The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —Vodka? asked Niko.

  —Perhaps not, said Haffner.

  —Maybe you prefer tea? asked Niko. It is more British?

  —A double vodka, said Haffner.

  Returning with a plastic cup awash with vodka, Niko asked Haffner if he knew that they had all survived radiation. Or survived as much as they could. Oh yes, many years ago, when they were children, a factory had blown up a hundred kilometres south of here, but the distance was nothing, said Niko. The radiation was everywhere, all over the countryside.

  —The motherfuckers, they killed us. Fucked us, said Niko.

  His sister, he told Haffner, was born with only four fingers on her left hand. He moved closer to Haffner. He understood this? Only four fingers. On her left hand.

  Unwillingly, Haffner inhaled the alcohol of Niko’s breath. He drank a gulp of vodka, for equilibrium.

  Haffner, said Haffner, understood.

  It wasn’t as if Haffner hadn’t seen the horrors: he had seen the rule book torture – the forced standing for twenty-four hours, so that the prisoner’s ankles swelled up, blisters developed on the soles of the feet, the kidneys shut down. In one village in Italy, the soldiers had just gone mad. They dressed up in women’s clothes. They hung clothes in the trees. They went through the houses. Soon, there was nothing left to eat. Once, on the edge of the desert, they came across a food truck, carrying fruit. The people inside were crushed. Haffner and his unit stopped. They wiped the fuel and blood off, and started to eat the peaches, the heavy grapes. They hadn’t eaten for a day. There was a girl there who had a dress but no legs. This was one of the women to whom Haffner felt closest. At a checkpoint in Syria, a kid was in an abandoned truck, cowering. He went to help her. He picked her up. Her head slumped off the neck on to his arm, heavy, like a pumpkin.

  It wasn’t then that Haffner threw up. It was ten minutes later, after he had buried her. After he had buried her just there, by the side of the road – because what fool would wander off to find a place to bury the dead? Just as what fool went off to seek his necessary privacy if he wanted to shit? The sniper fire on the way out; the friendly fire on the way back. Instead, you squatted there, in front of everyone, discussing the imaginary world of sports.

  6

  And Haffner discovered in this moment with Niko its secret twin, which already existed in the story of Haffner.

  In another blackout, the universal blackout of 1977 – the summer Haffner came back to New York after being away for three years – he had argued with Goldfaden about sport. They were in Chinatown. Goldfaden had just outlined his theory that genetically the Jewish race was programmed to adore Chinese food. And Haffner felt no urge to disagree. He was happy. Before him, sat a plate of crispy shredded beef: a pile of orange twigs – which was Haffner’s most reliable delight.

  Then the lights went out. And Haffner found the conversation turning to sports.

  It was escapism, said Goldfaden. There was nothing wrong with this, he wanted to add. He believed that everyone, at some time, needed a way of escaping. For Goldfaden, it was love. For Haffner, it was sports. Where, then, was the argument?

  The argument, thought Haffner, was precisely in this idea that anything could be imaginary. Nothing was imaginary. This was Haffner’s idea. So often accused of being divorced from real life, Haffner always maintained that – on the contrary – he would love to be divorced from real life, but the divorce was impossible. There was no counterlife.

  As waiters began to scurry round for candles, Haffner talked.

  The accusation of escapism was not a new one. Normally, however, this was seen as a bad thing. Esther used to accuse him of a lack of seriousness. Sport wasn’t, said Esther, real life. She asked her new husband to agree with her. And Esmond did. But Haffner now maintained, in front of Goldfaden, in the dark, that there was no difference between a sport and real life: how, he wondered, could there be? In what way was real life suspended by the act of kicking a football, that would not mean that the act of sipping a coffee also represented a suspension of real life? The theory was ridiculous. What escapism was it to be battered by emotion, scarred by defeat, elated in victory? In Haffner’s opinion, this proved a further and deeper truth: there was no such thing as escapism. No, never. How could you escape? Where did Goldfaden think he could go?

