Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

And for a moment, Haffner, on his massage bed, felt a rare tenderness for Esmond. He understood the difficulty — since this was how Haffner had felt too, when trying to contemplate the moral life of Papa.

History, thought Haffner, was simply a playground of repetition. It really did amaze him how limited were its motifs.

Hurt as Haffner was by Papa's reckless behaviour, with the women, and the money, he tried to understand his impulses. Papa was terrified of waste. It was the only lesson he had ever learned; the only one he could ever impart. Haffner thought he understood, therefore, why his father had acted with such theatrical self-pity when selling off the only other inheritance with which Haffner had been involved. Papa had been the greatest collector of cricketana the world had ever seen: he bought engravings, handkerchiefs printed with the laws of the game, mugs, memoirs, the technical manuals. In cricket, Papa found his reason for being. It made him safe. He compiled bibliographies, small monographs on centenary tankards. Haffner had inherited this love — a love he had passed on to Benjamin, his grandson and heir. Then, before Papa died, in what Haffner regarded with tacit admiration as an act of grand malevolence, but which was interpreted by everyone else as an act of petty and vindictive spite, he auctioned the entire collection. So that in the course of Haffner's life, in random provincial museums, he would observe a small typewritten card marked neatly in a bottom corner with his ancestral name.

When Haffner's mother died, no one expected his father to be sad. Only Haffner. It didn't amaze Haffner to receive a noble letter from his father in which Solomon told him that had he never known his wife, that grief would have been even greater than the grief he now felt at this temporary separation imposed on them. And maybe this was not so wrong. Maybe this was the only way in which Solomon Haffner could have loved his wife, in this exorbitant way — writing to posterity. Whereas Haffner's love for his mother had been different. It was all nostalgic. Whenever he remembered her, it was only as an idyll.

But then maybe every idyll is remembered: maybe memory is a condition of the idyllic.

So Haffner had sat there, his father's letter beside him, and remembered how his mother used to lay the lemon meringue pie on the stone floor of the larder, so that it could set.

The previous section, dear reader, as Haffner is lost in his memories, is a way of describing Raphael Haffner asleep.

For although to Haffner's dismay his penis had begun to burgeon towards Viko's hand, thus creating, in Haffner's opinion, a situation of the utmost delicacy, he couldn't think what to do. The solutions seemed absent. Previously, when faced by situations which disturbed him, Haffner had consulted his mental library of exempla. So now, desperate, with his face down, Haffner tried to consider his mentors. But, once more, the external forces which tended to disrupt the straight line of Haffner's life overtook him.

Worried, Haffner fell asleep. He relaxed. He drifted into a place of absence, emptiness. Drifting further, his legs spread slightly more apart, in a gesture which was unmistakably flirtatious, thought Viko.

Viko was used to these situations. They occurred often, in his candlelit basement. They followed an ordinary pattern.

Viko, poised above Haffner's back, couldn't see that Haffner's eyes were closed. He assumed that the greater deepness of Haffner's breathing meant only one thing: the masseur's skill at finding individual ways to please the gratified client. He continued to move his hands around Haffner's thighs, the tops of his thighs, brushing his penis and testicles with slow abandon. All the signs were there. The fact that Haffner had made no protest; the fact that he had positioned his penis deliberately so that its tip was softly available to Viko's touch; the fact that now he was even moving his legs apart to allow the masseur easier access: these were the ordinary, done thing.

His fingers ran up and down the shaft of Haffner's penis. As Haffner slept, Viko touched him, slid his hand in such a way that Haffner half woke, aroused, descending into thoughts of Livia: the only woman who had ever touched his penis so deftly. Who, even before their wedding in the Abbey Road Synagogue, as Haffner never tired of remembering, slipped her hand beneath the tightness of his waistband, just as she had done before: a gesture which remained the erotic zenith of Haffner's marriage.

Haffner's wedding! At this zenith, while Haffner remains there, happily asleep, with his penis in a stranger's hand, I am suddenly reminded of another Haffnerian story.

Haffner used to tell his stories in the car, while he was driving. Haffner drove like they drive in the ancient movies: inexplicably watching his passenger, and not the road. Between rows of parked cars, Haffner drove — as if before a pre-recorded backdrop — courageously oblivious to the malice of wing mirrors.

And, one night, Haffner told me the story of his wedding.

The service had been taken by his rabbi: the Reverend Ephraim Levine. The kindest man in the world, said Haffner. A very fine man. Who in fact, strange as it may seem, became the legal guardian of every Jewish refugee to London from Germany before the war. But that was another story. Yes, that was another story, which involved the story Haffner preferred to forget: of a girl upstairs in a locked bathroom, young Raphael adding up his batting average in the dining room with a pencil stub, its end wrinkled where he sucked it. Whereas a story Haffner always remembered was his father leaving the wedding service and asking for theological guidance.

— Ephie, why do we have two days for Rosh Hashanah?

And the Reverend Ephraim Levine looked at him and said:

— Solly, why do we have five days for Ascot?

It was very fine, said Haffner. Very fine. He was the wittiest of men. You never knew what to expect. And after the wedding, after his mother had by mistake drunk the wine which was meant for the bride, thus causing a dumbshow, a hiatus in the service, there was a tea dance at the Rembrandt Hotel, in Knightsbridge. Haffner's padre from his unit shared a taxi to the reception with the Reverend Levine. And did I know, Haffner asked, what the padre had said to him, astonished, when they returned to the unit? The padre took him aside. The things he had been told, the padre confided in Haffner, afterwards, refusing to enlarge this statement with detail. The things the Reverend Levine had told him. He had been shocked, said the padre: absolutely shocked.

And now, I think, I know what Haffner liked in this anecdote. He liked the revelation that all men were men of this world. Because every story, for Haffner, was the same.

Haffner was an admirer of the classics. He went to the classics for the higher gossip. Haffner, humble Haffner, wanted to understand how everything declined and fell. The history of the classical era was the history of decadence. Curious, Haffner read of Nero and his monstrous appetite — which overruled his reason so comprehensively that Nero devised a pretty game. He was released from a den, dressed in the skins of wild animals, and would then gnaw at the penises and exposed pubic bushes of servile men and women who had been bound naked to stakes. Haffner appreciated the underlying philosophy. For, in the vocabulary of Solomon Haffner, the patriarch of Haffner, to live one's life was the same thing, in the end, as wasting it. This was what the stories taught the gentle reader. Just as the classical, in the end, wasn't really classical: it led for ever to the Goths, to the Picts and the Saxons, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths: all the savage barbarians. The classical only existed in retrospect, when everything was over. You couldn't separate the classic from the decadent. No, the defeat might seem to come from nowhere, but really there was no escape from it: because it was visible, really, all along, from the beginning. So every story was a story of defeat. Even the stories about the victories.