The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  On the other hand, if Frau Tummel could hear everything, thought Haffner, could hear that Zinka’s was not the voice of her husband, then why had she not come out? This seemed reasonable.

  Oh Haffner! He hadn’t considered the depth of Frau Tummel’s pride. Nor the intricacy of her sadness.

  5

  Zinka lay there, in no apparent rush to dress herself in the tracksuit and vest which formed her sportswear. She lay against the bolster, in a T-shirt, and socks, and panties. She took an apple from the bowl of fruit placed with professional love beside his bed each morning, bit a slim curve out of it, then put it back, on the table. It wobbled; then came to rest. She looked at Haffner.

  She hooked a finger under the gusset of her panties. They looked at each other. Then Zinka withdrew her finger, let her gusset move back into place.

  In Haffner’s memory, this happened with an infinite languor. This was only, perhaps, because the speed of Haffner’s thought was now subject to a steep acceleration.

  She must like him, thought Haffner. In some way, she must like him. Haffner, after all, did not believe in the maliciousness of reality. This talent allowed him to discover so much solace where other people only saw benightedness, the end of civilisation.

  Zinka asked him if he wanted to watch her touch herself.

  No, thought Haffner, trying to reason, considering Frau Tummel, considering Benjamin, considering the villa which had led him into this ever more miniature trap: no, if against his better judgement the world was turning itself into a succession of traps, then what did Haffner care? The obvious reasons were there: the many ways in which Zinka might be thinking of repayment. Or she might be acting for reasons which would always remain inscrutable to Haffner. The reasons were beyond him.

  And this, I think, was where the story of the villa began to truly become the story of Haffner’s finale: at this point, he began to enter a world where all the usual values seemed reversed: a small gymnasium of moral backflips, with the joyful ideas walking on their hands.

  He couldn’t remember if any woman had ever asked him this at any other point in his history. It startled him with its poise. Usually, the women seemed to expect Haffner to do the action: Haffner was the highest executive, the producer there to give permission to the director in his folding and eponymous chair, with all the lights off and the crew observing him, expectantly, surrounded by vacant lots where the streetlights flickered in their high anxiety. He looked at Zinka. Frau Tummel, sweating, weeping, did not occur to him, not any more. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to see Zinka touch herself.

  Again, Haffner nodded.

  Then Zinka flipped over on to her stomach. This was not the position which Haffner had expected: his improvised imagination had been more orthodox, more pornographic. But at this point he was not burdened with the responsibilities of the critic.

  Then, he realised, there was a small problem involved in Haffner’s own position.

  Haffner considered sitting down. He worried this might seem too formal. It might seem rehearsed. So he stood: in the appearance of the casual. As if it were nothing more than an ordinary conversation, this exchange between a hotel guest and his spa assistant.

  Standing by his desk, at the foot of the bed, Haffner could see her moving her fingers, the red fingertips emerging where she lay.

  And that, Haffner suddenly realised, was it. There was nothing more to see. This moved him. It was, he thought, more intimate like this. He would see nothing, not even her face. Everything was in the noises, the small moans and inhalations, the slow exhalations. Her face was squashed against the pillow. The intimacy was musical. Entranced, Haffner stared.

  She rested a cheek on the bedraggled sheet, to look back at him. Her cheek was red, as if she were blushing.

  Outside, unknown to Haffner, the sun maintained its fixed decline.

  6

  Distractedly, Haffner saw once more the Lives of the Caesars, there on his bedside table. Even if this was not quite despotic, it was the closest he had really come, thought Haffner, to feeling imperial. This was Dacia, and Dalmatia. He could understand the euphoria.

  No wonder they set about erecting columns, thought Haffner: the camels and the trumpets. No wonder they wanted to parade their spoils, in triumph – the chariots drawn by panthers on their padded paws. No arch, no column, was grand enough to commemorate the few grand moments of desire in a life, the even fewer moments of possession.

  Yes, there had been twelve Caesars: and now here was the thirteenth – Haffner Augustus: whose image, if there were any justice in this world, should be carved on a marble tomb, its panels chased with Haffner in profile, leading his jungly train – the leopards, the chubby satyrs – to some screwed-up festival of Bacchus.

  7

  The lamps, in their shades, observed Haffner, delinquent.

  And Haffner forgot himself. All the characters of his recent history – Frau Tummel, Niko, Benjamin – dissolved like the swoon of a television’s closedown. There was only Haffner, in his second best tracksuit: and this figure in front of him, a resting contortionist.

  For Haffner was beginning to understand.

  That people tended to make other people up, that friendships tended to be formed between two imaginary people: Haffner knew this. What struck him as more poignant and more touching in the friendship of Zinka and Haffner was that it was so much less imaginary than he might ever have predicted. In ways which rather tended to be beyond him, Haffner seemed to offer her some kind of playfulness. And this version of Haffner, he thought, was the truest, the most profound.

