The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —No denying it! said Haffner, cheekily. He opened out his arms in a happy gesture of surrender.

  And in her irritation at Haffner’s refusal to offer her even the most minimal affection, Frau Tummel informed Haffner that she really should be returning to her husband, and so rose swiftly from her chair, thus colliding with the waiter who – as if he and Frau Tummel were a carefully rehearsed double act, a famous pair of clowns – tipped the wine gently over Zinka, as if in benediction.

  Frau Tummel, in a flurry of mortification, tried to apologise to Zinka, who waved her irritably away, pressing her napkin to her top. Haffner looked out of the window, at the sunset, at the inexpertly murdered sky.

  He scanned the horizon – like isolated Crusoe, with the craziest beard, wishing for a rescue which he never, now, expected.

  10

  Haffner was timeless. Perhaps this moment where Haffner scanned the horizon was one small proof. As he watched, he wondered to himself how far this scene was his fault. He searched the scene for hidden motives. And as he did so, all the previous allegations against Haffner fluently returned to him – trapped on his stage, in his follow spot, the ripples of a sequinned backdrop behind him, facing the disdain of his miniature audience: one couple waiting for another act, the manager himself, the confused splinter group of a stag party, one baffled drunk soldier on leave. In Haffner’s lone state, Frau Tummel multiplied into the other women – like Barbra, or Esther – who had found Haffner so disappointing.

  His efforts were rarely enough, thought Haffner – as he stood up with a superfluous napkin which he held out to Zinka, who did not see it, occupied as she was in preventing Frau Tummel from offering advice, while wiping off the sticky sheen of alcohol from her skin. It was so often the same, he thought – picking up his own glass, correcting himself, putting it gently down: like the confrontation with Livia, after the Allied liberation of Rome, who was wild with jealousy, having been sent a photo of the Colosseum.

  It was not the usual tourist cliché.

  In the centre of the photo was a jeep, on which an Allied soldier was sitting, at the wheel: a white carnation was a badge in his beret. A suntanned woman in a navy dress, with large sunglasses up on her blonde hair, was showing something to this Allied officer, which was making him contentedly smile. While beside them an assortment of elegantly coiffed, sunglassed Italians were clapping.

  Haffner had always denied that this was Haffner.

  The photo had been sent to Livia – whom Haffner had at that time not seen for two years, not since he had been mobilised straight after their marriage in 1942 – by a so-called friend of hers who had seen it in the newspapers. She was jealous, said Haffner. She was mad with jealousy. It was a spiteful thing to do.

  It was true that there was some ambiguity. The man in the photograph was looking down, in profile: so there was room for doubt. And this doubt also left room for Haffner to escape the accusations. When, fifty years later, Benjamin discovered this photograph too, going through a pile of Haffner’s things, Haffner repeated his excuses again. Why then, thought Benji, had Haffner kept this photograph for fifty years, if it wasn’t of him? Why would you preserve the triumph of another man?

  But I thought I knew. I tried to tell Benji; but Benji was unconvinced. For I was the only one who believed in Haffner’s innocence.

  This photograph marked Haffner’s jazz. His ultimate in pure freedom. It represented every moment in which Haffner had escaped, momentarily, from the observing world.

  Like the riffs he had heard played on Artie Shaw’s masterpiece ‘Nightmare’, in the rundown clubs of the Via Margutta. At some point, after all, you lost your moral compass. This was true. But it was difficult to know where. The borders of the bourgeoisie and bohemia were so hard to identify – like the manic jazz tune of Artie Shaw’s which was now returning to Haffner, as he sat there in the dining room, flanked by two gilt mirrors so that an infinite regress of Haffners looked with joyful affection at Zinka: her wet hair slicked to one side, like all the androgynous fashions of Haffner’s century: the flappers and the nouvelle vague, the movida after Franco, the perverse and civilised dolce vita of the Fascists and the Communists in Rome.

  11

  Zinka stood up, and said that he could follow her. And Haffner, who wanted no fuss in his public life, who wanted no attention to be drawn to him, followed mutely after Zinka, nodding adieu to Frau Tummel.

