Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

No wonder, thought Haffner, the emperors all went manic. He sympathised; he understood their frustration at reality's recalcitrance. No wonder they amused themselves with killing sprees.

In the Lives of the Caesars , the only ones who interested him were the monsters: Caligula, Tiberius, Nero. He liked the overreachers. How could you choose between them? If pressed, however, maybe Haffner would have gone for the god Caligula — who was happy to do it with anyone, male or female, active or passive. Caligula, continued Haffner, talking to himself, was famous for the comprehensiveness of his taste. He would give dinners to which he invited all the noble couples: the couples of the blood. This story in particular commanded Haffner's respect. It displayed a grand disregard for the niceties of public opinion. The wives would have to process up and down, passing a couch on which lay — untroubled by its stains, its cheap upholstery — the emperor Caligula. If one of them tried to avoid his gaze, he lifted up her chin. Like an animal. When the moment seemed right, he would send for one of them, and then the happy couple would retire. On their return, he would talk about her performance; mentioning a flaw here, a perfection there. He listed the movements for which she had no talent.

That, concluded Haffner, was the moment when Caligula rightly deserved his deification.

Perhaps he thought he only meant to shock. But Haffner was never coarse. If he shocked the general public, it was always because of a sincere misalignment in relation to the orthodox. So that even though I am not sure, as he said it, how much Haffner believed in this, it contained — perhaps unknown to Haffner — its own inverted logic, which was Haffner's deepest unexplored motif. He didn't really admire Caligula for the purity of his cruelty: he might have wanted his audience to think this, but Haffner was rarely sincere to his audience. No, Caligula was to be admired for his publicity. Haffner loved him, if he loved him, for the lack of shame.

No one understood the emperors. No one saw how humble they were — free from the deeper vanity of concealing one's own vanity — like Haffner before his family, refusing the illusion of maturity.

As Haffner arrived back at the hotel, intent on his newly discovered decisiveness, like an infant intent on the helium balloon clutched in a tight hand, a man emerged from an inner sanctum behind the reception desk. He was in a bright white T-shirt and blue tracksuit with silken sheen — his upper lip stained by a black and inadequate moustache. This was his masseur! the receptionist told Haffner, excitedly.

Haffner eyed his masseur, utterly indifferent. The helium balloon of his decisiveness floated up into the empty air.

Haffner allowed himself to be led downstairs, to the candlelit, scented day spa: and there, prone on the massage table, his face ensconced in its padded lasso — wrapped in tissue paper, to absorb the unguents of Haffner — he lay down.

As he did so, a montage of previous Haffners lay down with him.

There were the Kodaks of Haffner reclining on towelled beds in his sports clubs, then the black-and-white photos of his white body on a black bench in his army barracks. But the film stopped on the image of him in New York, at the Russian Bath House on Avenue B. He used to go there with Morton. The steam secluded them. They would sit there: heating up — on the steps of the sauna, as if awaiting some spectral performance, some senatorial oratory. Cleansed, they would go to a bar in the Village — the name escaped Haffner's stuttering memory. Not often, but sometimes. And, in this bar, they would continue their discussion of the Jews and the Blacks. This was why Haffner settled on this image, as he relaxed from his struggle in the committee rooms. He was het up with the century's usual argument. But there it was. Haffner loved the Blacks, and Morton loved the Jews. Enough of this! Haffner would say. Enough of this sectarian rubbish. The race was unimportant. He could go further: there were people with charm, and people without. That was the only division one ever needed to contemplate.

Maybe to him, Morton replied. Maybe to him.

Morton put down his bottle of beer. It rested there, in front of Haffner's tired eyes. A bubble stretched, a condom, over its rim.

He didn't understand, said Haffner. He didn't get what Morton was implying.

— You've made it, said Morton. So you're cool.

— I'm cool, said Haffner.

— Not literally, said Morton. I'd never say you were cool in the real sense of this word. No. But yeah, you're cool. You've won your fight. So you don't care.

Haffner wondered if this was fair. Certainly, he could see the accusation's force. Catholic only in his hatred of all Protestants, all splinter groups — to which Haffner preferred the international art of business: an art to which he felt a strong allegiance, an art of which his central principle had been his insistence, in the wreckage of 1950s Europe, that one could not capitalise, as it were, if an economy wanted to remain national. The future was international. That was all he believed. He warmed to cosmopolitans, like Cesare.

— Is he Jewish? Haffner had asked Livia once, about an acquaintance at their tennis club.

— Oh, interrupted Cesare. Did you not know that the whole concept of the non-Jew is strictly inapplicable?

He had always admired Cesare. Always been fond of him. Cesare, in Haffner's opinion, lived up to his name.

— I mean it, continued Cesare. Every time I meet someone new, I discover they are Jewish. It's true what they say: the Jews are everywhere. It's a problem for the anti-Semites. Everyone hates the Jews; but then everyone is a Jew. It's a dilemma.

And Haffner called that fine.

In his padded lasso, Haffner began to talk to his masseur. His name, it turned out, was Viko. It was really Viktor, he said: but everyone called him Viko.

— Niko? said Haffner.

— Viko, said Viko.

As if he were Niko's twin.

— Your name, it is like you are Hugh Hefner! said the masseur, delighted.

— You think you're the first person to make that joke? said Haffner, grimly.

— You know him? asked the masseur, undeterred. Relation?

It had been an exhausting morning, a very stressful morning, said Haffner. He could feel it, said Viko. There was much tension in him. But Haffner, as he always did, chose to turn the conversation away from his internal tensions.

He supposed, Haffner therefore observed, that it was a very difficult thing, to live in this country after the Communists had wrecked everything. And before Viko could reply, Haffner began to tell him a story about the Communists, which was a story about his brother-in-law: Cesare.

But maybe this was still a way of Haffner talking about Haffner.

Cesare, after the war, and his degree at Cambridge, had eventually decided to return to Italy, where he worked for the next two decades as a professor in sociology. The anecdote might interest Viko, said Haffner — raising himself up, patted back down. He was a Communist, Cesare: a Party man. But to understand this story, one also had to understand, said Haffner — talking into his lasso, to Viko's bright new trainers — that this man had a cold streak. He was hard. But there it was. In Italy, he began an affair with a girl whose name, Haffner tended to think, was Simonetta. Perhaps Simonetta. When it began, she was twenty-five. So Cesare must have been in his forties, in his fifties.

And Haffner suddenly noticed how this disparity in age, which had always struck him as tinged with a Hollywood seediness, was nothing when compared to the disparity between his age and Zinka's.