Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  One morning, after another lull, they woke up with the enemy right in front of them, beyond a stand of trees. There was a mist across the fields and they could see nothing, only a family of deer leaping away through the dawn. Roosters crowing in the distance. Through the sleepy emptiness of the landscape came the sound of screaming. Phantom voices of women screaming from the trees with every variation of hurt and anger coming closer through the morning air. The moment had arrived at last. As the sun was beginning to break through, bringing a hint of colour back to the landscape, the screaming became even more shrill, more hostile, more terrifying, until they finally saw a battalion of women soldiers running straight at them out of the mist.

  The men seemed unable to move. Men who were so eager to see women of any kind, had no idea what they should do. All that virile longing turned into a spurt of warm weakness. A hollow, immovable blue ache in the groin that made them unable to walk. Women of all shapes and sizes dressed in men’s uniforms, some with their hair tied and some with their hair wild. Women with big breasts, women with boyish figures and fiery eyes, women with enormous open mouths gone hoarse with screaming. Mothers and daughters and wives and fiancées, charging fully armed, carrying their weapons like ladles, running with open arms, some gone crazy with the instinct of child protection and mother love and passion for motherland. Women running with their bayonets flashing like silver eels in the morning light.

  By the time these female warriors came level with them, the men were all ready to submit. The officers ordered them to fire, which some of them began to do, but without any heart, because they were so confused. Unable to make out the difference between love and death, they waited for the warmth of these women to wash over them like a great big blanket of murderous affection. Some of the men dropped their weapons in shock and opened their arms in a great death wish as the women sliced through their straw stomachs. Women gone fierce with screaming, women with ancient kitchen skills wiping bayonets across men’s necks, letting their lives flow out across the mattress of the September fields. Some of the men fought for their lives and were conscious enough of their own mortality to see these women as their enemies. But Emil never saw so many men accept death with such ease of mind. He felt like an infant boy waiting for his mother to wrap a towel around him after his bath, and before he knew it, he blanked out and fell down in the spot where he stood.

  When he recovered consciousness in a field hospital, his body was deformed from the shock. His legs were twice their normal size, his face and neck like a bulging, sheepskin container of water. The first grotesque encounter with women was such a shock, he suffered acute kidney failure. A renal shutdown brought on by overwhelming fear, causing water retention and giving him that inflated appearance which he had for the rest of his life. He survived a battalion of women and eventually married the nurse who looked after him at the field hospital and vowed to calm his nightmares.

  He should have been terrified of women, but then he made a remarkable recovery and turned it into his life ambition to be loved by as many women as possible. And that’s what got him into trouble in the end, Gregor’s mother said, as a warning.

  ‘He was a great singer,’ she said. ‘He should have been on stage. He should have made records. Instead, he became a dealer on the black market.’

  Gregor often asked her to tell the rest of the story about his grandfather, but she did not have the answers to that. He disappeared in the end, she told him. He never came back to the railway station to collect them.

  Twelve

  Daniel has arrived with his girlfriend, Juli. He is the image of his father, though Gregor cannot see the resemblance himself. He finds it hard to see his own reflection at this point. Daniel is tall, but he’s got brown eyes, and he doesn’t have the curly hair. Maybe it’s the quiet, intense way they both talk, their smiles, their way of speaking with the head bowed a fraction to the side.

  Daniel and Juli go around embracing everyone. They all stand back and admire this young couple, their perfection. Juli’s father is a fruit importer from Istanbul and her mother is a true Berliner, born and brought up in the city, though Juli has become a rebel. She dresses in contradictions, wearing a white linen dress and dreadlocks in her hair that make her peer up at everyone through half-pulled curtains. In the sunlight, her white dress lights up like a paper lampshade and there is a stud in her lower lip which shines like a steel pearl. Daniel works as a chef, in a vegetarian restaurant. He is a little older than Juli, but she is the true environmental activist who has been involved in all kinds of protesting and has been arrested for obstructing the police.

