Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

The first time he heard the song was in Tel Aviv, in the apartment of the girl whom he once hoped would become his girlfriend. Or, more precisely, whom he once hoped would let him see her naked. He wasn't ambitious. She shrugged a nonchalant record from its sleeve and made it frantic. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a cream block of flats in the most modern version of Paris, with a patchy sky and burnt-out cars.

Since then, he had listened to this song called 'Darkness' over and over. And he still did not know precisely what it meant. But to him it was so beautiful — with its plush American romantic violins, crackling with nostalgia, and sarcastic clever French rhymes (rhymes whose meaning he did not understand). It seemed so poignant with poise, so world-weary with sadness.

Luxuriously, therefore, romantic, Benji contemplated his fears.

It wasn't the first time. Three years earlier, Benji had been stricken by a vision of his death, in some club in an industrial part of northwest London: for the first time in his life he had not only taken a tab of LSD but had added, recklessly, a pill as well. So Benji could soon be found sitting on his own, carefully near the accident and emergency room, feeling sick, and terrified, as hippies with matted dreadlocks bent forward to leeringly if kindly ask about his health. He had decided that he would not go into the emergency room until it was absolutely necessary. He was mortified by appearances. This tendency to be mortified was adding to his panic, since all too easily he could imagine the headlines in the newspapers the next morning: the school photo, the tearful parents, the charity established in his memory. It would have to be him, the amateur who died after taking a pointless and accidental overdose: the bourgeois boy adrift in the world of cool.

The great screw-up: this was Benji's constant anxiety. He always went in fear of doing or saying the minute thing which would place everything in the greatest danger.

Really, thought Benji, there was no need to understand the words of this, his favourite song. He knew what it was about. True, the moments of incomprehension were everywhere. He was not convinced, for instance, that in the chorus of one of their songs, a hip group of French hip-hoppers, whether from the graffiti'd banlieue of Paris or the graffiti'd suburbs of Marseilles, could really be saying c'est Loch Ness . Maybe Loch Ness, with its monstrous Scottish depths, connoted darkness to a group of French hip-hoppers, but this seemed hopeful and unconvincing. This seemed his provincial, unlikely mishearing. But then, what did this mistake really matter?

He knew what this song was about. The song was about the fear.

The voices were all he needed, because the voices were grave, and delicate: they were, for him, the meaning. The meaning of this song was in the collage of serious, careful voices, trying to resist the melancholy romantic violins.

Because they couldn't. No one could resist the romance, he thought: as he contemplated the screwed-up mess which was the life of Benjamin.

When Haffner woke up in his uncomfortable velvet seat, he discovered the black-and-white outlines of a new prison for the characters on the silver screen: a grander, more feudal kind of prison. It was some kind of schloss — with pines and stones, and Gothically written signs warning against escape. The scene took place by night. And this time a man with a French accent and a man with a German accent were talking to each other in English: a fact which led Haffner to wonder if he was still dreaming.

— Have you really gone insane? said the man speaking with a German accent.

— I am perfectly sane, said the man speaking with a French accent.

He really couldn't be sure, thought Haffner, at what point any of this had been a dream. From the moment he met Zinka until now. From the moment he met Livia until now. With depressed accuracy, however, he felt compelled to admit that no moment of his life could really be excused or explained by a theory of unreality.

The German and the Frenchman continued their elegant debate in English.

— It's damn nice of you, Raffenstein, but it's impossible, said the Frenchman.

And with that, he began to climb, while the Germans trained a searchlight on him, like a music hall artiste: the famous actor in his follow spot. As, presumed Haffner, he was. In another version of the world entirely. And when Haffner then saw the man halt, arch his back, and stumble; when he saw the Frenchman on his deathbed, tended to by the German who had shot him, he wished he could believe it. He wished he could be moved. But partly there was the problem that he could hardly be moved by a film he had barely seen, and barely understood; and also there was a deeper reason.

Haffner didn't care about nobility. He didn't care about the soul. Just the beauty of escape.

All of Haffner's dreams of escape were suddenly incandescent. He sat there. And when the house lights came up — revealing to Haffner's placid eye the empty drinks cartons, packets of sweets, the crisp cellophane from cigarettes — and the credits rolled, he sat there while the small audience filed out, checking the footwells for coats, for wallets, for all the human belongings. The man he thought was Pawel was just conceivably Pawel: he could not be sure.

The girl he thought was Zinka turned out to be a teenage boy.

And Haffner, left behind in the cinema, considered how, on the one hand, there was the myth of the escape. Everyone understood the need for this myth. But maybe the need was explained by another wish: the safety of a refuge.

He had always assumed that he would go back home, to London, when the paperwork on the villa was completed. It wasn't as if he was here as an exile. But then, anything could become an exile, if it became impossible to go back.

And Haffner considered this spa town.

In Haffner's mind, his vision of Livia's villa was now merging with his vision of the cottage in the film, a cottage where the Frenchman had conducted some form of love affair with a lonely woman on her farm. The husband, presumed Haffner, must have been away, at the war. This cottage represented some kind of idyll. And now Haffner was wondering if he was beginning to understand the need for this cottage, he understood the need for a refuge. It was the deeper meaning of every escape. Just as he now understood how deeply he missed the girl who had stayed with them, in 1939: the girl whom none of them could understand, who took her own life. She was looking for a refuge, and she had not found it. And just as how — if one discovered the most minute version of Haffner, the slimmest, most concentrated fraction of Haffner — in some way, he thought, he understood what their marriage had represented to Livia. It might have seemed inconceivable to the outside observer, but to her it was a place of safety. For she knew he would never leave her. Haffner mimed the act of leaving, but he never would.

He had always believed that there would always be another girl; just as he had always believed that he would always have another city. However much he might have made mistakes, however unsure he may have been that he had made the right decision, he could always start over again. But now, he thought, he didn't.

And me, I might put it more sadly. I might use the words of the poet — the poet of a disappeared empire — who once said that in the way a man destroys his life here, in this little corner, so he has destroyed it everywhere else. But Haffner's pessimism was more euphoric. The problem had always been in finding the right elopee. But surely the elopee was obvious. It was always only Livia. If he added up his women, he decided, he had only ever had two: Livia, and then everyone else. Yes, thought Haffner. He had always seen everything in terms of repetition. And now it turned out that there was such a thing as a singularity. And love proved it.