The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  Haffner had no sympathy for the manias of the twentieth century. The grand era of decolonisation; the century of splinter groups. All the crazed ethnicity. Was this such a triumph for the human spirit? It seemed to Haffner that it was a distinct defeat. All Haffner wanted was the conservative; the inherited; the right.

  But the twentieth century was all he had.

  And at this point I must describe a final loop in this aspect of Haffner’s character. He disliked the burden of a tragic heritage. He wished to live in a world free of this kind of inherited loyalty. But if anyone else, who was not Jewish, tried to agree with Haffner, he rebelled. No one else, he thought, had the right to criticise.

  This was one of the marks of Haffner. Disloyal among his friends; and loyal among his enemies.

  And so once more, in his exile, against his instincts, Haffner was becoming more Jewish than he wanted to be. Hyper-English among the Jews, this was Haffner – the blond and blue-eyed boy. But Jewish with everyone else.

  8

  As he prepared to defend his people, to argue the case of his embattled race, in a trance of passionate and unnecessary boredom, Haffner’s phone rang. Hopefully, he looked at it, wishing for a respite from the history of Europe. For a brief moment, before remembering that this was impossible, he imagined it might be Zinka. But it was Europe all over again.

  Once more, he heard the voice of Benjamin: the disappointment of Haffner’s old age: as Haffner was the disappointment of Benjamin’s youth.

  —Poppa, said a voice which emanated from a payphone in some Tel Aviv hall of residence.

  The recent mystery of Benjamin still confused Haffner. Each time Benji called, he said he wouldn’t call again. And then he called again. And maybe if Haffner had only paused to consider this, then he might have seen the mute obviousness of Benjamin’s behaviour: the slapstick of his reticence. He might have seen that Benjamin was in a crisis of his own. But Haffner was rarely good at that kind of thinking. He tended to believe that everyone said what they wanted. Just as, he maintained, he always said what he wanted. So it did not occur to him to wonder whether Benjamin might have more personal reasons for calling Haffner, the family’s legendary immoralist. No, he did not imagine, for instance, ensconced as he was in his own romantic crisis, that Benjamin could be in a romantic crisis as well. Since Haffner never chose to believe in his own mysteries, why should he be forced to believe in the mysteries of others?

  —Call me back, said Haffner, swiftly. I’m busy.

  The voice of Benjamin swooned into silence.

  And Haffner, in the unexpected glory of his triumph in so peremptorily dismissing Benjamin, returned to Isabella. He couldn’t understand it. Yes, let him change the conversation for just one moment. He had now been to this office four, perhaps five times. And no one seemed interested. Did they realise they had a legal duty? Had they no respect for the law?

  Isabella replied that there was no reason to raise his voice.

  He demanded that they stop this conversation, he said to Isabella, and that they go back in. She would smoke one final cigarette, said Isabella. And Haffner loped away: to fume.

  This pause lasted for as long as Haffner could contain himself, while staring at Isabella, angrily, with Isabella staring back. The pause, therefore, was short. He walked over to her again.

  Why, he enquired, did she have to care so much about the past? It wasn’t difficult, after all – remembering the past. It hardly needed to be an obligation.

  You didn’t need to remind Haffner about remembrance. He couldn’t help it. So many of the atrocities were his. But why then should Haffner remember them? What use was the guilt? Since when, he asked Isabella, was suffering the criterion of a life? Why not the charm? Why not the fun?

  —This country! sighed Isabella.

  The smoke on her cigarette, noted Haffner, listlessly, was being redundantly echoed by its imperfect twin, the smoke from a distant chimney.

  What kind of civilisation was it, she asked Haffner – who had no answer, just as he so rarely had answers to the absolute questions – where a girl was scared to go to church? Where a girl was told never to tell her friends that her family went to church? Because if they heard about it, they would send her family away. What kind of civilisation? This was reality, she said. This was real.

  Could he have a cigarette? he asked. Moodily, Isabella extracted one. She lit it behind Haffner’s hand. He inhaled: and felt sick.

  It was the first cigarette he had smoked for twenty years. That seemed right. Smiling, therefore, in this moment of complicity, Haffner tried to create a truce.

  Isabella pressed her cigarette out against the wall with her thumb: the butt bent. They went back into the cool of the building, and its humidified air.

  9

  This time, Haffner received a new answer.

  There was, they had ascertained, a problem which no one had quite anticipated. He had not given them all the information required. Haffner paused them here. He could assure them, he said, that all the necessary information had been supplied, on more than one occasion. Perhaps, they said. But they needed to be sure. And Haffner was then asked where his wife had been born. He replied that he had given them this information already. Nevertheless, they said. Nevertheless what? said Haffner to Isabella, who declined to reply or to translate. If he gave this information again, thought Haffner, he gave it only to show how generous he could be. He wasn’t one to bear grudges.

  It turned out that, as they had feared, they could not help him at all.

  His wife, you see, said Isabella, his late wife was a citizen not of this country but of Italy. He understood? So it was very difficult. They understood. But it was very difficult.

