The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —I haven’t seen you smile that smile tonight. It is good, she said.

  —I have a greater variety than that, said Benji, winningly.

  Oh Benjamin’s allegiances were all awry: they were jostled, irretrievably. He thought of the girl in Tel Aviv. Perhaps, he thought, he was not in love. Perhaps she was just a beginning. He didn’t want to be what others made of him. Surely that was cool. No longer did he want to be defined by his loyalty: not to a race, and not even to his family. He wanted, thought Benjamin, to be himself.

  —I want you so much, said Benjamin.

  A sentence said with such ardent and charming sincerity, so in excess of Benji’s pudgy demeanour, that Anastasia, helplessly, began to adoringly laugh.

  6

  It wasn’t that Anastasia was cruel. She had simply become, by accident, the audience to an ordinary kind of comedy.

  Himself! Benji wanted to be himself. So he exaggerated. And this is not so unusual. Maybe this is all the self is, really: whatever is most fervently displayed. It isn’t difficult, to find this kind of story. It was, for instance, a theme in Benji’s family itself.

  In 1940, Cesare was interviewed by the British police – trying to ascertain his loyalty to Mussolini. In his defence, Cesare had not only proved to them in minute detail how he was a Marxist, a member of the Mazzini Garibaldi club; he had not only quoted to them the words of Garibaldi himself, imploring his acolytes to have faith in the immortal cause of liberty and humanity, because the history of the Italian working classes was a history of virtue and national glory – no, this was not enough for Cesare. To clinch his point he had stood on a chair and sung the Internationale, improvising an English translation. After the third verse, with three still to come, the British police allowed that perhaps they had been wrong in their suspicions concerning Cesare.

  And when Cesare recounted this story, which was often, Haffner would riposte with the story of Bleichröder, Bismarck’s Jewish banker, a hero of finance. An allegory for Haffner. For Bleichröder never managed to become Prussian, rather than Jewish. He tried, but he failed. He went for walks, Haffner would begin. And then Livia and Cesare would continue – in a ritual which they did not know was a ritual, since no one ever remembered that the precise same conversation happened at regular intervals which were not regular enough to prevent this amnesic repetition. So Cesare would tell his story of Cesare. Haffner would begin the riposte of Bleichröder. And Livia would finish, reminding Cesare, in case he didn’t remember, how Bleichröder kept himself apart from the Jewish people, even in his weekend walks. On the promenades along the Siegesallee he walked on the western side: eschewing the east, with its Jewish crowds. And when asked why he walked on the other side, according to the police, added Haffner – yes yes, Livia would say, she knew this line: when asked why, Bleichröder answered that the eastern side smelled too much of garlic.

  Benjamin, as he kissed Anastasia, and felt for her slim breasts, in the furore of his passion, was forming the final panel in this luminous family triptych. If his God could see him, he did not care. The neon light in this plastic cubicle did not disturb him, nor the seven empty beer bottles lined up, as if posed for some pop-art portrait, on a ledge. And Benji revelled in the sensation that in kissing Anastasia, on this night which he understood marked no high point in Benji’s romantic life, no moment of deep conversion, still mindful of the girl whom he felt in love with, in Tel Aviv, he had made it impossible to return to the ways he used to think. In kissing Anastasia he had crossed over – through the looking glass, out the back of the wardrobe.

  7

  Haffner, however, found nothing new in this world. As Viko had elaborated the lays of Haffner, Zinka had led him out of the club. At the door, a group of girls were waiting for a taxi. He turned to Zinka, anxious to enquire quite if he really needed to leave.

  No, there was nothing new for Haffner. He knew this place. It was suburbia. Like everywhere Haffner lived. The clapboard pavilion on an artificial lake, with a landscaped golf course arranged around it; the hotel with souvenirs kept in a glass cabinet in the foyer; homes which once belonged to writers now preserved as monuments, complete with shops which sold tea towels on which were stitched, in italics, quotes from these great writers; or which were instead knocked down and replaced by an apartment block which bore the great hero’s name; or restaurants which advertised a return to the ethos of the nineteenth century, or advertised the cuisine of Italy, or China, even though they were staffed by white and disillusioned teenagers: all this was suburbia. And so was this youthful display he could now see outside the club, where girls in thin dresses gathered together to whisper and giggle while sporadic boys lit avoidant cigarettes, affecting to ignore them.

