The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  It wasn’t the defeat he had intended, or predicted: like everyone’s defeat. It was just the one that Haffner got.

  But at this moment, Haffner was still happy in the bliss of his escape. Up the hill he walked, out of the town, into the depleted suburbs: his natural habitat.

  On reaching the drive which led to the house, however, he was struck by a problem. What Haffner had not considered, in his moment of emotion, was the legal problem. He did not own this property, obviously. He knew this. The company who used it as a holiday home still owned it. It now struck him that he had no idea how he might explain why it was that he was here: a bedraggled ancient madman with a bruise above his eye and around his cheek.

  For a moment, his bravado disappeared. A homesickness overtook him. In Benjamin’s bedroom, which had already not existed for years, he began to describe to Benjamin, in his bunk bed, how easy it was for Santa Claus to fly: he was buoyant, said Haffner. He simply floated.

  In this cloud, Haffner stopped at the gate of the house. Perhaps, thought Haffner, no one was there. It could be standing empty.

  Haffner paused.

  He was here, thought Haffner, so he would brave it. And Haffner walked across the grass, and opened a door.

  2

  Haffner found himself in the kitchen: bare, lined with white tiles. A spiral iron staircase seemed to lead to all the other floors. Haffner stood at the base of the stairs, listening. He could hear nothing. So Haffner ascended and found himself in a corridor – covered in grey wallpaper, with brown stains, like stock market graphs, rising from the skirting – which led to the roofed veranda. Haffner knew about this veranda. On this veranda, Livia’s father used to sit, watching each Alpine sunset. It used to have wooden floors, with zigzagging parquet. Now, the floor was lino; and the view had been glassed in. It seemed to be a dining room: two Formica tables were lined up against each other. On one of them, there was a plate with a slick of butter flattened on its rim.

  Haffner stood there. He looked down. Just like Uncle Eli, who – so Goldfaden told him – at one point in his late escape from Warsaw reached a wall: and there below him was a courting couple. They were sitting on a bench. A plane tree was growing in its wire netting beside them. The man was begging his girl to come inside with him, up to his apartment. It was just up there, he said. Her mother would never know. The girl was not so sure. And Eli had perched there, looking down on them, begging this girl silently to ignore her moral scruples, to go into the room. This resistance fighter, said Goldfaden, his slight jowls shaking with laughter – imploring her to give up her resistance!

  Even now, Haffner found this amusing.

  From the veranda, another door led into an empty room, containing just a photo of the President, and a plastic sign advertising the various ice creams to be found in a miniature freezer, there in the corner, humming to itself. So Haffner did not know that this, in fact, was the room which had once contained the grand brick fireplace beloved by Livia’s mother, which had now been blocked up and plastered over. Nor did he know that Cesare’s treasured ceiling, on which he had depicted The Dream of Europa, being squabbled over by two women who represented two continents, had been boarded over by another dropped ceiling, twenty years ago.

  Everything was missing.

  Upstairs, the bedrooms were filled with bunk beds; and more grey wallpaper. The bathroom which had been Livia’s mother’s personal project, obsessed as she was by all the conveniences of modern hygiene, with bidet, toilet, mirrors, handshower – all the delightful gadgets – had been replaced by a stone floor and three doleful showerheads, hanging their heads from the ceiling.

  And when Haffner ascended, finally, into what had been the eaves, where Cesare kept his painting things and Livia kept her costumes from all the plays she had ever been in, there were now four small mansard rooms. Above each door there was a sign demanding that no one should smoke.

  Haffner pushed one door open. Again, there was a bunk bed. A bra was resting on a chair. He turned to go, and as he turned he saw the notice which was on the back of every door, extending a most cordial welcome to this vacation home. Haffner was wished a wonderful stay. To guarantee order in the home, however, he was asked to observe some simple house rules. Sadly, Haffner read the times for meals, and the pickup of picnic lunches; the time for the afternoon rest period. During this time, Haffner was asked to refrain from playing the radio: instead, he should walk quietly on the stairs, and close doors quietly. In the immediate vicinity of the house, children were also required to play quietly. Lying on the beds in day clothes was not permitted. Requests and complaints should be addressed to the house manager.

  All the ornament, all the marginalia and doodling were gone.

  Unlike Solomon Haffner, his son believed in inheritance. The European museums always left Haffner sad. He saw no reason why a home should be given to the state. If Haffner had his way, if Haffner were a president, or a mayor, he would restore these ancestral homes to their rightful families. The pleasure of the chateau tour always eluded him. He could not help thinking of the dispossessed. This sensation returned to him now.

  Yes, Haffner wished that he could bring everything back. He wished everything could be revised. In this, Haffner’s last judgement, everything he had once consumed would be made whole again: the cigarettes would ravel themselves back into neat cylinders, the wines would loop back into their bottles; all the newspapers he had ever thrown away, all the detritus, would be restored in Haffner’s sight. And finally the women. Everyone would be returned to him – resurrected: all the people he had loved. Because the problem with Haffner, really, was that he loved too many people. Thought Haffner.

  He tugged at a venetian blind’s toggle. It snapped up, like an aperture.

