The Escape

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And so the century ended: with Haffner watching a man caress a woman's breasts.

It was an imbroglio. He would admit that much. But at least it was an imbroglio of Haffner's making.

He might have been seventy-eight, but in Haffner's opinion he counted as young. He counted, in the words of the young, as hip. Or as close to hip as anyone else. Only Haffner, after all, would have been found in this position.

What position?

Concealed in a wardrobe, the doors darkly ajar, watching a woman be nakedly playful to her boyfriend.

This was why I admired him. Haffner Unbound! But there were other Haffners too — Haffner Pensive, Haffner Abandoned. He tended to see himself like this; as in a dream, in poses. Like the panels of a classical frieze.

A tzigani pop album — disco drumbeats, accordions, sporadic trumpets — was being broadcast by a compact-disc player above the minibar. This weakened his squinting concentration. He disliked the modern zest for sex with music. It was better, thought Haffner, for bodies to undress themselves in the quiet of the everyday background hum. In Naples once, in what, he had to say, could only be described as a dive, in the liberated city, the lights went suddenly out, and so the piano stopped, and in the ensuing silent twilight Haffner watched a woman undress so slowly, so awkwardly, so peacefully — accompanied only by the accidental chime of wine glasses, the brief struck fizz of matches — that she had, until this moment, more than fifty years later, remained his ideal of beauty.

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