  The air above Zinka smelled of florals and herbs: the intoxicating warm forest contained in the wine she had been doused in. Safely alone, in the hotel foyer, she contemplated her ruined hair, the map of stains forming on her dress. And Zinka said to Haffner that perhaps he could escort her to his room, so that she could wash.

  Oh Zinka! Haffner would have bathed her himself. He would have prepared baths of asses’ milk, vials of perfumes. He was an old man still piqued by lust, by love. Of this, Haffner had no illusions.

  He had so often believed in the counterlife, the myth of Haffner’s excess. A Haffner untrammelled by his marriage, his Atlantic existence. Haffner unencumbered! Like the most distant tropical sunset, reached by regal Concorde, supersonic – its front wheel propped under its chin, like the solid goatee of a monumental pharaoh. But his escapes were always so fleeting. A night with a girl, a night at the opera: these were Haffner’s Cinco de Mayo; his risorgimento: the Parisian événements of Haffner’s savage uprising.

  These were the new life which Haffner dreamed of – but it always needed, he felt, someone to take him there. And no one, in the end, had really wanted to go.

  So maybe, Haffner thought, he understood. The problem had been that he always wanted an elopee. Which meant that the problem, really, was Haffner. He could conjure with time as much as he liked, but the anecdotes only proved one thing. They were a strip cartoon which always involved the same dogged character: a Haffneriad. For the metamorphoses which lust invented in Haffner were never permanent. The glimpses of other Haffners – Haffner the New Yorker, Haffner the Roman, Haffner the free – did not transform him: just like Silberman, in Palestine, in 1944. Haffner had been told to do something with a couple of the other Jewish soldiers in his platoon. Surely something could be done to tone them down? Which Haffner contested. For nothing could be done with Silberman – disguised as a non-Jew with his clever costume of yarmulke, tefillin, and the extraordinary rapidity with which he entered arguments in Hebrew at roadside cafés frequented only by Russian Zionists and the occasional Zionist mule. Now, fifty years too late, Haffner had some sympathy for Silberman: disguised only in the guise of himself.

  Haffner Roman

  1

  After Haffner had located the key – with its tasselled mane – Zinka immediately made for Haffner’s bathroom. She went in, slammed the door. From within the bathroom, then came the sound of running water.

  Haffner sat on the edge of the bed; took off his shoes; discovered the Lives of the Caesars, in paperback, underneath the scalloped valance; placed the book on the bedside table, beside his edition of Gibbon; and he sighed.

  Three eras, he decided, marked any possible grandeur he might have ever had, the eras when he was most true to himself: there was the war; then the glorious 1970s; and maybe, he considered, now. At this coda to his life – as if his life had been extended, in a moment of grace, just slightly too long.

  Zinka had a mole on her left cheek, tusked with twin hairs. It was the same mole, with the same tusks of hair, as the one which had belonged to a girl whom Haffner had met when the war in North Africa was over. This was 1942, or thereabouts. The regiment had gone to Bone, a lovely little place. And there it was, somehow, that he had met a lovely Jewish family who gave two or three of them a dinner. Haffner often wondered what happened to those nice people in North Africa, after the war was over. He always remembered the girl, with the darkest skin Haffner had ever seen, playing ‘Invitation to the Waltz’ on the piano. The next day the family arranged for them to be called up to read a portion of the Torah at the synagogu
e.

  An echo in the bathroom, Zinka asked him if he wanted to come in.

  He didn’t think that this was his right – this openness which women so often displayed towards him. He never felt so confident as that. It was why the women loved him: his inherent modesty. He knew that this was happening by a grace which was beyond him.

  Joyful, as he stepped into the bathroom, on stockinged feet, he paused at his window – where the sky was now one single shade of red, like a colour sample.

  2

  And Haffner was transported.

  For just as the sky was now a painting of paint, to Haffner’s distracted eyes, so he remembered how, in 1973, he had seen an exhibition of pure colour: at MoMA in New York. The exhibition was of paintings which were simply called Colors. The trip, on this Sunday afternoon, was Livia’s idea. Haffner, always eager to discover new maps of his cultural ignorance, happily agreed.