  They have taken a vow of frugality, refusing to get into private cars, using only public transport, eating only organic food. They intend to make their way to Africa by ship, first to Egypt, then on to the Sudan, so it seems like a long exile ahead of them. No quick flights home for Christmas or whenever the mood strikes them.

  They are the new earth lovers for whom this fruit gathering is more like an elegy, more biblical than a simple day out in the country. They love the hand-to-mouth, subsistence notion of harvesting as much as the socialists of his parents’ generation admired the company of the real working class, people with coal marks on their faces and dirt under their fingernails. They are the believers now. But where does all this purist logic square up with the self-destruction of alcohol and drugs and dancing all night in a techno fit around those clubs in Berlin? Gregor and Martin and Mara were those revolutionaries once, but maybe they all go soft in the end, because revolution is hard work. For the moment, Daniel’s youth-bound principles have remained strong.

  They live in this city full of contradictions. A place where nothing matches but where everything blends together in a strange conformity of clashing styles and biographies. The city is vivid with history. Layers of it in every suburb, coming up through the streets, in people’s eyes. A chamber of horrors, but also a place of monuments and devotion to memory. A place that has no time for greatness any more and celebrates instead the ordinary genius of survival. A wounded place at the heart of Europe, eager to heal and laugh. A cut-price city full of mischief and functional chaos, full of thinkers and artists and extremists.

  On the street where Daniel lives, there is an ecological slogan reminding them, every time they leave their apartment, to respect their environment. It’s a city full of warnings from the past and warnings from the future. They live in an area of Berlin where the rents are down to nothing, where the punks and goths hang around outside the underground station with their bottles and their docile dogs, where everything is covered in graffiti like a film of thin paint along the walls and doorways. It’s all very reassuring, like a running commentary of the city’s life. When the Berlin Wall came down, the street art moved into these open spaces in a new search for belonging. Heroic, three-dimensional expressions, most of them making no sense at all. But here, across the street from Daniel’s apartment, where the corresponding apartments have been missing since the war and have been replaced by a repair workshop, some artist has painted a striking image on a red-brick wall. A convex face of a dog with orange teeth and rectangular jaws. It’s hard to say whether this enormous face is meant to be growling or smiling. Menacing or mocking? The dog is smoking a cigarette, a tiny stub balancing at an angle on the lower lip, with a thoughtful, almost human intelligence in his expression, speaking the jagged words of doom: ‘Waiting for the flood.’ A prophet with a sense of humour.

  Gregor and Daniel are getting on better now than before, making up for lost time. They meet occasionally for a drink. But it’s obvious at times that Martin has remained closer to Daniel, mainly because he became a surrogate father figure to him in Gregor’s absence. They have an amiable duel going that seems lacking between father and son. Only Martin can get away with calling Daniel an ecological missionary.

  Once every fortnight, during the summer, Daniel has brought Gregor a basket of fruit, sent to him by Mara with a note. It’s her way of gently pushing the
m towards each other, getting Daniel to carry the fruit with him the three kilometres from the farm to the station because he won’t accept a lift, delivering these certified, pesticide-free cherries along the least fuel-travelled route. Even if the cherries had little maggots doing back flips around the basket by the time it reached the city, Gregor must admire the effort his son has taken. It’s a message of goodwill from Mara, passed on to him through their son Daniel.

  Each time Gregor has invited Daniel inside, they’ve sat on the balcony, drinking coffee and eating fruit, listening to the mournful sound of the six o’clock bells tailing off in a sad, minor key.

  ‘Are they still complaining about your students?’ Daniel asked one evening.

  ‘Not so much,’ Gregor said. ‘Maybe they’re getting used to it.’

  Gregor has a great reputation for private lessons, though he’s got constant trouble with the people living below. It’s a war of noise and counter-noise in the city. He makes every new student lie on the floor beneath the grand piano in order to listen to the full sound travelling downwards before he even begins to make them sit at the keys to discuss posture. His students love him and maybe parents have begun to trust the eccentric teacher more than the clean-cut, conventional type.

