Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

A marriage, thought Haffner, was the invention of a code.

No one knew the secrets of a marriage: maybe this was true. Just as Haffner didn't know the secrets of his grandson, the conundrum of his grandson, standing there in front of him: confused, like his grandfather, by the monstrous state of love.

The villa which belonged to Livia's family was out on the outskirts of the town, above a slope which ran down to the river. Across from its veranda was the range of snowy mountains.

In 1929, the universal crash had meant that her father took a loan from his cousin's bank in Trieste. Seven years later, his talent for money had been so adroitly employed that he had earned enough to buy this villa.

Here, Livia used to argue with her father: a nationalist when considering the Italian state, an anti-nationalist when considering the Zionist cause. He was a businessman who imported coal from Britain. Through the quiet rise of wealth, the steady progress of business, he wanted his nation to be great again.

Her father had become a Fascist after fighting in the Great War. Then, in 1922, leaving behind his daughter in her blankets and her cradle, leaving behind his pregnant wife, her father had taken part in Mussolini's March on Rome: his pedestrian coup. Her mother had cut out clippings from the newspapers. They featured grand vocative apostrophes ( O Rome! ) written in a rhetoric which even then seemed obscure ( O ship launched toward World Empire that emerges from the flux of time! ). She kept them in an album for her husband. He believed in Italy. It was a refuge — his family's final escape from the misery of politics.

Even if this escape was a politics too.

Cesare was duly made to join the youth movements. He wore the uniform, scowling. In retaliation, he decided that when he grew up he would be a Communist. If, that is, he ever grew up. As for Livia, she also wore her black pleated skirts, white pique blouse, long white stockings, her black cape and beret. This was her Fascist youth.

Her father believed in discipline. Neither Cesare nor Livia was allowed to rest a wrist on the table when they were eating. She was told to hold two napkins under her armpits, so that she might achieve the correct deportment. His ideas of order were immutable.

She was too melancholic, her father told her, when they argued. Always on the dark side of the moon. She didn't have a positive concept of the reality of life. In reply, she would quote the Romantics to him. What else was this life but a failure? It lacked beauty. She looked forward to the one radiant light, bathed in which humanity would come together in perfect union.

In the cafe in the main square, Livia, when she was sixteen, had been asked to dance by a man whose eyebrows and teeth she distrusted. She had looked at Mama. And Mama had nodded her head. Her mother had never done this before. Normally, every dance was forbidden to Livia. And when she asked her mother, afterwards, why she had made her dance with that horrible man, Mama had simply said that it was because she had to: the man was a director of the secret police.

When Livia told Haffner this story, one day in 1953, he smiled at her. And did she, he wanted to know, tread on the man's toes?

— Naturalmente , said Livia. And she kissed him, her mischievous boy.

There had been a swing on the cherry tree outside the villa, stranded on an island of grass in the drive. They used to go looking for mushrooms and blackberries. In the early summer they would go to the seaside, on the Adriatic. And in August they would come up here into the mountains. That was their life.

And once, when the Buffalo Bill circus arrived in the town, Livia's mother told her that this would be the greatest night of her life. But when she told Haffner about this, forty years later, as they passed a sign for a travelling circus on the outskirts of London, following some visit to see their grandson, she did not remember the trapeze, nor the spectacle: all that had remained with her was an inarticulate concern for the living conditions of the elephants.

This, then, was what Haffner was now due to inherit: the occluded history of Livia.

— If you had only not been so impatient, said the Head of the Committee on Spatial Planning, perhaps I help you. Not now. Now the matter is closed.

— What do you mean closed? said Haffner.

— You think this is not something I understand? said his opponent. This is something I perfectly understand.

— Really? said Haffner.

— Aggressing my staff, said the Head of the Committee.

To Haffner's surprise, within ten minutes of entering the building, they had secured an interview with the Head of the Committee on Spatial Planning. It had been to his surprise, but also to his mild irritation, giving as it did an unfortunately fluent appearance to Benjamin of the Committee's workings. This irritation, however, had been mollified when they discovered that the Head of the Committee, having dismissed Isabella as unnecessary, spoke an English which was accurate but so heavily accented that they found it difficult to follow him.

This linguistic confusion, however, was possibly irrelevant. The case, it appeared, was closed.

— First place, said the Head of the Committee, you come here earlier, much earlier. Now the window is over. Occasion gone. Doubly, I cannot do nothing for you.

— So that's it? said Haffner, banished from his estates.

— I will make to you a concession, said the Head of the Committee.

— A concession? asked Haffner, eagerly.

— Yes, said the man. I am sorry for you, I really am. But my hands are tired.

— I'm sorry? said Haffner.

— Yes, said the Head of the Committee. Tired. It is a pity for you.

— That's your concession? said Haffner. In what way does that represent a concession?

— He means confession, said Benjamin.

— What? said Haffner.

There was no goodwill. Haffner knew that. But he hoped to be surprised. And so often he was duly let down.

He indicated to the Head of the Committee that he strongly intended to pursue the matter further. In Haffner's experience of offices, this phrase was usually potent. For Haffner's threats were real. It seemed less potent now.

The Head of the Committee was blowing away the flakes of an eraser, which he had been vigorously rubbing against a mistake in his calligraphy. It was music to his ears, he said. Music to his ears. And never, thought Haffner, would he trust a man again who used this phrase. All his sense of style was outraged.

But nothing in this room was stylish.

It was situated on the first floor of a building which once housed Hapsburg bureaucrats, and had then been gutted to service the administration of Communist aristocrats. From its ground-floor windows lolled the coiled tubes of the air-conditioning units, like elephant trunks. The office looked out on to a garden, with a sparse alley of plane trees which were sickly with dust, their leaves patchy with psoriasis. A poster on the wall implored Haffner not to smoke.

Haffner had no intention of smoking. Instead, he chose escalation. His last descendant beside him, fighting for his lineage, Haffner chose defiance. Yes, Haffner began to plead and rage, while beneath the stern poster — a man palming away a proffered packet of cigarettes — the Head of the Committee smoked from his collection of Marlboro Reds: ten of them in a bleak row.

— How can we have a conversation, cried Haffner, reasonably, when there is no goodwill? What kind of justice is this?

In the corner of the office, there was a bucket of soapy water: a souffle of foam disintegrating above its rim.