The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

—No, said Benji.

  —So you’ve never tried to masturbate when you’re circumcised? said Zeek.

  —How could I try it? said Benji.

  —So then. The thing is this, said Zeek. It needs a lot of Vaseline.

  —Vaseline? asked Benji.

  —Or something similar, said Zeek.

  —I don’t need Vaseline, said Benjamin.

  —But you’re not circumcised, said Zeek.

  —Yes, I know, said Benjamin. I told you that.

  In the grey dawns after parties, we would sit out in the garden and talk: while in the living rooms, the bedrooms, the girls dozed in each other’s arms, the junkies talked to themselves.

  The issue of circumcision used to worry Benjamin. Once, Benjamin had talked to a girl whom he dearly wanted to kiss. As so often in the imperfectly Jewish life of Benjamin, the conversation had turned to penises, and their foreskins. She really did think, she said, that circumcised penises were preferable. They lasted longer, she smiled at him. And Benjamin, with his yarmulke, his deep knowledge of archaic law, wondered if by this she meant to flirt with him. It was possible. Come on, kid, it was possible, he said grimly, to himself. Even if, as only he knew, her hope was utterly misguided. He had to be honest. Sadly, Benjamin admitted to the intact nature of his penis, its shroud of flesh: its headscarf. It was the only way in which Esther had resisted Esmond’s Orthodoxy: the practice of circumcision, she used to say, was barbaric. She couldn’t countenance it for her darling son. But of course, Benji’s girl then added, the circumcised penis had its own charm too. She looked at Benjamin. Confused, he looked back at her, and was quiet.

  This was the boy whom Haffner could hear outside his room: while Haffner struggled to extricate himself from the placid dreams of his sleep, into the more unnatural dreams of Haffner’s Alpine existence.

  3

  Haffner picked up the phone. He was sorry, said the receptionist to this newly bedraggled version of Haffner: his whitely blond hair awry, uncombed; his beard sprouting. Haffner asked him what he was sorry for: the receptionist explained that his grandson had said that his grandfather should be expecting him.

  —No problem, said Haffner, exhausted. No problem.

  And it was nearly lunchtime, added the receptionist, pedantically.

  It could hardly get worse, thought Haffner. But then, as he struggled with the sheets, his shoes, the elongated dimensions of his washing routine in the bathroom, he was interrupted by the realisation that it was, in fact, worse. Benjamin, Haffner suddenly realised, was not talking to himself. Though why he had thought the boy would be talking to himself, he didn’t know. No, there wasn’t just Benjamin. There was also Frau Tummel. They were engaged in conversation outside his door.

  And why not? thought Haffner, in dismal jubilation. Why wouldn’t Frau Tummel be here as well?

  It was as if the farce of his life were repeating itself, just on a diminishing scale. The interruptions of the real – the unwelcome real – which had marked his life continued even here, when Haffner was nowhere.

  4

  In the corridor, Frau Tummel was telling Benjamin that such devotion to a grandfather was rare in his generation. It was admirable, she said.

  —Uhhuh, said Benjamin.

  He had just arrived from the airport. And as he made himself known to reception, he had been interrupted by this woman whose appearance Benjamin felt he knew all too well, from the mothers of his schoolfriends: she was stern, and extravagant, simultaneously. When she discovered who Benjamin was, she was delighted, she said. She was ravished. She knew his grandfather, she assured him, very well. She was just on her way to see him.

  He would never understand what the women still saw in his grandfather, thought Benjamin, resigned. No, he wouldn’t even try. There was no point. It was part of the whole mystery of sex: a mystery which he felt was way beyond him. Though why the mystery of sex was not by now beyond his grandfather seemed an injustice too cosmic to be contemplated.

  Frau Tummel asked him if he was here for a holiday as well, like his grandfather. He replied that sort of. Yes? she said. He was more here on business, said Benji. Like his grandfather.

  He really did look very like his grandfather, she said. Absolutely handsome.

  Benjamin simpered.

  If only, thought Benjamin, she were about thirty years younger. It was always like this. If only women said this whom Benjamin thought of as girls.

