Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

The course on the Lives of the Caesars was Haffner's late education. He listened to a man berate the Caesars for their immorality. What a lesson it was, said Errol — sitting behind a desk which was too small for him, being made for a lissom teenager, not a distended middle-aged man — what a lesson in vanity, in the way power corrupted. To which the group, all seated at miniature desks, solemnly assented. A poster on the wall displayed a range of fluorescent vegetables and their appropriate names in German. Then Haffner asked if he could say something. He understood that they had all been very moved by the book which was the subject of this course. And he would like to say that he had been the most moved of them all. He had been converted, he said: and now he fully understood the grandeur of the Romans. He hadn't cared for them before, but now, said Haffner, reading about the glorious crimes of the emperors, he saw how truly great they really were.

At this point, Haffner paused for the expected laugh. It did not come.

Blissfully, Haffner had roamed along the shelves of the hotel library, parsing its eccentric selection of the classics. Beside his bed, there was now an abridged edition of Edward Gibbon, underneath his copy of the Lives of the Caesars . By his lounger at the side of the pool, with its view of the snow-shrouded mountains, was a novel by Thomas Mann. He liked to stretch himself. Only after a week here had Haffner realised he was the only one who read. Everyone else favoured sleep; they favoured chatter. But Haffner respected those things over which he had no authority. Those things made him want to accrue their authority too. His will was all vicarious.

Haffner hadn't been to university. His daughter had been, and his grandson, but not Haffner. He had been to war instead. But Haffner felt no insecurity. He had his own triumphs. It was Haffner, for instance, who had persuaded the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Emeritus Professor of Economic Theory at the LSE — Goldfaden, hero of the Brains Trust, doyen of the radio lecture — to be gathered in one unheard-of trio at the annual dinner of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers, in 1982. He wasn't nobody.

And now he was a student of philosophic history. With this knowledge, he weighed up his biography: he studied the story of Livia, his wife; and Goldfaden, Haffner's friend and counsellor. Goldfaden: the celebrity economist, famed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Goldfaden was a capitalist; but a capitalist who liked to tease. Where, Goldfaden would ask his baffled listeners, was the greatest monument to international esprit? Who had inherited the mantle of Isaac Leib Peretz, the Jewish cosmopolitan? The man who had once argued, at the beginning of the century, that it was a unique culture rather than its patrolled borders that guaranteed a nation its independent existence. True, maybe. But you couldn't beat patrolled borders to help you sleep at night, thought Haffner. Couldn't beat them. While Goldfaden carried on his party trick. They couldn't guess? They couldn't say which was the most cosmopolitan country on earth? The Soviet Union, of course! The greatest federation of nations this world had seen since the Roman empire. Communism! The highest stage of imperialism. What Jew wouldn't love an empire? An empire, continued Goldfaden, was the greatest political system on earth — a confederation of states, blithe to the problems of ethnicity. The zenith of liberalism. But its era was now over; and Goldfaden mourned it. Or so he said, thought Haffner.

But Haffner was still not ready to consider the problem of Goldfaden.

One time, having finished the classic novel I had told him to read, Haffner told me that it had prompted certain thoughts. Think about it: the novel of education was lost on the young. It was the old who were the true protagonists. It was the old, thought Haffner, who deserved the love stories. Return, Monsieur Stendhal! Let yourself go, Mr Dickens! Feast on Haffner! Write a sentimental education for the very old, the absolute advanced.

But no one would.

It was a pity, because Haffner was a folk hero. These were the stories I grew up with — about Haffner. He was a man of legend: his anecdotes were endless. Like this, his final story.

Because there it was, once more, the lust — extravagant: like a sprinkler in the rose garden of Haffner's suburban home, automatically turning itself on to soak the lawn already soaked with rain.

Niko was now spread on the bed, his legs twitching. His eyes were shut. Zinka was poised, leaning over his face. His mouth was blindly searching — a kitten — for her breasts.

Then Haffner swayed and chimed against the hangers.

Niko was stilled. Haffner was stilled, his heart an amplification. Only Zinka continued as if nothing had happened. She tended to Niko; she asked him to carry on. And Haffner stood and listened to his heart as if he were only an outsider — as if he were the minicab driver waiting outside a nightclub, in the dawn, in the East End of London, or the Meatpacking District of New York, listening to the deep bass rhythm through the guarded doors while swapping two Marlboros for two much stronger and harsher cigarettes illegally imported from Iran.

To Haffner's slow relief, he noticed that slowly Niko was slowly distracted, slowly.

He really should have been somewhere else, thought Haffner. He should have been with Frau Tummel. Or, even more morally, he should have been in his own room, in his own bed, asleep, with his head slipping off the bolster's irritating cylinder — before returning once again, the next morning, to the Town Hall and its endless offices, where the subcommittees sat, the subcommittees which included the Committee on Spatial Planning. The Committee over which Haffner was here to exercise his charm. Yes, he should have been performing his role as a family man. But Haffner, somehow, still preferred this wardrobe with a view.

Livia's own erotic style, he remembered, watching Zinka, had been subtler. She would meet him in the foyer of the municipal pool in Golders Green, having just performed a synchronised swimming routine, and Haffner would say to her, laughing, that she was his emissary in the world of women. He would beg her to tell him what she saw, in the changing rooms. Livia sat him down. She touched him with the tips of her fingers absently resting on his penis through the button fly of his trousers, for this was how gentlemen dressed, and she told him about the girls in their changing room, the ones who shaved the hair between their legs into neater triangles, the ones who stood there, naked, pretending nobody could see, a festival of women. And Haffner would ask her not to stop, not to stop, and Livia would say that she wasn't stopping, dear heart: she wasn't stopping.

Then Zinka and Niko came to their own conclusion.

Haffner relaxed, relieved. He was beginning, he realised, to be too preoccupied by the practical difficulties of this display. Now that it was over, he began to long for his own bed. But Niko, to Haffner's irritation, seemed to be in a languid state of abandon. He wanted to lie there; he wanted Zinka to rest in his arms.

This was not, thought Haffner, at all what he had been led to expect.

And Haffner waited, in a wardrobe, while a couple held each other: amorous.

Oh Haffner had stamina! So often, in the bedroom, Haffner surpassed everyone's expectation. So many people thought they knew him! As if anyone could really know him. But Haffner would often argue that in this matter of Haffner's monstrosity one could draw some distinctions. He wasn't, for example, a monster like Caligula. The incest didn't move Haffner. Whereas Caligula used to commit incest with each of his three sisters in turn. And very possibly his mother. And his brothers. His mother and his brothers and his aunts.