Mara was working as a physiotherapist by then. She was able to arrange her appointments so they could be together like this in the mornings. Gregor was giving music lessons and playing with a cover band at night. He was busy composing by day, and some of his more abstract pieces were getting noticed.
They needed nothing from the past. Everything was riding on the future. On their lives and on this little boy who was not even aware enough to notice that he was poking himself in the eye with his own thumb. Mara laughed a lot. Gregor sang a lot. They became babies themselves, barking and buzzing and making baby sounds. Daniel was the shape of their joy, and what more confirmation did they need from life than to hear his tiny sucking noises nearby at night. There was a sweet smell of milk in the bed from breastfeeding. And once or twice, it was milk love between them when her breasts began to leak across his chest. Afterwards, he always paid great attention to some part of her, circling his index finger round and round her kneecap while they whispered late into the night with the milky street light coming in across their bodies, staying awake inside their luck as long as they could. Her head coming to rest on his chest, listening to the resounding hum of his voice in her ear. His singing finally putting her to sleep.
One night, Mara brought up the subject of circumcision.
‘We’ll have to get him circumcised,’ she said.
‘I don’t think there’s any need for that,’ Gregor replied.
‘But of course we have to do it,’ she said.
‘It’s far too late, Mara. It’s meant to be done within eight days of birth,’ Gregor said. ‘Anyway, it’s not that important any more.’
‘Why not? I didn’t think you would be against it?’
She lifted her head up from his chest to look at him.
‘I don’t know, Mara. It’s very traumatic for the child. Also for the parents,’ he said. ‘It has to be done without an anaesthetic. It’s all very strict. They say that some mothers faint at the sight of it.’
‘But it’s all forgotten very quickly.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Gregor thought.
‘You don’t remember it, do you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He got himself into a bit of potential trouble then. He had allowed her to assume that it was done as an infant and that he had managed to survive miraculously until the end of the war without being detected. He had allowed her to believe things that were not quite true, without stepping in immediately to correct them. There was so much that remained vague in his life that he was glad sometimes when something was unequivocal. She talked about his penis and said she was glad that it was circumcised. To her it was unique, rough and smooth at the same time on her tongue. She had trapped it inside her mouth until it fused with her palate and finally exploded under pressure.
It was too late to go back now. Too late to say that it would have been virtually impossible, not to mention insane, for any parent to carry that operation out in wartime. He was afraid it would weaken the evidence and he allowed her assumptions to stand.
‘They say it makes a man less sensitive,’ he argued.
‘I haven’t noticed,’ she said.
‘I’d hate to put him through that for nothing,’ he continued. ‘Doctors don’t believe it has a function any more. They don’t think it has anything to do with hygiene. Believe me, Mara. We don’t want to put little Daniel through that horrific pain. For what?’
‘It’s your identity,’ she argued. ‘This is a survivor baby and we want to celebrate all that.’
‘The bloodline comes through the mother,’ he said. ‘You would have to be Jewish.’
In any case, he told her, he had already been to see that rabbi, that it was not that easy to be accepted into the Jewish faith.
‘You see, there’s no real proof,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing on paper, Mara. They won’t accept my word for it. It was only something I was told, by my uncle Max.’
‘Why didn’t your mother tell you?’
‘She didn’t know,’ Gregor said. ‘She wasn’t sure. I was brought up as a Catholic and there was never any talk about me being Jewish. You see, she didn’t have any proof either.’
‘Except the fact that you were circumcised,’ she said.
There was a buoyancy in her voice. She wanted to put all that doubt out of his mind about his true origins. She wanted to bring him back to life and to confirm the existence that he had lost. And maybe she wanted to fight for him and his identity, some atonement for what had gone on in the war.
‘Why are you not more positive about this?’
But they stopped talking about it and lay awake for a long time, drifting in their own thoughts. They heard the sound of a truck outside, parking on the street below their window. They listened to the driver getting out and closing the door. After a short while the door closed again, so they wondered if the driver had been stretching his legs and got back in to rest a few hours before driving away on some long journey across the Continent.
‘Is it one of those big ones, with a separate cab?’ she asked him. ‘The ones where you can sleep overnight in a bunk?’
They described it for themselves, with pin-ups of nude women in straw hats at the back of the cab to keep the driver company. Gregor wanted to get up and have a look for himself, but she would not let him disturb the way they were lying together. They even fell asleep for a while, only to wake up again, wondering if the truck was still there or whether it had moved on. They spoke about the truck that Emil, his grandfather, drove and what it must have looked like. Once again, Gregor wanted to get up and go to the window to check. But she turned him round and lay behind him with her warm, milky breasts against his back. And somehow, that night, he felt that even happiness could sometimes be a lonely thing. They fell asleep and woke up with Daniel’s cries in the morning. Gregor got up and brought him to the bed with Mara so that she could breastfeed him. Then he stood at the window and after a while said: ‘The truck has gone.’