  And so was the manifest violence.

  In the dark street Haffner stopped with Zinka, anxious to prove that he was scared of nothing, a speech which he had barely begun when Niko emerged from the crowded steps and stood there, in the doorway.

  Even at this point, Haffner refused to believe in violence: he refused to believe it was possible – for Haffner was surely invulnerable. He still refused to believe that his story could really be serious. So Haffner was surprised when Niko moved to where he stood with Zinka and then pushed him, in a way which Niko imagined was only gentle, a tender threat: an amused gesture of gentle reproach. It was all the violence Niko would ever offer this aged man. But, unprepared, an unbalanced Haffner swayed backwards and then, in his effort to overcompensate, swayed forwards.

  And Haffner fell.

  He lay there on the street, but still refused to be downcast, beneath the chemical sky, its wash of cloud – like the most perfunctory of watercolours in the window of a fine-arts dealer behind the British Museum, on a Sunday in November, when everything is closed. No, opined Haffner, bleeding, wasn’t it Cole Porter who used to say that, as he lay beneath the horse which was crushing his legs to a pulp, he worked on the lyrics of ‘At Long Last Love’? Surely Haffner too could discover a sprezzatura?

  Above him, like warring and disporting gods, Zinka and Niko were shouting. He was impossible, she said. What, she asked him, was he thinking – to attack an old and defenceless man? While Niko was shouting back, arguing with the facts as he now saw them, that he had never meant to hurt him, of course he had never meant to hurt him. And, then again, who was she to put the blame on Niko? Perhaps she should hear what Viko had to say about this man now lying there beside them. But Viko, suddenly, had disappeared.

  And Haffner remembered with a sensual pang how he had once woken on Viko’s massage table, surrounded by the scents of candles, the cries of whales, the tenderness of towels, in what now seemed to be a for ever lost vision of safety.

  8

  Defeated, bloodied, Haffner stumbled his way back inside, to find the bathroom. Against the basin, a girl was being roughly kissed, on her breast a man’s splayed hand, a starfish: a hand which she was lightly coaxing away.

  Into a stall stumbled Haffner.

  Adjacent to Haffner, unknown, in another cubicle, Benjamin was gasping with abandon, as he touched the girl between the legs, his hand a little trapped by the elastic of her underwear. He was in a modern heaven. Through the bathroom’s thin walls he could hear the music, throbbing. The DJs had been replaced by the Hungarian band, featuring a girl who sang her American English songs in the highest voice Benji had ever heard: as if the world were house music.

  While Haffner, oblivious, the end of all the modern, observed his ancient face, illuminated by one fluorescent tube. Behind him was a bucket with an indefinable mop drenched inside it. He should have known, he thought: this was how things tended to end up – with Haffner as a clown. He dabbled with the taps: they relinquished little water.

  He had always wanted to be a libertine, but now he was something else. Just Haffner Silenus – a sidekick, so prone to fall over, so vulnerable to capture, so easy to wound: the same Haffner as he had become when Livia announced, two years before she died, that she was leaving him.


  —Now? he said.

  It didn’t seem worth the effort. But yes, she said: she was finished. She was leaving him to live with Goldfaden. It was long enough after his wife’s death. It was what they had always wanted to do.

  And Haffner had looked at her amazed. He couldn’t understand it. It was always Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. But there she was, announcing that she would be going to live with Goldfaden. And although Haffner pleaded on behalf of his love for her, his family, Livia was unmoved. It was what she wanted, she said. And just as now Haffner stared into a mirror, hyperbolically lit, so Haffner had gone into the downstairs bathroom – the toilet with its pink fringed bib at its base, a china cow-creamer whose back overflowed with pot-pourri – and stared at the clown before him. There he tried to be precise about what he was feeling; he tried to be composed. But he was only possessed by a gigantic feeling that he missed Livia, that he had perhaps been missing her for many years: and Haffner wanted her back. He wanted to recover things. So he emerged, from the bathroom, ready to plead and beg – but found that Livia had gone.

