The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —Now OK you stop, said Zinka.

  Then he pushed the paper against her labia. He refolded. Pushed it again, a little harder. He dropped the paper between her legs, into the toilet bowl.

  —So, said Zinka. We go through.

  And Haffner followed her to the raised stage of his bed, where – earnest, dedicated – Zinka squatted over Haffner’s face.

  Zinka was hairless between the legs. Where the hair should have been, there was a brief tattoo: a mermaid easing herself against an invisible wave: sinuous, like Venus rising from her shell – a vision in dark green. And Haffner inhaled her.

  Canine, Bacchic, Haffner thrived on the lower thrills: the women with their marine and sour aroma, the rotting rich smell of powdered roe, the ammonia rinds of cheeses. The spread of molecules in the still air was one of Haffner’s most intense delights. They wafted and they drifted and they delighted him. He was undisgustable.

  —You must not move, said Zinka. You move, I punish you.

  Haffner wondered if this was serious. No one had ever said this to him before. Haffner had to admit that although he believed that Zinka possessed a charm he had never known in any other woman, it was true that he hardly knew her. He adored her, but she was unknown. He adored her because she was unknown. Unknown, and also young.

  —Is this serious? asked Haffner, gaily.

  In answer, Zinka pinched the twin wings of his nose together – their burst red cartilage poignant through the skin, like the surface of a butter bean – then pushed herself down on to his mouth. She was everywhere inside Haffner. His eyes goggled back at her, as she looked down, between her breasts.

  —We do this how I like, no? said Zinka.

  Haffner nodded. And she relaxed her grip on Haffner, flooding him with her delicate smell, a refined sweating bouquet.

  Maybe it was better like this, thought Haffner. He began to accustom himself to the absolute relinquishment of choice. Who needed to see Haffner holding in his stomach? Or his almost hollow shins – a veteran Roman legionary, the skin rubbed to a sheen? In this relinquishment, Haffner found his revolution.

  3

  His life had been shadowed by the counter-culture, the underground – and however much he disapproved of their childish politics, he admired the chutzpah of the protestors and the fighters, the uprisers and the deserters. Once, in New York, Haffner had helped a kid into the foyer of Chase Manhattan to extricate himself from the riot police, with their bright Lego helmets. Most orderly in his life, most savage in his imaginings, Haffner read with indulgence about the European anarchists, with their colourful cryptic names: the Black Bloc, the Tute Bianche. The Yippies in particular had gladdened Haffner’s heart – especially the day they strode into the New York Stock Exchange, quietened the black security men into meek submission with raucous accusations of anti-Semitism, then stood in the public gallery and rained down dollar bills on the dealers in their braces, their visors, their pinstriped bespoke suits. He felt less attached to the Parisian revolutionaries, whom Haffner had watched on the BBC – the students in the lofts of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, attaching posters to washing lines with clothes pegs, so they could dry in time to be glued all over the city: the garish fonts and pointing hands – Hypocrite reader! My double! My brother! – proclaiming their escape from all the bourgeois normality, their new creation of an idyllic island, a utopia.

  And now Haffner was stranded on this island, in this utopia.

  Zinka, without explaining to Haffner, skipped off him and ordered him to undress. And this, thought Haffner happily, might be the moment, the reward for all his courage. In his exuberance he undressed, ignoring his habitual neatness, letting the bunched pair of his socks roll anywhere, his shirt remain in its pool on the floor.

  He didn’t care what form his utopia might take. Any revolution would do. If he had to be, Haffner would be the Saint-Just of the hypermarket, Guevara of the guava. And if in fact his utopia were here, in a hotel bedroom in a spa town, then Haffner would not resist. No, thought Haffner, if this was it, then he would take his place.

  Leaning over the side of the bed, Zinka picked up the tracksuit trousers, and sloppily drew them up, like a snake charmer, along with the pool of his T-shirt. The trousers served to tie up one of Haffner’s hands behind him, to the bedhead; the T-shirt served for his other. And Haffner was tied to the bed.