  Well, said Goldfaden: he supposed he was much more of a romantic than Haffner.

  Did he really want to talk about football? said Haffner, ignoring this comparison. Because he could. The Norwegians, for instance, who refused to play Nazi football. So the quislings watched each other in desolate stadiums. How was that not real life? So OK, said Goldfaden. But Haffner wasn’t finished. Let us not, said Haffner, forget the Viennese genius Matthias Sindelar, known as The Wafer, who was said to have brains in his legs, and many unexpected ideas occurred to them while they were running. For instance, said Haffner, there was the last ever match between Austria and Germany, a month after the Nazis had annexed Austria in 1938. Everyone knew that Sindelar had been told not to score. For the whole first half, therefore, he pushed the ball a little wide of each post, sarcastically. And then, in the second half, he couldn’t stop himself: so Sindelar scored. And then another man scored a free kick, thus sealing the game, and Sindelar, because he had ideas in his legs, went to celebrate by dancing in front of the Nazi directors’ box.

  That, said Haffner, was sport. It could never be an escape from life. Life was everywhere.

  No, there was no such thing as a counterlife, Haffner wanted to argue. Just as there was no such thing as a real metamorphosis. In the end, you only had yourself to work with. Wherever you went, it was still you.

  While around them, the city of New York was looted. Though whether this proved or disproved Haffner, in his imaginary nostalgic lecture hall, he didn’t know.

  7

  He carried on looking at the girls. In Italy they had called them segnorini – the girls who went with the Allied soldiers: they mispronounced them, a l’inglese.

  When she bent down, you could see the neat fur between her legs.

  Behind him, the light of a candle flickered. A girl was standing beside him. She was tall, she had straight black hair, she was what the world would consider the pornographic ideal. Whatever her breasts were made of, Haffner liked it. She told Haffner her name. He could not hear it. She told him again. She thanked him for buying her a drink. He raised an eyebrow. Behind her, Niko raised a glass, gaily.

  —You have a drink? she asked Haffner.

  Haffner had a drink.

  —So, she said, you are good to go.

  He couldn’t deny it. Like one of Benji’s wind-up toys, which could unleash its skittering movements wherever it was placed: on the neat chevrons of blond parquet in a country-house museum or the linoleum of a kitchen floor – with damp stains, starry splashes of coffee, and one irrevocably non-matching square of concrete, where the lino had given out.

  The girl who now thought of herself as Haffner’s – or who thought of Haffner as her own – led him into what seemed a cave, or tunnel. It ventured into the underground. She told Haffner to sit – on a crate, or possibly an upturned bucket. It was difficult to tell. Haffner only knew that it had some kind of rim. It hurt him.

  Haffner had never been into the pornography, nor the pubs to which his City friends used to go: where angry women undressed and despised their spectators. All his pleasure was more traditional. He disliked the obscenity of modern film, the sexual glee of modern literature. There were things which shouldn’t be written down, said Haffner. There were certain forms to be observed. Pleasure was all about privacy, he thought: the burden of the boudoir.

  And even if I disagreed, I still agreed with Haffner’s motive – it wasn’t from primness that he thought this, but from a wish to preserve the erotic as a secret which one kept from other people. This didn’t seem unreasonable.

  But now, in this unstaged intimacy, Haffner could still not discover in himself any obvious erotic surg
e. He should have done, he knew this. And perhaps, even recently, he would have done – but no longer. Now, Haffner was more in love with love.

  This love was partly visible in the way his thoughts were tending to Zinka, in her bubble bath. But it was also visible in the way Haffner kept thinking of Livia. He sat on an upturned crate or bucket and told himself that he should simply do this so that Niko would still admire him. Because Niko was his ally. Niko was the friend who would restore Haffner to his heritage.

  8

  In his blackout basement, Haffner conversed urbanely with his girl. Her name, she told him, was Katya. A nice name, Haffner assured her. It was not her real name, she replied. Who needed real names? Not in here. Tonight, she said, she wanted sex, and she wanted vodka. And she had the vodka already, she said – raising the smudged plastic glass to Haffner’s worried gaze. So only one thing was missing.