  When Esther was very young, she used to play with Haffner and their schnauzer. Livia would be in the kitchen, or the garden. In this way, the three of them formed a diminishing series: for Esther would only play so long as Haffner was there, a minor role. Just as Haffner was only happy when he knew that Livia was there, somewhere close, if out of sight. With Haffner in attendance, occasionally called on to settle some argument, or adjudicate some game, Esther played with her seven imaginary friends, while pensively chewing on the blonde curling tips of her hair.

  Haffner wondered whether this resemblance perturbed him – between his daughter playing and a girl on his bed. He concluded that it did not. At that moment, he realised, he would accept whatever conditions were imposed, whatever distortions might be demanded. He would do anything: just so long as he could be there, in the sunlit room, with Zinka.

  He was interrupted momentarily from this glow of happiness by Zinka reaching a conclusion which Haffner only wished might be a little softer, a little less of a crescendo. And then there was a pause in which the world, sadly, began to right itself. Finally, Zinka sighed, began to move, and then turned round and sat there, on the bed, looking at him, a leg tucked under her waist: a seductive yogi.

  She should probably go, said Zinka: Haffner agreed that yes, she probably should. So, then, she said. And he sat down, by the desk, marvelling – a vague state which meant that her dressing and smiling at Haffner, then leaving the room, then the door shutting with its slow delayed click all seemed to happen in a miracle of speed, without Haffner noticing.

  She was the only woman he had ever met – apart from Livia, apart from Livia – marked by such self-possession.

  But Haffner had no time to consider the line of his life: its line of beauty. Out of the bathroom, in an adagio of sadness, emerged the judgement of Haffner.

  Haffner Guilty

  1

  As in the horror films of Haffner’s silent youth, the door to the bathroom swung open, and no one emerged. There was silence: except, thought Haffner, for the liquid, aquatic soundtrack of the bathroom. Then Haffner understood that he was listening to the profound whisper of Frau Tummel’s exhalations, the soughing of her inhalations. She had been standing there, staring into the mirror, her profile against the door. For a perturbed exalted moment, Haffner wondered if what he could hear was maybe the after-effect of a simultaneous Tummelian orgasm: still transc
endent, cascading.

  It was not.

  Frau Tummel emerged from her oubliette. She made hungrily for her handbag and discovered her package of cigarettes. She lit one, then relaxed into the usual minimalist rhythm, standing at the window, grinning against the light. To the mountains, the unending sky, she said that she had never been so much made mock of. She was a wife, she was a mother. Everything she had, she had offered to Haffner. And this was how he treated her. He had let her say so many things. He had told her so many untruths.

  He was like a boy, she said. This monster of immaturity! Even an adolescent would be more careful with love.

  2

  —But, argued Haffner, standing uneasily in the middle of the room.

  At this point in his intricate reasoning, Frau Tummel interrupted.

  She could not understand it. Was he rational? When he had done what he had just done? This man who had just shut her in a bathroom, while he entertained a woman in a way which she, Frau Tummel, could not explain. No, she could not understand it. A man who was dressed, as ever, in a variant on the shell suit.

  Haffner only wanted to say, he began again. Again, he was forced to pause.

  And although I am Haffner’s historian, I can observe Frau Tummel too. He only wanted to mock her, she thought. He must have staged the whole thing. She was feeling so suddenly desolate. Now, she had no one. It was clear enough, she thought, that Haffner would never want her in the way that she wanted him to want her; and yet she did not want her husband, not quite, in the way that she wanted to want him either – a man who was so delicate, so unlike the ideal of Frau Tummel’s youth.

  Why, she said, must there be so much vulgarity with Haffner? Why this obscenity? Her voice accelerated into the upper registers. What beauty was there in his behaviour? Why the dirt, Raphael? Why this dirt?

  And Haffner, still in the cloud of happiness produced by Zinka – illuminated, looking down on the pitiful world of humans – did not know what to say.

  But of course, continued Frau Tummel, let everything descend to his level. Because he didn’t understand the higher emotions. Haffner tried to remonstrate with her. When, said Haffner, had he ever? Whereas for her, continued Frau Tummel, fool that she was, it was a fantasy: of course, it was just a romance. If that was how he wanted to describe something eternal, something real.

  —You! said Frau Tummel. In your tracksuit.

  This point seemed incontrovertible.

  —You want, she said, to be with this girl? This teenager? It disgusts me.

  Once, this accusation would have seemed just to Haffner, perhaps: but not now. Up here, in the mountains, he had discovered a delighted sense of flippancy: yes, up here, he really could dispense with thinking in terms of the up or the down. As if the healthy were really ill. Or the old were really young.

  So what could he say to soothe her? She wanted love to be a refuge: the desert island. But Haffner never thought that anywhere was safe; nowhere was truly deserted. Not even a marriage. It was, he thought, impossible to desert into another country, across the border, in the blue dawn.

  It wasn’t Haffner’s fault, after all, if the moments of love and the moments of sex so rarely coincided.

  —So, said Frau Tummel. So.

  Haffner wondered what that meant. He wondered if he could ask.

  It was always the same, said Frau Tummel. Men would always say they were in love, when all they wanted was the body of a woman; whereas for a woman, said Frau Tummel, it was absolutely opposite. He came from an outside place. But what could this man in front of her know about a true woman?

