The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  Everything in Benjamin’s life now seemed so fraught with significance. As if, thought Benji, he could destroy his whole life with one wrong decision.

  He hazarded this to Haffner. Haffner thought it was unlikely that a life could be destroyed. It would take more than one wrong decision for that. Then he reached for the giant bottle of beer in front of him, and poured an accidentally overfoaming glass.

  The restaurant advertised itself as Chinese. In its provenance, the food perhaps tended more towards the Vietnamese than the Chinese. There were moments when it was nothing but Thai. But no one here was concerned with the detail of origins: not the sullen Slavic waiters, the absent owners. Haffner, however, didn’t care. So long as the effect was Oriental, then Haffner was happy. It possessed an aquarium in which melancholic fish hid themselves beneath mossy banks, munching sand. It seemed Oriental enough for Haffner.

  In this setting, Haffner sat and listened to his grandson: his anxious grandson. He was, thought Haffner, the kind of kid who was so vulnerable to women that he’d probably get aroused just by the naked mannequins in shop windows, their robotic defenceless arms. Their invisible nipples and missing pubic hair, like some statue of Venus found beneath the tarmac of a Roman street.

  But I think that Haffner could have gone further than this. There was so much to worry about, when considering the character of Benji.

  2

  Benji was the solitary only child. At fourteen he threw up in a girl’s toilet after an evening of drinking whisky and was pleased at the suavity of his aim until he found out the next day that they had found sick everywhere. He used to listen to Liverpool matches on his clock radio in the dark under his Tottenham Hotspur duvet, for he was fickle. The first girl he kissed frightened him. Aged nine, he used to rehearse cricket strokes with a cricket stump and a practice golf ball in his bedroom, while listening to the classic ballad ‘Take My Breath Away’ on repeat. Like Haffner, the songs were always his downfall. He listened to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ when Esmond drove him to the cricket matches.

  Nothing in Benjamin’s early youth had poise, or cool. Instead of cool, the miniature Benjamin hoarded Haffner’s anecdotes. The stories of Haffner formed Benji’s inheritance.

  He treasured a portable Joe Davis snooker table – made on the Gray’s Inn Road, in London, and guaranteed to add a touch of fun to family occasions – which he had found in Haffner’s loft. One ball, the pink, was still in the centre right pocket, slung in the netting. It nestled there, solidly. Benjamin studied the faint lines printed on the baize. There were shiny trails of turquoise chalk. There was a line horizontally printed across the table, a little below the top. From this, a semicircle arched and settled. It reminded Benjamin of a soccer pitch. It was like a magnified penalty area. But this was not why Benji loved it. Its instructions, glued to the wooden underframe, were signed, in facsimile, by the great Joe Davis himself. From then on, in bed, with his clock radio beside him, its incensed digital digits flipping luminously and silently, Benjamin would read about Thurston’s Billiards Hall in Leicester Square. Because he was romanced. For Haffner was Joe Davis’s banker, in the 1950s. One day Joe Davis was in South Africa, at a hotel. He was resting. He was having some time off snooker. But then some guy challenged Joe Davis to a game. This man didn’t know Joe Davis was Joe Davis. He thought he was just an ordinary person. It was, Haffner would remind his grandson, before the days of television. Joe Davis tried to refuse. He didn’t want to play snooker, on his holiday. But the man was insistent. So Joe Davis played snooker. Naturally, he played with exquisite grace. And his challenger was amazed.

  —What are you: Joe Davis or something? he said.

  And Joe Davis paused.

  —No, he said, but I know the man who sleeps with his missus.

  Yes, Benji loved his grandfather: his grand grandfather. He was a romantic. And the romance was all inherited from Haffner.

  So Benjamin found himself here: in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of a spa town, in the centre of Europe. And because he was here, he could ask Haffner anything.

  —Is it true, said Benji, that you once gave away the Mercedes to someone else?

  —No, said Haffner. No, it isn’t.

  —OK, said Benjamin.

  He returned to the more familiar ground.

