The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  4

  The viscount, however, had still been moved by the ghettos. Whereas Haffner felt more distance from the Jewish underclass. The stories from the ghettos distressed him but they were not his. Partly, this was from a sense that as a cossetted Londoner he could hardly adopt the tragedies of people he never knew. A position which seems calmly moral, precisely modest, to me. But there was also a more complicated distance. The person Haffner knew best, whose stories were ghetto stories, was Goldfaden. With Livia, thought Haffner jealously, Goldfaden possessed a tragic European past. So this meant, I think, that Haffner sometimes exaggerated his haughtiness in regard to history. For Haffner was not without his own sense of racial possessiveness. In Haffner’s opinion, there was no reason for the working classes, for the Blacks and the Chinese, to avail themselves of this word ghetto. It was a Jewish possession. No one else had suffered like the Jews had suffered. No one else had been persecuted with such universal thoroughness.

  In Venice, on holiday with Esther and her family, in the early 1980s, Haffner and Livia wandered away from San Marco: they ended up in what had been, Livia informed him, reading from a guidebook, the original ghetto (—From the sixteenth century! she exclaimed). In the bleak hot sunlight, no one was moving. On the seventh floor of a tenement building, some washing was strung on runners. A wireless was talking to itself.

  In this ghetto, Haffner and Livia discussed their recurrent story of the Ghetto: the story of Goldfaden’s uncle, Eli, who was now a cameraman in LA.

  Eli had not been on the family holiday in London with the Goldfadens. So he was left behind in Warsaw. Before the war, he had been a member of the Bund, the General Jewish Labour Union. He believed in a strange combination of the Yiddish language and culture, and secular Jewish nationalism. Like Livia’s father, and Haffner, he was not a Zionist. Unlike them, he expressed this Yiddishly, through his devotion to doyigkeyt, to hereness. His family lived on Sienna Street, near the Jewish quarter. And Eli, Goldfaden used to tell Livia, as they reminisced about Europe – while Haffner glanced at the diary pieces about his financial rivals in the evening papers – Eli was so earnest in his devotion to learning that he even read the novels which were serialised in the newspapers. A man should be prepared, thought Eli. Nothing was alien to him.

  In Warsaw, before the revolt in the Ghetto, and before the uprising in the city, but when everything still was bleak, Eli had been told to go with his parents to the main square. This seemed reasonable. Or, at least, not unreasonable. In the square, they were told to walk in single file to the train station, where a train was waiting at each platform. They had asked the rabbi if this seemed advisable. The rabbi, after long deliberation, thought that the best thing to do was obey those in power. Could they really wish them harm? And this, said Goldfaden, was where his cousin became heroic. He came to a decision. No one had ever heard again from those who had got on the trains to the east. Eli knew this. Therefore, concluded Eli, he would run. So what if he were shot in the back, his kidneys torn inside him? He would prefer to stage his own death, rather than sleepwalk into it. And so he ran, and managed to hide out in the rubble of a destroyed apartment block.

  Here, in the ghetto in Venice, just before Haffner had retired, Livia had praised Eli once more. But Haffner, this time, had paused. Then he had asked her: what about the others? She had asked him what he meant. They paused and looked at a dark canal. What about the others, the ones the man had left behind? said Haffner. What about his parents? And Livia had replied that they all died. Naturally, they had died. The moral value of Eli’s act seemed to Haffner to be complicated by this. He had chosen to abandon his friends. And maybe this was fine, maybe this was unremarkable, but Haffner thought that, at the very least, it was a complication.

  She should have known, said Livia, that Haffner would be difficult.

  Yes, said Haffner, Haffner would be difficult. Why shouldn’t he be difficult?

  And perhaps Haffner was right, even if he was only accidentally right, by transforming Eli’s story into a story of Haffner: a compromise.

  Haffner saw in this anecdote the grand bravery of refusing to act in the way you were supposed to act. In Haffner’s rewrite, Eli’s escape from the Ghetto was also a desertion.

