Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Reluctantly, Haffner undressed. He displayed his slighter breasts to the gathered winds: the voyeuristic zephyrs. They made for his pink nipples, the droop of his ghostly pectorals. He let his shirt drop where it wanted: it tumbled to the ground, a dying swan.

Just as after yet another late night of working he would undress in his dressing room, or on the landing, leaving puddles of clothes behind his tiptoeing footsteps — and then enter the bedroom, feeling the carpet on his bare feet, the densely corrugated metal strip at the door where the carpet ended, and then be suddenly surprised by Livia turning on an enquiring lamp, so that he paused there, a satyr, stalled in the pursuit of an invisible prey.

At the jetty, Haffner paused. The wood was greasy. Frau Tummel was already in — treading water, only her head visible. Her face had transformed itself into a smile.

— It is delicious, she said. You must come in.

Haffner was not amphibious, not normally. But nothing, at the moment, seemed normal. Their affair had been marked by water. Water was its motif. First the swimming pool, the Jacuzzi: and now this. It was unusual in the life of Haffner. In general, he avoided water. Although it was true that there had been that night in the baths at Rome — the day after they had liberated the city. The opened city.

Silk reflections from the water had unfolded on the ceiling. The building was Haffner's most exalted idea of the grand. It was monumental. It was imperial. The largest bronze eagle he had ever seen was spread, like a mounted butterfly, against a wall.

There had been other moments in Jacuzzis, whirlpool baths. There had been, also, Livia's love of swimming competitions, with her hair invisible in its sleek white cap. But, in these scenes, the water was an accessory. It was almost furniture.

He put a foot in, holding on to the jetty's post: paused. He retracted his foot.

— It is very cold, he said, gravely.

He looked around. The wind was breathing through the trees. But Haffner didn't want the nymphs, the naiads and dryads: the sylvan pastoral.

It wasn't that Haffner was immune to nature. Haffner was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society. Its journal would arrive, a precise oblong, in its plastic wrapper. It was the only society to which he felt allegiance: a community which shared his love of the cultivated, the meekly tended — the romance of the rose.

Haffner was an expert in breeding roses. He loved the extraordinary lottery of each new specimen. All the textbooks talked of the evolution of a species in temporal terms; for them, everything proceeded in a logical order. The first was always the most important. But breeding, Haffner decided, proved this could not be true. It was a pure fluke, if a new variety of rose was formed, and therefore propagated, before another one. Its place in the species had nothing to do with time. It was much more like a jigsaw puzzle. In nature, Haffner found the self-sufficiency of art. But he didn't describe it like this; which is how I might have described it. For Haffner, this insight had other vocabulary. That things could happen according to a logic which one could not understand was no argument against that logic's existence. But perhaps this was not right, either; perhaps Haffner didn't use words to describe the pain it caused him, the lush pain as he looked at the photographs of gardens in exotic places, full of grace, these places in another hemisphere — Persia, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

You have no idea how therapeutic it can be — he would tell bored Benji, bovine — to take the secateurs and go out into the garden, after a hard day's work. Everyone, he would add, must have a hobby; and Benjamin, who at this point, when he was fifteen, wanted no hobbies, no bourgeois attributes, absently nodded.

Now, however, Haffner was oblivious to the pastoral: he wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted sirens, emergencies, the asphalt and the smoke. The asphalt jungle and the big smoke. He wanted the transparent lethal purity of carbon monoxide.

So Haffner looked away, into the landscape, and there discovered to his dismay a shape which was walking with a staccato lilt, and which therefore would soon resolve itself into the more solid flesh of Zinka. Presumably, thought hampered Haffner, she was on her way back to work at the hotel. He looked down: at his slight breasts, his bright nipples, the hair around his belly button: his penis dwindling in the cold. An acorn, it blended in with the arboreal theme. There seemed no obvious hiding place, thought Haffner, rapidly assessing the bleak and empty parkland — and in any case it was too late. Zinka had seen him. Shame possessed Haffner — a shame that she was seeing him like this, so unclothed; and a greater shame of seeing her so soon after the escapade of the night before. He was not quite sure how one was to behave, when one has just concealed oneself inside a wardrobe in a vacated hotel room, to watch a woman nakedly converse with her boyfriend. But most of all, he felt embarrassed of her seeing him with Frau Tummel: in this illusion of intimacy. Because love was his downfall. And with Zinka, he was concerned that the love this time belonged to Haffner.

If only he could have explained how little Frau Tummel meant to him! Then, perhaps, he would have been glad to see Zinka. But he could not. So, in an ecstasy of embarrassment and shame — the only forms of ecstasy which seemed still available to Haffner — he jumped in.

As he sank, the everlasting problems of Haffner's life concentrated themselves into more particular problems of the body. He felt sheathed in cold; enveloped. It seemed unlikely that he would ever feel warm again. The water was dark, slubbed with weeds.

At first, Haffner thought that he was only sinking. But this was premature. Gradually, he felt his body ascend: gifted with buoyancy.

Finally, he reached the surface, where Frau Tummel joyfully greeted him. He tried to tread water. It seemed harder than he remembered. His heart was gripped by cold. He felt it slow, then slow some more. This scared him. His breathing became more difficult. He looked around for safety. No safety seemed visible.

— It is wonderful, no? said Frau Tummel.

Carefully, trying to swim suavely, Haffner made as if to disport himself, a porpoise, in the water. He tried to move towards the jetty, where he could cling to a step, or a pole.

— And how are you? asked Zinka: above him.

— Oh we are very well! said Frau Tummel. Is it not wonderful? Zinka smiled at Haffner: a bubble of intimacy. Haffner, his hair slick over his forehead, a bedraggled pony, tried to smile winningly back.

Then he felt the weather begin. It started to rain on Haffner, and his mistress, gently, in the lake.

He clung to the jetty, and found no solace. He was out of his depth, thought Haffner. In all the possible senses.

They seemed to be having fun together, said Zinka. They weren't together, said Haffner. They thought it would be charming, said Frau Tummel. That wasn't right, Haffner tried to say.

The rain became stronger. In response, Haffner maintained a casual grin. Glancing with mock-helplessness at the heavens, Zinka said that she really had to be getting to work. Was it really necessary? asked Haffner. Frau Tummel glared at him. Yes, said Zinka, she felt so — after all, they didn't want her there, did they, interrupting them? Oh, said Haffner. He was sure that wasn't true. Was it? he asked Frau Tummel.

She didn't want to make Zinka late, said Frau Tummel.

It wasn't special to Haffner, the desperation he felt as reality crowded in. Haffner was special only in his hyperbole: his unusually stubborn refusal to accept the order of the facts. And because he was determined in his refusal of reality, hyperbolic with effort, Haffner said to Frau Tummel that of course Zinka wouldn't be late. It really wouldn't happen. In any case, if there were any trouble, he would take care of the matter. Indignantly Frau Tummel splashed away. Haffner looked at her. Zinka looked at her. Then, before Haffner could turn back to Zinka, Zinka had looked away.