The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  They paused outside the entrace to a jazz café in a garden – its walls graffiti’d with red and black unicorns: the arpeggios scaling the heights of the trees. They considered it; they walked on.

  Maybe all of Benjamin’s anxiety was his fault, thought Haffner. Maybe this was the natural consequence of Haffner: he had bequeathed accidentally to his grandson this exorbitant need for rules. In Benji’s wish to be the opposite of his grandfather. Walking towards the hotel with Benjamin – as, still feeling exhausted, after two dramatic nights, Haffner dreamed of a possible nap, since exhaustion was becoming his natural state – he wondered if it was somehow in opposition to the ghost of Haffner that Benji had inherited this absolute anxiety about the feelings of others: a total timidity.

  And it seemed that Haffner was right.

  Only when they reached the doors to the hotel did Benjamin finally begin to talk about the fact that Benji was now in love. Yes, he said, he had met a girl whose gorgeousness transcended everything of which Benji had thought the world capable. But, wondered Benji, could he really know she liked him?

  —Have you kissed this girl? said Haffner.

  That wasn’t the question, said Benjamin. The question was: did she want him to do this again? She seemed so cool. It was, said Haffner, an easy question to answer. He should simply see what happened next. He should kiss her again. What harm could that do? And Benjamin replied that, well, he just didn’t know how much he wanted the burden of it. He didn’t know if he wanted the relationship. And if he didn’t want that, then he thought it was better to do nothing.

  Which made him more mature than Haffner, thought Haffner. It was not a position he had so far reached himself.

  —That’s fine of you, said Haffner. That’s very fine.

  He didn’t know that Benji was not quite telling him the truth. He did not know that Benji was not quite telling himself the truth. Benji’s struggle against his senses was Benji’s mute interior.

  He needed to sleep, said Haffner. He needed to lie down, old boy. And Benji, in a gentle gesture of goodbye, kissed him on the forehead.

  Innocence and experience! But which was which? The old young or the young old? Haffner wept for the things he thought he would no longer have; Benjamin for the things he thought he would never have. Both of them possessed their own comedy.

  Both of them were banished.

  When Livia was ill once, long before the end of their marriage, she had promised Haffner that if she died, she would come back and talk to him. He would know of the existence of an afterlife from the fact of this return; or the fact of a non-return. When she finally died and she did not, as Haffner hoped, come back to comfort him, he was not so astonished. After all, they had rarely seen each other in the two years preceding her death. Then a graver thought began to trouble him – that this was no proof of a lack of afterlife; it was only proof that she had not been able to come back. He was haunted by this idea of her trying to communicate with him, pressed to his ear, to his eyes, and Haffner unable to hear her, unable to see her. Or then an even graver and more plausible interpretation presented itself: it was only proof that she had not wanted to come back. She had decided against it.

  He had mourned alone in the empty house, like the tearful queen mourning that schmuck Aeneas, as she gazed at her abandoned couch.

  5

  In the summer of 1938 – when Haffner was away, playing for the Old Boys cricket team of his school – Livia’s father was reading, in silence, the Manifesto of the Racist Scientists. In the dining room, Cesare, who was sixteen, and believed in the greatness of his talent, was engaged on his great ceiling painting: The Dream, he said, of Europa. It featured three semi-nude women. No one was convinced of the mythological provenance: no one believed that the seriousness of the gods could compensate for Cesare’s shaky technique. The pipe in his father’s mouth was making him grin as he let the smoke dissolve in slow small clouds: a few smoke rings disappearing into other smoke rings. Outside, someone was beating a rug on the sill of the steps. And Livia’s father was reading that Jews, according to the ninth section of the manifesto, did not belong to the Italian race.

  He laid his pipe down.