  5

  According to Livia, the story of Eli was not a story of a desertion, because a desertion was morally bad. An escape, however, was morally good. But I am not so sure that the two can be so easily divided. People call a flight an escape, only after having been forced to give up the idea that it is moral to remain in a bad situation. So often, people think that if one person is suffering, then everyone else should suffer too. In these cases, if someone takes flight, then their escape is just a desertion.

  Yes, the whole vocabulary of flight is puritanical. So every act of desertion is also an act of hedonism.

  And maybe the deep reason for this is that no one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap. The trap is the image of life’s seriousness.

  Haffner, however, my hero, did not believe that life was serious. He didn’t believe that one must necessarily be faithful to the ordinary, inevitable tragedy of a life. If one could be faithless to anything, Haffner always hoped, surely it would be to one’s own past?

  But, however much I admire the hope, I am not so sure that this kind of infidelity is possible. And there, in the church, nor was Haffner. Because the story of Eli now made Haffner remember another story which he preferred to keep to himself: how under the patronage of the Reverend Levine, the appointed guardian of Jewish refugees from Germany, a girl stayed in the Haffners’ house, in 1938. He didn’t remember very much about her: he couldn’t remember her name. He knew very little, but he believed that she took her own life. Not when she was staying with them, but eventually.

  She must have been about twenty. He didn’t remember even trying to talk to her. She must have been with them a very short time, thought Haffner. She was extremely unhappy. Perhaps they couldn’t cope with her. Yes, in his mind, he heard that she had taken her own life. But his mind was a bit hazy. He hadn’t got involved – but he knew that there was somebody there, upstairs, in the spare room. She was always asleep. He had no idea how it had been organised.

  This was what it was to be Jewish in Britain. The East was always making its demands on you: the grief of its history entered your life and so it became your own. You were always being forced back: beyond the pale.

  He couldn’t remember that girl’s name.

  He was not sinful: he refused all ideas of sin. But if Haffner had ever sinned, thought Haffner, then this forgetting was it.

  6

  In the dark church Haffner called on God:

  —You are the Lord my God, Haffner exclaimed, in silence, in the darkness of this church, and I am a clod of dirt and a worm; dust of the ground and a vessel of shame.

  But Haffner didn’t need his God for such lavish repentance. The women were enough.

  Haffner had used the infidelities within his marriage as the Orthodox used the eruv. They were exercises in invention; the riches of self-blame. His interior life was festooned with sagging squares of string, marking out the permitted areas within the forbidden world. He believed in marriage like the Orthodox believed in God. It was a territory for permitting the unpermitted.

  And for testing the soul of Haffner.

  Livia had been expert at the put-down. She was, in Haffner’s language, a strong woman. This trait had endeared her to him. At the official dinners, the unofficial suppers, Haffner bore with pleased and happy grace her talent to resist Haffner’s charm, believing that this public scepticism served to illustrate his moral grandeur, his lack of vanity. It was not an unusual moment in his life when, on the night of the dinner for the City Branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982, he came into her dressing room while she was in her underwear – blue lace, white frills – and with a crooked finger, its nail tipped wit
h a varnish whose colour Haffner would never be able to name, she pointed out to him the direction of the door. And in his socks he turned around and left.

  Retrospectively, however, this moment had acquired a unique weight. For that, thought Haffner, was when he understood that his marriage had in fact been governed by forces which he did not understand or control. That night, after Haffner’s speech, after the speeches reciprocating Haffner’s speech, as they were driving home in Haffner’s Saab – with Livia driving, because Haffner was utterly drunk – Haffner quizzed her on the significance of why he had found her sitting outside the venue, the Butchers’ Hall; why he had found her sitting there with Goldfaden, sharing a cigarette while the meat-market traffic began revving and chirring around them and the rinsing smell of meat gusted and retreated: yes, why had he found them there, sitting peaceably, with Goldfaden cupping her hand as he lit her cigarette? And at the time Haffner had not so much minded about the fact that he had never seen her smoking; nor that it was a habit she had excoriated in Haffner: he minded about the casual way in which Goldfaden touched her hand.

