

  None of this, thought Haffner, explained why the villa was worth his protracted effort. The history of this century, in Haffner’s opinion, was rarely an adequate explanation. Instead, the private history of his century seemed more relevant. Haffner knew the concealed grievances of his family. He didn’t believe that Esther really wanted this villa: not for herself. No, it wasn’t about the villa. Haffner was here as a symbol. His daughter’s constant theme was that Haffner should pay for his mistakes: the carelessness of his parenting; the flippancy in his friendships; the breakdown of his marriage. Just once, as Esther put it, he would act unselfishly.

  Yes, thought Haffner sadly: it was always about Haffner. And the judgement on Haffner was simple: Haffner had failed.

  3

  Livia had not shared this mournful disappointment in Haffner. Her moments of reproach occurred more unexpectedly, there where Haffner felt most safe. Like the time when she rebuked both Haffner and her brother – in the seclusion of a booth in Sheekey’s, watched over by a black-and-white scene from a drawing-room farce – after a night out in theatreland. She was unconvinced by Haffner’s lack of commitment to an omnipotent God. No, she said, as Cesare tried to talk, let her finish. This was not because she was an Orthodox believer. She was simply unconvinced by Raphael’s refusal to believe that this world could not be the only world. But then, Cesare defended him, he thought that Raphael was very right to be unconvinced by their inherited God – that bearded legal system. Here, he accidentally dropped a piece of bread under the table. Together, both Haffner and Cesare motioned to pick it up. They bent; they paused: they left it to its fate. No, continued Cesare, he had always preferred a certain Jewish renegade, Spinoza (—Who?

  said Haffner; Spinoza, repeated Cesare, refusing all explication), who had observed that humans were mistaken if they thought that God was a superman, an elongated version of your average Joe. Absolutely! agreed Haffner. He couldn’t agree more – rebending down to recover the bread, avoiding Livia’s unimpressed gaze – thus hearing from between the stockinged calves of Livia, the trousered calves of Cesare, how there was no more reason to believe in such a myth, in Cesare’s opinion, than there was to believe that God’s form was that of a benign and bearded anteater, or a trident-wielding koala.

  4

  With this koala still perched on
a branch of his mind, chewing on a eucalyptus leaf and resembling uncannily the koala which the young Benjamin had adored until its polyester fur lost all its shine and volume, Haffner went to a guichet. He loped over in a now stilted imitation of the walk which had marked the heyday of Haffner: suave, indolent, assured. Or all the other adjectives to which Haffner had aspired. He was told that he needed a ticket, with a number. Haffner questioned this. He pointed out that he was the only customer in the room. He asserted that no one had minded before. But no, said the woman: he still needed a ticket. He went to the red plastic box on the wall, which was sticking its tongue out, and extracted a ticket; sat down, and waited. He waited for ten minutes. No one else came in. Finally, his number was called. He returned to the guichet. At this point, he was told that if he had to speak in English, then they must wait for the interpreter. And so Haffner sat down again.

  Such vacancy of waiting rooms! When Haffner wanted something done, it had been done. The fluency of the West – this was Haffner’s expectation. He came from a world of anxious secretaries, divine stenographers. Not for him the sullen service, the dejected functionaries. The office as a place of pleasure – this was Haffner’s norm. He sighed. He tried to read the notices. The notices gave nothing away.

  With a heartbeat of flickering anticipation, Haffner saw a man come in: he was tall, and he looked tired. His air was Slavic. Perhaps, thought Haffner, this was his interpreter. The man began to talk in an incomprehensible language, then switched to Italian, then switched, to Haffner’s relief, into English. His name was Pawel, he said. He was not an interpreter. Like Haffner, he was here as an applicant. He was here because his wife had – he was here to manage his wife’s estate. Haffner nodded. In a way which he hoped indicated a funereal solidarity.

  Together, they sat in silence.

  Finally, Haffner’s interpreter entered the room. Her name was Isabella. She was blonde. Her legs were long. Perhaps not the longest that Haffner had ever seen – in the matter of women only, he was not given to hyperbole – but they were extensive. She looked at Haffner, looked at the woman framed in the guichet like the image of the most venerated saint, and then nodded. Haffner moved over to the window. A relay involving sentences by Haffner and Isabella tried to reach the infinitely receding finish line of the woman in the guichet. Haffner was told that if he wished to discover information on the stages of the Committee’s deliberation, he was at the wrong guichet. The room he needed was two doors down, across the corridor.

  Haffner smiled encouragingly to Isabella.

  They entered the new office. An anglepoise lamp, without a bulb, was folded in on itself. A woman was filing her nails with slow long strokes. Another woman was staring at what looked like absent space, but which was really the image of her daughter, playing trom-bone, who did not practise enough, and who therefore was unlikely to succeed in the brass competition in four days’ time.

  The lassitude of the ages spread its stain through Haffner’s soul. He went up to the woman who was staring into space. As he spoke, she began to categorise papers into nine piles on her desk.

  He began with what he considered to be a minuscule request.

  Haffner wondered if at least it might be possible for a visit to be arranged inside the villa, even if the process were not yet fully complete. He had only, as it happened, seen photographs.

  The woman then spoke in what seemed to Haffner to be a paragraph. A long, eventful, dense paragraph. He looked inquisitively, hopefully, at his translator.

  —No, said the interpreter.

  Haffner sighed.

  There followed a much shorter sentence from the woman inside the guichet.