  He had come, he pointed out, a very long way. They appreciated this, said Isabella, but their hands were tied. It was a problem of citizenship.

  Were they serious? said Haffner. Isabella replied that absolutely. She was very sorry, she added. These were the ways of the world.

  But did they understand, Haffner wondered, that the question of ownership was completely separate from whatever problem of citizenship they wanted to invent?

  Isabella asked him to slow down. Could he please repeat himself?

  Haffner, in his fury, awkwardly leaned into the guichet: an avenging, unsteady god.

  He had no intention, he announced, of repeating himself to these people. He had had enough.

  —Everyone is very sorry, said Isabella.

  —It’s not happening today? Haffner asked her.

  —Today, no. I do not think so, she said.

  —I just wanted to know, said Haffner, coldly.

  As the gambler who plays cards, knowing they are rigged – the deal-box with its top-sight-tell, the coffee mill, the loaded dice – yet still believing in the efficacy of his luck, so Haffner confronted the miniature conflicts which the century placed in his path. That one had lost before the game had started was no reason not to play. And after all: surely he was still owed one great win: one absolute and effervescent triumph? He believed in it as other people believed in the more likely cascade of the slot machines: a parallel line of green apples, with jaunty stems.

  —I am so sorry, said Isabella: melancholy for all the exiled and dispossessed.

  Haffner only wanted a triumph. This was true. In the full panoply of his Jewishness, he had now experienced a moment of conversion. He wasn’t doing this for Esther. Now, he was going to recover this villa in a gesture of piety. Yes, Haffner’s triumph now consisted in his vision of the villa. And he knew his record when it came to obtaining triumphs. They proved, so often, beyond Haffner’s talent. But Haffner, thought Haffner, was ready for the fight.

  No wonder, thought Haffner, the emperors all went manic. He sympathised; he understood their frustration at reality’s recalcitrance. No wonder they amused themselves with killing sprees.

  10

  In the Lives of the Caesars, the only ones who interested him were the monsters: Caligula, Tiberius, Ner
o. He liked the overreachers. How could you choose between them? If pressed, however, maybe Haffner would have gone for the god Caligula – who was happy to do it with anyone, male or female, active or passive. Caligula, continued Haffner, talking to himself, was famous for the comprehensiveness of his taste. He would give dinners to which he invited all the noble couples: the couples of the blood. This story in particular commanded Haffner’s respect. It displayed a grand disregard for the niceties of public opinion. The wives would have to process up and down, passing a couch on which lay – untroubled by its stains, its cheap upholstery – the emperor Caligula. If one of them tried to avoid his gaze, he lifted up her chin. Like an animal. When the moment seemed right, he would send for one of them, and then the happy couple would retire. On their return, he would talk about her performance; mentioning a flaw here, a perfection there. He listed the movements for which she had no talent.

  That, concluded Haffner, was the moment when Caligula rightly deserved his deification.

  Perhaps he thought he only meant to shock. But Haffner was never coarse. If he shocked the general public, it was always because of a sincere misalignment in relation to the orthodox. So that even though I am not sure, as he said it, how much Haffner believed in this, it contained – perhaps unknown to Haffner – its own inverted logic, which was Haffner’s deepest unexplored motif. He didn’t really admire Caligula for the purity of his cruelty: he might have wanted his audience to think this, but Haffner was rarely sincere to his audience. No, Caligula was to be admired for his publicity. Haffner loved him, if he loved him, for the lack of shame.

  No one understood the emperors. No one saw how humble they were – free from the deeper vanity of concealing one’s own vanity – like Haffner before his family, refusing the illusion of maturity.

  Haffner Soothed

  1

  As Haffner arrived back at the hotel, intent on his newly discovered decisiveness, like an infant intent on the helium balloon clutched in a tight hand, a man emerged from an inner sanctum behind the reception desk. He was in a bright white T-shirt and blue tracksuit with silken sheen – his upper lip stained by a black and inadequate moustache. This was his masseur! the receptionist told Haffner, excitedly.

  Haffner eyed his masseur, utterly indifferent. The helium balloon of his decisiveness floated up into the empty air.

  Haffner allowed himself to be led downstairs, to the candlelit, scented day spa: and there, prone on the massage table, his face ensconced in its padded lasso – wrapped in tissue paper, to absorb the unguents of Haffner – he lay down.

  As he did so, a montage of previous Haffners lay down with him.

  2

  There were the Kodaks of Haffner reclining on towelled beds in his sports clubs, then the black-and-white photos of his white body on a black bench in his army barracks. But the film stopped on the image of him in New York, at the Russian Bath House on Avenue B. He used to go there with Morton. The steam secluded them. They would sit there: heating up – on the steps of the sauna, as if awaiting some spectral performance, some senatorial oratory. Cleansed, they would go to a bar in the Village – the name escaped Haffner’s stuttering memory. Not often, but sometimes. And, in this bar, they would continue their discussion of the Jews and the Blacks. This was why Haffner settled on this image, as he relaxed from his struggle in the committee rooms. He was het up with the century’s usual argument. But there it was. Haffner loved the Blacks, and Morton loved the Jews. Enough of this! Haffner would say. Enough of this sectarian rubbish. The race was unimportant. He could go further: there were people with charm, and people without. That was the only division one ever needed to contemplate.