  At first, Livia’s father, an honourable Fascist, was one of the discriminati: those discriminated from discrimination. Very soon, however, it was all over. His clients were forbidden to trade with him; his salesmen were banned from negotiating for his list. He decided to send his children to Britain, to stay with friends of his in the paint industry. They required a passport and a transit visa through France. He went to the Fascist chief of police – whose wedding anniversary he had recently celebrated at a small dinner party in town – and he said to him: either he arranged this, or he would break the law. He would buy the papers on the black market. Surely the police chief didn’t want him to break the law?

  The Fascist chief of police agreed that he should not break the law. So Cesare and Livia went to Britain.

  Haffner still owned a photograph of Livia’s mother – taken in 1915, to give to her fiancé when he went to war – dressed in a Japanese kimono. Her father owned a black Fascist fez with a silken fringe. Indignantly, he would tell her the shameful story of the Dreyfus case – from the time when Europe was imperial. And yet, on the other hand, the blue-and-white collection boxes for the nascent state of Israel: these he ignored. As if it was nothing to do with him. There was no need, he argued – unlike, perhaps, in racist France – for such drastic measures.

  Yes, Livia’s father believed in order. It was possible, he thought, for there to be an end of history: a utopia. But Italy, Livia wanted to say, was still Europe. Nowhere was safe from the stupidity of inheritance.

  But he believed in the nineteenth century, and its bourgeoisie. The year before, in 1937, Ettore Ovazza – who was Fascist, and Jewish, and saw no contradiction in this position – wrote his reply to Paolo Orano’s pamphlet which had maintained that in fact these positions were indeed contradictory. Livia’s father had agreed with Ovazza. If one wanted to express one’s sympathy with one’s suffering fellow Jews in Germany, this didn’t mean one wanted to found a second Fatherland, in the contested lands of Palestine. No, this was precisely what it meant to him to be Italian. Italy was the Fatherland for which so many of the purest heroes of Jewish blood had died.

  Later, Livia always used to berate her dead and absent father. Why hadn’t he understood? Why hadn’t they all left sooner? And Haffner would always reply that it was difficult to leave. Who knew when the right time was to flee? It was so difficult, abandoning the things you loved. It was difficult enough, said Haffner, abandoning the things you hated.

  Haffner Delinquent

  1

  In his bedroom, finally, Haffner drifted into what he hoped would be the greatest of all restorative sleeps.

  For a moment this was true. Then he was transformed into a baby Haffner, playing with the other children while in the next room sat Frau Tummel, taking tea, with all the other adults. Although, when he considered this, some minutes later, when Haffner had been woken up, it struck him as unusual: for Frau Tummel was nearly thirty years his junior. So what was his unconscious doing?

  But really, Haffner wasn’t often worried by his unconscious: nightly, his dreams were delinquent, involving all life forms, all birds of prey. He had grown used to ignoring the signs. He no more wanted Frau Tummel to mother him than he wanted Zinka to be his daughter.

  Enough of the family! Let the eternal couples unite!

  But Haffner was only thinking this because, as he was playing on the floor of his imaginary playpen, there came a knock at the door: this knock was then repeated. And when Haffner finally dragged his body – with patches of sweat on his back, scored creases on his cheek – to the door, he found the real Frau Tummel, who wished so urgently to speak with him.

  2

  So many things had been running through her head, said Frau Tummel. So many sad thoughts. Haffner murmured: as he had always murmured when confronted by t
he sadness of women. To see him there, talking with that woman: to see him with that girl. She knew that she was imagining things. And Haffner assured her that yes, absolutely: she was imagining things. What relationship could Haffner have with a girl so young? It was ridiculous.

  —Yes, agreed Frau Tummel: ridiculous.

  This disturbed Haffner’s vanity.

  Perhaps she understood, said Frau Tummel. It was as if Haffner would not trust himself, she said. What was wrong, she said, with the passion? Why always run away from it?

  There was nothing, thought Haffner, that he could say to this. It seemed so obviously true, in the abstract. As a statement it had its accuracy. But not to his friendship with Frau Tummel. Only to his friendship with Zinka.