  Frau Tummel thought that he must admire his grandfather very much. And Benjamin replied ruefully that he could be quite different at home. Frau Tummel queried this. No, said Benjamin: it was true.

  In the window, the Alpine mountains were blankly beautiful.

  Well, said Frau Tummel, she had to admit that maybe there was something in what he was saying. Herr Haffner had his complications. This she would admit. But that, she said flirtatiously, smiling at Benjamin, was, after all, the signature of a man! She had no idea, said Benjamin sadly, how difficult he could be. Difficult didn’t cover it.

  But he did not expand on this to Frau Tummel. No, Benji was loyal. He did not tell her what he was now remembering – how once they had discovered Haffner on the island of Malta. He was with a dancer from a cruise ship. Another time, in Florence, Haffner simply wandered off; and was found two days later, in a bar on the south side of the river.

  She could not believe it was true, said Frau Tummel. She had not seen this difficulty in Herr Haffner. Herr Haffner, she would at least accept, was a man with his own sense of himself, said Frau Tummel. That was one of the problems, agreed Benjamin. But there were others.

  Benjamin was an expert on his grandfather. Observations of his grandfather had formed his education. Once, he had idolised him. Now, perhaps, his idolisation had become inverted: a strange form of love, which was inseparable from dislike.

  5

  Haffner opened his door.

  —You’re here? said Haffner to Benji. How?

  —Surprised? asked Benji.

  —Not really, said Haffner.

  It was true. Nothing surprised him when it came to the decisions of his grandson, the wayward passions to which he was subject.

  —Shouldn’t you be in school? asked Haffner. Shouldn’t you be learning something? The cultivation of forelocks? The possibility of prayer?

  —You see? said Benjamin to Frau Tummel.

  Anyway, said Benjamin: he had told him. Haffner questioned this.

  —On the phone? said Benjamin, with his American fall and rise.

  —You never told me, said Haffner.

  They paused, in this silence of disagreement.

  —Are you really wearing that? said Benjamin.

  Yes, said Haffner, he was: refusing to explain this unusual wardrobe choice of pink hiking T-shirt and his familiar sky-blue tracksuit.

  There was another pause.

  —It is so wonderful, the devotion! exclaimed Frau Tummel, beaming on Haffner.

  Haffner looked at her, then at Benji. He could do, thought Haffner, curtly, with losing some of that weight. But there it was. He had always been spoiled: by Esther, and then by Livia. Who always cooked the kid steak. Who made hand-cut, hand-fried fries: a treat which Haffner, in fifty years of marriage, never got for himself.

  —You had breakfast? Haffner asked his grandson.

  —On the plane, said Benji. Plane food.

  —Hungry? asked Haffner.

  —I’m hungry, said Benjamin.

  Haffner’s appetites were catholic. Benji’s appetite had been for food. Now, unknown to Haffner, he was concerned to broaden the range of his appetites. But it was his appetite for food on which Haffner and his grandson had forged their friendship.

  —You know what’s happening in the cricket? asked Haffner.

  —No, said Benjamin.

  —Blowing a gale? said Haffner, cryptically, with an intimate smile.

  Benjamin looked embarrassed. And this saddened Haffner. Mutely, he went in search of the long-lost time when Haffner had ta
ught Benjamin his favourite routine from the movies – dialogue which they had then so often recited by heart – where a man stranded in a mountain hotel phones home to find out the cricket score.

  Now Haffner had to quote to himself, in silence, the next lines in his adored dialogue – You don’t know? You can’t be in England and not know the test score – grimly thinking as he did so that it was only natural that this was how his century should end: with everyone having lost their sense of humour.

  —I will leave you two boys together, said Frau Tummel.

  She would meet Haffner back here, she said to Haffner: to talk. For a moment, she looked darkly at Haffner. And then, smiling more benignly at Benjamin, she left.

  Haffner turned to Benjamin, and he sighed.

