Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

But there was another explanation. Her love was quieter because it was more true. Unlike everyone else, she trusted in Haffner's love. She would never, she once whispered to him, be loved by anyone else in the way that Haffner loved her. So how could she refuse him?

Zinka looked at Haffner's hand on her shoulder, drowning it in droplets. It was a girlish hand, she said. And Haffner wondered if at this late stage in his life he should waste himself in exercising his vanity on this kind of phrase. He decided that he had no choice. How could he invert the habits of a lifetime? He was not up to it.

So Haffner felt silently annoyed, silently exercised on behalf of his masculine hands.

Zinka asked if he were satisfied. He repeated the word to her: a question. Was he happy? she asked. But of course, replied Haffner, with a delirious grin. Then he paused. But maybe. Maybe what?

she asked him. No, it was nothing, said Haffner. But he had to tell her, said Zinka. Well then, maybe, Haffner wondered, he might be allowed to kiss her.

Now that, said Zinka, would be a very improper request. And Haffner, downcast, agreed. But, he added, contemplating how far down the path of humiliation Haffner might be prepared to walk, it would make him very happy.

He discovered that the path of humiliation had unexpectedly scenic views.

For although Zinka eventually said, from the depths of her silence, that yes, he could kiss her, it was not the kiss which Haffner was expecting.

She raised her left knee so that it rose from the water, crested with scintillating foam.

— You may kiss me on the knee, said Zinka.

Haffner considered Zinka's knee. At its tip, there was a small scar, translucent. A blurred and miniature map of France.

His own knees hurt him, cramped there on the bathroom tiles. He tried to ignore this. He bent his head to Zinka, hoping to see beyond the clouding bubbles: to the dark crevices of Zinka. He could not.

And Haffner kissed her.

His mouth filled with a froth of foam. It gilded his upper lip with a stray moustache. It embittered his mouth with chemicals.

How pleasurable was this? Haffner asked himself. Was it enough? For her part, Zinka thought it was. But Haffner wanted to lick her until her true smell returned: the delicious bare smell of her skin. Not the sterility of artificial foam. He asked if he could kiss her again. She said no. She was going to wash now. It was time for him to go back into the bedroom.

Haffner tried to stand up. He could not. Like some immovable sphinx, with buried paws. He could only turn his head away. He tried to explain this to Zinka, with the utmost maintenance of his dignity. In that case, said Zinka, she would just get out and dry herself. He must not look, she said. He promised this? Haffner promised. He turned his head.

There was a surge of water beside him. He tried to wrench the stocking away. Too late, he gazed at Zinka, with her back to him, wrapping herself in the softness of Haffner's towels: a Roman matron, in her flowing toga.

Sourly, he tasted the foam in his mouth. There was no doubt, thought Haffner, that his dignity was in danger. And yet, he was discovering, he seemed curiously avid for this degradation. It seemed, this ruin of Haffner, to be a kind of triumph too.

This wasn't a new motif in the life of Raphael Haffner.

In Rome, after the liberation, while Haffner waited for an infinitely postponed decision on his regiment's movements, he used to go up to the Pincio Gardens, and smoke his traded cigarettes, dropping the butts in the sand. Even up there, the smell from the sewage was heavy. The cigarettes, among other things, were Haffner's improvised pomander.

The light up there was pulverised; it was dust. The Tiber below Haffner was sluggish mud. A breeze made the leaves on the poplars silver themselves. Their pollen floated whitely on to the ground.

And Haffner looked down on the ruined, eternal city. It was the ruins, considered Haffner, which were precisely what was eternal.

Yes, this seemed to be Haffner's pattern.

Up from Anzio, before they reached Rome, they had ended up sleeping in the grounds of Ninfa. At that time, Haffner had not been horticultural. He had not admired the romantic unkempt wilderness. Kept awake by mosquitoes, Haffner instead found himself oppressed by the death of kings.

The gardens of Ninfa were built on the ruins of Ninfa — a town which had been sacked by its neighbours in the thirteenth century. The basilica had once held the coronation of a pope: now it was a dismantled heap of stones. Then, in the twentieth century, the town had been made into a true romantic garden: a meditation on the ruins of time. But Haffner had been troubled. There was no romance for him in ruins. They made him sad. Although this sympathy could so easily have been a more inward form of sympathy: Haffner's empathy for himself. In these cities' destruction, he only saw the futility of Haffner. The hollowness of Haffner.

— I will be remembered, he once told me, for my after-dinner speeches.

And then he paused.

— But that's worth nothing, he said.

And then Haffner smiled, glorious in the knowledge of his defeat.

Awkwardly, Haffner unfolded himself upright, via the rim of the bath, then the rim of the basin. He looked around — at the emptying swirl of the water, the deliquescent towels on the soaked mat. His masculine cologne was sitting on the shelf, its bottle embossed with a white tear of toothpaste foam. The toothpaste itself lay there, its tail twisted like a comma — like a fortune-telling miracle fish: its red plastic curled into the sign for passion, for jealousy, for sadness. The scenes of pleasure usually ended up this wasted, like the hotel in Venice where Haffner and the girl who had chosen him from his perch at the bar proceeded to order a feast of room service, one bottle and dish at a time, delighted by the maid's growing confusion between curiosity and distaste.

You should be happy for the things you get, Mama had said. No man should think he could have more than the Lord intended. So Haffner was humble. For at least the worship of women was a brave and noble aim.

Methodically, he laid out the full range of his medicines, in preparation for the night ahead. They included pills to combat the intensity of his blood pressure, pills to lower the ratio of bad cholesterol to good, antidepressants. Then the more soothing medicines: the ones to relieve Haffner's body of pain; the ones to make him sleep.

He picked up the wet towels, scented with Zinka's body. Then she appeared in the doorway.

Did he want to walk her home? asked a clothed and beautiful version of Zinka. To which a reduced version of Haffner wailed in response that the idea that he should ever be parted from her oppressed him with an absolute melancholy. If this miniature Haffner were to be allowed to rule reality, they would never be parted.

So Haffner said yes; and went out with his chaperone into the midsummer night.

To kiss a girl's knee, while on one's own knees, might have seemed, to the outside observer, a little pitiable, thought Haffner. To the outside observer, it might well have seemed to indicate some incipient breakdown. But Haffner tended to disagree. He admired the effects. The sound and light. The softly spattered fireworks above the ruined chateau: the fading and luminous palm fronds, thistles, water lilies in the sky.

For Haffner was in love.

They had left the lake behind; and the park, with its watchful factories. In what looked, to Haffner's bourgeois eye, like a shanty town, a tzigane was carrying a blue gas canister and a gold can of beer, following the dug-out route of a possible but phantom pipeline. Then they found themselves in another, less private park. It was a shortcut, said Zinka. At the centre of this park was a boating lake, embossed with a fountain, a fraying plume of foam. The rowing boats by the side of the lake crossed their arms neatly; the pedalos were chained together, clopping. Yes, there they were, at midnight: with the monuments to the source of the river; the monument to the unknown soldier. All the angels in stone, their wings in imitation of the earthly wings of pigeons.