Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

And now, when this place belonged to another country, here was Haffner, her husband: alone — to claim the villa, to claim an inheritance which was not his.

The hotel still served the food of Livia's memory. This place was timeless: it was the end of history. The customer could still order steak Diane, beef Wellington — arranged on vast circles of china, with a thin gold ring inscribing its circumference. Even Haffner knew this wasn't chic, but he wasn't after the chic. He just wanted an escape. An escape from what, however, Haffner could not say.

No, Haffner could never disappear.

In 1974, in the last year of his New York life, when Barbra — who was twenty-nine, worked in the Wall Street office as his secretary and smoked Dunhills which she kept in a cigarette holder, triple facts which made her desirable to Haffner as he passed middle age — asked him why it was he still went faithfully back every night to his wife, he could not answer. It didn't have to be like that, she said. With irritation, as he looked at Barbra, the steep curve between her breasts, he remembered his snooker table in the annexe at home, its blue baize built over by Livia's castles of unread books. He knew that the next morning he would be there, at home: with his breakfast of Corn Chex, morosely reading the Peanuts cartoons. He knew this, and did not want to know it. So often, he wanted to give up, and elope from his history. The problem was in finding the right elopee. He only had Haffner. And Haffner wasn't enough.

Zinka turned in the direction of the wardrobe. Usually, she wore her hair sternly in a pony tail. But now she let it drift out, on to her shoulders. And Haffner looked away. Because, he thought, he loved her. He looked back again. Because, he thought, he loved her.

No, there was no escape. And because this is true, then maybe in my turn I should not always allow Haffner the luxury of language.

He was burdened by what he thought was love. But therefore he did not express it in this way. No, trapped by his temptations, Haffner simply sighed.

— Ouf, he exhaled, in his wardrobe. Ouf: ouf.

In this vacant hotel room to which Zinka had lured Niko, Zinka had arranged things so that she was facing the mirror which hung above the bed. Behind her, stood Haffner — in the wardrobe. Before her, sat Niko, his legs and his testicles dangling over the edge of the bed. His foot protruded close to Haffner's lair. One of his toenails, Haffner noted, was blackened — the badge of Niko's fitness, of the dogged distances he jogged every day.

But Haffner felt no grievance at the disparity between their bodies. He had perspective. This was one reason to love him. He had the sense of humour I admired. It wasn't just that it was possible to imagine that what was higher could derive always and only from what was lower — in the words of another old master. No, one could go further. And so it was also possible to imagine that — given the polarity and, more importantly, the ludicrousness of the world — everything derived from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory was made up exclusively of beatings.

This defeat, therefore, could be a victory too. It seemed unlikely, perhaps, but Haffner rarely wanted to be burdened with the problems of probability. Haffner found perks everywhere.

Niko's face was now smothered by the dark nipples of his girlfriend. He was blinded by her body. He therefore couldn't see that, in the mirror, she was looking at the wardrobe, where Haffner was looking at her. Her lips were parted. She was smiling at him: at the invisible Haffner she knew was lurking there, having first splashed a tangle of coat hangers hurriedly into a drawer. Haffner happily smiled back. Then he stopped himself. It felt obscurely comical for a man to be smiling when concealed in a wardrobe. So, shyly, Haffner looked away. He gazed at her thin back instead, gently imprinted with vertebrae.

A thought arrived to Haffner. Was this it? he considered. Was this love?

When he was seventeen — so Haffner once told me, when we were both drunk on vodka cokes, at a golden-wedding party themed for no obvious reason to gangster films of the American 1970s — Haffner had gone to sleep each night imagining the girl he would meet, who would be his perfect girl. This was very important, he said. She would be a woman of the world, attractive, with a hint of something more, if I knew what he meant. I knew what he meant: he wanted the urban, he wanted a vision of cool. And, he told me, he continued to do this — even after the advent of his wife (and his girlfriends, his collection of lovers). Even there, in this spa town, at seventy-eight, he still calmed himself to sleep imagining this girl who would be so infinitely charmed by him. But now, something had changed.

As of now, this girl was simply Zinka.

This was not, of course, what Haffner was meant to be thinking. But then Haffner had a talent for not thinking the orthodox thoughts.

It wasn't enough that Haffner was failing to accomplish the bureaucratic task, which was why he was here, in this spa town: to oversee the legal restoration to his family of the villa — appropriated first by the Nazis, then by the Communists, and finally by nationalist capitalists — which now, in the absence of any other surviving relative, belonged theoretically to Haffner and his descendants. No, even here, in the centre of Europe, he had managed to complicate matters even more mythologically. In addition he had already managed to concoct this unusual story with Zinka. Not content with this, he had also managed to concoct another more ordinary story: an affair with a married woman, staying at the hotel. Her name was Frau Tummel. She said that she adored him; and one aspect of Frau Tummel's soul was its sincerity.

Haffner, however, at this moment, didn't care about Frau Tummel's soul. He knew that he was meant to have been with her — regarding a sad sunset. But Zinka's sudden plan had possessed an overwhelming power of persuasion.

He was not a good man. He didn't need to be told. The jury wasn't out on Haffner's ethics. The case was closed. As a businessman, he had tended to the risky; as a husband, to the unfaithful. He hadn't really cared about his duties as a father or a grandfather. He cared about himself.

How fluently Haffner could self-lacerate! Then again: how easily Haffner could be distracted from his tribunal.

Niko began to whimper, gently. Why, thought Haffner, in his cupboard, did Haffner have to be old? It was devastating; it was Sophoclean. How could this love for Zinka have arrived so late in his life? Yes, Haffner was lyrical. He understood the language of inspiration. Here it was. Yes, here it was. He was inflated: a Silenus raised from his stupor, made buoyant by a force which was beyond him, as he stood there, neatly framed by a hotel wardrobe.

I should pause on that adjective Sophoclean, that noun Silenus.

Haffner was an admirer of the classics.

He had always watched the television dons; he had listened to the radio intellectuals. And now, at this late stage, in his retirement, Haffner had embarked on a programme of enlightenment — a succession of evening classes. Even if he would learn nothing about himself, he still wanted to know everything about anything else. So there they were: the old and unemployed, the desperate to learn. Into this group came Haffner. In these classes, Haffner read history. That was his idea of the classic. Occasionally, after he had returned to London, until Haffner's dying took over, I came with him. We grappled, in the introductions to the classics, with the concept of philosophic history. History which was ironic, clever, unimpressed.