  6

  Precocious, in the heyday of his teenage years, Benjamin had listened to the hip hop from New York, the ragga from Jamaica. His favourite thing was the Los Angeles hip-hop artist, the modern saint: 2pac. Everyone loved 2pac, true. But in this love, Benji was unusual. He didn’t care about the drugs, nor the women. Nor about the gold and diamanté T round 2pac’s neck, a cartoon crucifix. No, for Benjamin, 2pac was an example of pure romance. His favourite song – which he played on repeat – was 2pac’s elegy ‘Life Goes On’. Have a party at his funeral, let every rapper rock it, sang 2pac, rapped 2pac. Let the hos that he used to know from way before kiss him from his head to his toe. Give him a paper and pen so he could write about his life of sin, a couple of bottles of gin in case he didn’t get in.

  The swagger had Benji entranced.

  He’d be lying, continued 2pac, if he told him that he never thought of death. My nigger, they were the last ones left. But life went on.

  It was so cool, thought Benjamin. Once, he tried to explain this to Haffner. Haffner tried to listen. This presented some problems: practical (the fitting of the earphones, the working of the portable CD player); and aesthetic (the understanding of this noise as music, rather than noise).

  As a teenager, Benji’s ideal habitat was the urban sprawl of Los Angeles: the gang warfare, the misogyny. He spent his life in thrall to the foreign, in thrall to images to which he had no right.

  This was the younger Benji – the boy whom Haffner still admired.

  A hint of the devastating problem which was to ensue occurred when Benjamin, aged fifteen, decided that, while everyone else went on holiday with their youth groups to Israel – to meet girls, and sleep on beaches – instead he wanted to stay in a Buddhist monastery. This monastery was located in the countryside outside London: in Hertfordshire. It was his spiritual goal. He arrived with a smuggled packet of cigarettes, and a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. For Benji, at fifteen, was a rebel, and philosopher. But when he was confronted by the bell at five the next morning, the meditation for two hours before breakfast, the unidentified and unidentifiable breakfast itself, the work in the fields, by the afternoon he was too depressed to carry on. He couldn’t even tell the men apart from the women. He went into the room of the Head Monk and asked to leave. The Head Monk looked at him. He implored him, having made the important break from the temptations of the city, to persevere in his difficult task. The worst was over, he said. But Benji was not so persuaded. There was a skull on the Head Monk’s desk; and Benji did not want to be confronted by memento mori. He could not tell, in fact, why it was he was here at all. He had simply liked the idea of it – a man above the temptations of beaches, and girls.

  Two hours later, Esther had arrived to take him home.

  He had at least learned something, Benjamin told everyone. He’d discovered how deeply he believed in food.

  And Haffner loved him for this. The boy was independent! He understood how much more important the senses were than a sense of the serious. But the let-down came soon afterwards. Benji, after all, was in a crisis of faith. He had gone through hip hop, drugs and Buddhism. And now he returned to the most basic, the least loved. Benjamin returned to the religion of his forefathers: a lineage which began with his father, if one missed out his grandfather.

  That was why, at university, he spent his vacations in the Promised Land. That was why, after university, he had entered the summer school of a rabbinical seminary.

  But then, Benjamin’s Jewishness, like all his other crazes, was really a form of romance. He wanted a past: he wanted a past which was more torn apart by history than the history of his happy family.

  In Tel Aviv, Benjamin had met a girl who came from a family of Jewish-Algerian intellectuals. Somewhere in the Sahara, she said, there was a tribe which bore her surname. Benji wished that this girl’s past were his. He didn’t know what he might do with it – but he was sure that this was the missing piece of Benjamin’s jigsaw, lost in another jigsaw box, abandoned underneath a sofa.

  His forefathers! Who else was more like Benjamin than Haffner? Like his grandfather before him, Benji was a sucker for bohemia.

  7

  Haffner, however, only saw in Benjamin an exponent of the Law. He was constantly depressed by the cowl of seriousness with which Benjamin so often insulated himself: the easy tristesse of history which enticed him.

  This judgement was true, in a way. Benjamin dearly wanted the reassuring safety of the righteous, the morally certain. But this was no reason, perhaps, to dislike him, to think that he was prim. He wanted order because he was so often overtaken by compulsions he could not understand.

