Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Haffner's appetites were catholic. Benji's appetite had been for food. Now, unknown to Haffner, he was concerned to broaden the range of his appetites. But it was his appetite for food on which Haffner and his grandson had forged their friendship.

— You know what's happening in the cricket? asked Haffner.

— No, said Benjamin.

— Blowing a gale? said Haffner, cryptically, with an intimate smile.

Benjamin looked embarrassed. And this saddened Haffner. Mutely, he went in search of the long-lost time when Haffner had taught Benjamin his favourite routine from the movies — dialogue which they had then so often recited by heart — where a man stranded in a mountain hotel phones home to find out the cricket score.

Now Haffner had to quote to himself, in silence, the next lines in his adored dialogue — You don't know? You can't be in England and not know the test score — grimly thinking as he did so that it was only natural that this was how his century should end: with everyone having lost their sense of humour.

— I will leave you two boys together, said Frau Tummel.

She would meet Haffner back here, she said to Haffner: to talk. For a moment, she looked darkly at Haffner. And then, smiling more benignly at Benjamin, she left.

Haffner turned to Benjamin, and he sighed.

Precocious, in the heyday of his teenage years, Benjamin had listened to the hip hop from New York, the ragga from Jamaica. His favourite thing was the Los Angeles hip-hop artist, the modern saint: 2pac. Everyone loved 2pac, true. But in this love, Benji was unusual. He didn't care about the drugs, nor the women. Nor about the gold and diamante T round 2pac's neck, a cartoon crucifix. No, for Benjamin, 2pac was an example of pure romance. His favourite song — which he played on repeat — was 2pac's elegy 'Life Goes On'. Have a party at his funeral, let every rapper rock it, sang 2pac, rapped 2pac. Let the hos that he used to know from way before kiss him from his head to his toe. Give him a paper and pen so he could write about his life of sin, a couple of bottles of gin in case he didn't get in.

The swagger had Benji entranced.

He'd be lying, continued 2pac, if he told him that he never thought of death. My nigger, they were the last ones left. But life went on.

It was so cool, thought Benjamin. Once, he tried to explain this to Haffner. Haffner tried to listen. This presented some problems: practical (the fitting of the earphones, the working of the portable CD player); and aesthetic (the understanding of this noise as music, rather than noise).

As a teenager, Benji's ideal habitat was the urban sprawl of Los Angeles: the gang warfare, the misogyny. He spent his life in thrall to the foreign, in thrall to images to which he had no right.

This was the younger Benji — the boy whom Haffner still admired.

A hint of the devastating problem which was to ensue occurred when Benjamin, aged fifteen, decided that, while everyone else went on holiday with their youth groups to Israel — to meet girls, and sleep on beaches — instead he wanted to stay in a Buddhist monastery. This monastery was located in the countryside outside London: in Hertfordshire. It was his spiritual goal. He arrived with a smuggled packet of cigarettes, and a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. For Benji, at fifteen, was a rebel, and philosopher. But when he was confronted by the bell at five the next morning, the meditation for two hours before breakfast, the unidentified and unidentifiable breakfast itself, the work in the fields, by the afternoon he was too depressed to carry on. He couldn't even tell the men apart from the women. He went into the room of the Head Monk and asked to leave. The Head Monk looked at him. He implored him, having made the important break from the temptations of the city, to persevere in his difficult task. The worst was over, he said. But Benji was not so persuaded. There was a skull on the Head Monk's desk; and Benji did not want to be confronted by memento mori. He could not tell, in fact, why it was he was here at all. He had simply liked the idea of it — a man above the temptations of beaches, and girls.

Two hours later, Esther had arrived to take him home.

He had at least learned something, Benjamin told everyone. He'd discovered how deeply he believed in food.

And Haffner loved him for this. The boy was independent! He understood how much more important the senses were than a sense of the serious. But the let-down came soon afterwards. Benji, after all, was in a crisis of faith. He had gone through hip hop, drugs and Buddhism. And now he returned to the most basic, the least loved. Benjamin returned to the religion of his forefathers: a lineage which began with his father, if one missed out his grandfather.

That was why, at university, he spent his vacations in the Promised Land. That was why, after university, he had entered the summer school of a rabbinical seminary.

But then, Benjamin's Jewishness, like all his other crazes, was really a form of romance. He wanted a past: he wanted a past which was more torn apart by history than the history of his happy family.

In Tel Aviv, Benjamin had met a girl who came from a family of Jewish-Algerian intellectuals. Somewhere in the Sahara, she said, there was a tribe which bore her surname. Benji wished that this girl's past were his. He didn't know what he might do with it — but he was sure that this was the missing piece of Benjamin's jigsaw, lost in another jigsaw box, abandoned underneath a sofa.

His forefathers! Who else was more like Benjamin than Haffner? Like his grandfather before him, Benji was a sucker for bohemia.

Haffner, however, only saw in Benjamin an exponent of the Law. He was constantly depressed by the cowl of seriousness with which Benjamin so often insulated himself: the easy tristesse of history which enticed him.

This judgement was true, in a way. Benjamin dearly wanted the reassuring safety of the righteous, the morally certain. But this was no reason, perhaps, to dislike him, to think that he was prim. He wanted order because he was so often overtaken by compulsions he could not understand.

His first craze was soccer. On the white gloss of his bedroom cupboards, whose moulding was painted dark blue, in imitation of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer strip, Benjamin had arranged stickers produced by Panini for the 1986 World Cup. His favourite stickers were the Brazilians — with their pineapple T-shirts, their one-word names (Socrates!), their impossible hair. Benjamin had arranged Brazil, and Paraguay, and England, gently overlapping, following the blue line of gloss along his cupboards.

Benjamin, in the youth of his youth, didn't have ripped-out pictures of film stars, or porn stars, on his ceiling. No nipples, or even bikinis, in black and white or colour, were visible in his room. True, he did possess one photocopy of a pornographic image. This picture had been given to him, as a special favour, by Ezekiel. A girl with thick, if indistinctly printed, nipples was raising a sailor-suit top towards her chin. A sailor's hat was cocked, coquettish, on her white-blonde permed hair. How innocent he was! In Benjamin's special dreams, he would touch her nipples, curiously — like tuning a radio. But this image was not public. He had simply tucked his pornographic possession, neatly folded, between pages 305 and 306 of his book which contained 1001 facts about the French Revolution, with its glossy laminated boards.

Instead of sex, Benjamin had crazes. There had been the soccer, then the drugs, and the hip hop, and the Buddhism. Then the Orthodox Jewishness. And now, finally, Benji had been disturbed by the true sexual furore — inspired by his Jewish and Algerian and French girl in Tel Aviv. With this girl, finally, Benjamin had lost his virginity. She was hairless between the legs, except for a black tuft, so that when he touched her all he felt was a slick softness. He nearly swooned. For this, thought Benji, was love.