The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  —I don’t know it, said Haffner.

  And Isabella paused, lost in memories of bygone times.

  Sweating, craving rest, Haffner excused himself, turned round, and – refusing the usher – entered the auditorium.

  2

  He realised that the reason for the usher’s reluctance to let Haffner in – bearing though he did bars of chocolate and tickets, all the normal signifiers of an ordinary spectator – was that the film had started almost twenty minutes earlier. And perhaps, thought Haffner, if he had arrived at the beginning, then maybe he could have followed the plot. Now, it seemed unlikely.

  Ahead of him, gigantic, loomed the dead.

  He didn’t really know, poor Haffner, why he was there. But then, the question of what he was doing anywhere had been posed so deeply to Haffner in the last few days that now he was tired of it. Happy, he settled into his bewilderment.

  The film, it turned out, was in French, with subtitles; but Haffner no more understood the subtitles than he understood French.

  One thing, at least, was clear. It was a war story. At first, he thought it took place in his war. Gradually he realised that it was taking place in his father’s war: the Great War. Often wrongly called a World War. Whereas it was to be distinguished from Haffner’s War, which was a truly World War. Though Haffner was increasingly unsure of both the greatness and the world.

  Bereft of language, Haffner watched the slapstick. It seemed a reliable guide. Like so many war stories, this film was about escape. Happily, he watched as the prisoners propped a chair against the door, hooked a blanket over the blank window, prised up a floorboard. The alarm system was a tin can pierced by a string.

  These escapes repeated themselves.

  While, in the occasional background of an occasional shot, Haffner recognised what was left of his youth: sunlight, a horse passing by – its hooves and white ankles – watched by a slumped bored sentry.

  How important could a man’s life get? wondered Haffner. At what point would it ever become symbolic, or cosmic? Haffner was beginning to get a pretty shrewd idea. He was beginning to understand the abysmal length of the odds.

  On the screen, the boredom continued. The prisoners tried to amuse themselves with amateur theatricals. They dressed up as girls, in stockings and heels. And Haffner with approving assent noted the silence, the deep hollowed silence as the prettiest kid emerged on stage in his chemise and stockings and hairband. The parody of the wife you hadn’t seen for the last three years. The parody which broke the obvious rule: you couldn’t think about sex, not in a war. But you only thought about sex. The last thing you needed was the reminder. And then a singing comedian came up on stage, who could neither sing nor make his audience laugh: a vampire, backlit, in white tie and tails.

  And this was Haffner’s past. He knew it intimately. The boredom was Haffner’s domain – an infinite suspension. One had always lived, during the war, under the illusion that everything would be over very soon. Whereas now Haffner wondered whether both victory and defeat were for ever deferred. Although Haffner could not have said why – because one was endlessly defeated, or simply because the war was never over.

  In the life of Raphael Haffner, maybe a truth became obvious: the great illusion – the true schmaltz – was always the illusion of victory.

  3

  Above him glowed the tired and blissful face of a French actor, licking his way along the rim of a cigarette paper: a harmonica. And although Haffner was almost happy here, in this cinema, after the initial coolness, the initial comfort of the velvet and the chocolate, he was still finding it difficult to focus.

  He looked at the audience instead. It was sparse. The usual collection of misfits, the bedraggled loners: the geeks, the academics.

  Then Haffner noticed a tall lean angular neck, with a crest of hair, and seemed to recognise it. Was that Pawel? He couldn’t tell. Pawel from the Committee waiting room: Haffner’s exposed twin.

  Haffner tried to get his attention – coughing, leaning forward – but Pawel simply sat there, entranced in the picture. And then, in Haffner’s bored scan of the audience, his heart jolted.

  Was that Zinka sitting a few rows ahead of him, diagonally across? He could not be sure. But before he could try to look closer, there sat down, late, a woman whose face was darkly hidden from Haffner, but whose scent clouded towards him: the delicious mixture of perfume and sweat. He had a thing for the imperfectly adorned, did Haffner. For the sorrow and the pity. But not now. Now he only wanted her to move.

