Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

And Haffner discovered in this moment with Niko its secret twin, which already existed in the story of Haffner.

In another blackout, the universal blackout of 1977 — the summer Haffner came back to New York after being away for three years — he had argued with Goldfaden about sport. They were in Chinatown. Goldfaden had just outlined his theory that genetically the Jewish race was programmed to adore Chinese food. And Haffner felt no urge to disagree. He was happy. Before him, sat a plate of crispy shredded beef: a pile of orange twigs — which was Haffner's most reliable delight.

Then the lights went out. And Haffner found the conversation turning to sports.

It was escapism, said Goldfaden. There was nothing wrong with this, he wanted to add. He believed that everyone, at some time, needed a way of escaping. For Goldfaden, it was love. For Haffner, it was sports. Where, then, was the argument?

The argument, thought Haffner, was precisely in this idea that anything could be imaginary. Nothing was imaginary. This was Haffner's idea. So often accused of being divorced from real life, Haffner always maintained that — on the contrary — he would love to be divorced from real life, but the divorce was impossible. There was no counterlife.

As waiters began to scurry round for candles, Haffner talked.

The accusation of escapism was not a new one. Normally, however, this was seen as a bad thing. Esther used to accuse him of a lack of seriousness. Sport wasn't, said Esther, real life. She asked her new husband to agree with her. And Esmond did. But Haffner now maintained, in front of Goldfaden, in the dark, that there was no difference between a sport and real life: how, he wondered, could there be? In what way was real life suspended by the act of kicking a football, that would not mean that the act of sipping a coffee also represented a suspension of real life? The theory was ridiculous. What escapism was it to be battered by emotion, scarred by defeat, elated in victory? In Haffner's opinion, this proved a further and deeper truth: there was no such thing as escapism. No, never. How could you escape? Where did Goldfaden think he could go?

Well, said Goldfaden: he supposed he was much more of a romantic than Haffner.

Did he really want to talk about football? said Haffner, ignoring this comparison. Because he could. The Norwegians, for instance, who refused to play Nazi football. So the quislings watched each other in desolate stadiums. How was that not real life? So OK, said Goldfaden. But Haffner wasn't finished. Let us not, said Haffner, forget the Viennese genius Matthias Sindelar, known as The Wafer, who was said to have brains in his legs, and many unexpected ideas occurred to them while they were running. For instance, said Haffner, there was the last ever match between Austria and Germany, a month after the Nazis had annexed Austria in 1938. Everyone knew that Sindelar had been told not to score. For the whole first half, therefore, he pushed the ball a little wide of each post, sarcastically. And then, in the second half, he couldn't stop himself: so Sindelar scored. And then another man scored a free kick, thus sealing the game, and Sindelar, because he had ideas in his legs, went to celebrate by dancing in front of the Nazi directors' box.

That, said Haffner, was sport. It could never be an escape from life. Life was everywhere.

No, there was no such thing as a counterlife, Haffner wanted to argue. Just as there was no such thing as a real metamorphosis. In the end, you only had yourself to work with. Wherever you went, it was still you.

While around them, the city of New York was looted. Though whether this proved or disproved Haffner, in his imaginary nostalgic lecture hall, he didn't know.

He carried on looking at the girls. In Italy they had called them segnorini — the girls who went with the Allied soldiers: they mispronounced them, a l'inglese .

When she bent down, you could see the neat fur between her legs.

Behind him, the light of a candle flickered. A girl was standing beside him. She was tall, she had straight black hair, she was what the world would consider the pornographic ideal. Whatever her breasts were made of, Haffner liked it. She told Haffner her name. He could not hear it. She told him again. She thanked him for buying her a drink. He raised an eyebrow. Behind her, Niko raised a glass, gaily.

— You have a drink? she asked Haffner.

Haffner had a drink.

— So, she said, you are good to go.

He couldn't deny it. Like one of Benji's wind-up toys, which could unleash its skittering movements wherever it was placed: on the neat chevrons of blond parquet in a country-house museum or the linoleum of a kitchen floor — with damp stains, starry splashes of coffee, and one irrevocably non-matching square of concrete, where the lino had given out.

The girl who now thought of herself as Haffner's — or who thought of Haffner as her own — led him into what seemed a cave, or tunnel. It ventured into the underground. She told Haffner to sit — on a crate, or possibly an upturned bucket. It was difficult to tell. Haffner only knew that it had some kind of rim. It hurt him.

Haffner had never been into the pornography, nor the pubs to which his City friends used to go: where angry women undressed and despised their spectators. All his pleasure was more traditional. He disliked the obscenity of modern film, the sexual glee of modern literature. There were things which shouldn't be written down, said Haffner. There were certain forms to be observed. Pleasure was all about privacy, he thought: the burden of the boudoir.

And even if I disagreed, I still agreed with Haffner's motive — it wasn't from primness that he thought this, but from a wish to preserve the erotic as a secret which one kept from other people. This didn't seem unreasonable.

But now, in this unstaged intimacy, Haffner could still not discover in himself any obvious erotic surge. He should have done, he knew this. And perhaps, even recently, he would have done — but no longer. Now, Haffner was more in love with love.

This love was partly visible in the way his thoughts were tending to Zinka, in her bubble bath. But it was also visible in the way Haffner kept thinking of Livia. He sat on an upturned crate or bucket and told himself that he should simply do this so that Niko would still admire him. Because Niko was his ally. Niko was the friend who would restore Haffner to his heritage.

In his blackout basement, Haffner conversed urbanely with his girl. Her name, she told him, was Katya. A nice name, Haffner assured her. It was not her real name, she replied. Who needed real names? Not in here. Tonight, she said, she wanted sex, and she wanted vodka. And she had the vodka already, she said — raising the smudged plastic glass to Haffner's worried gaze. So only one thing was missing.

As usual, the god Priapus harried Haffner: with his cloven hooves, his staff entangled in ivy. His entire being a pulsing penis.

An arm was twined around Haffner's neck. He felt his lips being kissed. Then he realised that the small bikini top which Katya had been wearing was now slipping, weightless, on to his arm, then on to the floor — where it rested, invisible, unknown to Haffner, on his foot. She lifted a candle to her torso: her breasts were there, in the magical light. Katya told him that he could touch. If he were gentle.

He belonged to an older world. The older he got, the more he believed in it. Here, in the centre of Europe, in a town which was so nearly modern, and yet had been already so melancholically superseded by other fashions, Haffner believed in romance: the candlelit dinner, the car ride home, the kiss on the cheek. This routine to be repeated, with variations.