The Escape: A Novel
Page 30
As he walked, he remembered Livia’s funeral: how from the window he had seen the undertakers waiting outside, like paparazzi, for the body; and the organist, playing the funeral march as everyone shuffled away, finished with a comic trill, a final flourish, when he thought that everyone had gone – a squiggle of pure flippancy. Just as Haffner would have told her, afterwards, in the refuge of their bedroom, if it hadn’t been Livia who had died.
Think about it, thought Haffner.
Exiled on St Helena, Napoleon continued to be chic. He cared about his waistcoats, the gold stitching of his shoes. Yes, it was unbelievable, but it was true. All the victors were masters of retreat. They cultivated retreat. Even Tiberius, the ruler of the world – a god with his giant pied-à-terre in Rome – preferred the quiet island of Capri.
But me, I might put it like this: there you are, dear reader, at the pool party, by the sea, in the sunlight, with the pine forest sighing behind you, and the blue sea sighing in front of you, ceaselessly bringing you tribute, while in the distance the dolphins show off the sheen of their backs; and then, from somewhere invisible, out of your field of vision, you hear a deep splash, a forsaken cry, and when you turn to look – there it is, the surface, settling in circular ripples, which enlarge, and then enlarge some more: until they enlarge into nothing.
Postscript
This book contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Bertolt Brecht, Mel Brooks, Constantine Cavafy, Blaise Cendrars, George Eliot, Ella Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Gibbon, Alfred Goldman, Robert Graves, Alfred Hitchcock, Courtney Hodell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Christophe Honoré, Horace, Bohumil Hrabal, Peter Stephan Junk, Franz Kafka, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ladislav Klíma, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, Groucho Marx, Thomas Middleton, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Ophuls, Georges Perec, Petronius, Alfred Polgar, Alexander Pope, Cole Porter, Alexander Pushkin, François Rabelais, Saïan Supa Crew, Viscount Samuel, William Shakespeare, Tupac Shakur, Stendhal, Laurence Sterne, Alexander Stille, Suetonius, Tacitus, Junichiro Tanizaki, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Valéry and Virgil.