By morning she had changed her mind. Gregor had managed to put her off with his talk of the scalpel violating her baby boy, cutting into his foreskin. The sound of him crying. The distress in his eyes. A moment of helpless self-awareness in which he felt totally alone in the world, with the pain darting through his entire body. His mouth opening in a silent cry, full of terror, before he found the breath to actually scream. That bright moment of cruelty entering into his memory forever.
But that didn’t stop her trying to get Daniel accepted as a Jew. She said there were those who thought nothing of identity, people who felt it was not much of an issue any more, except for those who are dispossessed.
‘You have lost something and we must put it back,’ she said.
He had nothing but the name given to him by his adoptive parents.
‘We’re not going to deny your people any more,’ she added with a finality in her voice. ‘We have a duty to all those relatives of yours who were killed. We want to give them their dignity back.’
He could be sullen sometimes. He could go into himself, a refugee, staying silent for hours, doing nothing but playing his guitar. Alone. An orphan again. Right in the middle of their happiest years, the trapdoor opened up underneath him and he became a loner again. She was concerned about him sometimes. She had a friend whose young husband had killed himself. And Gregor’s favourite book was written by Egon Friedell, a man who ended his life during the Nazi years by throwing himself out the window, even shouting a warning into the street beforehand to avoid injuring pedestrians.
Was it hereditary, that faculty of doubt? Or was it something he got from his adoptive parents. They were refugees, too, and had that dreamy gaze into the past, to what might have been, to empty places in memory. Was there some distance in his mother’s eyes as he grew up? Some feeling that he would never live up to her dreams? The boy who could never match up to the child lost in the bombing.
Was there some companionship in his depression, some fear of happiness,
some overproduction of defensive thoughts? Maybe depression is linked in some way to lack of belonging. Was that the old cure for depression, she wondered, the constant reference to tradition, the rituals, the barmitzvahs, the baptisms, the big weddings, the songs and the ceremonies of transition? Is that why people don’t need tradition that much any more because there are other ways of dealing with mental disorder now?
She was all the more determined to restore his sense of belonging. She arranged a meeting with the rabbi, but the same arguments came up again. Lack of proof. No documentation. No evidence in Gregor’s favour, only the word of his dead uncle Max.
The rabbi remained polite, but then Mara became angry, with Daniel on her arm.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Not that long ago, this baby would have been taken away to Auschwitz on less evidence. Now the evidence is not enough.’
She stormed out into the street with Gregor behind her. And that afternoon, it was she who became gloomy. Until a new idea came to her.
‘Go to Warsaw,’ she said, lifting herself up. ‘Go to Danzig, Gregor. Go and see those places where you might be from.’
He did that. He applied for a visa and went to Warsaw some months later in the hope that he might recover some grain of memory. He read about the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising. He learned about the conditions there and about the woman who had smuggled children out through the sewers. The city had awakened something inside him. He cried openly on the street, with people staring at him as they passed by, wondering what his story was and what painful memory had suddenly come up through the asphalt.
Stepping onto the streets of some strange city was not evidence. He could tell people that he had been to Warsaw, but he still felt a fake. Though his friends were not asking for proof. They went to his concerts and heard him play with his band at night. They loved his music and believed his talents had been handed down to him through generations, a quiet cultural evolution which reached a peak every time he performed, a human flaw turned into virtue, a hollow place turned into song. All the evidence they needed to hear was in the minimalist fingertip passion of his notes, in those bent and curtailed riffs, in the raw, breathy survivor blast which filled the empty spaces.
They were aware that biography is never a stationary thing, but something that constantly changes shape. They accepted the facts on trust and began to say it was ‘very likely’ that he came from Warsaw. They were willing to believe him and he only needed to say that it was ‘possible’ that he was one of the children rescued from the ghetto. All they wanted from him was to say that he ‘believed’ he was Jewish. The evidence was inside all of them. It screamed at them from the history books. Who would dare deny it? Who would question a man who escaped from this dark corridor of time and came out alive?
Eleven
Gregor’s mother also explained to him why his grandfather was fat. When Gregor was growing up, she showed him the pictures of Emil before the First World War. A tall, handsome young man. She also showed him the pictures of his grandfather before the Second World War, a bloated man who had trouble with his health and drank too much. He was sometimes unreliable. He was a deserter in the Second World War, but there were reasons for that, she told him. He was not a criminal, only a man who should never have been called up.
She told him that things happened to Emil as a soldier in the First World War. It was a miracle that he ever married after his experiences on the Russian front.
Later in life, Gregor began to call it the poets’ war, not only because there were so many poets on both sides who took part, but because of the great passion with which men threw themselves into that war like lovesick poets. They went to the front in a kind of patriotic haze that was close to being in love. It must have been a time when love was something so much more tragic, more elevated and pernicious, more once in a lifetime. Not something that happened twice. Maybe love has become more transferable now. Back in the time of the First World War love was more apocalyptic, like the love you gave to your country. His grandfather Emil would have formed the opinion that fighting for his country was the greatest act of love he would ever experience in his lifetime. The act of love to the nation, to the greatness of his people and their noble traditions. And war was the ultimate expression of that love in which he would be embraced by the masses.
