The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —I am glad, said Zinka.

  He knew his place in the art of love: the comic figure, for ever grasping after the women who fled him. Just like Silenus, whose comically old flesh concealed the youth of the lust within.

  He tended to see himself in poses. This was true. But I saw him as something else. Like the hero of every legend – you had to gnaw on him, like on a bone, to discover the richness, the inner meaning. So I preferred my private image. Haffner was his own matrioshka: concealing within himself the other, diminutive dolls of Haffner’s infinite possibility.

  5

  Zinka used to live in a village with her grandmother. Haffner considered if he could think of any questions about this arrangement. He paused. So, asked Haffner, were her parents dead? Not at all, replied Zinka. She described their characters for him. Her mother was hysterical. Her father was calm. That was all he needed to know. Haffner paused again. In this pause, Zinka asked if he believed in God. Did she? asked Haffner, avoiding the question. She replied that she believed in an energy. And Haffner? He did not believe, said Haffner.

  —I will tell you what you are, said Zinka. You are realistic, but also a dreamer. I think you are easy to melancholy. Is this true?

  —Oh it’s true, said Haffner.

  —Yes, said Zinka. Now you tell me about myself.

  —Oh, said Haffner. I think you are: I think you are tough, but you are not as tough as you want to be. Something softer there.

  —Oh, said Zinka, you are fifty per cent true. No. No, you are much closer. Too close perhaps.

  Haffner wondered what he was really doing here.

  —I have no regrets, said Zinka. People have to live the moment.

  Haffner murmured something indistinct.

  And because Zinka seemed suddenly sad, Haffner asked her, delicately, if she were sad. Yes, she replied, she was sad. But she did not want to talk about it.

  —My country, it is destroyed, said Zinka. The baddest country in Europe.

  But Haffner had seen worse.

  The light outside, as usual, still persisted. It was as if the light went on for ever. In this light, Haffner looked down at his plate. He had to confess, the food here distressed him. He had never been one for the Jewish food, the food of Eastern Europe. He preferred nouvelle cuisine to the heaviness of starch. In a sauce of sour cream and oil lay a dumpling, stuffed with pork. Haffner considered if at this late stage he should return to keeping kosher. It seemed desirable. The dumpling outdid him. First, it had been fried. This fried dumpling had then, surmised Haffner, been boiled. Nothing else could have created this texture, of the softest rubber. He did not understand it. In the sauce of sour cream and oil, small moments of bacon were visible.

  In what way, thought Haffner, could this hotel be said to care about health? What was the point of the massages, the waters, the sauna?

  He looked across at Frau Tummel. She was staring at him, angrily; and Herr Tummel was staring at his wife. He also seemed to be angry.

  There had been a woman in love with her in Zagreb, Zinka was telling him. Did he understand this? He did, he assured her, he did. But why should she seem so proud of this fact, thought Haffner. It wasn’t so strange, to fall in love. It just needed, in the end, someone else to be there. Oh Zinka was so tired of love, she said. And Haffner raised an eyebrow: a self-interested, altruistic eyebrow. He mentioned, for instance, Niko. Yes, she said: but Haffner knew Niko too. That boy. She was not sure he understood her. But no. She did not want to talk about this.

  —No? said Haffner.

  He began to worry that she wanted to mention the wardrobe, and all the pleasures which Haffner had seen. On this subject, he worried, he had no conversation.

  No, she said. There were things it was good not to talk about. The matters of the heart. It was complicated. He did not want to hear this. Haffner tried to assure her that he did.

  —No, she said. Not now.

  The sex scene which was not a sex scene: this was the recent story of Niko and Zinka. The idyllic scene in the hotel room had been only theatre, after all. They were absent from each other. They coupled only in disguise, in the dark.

  How could Haffner know this? Was it Haffner’s fault, dear reader, if he did not know the inner history of Zinka?

  6

  No, Haffner wasn’t free. Unlike the transparent and liberated reader, he couldn’t be everywhere, like the bright encompassing air.

