Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

— I should be going, said Zinka.

Surely, thought Haffner, he could think of something to say? Surely at this point he could come up with the sentence which would charm Zinka, and make her stay?

No, said Zinka. She really had to go. Frau Tummel splashed noisily in the calm water. Momentarily, Zinka was distracted. But she would see them later, no — perhaps for the aerobics? She smiled at Frau Tummel; then at Haffner. It would be at twelve. And she turned around, while Haffner gazed after her: her retreat in the grey towelling of her tracksuit.

Well, that went well, he thought, brightly. One should build on that. They weren't far off, he decided, mordantly, from reaching an understanding.

And this was how I could have depicted Haffner as an allegory, if I had wanted to make Haffner an allegory — with a woman walking away from him and a woman swimming away from him, while he clung to a jetty, frantically thinking, failing, possibly dying.

Now, announced Frau Tummel, they must swim. She offered Haffner the prospect of catching her, and then set off, with swift strong choppy strokes — the fat shaking beneath the curves of her biceps — towards what might, to Haffner's straining eyes, have been an island: or might have been just debris, floating in the lake.

Around him, the horizons gathered, and their attendant mountains.

He set off. Mistakenly, he swallowed some cold and soiled water. Very soon he wallowed back. If he could only move his arms, thought Haffner, then he might survive. The prospect seemed unlikely. It seemed improbable that Haffner's body would ever work again.

He was not, it was true, famous for the accuracy of his self-diagnosis. The day he thought he had cancer, he asked Livia if he could show her his testicles. She had just come out of the shower — in a perfume of synthetic citrus fruits. Her hair was flattened against her face, which emphasised the way her face with its perfect cheekbones looked old, looked mournfully mature. He proffered her a testicle, asked her to feel it. She declined. Over breakfast, he pointed out that he should probably go to see Ordynski. Livia tightened the lid on the marmalade and agreed that he probably should. If it was absolutely necessary, then of course he should. And so it was that Haffner went to his doctor, who told him that no, there was nothing to worry about: there was no evidence of any tumour.

Haffner corrected Ordynski.

— Not yet, he sadly said.

He was the recorder on the grandest scale of all the ways in which life was unjust to him. These ways were mainly physical. And maybe Haffner was right: maybe this was one way of living healthily — minutely to record a list of all the unfair weaknesses he endured: a heart murmur, an attack of asthma, exploratory tests on his kidneys and aorta in an effort to discover the causes of Haffner's exorbitant blood pressure. Then the possible cancers, the lingering viruses. If this made him a hypochondriac, so be it. So what if he was still alive? It didn't prove the irrelevance of his symptoms. It didn't prove that one day they wouldn't unfurl themselves into truths.

What no one seemed to understand, he used to tell his daughter, as they watched Benjamin play cricket, on some sports ground in the bucolic environs of London — before Benjamin developed his intellectual difficulties with the idea of sport — was how the imagination of disaster was such a burden. He wouldn't wish it on anyone. It was no joke, living with illness in the way that Haffner lived with it. It was debilitating. Churchill, in Marrakech, got through his pneumonia on pills. He knew that. But that was Churchill. And Esther had simply got up, silently, straightened the creases in her slacks, and gone to buy herself a tea.

And as he mournfully watched the distant image of his grandson perform the neat parallelogram of a forward defensive stroke, Haffner considered the sad truth that his fears were never believed. Haffner was always alert to the way a life became a system of signs. It didn't seem unreasonable to Haffner. Greater men than Haffner, he reminded the now imaginary Esther, had been caught in the trap of a justified paranoia. Wasn't it well known, thought Haffner, that an emperor, of all people, was the most miserable of men — since only his actual assassination could convince the people that the manifold conspiracies against his life were real? This was one resemblance of Haffner to the emperors. Only Haffner's death would convince his family that he had been right all along.

In the mercurial water, this death seemed finally imminent. Frau Tummel had swum back. Such a kitten he was, to dislike the joys of water! And angrily Haffner had gestured at Frau Tummel — a gesture which was meant to signify absolute irritation, but because this gesture meant that he let go of the jetty, he suddenly found himself underwater, then hoisted by Frau Tummel in an ungainly manner back towards a pole which he grabbed at, gratefully, spouting water like a respiring whale.

Frau Tummel asked after him, but Haffner could not speak. Breathing heavily, he looked across the lawns. On the edge of the park, there was what to Haffner seemed another park. This one was an area of tarmac, for children's games. Yearningly — because Haffner adored all games — he imagined the roundabout, the swings, the rocking horses with their bellies pierced by springs. The springs beneath one swaying horse were creaking in the wind: as if, thought Haffner, the horse were neighing.

This playground seemed a refuge to Haffner.

Frau Tummel had plunged underwater, to tug at his legs, pulling him away from the safety of the jetty, into the abysmal open water. There was sun as well, true, but the sun was no help to him now. The rain was coming down, thought Haffner, really quite hard.

Behind the hills arc'd a fuzzy rainbow.

— You are so Englishman! said Frau Tummel. Enjoy yourself, my love. Express your feelings!

He couldn't help thinking that Frau Tummel was angry with him. No other explanation seemed plausible for her oppressive joyfulness. Swimming wasn't how Haffner expressed himself. When he wanted to express himself, he turned to his clarinet.

He wouldn't do it, he told Frau Tummel. He wouldn't swim. He was finished. And he raised himself gradually out of the water, the sheen streaming off him in the pale beginning sunlight.

And as he stands there, rubbing at his body with a towel which seemed of an unnaturally limited size, gathering his clothes about him, I feel a little sad that Haffner's moments of self-expression should be so absolutely historical. Let Haffner be allowed his chapter of jazz!

For he played his clarinet with abandon, in the suburbs of north London. Dutifully, he studied Benny Goodman's exercises for the modern player: the complex intervals of his jazz arpeggios. The greatest melody of all time, thought Haffner, was 'Begin the Beguine', as rendered by the genius Artie Shaw. For its outlandish, unhummable length. Its reckless shape which defied all normal ideas of the proper lifespan of a melody. That was self-expression. But self-expression, so often, was banned for Haffner. Gently, Livia would beg him to think of the neighbours. And Haffner would reply that he was thinking about the neighbours: it was a generous gift, this performance by Haffner of 'Begin the Beguine'.

Some saw in his love of jazz songs an irrevocable flippancy. He had no respect, Goldfaden used to say, for authority. It was quite extraordinary. But Haffner wasn't so sure that this was true. His authorities were simply different from those of other people. Esmond tried to find authority in his wife; his grandson found it in his rabbi. Other people depended on their manager, their marriage-guidance counsellors. Haffner found it in jazz. He took what he could. How strange was it anyway to listen to Cole Porter? Had anyone else come up with better descriptions of the heart's affections? Not Shakespeare, as his daughter argued; not the writer of the Psalms, as Benjamin now argued.