  And Haffner, ignoring the landscape, remembered how, ten years earlier, when Morton was dying, he had gone to see him in Brooklyn. And because he couldn’t think of anything which seemed in any way adequate to the monstrous fact of Morton’s death, he tried, as he had so often tried to explain to Morton, the nature of a draw in cricket. It wasn’t the simple matter of the scores being level. As always, this was where the foreigner became confused. But this time Haffner didn’t bother with the detail. He didn’t try to explain the technicalities: he just tried to explain its beauty. What it meant, he said, was that in cricket you could never be sure of victory or defeat: you could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and victory from the jaws of defeat. And this was wonderful. It meant, Haffner tried to explain, that there was no reason for the strong to win.

  Morton’s contribution to this had been to tell him a story.

  Was it like this? said Morton.

  Man, said Morton, Haffner didn’t know what the British had missed, sitting outside Rome, waiting on the Americans. When they had gone into Rome, said Morton, it was crazy. And Morton then told him a secret. So there Morton was, in Rome, in bed with two girls. One of them was his girlfriend, the other one was not. They were simply trying to sleep. Because everything was a mess. He had no idea why they’d ended up in the same bed. And in the middle of the night, he turned to the girl who was not his girlfriend. For she undid him. She was so beautiful. And they kissed. He shivered with the memory of it. They kissed and kissed. He put his hand down her skirt. He felt her, there where her legs became so intricate with flesh. The soft cleft with the strong bone above it. And this was the great moment of his life, said Morton. Beyond anything he had ever felt with his adored wife. It was the moment of absolute excitement.

  —And? said Haffner.

  —And nothing, Morton said. Nothing happened. My girl woke up. So we both pretended to be asleep.

  3

  No doubt about it: Morton understood.

  In the end, you had to get over the victories and the defeats.

  —You know, said the celebrated movie star Hugh ‘Tam’ Williams, on the way to Aldershot in 1939 for their training, you’re going to make it. You’ve got it in you. You have star quality. I can tell th
ese things.

  And Haffner had never forgotten this. Slick compliment it may have been, to pass the time in some station café more pleasantly, but Haffner believed he meant it.

  He didn’t need his wallet and its mute photograph album now. Haffner was quite happily his own mausoleum. The pictures came back to him so easily.

  What had been Haffner’s victories? The Athletics Cup in 1934. The Divisional Cricket Championship in Jerusalem in 1946. The presidency of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982.

  But the real victory, thought Haffner, was elsewhere. It could take place anywhere: not just in the eternal cities, with the Colosseum for backdrop, or disporting in the Roman swimming pool, watched over by a Fascist eagle. And Haffner, remembering that night, when Rome was liberated, then thought of another swimming pool – in LA, where Goldfaden’s Uncle Eli lived. He was having some kind of pool party. And Eli had begun to reminisce about the Ghetto in Warsaw. Of course, said Eli, after the third year people started reminiscing. It wasn’t like this in the beginning, they used to say: then things were so much better.

  With a bottle of beer in his hands, tipped with a crescent of lime, Haffner had guffawed.

  In this humour, in this privacy, Haffner reckoned the true triumph might be found.

  And then Cesare – who had wandered over, dressed neatly in his European and academic suit, refusing all West Coast dress codes – entered the conversation and reminded Haffner and Eli of a resistance fighter’s great interview, twenty-five years after it was over, when he pointed out that the history of the Warsaw revolt wasn’t going to be one for the military historians. The outcome had never been in doubt. It wasn’t notable for its strategy. But if there was a school to study the human spirit, then it should be a major subject. The importance was the force shown by the Jewish kids, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers: and choose their own death. Was there, asked this hero, a standard which could measure that?

  This man here, said Cesare, pointing at Haffner, he didn’t want to be Jewish. He would never acknowledge, said Cesare, how much the Jews were hated. How much strength they had to be capable of. And Haffner, only wanting to locate Livia and go with her to the edge of the garden, to look out over the city, disagreed. It was true that he loved the image of the Jews as musclemen, the men of steel. But really what he admired was something else entirely. It wasn’t Jewish – the revolt. This was Haffner’s theory. It was a triumph of something much more universal.

  Such confusion! said Cesare. But it was only to be expected. This was the constant problem. You try to assimilate, and in fact you just lose everything: you lose your family, but you also can’t make friends. You can neither go forwards nor backwards. Wasn’t this right, Raphael?

  Oh he had loved Cesare so much, thought Haffner. Cesare had courage. But even Cesare was not as courageous, thought Haffner, as he should have been. The deepest courage belonged to those who chose to withdraw. To be doubly rejected, encircled by rejections – by the Jews and the non-Jews – allowed you an absolute freedom.

  Haffner didn’t care if he was a contradiction, an impossible hybrid. After all, he liked the hybrids. The greatest piece of music in the world was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, as improvised by the great Benny Goodman. Haffner went for such impossible beings: the sphinxes, the centaurs.

  And maybe, I think, Haffner was right – as he stands there at the window of a dismal bedroom, which had once belonged to Livia. His century had been a century of metamorphoses. And at its centre was his greatest invention of all: the strange winged beast of Haffner’s marriage.

