Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Haffner was the generalissimo of hyperbole. Unlike a real generalissimo, however, he had to perform the hyperbole himself.

My poor Haffner: his own shill.

No one else, for instance, was so sure that the obvious comparison to Haffner was Caligula. It wasn't so much Haffner's monstrosity which troubled his family, but his absolute mundanity. Whenever his daughter, Esther, brought up the issue of his adultery, his bed tricks, she said he was banal. She would stand there, in her business suits, with their badly cut trousers; her silk blouse; the sleek blonde bob which Haffner regretted, taming as it did the cuteness of her curls. This belittling idea of hers had always unnerved Haffner. He felt a distant sense of pique. Surely, he would reason, unconvincingly, afterwards — to an unconvinced Haffner, or an unconvinced anonymous drinker, or the indignant husband of his daughter — the infidelity had contained infinite riches, if only you knew how to look? From one perspective, pure vanity: yes maybe. But from another — what gorgeous vistas! What passes, what valleys, what pastoral hillocks!

Was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, in a crescendo of impatience, as he waited for Niko and Zinka to leave, as Zinka paused in the doorway, looking back to the innocent wardrobe — was there really anything so wrong, thought Haffner, as he finally emerged, with being a man of feeling?

The classics were full of it. The loves of the gods were various. The loves of Jupiter, for instance, were a festival of costume change, of metamorphosis. He mated with Aegina as a flame, Asteria as an eagle, Persephone as a snake; with Leda he took the form of a swan, with Olympias a snake. To Semele he appeared as a blazing fire, to Io as a fog, to Danae as a shower of gold. When he first slept with Juno, his wife, he became a cuckoo. Alcmena and Callisto were won by his impersonations of humans. Yes, the loves of Jupiter were famous. They had heft.

With these stories Haffner sought consolation.

But, I have to add, in the many stories of Haffner, he was always only himself.

Returning to his room, Haffner rounded a corner and passed a coiled roulade of fire hose pinned to the wall, as he happily imagined his bed and its crisp sheets, a single circle of chocolate laid out on one diagonal fold. And then he discovered the weeping monumental form of Frau Tummel.

For what was up was also down, and what seemed a victory, after all, was really a defeat: so Haffner's happiness must always be subject to swift reversals.

Frau Tummel was in a cotton nightgown, with ruched lace at the breasts, and a cotton bathrobe stitched with pink tight roses. There, in front of his door, Haffner confronted her — outlandish in his sky-blue and pistachio ensemble. He looked around, to see if anyone else might be there. He felt burdened with concern: for Frau Tummel, and for himself. He didn't want to explain why it was that he had returned to his room this late, in such exhaustion.

Frau Tummel raised her face, displaying the ravages of her mascara: a harlequin.

— What are you doing here? said Haffner, brightly.

— We had a rendezvous, she said.

— Come now, said Haffner, less brightly.

Maybe it was over, she said, sadly.

— Over? said a Haffner transformed into the sign for a smile: a single reclining parenthesis.

Yes, continued Frau Tummel. It would end with him leaving her. She knew this. And it was right. For sure. It was understandable.

He tried to reassure her. Of course he wasn't going to leave! The idea of it! And Frau Tummel said that yes, she knew this. She knew he thought this was true. But how could he know this? There were so many complications. She really thought they needed to discuss this.

The sign for Haffner was no longer a supine parenthesis.

He knew what he was meant to say. He didn't want to say it. He wanted to be alone; to go to sleep. But Haffner had his code of honour. This was one aspect of his undoing. He was an admirer of the classics, and no man with a classical education could deny the wills of women. The classics taught one, he had decided, to trust in the pagan gods. Trust Cupid. Trust him in all his other guises, as cherubs, or as Eros. The men must always allow themselves to be led by the women. So he said what he was meant to say. He wondered if she would like to come into his room.

Frau Tummel raised her ravaged face: a joyful harlequin.

So ended, in one swift exchange, the swift moment of Haffner's happiness.

The imbroglios seemed so fluently to come to Haffner.

He was here to claim his wife's inheritance — therefore, naturally, he became involved with other women. This seemed to be the logic of his life.

They had met two weeks ago, on the second day of his stay, at the swimming-pool complex in the hotel's basement. There were three pools — three adjacent water lilies, each attached to the other by a miniature set of steps. The smallest was a Jacuzzi — for the indolent, or the fat. In it could therefore be found Haffner, who was indolent, and Frau Tummel, who was fat.

The voice of Frau Tummel, he soon discovered, was husky, it was rasping. She had class. She wrapped herself in a towel to go and lie on a lounger outside, to smoke three rapid cigarettes, pinched in the contraption of her extravagant cigarette holder — which unfolded and then unfolded one more time, just when you thought it could not be extended further. Then she relapsed into the boiling Jacuzzi, to Haffner's charmed curiosity.

He wasn't normally so devoted to swimming pools. He preferred the gyms — the exercise machines which prolonged to such a surprisingly toned extent the overlong life of Haffner. The gym was another place where we had fleetingly made conversation. Occasionally, I would happen on Haffner in the changing room: and, delighted, he maintained a naked conversation — our penises dolefully looking away — while I stood there on the bobbled tiles wishing I were not faced by the superior nature of Haffner's so much older muscles. Although the gym was really a place of yearning for Haffner. It was, quite frankly, most often a place of rest. In the gym, a slothful primate, he could let his arms droop over the bars on the chest press. Below the slope of his T-shirt, his arms were white and darkly speckled, like a photocopy. From here, he could observe the varieties of breast movement — some solid in sports bras, others fragile, unsupported, tenderly visible. He developed a stare for this purpose, an alibi — heavy-lidded with exhaustion, hypnotically unfocused, unable to look away.

Frau Tummel worked in the perfume industry. She was here in this spa hotel with her husband — whose nerves, she told Haffner, were gone, whose blood pressure was abnormal. He spent his days on the veranda, looking at the silent mountains: sipping peppermint tea. It was, thought Haffner, the old old story: the loyal wife who was bored of her loyalty — the century's normal story of a spa.

When Frau Tummel had gone, Haffner leaned back in the Jacuzzi, letting the movement of the bubbles absorb his concentration with their frantic foam — and then he padded off, leaving dark echoes of his feet on the floor's lukewarm tiling. In one room, he discovered a table with flowers: gentian, violets. In another room there was a sauna, where a woman was lying, motionless, on the pine slats of the highest step. Haffner paused, considered not. And then he pushed open another door, and discovered Frau Tummel again, in the process of being massaged. She was lying on her front, on a towel monogrammed in stitched gold thread with the hotel's invented crest. And in her shock she leaned up, so exposing to Haffner's gaze the moles on her breasts, the beginnings of her pink areolae, cobbled with cold.