The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —It kind of baffles me, sometimes, how you sleep at night, Pfeffer once said, as they sat in the Overseas Bankers’ Club in Lothbury: amazed how Haffner could lie beside the wronged form of Livia.

  Haffner dropped a chunk of sugar into his coffee, observing the brief spawn of bubbles on the black surface.

  With Pfeffer, the family man, when trying to defend his sexual record, Haffner had then developed a theory of the wife and the mistress. Really, said Haffner, people didn’t understand: the wife was safe. The really vulnerable were the other women. Pfeffer queried this. Haffner was always good, he observed, at misplacing his tenderness. His sense of what was important and what was not had never been a thing of moral beauty.

  Haffner’s argument had never convinced Haffner, let alone Pfeffer. Now, however, Haffner was beginning to wonder if he had been right all along. He couldn’t remember the other women. They meant nothing to him. It was sad to admit this, but it was true. Whatever Barbra was doing now, Haffner didn’t care. Whereas Livia was different. Livia was everything.

  And me, I might add something else.

  It is still the same Promised Land, it is still the same story, whether we talk of Moses and his Promised Land, or Odysseus and his Ithaca; or Haffner and this villa in the centre of Europe. And in a version of the story of Odysseus, which I once read, when Odysseus finally arrived safely home in Ithaca, he found himself utterly disappointed. And yet, wrote the author, whose name I have forgotten, what did he want of Ithaca? What else did it really offer him, if not precisely that journey home?

  Just as Haffner stepped out into the midsummer night – the longest night of the year, the longest night of Haffner’s life – but did not see before him the deserted nocturnal retail village, but instead entered the noblest park, and stood there observing a spreading oak tree, under which a long-lost version of Haffner sat with his beloved wife. Around them, deer munched. They were in Gloucestershire, or Warwickshire: ensconced in England. A fox was a red blur in the dark of a blackberry bush. And this lost but momentarily recovered Haffner lay watching the yellow-green where the sun lit the leaves; the black-green where it didn’t.

  Haffner Defeated

  1

  The club which Haffner was speeding towards in Niko’s car was located down a side street, pretending to be a milk bar. So went its name. It opened on to the street via a metal door. When this door was opened, the clubber walked down some steps to a checkpoint where a girl waited behind a table, branding you with an ink stamp, before letting you turn left, down a further flight of stairs, further underground, into the club itself.

  In the first room, there was the bar, and a selection of chairs. In the second, there was a room where two girls were DJing. On the wall was projected a selection of childhood images: though from whose childhood, no one knew. In the final room, the kids were dancing; when the DJs finished, a live set began. Tonight, it was an electro band from Hungary who were pretending they were from New York: singing their lyrics in a filmic version of American. They screamed at their appreciative crowd, drinking vodka and Coke from plastic cups; drinking beer from bottles; drinking shots of absinthe from a cache of plastic espresso cups stolen from a hospital canteen.

  Into this underground came Haffner: the back of his hand – freckled, brown-spotted – now stamped with an extra red stain, so prompting Haffner to the thought of all the major crimes he could have committed, but had not. Yes, Haffner descended into the night, as he contrived to answer his phone, into which he shouted to Benji that yes everything had gone smoothly, that yes it was very loud, he was in a club, called Milk Bar, or maybe it was a milk bar, he had no idea: and then he lost reception; and the collar on his shirt seeped with sweat, and his lungs filled with the smoke of 250 cigarettes, lit from each other by the manic youth of Europe.

  It was an inferno. But to Haffner, triumphantly still reminding himself that Livia’s villa was soon to be his, it seemed a blessed paradiso.

  2

  Inside, alone for a moment in the middle room, Haffner looked around. Behind Haffner, a boy was cycling along a mountain path. His path wobbled with the trembling grip of the super-8 camera which was working so hard to preserve his balance for eternity. A girl who was more real, in sunglasses and a bracelet made of pink plastic paperclips, was watching this film, intently, while shifting her feet to the beat from the DJs behind her. The boy continued pedalling, now observed by an ecstatic parent in mint-green sunglasses, encouraged by the severed hand of the camera operator.