  From the playground next door came the wild echoes of football players amplified around the empty court-yards at the back, preventing them from having much of a conversation. At times, the noise of screeching voices was like the seaside, with the ball banging against the fence being mistaken for the hollow thump of the surf folding on the shore. Cars passing by along the cobbles making up the raking swish of the retreating wave across a stony beach. And right underneath them, the people sitting outside the restaurant at the orange tables, chatting and laughing. When the winter comes, all of those sounds will disappear for another year as the acoustic landscape outside becomes every bit as muted as the visual one of bare trees and empty benches and abandoned playgrounds. Only the bells will remain with their holy, melancholy chords. In the summer, the noise of the city conspired to keep them silent.

  Daniel has taken his shirt off in the heat, so he can start picking the apples in earnest. One of his shoulders is bigger, better built than the other, a strange physical anomaly that comes from Mara’s side of the family and has been passed on at random. One of her uncles has the same feature and maybe they were all hammer throwers going back in time, or miners in the Ruhr valley with an overdeveloped right shoulder.

  Quite suddenly, he is forced to drop his basket when a wasp hovers around him. Everyone else ignores the wasps, but Daniel feels exposed. He runs away. Fights off the unseen wasp in a silent tantrum among the trees, an irrational performance, lashing all around him, punching holes in the air in this peaceful place as though he’s remembered some grotesque dream.

  ‘Hit him with the rake,’ Martin says. His big laugh fills the entire orchard.

  ‘You must stay calm,’ Thorsten advises. ‘You mustn’t make sudden movements. They won’t harm you as long as you stay calm.’

  ‘What are you going to be like in Africa?’ Mara laughs.

  ‘Look, Daniel,’ Thorsten says. He digs his big hand right into the rotten apples on the wheelbarrow. Everyone turns to stare at his bare arm covered in wasps.

  ‘They’re drunk,’ Mara says. ‘Drunk on food. They are so heavy and full of fruit juice, most of them, that they can hardly even fly. They don’t have the energy to get angry and sting anyone.’

  ‘Look, they have droopy eyelids,’ Martin adds.

  Thorsten says that he’s only been stung once, inside the house when he happened to put his arm right down on the table where a wasp must have been feeding on a spot of jam. Never while picking fruit. They often take up apples or pears off the ground with two or three wasps crawling out, embarrassed at being caught gorging themselves.

  Martin turns it all into a larger joke, pretending that he has been attacked by the same wasp. He imitates Daniel’s erratic motions of terror, chopping the air, kicking and running to pick up the rake to defend himself against an invisible monster.

  ‘Down with this sort of thing,’ he shouts, and it is Mara who laughs more than anyone else.

  Thorsten mentions that they had bees for a while, in one of the barns. Nesting in the loam floor. A beekeeper came to transfer them to a proper hive out in the open, close to the orchard. For a few years, they thrived there until the colony died out. The hive was attacked by wasps and there was nothing left of them, only the dark honeycomb all empty and the shells of dead bees.

  Gregor talks about a house he stayed in that was full of wasps, when he was travelling in the USA, out there in the mountains of Colorado, in one of those mining towns where the frontier men went to dig for lead and other metals.

  ‘I swear, they were everywhere,’ Gregor says. He speaks with a husk of protection around his words, without metaphor. It is not easy to extract any secondary meaning.

  ‘It was a big old wooden house and they were crawling up and down the sash windows, trying to get out to the light. Desperate for water. I told the woman of the house about them, so she came and killed a whole load of them, then she tried to flush them down the toilet but they were still floating around when I came back that night after the concert. They were all over the bed, alive again, so I had to kill about a dozen of them myself. Next morning there were dozens more alive again at the window. Must have been nesting right in the walls.’

  Daniel goes back to pick up the apples he dropped, still keeping his eye on every wasp in his vicinity.

