Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

She used to refute him, often. She was Haffner's educator. This seemed like Haffner's ideal of marriage. Without her, he was adrift. But adrift as he was, now that she was absent, he could still admit that not even in Haffner's moral philosophy was it possible to argue that his attempt to secure her inheritance should have transformed itself into this Haffnerian farce: the bored affair with a married woman; the excited affair with a girl who was half a century younger than him. In neither of which, thought Haffner, did Haffner seem to be in control. No, it rather seemed to be Haffner on the massage table, supine: Haffner himself in stirrups.

A cold remorse flowed through him. Today, he thought, would be the day he finished this business of Livia's villa. Let his grandson be proud of Haffner! He would go back to that committee room, he would try once more. No one would vanquish Raphael Haffner.

And so he strode in his damp sportswear through the hotel's uniform gardens. The electric doors of the entrance hissed open, and Haffner hurried in, only to be called back by the receptionist. He hadn't, presumably, forgotten about his early massage?

Mr Haffner, thought Haffner — who? Him? That schmuck could forget anything.

But Haffner was in a new era of maturity. He asked if the massage could wait. The receptionist thought that it could. So Haffner strode on, and returned to his room.

He stood there, looking in the mirror — contemplative at the sketchy portrait of Haffner. The diminutive slope of his belly seemed suddenly sad to him now: the fat, the mark of the human. His penis hung there, in its brief tuft of hair, so oblivious, thought Haffner sadly, to the history of its glories and disasters. The veins on his chest were turquoise behind his skin. Bruises, like passport stamps, lay on his shins and arms.

It seemed unlikely, he admitted, that Zinka could love him. But Haffner was not downcast. He was unmockable when it came to his body. And in this, truly, he was greater than Julius Caesar, who was so disturbed by his lack of hair that he combed the thin strands forward over his head. Which was one reason, and perhaps the most important, why Caesar, it was said, so coveted the laurel wreath.

Haffner was not vain. He dismissed the love Frau Tummel felt for him; he dismissed the love he might feel for Zinka. He was an emperor, a dictator.

Now, he had to deal with his inheritance.

Haffner walked into town. At first, he proceeded through a suburban and universal neatness — past the front gardens embroidered with roses; the garbage cans topped with sedge hats; the open garages displaying workbenches and shelves of car accessories: the serried oblongs of oil cans — like the retrospective Manhattan skyline as one stands on the ferry, and the sun is everywhere, and everyone is in love. Haffner's Saab 900 returned to him, isolated in the car show of his memory: the avant-garde slope of its trunk, the sky blue of its paintwork, the luminous orange quiver of its speedometer. A car which Livia had driven into their garden wall. Which Haffner had driven into the new glass frontage of an evangelical church. Thus continuing a grand family tradition, begun in 1922 when Papa crashed the new Mercedes, blaming first the wind conditions, then the road conditions, and finally an assortment of malevolent historical enemies, the most powerful of whom were the Bolsheviks.

Two men walked past him, carrying a wardrobe, one of whose doors had fallen open, so exposing to the outside world a mirror which was now reflecting the unimpressed landscape, behind which disported the tremulous picturesque mountains.

A variety of apartment blocks arranged themselves around an absent centre. Then a road adorned with nothing: no building, no monument, not even slick patches of well-kept grass. Just dust and the sky and a view of a factory. This landscape then softened into more apartment blocks. By the side of the road was a cement mixer and its accompanying builder — in T-shirt, socks and jeans — who was slapping the soles of his trainers together to dislodge the dry mud, his arms flapping up and then down.

He really did have no idea why the family so insisted on reclaiming a villa in this benighted country. He hardly envisaged the family holidays, the relaxing weekend breaks. But then Haffner, having reached this obvious conclusion, could see the force of an obvious question. If this was the case, then why was Haffner here?

Haffner was disinclined, at this point, to undertake the self-examination. Already, too many people seemed to want to understand his motives. It didn't need Haffner to enquire into them as well.

Instead, Haffner entered into the old town. Just off the main square, in the courtyard of a church, there was a kiosk topped with a cross, with lit candles for the dead. The air was weeping above the flames. A woman lit a small stub then changed her mind. She plucked then dabbed its wick, then selected the tallest, most powerful candle. Beside the church, set back in its railed-off enclosure, stood the Writers' Club. It advertised coffee. Haffner wandered in. The Writers' Club was also marked by candles, which lit the dining room, pointlessly illuminating the coffered dark ceiling, the mahogany sideboards. In the foyer were gilt candelabra, gripped in their mouths by silenced lions. At each corner of the room, there was a mirror; caryatids in the eaves of the roof, which displayed a peeling fresco of a fleshy muse, airborne in a toga. On the terrace, an emblematic writer was scribbling at a table, throwing away crumpled carnations of paper. On the table beside him, two slices of melon rind had been laid crossways over each other by an artistic vanished diner: an impromptu four-pointed crown.

Yes, here Haffner was: in what he only knew as Bohemia. It wasn't Bohemia, of course. But Haffner's idea of geography, like his idea of history, was eclectic. It had been taught to him by his Uncle Ernie. Uncle Ernie! — who ran a brewery business and whose hatred of women developed intricate disguises, so that once, from Nice, he sent a postcard to the young Haffner describing how Mrs Jay had once more collared him for a dance, but thank goodness this time she didn't have her monkey with her. Haffner always wondered if this monkey were real, or allegorical. Uncle Ernie's theory of Europe was simple: there was England, there was France, and then began Bohemia — a land which stretched from Gdansk to Vienna, from Strasbourg to Odessa. A minute version of Haffner tried to query this, but was rebuffed. So although Bohemia had disappeared in 1918, before the era of Haffner, it was now Haffner's central country: wherever Haffner was in Europe, that place became Bohemia.

He couldn't really say that the architecture of this town was truly modern. It was, he thought, as he left the club, a place which seemed unobtrusively to have opted for excess. What might have been a palace or at least the grandest of condos rose proudly in the sunlight. Over the porch curved a glass shell, with strutted ribs, a petal of glass: on either side of it were twin balconies, made of iron: these balconies were furious with detail. Curlicues of foliage melted into each other, in black mazes, twisted into dripping florets and stems — like the rose bushes Haffner had so coveted, in Pfeffer's garden. Pfeffer, Haffner's schoolfriend, was a lawyer in the City. His rose bushes were all tended by a gardener — and yet it was Pfeffer whose picture was found in the horticultural journals, Pfeffer who wrote in with exquisite botanical notes describing impossible species; Pfeffer who sentimentally named each of his new breeds with the name of one of his grandchildren. Above these railings, the brickwork was scrolled and crenellated. The facades had terracotta highlights, small statues which carried flaming torches in an upstretched hand, dead goddesses, proud heroes. The entire classical corpus. And the walls of the Town Hall's foyer bore bas-reliefs, mosaics. Industry Leading the Spirit of the People. The Triumph of the Working Man. The Fecundity of the New Woman .