  —This food is good, said Benji: piercing the inflated curve of a chicken dumpling with a chopstick. I mean it’s exquisite.

  Haffner queried this; the food, he thought, verged on the inedible: like every cuisine in this town. But for a moment Haffner loved him – his progeny with the marvellous appetite.

  3

  The problem was, Benji told Haffner, how did he know that this wasn’t a craze? Because he was prone to crazes, he knew this. It was just that this didn’t feel like a craze. It felt true. What else did he feel but love, thought Benji, when looking at the curve of his girl’s breasts, matched yearningly by the imitative curve of his penis in his briefs? But, continued Benjamin, even if it was true, how important was this, in the end? It was only desire. It wasn’t everything. So maybe he should return to his summer school, and forget all about her.

  Haffner raised an eyebrow.

  And he considered how, in the more ordered nineteenth century, the ordinary family judgement was the father on the son. This was how Haffner’s life had begun – with Solomon Haffner in judgement. Now that the twentieth century was ending, however, it turned out that there could be something different: the judgement of the grandfather on the grandson. But instead of judging him for his lack of restraint, it was the lack of chutzpah which Haffner found wanting in his descendant. He would have to educate him into courage.

  —Let me tell you my story about Palestine, said Haffner.

  —No, I know this story, said Benji.

  —I haven’t started, said Haffner.

  —Your Jewish story? said Benjamin.

  —I will tell you again, said Haffner.

  Having missed the major battle of the war in North Africa, then serving in the liberation of Italy, Haffner had been posted to Palestine. He was twenty-four at the time, he reminded Benji. He was – how old was Benjamin? He was about the same age as Benji was now. In fact, Jerusalem was the setting for his twenty-fourth birthday, on which day he announced he was going to drink twenty-four pink gins. And he did.

  His battalion was ordered to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews: or, more precisely, between the Arabs and the crazy Russian Zionist Jews.

  His people! As if those crazies were his people! What did Haffner have to do with the Orthodox, the serious – complete with dyed sidelocks and dyed caftans, the fringes of their prayer shawls ragged around their waists? In Palestine, Haffner had learned one of his very first truths. To be bohemian you had to be an absolute insider. It was the recent immigrants, the suddenly displaced, who most believed in nations and in boundaries. The ones who believed in a people at all.

  Benjamin threw a wasabi pea up into the air and, to his profound satisfaction, caught it in the maw of his mouth.

  Haffner ignored him.

  It turned out, however, that in the eyes of the British war cabinet the crazies were Haffner’s people. All members of the Jewish faith, commissioned or uncommisioned, were to leave the battalion in Palestine and travel to Cairo in the next forty-eight hours. This was the order. And yes, Haffner would concede, if discussing the matter with a benign historian, at that time the Jewish underground was conducting tactics not dissimilar to those of the IRA – but the order utterly devastated him. He had been with his battalion for nearly five years and fought through the Battle of Anzio, the only battle – he would remind this now less benign historian – in the World War which, like the Great War, had been fought in the trenches, and here he was to be kicked out because of his faith. He wouldn’t stand for it. His faith, not his race. This was the important distinction. Even if Haffner still had a faith at all, which was doubtful.

  Haffner was the senior Jewish member of the batt
alion, so he called all ranks together: about thirty of them. All felt as Haffner did, with one exception. Whose name now eluded him. Haffner went to see the CO, who took him that evening to see the divisional commander in his HQ at Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa. He was a Canadian, who afterwards became Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  At this point in the story, Haffner would put on an accent which he assumed was Canadian (it was not).

  —Well, Haffner, I’m a Canadian, and if I were asked to fire on my boys in Montreal, I’d refuse.

  —But, Haffner replied, in his own voice, I do not regard the Jews here as my boys. I’m an Englishman and my faith is Jewish.

  Benji continued to scan the empty restaurant for a waiter to bring the beef: crispy, shredded. Or the approximation to crispy shredded beef which Benjamin had hoped to see in the fried ripped beef offered to him by the menu’s translation: in haphazard italics, and assorted brackets.

