Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

Haffner pushed one door open. Again, there was a bunk bed. A bra was resting on a chair. He turned to go, and as he turned he saw the notice which was on the back of every door, extending a most cordial welcome to this vacation home. Haffner was wished a wonderful stay. To guarantee order in the home, however, he was asked to observe some simple house rules. Sadly, Haffner read the times for meals, and the pickup of picnic lunches; the time for the afternoon rest period. During this time, Haffner was asked to refrain from playing the radio: instead, he should walk quietly on the stairs, and close doors quietly. In the immediate vicinity of the house, children were also required to play quietly. Lying on the beds in day clothes was not permitted. Requests and complaints should be addressed to the house manager.

All the ornament, all the marginalia and doodling were gone.

Unlike Solomon Haffner, his son believed in inheritance. The European museums always left Haffner sad. He saw no reason why a home should be given to the state. If Haffner had his way, if Haffner were a president, or a mayor, he would restore these ancestral homes to their rightful families. The pleasure of the chateau tour always eluded him. He could not help thinking of the dispossessed. This sensation returned to him now.

Yes, Haffner wished that he could bring everything back. He wished everything could be revised. In this, Haffner's last judgement, everything he had once consumed would be made whole again: the cigarettes would ravel themselves back into neat cylinders, the wines would loop back into their bottles; all the newspapers he had ever thrown away, all the detritus, would be restored in Haffner's sight. And finally the women. Everyone would be returned to him — resurrected: all the people he had loved. Because the problem with Haffner, really, was that he loved too many people. Thought Haffner.

He tugged at a venetian blind's toggle. It snapped up, like an aperture.

And Haffner, ignoring the landscape, remembered how, ten years earlier, when Morton was dying, he had gone to see him in Brooklyn. And because he couldn't think of anything which seemed in any way adequate to the monstrous fact of Morton's death, he tried, as he had so often tried to explain to Morton, the nature of a draw in cricket. It wasn't the simple matter of the scores being level. As always, this was where the foreigner became confused. But this time Haffner didn't bother with the detail. He didn't try to explain the technicalities: he just tried to explain its beauty. What it meant, he said, was that in cricket you could never be sure of victory or defeat: you could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and victory from the jaws of defeat. And this was wonderful. It meant, Haffner tried to explain, that there was no reason for the strong to win.

Morton's contribution to this had been to tell him a story.

Was it like this? said Morton.

Man, said Morton, Haffner didn't know what the British had missed, sitting outside Rome, waiting on the Americans. When they had gone into Rome, said Morton, it was crazy. And Morton then told him a secret. So there Morton was, in Rome, in bed with two girls. One of them was his girlfriend, the other one was not. They were simply trying to sleep. Because everything was a mess. He had no idea why they'd ended up in the same bed. And in the middle of the night, he turned to the girl who was not his girlfriend. For she undid him. She was so beautiful. And they kissed. He shivered with the memory of it. They kissed and kissed. He put his hand down her skirt. He felt her, there where her legs became so intricate with flesh. The soft cleft with the strong bone above it. And this was the great moment of his life, said Morton. Beyond anything he had ever felt with his adored wife. It was the moment of absolute excitement.

— And? said Haffner.

— And nothing, Morton said. Nothing happened. My girl woke up. So we both pretended to be asleep.

No doubt about it: Morton understood.

In the end, you had to get over the victories and the defeats.

— You know, said the celebrated movie star Hugh 'Tam' Williams, on the way to Aldershot in 1939 for their training, you're going to make it. You've got it in you. You have star quality. I can tell these things.

And Haffner had never forgotten this. Slick compliment it may have been, to pass the time in some station cafe more pleasantly, but Haffner believed he meant it.

He didn't need his wallet and its mute photograph album now. Haffner was quite happily his own mausoleum. The pictures came back to him so easily.

What had been Haffner's victories? The Athletics Cup in 1934. The Divisional Cricket Championship in Jerusalem in 1946. The presidency of the City branch of the Institute of Bankers in 1982.

But the real victory, thought Haffner, was elsewhere. It could take place anywhere: not just in the eternal cities, with the Colosseum for backdrop, or disporting in the Roman swimming pool, watched over by a Fascist eagle. And Haffner, remembering that night, when Rome was liberated, then thought of another swimming pool — in LA, where Goldfaden's Uncle Eli lived. He was having some kind of pool party. And Eli had begun to reminisce about the Ghetto in Warsaw. Of course, said Eli, after the third year people started reminiscing. It wasn't like this in the beginning, they used to say: then things were so much better.

With a bottle of beer in his hands, tipped with a crescent of lime, Haffner had guffawed.

In this humour, in this privacy, Haffner reckoned the true triumph might be found.

And then Cesare — who had wandered over, dressed neatly in his European and academic suit, refusing all West Coast dress codes — entered the conversation and reminded Haffner and Eli of a resistance fighter's great interview, twenty-five years after it was over, when he pointed out that the history of the Warsaw revolt wasn't going to be one for the military historians. The outcome had never been in doubt. It wasn't notable for its strategy. But if there was a school to study the human spirit, then it should be a major subject. The importance was the force shown by the Jewish kids, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers: and choose their own death. Was there, asked this hero, a standard which could measure that?

This man here, said Cesare, pointing at Haffner, he didn't want to be Jewish. He would never acknowledge, said Cesare, how much the Jews were hated. How much strength they had to be capable of. And Haffner, only wanting to locate Livia and go with her to the edge of the garden, to look out over the city, disagreed. It was true that he loved the image of the Jews as musclemen, the men of steel. But really what he admired was something else entirely. It wasn't Jewish — the revolt. This was Haffner's theory. It was a triumph of something much more universal.

Such confusion! said Cesare. But it was only to be expected. This was the constant problem. You try to assimilate, and in fact you just lose everything: you lose your family, but you also can't make friends. You can neither go forwards nor backwards. Wasn't this right, Raphael?

Oh he had loved Cesare so much, thought Haffner. Cesare had courage. But even Cesare was not as courageous, thought Haffner, as he should have been. The deepest courage belonged to those who chose to withdraw. To be doubly rejected, encircled by rejections — by the Jews and the non-Jews — allowed you an absolute freedom.

Haffner didn't care if he was a contradiction, an impossible hybrid. After all, he liked the hybrids. The greatest piece of music in the world was Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, as improvised by the great Benny Goodman. Haffner went for such impossible beings: the sphinxes, the centaurs.