Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Every time we say goodbye, I die a little. That was all it took for Haffner to shiver with emotion.

There was a stringent division in the record collection which Haffner shared with Livia. Haffner owned the jazz. Livia admired her opera singers, her great conductors. She was the one who owned the cumbersome box sets — the collected symphonies, the complete quartets. As an encouraging birthday present, she had given Haffner Mozart's Haffner Symphony . He had tried to listen, but he had to confess that he saw no interest in it. Not even with such a title. No, if Haffner tried to improve himself, he preferred to read. That was his chosen domain of education. Whereas when it came to music, he preferred the songwriters: Arlen, Gershwin, Mercer. The songs from the era when Haffner was young: the songs from before the era when Haffner was young.

According to the liner notes on the record Haffner loved most — of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter — the qualities which made Porter great were Knowledge, Spunk, Individuality, Originality, Realism, Restraint, Rascality. Haffner had no problem with this list. Its last term, however, was a problem for Haffner's idea of the aesthetic. The last quality on the liner notes was Maturity. And Haffner could do without maturity. As if that was an ideal. The greatest education possible, thought Haffner, would not lead its citizens into an age of responsibility, but instead would escalate them to the rarefied heights of dazzling, starlit, spangled immaturity.

He was saying goodbye, said Haffner to Frau Tummel: and then he turned away.

— Raphael, said Frau Tummel.

Haffner turned back.

But Frau Tummel did not say anything. She smiled at him, in a way which she hoped was happy. And Haffner, once more, turned away.

He had finally become his father. The man who drifted away. It had never been his aim. He had done his best to avoid becoming Papa. At least, for instance, it had only been the one wife for Haffner. He had that over him. But still, all the motifs were there.

His father had been the quietest man he ever knew. One finger was missing, due to an accident in the Great War, for which Papa never offered an explanation. A photograph survived somewhere — in a box in some attic, acrid with asbestos — of Solomon Haffner, smiling as he held a grenade in his muddy hand: like the proud cultivator of a prize marrow at a provincial gardening show. But Solomon never talked. So Haffner had been forced to imagine the reasons for his missing finger: chewed off in hunger, blown away by a bullet, poisoned to the root by acid. The word for his father, said his mother, was destroyed . Some of Papa had been destroyed. Raphael had to understand this. She said this to Haffner when yet another cook was sitting in the hall, waiting to be interviewed, since her predecessor, along with several others, had condescended to treat Solomon Haffner in ways which went beyond the normal domestic duties of domestics. She only hoped (oh Mama!) that Raphael would not behave in this way when he was a man.

And as if the powers governing Haffner wished to demonstrate how comprehensively he could be entrapped, Haffner's phone went — stowed in his tracksuit pocket. The voice of his grandson asked him if things were fixed yet. Had he managed to get any further?

Really, thought Haffner, Mama had been correct all along. It wasn't right, for Haffner to be adult. The duties were beyond him.

At the moment, the twenty-three-year-old Benjamin was in Israel, somewhere near Tel Aviv. He was at a summer school in a rabbinical seminary, where he was educating himself about the history of his people. His people and their invented traditions. As Haffner argued. In Tel Aviv, in his self-imposed isolation, Benjamin had taken on — for reasons which were obscure to his grandfather — the burden of his family's disappointment in Haffner. Every day, he had called Haffner: wondering when the matter would be fixed. Because no one understood, said Benjamin, why it was taking so long. He couldn't understand it himself. He really thought, he said, that Haffner should at least be explaining what was going on.

— Your mother put you up to this? said Haffner.

Benjamin assured him that this wasn't true. He was only, he was only trying to understand what was going on.

Everyone was tired of the grandfathers. Everyone was bored with the everlasting males. This seemed fair.

Was it possible that Haffner wasn't the father of his child? He envied his brother-in-law, Cesare, who had lived his life only for himself, unencumbered. Cesare's lone state had always worried Livia. It had never worried Haffner. Or there were those other men, the cuckolds, with their blissful state of non-paternity. He could see the point of that as well. Oh Haffner so wanted to desert! It was just, he never had a clear idea of what he would desert for: no, he was not a natural elopee. Haffner had never joined the truant train of Bacchus — Bacchus, with his gang of heartbreakers, his absconding crew. Always, the final disappearance had been beyond him.

The first time he had heard the music of Artie Shaw was in his training camp in Hampshire, listening to the wireless with Evelyn Laye. She had expressed admiration. So, quickly, Haffner became a connoisseur; he developed a taste for the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the music of Hoagy Carmichael. Haffner loved the USA — that land of opportunity, of the Ritz, and razzmatazz. One night, waiting to find out what to do next at Anzio, when the options seemed decidedly limited, Haffner chatted to a black man in a US cavalry unit. His name was Morton. He was Haffner's double; his twin. They spent the night amusing themselves by coming up with the names of the great women songwriters: Kay Swift, of course; and Alice Wrubel. The geniuses for the standards.

But Morton was now dead too. Like everyone else whom Haffner loved, including Haffner's wife.

Haffner walked home, to the hotel. In the distant landscape, there were concrete buildings. These were the buildings of the Socialist renaissance. Their facades were stained concrete and patched glass. There was no ornament. A small sports complex, with its dank swimming pool and dark sauna. A home for the mentally ill. And out on the absolute edge of the town, where the motorway began, were the beginnings of the capitalist renaissance: the warehouses and their associates: the strip club, the pool hall, the strangely Chinese restaurant.

It was hard to see the attraction of this spa town. It was melancholy: chlorinated, salty, sulphuric. It wasn't the spa town which Haffner had imagined. It wasn't for Haffner. He wished he were anywhere else but here. He'd rather, quite frankly, be in a provincial town in Britain, standing at a bar where coked-up girls drank Malibu through fluorescent plastic straws. Haffner's image of the sanatorium had been a lustful, tubercular hothouse. That was surely what it had been like, in the era of the Great War — before Haffner had even been born. The stories Livia had reported! Of docile and female patients, their legs akimbo in stirrups. The women would invent symptoms, just so they could be treated by the stern philandering doctors, there, on the examination table. They would lay themselves out, tense specimens to be relaxed and galvanised by massage. Or even, wondered Haffner, they would begin to enjoy the tenderness of the speculum. Because it was very possible, Haffner had once been told, by a girl whom he believed was flirting with him, that one could climax through these examinations: it had once been very embarrassing for her, but the nurse assured her it was entirely normal. A fact which, when relayed idly to Livia, received only an abrupt refutation.

On Livia, Haffner paused.