The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  Cesare used to come up with Livia from Charlton, in south London, where they were boarding, at the home of a paint salesman from Trieste. Haffner used to sit with him on Wimbledon Common.

  He was about twenty; Cesare was about eighteen. Cesare delighted in deckchairs. And patiently Haffner explained the rules of cricket. Cesare was slightly deaf in one ear – after an accident when he was a child. He didn’t mind, however, because in Cesare’s opinion it added lustre to him. His deafness was distinguished. He listened to Haffner with one hand cocked, like the flower of an ear trumpet. A hollyhock, thought Haffner. Patiently, he convinced Cesare that just because the two batsmen were at opposite ends of the wicket, this didn’t mean that they were on different sides. Cesare could not understand this. He tried, but he could not.

  Haffner loved him, but had never quite got him. Never, in his entire life, did Cesare lose his comical Italian accent. His hair was white by the time he was twenty; but his eyebrows for ever were black. And Haffner never asked him if this was due to nature or nurture. Yes, Cesare would sit there, reading War and Peace, while Haffner watched the cricket. This must have been 1940, thought Haffner. When the BBC was supporting the Russian cause with its radio version of Tolstoy’s novel. Haffner must have been on leave, or about to ship out. He would test Cesare on the characters’ names from the bookmark – on which was printed each family, and a guide to pronunciation.

  And then, as always, they discussed the politics of Europe. To Cesare, this was natural. So natural that from that point on it had marked his life, thought Haffner, these discussions of European politics: the endless problems Cesare found with any kind of state. Problems to which Haffner was oblivious. He had the arguments with anarchists, with Socialists, with social democrats and liberal democrats. He had talked them through with Fascists and with Communists. Cesare himself had preferred a modified form of Communism. Haffner, the Englishman, had demurred. He wouldn’t be swayed by Cesare’s assertion that Haffner, like Cesare, was a Jew, not an Englishman; that as a Jew he really should be more mindful of the rights of minority peoples.

  Cesare was European; and Haffner was not.

  Haffner did care about the rights of minorities. His way of displaying this was simply less exhibitionist than others – or so Haffner told himself. In 1938, for instance, at the Scarborough Cricket Festival, a week or so before Chamberlain set off for Munich, he had remonstrated with his father, who had offered the opinion that a Nazi Britain might have its advantages – less obsessed with money, less nouveau riche – unconvinced as he was that Hitler really meant to do away with every Jew. First, Raphael had reminded him, Hitler really did want to do away with every Jew; and secondly – he continued – what was so wrong with the plutocrats? Who had a problem with the City of London? He wasn’t bothered by the vulgar, Haffner. He didn’t see why Papa should so look down on people.

  But then, sanity had never been Papa’s hallmark. In the Great War, he had joined up in the Rangers. He served in the Dorsetshire Regiment, a machine-gunner. He served throughout the battle of Passchendaele, until he was wounded.

  —Anything is better than war, said Papa. Anything.

  And although Haffner thought he was the opposite of Papa, I am not so sure. No, like Papa, Haffner never took the Europeans seriously. Like Papa, he never quite understood their rages.

  —My theory of course is that Cohen is not a real Jew, Haffner once said to me, talking about Goldfaden’s friend, a Canadian Marxist Jewish academic: the son of immigrant pioneers. He’s too Jewish to be true. My theory is, continued Haffner, that at a certain point in, say, the 1950s, he realised that his career could flourish if he were Jewish – not true now, of course, not true now – and that he therefore took on the persona of a Marxist Jewish intellectual.

  —In reality, he concluded, his ancestry is Polish. Working-class anti-Semitic Polish. He denies this, of course. But then, finished Haffner, pouring himself another drink, smiling at me, ignoring my empty proffered glass, he would.

  9

  Haffner was silent. He kissed Frau Tummel, gently, on the cheek.

  —I have an idea, said Frau Tummel. We will swim. Yes? We will have eine kleine dip. You have a wife. I have a husband. We must forget them both. For an hour.