  For these were the nights of Zinka. The concrete balcony to her apartment was covered by an advert, a scrim hung down ten floors from the roof. The scrim was printed with a woman on a cell phone, in some countryside, surrounded by birds. On Zinka’s balcony, therefore, the reverse of a savage, eight-foot swallow looked in on her – observing the television in its mahogany hutch; a garden chair, for ever folded, in a corner; the reproductions of Impressionist paintings, from the era when leisure was invented. In the apartment block opposite hers, the forgetful cleaner – who returned home on the buses, disliking the organic smell of her shoes, the chemical smell of her hands – would leave random lights on, illuminating the darkness for the potential spectator. But there were no other spectators. Except for Zinka’s books – an illustrated translation of Pushkin, a novel in Russian by Dovlatov, a history of ballet – which looked down on her and Niko in their bed.

  And Niko would touch Zinka’s thigh, gently – which began their new game. In response to Niko’s roughness, Zinka now never gave him permission. He could do what he wanted, she said: just so long as he expected her to do nothing.

  And so, sadly, Niko did.

  7

  Perhaps this, then, was one reason for her silence. Perhaps this was one reason why she said to Haffner that she didn’t want to talk about herself. Instead, she wanted him to tell her about Haffner’s war.

  And she looked up at Haffner.

  So Haffner began where he always began, with the long night of Haffner’s spring in Italy: in the foothills around Anzio. Haffner got there on Valentine’s Day. They were in the woods, on the flat ground, and the Germans, with the Ukrainians, were on the Alban Hills outside Rome. So they could see everything. There was nowhere you could escape. Everything was bound to hit something. The Germans had one wonderful gun – an 80 mm. Much better than anything the British had. They were sending over these great big heavies called Anzio Annies. Going for the docks. But it was much worse when they came over at night with the cluster bombs. On the whole, said Haffner, the British were very well dug in. But just about the time that Haffner got there, on Valentine’s Day, was when the Germans made their one last big effort. They couldn’t use their armour in that sort of mud. He didn’t know it at the time. He didn’t realise that those four or five days were the Germans’ last chance to push the British and the Americans into the sea. They put everything into it. The noise, said Haffner. The noise. Their artillery was very good. The British had some destroyers outside the docks who were firing as well. And years later, on holiday in Madeira with his wife, he met a naval chap, who said: it was him. He was helping them. So there it was. Things got better when they began to see their own planes.

  It was amazing, thought Haffner, how you settled down to a life: truly amazing. The chaps in the front were machine-gunned, killed in hand-to-hand fighting. And yet soon this seemed like a façon de vivre. His job as the second in command was to take up all the rations and things. And there was really only one way, which the Germans knew about: an alley.

  Haffner paused. He considered himself. What could he tell her about Haffner’s war? It seemed indescribable.

  He remembered the yard in a town outside Alexandria, where he had enjoyed the greatest shrimp of his life, its flesh a white fluff inside the charred shell: there was a concrete reservoir, and a wind pump pumping water into it, clacking as it turned, casting a flickering shadow on the house.

  This was all he could really tell her.

  The problem about catastrophe, he had learned from the silences in his conversations with Papa, and
then had learned for himself, from the silences in his own conversations with other people, was the incomprehension. There was the incomprehension of those who had seen nothing; and then there was the incomprehension of those who had seen everything.

  Everyone persisted in the safety of flippancy. But maybe the flippancy was right.

  At home, when the war was over, Livia would ask him why he was so private. She used to ask him this as if it were a fault, remembered Haffner – only idly noticing the fact that Frau Tummel was suddenly talking with animation to her husband. Livia expected Haffner to behave like a hero – to revel in his war stories. But Haffner never felt like a hero; not when he was being heroic. It had only bred in him a certain humour: a wit which could enjoy the gags of the emperors, like the one who, when a man asked for extension of his sick leave, ordered that this man should have his throat cut – for if the medicine had taken so long to work, then the man needed to be bled. With this humour, Haffner preserved his version of privacy. Livia used to upbraid him for his gaucheness at parties. He was always ready for his tête-à-têtes, she said. So why could he not be charming when there was more than one person present? And Haffner tried to explain that he had never been one for parties: for all the social whirl.