  He was going mad, he knew this. As if suddenly, in this backstreet backwater cinema, everyone he knew would have gathered, for Haffner’s finale.

  Concentrate! Concentrate!

  And Haffner settled back into his seat, begrudging the cheapness of the velveteen, the dead springs inside.

  He was oddly adrift from everything he knew. Haffner, now, had no one. Not even the troubles of his heart. No, not even the women troubled Haffner’s thoughts.

  On their holidays, Livia always had her little ritual. Happy at their escape, she used to ask him how far they were from the West End – the bright theatres – snug in her couchette above him, as they sped through the mountains of Italy to Venice, or Lake Como. Their daughter, with her husband and their son, was in the adjacent compartment. And the rain fell, wriggling in jerky zigzags down the pane. Against the wall was pinned a bulging net for Haffner’s book and glasses. Yes, thought Haffner. She was always intent on putting distance between them and the rest of their known world. So how far was he now from London? He tried to imagine the distances. And in this way, making this calculation, in the full emergence from his chrysalis, Haffner fell asleep.

  4

  But maybe, to understand the full happiness of Haffner, I should contrast it with another metamorphosis: for Benjamin had undergone his own metamorphosis, his conversion to a world of pleasure. But this conversion had not led to a happiness impervious to fear.

  In his room, the twin buds of his earphones in his ear, he was once more listening to his favourite hip-hop song of the moment, called ‘Darkness’. And as he listened, he brooded, darkly.

  The song called ‘Darkness’ was by Saïan Supa Crew, rappers from Marseilles. It opened with a sample from the most romantic song: ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ – with an abrupt drum roll and first faint orchestrated crackle, like the oldest radio in the world. And then, almost simultaneously, began the wistful violins. But the words – oh the words – Benji could not understand them. The rap, apart from one moment which he was sure mentioned the metro, eluded him. All he could recite, without understanding, was the chorus.

  Ho, c’est le darkness, recited Benji, grandly: adieu à l’allégresse, c’est le darkness, c’est Loch Ness, c’est le madness, la lumière se baisse.

  The first time he heard the song was in Tel Aviv, in the apartment of the girl whom he once hoped would become his girlfriend. Or, more precisely, whom he once hoped would let him see her naked. He wasn’t ambitious. She shrugged a nonchalant record from its sleeve and made it frantic. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a cream block of flats in the most modern version of Paris, with a patchy sky and burnt-out cars.

  Since then, he had listened to this song called ‘Darkness’ over and over. And he still did not know precisely what it meant. But to him it was so beautiful – with its plush American romantic violins, crackling with nostalgia, and sarcastic clever French rhymes (rhymes whose meaning he did not understand). It seemed so poignant with poise, so world-weary with sadness.

  Luxuriously, therefore, romantic, Benji contemplated his fears.

  It wasn’t the first time. Three years earlier, Benji had been stricken by a vision of his death, in some club in an industrial part of northwest London: for the first time in his life he had not only taken a tab of LSD but had added, recklessly, a pill as well. So Benji could soon be found sitting on his own, carefully near the accident and emergency room, feeling sick, and terrified, as hippies with matte
d dreadlocks bent forward to leeringly if kindly ask about his health. He had decided that he would not go into the emergency room until it was absolutely necessary. He was mortified by appearances. This tendency to be mortified was adding to his panic, since all too easily he could imagine the headlines in the newspapers the next morning: the school photo, the tearful parents, the charity established in his memory. It would have to be him, the amateur who died after taking a pointless and accidental overdose: the bourgeois boy adrift in the world of cool.

  The great screw-up: this was Benji’s constant anxiety. He always went in fear of doing or saying the minute thing which would place everything in the greatest danger.