  Calmly, without malice, Livia had simply told Haffner that it was not as if he could really lecture her. It was not as if he could condemn what she had done, and would continue to do.

  Drunk, silenced, Haffner considered this. And what he wanted to say was that the two were incomparable: because when it came to women, Haffner had only ever got whoever came along. They loved him, true – but Haffner never really loved them back. He just amazed them with the strength of his devotion: a devotion which was indistinguishable from the fear that they would leave him. Even if no one did leave Haffner. Whereas Livia had something else. Livia, it seemed, had love.

  —Do you love him? asked Haffner.

  And Livia, braking gently at the traffic light by the Hampstead pond, said that yes of course: naturally, she said – and she touched Haffner, gently, on the cheek. So Haffner asked her what they were going to do about it now, to which Livia simply replied that she saw no reason to do anything.

  Livia didn’t believe in an escape.

  She parked the car in the drive, went into the house, and Haffner sat there: listening to the rose bushes’ gentle crackle in the wind. Just as now, years later, Haffner sat in a church and surveyed the wondrous mistakes of his life: his infidelity to his wife, his infidelity to his race. Or, to put it another way, his infidelity to the women he had slept with – to Barbra, to Pilar and Joan and Laure and all the other names he now could not remember – his infidelity to his nation.

  All the nebulous fairies of his history and his politics, dissolving, now, on a midsummer night, in the middle of nowhere.

  He was such a klutz, thought Haffner. Then he translated himself out of Goldfaden’s language. He was a fool.

  It was fitting, really, that one of Goldfaden’s favourite party tricks was his riff on the word dope. As Goldfaden would explain to you, it was the trickiest word in the language: on the American side, it came from the Dutch for sauce, so meaning any kind of goo, lubricant, liquid, liquor, and hence any kind of narcotic, drug, medicine, adulterating agent, and hence, through the racetracks, and their need to know the inside dope, all esoteric lore, all arcana. And there it met, at its apex, the British derivation, from dupe, meaning the gull, the fool, the absolutely-in-the-dark: and where else were we, Goldfaden would conclude, if not always in the dark, drugged by lack of knowledge, unaware of the systems which eluded us and which invaded us at every moment? This word dope was the real thing which bound the British and Americans together: this was the real Atlantic Ocean.

  But at this point, with this word dope, Haffner had gone as far as he could in the business of self-discussion. Because everything was obvious to him now. Everything had always been to do with Livia. And Haffner had never noticed.

  It was so evident, so infinite in its evidence, that Haffner had never known.

  7

  Haffner stood up: he turned to go – making for the Chinese restaurant where he was meant to eat with Benjamin. In front of the church, where the baroque facade hid the brick barn of a nave, a line of floats was parked, each decorated with a tableau vivant. All the actors in these tableaux were children. Surrounding them, the adults of the town were taking photographs. Saint Peter was scratching the side of his nose with a translucent wafer, while another boy in white shirt and black trousers kneeled before him, on a plush velvet cusion, with his eyes escaping through the trickle of his fingers.

  No, thought Haffner, observing the children. Some things were irreversible. The entropy of Haffner! Not everything could be recuperated. Like Haffner’s gilded youth. For how can a man be young, when he is old? He knew enough of the Bible to know that this was difficult.

  As Morton would have said, do the math.

  Only on the last day in Cairo, in 1946, did Haffner write to Livia as his wife. Throughout their engagement and the early years of their marriage, throughout the war, he had referred to her as his darling girl, his sweetheart. Only now, in the last letter he would write to her from the war, when he was coming home, did Haffner address her as his very darling wife.