  4

  In the darkening sky, the reticulate constellations were nets, hauling in Haffner.

  He had left Frau Tummel behind. Zinka, it is true, troubled Haffner’s thoughts: but gently, tenderly. She still eluded him. He could only think of her obscured: taking off her T-shirt, an arm making shadows of her face.

  So, for one last time, I want to go in search of Zinka.

  She was in her apartment, in front of her television: in the living room decorated with prints of haystacks, a cathedral facade disintegrating in the twilight. She sat there until the light went, then went to sleep. And then that night, as usual, Niko came home, and made for Zinka’s bed, where Zinka was doing her best to form the letter S. Her bed was in fact a sofa. It disguised itself as a bed in the darkness of the night. Its covering was ribbed polyester, dyed grey. Niko tried to follow the breathing which made her chest ascend and descend, cleanly silhouetted in a sheet. He tried to synchronise his breathing to hers. In the same way, in the dark mornings, before school, when he was eight, and it was snowing, he had crept into bed beside his mother, and tried to match his breathing to hers. Someone once had told him that men’s respiration was quicker than women’s, which was why women lived longer. So he tried to calm his breathing down.

  Very slowly, Niko then began to move.

  He felt his usual combination of the erotic and the uncomfortably sad. As he laboured inside Zinka – as she lay on her stomach, her legs cramped in angles which he could not alter, which would not let him extend himself in the way which Niko might have liked – he tried to tell himself that although it was not the life of desire he had imagined, perhaps it was enough. Perhaps Niko was happy.

  But he could not.

  No, long after he had finished with Zinka, who was pretending to pretend to be asleep, Niko lay awake, watching the shapes of the books melt and blur against the wall, in the dark, in dawn’s twilight – yes, long after his bleated, blurted defeat as he reared over her, stabbed in the back by his soft orgasm. While Zinka lay there, imagining all the other lives she could be living.

  And then they fell asleep.

  5

  Haffner walked downstairs, and went on to the villa’s enclosed veranda. He looked out into the landscape: where the colours were. Yes, there they were: pure, like the colours Haffner had seen in the museum in New York – more neatly arranged there, true, more vibrant, but with the same lightness, the same absence of any human mistake. They obeyed their own mute logic.

  Haffner was horticultural. He knew about the breeds of roses: how they formed an ideal order, invisible to the human brain. His life had often led him to gardens. Like the gardens of Ninfa, near Rome. Or Haffner’s own rose garden, where Solomon had taught him the two possibilities for a life: to live it, or to waste it. As if the choice were Haffner’s.

  The forest was a smudge of greens and blacks: a giant discarded palette. Through the trees, the sun was a precise gold disc pressed on to the horizon.

  It was an industrial pastoral, with the sounds of the sibilant freeways in the distance: the twentieth century’s automobiles and dryads, its fauns and chemical plants. He tried to hear the tune which had been playing at his first ever dance with Livia in Southwark. Naturally, he could not. He was not romantic enough for that. There was now just the sound of the wind in the trees, and the sound somewhere of the cattle bells – those bells, thought Haffner, which must so irritate the proud cow, reminded with every move of their ownership by others. Or maybe, thought Haffner, it was no more irritating to them than the weather. Maybe the bell was part of the bovine condition.

  But before he could continue his meditation on the limits of a cow’s perception, he was distracted by a bumble bee, hovering against the glass. And then another. And Haffner, in his exasperation and fever, began to wave the bees away: so that from a distance, from the position of the imaginary spectator, all that could be seen was Haffner, standing at the window, beating time to the grandest and most transparent orchestra.

  6

  And maybe, as he stands there, I should balance Haffner’s faults and virtues. Perhaps this is the point to decide whether Haffner was a hero or a monster. But even if I could truly describe him now, as he looks out of the window, in his wife’s villa, would that portrait equally apply to the soldier in Palestine, the husband in New York, the romantic in London?

  He always saw himself
in poses. And this series of receding Haffners could continue diminishing, into infinitely vanishing fractions.

  I wanted to preserve the real Haffner. I wanted to resurrect him. The Haffner I actually knew was a man of reticent privacy. I only had the stories to work with. I only had my inventions. But whether they were true or not, Haffner was inescapable, in all the stories he gave rise to . . .

  And this was, perhaps, how history worked.

  As an admirer of the classics, Haffner wanted to understand what caused the great empires’ decline. I was more modern. I wanted to know how the emperors had turned into legends. But maybe both these questions possessed the same solution. The law of unintended consequence – the law which governs every empire’s decline – was so definitive that every emperor became a legend: enveloped by their own defeat. No historian, after all, could ever know all the causes. So they had to write a legend. A legend is just a story which is missing most of its causes; a legend is just a feat of retrospective editing.

  The more I knew of Haffner, the more real he became: this was true. And, simultaneously, Haffner disappeared.

  7

  Haffner walked away, down the steep road back into town, towards the spa, to find a hotel. In the same way as that classical king who, as the poet says, when deserted by the Macedonians did not behave like a king. Instead he threw away his golden robes, borrowed someone’s everyday outfit, then left – like an actor who, once the play is over, changes back into his clothes and wanders away.