  —It’s a good story, said Benjamin.

  —The divisional commander, said Haffner.

  —You should do the clubs, said Benji, grinning. I’m amazed you haven’t.

  The divisional commander, said Haffner, gave him permission to go and see the C.-in-C., Middle East Forces, in Cairo. So Haffner went with his driver, Private Holmes. They travelled 600 miles in twenty-four hours. Across the only little metal road in the desert to Cairo. Put up in a hotel to wait the pleasure. Etc. His driver had sunstroke and went into hospital. But the C.-in-C. had been sent to deal with the Communist threat in Greece. So Haffner was seen by his deputy, who sympathised, but there was nothing he could do. It was a cabinet decision.

  A cabinet decision, emphasised Haffner. This was in about November 1945. In June, the war in Europe had come to an end. It was now three years since he had last seen his wife, just after their wedding. For the early married life of Haffner and Livia was an absence: a hiatus. And here he was being questioned about his Jewish loyalty: his Eastern heritage.

  —No really, like Lenny Bruce, said Benjamin.

  Haffner’s East!

  Looking back on Haffner, he was so clear to himself – it was like he was made of the most transparent glass. He had always wanted to mean something: to reach the grandeur of the world-historical. Like all the characters in the grand novels: the American novels which Esther used to give as Christmas presents to Haffner, to further his education. But the problem wasn’t Haffner, he was discovering: the problem was the world-historical. Not even the world-historical was world-historical. The instances of everything, Haffner thought, had turned out to be so much smaller than one expected. The magnificence was so much more minute than one expected.

  He had gone to school with the man who later married the Prime Minister. He remembered her, from the days watching her son play cricket. Once, in the 1970s, before she became the party leader, he danced with her at a dinner at the Criterion. She was really very brilliant.

  Haffner emptied his glass of its pale beer. He felt a little blurred, a little faded – a faded Haffner which dissolved even further as the tape in the restaurant came round to one of his favourite songs, in one of his favourite incarnations.

  —You know this song? cried Haffner.

  —No, said Benjamin.

  —Then listen! said Haffner.

  4

  And Haffner floated away: forwards, into the past.

  For when they began the beguine – according to Cole Porter, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, as listened to by Haffner as he tried to educate his grandson – the sound of that beguine brought back the sound of music so tender; it brought back the night of tropical splendour; it brought back a memory evergreen. And then Ella’s voice went higher. She was with him once more under the stars, and down by the shore an orchestra was playing, and even the palms seemed to be swaying when they began the beguine.

  He had heard this song with Livia, sung by Ella, in Ronnie Scott’s on Frith Street: and the shadow of the double bass’s scroll on the white backing screen was a seahorse behind the Lady. She was in a gold lamé dress.

  But you couldn’t go back. This was the meaning of the song. But precisely because one couldn’t go back, thought Haffner, was why one wanted to go back. Precisely because one had lost everything.

  Yes, weakened, exhausted, melancholy, Haffner was beginning to revise his ideas of sin. It was so hard, he was finding, not to regret certain aspects of one’s life, now that one considered one’s life carefully.

  And so the reason why Haffner so loved this song now, here in a Chinese and Slavic restaurant, was that it allowed you the romance of resurrection, of recuperation. It allowed you the dream.

  For, against all expectation, the rhythm moved into a different beat; so that, as Ella’s voice rose, she changed her rhythm against the beat – as she begged them not to begin the beguine; as she begged the orchestra to let the love which was once a fire remain an ember. And then again, in a contradiction which Haffner had always cherished (—Listen to this! he cried to Benji. Listen to this!), Ella with as much sad abandon contradicted herself, with the same push against the beat, the same refusal to give in to the obvious rhythm: that yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play till the stars that were there before return above them, till whoever it was who she loved might whisper to her once more, darling, that he loved her – and the song softened. And they would suddenly know, as she quietened down, what heaven they were in – she quietened to a becalmed softness – when they began the beguine.