  But Haffner, he was realising, could forget nothing. Haffner was still ancient. He was wondering if Trajan had come here. Was this the land of Dacia, or Dalmatia? Pannonia? The Romans had conquered everywhere; their triumph was total. So presumably the legionaries had ended up in these mountains too – blistered, their groins chafed, their cracked nipples greased with duck fat to protect them against the coarse fabric of their shirts – and then afterwards, on their return to Rome, they had set up that column with its curving wrap-around frieze, like a stick of candy – or like the lighthouse on Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks, where Haffner had spent a weekend with Livia, where they had seen the dolphins shimmying after each other, their sheen dappled and mottled in the water. Yes, that column which Haffner had seen when he was twenty-four and remembered nothing about the Romans except the fact that an orator called Cicero made many speeches – speeches, Livia told him, which had been delivered in that sad and empty brick building on the edge of the Forum. It hadn’t moved Haffner then. It seemed to move Haffner now.

  He had understood Livia, and Livia had understood him. She had borne with fractious grace the obvious signs of infidelity; the crazy signs of infidelity – like the moment when she saw a woman driving down the high street in Hendon, in Haffner’s car. A car, he told her that evening, he had donated to the garage because it was out of order. How could he control what the garage had done with it next (folding his napkin, finding his pipe, leaving the room, aggrieved)? Yes, she understood the dictators. Livia – the most naturally elegant woman he ever knew: who once played tennis naked, he suddenly remembered, in the rain, after two gimlets and three martinis, at some friend’s house in the Cotswolds. Oh he was stricken!

  —Raphael! said Frau Tummel. Are you listening?

  And yes yes, said Haffner, in another world entirely – where a rejuvenated version of Haffner issued giggling directions from the passenger seat, as Livia drove them back to London, tipsy and still naked except for a towel across her waist, the seat belt tight between her freezing breasts.

  Haffner Amphibious

  1

  The lake in this town was not the kind which Haffner admired: it had no follies – no ruined grottos, no temples to Venus. Its spirit was civic, not aristocratic. Politics possessed it, not pleasure. It lay in front of the hotel; on the edge of the park. In the distance, made fuzzy to Haffner – bereft, as ever, of his glasses – were the twin peaks of the mountains, and their thinner silhouettes, the twin peaks of the factory chimneys. And all the cement apartment blocks: the random codes of their illuminated windows like the punched cardboard sheets for street organs.

  Beside this lake, as the dawn freshened, Frau Tummel began to undress. Haffner looked around, nervously. They were sheltered, here, by two clustering beech trees. They did not reassure him very much. He looked at Frau Tummel, who was bending over, folding her nightgown. The tuft of hair between her legs was visible then invisible as she leaned further forward, arranging her bathrobe on top of the nightgown: a neat arrangement of squares.

  An echo in Haffner’s mind, Zinka bent over to extract her stocking from the bed’s scalloped valance.

  Reluctantly, Haffner undressed. He displayed his slighter breasts to the gathered winds: the voyeuristic zephyrs. They made for his pink nipples, the droop of his ghostly pectorals. He let his shirt drop where it wanted: it tumbled to the ground, a dying swan.

  Just as after yet another late night of working he would undress in his dressing room, or on the landing, leaving puddles of clothes behind his tiptoeing footsteps – and then enter the bedroom, feeling the carpet on his bare feet, the densely corrugated metal strip at the door where the carpet ended, and then be suddenly surprised by Livia turning on an enquiring lamp, so tha
t he paused there, a satyr, stalled in the pursuit of an invisible prey.

  2

  At the jetty, Haffner paused. The wood was greasy. Frau Tummel was already in – treading water, only her head visible. Her face had transformed itself into a smile.

  —It is delicious, she said. You must come in.

  Haffner was not amphibious, not normally. But nothing, at the moment, seemed normal. Their affair had been marked by water. Water was its motif. First the swimming pool, the Jacuzzi: and now this. It was unusual in the life of Haffner. In general, he avoided water. Although it was true that there had been that night in the baths at Rome – the day after they had liberated the city. The opened city.