When he was given his heavy boots and the itchy uniform as an eighteen-year-old country boy and taught how to hold a rifle in his hand and ordered to spend days practising how to slice his bayonet into straw men lined up in the barracks square, he was convinced how glorious it would be to die in battle. To have an enemy bayonet slice through your own stomach was a wonderful, painless experience to a man who truly loved his nation. The general with the straw moustache who made all these speeches about the manliness of sacrifice described it all as patriotic bliss. Fear was the natural, preliminary rush of excitement that comes with love, and dying in battle was the closest thing you could get to sleeping with a woman.
When Emil got to the front, it was anything but romantic. The men liked him because he brought jokes and songs. Every night, they would ask him to sing his songs about maidens and courtiers, songs about lovers unable to return to each other. But he didn’t go out to fight in order to sing about women. He was expecting the place to be full of women and love. He was waiting for women in white flowing clothes to lie down with him in the fields. He had begun to imagine them semi-naked, walking out of the tall fields of wheat or dancing in the woods. He imagined them leaving the milking and dropping their buckets and the warm white milk running through the grass as they came running towards him. Their embrace and their coy giggles and the freedom of their bodies. But there was not a single woman in sight. Instead, it was all men shouting orders. Men with bad tempers, men with bad skin, men with bowel problems, men who seemed lost and held photographs of their loved ones or their mothers, knowing they might never see them again. Men stealing from each other. Men cursing and men telling lies about themselves. Men who got drunk and found prostitutes outside the camp, paying for love even though it was promised in such abundance to all fighting men.
Emil was eager to get into battle, eager to feel the dreamy embrace of war. When he heard the cannons in the distance coming closer, he felt the fear which had been described to him so accurately as a first kiss. When he saw the enemy appearing for the first time on the flat landscape ahead, he wanted to get sick. Some of his comrades soiled their trousers without even knowing it. Many of them fell in the first encounter. He saw men groaning with their intestines in their hands. Men with missing limbs staring up into the sky in a state of blissful exhaustion, comrades he knew by name, dying as though they had just fallen asleep on their backs in the middle of it all.
Emil was not blessed with the sacrifice of love himself. He was in shock at the sight of blood and death all around him. Fear kept coming in waves, like a great emptiness in the pit of his stomach, in his sphincter, in his genitals. He could hardly eat any more. He felt the stings of heat under his uniform. He got baby hands whenever he had to lift his weapon. He sometimes suspected there was something wrong with his heart and that he would just drop dead any moment. What he hated most was the lull where nothing happened. That great absence of women when the men spent hours doing nothing but smoking cigarettes and writing letters and listening to other men rambling about their lovers, real and imaginary. He saw men who could not wait any longer fumble in their trousers. In each other’s trousers. Gentle sounds of dying every night in the tent right beside him, men growling in each other’s arms as they tried to bring that glorious moment of death to each other.
And then he killed a man. For weeks he had been shooting aimlessly at everything that moved ahead of him. Who knows where all those bullets went to. But he knew at first hand when he had taken the life of another man, because it changed everything. A Russian soldier of his own age appeared from behind a barn one afternoon and stood a moment with his broad, indestructible chest, defying death as th
ough he was protected in some way by the prayers of his family back home. Emil raised his gun and shot into that chest. The other man blinked, but remained standing. He must have been struck by the same paralysing fear, unable to lift the heavy rifle, even though he seemed like a strong farming type himself. When he eventually tried to aim the rifle back at Emil, he fell down dead. He had been praying. There was a brass icon opened on his chest, a triptych of religious figures carved into panels. The white ribbon that normally kept the icon doors closed still wrapped around his trigger finger.
Emil stood over him wishing he could take the bullet back. He kneeled down to say a prayer for him and lost all regard for his own life, utterly defenceless now, leaving his gun aside on the ground and praying for his enemy with a pool of blood edging like a slow, dark delta towards his knees. He closed the man’s eyes and felt the stubble of his beard as his hand glanced across his chin. He could see the tan line around his neck. Then he cut the icon off with his bayonet. The icon would remain in Emil’s possession as a kind of reminder of the man he had killed, a man he would spend the rest of his days trying to bring back to life. Gregor has the icon now in his apartment in Berlin. It’s one of the only things which he has brought with him from his family. The white ribbon has gone beige and the brass is dulled with time. Occasionally, he stands it up on the hall table and opens out the doors on their plain hinges, a kind of duty that comes along with this precious possession, to think of the dead Russian soldier.
For Emil, the glorious moment of ecstasy came not long after that. He had been in a numb state for days, stepping over dead bodies from his own ranks and from enemy ranks, all lovers of their own nation now lying in the early agony of decay around the sandy roads and fields. Men lying in orchards, surrounded by apples and baskets. A cow grazing among the dead, as though they were farmers lying idle.
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