  Really, thought Benji, there was no need to understand the words of this, his favourite song. He knew what it was about. True, the moments of incomprehension were everywhere. He was not convinced, for instance, that in the chorus of one of their songs, a hip group of French hip-hoppers, whether from the graffiti’d banlieue of Paris or the graffiti’d suburbs of Marseilles, could really be saying c’est Loch Ness. Maybe Loch Ness, with its monstrous Scottish depths, connoted darkness to a group of French hip-hoppers, but this seemed hopeful and unconvincing. This seemed his provincial, unlikely mishearing. But then, what did this mistake really matter?

  He knew what this song was about. The song was about the fear.

  The voices were all he needed, because the voices were grave, and delicate: they were, for him, the meaning. The meaning of this song was in the collage of serious, careful voices, trying to resist the melancholy romantic violins.

  Because they couldn’t. No one could resist the romance, he thought: as he contemplated the screwed-up mess which was the life of Benjamin.

  5

  When Haffner woke up in his uncomfortable velvet seat, he discovered the black-and-white outlines of a new prison for the characters on the silver screen: a grander, more feudal kind of prison. It was some kind of schloss – with pines and stones, and Gothically written signs warning against escape. The scene took place by night. And this time a man with a French accent and a man with a German accent were talking to each other in English: a fact which led Haffner to wonder if he was still dreaming.

  —Have you really gone insane? said the man speaking with a German accent.

  —I am perfectly sane, said the man speaking with a French accent.

  He really couldn’t be sure, thought Haffner, at what point any of this had been a dream. From the moment he met Zinka until now. From the moment he met Livia until now. With depressed accuracy, however, he felt compelled to admit that no moment of his life could really be excused or explained by a theory of unreality.

  The German and the Frenchman continued their elegant debate in English.

  —It’s damn nice of you, Raffenstein, but it’s impossible, said the Frenchman.

  And with that, he began to climb, while the Germans trained a searchlight on him, like a music hall artiste: the famous actor in his follow spot. As, presumed Haffner, he was. In another version of the world entirely. And when Haffner then saw the man halt, arch his back, and stumble; when he saw the Frenchman on his deathbed, tended to by the German who had shot him, he wished he could believe it. He wished he could be moved. But partly there was the problem that he could hardly be moved by a film he had barely seen, and barely understood; and also there was a deeper reason.

  Haffner didn’t care about nobility. He didn’t care about the soul. Just the beauty of escape.

  All of Haffner’s dreams of escape were suddenly incandescent. He sat there. And when the house lights came up – revealing to Haffner’s placid eye the empty drinks cartons, packets of sweets, the crisp cellophane from cigarettes – and the credits rolled, he sat there while the small audience filed out, checking the footwells for coats, for wallets, for all the human belongings. The man he thought was Pawel was just conceivably Pawel: he could not be sure.

  The girl he thought was Zinka turned out to be a teenage boy.

  6

  And Haffner, left behind in the cinema, considered how, on the one hand, there was the myth of the escape. Everyone understood the need for this myth. But maybe the need was explained by another wish: the safety of a refuge.

  He had always assumed that he would go back home, to London, when the paperwork on the villa was completed. It wasn’t as if he was here as an exile. But then, anything could become an exile, if it became impossible to go back.

  And Haffner considered this spa town.

  In Haffner’s mind, his vision of Livia’s villa was now merging with his vision of the cottage in the film, a cottage where the Frenchman had conducted some form of love affair with a lonely woman on her farm. The husband, presumed Haffner, must have been away, at the war. This cottage represented some kind of idyll. And now Haffner was wondering if he was beginning to understand the need for this cottage, he understood the need for a refuge. It was the deeper meaning of every escape. Just as he now understood how deeply he missed the girl who had stayed with them, in 1939: the girl whom none of them could understand, who took her own life. She was looking for a refuge, and she had not found it. And just as how – if one discovered the most minute version of Haffner, the slimmest, most concentrated fraction of Haffner – in some way, he thought, he understood what their marriage had represented to Livia. It might have seemed inconceivable to the outside observer, but to her it was a place of safety. For she knew he would never leave her. Haffner mimed the act of leaving, but he never would.