  Maybe to him, Morton replied. Maybe to him.

  Morton put down his bottle of beer. It rested there, in front of Haffner’s tired eyes. A bubble stretched, a condom, over its rim.

  He didn’t understand, said Haffner. He didn’t get what Morton was implying.

  —You’ve made it, said Morton. So you’re cool.

  —I’m cool, said Haffner.

  —Not literally, said Morton. I’d never say you were cool in the real sense of this word. No. But yeah, you’re cool. You’ve won your fight. So you don’t care.

  Haffner wondered if this was fair. Certainly, he could see the accusation’s force. Catholic only in his hatred of all Protestants, all splinter groups – to which Haffner preferred the international art of business: an art to which he felt a strong allegiance, an art of which his central principle had been his insistence, in the wreckage of 1950s Europe, that one could not capitalise, as it were, if an economy wanted to remain national. The future was international. That was all he believed. He warmed to cosmopolitans, like Cesare.

  —Is he Jewish? Haffner had asked Livia once, about an acquaintance at their tennis club.

  —Oh, interrupted Cesare. Did you not know that the whole concept of the non-Jew is strictly inapplicable?

  He had always admired Cesare. Always been fond of him. Cesare, in Haffner’s opinion, lived up to his name.

  —I mean it, continued Cesare. Every time I meet someone new, I discover they are Jewish. It’s true what they say: the Jews are everywhere. It’s a problem for the anti-Semites. Everyone hates the Jews; but then everyone is a Jew. It’s a dilemma.

  And Haffner called that fine.

  3

  In his padded lasso, Haffner began to talk to his masseur. His name, it turned out, was Viko. It was really Viktor, he said: but everyone called him Viko.

  —Niko? said Haffner.

  —Viko, said Viko.

  As if he were Niko’s twin.

  —Your name, it is like you are Hugh Hefner! said the masseur, delighted.

  —You think you’re the first person to make that joke? said Haffner, grimly.

  —You know him? asked the masseur, undeterred. Relation?

  It had been an exhausting morning, a very stressful morning, said Haffner. He could feel it, said Viko. There was much tension in him. But Haffner, as he always did, chose to turn the conversation away from his internal tensions.

  He supposed, Haffner therefore observed, that it was a very difficult thing, to live in this country after the Communists had wrecked everything. And before Viko could reply, Haffner began to tell him a story about the Communists, which was a story about his brother-in-law: Cesare.

  But maybe this was still a way of Haffner talking about Haffner.

  Cesare, after the war, and his degree at Cambridge, had eventually decided to return to Italy, where he worked for the next two decades as a professor in sociology. The anecdote might interest Viko, said Haffner – raising himself up, patted back down. He was a Communist, Cesare: a Party man. But to understand this story, one also had to understand, said Haffner – talking into his lasso, to Viko’s bright new trainers – that this man had a cold streak. He was hard. But there it was. In Italy, he began an affair with a girl whose name, Haffner tended to think, was Simonetta. Perhaps Simonetta. When it began, she was twenty-five. So Cesare must have been in his forties, in his fifties.

  And Haffner suddenly noticed how this disparity in age, which had always struck him as tinged with a Hollywood seediness, was nothing when compared to the disparity between his age and Zinka’s.

  For Cesare, he said to Viko, it was everything he wanted. This girl of his wore leather; she rode a Honda bike. She was an assistant lecturer at the university. Could anything be more alluring? At the time, Cesare was editing a journal of revolutionary sociology. He made Simonetta his deputy editor. Cesare was a man of the world, said Haffner. A Communist, yes: but a Communist who loved the shops in the Quadrilatero d’Oro. A Communist who bought himself handstitched shirts, or shoes made from a single piece of leather. He loved his life. He was happy.

  Then this girl wanted a baby. It made Cesare pause.

  —I would love one, he said, absolutely love one. But first I must divorce my wife.

  Dutifully, Viko chuckled.

  In revenge, continued Haffn
er, unbeknown to Cesare, she stopped taking the Pill, and got pregnant. But Cesare didn’t care about this difficulty. He simply got her sacked from her deputy editorship of the journal; and also from her job at the university. But then, a year later, when Cesare was in the process of manoeuvring for the university rectorship, the Italian Communist Party issued a list of approved yet not affiliated intellectuals. These were the kosher ones, though not confirmed. Cesare was duly admitted as being ideologically pure. But Simonetta campaigned. Using her contacts in the women’s section of the Communist Party, she held meetings, she published denouncements.

  Of all the intellectuals duly nominated by the Communists, said Haffner, only Cesare failed in his bid for election.

  But the greatest moment of all, he concluded, was when Cesare told this story to his mentor at the university in Rome – who, on being told by a mournful Cesare the full dossier of the facts over a lavish dinner at a restaurant in a side street off the Spanish Steps, asked him if this was really how it would be from now on. Were they, said his mentor, to be ruled now by their mistresses?