Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

The trompe l'oeil of the ending! The false bottom of the ending!

Could he manage one more? wondered Haffner. He thought he could. Let him swing it one last time.

His century was over, and all Haffner wanted to take from it was the memory of Livia. He only wanted, now, to assert his constant fidelity.

Why did he need to go back, when the paperwork was completed? Why couldn't he, thought Haffner, live there in the villa — surrounded by the history of Livia? And in the excitement of his decision, Haffner wanted to see the villa, now — the villa which he had not thought he ever wanted to visit. He wanted to pay homage to Cesare's famous ceiling — executed in the dining room when he was sixteen, when he still believed in his destiny as a great European painter. Homeless, he wanted to observe what would be Haffner's final home.

Haffner marched out into the foyer. The window to the cloakroom was shut. At the ticket booth, he pointed to the cloakroom. The woman in the ticket booth shrugged, helplessly. Haffner mimed, like a monkey, the heaviness of twin suitcases, invisibly weighing down his arms.

— No no, said the girl.

— No? said Haffner.

The girl said a word which Haffner did not understand. She turned to the calendar behind her on the wall, one half of which was a series of mountain views, underwritten by romantic poetry; the other half of which was a grid with numbers. She pointed to one square, containing one number.

And finally Haffner understood that he would only be able to recapture his belongings the next day.

With a renewed sense of triumph, therefore — since what more could he now lose? — the untold story of Haffner reached its conclusion. He would go to look at the villa, unencumbered by his possessions. And eventually he would live up here, in this spa, in this place of his escape: in the solitude of their infinite marriage: its absolute irrelevant immortal secrets.

For this, thought Haffner, was the true version of Haffner — a husband.

In a bar out on North Beach once, in San Francisco, he had talked to the barman about DiMaggio. DiMaggio, said the guy behind the bar, had been a regular. And the barman confided in him that when Joe was dying, he used to say that it was no sadness to him. At least, he said, it would maybe give him another chance with Marilyn.

It had shocked Haffner then. Now, however, it seemed bleakly accurate. It seemed adequate to the facts.

Always, he had wanted out, thought Haffner. And now he didn't.

As the twilight began, the subtlest twilight, Haffner walked up the long road towards the villa. He tended to his memories of Livia. It was his triumph, his procession through the city's streets: with his conquered slaves before him — and his personal freedman behind him, whispering that Haffner was mortal.

And that former slave, for now, is me.

Yes, the conjuring with tenses was now all over. For Haffner had indeed caught a cold two mornings ago, when he swam in the lake with Frau Tummel: finally, the symptoms were for real. And in two weeks' time this cold would develop into a virulent form of pneumonia, which would be imperfectly treated, here, in the Alps, by a junior doctor whose concentration was distracted by his concern to keep calling his girlfriend and assure her that he loved her, stricken as he was by his lone moment of infidelity, an impulsive regretted kiss at a soiree after a conference; so that by the time Haffner was flown home to London — successful, true, in his legal pursuit of the villa — he would have already suffered a stroke. And in that weakened, muted state, began the long dying of Haffner.

It wasn't the defeat he had intended, or predicted: like everyone's defeat. It was just the one that Haffner got.

But at this moment, Haffner was still happy in the bliss of his escape. Up the hill he walked, out of the town, into the depleted suburbs: his natural habitat.

On reaching the drive which led to the house, however, he was struck by a problem. What Haffner had not considered, in his moment of emotion, was the legal problem. He did not own this property, obviously. He knew this. The company who used it as a holiday home still owned it. It now struck him that he had no idea how he might explain why it was that he was here: a bedraggled ancient madman with a bruise above his eye and around his cheek.

For a moment, his bravado disappeared. A homesickness overtook him. In Benjamin's bedroom, which had already not existed for years, he began to describe to Benjamin, in his bunk bed, how easy it was for Santa Claus to fly: he was buoyant, said Haffner. He simply floated.

In this cloud, Haffner stopped at the gate of the house. Perhaps, thought Haffner, no one was there. It could be standing empty.

Haffner paused.

He was here, thought Haffner, so he would brave it. And Haffner walked across the grass, and opened a door.

Haffner found himself in the kitchen: bare, lined with white tiles. A spiral iron staircase seemed to lead to all the other floors. Haffner stood at the base of the stairs, listening. He could hear nothing. So Haffner ascended and found himself in a corridor — covered in grey wallpaper, with brown stains, like stock market graphs, rising from the skirting — which led to the roofed veranda. Haffner knew about this veranda. On this veranda, Livia's father used to sit, watching each Alpine sunset. It used to have wooden floors, with zigzagging parquet. Now, the floor was lino; and the view had been glassed in. It seemed to be a dining room: two Formica tables were lined up against each other. On one of them, there was a plate with a slick of butter flattened on its rim.

Haffner stood there. He looked down. Just like Uncle Eli, who — so Goldfaden told him — at one point in his late escape from Warsaw reached a wall: and there below him was a courting couple. They were sitting on a bench. A plane tree was growing in its wire netting beside them. The man was begging his girl to come inside with him, up to his apartment. It was just up there, he said. Her mother would never know. The girl was not so sure. And Eli had perched there, looking down on them, begging this girl silently to ignore her moral scruples, to go into the room. This resistance fighter, said Goldfaden, his slight jowls shaking with laughter — imploring her to give up her resistance!

Even now, Haffner found this amusing.

From the veranda, another door led into an empty room, containing just a photo of the President, and a plastic sign advertising the various ice creams to be found in a miniature freezer, there in the corner, humming to itself. So Haffner did not know that this, in fact, was the room which had once contained the grand brick fireplace beloved by Livia's mother, which had now been blocked up and plastered over. Nor did he know that Cesare's treasured ceiling, on which he had depicted The Dream of Europa , being squabbled over by two women who represented two continents, had been boarded over by another dropped ceiling, twenty years ago.

Everything was missing.

Upstairs, the bedrooms were filled with bunk beds; and more grey wallpaper. The bathroom which had been Livia's mother's personal project, obsessed as she was by all the conveniences of modern hygiene, with bidet, toilet, mirrors, handshower — all the delightful gadgets — had been replaced by a stone floor and three doleful showerheads, hanging their heads from the ceiling.

And when Haffner ascended, finally, into what had been the eaves, where Cesare kept his painting things and Livia kept her costumes from all the plays she had ever been in, there were now four small mansard rooms. Above each door there was a sign demanding that no one should smoke.