  —But I never said I loved you, said Haffner.

  And then he immediately regretted this moment of pointless truth. Suddenly, Frau Tummel stalled in the headlong pursuit of her anger. But then, perhaps this was what she had expected all along: this brutal Haffner.

  It didn’t mean, however, that Frau Tummel was not in love. It only confirmed her in her feelings all the more. The suffering was no contradiction. It couldn’t be love, thought Frau Tummel, without the suffering. It came upon you, unbidden.

  She waited for Haffner to say something kind, to tell her that of course he loved her. But Haffner simply stood there, deserted by his politesse: maimed by sincerity.

  He refused to agree, said Haffner, with her theory. No, love was not a compulsion. The suffering was not necessary. It was just imagination, he told her. Everyone, said Haffner, chooses if they want to fall in love.

  And as he said it, he wasn’t sure if it was true. It didn’t seem true of his love for Zinka. It had never been true of his love for Livia.

  Let me be my own author! This was Haffner’s cry. He wanted to be the one who invented his own stories as he went along. Except he hadn’t then; and he couldn’t now.

  3

  No, there was nothing masculine about Haffner’s desire for Zinka: it did not obey the usual categories of Haffner: pursuit, and then seduction. Instead, it represented a happy passivity, content with whatever it might get.

  Perhaps Zinka understood this. She wanted a man who was beyond the normal aggression. She wanted, really, an escape from the men. Whereas Frau Tummel – who craved the masculine – did not.

  If Haffner were only allowed to exist in one sentence, it would be this: he was a desire that had outlived its usefulness.

  And maybe this was the universal law of the empires: the law of decadence. That was the secret history of history. The very quality that led to an empire was the reason why that very empire would no longer be able to sustain itself. No contemporary, in the words of the great historian, could discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. He was talking about the Roman empire. But he could have been talking about Haffner. The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. And so the minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level; everyone sunk into the languid indifference of private life.

  Not survival of the fittest, then, but the deeper truth: survival of the weakest. Haffner had been so intent on the pursuit of women. He had always been kind to his desires. And now this very taste for possession had led to his transformation into the greatest of fantasists – the most elegant and whimsical of imaginative artists. Because the desire was still there, but Haffner was no longer in control of where he might act these desires out.

  And this reminds me of one story from a more decadent empire than our own.

  The emperor Elagabalus was emperor when the empire was disintegrating. As if that wasn’t obvious. His reputation as a voluptuary was awesome. It might be possible, recorded Elagabalus’s historian, that his vices and follies had been exaggerated; had been adorned in the imagination of his narrators. But even if one only believed those excesses which were performed in public, and attested to by many witnesses, they would still surpass the records of human infamy. Of these excesses, the one which I most admire is the way in which Elagabalus – the instigator of a coup – loved to dress up in women’s clothes. He preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and distributed the honours of the empire among his male lovers, including one man who was invested with the authority of the emperor – or, as Elagabalus insisted on being known, the empress’s husband.

  Laughable, maybe – but man! What possessions one could enter into, when dispossessed to this extent!

  4

  Perhaps, said Frau Tummel, he simply lacked soul.

  This was more than Haffner had expected. Perhaps, she continued, the spirit was beyond him. She was sure that he didn’t even know how to cross himself. No, said Haffner, he didn’t. This, said a demonstrative Frau Tummel, is how you do it.

  Was it only Haffner, he wondered, who was constantly available for education?

  Like this? he wondered. No, that was wrong, she said. The forehead first? queried Haffner. The forehead was not important, said Frau Tummel. The forehead was nothing. Why was he worrying about the forehead?

  Then there was a
nother knock at the door.

  —Don’t answer it! cried Frau Tummel.

  —Why not? said Haffner, flinging open the door, to reveal a boy bearing a tray.

  It was reception, he said. They were sending Haffner complimentary refreshment.

  —Why? said Haffner.

  —A gift, said the boy.

  —From whom? said Haffner.

  —I don’t know, said the boy.

  And he placed on the table an inaccurate planetarium: a galaxy of white chocolates, with seven half-moons of cinnamon biscuits.

  Frau Tummel looked at Haffner.

  —You mock me, she said.

  And, for a moment, he wanted to enfold her in his arms and tell her no, he did not mock her at all.

  He was truly a monster, she told him. What right did he think he had?

  He could admit, as she said this, that there were ways of finding Haffner guilty. Therefore, maybe it was right that, more and more, his life resembled some bizarre form of punishment, some gonzo idea of karma. But Haffner wasn’t one to be abused by ideas of sin. The devil, like all the other gods, was one invention among many, in Haffner’s improvised theology: the gods were just decoration; scribbled marginalia. The gods were doodling. He preferred to form the categories himself. If Haffner were pressed, he preferred the more charming and likeable others: the demigods. The infinite fairies: the 33,000 gods of the pagan religions. These were the gods he might have called on when he felt that he was sinning. But the prospect was unlikely, He doubted that, if the gods existed, their concern would be the soul of Raphael Haffner.

  —I said I loved you, said Frau Tummel.