  ‘For an environmentalist,’ Martin comments, ‘you’re very mistrustful of insects, Daniel.’

  Daniel smiles. ‘They have it in for me, those things.’

  ‘He was stung by a hornet when he was a boy,’ Mara explains.

  Why does she mention the hornet? Why here? The mood has turned serious and Gregor finds Daniel staring at him now.

  ‘They’re protected,’ Thorsten says, as a fact. ‘It’s illegal to kill a hornet.’

  ‘How would you like to be stung by a hornet?’ Juli says, turning on Gregor as though she felt the pain herself.

  Her words reveal the hurt passed on. She must know that the hornet sting all those years ago is still associated with Gregor leaving. Daniel crying at night as a boy and the neighbours in the town where they were staying on holiday in the mountains coming over with aloe vera ointment. The pain is gone now, but the memory of it returns, prolonged by each year that Gregor spent away from his family. Daniel crying months later because his father was gone. Still asking for his father years later and pointing to the spot where the hornet sent the hot, poisoned sword into the back of his leg.

  ‘You fucked off after that,’ Daniel says. ‘You left your family.’

  The orchard is thrown into silence. The outburst seems at odds with the calmness and the intense hum draped over this gathering. The pain has come back and everyone looks at Gregor.

  ‘Daniel, please,’ Mara intervenes. ‘You promised.’

  Martin sucks the hostility out of the air by changing the subject. He smooths over the tension by ignoring Daniel’s words, pretending there is some acoustic black hole in the orchard by which nobody heard anything. Instead, he mentions a Beach Boys’ song he heard in the car on the way down. ‘Good Vibrations’.

  He begins to howl some of the words of the hit song. ‘Good, good, good…‘

  ‘That’s your era, isn’t it?’ Daniel mocks.

  ‘It’s a classic that,’ Martin says. ‘I never knew that the wobbly instrument was invented by a Russian.’

  ‘Theremin,’ Gregor says. ‘Leon Theremin. He tried to sell it in the USA, but then Stalin sent the KGB after him. Ended his days in the Gulag.’

  ‘Then the Beach Boys got a hold of it.’

  Once again Martin begins to imitate the sound of the theremin. Gregor joins in, adding the instrumentation and the harmonies. Martin picks up the rake and plays air guitar with it for a moment. When they calm down again,
Martin leans the rake back up against the tree and quotes one of the lines from the hit song with a puzzled expression.

  ‘I don’t know where but she sends me there.’

  He pauses for a moment and translates the words into German.

  ‘Ich weiss nicht wohin aber sie treibt mich dahin.’

  They laugh together for a while at that and then go back to concentrating on picking the apples.

  Thirteen

  He knows only that he was left alone a lot as a child. There are certain doorways, certain architectural features, entrance hallways and stairwells of a green or beige colour which will always remind him of the house where he stayed every day after school. Because his mother had to work in order to keep things going after the war, he was kept in a home until she came to collect him. For a while she worked at night, in a bakery, so then he had to stay overnight in the care centre. To this day, he still gets the chalky taste of pea soup at the back of his throat every time he’s reminded of that place. He knows they were not very nice to him there. He knows that he was left for long periods in the cot. He knows that he was calling the nurse, but when she came it was already too late. She smiled as she slapped him in the face. She said it was the most disgusting painting she had ever seen in her whole life, a train at the end of the cot and tracks going all the way along the wall. He remembers them hosing him down with cold water in the bath. He must have been crying afterwards, because a woman came over to his cot. She was collecting her own son, but stopped to stroke Gregor’s head and told him he would be collected very soon, too. He remembers the worried look on the other boy’s face watching his mother sharing that precious affection around so indiscriminately.

  His own mother didn’t like him playing in the rubble with other children as he grew up. He had died in those ruins before. She preferred him to stay inside with her, making lists together. It was her way of dealing with life, holding everything in place, writing it all down methodically.