  Whereas this time he emerged, with wild wet hair, and discovered that, as in the puzzles of his youth – Spot the difference, dear reader! Can you see it, kids? – the picture had been doctored. Where Livia had been absent, there now stood Zinka, her arms folded, leaning against the bathroom’s plastic walls. She unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum, and offered it to Haffner: its dusty granular surface.

  She was taking him home, she said. She would spend tonight with him.

  It seemed true, thought Haffner. She did not seem to be one of Haffner’s visions. In the words of the very old song, the dream was real.

  9

  And yet, the dream life of Haffner was troubled.

  It did seem all too possible that the brief moment of his triumph in relation to the villa was now over. The ordinary rules would soon reassert themselves. He doubted if the deal with Niko and Viko was still on. This seemed even less likely if he chose to allow Zinka to spend the night with him. Presumably, he could return to Viko and Niko and offer them the agreed sum. Presumably, he could try. But their goodwill might well be lacking.

  Was Haffner to blame for this sudden fiasco? It seemed possible to plead that he was not – not responsible, in the end, for Niko’s rages, for Viko’s pride. He consulted the shade of Livia: would she really have wanted him to play the coquette with another man, simply to ensure her inheritance?

  He could imagine the shade of Livia smiling.

  Then Haffner was interrupted in this vision by a strong sense of nausea. A shiver took possession of his body, then relinquished it.

  Yes, this, thought Haffner, was his return to the everyday. All his ingenuity had failed him. The Committee would have to be wooed all over again. So Haffner only felt a tired disappointment.

  And yet, he thought, in compensation he seemed to have Zinka, in this party dress, beside him. But Haffner realised that even his joy in her was tempered. On arrival at this club he had felt so confident, so victorious. If he had been told he would leave with Zinka, it would have only made him a happy Haffner. Yet now here he was, still burdened with the problem of the villa, walking slowly through the dark streets of a spa town so marked with Livia’s memory. And whether Zinka was a digression or in fact some covert route to Livia, Haffner did not know.

  He still felt confident of his innocence. He had tried to remain faithful to Livia, and he would continue to try. But he was a connoisseur of Haffner’s ability to be defeated. That Haffner had done his best, he was coming to realise, sadly, didn’t mean he wasn’t still guilty.

  In this unaccustomed melancholy, Haffner followed after Zinka: his halting walk now embellished by the iambic rhythm of a limp.

  But I am not so sure that Haffner should have felt so divided. Perhaps there is no such thing as a digression.

  Zinka, it’s true, was thinking in the same way as Haffner. She thought that it was an unusual event in Haffner’s life – this dejected progress through the empty streets. She was moved by Haffner’s comical plight. And it moved her more because she assumed that this comedy was all her fault. There was no way this man could have previously suffered the indignity from which he was suffering now. She didn’t realise that in this story, as in all of Haffner’s stories, there were certain patterns, certain repeats. She didn’t know that farce was Haffner’s constant mode.

  This form was not new in the life of Raphael Haffner. Free from his ordinary customs, let loose in the wild East, Haffner was just allowed to become even more Haffnerian than ever – his own exaggeration.

  So that every zenith was also a nadir, as usual, and all victory consisted of beatings. And, as usual, while illuminated with desire for Zinka, Haffner didn’t know that a bruise was beginning to develop around his eye and on his cheek, like a Riviera sunset, the backdrop to a promenade bordered with palm trees, illuminating the night in green explosions, accompanied by the muzak of the rhyming cicadas.

  Haffner Translated

  1

  So, said Zinka, as they entered Haffner’s bedroom. Here they were.