  Was this what the kids were up to? wondered Haffner. Their mania for nostalgia took them this far? This farrago of the sentimental. The kids observing the kids. Whereas all Haffner had wanted, as a boy, was the adult. He had wanted to wear a tie, to wear a suit. The two girls DJing were drinking from the same pink straw in the same glass of Coke. Although Haffner rightly doubted if it contained only Coke.

  In this setting, his tracksuit, he thought, was more appropriate than he had imagined. Around him there seemed to be no dress code, no fashion which Haffner could recognise. The laws were gone.

  So much posturing at the infantile! But now that he was old, Haffner rather applauded this resistance to the adult: the spirit of the flippant. The bare midriffs; the obvious bra straps; the visible panties. Everything in fluorescent colours. He warmed to this; as he warmed to everything which seemed unimpressed with the adult world. The nostalgia, perhaps not. But the infantile, this the older, less mature Haffner could admire.

  Viko was offering to buy Haffner a drink. Haffner looked round. He suddenly realised that Niko was gone. With a depressed shrug, Haffner assented. He watched Viko lean against the bar, a man at ease. And Haffner tried to understand what was meant to happen next. He had hoped to avoid this, the time alone with his masseur. Their business relationship had been maintained with surprising ease, thought Haffner. This still did not resolve the question of where they stood more privately: what conclusion had been drawn after Haffner’s curtailed massage. The problem was how seriously Viko thought that Haffner had taken it. Preferably, their relationship would have ended in the fog of its ambiguity – stranded, on a mountain top, with the night coming on, and only the cowbells for company.

  Viko returned with the drinks. They chinked glasses, plasticly. Then Viko moved closer to him.

  Viko, of course, didn’t want Haffner. He only thought that Haffner wanted him. If there were more ways to make money from Haffner, then Viko was happy to explore those ways. He was a man of mode. The older men went for the younger men: this was the story of Viko’s life. They offered you money to let them touch you; or watch you. So went the ways of the Riviera.

  Haffner placed a palm on Viko’s chest, girlishly: in a cute gesture of rebuff. Viko looked at it. He removed Haffner’s palm, and held it tight.

  He was drunk, Haffner. He was gone. He was there, at the crest of his ascent – in the glory of his absolute inspiration: just before it transformed itself, as if nothing had happened, into the absolute descent.

  3

  The descent of the grandfather, however, was being deftly matched by the ascent of the grandson. Even if, at the moment, this ballet was suffering from problems with timing. Oblivious to his future ascent, Benjamin was depressed. He was standing at a corner of the bar: trying to lean forward enough so that the deep folds of his T-shirt could hang down in a perpendicular line. For Benji’s body in these clubs became a pastoral: the hillocks of his breasts, the trilling streamlets of sweat which ran between them.

  This was not the kind of club in which Benjamin had ever felt happy. His grandfather’s phone call, however, had disturbed him. So here he was, in his excited fear, and he felt alarmed. Packed as the club was with assured and sexual girls, it presented multiple temptations to Benji’s soul. The temptation of lust, naturally, but also the darker temptations: of self-pity, and self-disgust.

  His reaction to this state, before his Orthodox training, used to be a prolonged session at the bar, followed by a session of manic d
ancing. And it was to this practice, haunted by his recent erotic memories, worried for the safety of his grandfather, that Benjamin, against his moral code, returned.

  His yarmulke was now stuffed, shyly, in the pocket of his jeans.

