Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Which made him more mature than Haffner, thought Haffner. It was not a position he had so far reached himself.

— That's fine of you, said Haffner. That's very fine.

He didn't know that Benji was not quite telling him the truth. He did not know that Benji was not quite telling himself the truth. Benji's struggle against his senses was Benji's mute interior.

He needed to sleep, said Haffner. He needed to lie down, old boy. And Benji, in a gentle gesture of goodbye, kissed him on the forehead.

Innocence and experience! But which was which? The old young or the young old? Haffner wept for the things he thought he would no longer have; Benjamin for the things he thought he would never have. Both of them possessed their own comedy.

Both of them were banished.

When Livia was ill once, long before the end of their marriage, she had promised Haffner that if she died, she would come back and talk to him. He would know of the existence of an afterlife from the fact of this return; or the fact of a non-return. When she finally died and she did not, as Haffner hoped, come back to comfort him, he was not so astonished. After all, they had rarely seen each other in the two years preceding her death. Then a graver thought began to trouble him — that this was no proof of a lack of afterlife; it was only proof that she had not been able to come back. He was haunted by this idea of her trying to communicate with him, pressed to his ear, to his eyes, and Haffner unable to hear her, unable to see her. Or then an even graver and more plausible interpretation presented itself: it was only proof that she had not wanted to come back. She had decided against it.

He had mourned alone in the empty house, like the tearful queen mourning that schmuck Aeneas, as she gazed at her abandoned couch.

In the summer of 1938 — when Haffner was away, playing for the Old Boys cricket team of his school — Livia's father was reading, in silence, the Manifesto of the Racist Scientists. In the dining room, Cesare, who was sixteen, and believed in the greatness of his talent, was engaged on his great ceiling painting: The Dream , he said, of Europa . It featured three semi-nude women. No one was convinced of the mythological provenance: no one believed that the seriousness of the gods could compensate for Cesare's shaky technique. The pipe in his father's mouth was making him grin as he let the smoke dissolve in slow small clouds: a few smoke rings disappearing into other smoke rings. Outside, someone was beating a rug on the sill of the steps. And Livia's father was reading that Jews, according to the ninth section of the manifesto, did not belong to the Italian race.

He laid his pipe down.

At first, Livia's father, an honourable Fascist, was one of the discriminati: those discriminated from discrimination. Very soon, however, it was all over. His clients were forbidden to trade with him; his salesmen were banned from negotiating for his list. He decided to send his children to Britain, to stay with friends of his in the paint industry. They required a passport and a transit visa through France. He went to the Fascist chief of police — whose wedding anniversary he had recently celebrated at a small dinner party in town — and he said to him: either he arranged this, or he would break the law. He would buy the papers on the black market. Surely the police chief didn't want him to break the law?

The Fascist chief of police agreed that he should not break the law. So Cesare and Livia went to Britain.

Haffner still owned a photograph of Livia's mother — taken in 1915, to give to her fiance when he went to war — dressed in a Japanese kimono. Her father owned a black Fascist fez with a silken fringe. Indignantly, he would tell her the shameful story of the Dreyfus case — from the time when Europe was imperial. And yet, on the other hand, the blue-and-white collection boxes for the nascent state of Israel: these he ignored. As if it was nothing to do with him. There was no need, he argued — unlike, perhaps, in racist France — for such drastic measures.

Yes, Livia's father believed in order. It was possible, he thought, for there to be an end of history: a utopia. But Italy, Livia wanted to say, was still Europe. Nowhere was safe from the stupidity of inheritance.

But he believed in the nineteenth century, and its bourgeoisie. The year before, in 1937, Ettore Ovazza — who was Fascist, and Jewish, and saw no contradiction in this position — wrote his reply to Paolo Orano's pamphlet which had maintained that in fact these positions were indeed contradictory. Livia's father had agreed with Ovazza. If one wanted to express one's sympathy with one's suffering fellow Jews in Germany, this didn't mean one wanted to found a second Fatherland, in the contested lands of Palestine. No, this was precisely what it meant to him to be Italian. Italy was the Fatherland for which so many of the purest heroes of Jewish blood had died.

Later, Livia always used to berate her dead and absent father. Why hadn't he understood? Why hadn't they all left sooner? And Haffner would always reply that it was difficult to leave. Who knew when the right time was to flee? It was so difficult, abandoning the things you loved. It was difficult enough, said Haffner, abandoning the things you hated.

In his bedroom, finally, Haffner drifted into what he hoped would be the greatest of all restorative sleeps.

For a moment this was true. Then he was transformed into a baby Haffner, playing with the other children while in the next room sat Frau Tummel, taking tea, with all the other adults. Although, when he considered this, some minutes later, when Haffner had been woken up, it struck him as unusual: for Frau Tummel was nearly thirty years his junior. So what was his unconscious doing?

But really, Haffner wasn't often worried by his unconscious: nightly, his dreams were delinquent, involving all life forms, all birds of prey. He had grown used to ignoring the signs. He no more wanted Frau Tummel to mother him than he wanted Zinka to be his daughter.

Enough of the family! Let the eternal couples unite!

But Haffner was only thinking this because, as he was playing on the floor of his imaginary playpen, there came a knock at the door: this knock was then repeated. And when Haffner finally dragged his body — with patches of sweat on his back, scored creases on his cheek — to the door, he found the real Frau Tummel, who wished so urgently to speak with him.

So many things had been running through her head, said Frau Tummel. So many sad thoughts. Haffner murmured: as he had always murmured when confronted by the sadness of women. To see him there, talking with that woman: to see him with that girl. She knew that she was imagining things. And Haffner assured her that yes, absolutely: she was imagining things. What relationship could Haffner have with a girl so young? It was ridiculous.

— Yes, agreed Frau Tummel: ridiculous.

This disturbed Haffner's vanity.

Perhaps she understood, said Frau Tummel. It was as if Haffner would not trust himself, she said. What was wrong, she said, with the passion? Why always run away from it?

There was nothing, thought Haffner, that he could say to this. It seemed so obviously true, in the abstract. As a statement it had its accuracy. But not to his friendship with Frau Tummel. Only to his friendship with Zinka.

And he stood there, rummaging through his brain, like a man searching in his pockets, in his bag, for the ticket which might finally allow him entrance to the airplane which will take him away from all this misery, but finding nothing: just three coins, a key, an obediently switched-off cell phone — none of which, when proffered in a gesture of goodwill, convince the air hostess that he possesses the authority to board the plane and leave.