  Thin slabs of colour were laid next to each other: like in a paint catalogue. There seemed no genius, thought Haffner, no sublime. It was the absence of hyperbole – but precisely at this point Haffner found himself warming to this painting. Yes, this – so Haffner once told me – was the only art which he had ever liked. Livia had expected him to act with his normal grumpy chutzpah in the face of the masterpieces of modernism. But Haffner was transfixed. He was transfigured.

  Long after Livia had left him for the cafeteria, where she sat with a filter coffee and three shrugs of sugar, Haffner still stood there, gazing into colour.

  Such freedom! Although Haffner also enjoyed trying to trace the patterns in the grid – trying to work out if the repetitions of the yellow or the red could be predicted. He wasn’t sure they could. So he let his eyes go endless.

  Livia had disliked this abstract art: this most abstract of abstract art. It seemed emotionless, she thought. It was cold. This was what she told Haffner in the leather nook of a banquette at the Plaza, in the Oak Room. It had nothing to do with the real world. And Haffner had discovered a tirade within himself: that what the fuck did she care about the real world; that as far as Haffner was concerned there was no such thing as the real world; that this painting – to which, he reminded her, she herself had taken him, it wasn’t Haffner’s idea – this painting was as real as anything else; that in fact it seemed to Haffner an accurate portrayal of the real world in its clarity, its order; that quite frankly he saw little difference between the world which Livia called real and the world of colour in the grid on a wall at MoMA.

  In the colours, Haffner found something he loved. He didn’t understand it. But he knew that he admired it. This world beyond the world: where everything was pure.

  3

  There in her bath, Zinka was a vision of bubbles. Haffner knew the word for this. It was a fantasia. The vision of Walt Disney, the master of cartoons.

  From the costume of her bubbles, Zinka said that first he must blindfold himself. Haffner queried this. Yes, she said. If he wanted to stay. He could take that stocking from over there. Haffner looked: a sliver of black pantyhose was slumped under her dress. He looked back at her. She nodded. That was the condition, she said.

  These were the trials, thought Haffner. He was happy with the trials. Yes, for pleasure, Haffner could undergo anything.

  With clumsy hands, Haffner tied the stocking limply over his eyes: a robber baron. But Haffner didn’t care. He could still see: cloudy, in black and white. The peep shows of his maturity.

  Haffner transformed by lust! Haffner crowned with the head of an ass!

  If Haffner wanted, she said, he could now come and help to wash her. Would he like that? If he wanted, he could take that sponge and wash her back. Just so long as he was careful.

  The fragrances from the water overtook Haffner. He stood over her. He wished he could have seen more. There her outline was, like the coyest vision of Hollywood, submerged by infinite foam. Her hair was done up in a hazy bun. One hand was leaning over the rim of the bath. She was looking up at him.

  She told him to tighten the stocking. Haffner obeyed.

  Then he took off his jacket, pushed the cuffs of his sweatshirt up – a bad imitation of his father, whose billowing sleeves were always secured with two silver bands, like the neat cuffs for napkins. He took a sponge, and dunked it: then expressed the water in warm rivulets over the curve of her back, with its peeling patches of foam.

  An incubus, Haffner hunkered over Zinka. Perhaps this was another image which Haffner thought he should have minded. Haffner, however, never minded the embarrassments in his pursuit of pleasure. The embarrassments were just the acknowledged debt one owed.

  Just below the disintegrating level of foam, he could see – through the thin blindfold – the momentary beginning of Zinka’s breasts. He could see the side of her left breast, but the slope was something else. Pretending not to look, he tried to notice as much as he could: to preserve it for the playground of his memory, while Zinka told him that he was being very kind. He was quite the gentleman.

  Haffner wondered how long he could maintain a courtly conversation with a woman while blindfolded with her stocking. Its scent was odd: a mixture of must and shoe leather and the faintest last echo of her perfume.

  Yes really, she said. He was a civilised man, and she liked that.