  His first craze was soccer. On the white gloss of his bedroom cupboards, whose moulding was painted dark blue, in imitation of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer strip, Benjamin had arranged stickers produced by Panini for the 1986 World Cup. His favourite stickers were the Brazilians – with their pineapple T-shirts, their one-word names (Socrates!), their impossible hair. Benjamin had arranged Brazil, and Paraguay, and England, gently overlapping, following the blue line of gloss along his cupboards.

  Benjamin, in the youth of his youth, didn’t have ripped-out pictures of film stars, or porn stars, on his ceiling. No nipples, or even bikinis, in black and white or colour, were visible in his room. True, he did possess one photocopy of a pornographic image. This picture had been given to him, as a special favour, by Ezekiel. A girl with thick, if indistinctly printed, nipples was raising a sailor-suit top towards her chin. A sailor’s hat was cocked, coquettish, on her white-blonde permed hair. How innocent he was! In Benjamin’s special dreams, he would touch her nipples, curiously – like tuning a radio. But this image was not public. He had simply tucked his pornographic possession, neatly folded, between pages 305 and 306 of his book which contained 1001 facts about the French Revolution, with its glossy laminated boards.

  Instead of sex, Benjamin had crazes. There had been the soccer, then the drugs, and the hip hop, and the Buddhism. Then the Orthodox Jewishness. And now, finally, Benji had been disturbed by the true sexual furore – inspired by his Jewish and Algerian and French girl in Tel Aviv. With this girl, finally, Benjamin had lost his virginity. She was hairless between the legs, except for a black tuft, so that when he touched her all he felt was a slick softness. He nearly swooned. For this, thought Benji, was love.

  It wasn’t love, of course. Over various phone calls, Zeek tried to explain this to him. But Benji didn’t care. Instead, he simply retreated into the burrow of his feelings. He told Zeek what he had not told her: that when he left her, the next morning, after they had slept together, in the taxi, he wrote in the dawn, on the back of a receipt, that this was true desire, a true passion. And passions were so rare.

  This was why Benjamin was here, in the spa town. He needed an escape from the summer school, the regalia of his religion – and he needed to talk to the man who was his only authority when it came to women. The man who was his – faulty, despaired-of – authority as an adult.

  But I think there was a further complication. Benji was here because he wanted permission to leave the summer school: he wanted to replace his respect for his religion with a more freestyle interest in his girl. This was true. But in his am
atory crisis the family’s inheritance had therefore acquired more significance than it might, perhaps, have had. For Benjamin felt guilty at his wish to abandon his religion. The villa was therefore his chance for redress: his chance to show his family and forefathers that he had not abandoned them entirely.

  The villa was an excuse.

  Which was, perhaps, one way in which Benji differed from his grandfather.

  8

  He should really stop looking at women like that, said Benjamin. Haffner said he would look where he liked. And believe him, he wasn’t looking. Benjamin said that it just wasn’t right.

  Again, the lethargy which Haffner felt when contemplating his adventure with Frau Tummel transformed into something so much more protective. So much more like love. Such sadness which Haffner felt for the bodies of women! Such sadness which transformed into a pity of the flesh!

  She was, said Haffner, a very handsome woman.

  —Whatever! exclaimed Benjamin. Whatever.

  Benji was here for business. So skip the breakfast, said Benji, skip the lunch: surprising even himself. They were going to sort this whole thing with the villa today. It was why he was here.

  He knew, as he said this, that his motives were mixed. He knew how much he was fleeing from his summer school. He knew what a convenient excuse the story of the family villa was to him. But surely, thought Benji, the fact that he was in panicking flight should not mean he could not solve a practical problem. At least the villa was a problem whose solution was obvious.

  —Not so simple, said Haffner.

  —It’s simple, said Benjamin.

  —Believe me, said Haffner. If anything were simple, this isn’t it.

  Would the young not give this up? wondered Haffner. When would they learn to talk precisely? He wanted to be done with trying to bring them up. Or, maybe more precisely, he wanted to educate them out of their attempts to bring him up.