Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

The unsure length of Haffner's penis was now being mimicked and outdone by the candle — slick with hand cream she had found in her handbag — grasped in Zinka's hand, like a light sabre.

There was no way, thought Haffner, that he could allow this indignity. But then again: why shouldn't he? It was his liberation. In it, he was prepared to entertain ideas for which he felt no natural wish to be an entertainer. It was not as if he hadn't done this to women himself. So why was it that he would blithely do to a woman — sure of their mutual pleasure, concerned to move with a more exaggerated tenderness — something he would not want a woman to do to him?

He had been content to let matters take their course when Zinka had entered his room that afternoon. In this way, Haffner meditated. Then, he had been moved by her pensive creativity. So why should he stop now?

The problems of philosophy were not, however, Haffner's primary concern. She let the thin candle, deftly coated in her hand cream, slip and settle slightly inside him. She watched him watch her. He could not see the oddity of it; he could not see this act's improbability — as it distended him, and enlarged him, beneath his tight testicles, as it made him wriggle and his stomach break out in sweat.

Then Zinka's other slippery hand became intricate around his penis, just as he had watched it elaborate itself on Niko's penis, two days ago: when his life, reflected Haffner, seemed so much simpler.

As she rested his rough, unpedicured feet on her soft shoulders, he felt moved to hazard the existence of a soul. Nothing else rendered his feelings explicable. And Haffner — Haffner cried out in his denuded, opened closeness to Zinka. They looked into each other's eyes and saw each other: illuminated.

Haffner's paradise! His translation to the supine, the passively cherubic!

She had begun by causing him pain. Now, gradually, she was gently moving the candle, back and forth, as she moved the skin on his penis, up and down, up and down, in front of her. She looked into his eyes and he looked back at her — comical, romantic. She didn't speak to him. Simply, they continued to look at each other, intently, while Zinka continued to make her motions inside Haffner. There was a blemish in one of her pupils.

And Haffner ascended.

With a burgeoning slow realisation, a shy astonishment, he could feel the slow progress of a climax he had not quite ever believed would be possible. Like the faintest music from a radio, playing in some car which pauses, behind an apartment block, as you lean out the window and enjoy a pensive cigarette, watching the unknown city below you, and then, when you think that no, you will never quite be able to make out the tune, that it will remain for ever just beyond you, the car turns a corner and with it you recognise with an unexpected glow of recollection the full volume of some hit made famous by the genius Django Reinhardt in the music halls of New York.

In this way, Haffner finally jolted his hips, and cried out.

Zinka scooped up Haffner's tepid liquid into an enticing paw. Then she told Haffner to open his mouth. Haffner opened. Then she tapped a fingertip on his tongue: a nymph tapping an aged demigod — asleep and drunk — with a finger stained with mulberry juice, to wake him and make him sing.

Haffner paused. Then Haffner swallowed.

And Zinka smiled at him. Plucking a tissue from beside the bed, she wiped the trickling semen from his belly — then flushed the heavy tissue discreetly away.

When Frau Tummel had left Haffner that afternoon, he had tried to argue that he was a libertine. Because he only cared about pleasure, he told her. This was why it would never work between them. And, furious, she had looked at him: her nostrils angrily flared.

— No, she said. No: you are too frightened.

The chutzpah of it had enraged him: because Haffner knew that it was true. For if Haffner were ever a libertine, it was never absolutely. He wasn't an absolute immoralist. He lacked the ruthlessness, the total selfishness.

But now, as he rested from Zinka's labours, he wanted to say that no, Frau Tummel was wrong. In some ways — the rhetorical ways — he wished that Frau Tummel could see him now. (He wished that Livia could see him now.) He wasn't too scared. He just hadn't wanted Frau Tummel enough. He just hadn't ever understood the ludicrous crazytalk of true desire.

Because, yes: desire is the ultimate in the improvised. This is the normal theory of desire. It was Zinka's — who was just about to explain to Haffner that now everything was over. But I am not so sure.

The difficult task is to improvise the seventeenth time. Or even, say, the second. It might have seemed so incandescent, one's impromptu smearing of chocolate mousse on the palpitating body of a woman — there where her flesh is most exposed. But if the next time one again moves doggedly to the refrigerator, then the prone and lovely woman will experience in her soul a tiny qualm.

The true libertines are the geniuses at repetition. Not the artists of the one-off, the improvised. Everyone can improvise. The true talent is in the persistence.

He woke up, to discover Zinka leaving.

He had drifted into what seemed like the deepest night of sleep, but which was in fact only a small moment; he had hardly closed his eyes. He looked down: his shrunken penis was sticky as an orchid bud.

— I have to go, she said.

— You could stay here with me, he said. Why not?

— I can't stay here, she said. I have to go home.

— But you can't let him make you, said Haffner.

— No one's making me, said Zinka.

Haffner looked woebegone. He felt worse than woebegone: he felt as if everything was over. Yet for a brief moment he had felt so utterly reborn. But then, who was Haffner kidding? How could a man be born, when he was old? What schlub was ever allowed the victory of a second chance?

— I mean, she said. Look at you. Look at me.

It was just a moment, she said. It wasn't love.

But, thought Haffner, he loved her. This seemed plausible. The speed of it was nothing for Haffner. It simply overwhelmed him with the evidence.

He knew, however, that he had thought that he had never thought like this before on previous occasions. The repetition, he had to admit, tended to produce a comical effect. So what was true? The feeling of uniqueness, or the feeling of a repeat?

And me, I do not know. Two answers seem possible, and only one can be true. Maybe Haffner was right to feel that he was always stuck in a repeat. He had always thought, every time he fell in love, that it had no precedent in the past. Just as a perplexed critic looks at a barbaric work of art, which seems to come from nowhere. And this was precisely why he repeated himself. He recognised nothing, because he forgot so much. And since he forgot so much, he always repeated himself. He always believed he was in love, when it was perhaps just another brief moment of desire. On the other hand, maybe the opposite was also possible. Every time he said he was in love, it was true. Every woman Haffner had loved had been unique. But he forgot so much, so lavishly. And the more he forgot, the more he tended to see each story as the same. Whereas, perhaps, no story was the same.

It is all a problem of perspective.

But whatever. Haffner, in however baffling a mess he found himself, was sure of this: the desire was nothing to do with Haffner. It wasn't a whim; it wasn't capricious. How could it be capricious if it was a compulsion? So maybe nothing was an imbroglio of one's own making. Maybe nothing was Haffner's fault. A new goddess appeared — that was all. And he surrendered.

Abandoned, Haffner began to argue with Zinka about the faithlessness of woman. He was aware that this was the opposite of what he had argued, a few hours earlier, to Frau Tummel: when he complained about the faithfulness of women. He was aware that he was beginning to resemble a character in the farces he had watched with Livia, in the 1960s, on Shaftesbury Avenue, the era when Haffner could still happily go to the theatre without being disappointed in the quality. But then, maybe this was fine. What else was farce but the way of understanding how quick one's ideas were, how soon their showers passed?