  How many of his beliefs, considered Benji sadly, were really just romances? It seemed so very likely that his moral code was a romance too. It was all too possible. Benji wanted to be there in the Jewish East End: with Fatty the Yid, the fixer, handing out betting slips in Bethnal Green. Could he have told you why? Wasn’t it obvious? These people had cool. On one street there would be Jewish Friendly Societies, for Benjamin’s relatives, newly emerged from Lithuania; and a house which concealed a miniature synagogue, whose ceiling would be azure with gold stars, and below which, on the walls, would be engraved in gilt the names of its benefactors – the Rothschilds, the Goldsmids, the Mocattas, the Montagues. Had Benjamin not been born too late, what a member he would have made of the Bilu Group, of Hovevei Zion! A group which he had once admired for the sarcastic praise they had bestowed on their nation for having woken from the false dream of Assimilation. Now, thank God, thou art awakened from thy slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened thee from thy slothful slumber. No, thought Benjamin, this was the melancholy truth. In his identification with the marginalised, the bereft, he had been wowed by the romance of belonging to an elite. Because the persecuted could be an elite, of this he had no doubt.

  Inside him lay Benjamin’s grand emotions: envy, anxiety, self-hatred, self-contradiction. There they were, in their plush velvet case – snug, like a cherished heirloom; a polished silver piccolo.

  They seemed unnecessary now.

  Beside him, sitting on the plastic pod of a stool, a girl began to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to him about the state of his soul, nor the state of world politics: the endless problems of minority peoples. She only wanted to ask him what his plans were that evening, what his girlfriend’s name was. Benji sadly admitted that he had none: no plans, no girlfriend. She offered him a cigarette. Her name was Anastasia, she said. And when somehow Benjamin inveigled into the conversation a mention of his Jewish origins, she looked at him. There was a pause. This was it, he thought: the moment when everything became obvious.

  —Uhhuh, she said. So anyway.

  He looked at Anastasia. She was the tallest girl he had ever met; and although he could not help remembering the distracting features of the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, he also could not help feeling that in Anastasia he had discovered something so much more refined. She was wearing a black shift dress, black tights: and red high heels. Her hair was cut in some sort of slick bob. There was a plastic butterfly visible on her left, diminutive breast.

  —You are American? asked Anastasia.

  —British, said Benjamin.

  —Is better, said Anastasia.

  And at that moment, as she shifted her weight, so accidentally placing her thigh in warm proximity to Benjamin’s podgy hand, Benjamin finally noticed Haffner, talking to a man. He stalled in a trance of indecision. And although this was why he was here – to protect his wayward grandfather – Benjamin did nothing. He did not excuse himself and go to offer Haffner his protection. He simply looked into Anastasia’s eyes, smiled, lit a cigarette which she had offered him, and desperately, feeling sick, hoping that he would not regret this, tried to take up smoking.

  4

  The smoke here was mythical. It was its own clouding exaggeration – not just in the usual secret places: one’s nostrils, the creases of clothes. Here, it hurt the cornea, the tonsils, the ganglia of one’s lungs.

  Politely, Haffner wondered if Viko could perhaps put out his cigarette. It was terribly hurting his eyes. In fact, he said, he really did feel very tired. He really thought that he might sadly have to excuse himself and end his evening here.

  But Viko, by now, was dictatorial in his drunkenness: a Tamerlane. Barbaric, he looked at his cigarette, and looked at Haffner, vanquished. He could not believe it, he said. It was a cigarette. And now this man in front of him wanted it to be put out. For why? It wasn’t, he pointed out, as if he was the only person smoking.

  And he gave out a staccato mirthless laugh – a studio audience of one.

  Uneasily, Haffner looked around, into the crowd: the extraordinary overspill of beauty in this basement amazed him with its grace. It contrasted with Haffner. It contrasted less with Viko. He looked back at him.

  Viko continued to stare – the cigarette hanging limply from his lower lip.

  There was nothing else for it, thought Haffner. Any conversation which might restore some poise, some grace, seemed impossible to him now. And he had done what he needed to do. So he was leaving, said Haffner. He was very grateful, but now he really must go.