  4

  Stoical in his pursuit of pleasure, the true classical epicure, it wasn’t the first time Haffner had been involved in the bedbound business of knots. It had been a habit of Barbra, his American secretary, to need to be tied to the bed, before being smacked with a book, struck with a cane, spanked until her buttocks turned a chaste and virginal pink. She liked to lose control, in the most controlled way possible. In her apartment in Chelsea, Haffner employed his ingenuity – even, in a moment of inspiration, lassoing a rope that had been stashed in a canvas bag left behind by her hearty and mountaineering brother over an exposed joist, so that Barbra could be tied there, standing naked, her arms above her head, her breasts raised with the tension – breasts which Haffner struck lightly but woundingly with the edge of his belt. When her breasts were raised like this you could see the mole which was usually a deft stowaway underneath the left. No, Haffner never minded these contrivances: but they were not for him. Not even medicinally. In the Russian Bath House in New York, he never understood why Morton so enjoyed being whipped with switches, beaten with birch rods.

  Here in Central Europe, however, the position was reversed. Haffner was the one who was tied. Lightly, it was true: with garish sportswear. But his power had still gone.

  Haffner had abdicated.

  Slowly, Zinka lowered her mouth to Haffner’s chest. With her teeth she tugged at a nipple – its blunt miniature nub. To Haffner, this action still felt within the limits of the normal, or the possible. It hadn’t yet gone beyond the border of the pleasurable. Then she continued to bite. And Haffner began to revise his definitions of pleasure. He wondered how far he could take this before she might draw blood. Nevertheless, he thought, nevertheless. His body took over – with its strange routes to enjoyment. Zinka began to bite the other nipple. As she did so, she dragged the sharp nails of her fingers over Haffner’s delicate skin. Wildly, he felt his penis stir. She held his penis, tightly, painfully. It tried to stir some more.

  Then Zinka began her game of teasing.

  Stupendous, haughty, grand, the diminutive form of Zinka began its travails down the length of Haffner’s body. She struck him; she bit him. Soon, he knew, his old body would become a palette of bruises – the yellows and browns of a landscape from the nineteenth-century French countryside, with cows, and sheep, and a misshapen cypress. She told him to close his eyes. He could feel her hover over him – her warmth and smell. With a calm hand, she rubbed her wetness on his eyelids, on his nose: a pensive Impressionist. And then she moved further down until she reached his penis, where she waited.

  Oh Haffner was adrift! He was in a new ecstasy, confused beyond the obviousness of pain and pleasure. He began to whimper. As he made a sound, she hurt him. So that then Haffner lay still, silent, blinded: in the absolute perfection of his denuded state.

  And this was it, he thought. It was the final liberation.

  He had found a strange detachment – like the Zen-like kids in the sixties, on Wall Street, who used to tell him the world wasn’t the way everyone said it was. Everything was perspective. The real object of the game, they told him, wasn’t money: it was the playing of the game itself.

  If Haffner had been a mystic, he could have found in this some kind of god. But Haffner was not given to the mystical. He preferred the reckless sensual. It seemed more rational.

  5

  In a fleeting, floating way, this reminded him.

  Long ago, when Haffner was fitter and more beautiful, he had been having lunch with Livia, in Mayfair’s Mirabelle. For reasons which were already obscure to them, they were arguing about the merits of the 1968 revolution
s: the revolution in Prague, the riots in Paris, the protests in London, then the sit-ins in New York, which Haffner rather saw as pitiful imitations of the European originals.

  But it wasn’t just the Americans whom Haffner doubted. Even the Europeans, Haffner argued, couldn’t be taken seriously. The kids with their posters! They were yearning for violence. And they hadn’t seen what violence was. They couldn’t understand it.