  She flattered him. As Haffner had been flattered all his life, by the women. The women loved to flatter him: they loved to exercise his ego. He was cosseted. Not every woman, obviously. Not, most importantly, Livia. But the women Haffner went for in his secret life, his private life, were images of his mother. They told him how wonderful he was. They wrapped presents for him, surprises. On his sixtieth birthday, a woman for whom Haffner had only the most vestigial of passions privately presented him with a giant trunk of presents: sixty, each wrapped inside the other. A present of presents for the birthday boy. But maybe Livia had praised him like this, at the beginning. Maybe she simply got tired of his demands for flattery: or simply realised the untruth of all her praise – the practised way in which he enticed her with his vulnerability.

  But there was another explanation. Her love was quieter because it was more true. Unlike everyone else, she trusted in Haffner’s love. She would never, she once whispered to him, be loved by anyone else in the way that Haffner loved her. So how could she refuse him?

  Zinka looked at Haffner’s hand on her shoulder, drowning it in droplets. It was a girlish hand, she said. And Haffner wondered if at this late stage in his life he should waste himself in exercising his vanity on this kind of phrase. He decided that he had no choice. How could he invert the habits of a lifetime? He was not up to it.

  So Haffner felt silently annoyed, silently exercised on behalf of his masculine hands.

  Zinka asked if he were satisfied. He repeated the word to her: a question. Was he happy? she asked. But of course, replied Haffner, with a delirious grin. Then he paused. But maybe. Maybe what?

  she asked him. No, it was nothing, said Haffner. But he had to tell her, said Zinka. Well then, maybe, Haffner wondered, he might be allowed to kiss her.

  4

  Now that, said Zinka, would be a very improper request. And Haffner, downcast, agreed. But, he added, contemplating how far down the path of humiliation Haffner might be prepared to walk, it would make him very happy.

  He discovered that the path of humiliation had unexpectedly scenic views.

  For although Zinka eventually said, from the depths of her silence, that yes, he could kiss her, it was not the kiss which Haffner was expecting.

  She raised her left knee so that it rose from the water, crested with scintillating foam.

  —You may kiss me on the knee, said Zinka.

  Haffner considered Zinka’s knee. At its tip, there was a small scar, translucent. A blurred and miniature map of France.

  His own knees hurt him, cramped there on the bathroom tiles. He tried to ignore this. He bent his head to Zinka, hoping to see beyond the clouding bubbles: to the dark crevices of Zinka. He could not.


  And Haffner kissed her.

  His mouth filled with a froth of foam. It gilded his upper lip with a stray moustache. It embittered his mouth with chemicals.

  How pleasurable was this? Haffner asked himself. Was it enough? For her part, Zinka thought it was. But Haffner wanted to lick her until her true smell returned: the delicious bare smell of her skin. Not the sterility of artificial foam. He asked if he could kiss her again. She said no. She was going to wash now. It was time for him to go back into the bedroom.

  Haffner tried to stand up. He could not. Like some immovable sphinx, with buried paws. He could only turn his head away. He tried to explain this to Zinka, with the utmost maintenance of his dignity. In that case, said Zinka, she would just get out and dry herself. He must not look, she said. He promised this? Haffner promised. He turned his head.

  There was a surge of water beside him. He tried to wrench the stocking away. Too late, he gazed at Zinka, with her back to him, wrapping herself in the softness of Haffner’s towels: a Roman matron, in her flowing toga.

  5

  Sourly, he tasted the foam in his mouth. There was no doubt, thought Haffner, that his dignity was in danger. And yet, he was discovering, he seemed curiously avid for this degradation. It seemed, this ruin of Haffner, to be a kind of triumph too.

  This wasn’t a new motif in the life of Raphael Haffner.

  In Rome, after the liberation, while Haffner waited for an infinitely postponed decision on his regiment’s movements, he used to go up to the Pincio Gardens, and smoke his traded cigarettes, dropping the butts in the sand. Even up there, the smell from the sewage was heavy. The cigarettes, among other things, were Haffner’s improvised pomander.