  Silk reflections from the water had unfolded on the ceiling. The building was Haffner’s most exalted idea of the grand. It was monumental. It was imperial. The largest bronze eagle he had ever seen was spread, like a mounted butterfly, against a wall.

  There had been other moments in Jacuzzis, whirlpool baths. There had been, also, Livia’s love of swimming competitions, with her hair invisible in its sleek white cap. But, in these scenes, the water was an accessory. It was almost furniture.

  He put a foot in, holding on to the jetty’s post: paused. He retracted his foot.

  —It is very cold, he said, gravely.

  He looked around. The wind was breathing through the trees. But Haffner didn’t want the nymphs, the naiads and dryads: the sylvan pastoral.

  It wasn’t that Haffner was immune to nature. Haffner was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society. Its journal would arrive, a precise oblong, in its plastic wrapper. It was the only society to which he felt allegiance: a community which shared his love of the cultivated, the meekly tended – the romance of the rose.

  Haffner was an expert in breeding roses. He loved the extraordinary lottery of each new specimen. All the textbooks talked of the evolution of a species in temporal terms; for them, everything proceeded in a logical order. The first was always the most important. But breeding, Haffner decided, proved this could not be true. It was a pure fluke, if a new variety of rose was formed, and therefore propagated, before another one. Its place in the species had nothing to do with time. It was much more like a jigsaw puzzle. In nature, Haffner found the self-sufficiency of art. But he didn’t describe it like this; which is how I might have described it. For Haffner, this insight had other vocabulary. That things could happen according to a logic which one could not understand was no argument against that logic’s existence. But perhaps this was not right, either; perhaps Haffner didn’t use words to describe the pain it caused him, the lush pain as he looked at the photographs of gardens in exotic places, full of grace, these places in another hemisphere – Persia, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

  You have no idea how therapeutic it can be – he would tell bored Benji, bovine – to take the secateurs and go out into the garden, after a hard day’s work. Everyone, he would add, must have a hobby; and Benjamin, who at this point, when he was fifteen, wanted no hobbies, no bourgeois attributes, absently nodded.

  Now, however, Haffner was oblivious to the pastoral: he wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted sirens, emergencies, the asphalt and the smoke. The asphalt jungle and the big smoke. He wanted the transparent lethal purity of carbon monoxide.

  So Haffner looked away, into the landscape, and there discovered to his dismay a shape which was walking with a staccato lilt, and which therefore would soon resolve itself into the more solid flesh of Zinka. Presumably, thought hampered Haffner, she was on her way back to work at the hotel. He looked down: at his slight breasts, his bright nipples, the hair around his belly button: his penis dwindling in the cold. An acorn, it blended in with the arboreal theme. There seemed no obvious hiding place, thought Haffner, rapidly assessing the bleak and empty parkland – and in any case it was too late. Zinka had seen him. Shame possessed Haffner – a shame that she was seeing him like this, so unclothed; and a greater shame of seeing her so soon after the escapade of the night before. He was not quite sure how one was to behave, when one has just concealed oneself inside a wardrobe in a vacated hotel room, to watch a woman nakedly converse with her boyfriend. But most of all, he felt embarrassed of her seeing him with Frau Tummel: in this illusion of intimacy. Because love was his downfall. And with Zinka, he was concerned that the love this time belonged to Haffner.

  If only he could have explained how little Frau Tummel meant to him! Then, perhaps, he would have been glad to see Zinka. But he could not. So, in an ecstasy of embarrassment and shame – the only forms of ecstasy which seemed still available to Haffner – he jumped in.

  3

  As he sank, the everlasting problems of Haffner’s life concentrated themselves into more particular problems of the body. He felt sheathed in cold; enveloped. It seemed unlikely that he would ever feel warm again. The water was dark, slubbed with weeds.

  At first, Haffner thought that he was only sinking. But this was premature. Gradually, he felt his body ascend: gifted with buoyancy.

  Finally, he reached the surface, where Frau Tummel joyfully greeted him. He tried to tread water. It seemed harder than he remembered. His heart was gripped by cold. He felt it slow, then slow some more. This scared him. His breathing became more difficult. He looked around for safety. No safety seemed visible.

