Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Calmly, without malice, Livia had simply told Haffner that it was not as if he could really lecture her. It was not as if he could condemn what she had done, and would continue to do.

Drunk, silenced, Haffner considered this. And what he wanted to say was that the two were incomparable: because when it came to women, Haffner had only ever got whoever came along. They loved him, true — but Haffner never really loved them back. He just amazed them with the strength of his devotion: a devotion which was indistinguishable from the fear that they would leave him. Even if no one did leave Haffner. Whereas Livia had something else. Livia, it seemed, had love.

— Do you love him? asked Haffner.

And Livia, braking gently at the traffic light by the Hampstead pond, said that yes of course: naturally, she said — and she touched Haffner, gently, on the cheek. So Haffner asked her what they were going to do about it now, to which Livia simply replied that she saw no reason to do anything.

Livia didn't believe in an escape.

She parked the car in the drive, went into the house, and Haffner sat there: listening to the rose bushes' gentle crackle in the wind. Just as now, years later, Haffner sat in a church and surveyed the wondrous mistakes of his life: his infidelity to his wife, his infidelity to his race. Or, to put it another way, his infidelity to the women he had slept with — to Barbra, to Pilar and Joan and Laure and all the other names he now could not remember — his infidelity to his nation.

All the nebulous fairies of his history and his politics, dissolving, now, on a midsummer night, in the middle of nowhere.

He was such a klutz, thought Haffner. Then he translated himself out of Goldfaden's language. He was a fool.

It was fitting, really, that one of Goldfaden's favourite party tricks was his riff on the word dope . As Goldfaden would explain to you, it was the trickiest word in the language: on the American side, it came from the Dutch for sauce, so meaning any kind of goo, lubricant, liquid, liquor, and hence any kind of narcotic, drug, medicine, adulterating agent, and hence, through the racetracks, and their need to know the inside dope, all esoteric lore, all arcana. And there it met, at its apex, the British derivation, from dupe, meaning the gull, the fool, the absolutely-in-the-dark: and where else were we, Goldfaden would conclude, if not always in the dark, drugged by lack of knowledge, unaware of the systems which eluded us and which invaded us at every moment? This word dope was the real thing which bound the British and Americans together: this was the real Atlantic Ocean.

But at this point, with this word dope , Haffner had gone as far as he could in the business of self-discussion. Because everything was obvious to him now. Everything had always been to do with Livia. And Haffner had never noticed.

It was so evident, so infinite in its evidence, that Haffner had never known.

Haffner stood up: he turned to go — making for the Chinese restaurant where he was meant to eat with Benjamin. In front of the church, where the baroque facade hid the brick barn of a nave, a line of floats was parked, each decorated with a tableau vivant . All the actors in these tableaux were children. Surrounding them, the adults of the town were taking photographs. Saint Peter was scratching the side of his nose with a translucent wafer, while another boy in white shirt and black trousers kneeled before him, on a plush velvet cusion, with his eyes escaping through the trickle of his fingers.

No, thought Haffner, observing the children. Some things were irreversible. The entropy of Haffner! Not everything could be recuperated. Like Haffner's gilded youth. For how can a man be young, when he is old? He knew enough of the Bible to know that this was difficult.

As Morton would have said, do the math.

Only on the last day in Cairo, in 1946, did Haffner write to Livia as his wife. Throughout their engagement and the early years of their marriage, throughout the war, he had referred to her as his darling girl, his sweetheart. Only now, in the last letter he would write to her from the war, when he was coming home, did Haffner address her as his very darling wife.

— I only pray that you will find me a better man than when I left you and that I will fulfil all your dreams , he wrote. I believe that we can do tremendous things together and that with our lives, with our happiness, we can make others happy. And that is what I think life is for, the real purpose behind it all. So Haffner wrote to Livia, the night before he sailed back to England, in 1946.

— Bless you, my beloved girl , wrote Raphael Haffner, keep you safe always .

The meals of Haffner and Benjamin were epic. In this gargantuan size, they expressed their love. They went to Bodean's on Poland Street and sucked at the burned ends and ribs of cows — which jutted out forlornly, and unevenly, like organ pipes. They were experts in the cuts of steak: both convinced that the aged hanger steaks of New York were the greatest of them all. Then there were the deep-fried marvels of Japan: the chicken katsu, endowed with its cloudy pot of barbecue sauce. Candy undid them: not the ordinary treats, but the strange, gourmet sugar of internationally local cuisines: nougat, glace cherries, marzipan fruits, baklava. They invented festivals of junk food: on one famous occasion, they had walked down Oxford Street, eating at every branch of American burger chain they could find. But there was more. This more was the Chinese food.

There was nothing, said Benjamin, more Jewish than this — Haffner's passion for Chinese food. Nothing more emphasised, said Benjamin, his genetic roots to the scattered race.

Haffner looked at him, amazed: his own grandson, with the same weird theory of Chinese food as Goldfaden. Or perhaps he was misremembering. This was, after all, possible.

Underneath a red paper lantern, Benjamin's cheeks were carmine — incandescent. On his face shone a glaze of sweat, echoing the lacquer on the slices of pork belly which lay, unguent, on their bed of shredded iceberg lettuce set before Haffner.

— You ordered the crispy beef, said Benji.

— Yes, I ordered the beef, said Haffner. Of course I ordered the beef. Wait a minute.

Benjamin swivelled round. Or, he swivelled as much as his bulk would allow: an imperfect barn owl.

He saw no one who could help him. He turned back to Haffner.

They continued to argue over whether Haffner should keep his appointment with Niko. Haffner thought it was obvious; Benjamin thought it was less obvious. But he couldn't see, said Haffner, what he had to lose. Could Benjamin explain this to him? He wasn't so proud that he would refuse someone else's help.

It was the principle, said Benjamin. He didn't know these people. How could he trust them?

What kind of principle was that? replied Haffner. It was fear, that was all. And they were hardly, said Haffner, going to rob him — and he exhibited his Nike T-shirt; his flared turquoise tracksuit trouser.

Benji swivelled round once more: he still saw no one who could help him.

Sighing, he turned back, and introduced a new topic of conversation.

What, he wanted to know, did Haffner know about hip hop?

— Hip hop? queried Haffner.

— Hip hop, confirmed Benjamin. But not the West Coast hip hop, nor the East Coast hip hop. Instead, his new thing was South Coast: the hip hop of urban and immigrant France.

In this way, Benji combined a former craze, his craze for hip hop, with his new — and, he believed, ultimate — craze for love. In Tel Aviv, he had been introduced by the girl who had deflowered him to the classics of French hip hop: the angry banlieusards in the angry banlieues .