Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

— I will tell you what you are, said Zinka. You are realistic, but also a dreamer. I think you are easy to melancholy. Is this true?

— Oh it's true, said Haffner.

— Yes, said Zinka. Now you tell me about myself.

— Oh, said Haffner. I think you are: I think you are tough, but you are not as tough as you want to be. Something softer there.

— Oh, said Zinka, you are fifty per cent true. No. No, you are much closer. Too close perhaps.

Haffner wondered what he was really doing here.

— I have no regrets, said Zinka. People have to live the moment.

Haffner murmured something indistinct.

And because Zinka seemed suddenly sad, Haffner asked her, delicately, if she were sad. Yes, she replied, she was sad. But she did not want to talk about it.

— My country, it is destroyed, said Zinka. The baddest country in Europe.

But Haffner had seen worse.

The light outside, as usual, still persisted. It was as if the light went on for ever. In this light, Haffner looked down at his plate. He had to confess, the food here distressed him. He had never been one for the Jewish food, the food of Eastern Europe. He preferred nouvelle cuisine to the heaviness of starch. In a sauce of sour cream and oil lay a dumpling, stuffed with pork. Haffner considered if at this late stage he should return to keeping kosher. It seemed desirable. The dumpling outdid him. First, it had been fried. This fried dumpling had then, surmised Haffner, been boiled. Nothing else could have created this texture, of the softest rubber. He did not understand it. In the sauce of sour cream and oil, small moments of bacon were visible.

In what way, thought Haffner, could this hotel be said to care about health? What was the point of the massages, the waters, the sauna?

He looked across at Frau Tummel. She was staring at him, angrily; and Herr Tummel was staring at his wife. He also seemed to be angry.

There had been a woman in love with her in Zagreb, Zinka was telling him. Did he understand this? He did, he assured her, he did. But why should she seem so proud of this fact, thought Haffner. It wasn't so strange, to fall in love. It just needed, in the end, someone else to be there. Oh Zinka was so tired of love, she said. And Haffner raised an eyebrow: a self-interested, altruistic eyebrow. He mentioned, for instance, Niko. Yes, she said: but Haffner knew Niko too. That boy. She was not sure he understood her. But no. She did not want to talk about this.

— No? said Haffner.

He began to worry that she wanted to mention the wardrobe, and all the pleasures which Haffner had seen. On this subject, he worried, he had no conversation.

No, she said. There were things it was good not to talk about. The matters of the heart. It was complicated. He did not want to hear this. Haffner tried to assure her that he did.

— No, she said. Not now.

The sex scene which was not a sex scene: this was the recent story of Niko and Zinka. The idyllic scene in the hotel room had been only theatre, after all. They were absent from each other. They coupled only in disguise, in the dark.

How could Haffner know this? Was it Haffner's fault, dear reader, if he did not know the inner history of Zinka?

No, Haffner wasn't free. Unlike the transparent and liberated reader, he couldn't be everywhere, like the bright encompassing air.

For these were the nights of Zinka. The concrete balcony to her apartment was covered by an advert, a scrim hung down ten floors from the roof. The scrim was printed with a woman on a cell phone, in some countryside, surrounded by birds. On Zinka's balcony, therefore, the reverse of a savage, eight-foot swallow looked in on her — observing the television in its mahogany hutch; a garden chair, for ever folded, in a corner; the reproductions of Impressionist paintings, from the era when leisure was invented. In the apartment block opposite hers, the forgetful cleaner — who returned home on the buses, disliking the organic smell of her shoes, the chemical smell of her hands — would leave random lights on, illuminating the darkness for the potential spectator. But there were no other spectators. Except for Zinka's books — an illustrated translation of Pushkin, a novel in Russian by Dovlatov, a history of ballet — which looked down on her and Niko in their bed.

And Niko would touch Zinka's thigh, gently — which began their new game. In response to Niko's roughness, Zinka now never gave him permission. He could do what he wanted, she said: just so long as he expected her to do nothing.

And so, sadly, Niko did.

Perhaps this, then, was one reason for her silence. Perhaps this was one reason why she said to Haffner that she didn't want to talk about herself. Instead, she wanted him to tell her about Haffner's war.

And she looked up at Haffner.

So Haffner began where he always began, with the long night of Haffner's spring in Italy: in the foothills around Anzio. Haffner got there on Valentine's Day. They were in the woods, on the flat ground, and the Germans, with the Ukrainians, were on the Alban Hills outside Rome. So they could see everything. There was nowhere you could escape. Everything was bound to hit something. The Germans had one wonderful gun — an 80 mm. Much better than anything the British had. They were sending over these great big heavies called Anzio Annies. Going for the docks. But it was much worse when they came over at night with the cluster bombs. On the whole, said Haffner, the British were very well dug in. But just about the time that Haffner got there, on Valentine's Day, was when the Germans made their one last big effort. They couldn't use their armour in that sort of mud. He didn't know it at the time. He didn't realise that those four or five days were the Germans' last chance to push the British and the Americans into the sea. They put everything into it. The noise, said Haffner. The noise. Their artillery was very good. The British had some destroyers outside the docks who were firing as well. And years later, on holiday in Madeira with his wife, he met a naval chap, who said: it was him. He was helping them. So there it was. Things got better when they began to see their own planes.

It was amazing, thought Haffner, how you settled down to a life: truly amazing. The chaps in the front were machine-gunned, killed in hand-to-hand fighting. And yet soon this seemed like a facon de vivre . His job as the second in command was to take up all the rations and things. And there was really only one way, which the Germans knew about: an alley.

Haffner paused. He considered himself. What could he tell her about Haffner's war? It seemed indescribable.

He remembered the yard in a town outside Alexandria, where he had enjoyed the greatest shrimp of his life, its flesh a white fluff inside the charred shell: there was a concrete reservoir, and a wind pump pumping water into it, clacking as it turned, casting a flickering shadow on the house.

This was all he could really tell her.

The problem about catastrophe, he had learned from the silences in his conversations with Papa, and then had learned for himself, from the silences in his own conversations with other people, was the incomprehension. There was the incomprehension of those who had seen nothing; and then there was the incomprehension of those who had seen everything.

Everyone persisted in the safety of flippancy. But maybe the flippancy was right.

At home, when the war was over, Livia would ask him why he was so private. She used to ask him this as if it were a fault, remembered Haffner — only idly noticing the fact that Frau Tummel was suddenly talking with animation to her husband. Livia expected Haffner to behave like a hero — to revel in his war stories. But Haffner never felt like a hero; not when he was being heroic. It had only bred in him a certain humour: a wit which could enjoy the gags of the emperors, like the one who, when a man asked for extension of his sick leave, ordered that this man should have his throat cut — for if the medicine had taken so long to work, then the man needed to be bled. With this humour, Haffner preserved his version of privacy. Livia used to upbraid him for his gaucheness at parties. He was always ready for his tete-a-tetes, she said. So why could he not be charming when there was more than one person present? And Haffner tried to explain that he had never been one for parties: for all the social whirl.