  And Haffner turned – to discover Niko, bearing Zinka as a trophy. Gently, with distracted distance, she bestowed her smile on Viko, and then Haffner. And Haffner stood there, confident that if Zinka stayed here for ever, then so would he. With a gesture of European politesse, Haffner kissed the raised paw of Zinka’s hand. He stood there, happily smiling.

  And suddenly, Viko understood.

  Viko believed in desire being rewarded. He believed in the myth of the kept man. No shame attached to money. The sudden way in which Haffner had left the massage table, having solicited Viko’s attention, had not been forgotten. It irked him. Especially because he had heard the rumours of Haffner’s friendship with Zinka. Why should Viko be spurned? It was the more galling for being the more unjust. This, after all, was the man whose property claims would be made easier by Viko: from Haffner, Viko had expected money in instalments, he had expected cash.

  In this sad way, Viko talked to himself. His monologue took place before an unseeing audience of Zinka and Haffner.

  Haffner was telling Zinka the story of his nightlife: how he had known the former Prime Minister of his country, and in a bar in London he had danced with her and talked of world finance. And although the details of this conversation were inaudible to Viko, his rage was inventive enough to inflame itself just with its visionary gifts: observing Haffner’s charmingly enfeebled touch on her arm, Zinka’s dimpling smile.

  It was incredible, said Viko. No one heard him. He said it again. It was utterly incredible. And he began to shout, in the language which Haffner did not understand. Spurned, Viko listed the million vices of Haffner. Ignoring Zinka’s calming protestations, her anxious glances, Niko’s confused scowl, he listed Haffner’s lechery, his financial manoeuvres, his cowardice.

  Haffner mildy asked what was happening. He seemed upset, observed Haffner. Zinka silenced him with an irritated flourish of her arm.

  —You, said Viko, anxious to explain, jabbing at Haffner and Zinka and Niko in confused identification. You fuck her. His girl.

  Haffner, full of justified smugness, tried to explain that this was not true, not at all. He really had to say that this was quite ridiculous. Viko refused his explanations. Everyone knew, he said. So Niko might as well know too. He glared at Zinka. Zinka lit a cigarette, and exhaled a plume of smoke in Viko’s face, like the most classical of zephyrs.

  The character of Niko was often inscrutable: so said his teachers, his mother; so said Zinka, the girl who tried to love him. It was difficult to predict. This difficulty was made more difficult by the various heaps of cocaine which Niko had inhaled that evening, the various drinks he had imbibed.

  At first, he seemed only amused. He didn’t care if Haffner had been trying to get more of his Zinka. Who wouldn’t? said loyal Niko.

  No, said Viko, doggedly, he didn’t seem to understand.

  While Haffner, as he listened to what he understood to be another attack on the soul of Haffner, realised that his feelings were oddly divided. It was true that he didn’t want any violence; he didn’t want a display of machismo. But on the other hand, he would have preferred Niko to be more worried, more ill at ease. At least violence would have demonstrated some form of sexual contest. Whereas Niko
did not seem aware of any sexual contest.

  So Haffner’s pride debated with itself.

  5

  And, in this way, the ballet of Haffner and Benjamin began to find its synchronisation. For Benjamin was also considering the nature of his sexual pride. But not, however, with sadness. In the bathroom of this club – located in what seemed to be a makeshift plastic tunnel attached to the basement, reached through an emergency door – Benjamin was delirious with success.

  —When you say obscenities in another language, it’s only ever funny, said Benji. You can’t do it. I mean, how do you say fuck me in your language?

  She told him. He tried to repeat it. She started to giggle.

  —You see? said Benji. I mean, say fuck me, in English.

  —Fuck me, said Anastasia.

  There was a pause.

  —Oh no, said Benji, softly. Well maybe no. Maybe we could continue like that.

  With no shiver of distaste, her hands were stroking the softness of his breasts; they were clasping the rings of fat which circled Benji, like a planet, and still she kissed him with abandon.

  —Was that a practice sentence, or a real sentence? said Benjamin.

  —Maybe both, said Anastasia.

  And after they had kissed, Benji smiled at her.