  And he stood there, rummaging through his brain, like a man searching in his pockets, in his bag, for the ticket which might finally allow him entrance to the airplane which will take him away from all this misery, but finding nothing: just three coins, a key, an obediently switched-off cell phone – none of which, when proffered in a gesture of goodwill, convince the air hostess that he possesses the authority to board the plane and leave.

  In this pause, Frau Tummel lit a cigarette: she only managed to light half its tip. She inhaled deeply, until the whole circumference fiercely glowed.

  She appeared to change the subject. What a wonderful grandson Benjamin must be, she said: what a solace – as she busied herself with tidying Haffner’s bedroom, opening the curtains, neatly folding his tracksuit jacket: its arms pinned behind itself – a straitjacket.

  Perhaps, thought Haffner, he was not so wrong to dream of Frau Tummel as his mother. She represented all the domestic he had ever known, a sinful heaven of supervision. And Haffner liked to feel that he was supervised. It was how he had lived in the family home – where at Pesach the cockney maid fell into the dining room, closely followed by the cook, who had been listening in amazed curiosity at the door: a door which had been flung open by Papa in hopeful if theatrical expectation of Elijah.

  But surely, thought Haffner, he wasn’t here, in exile, banished, to find a second version of a mother. It couldn’t be that. Haffner was here to find a house, not a family: not a mother or a wife.

  Yet Haffner was still so easily won over by those who tried to care for him. Those who sacrificed themselves for Haffner! Like Barbra, the delight of his New York years, who used to keep a selection of his clothes freshly ironed in her wardrobe. The secret of a marriage? Haffner once argued with Morton. He wanted to know the secret of a marriage? You had to find someone who agreed to be the slave. Somebody had to give up. That was the only solution. Two people in love with their pride, then everything was over. Maybe not immediately, but in the end. The only successful marriages involved someone giving up on their life.

  He did not tell Morton who, in the marriage of Livia and Haffner, was the masochist, and who was not.

  But it wasn’t just marriage. It seemed, thought Haffner, to be the secret of everything. At a certain point, you just gave up on the infantile wish to be an emperor. You stopped complaining that people were changing their clothes beside your marble statue, or carrying a coin stamped with your counterfeit face into a bathroom, or a brothel. Those were the crazy edicts of Augustus. And Haffner, now, was beyond them.

  3

  Frau Tummel stubbed her cigarette, half smoked, into Haffner’s ceramic ashtray, engraved with a view of a mountain whose name Haffner did not know. Then, slowly, Frau Tummel began to undress.

  —We don’t want to talk, after all, she said.

  What was the point in all these arguments? They loved each other; that was all that mattered. Her husband, he was talking to her all day. His health, it was so up and down. He planned walks in the mountains which he would never take. And to think that she was contemplating leaving him! So much strain she was under! But what could she do?

  She wanted the sex. And this might have suited Haffner, but the sex was wasted on him, because she wanted to make the sex love. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have the two together at any point, but with Frau Tummel it was impossible. He didn’t love her. The dramatics bored him. With Frau Tummel, he just wanted the purity of pure dirt. The kind of dirt Frau Tummel could have been into as well, with her lavish breasts, the tired lilt of her belly, if only she had been less in love.

  She reclined: as normal, her bra still on.

  —There might be no more beauty, said Frau Tummel, observing herself, but there can be a little grace.

  And although this forgivable vanity touched Haffner with a remote tenderness, he still felt nothing. Yes, at this point, Haffner suddenly discovered that not only did he not love her, but he didn’t even want her. It struck him as strange.

  Would he put her on her stomach? Frau Tummel asked him.

  He wished he could; he wished that he wanted to do this for Frau Tummel; but he could not see his way to it. Kneeling on the bed, he toyed with her bra. She looked up at him, breathing heavily.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  Saved! thought Haffner. Saved!