  But maybe it was more of a problem that after the war Haffner’s sense of humour had been replaced with something no one, really, wanted to know.

  In Rome, Haffner had admired the triumphal column on which was carved a panel displaying a German baby being screamingly torn away from the arms of its mother by a stern Roman soldier. But most of all, he admired the Roman talent for the comic. Because – wrote a scholar in a booklet which Cesare bought and then translated out loud for Haffner, over a coffee in Piazza Navona – although a modern viewer might see this panel as deeply affecting, for the Romans it would have been amusing. It would have been sitcom.

  And maybe Haffner and his Romans had it right. A war as a farce: this doesn’t seem to me to be so implausible – with its mismatched exits and entrances, and its grandly outflanked speeches.

  8

  No, he hadn’t told Livia about certain things. So he was hardly going to be able to do it here, thought Haffner, with a girl he hardly knew.

  His anecdotes faded away.

  But then Zinka said that her friend, she too had been in a war: the recent war. Haffner nodded. She once told Zinka that she had seen such a horrible thing: she had seen one of her neighbours with his mouth propped open with a piece of wood. Then they made him swallow sewage water. This was the woman who loved her.

  —She committed suicide, said Zinka, thoughtfully.

  —Who? said Haffner.

  —That woman, said Zinka.

  —The lesbian? asked Haffner.

  —Yes, said Zinka.

  —In what way? said Haffner.

  —Drinking pills, said Zinka.

  —It’s easier, said Haffner.

  The conversation paused.

  This wasn’t something that she told people, said Zinka. But she would tell Haffner.

  This struck Haffner as strange, but he was feeling so unsure of what was happening that he decided to let this thought go. So intent was he on constructing his own escape, his desertion from his duty, he didn’t consider that, for Zinka, Haffner could represent an escape too.

  There was one time, said Zinka, when she was walking down the street in Zagreb. And some soldiers were outside an embassy. And she was with her friend. As they approached, the soldiers began to raise their rifles. This was true.

  He didn’t doubt it, said Haffner.

  And this was what she had never forgotten, said Zinka. They were shouting that they were nothing: they were only walking home. And eventually, of course, as he could see, nothing happened. But at the moment when it seemed possible the soldiers would shoot, said Zinka, she stepped behind her friend. And although immediately she stepped back out, level with her, she could never forget this moment of self-betrayal.

  There was a pause.

  And at this moment, Haffner – timeless – felt everything returning to him.

  The beach at Anzio strewn with bodies, as if everyone were sunbathing.

  But most of all, in the series of women who had graced the life of Haffner, here, at its zenith, there was Zinka – for whom he felt such absolute adoration. Yes, at this moment, thought Haffner, extravagant through nostalgia, ignorant of Zinka, he could have endured anything, if only she would love him. Even if there was, I feel, little left for Haffner to endure. Yes, this was Haffner’s ideology now. Maybe it could even borrow a slogan. Love me as little as you like – this was Haffner: but just love me as long as you can.

  For Haffner believed in coincidence – he saw his life as a system of signs. He scanned each new acquaintance for the meaning they were trying to figure in the everlasting life of Haffner. So here, in his finale, he could only see in Zinka a kindred spirit, the twin for whom he had been searching all his life. The twin whom Haffner tried to align as closely as possible to himself.

  —Oh but that was nothing, said Haffner.

  There were so many ways, he said, that you could feel ashamed. Not just the obvious betrayal. In Anzio, he said, at night, they had to leave the bodies on the beach: it was too dangerous to go back for anyone. So Haffner had to lie there. And a boy was calling, quietly: Mama Mama Mama.

  —Mama Mama Mama, said Haffner.

  All he wanted, said Haffner, was for this boy to bloody shut up.