  But Haffner had? asked Livia. Haffner had. Of course he had. She knew he had. And these kids wouldn’t have been able to contemplate it. What about the one up the tree, the poet? Who on being asked to come down by a policeman replied that he wouldn’t, and, on being asked by the policeman why, answered by saying that he would not come down because if he came down then the policeman would beat him. A pacifist revolutionary! But then: he was a poet. A master of theatricals. Like his friend, the theatre critic: who left the protests because his Berlutis were scuffed. No, Haffner, she had to concede, knew about violence. And so he was best placed to ask the following question. (At this point Livia, distractedly busying herself with the tea, scalded herself on the stainless-steel teapot, where a teabag was in agony.) The following question. Could she honestly say that any of these students, these playwrights, these children, were motivated by anything except a desire to be seen in the newspapers? Could she? He didn’t think she could. However much they might dress it up as something else, however much they might turn it into street theatre, or whatever, it was still the same old story: the ancient desire for glamour, for someone to notice you.

  Livia asked when he would ever stop being flippant. At what point would he learn to take things seriously? Haffner considered his petits fours; the black water which was offering itself as coffee. He was, he assured her, taking it seriously.

  She could put it this way, said Livia, spooning the teabag on to a saucer, bleeding its brown ichor on to the china. Haffner looked at her, and realised, with a small shock, that her hair was now white. So, said Livia, Haffner saw everything as selfishness. This was nothing new. A gangster, he thought that everyone else had the ethics of the gangster too: she knew this. But what revolution would survive the accusation? What moment of human history? Everyone only cared about themselves. This was obvious! Less obvious was how much, said Livia, anyone should really care. So everyone – Robespierre, Brutus, Lenin, Mussolini – these were all men who wanted to be noticed. But maybe, said Livia, this wasn’t the truth of Brutus. And Haffner had to concede – for he was a lover of the classics – that Livia wasn’t absolutely wrong. He was always on Caesar’s side, true. But even a Caesar was impeachable.

  The revolutions happened – nourished by a healthy sense of melodrama. Who was Haffner to judge the revolutionaries? asked Livia. Who was Haffner to judge the people who didn’t care about all the irrelevant emotions – the self-consciousness, the self-pity: the people who didn’t care what others thought of them?

  So long ago, Livia had said this to Haffner. Now, when she was dead, it occurred to him that perhaps he finally agreed. If she was right, then Haffner was finally behaving like a true revolutionary. Like the revolutionaries, he was untroubled by the usual emotions: the self-pity, the embarrassment. Here, in the East, in the remnants of Kakania, he no longer cared about social niceties. So a girl was treating him with absolute hauteur, and he was loving it? What did Haffner care? He was his only audience.

  Solitary, realised Haffner, he was shameless.

  6

  Haffner’s room still preserved the forms of the 1920s. As well as its view of the mountains, its Zarathustrian height, the room was also equipped with armchairs, an escritoire, and a marble fire surround, on which were two silver candlesticks, containing the unlit slim obelisks of two cream candles.

  Haffner opened his eyes to see Zinka pluck a candle from its niche. This baffled him. Then she told him, lying there on his back, to raise his knees to his chest, so exposing himself to whatever Zinka might want to do to him.

  It was a fantasy she had always had: to use a man as a woman.

  Once, Zinka was talking to her friend, about love and its ramifications. Zinka’s friend had explained how her husband’s favourite thing was that she should perch there, behind him, and use a dildo on him, with its pink latex bobbles. Slavenka was happy to do this. She was a dutiful wife. But when Zinka asked her if she enjoyed it, if she found it sexy – because she thought it must be sexy, she envied Slavenka her exotic and fulfilling sex life – Slavenka sighed.

  —Oh no, she said. It’s so boring. I keep forgetting I’m doing it. It’s like doing the ironing.

  It wasn’t how Zinka felt. The idea of it excited her. All her life, she had felt so managed, so in thrall. The idea of being the manager herself seemed so dense with possibility.

  In an amazed trance of obedience, Haffner held his knees up. It felt so insubstantial, thought Haffner, that he could not rule out the possibility that this was all a dream. He rather hoped it might be. And as he raised his knees, Zinka noticed the creases which emerged on his stomach – as on a sofa, a clubman’s Chesterfield. These creases, for Zinka, were tender with vulnerability. And this was what she wanted. To make the men unusual. To make them unprotected.