  As usual, the god Priapus harried Haffner: with his cloven hooves, his staff entangled in ivy. His entire being a pulsing penis.

  An arm was twined around Haffner’s neck. He felt his lips being kissed. Then he realised that the small bikini top which Katya had been wearing was now slipping, weightless, on to his arm, then on to the floor – where it rested, invisible, unknown to Haffner, on his foot. She lifted a candle to her torso: her breasts were there, in the magical light. Katya told him that he could touch. If he were gentle.

  He belonged to an older world. The older he got, the more he believed in it. Here, in the centre of Europe, in a town which was so nearly modern, and yet had been already so melancholically superseded by other fashions, Haffner believed in romance: the candlelit dinner, the car ride home, the kiss on the cheek. This routine to be repeated, with variations.

  He tried to explain to Katya that he really did not want to touch her. If she didn’t mind. He wondered if perhaps they should rejoin the others.

  But he was in such a rush, said Katya, sadly. Did she not please him?

  He tried to look for Niko, and could see nobody. He was alone with her, in this back room. Of course, he replied, she pleased him.

  Visually, it was inarguable.

  Then he felt her press her breasts against him. Softly they gave against the protrusion of Haffner’s nose. The rough nipples rubbed against the harsher roughness of Haffner’s cheeks.

  But no, it wasn’t Haffner’s thing. He tried to explain this to her. Really, she had been very kind, but he ought to be going. And to his unsurprised dismay, Katya seemed to feel wronged by his explanations. Angrily, she upbraided him. Never, she said, had she met such a man.

  Helpless Haffner bent his head.

  Did he think she really wanted him? she asked Haffner. Dumbly, Haffner shook his head. Did he think that this was her idea of love?

  —You’re nodding when you’re not supposed to be nodding, she said.

  —Ah yes, said Haffner.

  —You’re still doing it, she said.

  They were everywhere, thought Haffner: the experts in what was real; the people who wanted to begin, or complete, his education.

  Look at him! said Katya. The man was dressed in a cagoule. She could not understand how stupid he was.

  And Haffner wanted to assure her that he was capable of stupidity so gigantic that she would hardly comprehend it.

  Maybe, thought Haffner, he was going off sex. Once, a Texan friend of his had told him a Dallas proverb. Every time you find yourself not thinking about sex, so ran the proverb, then your mind is wandering. And this had been Haffner’s philosophy, in so far as the man could have a philosophy.

  My squalid Don Quixote: avid for the higher things. The higher things which Haffner looked for in the lower things: in the lust, and the vanity, and the shame.

  The point was, said Katya, that she at least needed to be paid.

  It was the second time that day, considered Haffner, amazed – emptying the pockets of his cagoule, presenting her with all the notes he found – when he had paid for sexual services he had never wanted. But Haffner was flexible.

  He should never forget his favourite item of vocabulary. When he was in Brazil, when they were leaving the theatre, laughing to themselves at the disconcerted policemen, his counterpart in the Rio bank had tried to explain how one survived in these great times. You could do it, sure, by going underground and becoming a hero. But then you died. Or you could do it by offering up your politics to whatever came along. You preserved yourself through sacrificing your ideals. They had a word for this, he said. It was trampolin-ability. And this immediately became Haffner’s favourite word. He could trampoline. Yes, this seemed possible.

  To trampoline: the only form of maturity which Haffner ever recognised.

  9

  Rising back into the air, buoyant against gravity, Haffner made for the exit – where Niko was waiting for him. Was Niko not good to him? asked Niko. Haffner replied that Niko was very very good to him. So what, asked Niko, did Haffner think?

  Haffner promised him that yes: why not? If Niko thought he could help. He didn’t see why not. And Niko said that this was very good. He had perhaps said this before, but he liked Haffner very much. Now then: the practicals. He knew the snooker club? Of course, said Haffner, he didn’t know the snooker club. Well then, said Niko. Well then. They would sort something out. Niko himself would take him there.