  It was only some years later that he realised how much he was like his father – when Esther reminded him of the story her grandfather had once told her. He described to her the wailing you could hear from no-man’s-land, at night. At this point, he recalled, Papa would begin to shout. Because Papa was still angry at the disparity between this wailing and the official British telegrams, informing the anguished families that their heroes had died instantly, from a bullet in the heart.

  —Sometimes, Haffner said to Zinka, one has conversations which are impossible with one’s wife.

  —But you’re not married, said Zinka. Your wife, she is dead.

  —It’s the principle, he said.

  And Haffner smiled.

  —She’s still alive in spirit, said Haffner.

  And Zinka smiled too.

  And in the sudden pause of their understanding, Haffner could still not prevent himself remembering the first time he had used this line about impossible conversations. It was one of his ordinary lines: in the Travelodge, at the business convention. Each time he used it, even now, even though he could remember all the times he had used it insincerely, he believed in it as true.

  9

  As if to celebrate this moment of Haffner’s glory, the small jazz band serenading the hotel’s residents began a melody from the oeuvre of Haffner’s hero, Artie Shaw; and, cushioned by this melody, Frau Tummel descended on him, as if from the highest clouds.

  Haffner looked to Zinka. Zinka looked away, staring at the indifferent mountains, as if finding in their indifference some kind of solace.

  Frau Tummel was simply here, she said, to have the smallest word with Haffner. She beamed at Zinka. She did not want to interrupt.

  He was all ears, said Haffner. She was sorry? said Frau Tummel. He was listening, said Haffner.

  But this was not entirely true. The melody began to bother Haffner. He couldn’t remember the title. Even as Frau Tummel stood in front of him. It suddenly seemed important. And maybe this wasn’t just a ruse of Haffner’s. For his only dates left were the songs. The songs in which dead people sang about their immortal love. As soon as he heard a song, then everything came back to him. With the songs, he could happily wallow in the wreckage of Haffner.

  She just wanted to check that they still had their arrangement for the next day, said Frau Tummel. And Haffner nodded: a toy dog.

  That was wonderful, exclaimed Frau Tummel. Because if he didn’t want to, then he only needed to say.

  It was a conversation Haffner was practised in.
Of course he wanted to see her, he said, fluent and abstract with flattery.

  In that case, said Frau Tummel, she would leave them be. Or perhaps, she added, she could take a glass of aquavit with them – glancing over at her husband making pencilled notes in his guidebook.

  Zinka sighed. Haffner was silent. Encouraged, Frau Tummel motioned to the distant waiter. She pointed to Haffner’s glass of aquavit. She mimed her desire for another. Then no, she reconsidered: she called the waiter over and ordered a glass of dry white wine.

  —The aquavit, she explained to Haffner and Zinka, it is not for me.

  She smiled, at Zinka, who did not smile back.

  Frau Tummel, thought Haffner, was the absolute bourgeois. She embodied strength: the statuesque matronly repression. There was nothing, thought Haffner, which Frau Tummel could not sublimate. And perhaps this, if he were honest with himself, was also why Frau Tummel so appealed to him. He liked the effort of her strength. Her strength enchanted him. Yes, he realised, for Frau Tummel he felt a spreading tenderness, welling under Haffner’s soul, like a bruise.

  Frau Tummel was talking about her husband. She was playing the part of the wife. One never knew, she said, how much one was doing the right thing.

  —Perhaps, said Frau Tummel, I am not the right woman for him.

  —Come now, said Haffner. Of course you are!

  And perhaps if he had thought more precisely or extensively he might have decided that this was not exactly the right tone; that seduced as he may have been by Frau Tummel’s calm he should still have understood its fragility. He should still have expected that his pity was not what Frau Tummel wanted.

  He really didn’t need to talk to her like this, she said. It was hardly elegant. To this accusation, Haffner made some kind of noise. In this noise, he hoped to register a charming protestation. Frau Tummel regarded him. He was useless, she observed.