  —Perhaps we could do this without a bribe, but maybe you don’t need the stress, said the interpreter, interpreting.

  There was a pause. They looked at Haffner. In this pause, the trio considered how corrupt this Haffner might be.

  5

  Haffner’s moral code belonged to the previous century – to the tsarist world of his great-grandfathers. His ideal was his great-great-grandfather: the emigrant – off the boat in the north of England, at a seaport no destitute Lithuanian cared or knew about. A miracle of survival, of charming strategy. Which was to be found also, he had to admit, in the history of Goldfaden and his family – unintentionally escaped from Warsaw in May 1940, their only possessions being two trunks of holiday clothes. For Goldfaden had only avoided the terror of the Ghetto because he had been in London with his family, to celebrate his sister’s marriage. Strategic corruption, then, was Haffner’s ideal: not the guarded lavishness of Haffner’s parents, or the slick luxury of his contemporaries.

  No, Haffner had no problem with the bribes. It was all a matter of survival. But in this case, he doubted if a bribe was worth the effort. He doubted if this woman really did possess the power she tried to flaunt.

  And so, as often happened in Haffner’s life, he accepted the facts and tried to re-create them according to Haffner’s version of reality: he tried to discover an ally. He had never been hampered by the British ethos of the queue – its hopeful stance, its doleful allegiance to the scarcity, the want. He very much doubted, he used to say, if there was anyone who couldn’t be corrupted. He went for friends: the deep connection. In Isabella he saw this possible ally in his route to justice. He offered to buy her a coffee. She looked at him. Resolutely, he did not look at her legs. And she said yes. Why not?

  —Just five minutes, said Haffner, to the woman inside the guichet.

  There had been many stories of Haffner. According to Haffner, this was because events conspired to ruin him. His innocence was always unimpeachable. But perhaps this was not so true. Was Haffner not to blame for the series of amatory notes sent to the rabbi’s wife, which culminated in her flight to his house and the much talked about scene with Livia, who talked her through the crisis, and sent her home? Was it not Haffner who had spontaneously suggested an orgy in the London office after a retirement party – before swiftly and unobtrusively absenting himself? He couldn’t deny it. All the facts of his legend were true.

  6

  She was so sorry, said Isabella. This was her country! So what could they do? He was Jewish, yes? And his wife as well. Such terrible suffering the Jews had faced. She felt very close to the Jews. She understood. She felt, she said, very close to every people that had suffered. For so many others had suffered too. This Haffner had to understand. Her people had also suffered so very terribly.

  Once more, the horrified angel of history had come to roost on Haffner’s shoulder: its wings gently flapping.

  No, she said, it was true. Her grandmother was put into a cattle truck and taken to Siberia. Did Haffner know of this? Her grandmother saw a woman give birth to a child and then throw it over the side of the truck. These were horrors. Was he going to deny this?

  Haffner was not going to deny it.

  Her grandmother, she continued, had started smoking to make herself less hungry. She was hungry every day, in this Russian state. As if her country ever had anything to do with Russia! How she hated the idea of Eastern Europe – an invention of the West. This was the kind of tragedy her people had suffered. And no one cared.

  —Well let’s be precise here, said Haffner.

  Like everyone else, she wanted to burden him with a past which was not his.

  So, wearily, Haffner sat down to talk. But Haffner had not understood. He thought she wanted to deny the Jews their suffering. He thought she wanted to subject it to some diminuendo. All his life, he had tried to give this up – the talk of Jews and those who hated them. It belonged to a place which Haffner did not want to visit. It belonged to the conversations of his relatives. But now here he was, trapped: in the former Hapsburg empire, the former Soviet empire: high in the Alps, deep in the problem of grievances: and Haffner, if he had to, would fight.

  —I don’t know why, said Haffner, we need to be talking about the Jews.

  —But I am not, said Isabella.

  —Yes,
said Haffner. You are. I know this is what you are saying.

  —But I am not, said Isabella.

  And she was right.

  7

  I should say this now, in this chapter on Haffner’s inheritance: Haffner was not Jewish in the way that other people were Jewish. He was a minor sect of one. He always said that he never really cared about his religion at all. If Haffner had been an intellectual, if Haffner had been Goldfaden, the ever so fucking verbal Goldfaden, then perhaps he would have tried to explain his sympathy for the half-Jews, the non-Jewish Jews. Haffner could even see the worth of the self-hating Jew. It didn’t seem reprehensible to Haffner. It had a rationale: the refusal to be burdened by the past of other people. But he wasn’t an intellectual. This wasn’t his way. He just knew that he only found amusing the attempts by the Orthodox communities of London to re-create a shtetl. When it was decided, late in Haffner’s life, to re-create an eruv in the suburbs of north London, Haffner found this deeply comical – with Esther, as they walked to the car, having lunched at some new and disappointing Chinese eatery, Haffner sarcastically pointed out the string hung from lamp posts, a dejected line which sagged like the bunting at the saddest village fête, in the rain, in the centre of England, in the absent summer. He was bored by his friends who kept kosher, by the women who married and then developed a religious side, by the friends who wanted to visit historic synagogues, or remnants of ghettos, on their otherwise bourgeois summer holidays. Schmaltz! All of it! They weren’t for him, the Jewish museums – with their nineteenth-century oil paintings of Torah scribes; the postcards thrown from moving trains, with the saddest phrases (We must always think of the good things in life) underlined. He wouldn’t let it sadden him. It was not, he thought, his heritage: this European disaster.