  The unsure length of Haffner’s penis was now being mimicked and outdone by the candle – slick with hand cream she had found in her handbag – grasped in Zinka’s hand, like a light sabre.

  There was no way, thought Haffner, that he could allow this indignity. But then again: why shouldn’t he? It was his liberation. In it, he was prepared to entertain ideas for which he felt no natural wish to be an entertainer. It was not as if he hadn’t done this to women himself. So why was it that he would blithely do to a woman – sure of their mutual pleasure, concerned to move with a more exaggerated tenderness – something he would not want a woman to do to him?

  He had been content to let matters take their course when Zinka had entered his room that afternoon. In this way, Haffner meditated. Then, he had been moved by her pensive creativity. So why should he stop now?

  The problems of philosophy were not, however, Haffner’s primary concern. She let the thin candle, deftly coated in her hand cream, slip and settle slightly inside him. She watched him watch her. He could not see the oddity of it; he could not see this act’s improbability – as it distended him, and enlarged him, beneath his tight testicles, as it made him wriggle and his stomach break out in sweat.

  Then Zinka’s other slippery hand became intricate around his penis, just as he had watched it elaborate itself on Niko’s penis, two days ago: when his life, reflected Haffner, seemed so much simpler.

  As she rested his rough, unpedicured feet on her soft shoulders, he felt moved to hazard the existence of a soul. Nothing else rendered his feelings explicable. And Haffner – Haffner cried out in his denuded, opened closeness to Zinka. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw each other: illuminated.

  Haffner’s paradise! His translation to the supine, the passively cherubic!

  She had begun by causing him pain. Now, gradually, she was gently moving the candle, back and forth, as she moved the skin on his penis, up and down, up and down, in front of her. She looked into his eyes and he looked back at her – comical, romantic. She didn’t speak to him. Simply, they continued to look at each other, intently, while Zinka continued to make her motions inside Haffner. There was a blemish in one of her pupils.

  And Haffner ascended.

  With a burgeoning slow realisation, a shy astonishment, he could feel the slow progress of a climax he had not quite ever believed would be possible. Like the faintest music from a radio, playing in some car which pauses, behind an apartment block, as you lean out the window and enjoy a pensive cigarette, watching the unknown city below you, and then, when you think that no, you will never quite be able to make out the tune, that it will remain for ever just beyond you, the car turns a corner and with it you recognise with an unexpected glow of recollection the full volume of some hit made famous by the genius Django Rein
hardt in the music halls of New York.

  In this way, Haffner finally jolted his hips, and cried out.

  Zinka scooped up Haffner’s tepid liquid into an enticing paw. Then she told Haffner to open his mouth. Haffner opened. Then she tapped a fingertip on his tongue: a nymph tapping an aged demigod – asleep and drunk – with a finger stained with mulberry juice, to wake him and make him sing.

  Haffner paused. Then Haffner swallowed.

  And Zinka smiled at him. Plucking a tissue from beside the bed, she wiped the trickling semen from his belly – then flushed the heavy tissue discreetly away.

  7

  When Frau Tummel had left Haffner that afternoon, he had tried to argue that he was a libertine. Because he only cared about pleasure, he told her. This was why it would never work between them. And, furious, she had looked at him: her nostrils angrily flared.

  —No, she said. No: you are too frightened.

  The chutzpah of it had enraged him: because Haffner knew that it was true. For if Haffner were ever a libertine, it was never absolutely. He wasn’t an absolute immoralist. He lacked the ruthlessness, the total selfishness.

  But now, as he rested from Zinka’s labours, he wanted to say that no, Frau Tummel was wrong. In some ways – the rhetorical ways – he wished that Frau Tummel could see him now. (He wished that Livia could see him now.) He wasn’t too scared. He just hadn’t wanted Frau Tummel enough. He just hadn’t ever understood the ludicrous crazytalk of true desire.

  Because, yes: desire is the ultimate in the improvised. This is the normal theory of desire. It was Zinka’s – who was just about to explain to Haffner that now everything was over. But I am not so sure.