  He dreamed of the receptionist, of Viko, of the waiter in the dining room: joyfully, he considered how it could only be someone who was here to help him, to release him from this agony of politesse and sadness.

  No voice came. Haffner asked who it was. Still no one replied. Frau Tummel looked at him: startled.

  —My husband! she exclaimed, in a whisper.

  To his surprise, Haffner discovered that he was enjoying himself. The male competition of it appealed to him. Anything, so long as Frau Tummel was returned to her own life: a life which had no place for Raphael Haffner.

  Did she think so? he whispered back to her. She was sure. Who else could it be? It could be anyone, he argued. Absolutely anyone from the hotel. Or even Benjamin, he argued. Whispering, she shouted at him that this was no time for argument. It was obvious who it was. They needed a plan.

  Haffner had no plan. Haffner had no plan.

  They looked around the room: at the desk, the window, the elegant armchair, the veranda and its view, the door to the bathroom.

  Five seconds later, Haffner confidently opened the door, to discover Zinka: in her sunglasses – twin beige lenses, flat against the hollowed angles of her cheeks.

  4

  Haffner could understand the icons of the Orthodox Church, with their mournful expressions: the deep sadness of distance inscribed in their high cheekbones, almond eyes, the nose which Haffner always found alluring: dense with bone, its line an asymmetrical quiver.

  Perhaps it was true that he had momentarily abandoned the quest for Zinka in his quest for the villa. He would admit so much. But that was no argument against the sincerity of his desire. The true desire, as Haffner was discovering – as Haffner had so often discovered – was returning. Just as it had returned when he first met Barbra, in his office on a twilit morning in November in Manhattan: a story which Haffner cherished. Just as it had recovered when he had met a woman called Olga, in an executive box at the World Series, who said she was with the Dow Jones, and who so wanted to write about his career, who would appreciate just a few moments with him in private: a story which Haffner, when questioned by his colleagues, had always denied.

  Zinka stood there in front of him. She had just come because she had a message from Niko. That he would meet Haffner in the car park: after dinner. It was OK with Haffner? He understood? It was OK, said Haffner.

  —So OK, she said.

  Haffner did not shut the door. She noticed this. She did not move.

  She observed that they seemed to get along. And Haffner agreed. So she had nothing to do now, she said: she was just here to tell him the message.

  Haffner thanked her. He told her to thank Niko.

  —Maybe, said Zinka, I can come in?

  Panicking, considering Frau Tummel in the bathroom, a recording booth, Haffner asked her if she wanted to get a coffee. It seemed the better option: to lock Frau Tummel in, rather than let her hear w
ho was now replacing her – in Haffner’s room, in Haffner’s desire. But Zinka said that no, why did they need to go anywhere else? He wasn’t sure, said Haffner, if he had the facilities for making coffee.

  —But whatever, said Zinka, elongating past him. And Haffner paused, anguished by indecision.

  But, too late, Zinka had walked towards the window, where her silhouette asked him if she might change into her yoga things in Haffner’s room. There was no way, thought Haffner, in which he could answer this with anything approaching the correct decorum. So Haffner only nodded. And as, delirious, he nodded, Haffner considered Frau Tummel, in the bathroom. Transfixed in the fluorescent light. He considered this in a different delirium to the delirium with which he looked at Zinka: a delirium of pensive concern.

  Somehow, he considered, without him meaning it to happen, his actions became cruel in their effects.

  And Haffner was not cruel. The emperors, of course, were not like him. The great dictators enjoyed their torture: but it was never Haffner’s way – to throw a party for a father, to make his son’s execution go that much more sociably.

  Haffner looked at the wood of the bathroom door. It was probably just a veneer, thought Haffner: not a solid oak, or trusty beech. Harshly, he judged its inadequate soundproofing. He cursed this country. He cursed the former Communist empire for its inadequate provision of workmanship. Then he cursed the nascent capitalist transition.