Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

She should probably go, said Zinka: Haffner agreed that yes, she probably should. So, then, she said. And he sat down, by the desk, marvelling — a vague state which meant that her dressing and smiling at Haffner, then leaving the room, then the door shutting with its slow delayed click all seemed to happen in a miracle of speed, without Haffner noticing.

She was the only woman he had ever met — apart from Livia, apart from Livia — marked by such self-possession.

But Haffner had no time to consider the line of his life: its line of beauty. Out of the bathroom, in an adagio of sadness, emerged the judgement of Haffner.

As in the horror films of Haffner's silent youth, the door to the bathroom swung open, and no one emerged. There was silence: except, thought Haffner, for the liquid, aquatic soundtrack of the bathroom. Then Haffner understood that he was listening to the profound whisper of Frau Tummel's exhalations, the soughing of her inhalations. She had been standing there, staring into the mirror, her profile against the door. For a perturbed exalted moment, Haffner wondered if what he could hear was maybe the after-effect of a simultaneous Tummelian orgasm: still transcendent, cascading.

It was not.

Frau Tummel emerged from her oubliette. She made hungrily for her handbag and discovered her package of cigarettes. She lit one, then relaxed into the usual minimalist rhythm, standing at the window, grinning against the light. To the mountains, the unending sky, she said that she had never been so much made mock of. She was a wife, she was a mother. Everything she had, she had offered to Haffner. And this was how he treated her. He had let her say so many things. He had told her so many untruths.

He was like a boy, she said. This monster of immaturity! Even an adolescent would be more careful with love.

— But, argued Haffner, standing uneasily in the middle of the room.

At this point in his intricate reasoning, Frau Tummel interrupted.

She could not understand it. Was he rational? When he had done what he had just done? This man who had just shut her in a bathroom, while he entertained a woman in a way which she, Frau Tummel, could not explain. No, she could not understand it. A man who was dressed, as ever, in a variant on the shell suit.

Haffner only wanted to say, he began again. Again, he was forced to pause.

And although I am Haffner's historian, I can observe Frau Tummel too. He only wanted to mock her, she thought. He must have staged the whole thing. She was feeling so suddenly desolate. Now, she had no one. It was clear enough, she thought, that Haffner would never want her in the way that she wanted him to want her; and yet she did not want her husband, not quite, in the way that she wanted to want him either — a man who was so delicate, so unlike the ideal of Frau Tummel's youth.

Why, she said, must there be so much vulgarity with Haffner? Why this obscenity? Her voice accelerated into the upper registers. What beauty was there in his behaviour? Why the dirt, Raphael? Why this dirt?

And Haffner, still in the cloud of happiness produced by Zinka — illuminated, looking down on the pitiful world of humans — did not know what to say.

But of course, continued Frau Tummel, let everything descend to his level. Because he didn't understand the higher emotions. Haffner tried to remonstrate with her. When, said Haffner, had he ever? Whereas for her, continued Frau Tummel, fool that she was, it was a fantasy: of course, it was just a romance. If that was how he wanted to describe something eternal, something real.

— You! said Frau Tummel. In your tracksuit.

This point seemed incontrovertible.

— You want, she said, to be with this girl? This teenager? It disgusts me.

Once, this accusation would have seemed just to Haffner, perhaps: but not now. Up here, in the mountains, he had discovered a delighted sense of flippancy: yes, up here, he really could dispense with thinking in terms of the up or the down. As if the healthy were really ill. Or the old were really young.

So what could he say to soothe her? She wanted love to be a refuge: the desert island. But Haffner never thought that anywhere was safe; nowhere was truly deserted. Not even a marriage. It was, he thought, impossible to desert into another country, across the border, in the blue dawn.

It wasn't Haffner's fault, after all, if the moments of love and the moments of sex so rarely coincided.

— So, said Frau Tummel. So.

Haffner wondered what that meant. He wondered if he could ask.

It was always the same, said Frau Tummel. Men would always say they were in love, when all they wanted was the body of a woman; whereas for a woman, said Frau Tummel, it was absolutely opposite. He came from an outside place. But what could this man in front of her know about a true woman?

— But I never said I loved you, said Haffner.

And then he immediately regretted this moment of pointless truth. Suddenly, Frau Tummel stalled in the headlong pursuit of her anger. But then, perhaps this was what she had expected all along: this brutal Haffner.

It didn't mean, however, that Frau Tummel was not in love. It only confirmed her in her feelings all the more. The suffering was no contradiction. It couldn't be love, thought Frau Tummel, without the suffering. It came upon you, unbidden.

She waited for Haffner to say something kind, to tell her that of course he loved her. But Haffner simply stood there, deserted by his politesse: maimed by sincerity.

He refused to agree, said Haffner, with her theory. No, love was not a compulsion. The suffering was not necessary. It was just imagination, he told her. Everyone, said Haffner, chooses if they want to fall in love.

And as he said it, he wasn't sure if it was true. It didn't seem true of his love for Zinka. It had never been true of his love for Livia.

Let me be my own author! This was Haffner's cry. He wanted to be the one who invented his own stories as he went along. Except he hadn't then; and he couldn't now.

No, there was nothing masculine about Haffner's desire for Zinka: it did not obey the usual categories of Haffner: pursuit, and then seduction. Instead, it represented a happy passivity, content with whatever it might get.

Perhaps Zinka understood this. She wanted a man who was beyond the normal aggression. She wanted, really, an escape from the men. Whereas Frau Tummel — who craved the masculine — did not.

If Haffner were only allowed to exist in one sentence, it would be this: he was a desire that had outlived its usefulness.

And maybe this was the universal law of the empires: the law of decadence. That was the secret history of history. The very quality that led to an empire was the reason why that very empire would no longer be able to sustain itself. No contemporary, in the words of the great historian, could discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. He was talking about the Roman empire. But he could have been talking about Haffner. The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. And so the minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level; everyone sunk into the languid indifference of private life.

Not survival of the fittest, then, but the deeper truth: survival of the weakest. Haffner had been so intent on the pursuit of women. He had always been kind to his desires. And now this very taste for possession had led to his transformation into the greatest of fantasists — the most elegant and whimsical of imaginative artists. Because the desire was still there, but Haffner was no longer in control of where he might act these desires out.