  5

  —Yeah, it’s cool, said Benjamin.

  Haffner didn’t know what to say. He was lost, in contemplation of his past.

  Finally, Haffner spoke.

  —You finished? he asked Benjamin. You full?

  —I don’t finish when I feel full, said Benjamin proudly. What kind of person finishes when they’re full? Me, I finish when I hate myself. That’s the treasured moment.

  And as Benjamin said this, more dishes arrived: chicken in a black bean sauce; chicken with lemon. Then finally another porcelain plate, chased with fake Chinese scenes: on which cubes of beef were shivering. Then two more decanters of beer.

  In a reverent silence, Benji’s mind considered Haffner’s ideas of loyalty. Oh Benji wanted so much to lose his loyalty! He wanted so much to leave his religion behind. He imagined himself in the backstreets of Paris, the docks of Marseilles, and it entranced him. But he found this subject difficult. The guilt distressed him. So, in defence against himself, Benji tried to talk himself out of his new temptations.

  —I don’t get this, said Benji.

  —You don’t get what? asked Haffner.

  —I don’t see why it’s more cosmopolitan to be anti-Zionist, said Benji. It just means you feel more nationalist about Britain.

  —Don’t be clever, said Haffner.

  Gluttonous, still perplexed by Haffner’s ideas of loyalty, Benji continued to reach for the black bean chicken with his chopsticks: trembling in the air, like dowsers. Haffner continued too. On one thing were Haffner and Benjamin agreed: the absolute superiority of MSG – that glorious chemical. They adored its sweet and savoury slather – and there it was, unctuous, before them.

  Through the prism of his newly sexual nature, Benjamin considered the problem of fidelity. Perhaps, he thought, there was something in what Haffner said. Maybe it was true that it was better to refuse one’s own nation. And I think that I should repeat that Benji had inherited from Haffner the love of romance. So he liked the grander, political structure which Haffner’s theory offered him when he considered his current predicament, more than the crudely sexual structure in which it was housed at the moment. It was nothing to do with the girl! Nothing to do with the smell of her, which Benji had caressed with his nostrils all the next day, and night, refusing to wash. Nothing to do with the wet warmth of her mouth on his penis. All of Benji’s urges, he thought, were simply desires to be free. They were all about his new refusal to be faithful to irrelevant ideals.

  It did seem possible.
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  —So then, said Haffner. Time to go.

  —You can’t, said Benjamin.

  —I am, said Haffner. I’m meeting this man, and I’m meeting him now.

  Had Benjamin, wondered Haffner, any better ideas? No, thought Benjamin. He didn’t. He only knew that he had barely begun the conversation he wanted to have. He had barely begun at all.

  If he wanted, said Haffner, if he was really worried, then Benjamin could call him. Haffner promised to keep his phone on. And then Haffner, replete with a final spring roll, having laid down his chopsticks on their concertina of wrapper, and given Benjamin a selection of banknotes to pay for the meal – a meal in which Benjamin settled to the last dishes, as if to the last supper – ventured back out into the fading day.

  And as he walked, he hummed. In the tropical night, the beguine washed over him.

  Raphael Haffner was drunk.

  Haffner Drunk

  1

  In the driveway of the hotel, Niko was in his car – now wearing a pair of outlandish tinted glasses – waiting for Haffner.

  The sky was fading, elaborating its golden cloths. And all its other traditional effects.

  —Yes we have it, he said. I have found your man.

  Haffner peered into the car. There was a plastic bag full of Coke cans in the footwell behind the driver’s seat. A packet of cigarettes was protruding from the open glove compartment. The radio, to Haffner’s antiquarian delight, was only a radio – without even the empty slit for a cassette.

  Niko’s jacket had the word death stitched gothically at the back of its collar. He took it off, and threw it on to the back seat – so revealing a T-shirt which said Godless Motherfucker.

  This was the company Haffner now kept. He decided that he rather liked it.

  —You saw my girl, yes? said Niko chirpily, bending to slurp at the keyhole of a newly opened can of Coke.