Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

After all: this was why he liked Zinka. It was why he had loved Livia: he was always in search of the one who would leave him.

It had always been Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. First Livia had destroyed this illusion of Haffner. But he had been able still to preserve one place of hope: that in the one-night stands, the brief affairs, it was always Haffner who left, cold-hearted.

Now even this was not true. Now that it was happening to him he was enraged by the injustice of it. Could a person simply choose whether or not they would have sex with someone else? Surely, if you had done it once, you had an obligation to continue for ever?

Although, as Zinka tenderly kissed him on the forehead, and left his room — not looking back at Haffner, naked on the bed — he could not conceal from himself the thought that this new incarnation did possess a certain logic. Maybe, thought Haffner, in a haze of contradiction, it was possible to love someone without wanting them: not to be tired with the need for possession. It didn't seem so unlikely. To want to inhabit the mind and body of someone else. For desire may involve possession. But also it might mean the opposite desire: to be possessed.

In his bedroom, Haffner was translated.

There was no reason, therefore, to be angry at Zinka. There was no reason to be proud. So what if she had left him? She entranced him precisely because she had never belonged to him at all.

Just as no one, thought Haffner, would belong to him again.

Or to put it in a way more familiar to Haffner, in the words of a great comedian. . One day, this comedian, tired but happy, was walking down some street in Manhattan with his producer. The day's filming had gone well. Now they were off to some diner for a much needed salt beef sandwich, a much needed latke. Or whatever. As they sauntered down the street, two nuns, in wimples and solid shoes, walked towards them. And, solicitously, the great comedian took them aside, and very gently reminded them that he did apologise but they were in the wrong place. They had made a mistake. They weren't in this sketch.

In exactly the same way, what Haffner needed was the voice of a comedian, gently reminding him that now, regretfully, in the matter of Haffner, life was through.

Haffner, my hero, had outlived himself.

The next morning — as the sun rose over the conifers, gilding the distant snows — Haffner woke up, raised his aching face and saw his battered suitcase: wrapped in creased and blotched cellophane, swaddled in blue adhesive tape, slashed by a diagonal tear which, according to the man who had delivered it — reception told him — could not be explained, and for which the airline admitted no responsibility.

In another era, perhaps Haffner would have instituted various legal battles. He would have written to the chairman and demanded compensation: donations to his designated charities. But not now. Haffner was no longer so proud of his property. He only felt a warm relief, as he abandoned his golfing trousers and tracksuits, and replaced the image in the mirror with a more familiar Haffner, in his brown tweed suit, his checked twill shirt, a muted tie: the handkerchief which Cesare had bought him in the Milan arcades stuffed with elegant negligence in his pocket.

Then he put on his glasses, and was fearful at his suddenly precise reflection. A livid stain was spreading across one cheek. A gummed splinter gelled in the tear duct of his right eye.

The reflection, however, perturbed him less than the pain within. His body seemed exhausted: he was shivering, worried Haffner, and his pulse was erratic. He felt for his clammy forehead: it seemed hot.

His first step, thought Haffner, in the life of this renovated, broken-down version of Haffner, should be breakfast. Then he should find Benjamin, and admit that perhaps Benji had been right all along. Though would he still believe that for a brief hour Haffner had been successful? Perhaps not, thought Haffner: perhaps not.

The dining room, by now, at this late stage of the morning, was empty. Haffner moved slowly along its buffet: with its sacks of grains and cereals, the contraption — which resembled no toaster Haffner had seen — for toasting bread, from which each slice emerged with its black insignia: a franking machine. All of these Haffner ignored. He took a croissant from some imitation of the rustic panier , and poured himself a coffee from the dregs of three silver Thermoses.

Haffner felt sick.

With flakes of croissant caught in the fibres of his tie, Haffner wandered out into the hotel's lounge: where the windows looked on to the mountains: their blues and greens and mauves. The absolute blue of the sky. It suddenly made sense to bespectacled Haffner now: this perfect view. He made for the bookshelves, but Haffner, whose flesh was sad, had read all the books he could. Humming to himself, he moved on to the miniature but eclectic collection of CDs — on a shelf, beside a book of mountain views, and a guidebook to the mountain walks, in French, from four years ago. And Anne of Green Gables in Spanish, and Volumes I and II of the History of Nottingham from the 1930s — but not the crowning Volume III.

Without expecting much, Haffner ejected someone else's CD featuring the classics of reggae from the 1970s, slid his own random choice into the waiting machine, and pressed play.

And Haffner discovered that he was in the orchestra stalls at the opera house.

As he gazed in the darkness, while fairies disported themselves on stage, Haffner was distracted by the surprise which had persisted, throughout the ballet's first half, at the smallness of Pfeffer's shilling tip to the cloakroom attendant in Rules, where they had eaten their theatre supper. In Haffner's opinion, no largesse was too much for the everyday retainers. So Pfeffer baffled him. But then Pfeffer often baffled him. Beside him, in the darkness, Pfeffer was holding opera glasses to his eyebrows like some marine instrument. They seemed to be directed at the mechanics of the flies.

Their respective wives were watching the ballet intently.

Haffner tried to settle into his velvet chair. He had accepted patiently this proposed outing, to celebrate Livia's birthday, to the Royal Ballet. It hadn't fit Haffner's idea of entertainment. But when he saw Bottom shrugging away his sorrow with a neat bend of his legs, Haffner began to enjoy himself. These people had humour, after all. While Livia watched beside him, on edge, transported — plucking at the plush velvet with her fingernails.

This theme recurred in Haffner's life. Twenty years later, in the living room of his daughter's house, he heard Benjamin trying to sight-read the same melodies: the cover of the score was worn like blotting paper. And in Benji's clumsy chords, Haffner rediscovered the sad emotion he had felt for the actor playing Bottom — the pirouettes, the tender holds! — in his massive ass's head. The sadness seemed to make sense to him now.

For what else was it as you lumbered across a room, towards the body of a woman, the prong of your penis straining to beat you in the race to touch her? It was farcical, always.

In the lounge of the hotel there was a curved bar made of vertical strips of pine, a collection of sofas, a box of board games. Into one sofa sank Haffner, as he played to himself, in the morning, the nocturne from Mendelssohn's ballet.

The horns, softly, their own echo, lay on the bed of the violins.

And as they did so, Haffner made a loop, descending from the childhood of Benji, back through Livia's birthday, to where this theme had first emerged. It was Haffner's theme tune. His first ever delicate kiss had occurred to this accompaniment, the music played with the film he had watched at the Ionic Picture Theatre, after which Hazel had allowed him to kiss her cheek.