  —It is wonderful, no? said Frau Tummel.

  Carefully, trying to swim suavely, Haffner made as if to disport himself, a porpoise, in the water. He tried to move towards the jetty, where he could cling to a step, or a pole.

  —And how are you? asked Zinka: above him.

  —Oh we are very well! said Frau Tummel. Is it not wonderful? Zinka smiled at Haffner: a bubble of intimacy. Haffner, his hair slick over his forehead, a bedraggled pony, tried to smile winningly back.

  Then he felt the weather begin. It started to rain on Haffner, and his mistress, gently, in the lake.

  He clung to the jetty, and found no solace. He was out of his depth, thought Haffner. In all the possible senses.

  They seemed to be having fun together, said Zinka. They weren’t together, said Haffner. They thought it would be charming, said Frau Tummel. That wasn’t right, Haffner tried to say.

  The rain became stronger. In response, Haffner maintained a casual grin. Glancing with mock-helplessness at the heavens, Zinka said that she really had to be getting to work. Was it really necessary? asked Haffner. Frau Tummel glared at him. Yes, said Zinka, she felt so – after all, they didn’t want her there, did they, interrupting them? Oh, said Haffner. He was sure that wasn’t true. Was it? he asked Frau Tummel.

  She didn’t want to make Zinka late, said Frau Tummel.

  It wasn’t special to Haffner, the desperation he felt as reality crowded in. Haffner was special only in his hyperbole: his unusually stubborn refusal to accept the order of the facts. And because he was determined in his refusal of reality, hyperbolic with effort, Haffner said to Frau Tummel that of course Zinka wouldn’t be late. It really wouldn’t happen. In any case, if there were any trouble, he would take care of the matter. Indignantly Frau Tummel splashed away. Haffner looked at her. Zinka looked at her. Then, before Haffner could turn back to Zinka, Zinka had looked away.

  —I should be going, said Zinka.

  Surely, thought Haffner, he could think of something to say? Surely at this point he could come up with the sentence which would charm Zinka, and make her stay?

  No, said Zinka. She really had to go. Frau Tummel splashed noisily in the calm water. Momentarily, Zinka was distracted. But she would see them later, no – perhaps for the aerobics? She smiled at Frau Tummel; then at Haffner. It would be at twelve. And she turned around, while Haffner gazed after her: her retreat in the grey towelling of her tracksuit.

  Well, that went well, he thought, brightly. One should build on that. They weren’t far off, he decided, mordantly, from reaching an understanding.

  And this was how I could have depicted Haffner as an allegory, if I had wanted to make Haffner an all
egory – with a woman walking away from him and a woman swimming away from him, while he clung to a jetty, frantically thinking, failing, possibly dying.

  4

  Now, announced Frau Tummel, they must swim. She offered Haffner the prospect of catching her, and then set off, with swift strong choppy strokes – the fat shaking beneath the curves of her biceps – towards what might, to Haffner’s straining eyes, have been an island: or might have been just debris, floating in the lake.

  Around him, the horizons gathered, and their attendant mountains.

  He set off. Mistakenly, he swallowed some cold and soiled water. Very soon he wallowed back. If he could only move his arms, thought Haffner, then he might survive. The prospect seemed unlikely. It seemed improbable that Haffner’s body would ever work again.

  He was not, it was true, famous for the accuracy of his self-diagnosis. The day he thought he had cancer, he asked Livia if he could show her his testicles. She had just come out of the shower – in a perfume of synthetic citrus fruits. Her hair was flattened against her face, which emphasised the way her face with its perfect cheekbones looked old, looked mournfully mature. He proffered her a testicle, asked her to feel it. She declined. Over breakfast, he pointed out that he should probably go to see Ordynski. Livia tightened the lid on the marmalade and agreed that he probably should. If it was absolutely necessary, then of course he should. And so it was that Haffner went to his doctor, who told him that no, there was nothing to worry about: there was no evidence of any tumour.