  It seemed undeniable. Here they were, at Haffner’s finale. But Haffner was worried that his body was going to prove unequal to this finale. He was quite sure that he was getting ill. True, he was drunk. It could be just the drink. But Haffner knew about his body: its breakdowns and malfunctions. And this feeling was unusual: the dizzy sweating ague of it. He felt for his palms. They were sweating. He brushed the hair which still remained to him down with the Brylcreem of his sweating hand. As if to simultaneously produce a suavely dry palm and a suavely plumed forelock.

  He offered Zinka a smile.

  Tonight, Zinka explained to him, there was only one rule. Haffner asked what it was. The rule, said Zinka, was that everything came from her. Everything was her decision.

  She liked Haffner, this was true, and she felt for his bruised pathos. But this did not mean that this was going to be Haffner’s evening.

  And Haffner said yes, absolutely.

  He had never been one for the fantasies of permission: the allowed and the disallowed. But if rules were going to be a condition of this night with Zinka, then he didn’t care. He revelled in them. He would content himself with the little which he was offered. Whatever the modern age would give him. At no point could Haffner touch himself, said Zinka; at no point could he touch her without permission. If at any time he broke these rules, the night was over.

  Let Haffner submit! Let Haffner be debased!

  All his life, the erotic for Haffner had been a matter of apertures: all the exits and entrances. And now he discovered that the apertures were something, but the rest was something else. There was so much else to play with.

  Zinka pushed him gently to the bed, where he slumped down: his head raised, expectantly, like a yawning sea lion.

  —You will do what I tell you, said Zinka. Yes?

  —Yes, said Haffner, meekly.

  Zinka stood between his legs, bent her head, and told him to open his mouth – which Haffner obediently did – then she let her spit dribble out: a thread slowly fastening with its own weight, then falling, gathered in by harmless Haffner.

  2

  Zinka went into the bathroom, crowded with the male accoutrements of Haffner, bought from a chemist in the town – a shaving brush, the tube of shaving cream, doubly creased in a sine curve which a parsimonious History had borrowed from the smudged blackboards of Haffner’s prep school. With the door still open, she crouched on the toilet. She beckoned to Haffner. From below her crotch came the whispering sound of her pissing.

  She told Haffner to come closer. He tried to sit down, like the men in Oriental street scenes exhibited at the Academy: a neat bobbing squat. It hurt too much. Instead, he therefore watched her on his hands and knees. Crawling, Haffner approached her closely. He could see her stream – braided, splurging.

  —You like this? Zinka asked him.

  —I do, yes, said Haf
fner.

  As if there was nothing of the bodily about her, no smell emerged from Zinka. And Haffner, as he waited there, on all fours, only felt an overwhelming happiness. He was in the paradise of women; an island of intimacy, like Gulliver among the giants – whose travels Haffner had read when he was ever so young, so much younger than he would ever be again, in a miniature, octavo, red-leather edition. The eighteenth-century disgust remained with him now. It was there in his stomach, in his nervous system. But also the erotics. Gulliver astride a giant nurse’s nipple! Even now, he felt himself rise up in applause. The rough pitted areolae which little Gulliver observed; by which Gulliver was entranced and perturbed. And when Gulliver – or did he? was this just a mistake of Haffner’s imagination? – went on to describe the gaping maw of her crotch, Haffner, the delinquent eight-year-old, was not stricken by disgust at the human animal. Instead, he was overtaken by an acrid pleasure. The minuscule Haffner longed for this closeness to the women: the fur and softness. What was small was large, and what was large was small. The world was just a trick of perspective. It all depended, he supposed, on how good you were at magnifying, or diminishing.

  Zinka came to an end. From his canine position, Haffner looked up at her, expectantly.

  —Now you wipe, said Zinka.

  Haffner tended to Zinka. He unrolled a small section of paper, then folded it into the most luxurious, downiest towel. He wanted to do the job with elegance: no one could ever accuse Haffner of not being a good sport.

  —No. First with your mouth, she said. Your tongue.

  It was for only a brief moment that Haffner paused in a qualm of indecision, before he bent his neck, uncomfortably, deliriously, and licked at Zinka’s ferrous crotch. To his surprised disappointment, only a trace of her pale urine was detectable to Haffner’s tongue: a sweetly sour herbaceous perfume.