  Whatever suited him, said Haffner, simply wanting to end the evening: and he walked out into the benighted dawn.

  And carelessly, without thinking, the hand of fate or the world-soul nearly placed a man in a bowler hat, Haffner’s twin, his arms by his side, like a sentry, at the end of Haffner’s day, as Haffner turned the corner into the town’s main square. But luckily this world-soul managed to arrange it so that Haffner changed his mind, did not proceed briskly back home, but lingered, looking in the window of a shop which sold domestic cleaning products, ironing boards, Hoovers, dog baskets, plastic and multicoloured clothes pegs; then the window of an adjoining lingerie shop in which was fixed a row of disembodied and cocked legs, like the Platonic ideal of a cancan.

  Finally, Haffner reached the hotel. He ignored the greeting of the woken receptionist – clutching a paperback and a serrated freshly burning plastic cup of coffee – walked into the lift, and pressed the wrong button, so that when he turned as normal to the left and tried to move his key in the lock, it would not work. Finally, after three minutes, he realised his mistake – oblivious to the scene he had left behind the door: a man in pyjamas, wielding an umbrella; a woman whimpering in the bed; a marriage teetering.

  Haffner went to sleep, dressed in the tracksuit which now doubled as his pyjamas. Commas of white chest hair nestled in the gap above the jacket’s open zip. He wanted to talk to Livia. He wanted to tell her about that conversation he had had in Chinatown, twenty years earlier, with Goldfaden. The conversation about sports. And she would turn to him, sleepy in her velvet nightgown, and tell him that of course Goldfaden was wrong. He knew that. For Livia, like Haffner, understood the majesty of sport.

  Yes, it was Livia who had watched the 1980 Wimbledon tennis final with Haffner one weekend, in the early morning, in Florida – where they had gone for a summer break: featuring the American kid with the curls, and the Swedish man with the blue-eyed stare. And it was Livia who had pointed out to Haffner the obvious symbolism of the fight: the two versions of machismo. And which one, did Haffner think, was him? He thought, he said, that he was possibly the kid with the curls. And which one, asked Livia, did he think that she would go for?

  The likeable kid with the curls? asked Haffner, hopefully.

  No, unfortunately for Haffner, Livia’s preference was instead for the resourceful and quiet man: whose machismo needed no theatricality. Even though as she said it Livia kissed him on the cheek, and grinned at him. And Haffner was glad that as he looked at her blouse – one button wrongly fastened so that the fabric bunched out and Haffner could see the beginning of a breast, the lace florets of her bra – his lust was unabated.

&nbs
p; But Haffner’s audience was gone. So Haffner lay there, on his left side, then shifted, to give solace to his heart, so placating the superstitious aspect of his soul. The aspect of his soul which believed in a soul at all.

  PART THREE

  Haffner Interrupted

  1

  The next morning, Haffner woke up late, to hear Benji in conversation outside his door.

  Perhaps it was a bad dream. He tried to wake up further.

  He couldn’t. The dream was real.

  2

  —Me, Benji used to say, to his friends, his admirers, I have the greatest breasts of anyone I know. If I were a woman, said Benji, I’d want me. I mean yeah. I mean absolutely.

  Yes, Benji was huge.

  The hugeness had caused so many miniature aspects of Benji. It was, for example, one reason why he hadn’t really had girlfriends. His emotions were distractedly doodled with shyness. Self-consciousness possessed him. This was also a reason why Benjamin was beauty-obsessed. He was always a sucker for the grand beauty. When it came to female beauty, his standards were strict. And finally, the size was why he had been forced to teach himself survival through wit.

  —You want to know something? Benji said to our mutual friend Ezekiel: Ezekiel, known as Zeek.

  —They look at my penis in the urinals, continued Benjamin, and they can’t see it. It’s like I’m pissing from my belly, you know?

  —You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, said Zeek. It’s not so bad. I mean, you’re not circumcised, are you?