Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Here in Central Europe, however, the position was reversed. Haffner was the one who was tied. Lightly, it was true: with garish sportswear. But his power had still gone.

Haffner had abdicated.

Slowly, Zinka lowered her mouth to Haffner's chest. With her teeth she tugged at a nipple — its blunt miniature nub. To Haffner, this action still felt within the limits of the normal, or the possible. It hadn't yet gone beyond the border of the pleasurable. Then she continued to bite. And Haffner began to revise his definitions of pleasure. He wondered how far he could take this before she might draw blood. Nevertheless, he thought, nevertheless. His body took over — with its strange routes to enjoyment. Zinka began to bite the other nipple. As she did so, she dragged the sharp nails of her fingers over Haffner's delicate skin. Wildly, he felt his penis stir. She held his penis, tightly, painfully. It tried to stir some more.

Then Zinka began her game of teasing.

Stupendous, haughty, grand, the diminutive form of Zinka began its travails down the length of Haffner's body. She struck him; she bit him. Soon, he knew, his old body would become a palette of bruises — the yellows and browns of a landscape from the nineteenth-century French countryside, with cows, and sheep, and a misshapen cypress. She told him to close his eyes. He could feel her hover over him — her warmth and smell. With a calm hand, she rubbed her wetness on his eyelids, on his nose: a pensive Impressionist. And then she moved further down until she reached his penis, where she waited.

Oh Haffner was adrift! He was in a new ecstasy, confused beyond the obviousness of pain and pleasure. He began to whimper. As he made a sound, she hurt him. So that then Haffner lay still, silent, blinded: in the absolute perfection of his denuded state.

And this was it, he thought. It was the final liberation.

He had found a strange detachment — like the Zen-like kids in the sixties, on Wall Street, who used to tell him the world wasn't the way everyone said it was. Everything was perspective. The real object of the game, they told him, wasn't money: it was the playing of the game itself.

If Haffner had been a mystic, he could have found in this some kind of god. But Haffner was not given to the mystical. He preferred the reckless sensual. It seemed more rational.

In a fleeting, floating way, this reminded him.

Long ago, when Haffner was fitter and more beautiful, he had been having lunch with Livia, in Mayfair's Mirabelle. For reasons which were already obscure to them, they were arguing about the merits of the 1968 revolutions: the revolution in Prague, the riots in Paris, the protests in London, then the sit-ins in New York, which Haffner rather saw as pitiful imitations of the European originals.

But it wasn't just the Americans whom Haffner doubted. Even the Europeans, Haffner argued, couldn't be taken seriously. The kids with their posters! They were yearning for violence. And they hadn't seen what violence was. They couldn't understand it.

But Haffner had? asked Livia. Haffner had. Of course he had. She knew he had. And these kids wouldn't have been able to contemplate it. What about the one up the tree, the poet? Who on being asked to come down by a policeman replied that he wouldn't, and, on being asked by the policeman why, answered by saying that he would not come down because if he came down then the policeman would beat him. A pacifist revolutionary! But then: he was a poet. A master of theatricals. Like his friend, the theatre critic: who left the protests because his Berlutis were scuffed. No, Haffner, she had to concede, knew about violence. And so he was best placed to ask the following question. (At this point Livia, distractedly busying herself with the tea, scalded herself on the stainless-steel teapot, where a teabag was in agony.) The following question. Could she honestly say that any of these students, these playwrights, these children, were motivated by anything except a desire to be seen in the newspapers? Could she? He didn't think she could. However much they might dress it up as something else, however much they might turn it into street theatre, or whatever, it was still the same old story: the ancient desire for glamour, for someone to notice you.

Livia asked when he would ever stop being flippant. At what point would he learn to take things seriously? Haffner considered his petits fours; the black water which was offering itself as coffee. He was, he assured her, taking it seriously.

She could put it this way, said Livia, spooning the teabag on to a saucer, bleeding its brown ichor on to the china. Haffner looked at her, and realised, with a small shock, that her hair was now white. So, said Livia, Haffner saw everything as selfishness. This was nothing new. A gangster, he thought that everyone else had the ethics of the gangster too: she knew this. But what revolution would survive the accusation? What moment of human history? Everyone only cared about themselves. This was obvious! Less obvious was how much, said Livia, anyone should really care. So everyone — Robespierre, Brutus, Lenin, Mussolini — these were all men who wanted to be noticed. But maybe, said Livia, this wasn't the truth of Brutus. And Haffner had to concede — for he was a lover of the classics — that Livia wasn't absolutely wrong. He was always on Caesar's side, true. But even a Caesar was impeachable.

The revolutions happened — nourished by a healthy sense of melodrama. Who was Haffner to judge the revolutionaries? asked Livia. Who was Haffner to judge the people who didn't care about all the irrelevant emotions — the self-consciousness, the self-pity: the people who didn't care what others thought of them?

So long ago, Livia had said this to Haffner. Now, when she was dead, it occurred to him that perhaps he finally agreed. If she was right, then Haffner was finally behaving like a true revolutionary. Like the revolutionaries, he was untroubled by the usual emotions: the self-pity, the embarrassment. Here, in the East, in the remnants of Kakania, he no longer cared about social niceties. So a girl was treating him with absolute hauteur, and he was loving it? What did Haffner care? He was his only audience.

Solitary, realised Haffner, he was shameless.

Haffner's room still preserved the forms of the 1920s. As well as its view of the mountains, its Zarathustrian height, the room was also equipped with armchairs, an escritoire, and a marble fire surround, on which were two silver candlesticks, containing the unlit slim obelisks of two cream candles.

Haffner opened his eyes to see Zinka pluck a candle from its niche. This baffled him. Then she told him, lying there on his back, to raise his knees to his chest, so exposing himself to whatever Zinka might want to do to him.

It was a fantasy she had always had: to use a man as a woman.

Once, Zinka was talking to her friend, about love and its ramifications. Zinka's friend had explained how her husband's favourite thing was that she should perch there, behind him, and use a dildo on him, with its pink latex bobbles. Slavenka was happy to do this. She was a dutiful wife. But when Zinka asked her if she enjoyed it, if she found it sexy — because she thought it must be sexy, she envied Slavenka her exotic and fulfilling sex life — Slavenka sighed.

— Oh no, she said. It's so boring. I keep forgetting I'm doing it. It's like doing the ironing.

It wasn't how Zinka felt. The idea of it excited her. All her life, she had felt so managed, so in thrall. The idea of being the manager herself seemed so dense with possibility.

In an amazed trance of obedience, Haffner held his knees up. It felt so insubstantial, thought Haffner, that he could not rule out the possibility that this was all a dream. He rather hoped it might be. And as he raised his knees, Zinka noticed the creases which emerged on his stomach — as on a sofa, a clubman's Chesterfield. These creases, for Zinka, were tender with vulnerability. And this was what she wanted. To make the men unusual. To make them unprotected.