Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

While Haffner, oblivious, the end of all the modern, observed his ancient face, illuminated by one fluorescent tube. Behind him was a bucket with an indefinable mop drenched inside it. He should have known, he thought: this was how things tended to end up — with Haffner as a clown. He dabbled with the taps: they relinquished little water.

He had always wanted to be a libertine, but now he was something else. Just Haffner Silenus — a sidekick, so prone to fall over, so vulnerable to capture, so easy to wound: the same Haffner as he had become when Livia announced, two years before she died, that she was leaving him.

— Now? he said.

It didn't seem worth the effort. But yes, she said: she was finished. She was leaving him to live with Goldfaden. It was long enough after his wife's death. It was what they had always wanted to do.

And Haffner had looked at her amazed. He couldn't understand it. It was always Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. But there she was, announcing that she would be going to live with Goldfaden. And although Haffner pleaded on behalf of his love for her, his family, Livia was unmoved. It was what she wanted, she said. And just as now Haffner stared into a mirror, hyperbolically lit, so Haffner had gone into the downstairs bathroom — the toilet with its pink fringed bib at its base, a china cow-creamer whose back overflowed with pot-pourri — and stared at the clown before him. There he tried to be precise about what he was feeling; he tried to be composed. But he was only possessed by a gigantic feeling that he missed Livia, that he had perhaps been missing her for many years: and Haffner wanted her back. He wanted to recover things. So he emerged, from the bathroom, ready to plead and beg — but found that Livia had gone.

Whereas this time he emerged, with wild wet hair, and discovered that, as in the puzzles of his youth — Spot the difference, dear reader! Can you see it, kids? — the picture had been doctored. Where Livia had been absent, there now stood Zinka, her arms folded, leaning against the bathroom's plastic walls. She unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum, and offered it to Haffner: its dusty granular surface.

She was taking him home, she said. She would spend tonight with him.

It seemed true, thought Haffner. She did not seem to be one of Haffner's visions. In the words of the very old song, the dream was real.

And yet, the dream life of Haffner was troubled.

It did seem all too possible that the brief moment of his triumph in relation to the villa was now over. The ordinary rules would soon reassert themselves. He doubted if the deal with Niko and Viko was still on. This seemed even less likely if he chose to allow Zinka to spend the night with him. Presumably, he could return to Viko and Niko and offer them the agreed sum. Presumably, he could try. But their goodwill might well be lacking.

Was Haffner to blame for this sudden fiasco? It seemed possible to plead that he was not — not responsible, in the end, for Niko's rages, for Viko's pride. He consulted the shade of Livia: would she really have wanted him to play the coquette with another man, simply to ensure her inheritance?

He could imagine the shade of Livia smiling.

Then Haffner was interrupted in this vision by a strong sense of nausea. A shiver took possession of his body, then relinquished it.

Yes, this, thought Haffner, was his return to the everyday. All his ingenuity had failed him. The Committee would have to be wooed all over again. So Haffner only felt a tired disappointment.

And yet, he thought, in compensation he seemed to have Zinka, in this party dress, beside him. But Haffner realised that even his joy in her was tempered. On arrival at this club he had felt so confident, so victorious. If he had been told he would leave with Zinka, it would have only made him a happy Haffner. Yet now here he was, still burdened with the problem of the villa, walking slowly through the dark streets of a spa town so marked with Livia's memory. And whether Zinka was a digression or in fact some covert route to Livia, Haffner did not know.

He still felt confident of his innocence. He had tried to remain faithful to Livia, and he would continue to try. But he was a connoisseur of Haffner's ability to be defeated. That Haffner had done his best, he was coming to realise, sadly, didn't mean he wasn't still guilty.

In this unaccustomed melancholy, Haffner followed after Zinka: his halting walk now embellished by the iambic rhythm of a limp.

But I am not so sure that Haffner should have felt so divided. Perhaps there is no such thing as a digression.

Zinka, it's true, was thinking in the same way as Haffner. She thought that it was an unusual event in Haffner's life — this dejected progress through the empty streets. She was moved by Haffner's comical plight. And it moved her more because she assumed that this comedy was all her fault. There was no way this man could have previously suffered the indignity from which he was suffering now. She didn't realise that in this story, as in all of Haffner's stories, there were certain patterns, certain repeats. She didn't know that farce was Haffner's constant mode.

This form was not new in the life of Raphael Haffner. Free from his ordinary customs, let loose in the wild East, Haffner was just allowed to become even more Haffnerian than ever — his own exaggeration.

So that every zenith was also a nadir, as usual, and all victory consisted of beatings. And, as usual, while illuminated with desire for Zinka, Haffner didn't know that a bruise was beginning to develop around his eye and on his cheek, like a Riviera sunset, the backdrop to a promenade bordered with palm trees, illuminating the night in green explosions, accompanied by the muzak of the rhyming cicadas.

So, said Zinka, as they entered Haffner's bedroom. Here they were.

It seemed undeniable. Here they were, at Haffner's finale. But Haffner was worried that his body was going to prove unequal to this finale. He was quite sure that he was getting ill. True, he was drunk. It could be just the drink. But Haffner knew about his body: its breakdowns and malfunctions. And this feeling was unusual: the dizzy sweating ague of it. He felt for his palms. They were sweating. He brushed the hair which still remained to him down with the Brylcreem of his sweating hand. As if to simultaneously produce a suavely dry palm and a suavely plumed forelock.

He offered Zinka a smile.

Tonight, Zinka explained to him, there was only one rule. Haffner asked what it was. The rule, said Zinka, was that everything came from her. Everything was her decision.

She liked Haffner, this was true, and she felt for his bruised pathos. But this did not mean that this was going to be Haffner's evening.

And Haffner said yes, absolutely.

He had never been one for the fantasies of permission: the allowed and the disallowed. But if rules were going to be a condition of this night with Zinka, then he didn't care. He revelled in them. He would content himself with the little which he was offered. Whatever the modern age would give him. At no point could Haffner touch himself, said Zinka; at no point could he touch her without permission. If at any time he broke these rules, the night was over.

Let Haffner submit! Let Haffner be debased!

All his life, the erotic for Haffner had been a matter of apertures: all the exits and entrances. And now he discovered that the apertures were something, but the rest was something else. There was so much else to play with.

Zinka pushed him gently to the bed, where he slumped down: his head raised, expectantly, like a yawning sea lion.