  He had always believed that there would always be another girl; just as he had always believed that he would always have another city. However much he might have made mistakes, however unsure he may have been that he had made the right decision, he could always start over again. But now, he thought, he didn’t.

  And me, I might put it more sadly. I might use the words of the poet – the poet of a disappeared empire – who once said that in the way a man destroys his life here, in this little corner, so he has destroyed it everywhere else. But Haffner’s pessimism was more euphoric. The problem had always been in finding the right elopee. But surely the elopee was obvious. It was always only Livia. If he added up his women, he decided, he had only ever had two: Livia, and then everyone else. Yes, thought Haffner. He had always seen everything in terms of repetition. And now it turned out that there was such a thing as a singularity. And love proved it.

  The trompe l’oeil of the ending! The false bottom of the ending!

  Could he manage one more? wondered Haffner. He thought he could. Let him swing it one last time.

  His century was over, and all Haffner wanted to take from it was the memory of Livia. He only wanted, now, to assert his constant fidelity.

  Why did he need to go back, when the paperwork was completed? Why couldn’t he, thought Haffner, live there in the villa – surrounded by the history of Livia? And in the excitement of his decision, Haffner wanted to see the villa, now – the villa which he had not thought he ever wanted to visit. He wanted to pay homage to Cesare’s famous ceiling – executed in the dining room when he was sixteen, when he still believed in his destiny as a great European painter. Homeless, he wanted to observe what would be Haffner’s final home.

  7

  Haffner marched out into the foyer. The window to the cloakroom was shut. At the ticket booth, he pointed to the cloakroom. The woman in the ticket booth shrugged, helplessly. Haffner mimed, like a monkey, the heaviness of twin suitcases, invisibly weighing down his arms.

  —No no, said the girl.

  —No? said Haffner.

  The girl said a word which Haffner did not understand. She turned to the calendar behind her on the wall, one half of which was a series of mountain views, underwritten by romantic poetry; the other half of which was a grid with numbers. She pointed to one square, containing one number.

  And finally Haffner understood that he would only be able to recapture his belongings the next day.

  With a renewed sense of triumph, therefore – sinc
e what more could he now lose? – the untold story of Haffner reached its conclusion. He would go to look at the villa, unencumbered by his possessions. And eventually he would live up here, in this spa, in this place of his escape: in the solitude of their infinite marriage: its absolute irrelevant immortal secrets.

  For this, thought Haffner, was the true version of Haffner – a husband.

  In a bar out on North Beach once, in San Francisco, he had talked to the barman about DiMaggio. DiMaggio, said the guy behind the bar, had been a regular. And the barman confided in him that when Joe was dying, he used to say that it was no sadness to him. At least, he said, it would maybe give him another chance with Marilyn.

  It had shocked Haffner then. Now, however, it seemed bleakly accurate. It seemed adequate to the facts.

  Always, he had wanted out, thought Haffner. And now he didn’t.

  Haffner Mortal

  1

  As the twilight began, the subtlest twilight, Haffner walked up the long road towards the villa. He tended to his memories of Livia. It was his triumph, his procession through the city’s streets: with his conquered slaves before him – and his personal freedman behind him, whispering that Haffner was mortal.

  And that former slave, for now, is me.

  Yes, the conjuring with tenses was now all over. For Haffner had indeed caught a cold two mornings ago, when he swam in the lake with Frau Tummel: finally, the symptoms were for real. And in two weeks’ time this cold would develop into a virulent form of pneumonia, which would be imperfectly treated, here, in the Alps, by a junior doctor whose concentration was distracted by his concern to keep calling his girlfriend and assure her that he loved her, stricken as he was by his lone moment of infidelity, an impulsive regretted kiss at a soirée after a conference; so that by the time Haffner was flown home to London – successful, true, in his legal pursuit of the villa – he would have already suffered a stroke. And in that weakened, muted state, began the long dying of Haffner.