  —I only pray that you will find me a better man than when I left you and that I will fulfil all your dreams, he wrote. I believe that we can do tremendous things together and that with our lives, with our happiness, we can make others happy. And that is what I think life is for, the real purpose behind it all. So Haffner wrote to Livia, the night before he sailed back to England, in 1946.

  —Bless you, my beloved girl, wrote Raphael Haffner, keep you safe always.

  PART FOUR

  Haffner Gastronomic

  1

  The meals of Haffner and Benjamin were epic. In this gargantuan size, they expressed their love. They went to Bodean’s on Poland Street and sucked at the burned ends and ribs of cows – which jutted out forlornly, and unevenly, like organ pipes. They were experts in the cuts of steak: both convinced that the aged hanger steaks of New York were the greatest of them all. Then there were the deep-fried marvels of Japan: the chicken katsu, endowed with its cloudy pot of barbecue sauce. Candy undid them: not the ordinary treats, but the strange, gourmet sugar of internationally local cuisines: nougat, glacé cherries, marzipan fruits, baklava. They invented festivals of junk food: on one famous occasion, they had walked down Oxford Street, eating at every branch of American burger chain they could find. But there was more. This more was the Chinese food.

  There was nothing, said Benjamin, more Jewish than this – Haffner’s passion for Chinese food. Nothing more emphasised, said Benjamin, his genetic roots to the scattered race.

  Haffner looked at him, amazed: his own grandson, with the same weird theory of Chinese food as Goldfaden. Or perhaps he was misremembering. This was, after all, possible.

  Underneath a red paper lantern, Benjamin’s cheeks were carmine – incandescent. On his face shone a glaze of sweat, echoing the lacquer on the slices of pork belly which lay, unguent, on their bed of shredded iceberg lettuce set before Haffner.

  —You ordered the crispy beef, said Benji.

  —Yes, I ordered the beef, said Haffner. Of course I ordered the beef. Wait a minute.

  Benjamin swivelled round. Or, he swivelled as much as his bulk would allow: an imperfect barn owl.

  He saw no one who could help him. He turned back to Haffner.

  They continued to argue over whether Haffner should keep his appointment with Niko. Haffner thought it was obvious; Benjamin thought it was less obvious. But he couldn’t see, said Haffner, what he had to lose. Could Benjamin explain this to him? He wasn’t so proud that he would refuse someone else’s help.

  It was the principle, said Benjamin. He didn’t know these people. How could he trust them?

  What kind of principle was that? replied Haffner. It was fear, that was all. And they were hardly, said Haffner, going to rob him – and he exhibited his Nike T-shirt; his flared turquoise tracksuit trouser.

  Benji swivelled round once more: he sti
ll saw no one who could help him.

  Sighing, he turned back, and introduced a new topic of conversation.

  What, he wanted to know, did Haffner know about hip hop?

  —Hip hop? queried Haffner.

  —Hip hop, confirmed Benjamin. But not the West Coast hip hop, nor the East Coast hip hop. Instead, his new thing was South Coast: the hip hop of urban and immigrant France.

  In this way, Benji combined a former craze, his craze for hip hop, with his new – and, he believed, ultimate – craze for love. In Tel Aviv, he had been introduced by the girl who had deflowered him to the classics of French hip hop: the angry banlieusards in the angry banlieues.

  This was, after all, why he had come to the spa town. Benjamin was in love. He was in love, and was here to receive advice from Haffner.

  So he talked about hip hop. To Benji, this seemed logical.

  As he ate, Benjamin described the curious fact that his two favourite songs, at this moment, were both about terror: the French hip-hop song called ‘Darkness’, and the French hip-hop song called ‘Mourir 1000 fois’, with its dark first line: in which the rapper told his terrified audience about his fears of death, in which the chorus simply stated that existence was punishment. They entranced Benji with their myth of the grand: the imagination of disaster. This was why he so loved the rappers from Marseilles: a city he had never been to; a city which, if he were honest, scared him with its reputation for the brutal.