Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  The yard is enclosed in a rectangular shape by buildings on all sides, leaving access to the fields at each corner. Everything seems to have moved on and left this farm behind now. A barn owl comes in the late afternoons from time to time to sit on the roof or in the plum tree at the centre of the yard. The weeds are growing everywhere and maybe nature may yet manage to have the last word.

  Could the old fairy tales be coming back? Or did they ever disappear? Once a year in a nearby village, the women wear their traditional dresses, claiming that the legend of Red Riding Hood sprang up here centuries ago. They have marked a place in the forest where they believe a small girl in her red cape was abducted on her way to see her grandmother. Was there something darker about the original story that made it too difficult to tell in any other form but in a fairy tale? Is it possible that the tale of Red Riding Hood was invented in answer to sexual predators of the time, and that the wolf became loaded with all the unspeakable crimes of society? Just as some people now believe the story of the seven dwarfs was based on child labourers working in the mines. Mara has seen the women in the village, around fifty Red Riding Hoods of all ages gathering together. They march into the local bar and order schnapps. Old and young women in red hoods, celebrating the day when the predator was defeated and ended up in the well with a meal of rocks in his stomach.

  ‘Thorsten was brought up in Berlin,’ Mara says. ‘Katia told me that when his mother was taking him to school on the S-Bahn, they used to pass by the Berlin Wall and see the soldiers and the dogs below them. He would ask her questions and his mother would answer them quite honestly.’

  She reconstructs the surreal conversation which Thorsten and his mother had going to school, with everyone on the train listening to the banal, but absolutely correct answers.

  ‘Mama, why are the dogs there?’ Thorsten asked.

  ‘To stop people going over the Wall,’ she answered.

  ‘What is the Wall there for?’

  ‘To protect us from the capitalists, son.’

  ‘Who are the capitalists?’

  ‘People who love money.’

  ‘Do we not like money?’

  ‘No,’ his mother answered. ‘We hate money. It makes you sick. It makes you want to buy nice things.’

  Mara says there was nothing that anyone listening in on the train could argue with. But the innocence of the questions and the answers must have sounded absurd, mocking the entire socialist system even if what she was saying was absolutely bang in line with Communist dogma. The clarity of the child’s questions and the simplicity of the mother’s answers always revealed the lies inside the system.

  ‘Are they all sick over there?’ Thorsten asked, pointing across the Berlin Wall to the other side.

  ‘Yes,’ his mother would answer. ‘They’re all sick over there because they want to do nothing else but shop.’

  It went on for weeks like that, his mother answering every question correctly and innocently, everything going along with a socialist view of the world, but all the passengers listening in knowing that the answers sounded completely daft.

  ‘What did the other passengers say?’ Martin asks.

  ‘They kept their mouths shut, mostly,’ Mara says. ‘They stared ahead and ignored it. Except for one man, who once said her attitude was disgraceful and that she should stay quiet. So she barked back at him and asked him what he would answer to all those questions. “You answer them,” she said. After they got off, another woman quietly came up to her and, without saying anything, shook her hand. Thorsten kept asking the same questions every day going to school, because he was fascinated by the sight of the soldiers and the dogs and the barbed wire and the lookout towers. But even more than that, he was obsessed with the strange answers that his mother gave. Eventually, an official came to the house one day and told her she was no longer permitted to travel on the S-Bahn. And it was not long after that that only special people could travel that close to the Wall.’

  With the large doors open on both sides of the building, the farm almost looks operational again, as though the cattle are merely out in the fields and will soon be returning for the night. The sunlight slopes into these dusty, forsaken halls now, along the loam floor and through the empty pens, casting shadows. The air is full of sound memories, hooves, chains, clanging buckets, the lowing of cows and the whistling farmhands. The reimagined smells of dung and straw. Old leather straps and blinkers and cobwebbed harnesses still hang on the walls. At the centre of the doorway onto the fields, a swing has been erected on long ropes.

  ‘How do you think Daniel will manage in Africa?’ Gregor wonders.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Mara says. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘As long as they get all their shots.’

  ‘He’s got Juli with him,’ Mara says. ‘And she’s a tough one.’

  ‘Like a bodyguard,’ Martin says. ‘I don’t think Putin has a better security team around himself than that.’

  Mara steps towards the swing and sits in the wooden seat. Martin stands behind her, ready to push. They fall into the roles of children without giving it a thought.

  ‘Remember that rash he got once,’ Martin says.

  ‘What rash?’ Gregor asks.

  ‘He got this terrible rash behind the knees,’ Mara explains. ‘Lasted for about a year. We took him to all kinds of specialists.’

  ‘Leprosy,’ Martin says.

  ‘I actually thought it had something to do with the hornet sting,’ Mara says. ‘Had to get him a dozen different ointments. We even tried acupuncture. In the end it just disappeared again. Complete mystery.’

  Gregor becomes aware of how much has been lost by his former absence. He would like to claim back some of those details, but they don’t belong to him. She has used the word ‘we’ to incorporate Martin into those intimate family episodes, because he was there to help at the time when Gregor was abroad. Looking out into the fields at the stubble and the blonde rectangles of straw still waiting to be picked up and brought in for storage, he feels what is missing.

  ‘His outburst this morning,’ Gregor says. ‘There’s something he wants to get off his chest.’

  ‘He hasn’t mentioned anything to me,’ Mara says.

  ‘He’s never really forgiven me,’ Gregor says.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I feel it. There’s something on his mind,’ Gregor says.

  ‘You haven’t really talked much recently, have you?’

  ‘I thought we’d sorted everything out,’ Gregor says. ‘But there’s something wrong. I know he still blames me. I can feel it coming. From her, from Juli as much as from Daniel.’

  ‘He needs to go away and clear his head,’ Martin says.

  ‘Maybe Africa will change him.’

  ‘He’s just like you,’ Martin says. ‘He has to travel and discover himself. You’ll see. He’ll come back in a year’s time and the two of you will have so much to talk about.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better if he gets it off his chest before he leaves,’ Mara says.

  She settles into the seat and begins to swing in and out. With the help of Martin, she sails into the open air. Her dress rises up in the breeze and she appears to go right out into the landscape with her bare legs pointing towards the lake. The ropes are very long, four metres at least up to the frame of the doorway, and she swings like a young girl defying all instincts for safety, feeling the narcotic, funfair rush inside her stomach. Out into the blinding sunlight and right back into the shade of the farm building, speeding back and forth through the entrance full of hovering dust and flies. Higher and higher with her eyes closed, as though she wants to continue going all the way up to the sun. Leaning back with the ropes in her hands and her feet stretched out in order to gain the maximum height. Returning with her hair going forward and knees folded so as to keep going, almost up as far as the heavy wooden beams crossing under the roof.

  Twenty-two

  There was a frightening moment soon after Gr
egor left. Coming back from shopping one day, Mara parked across the street from the apartment. She let Daniel out and went around for the groceries, handed him one of the bags and before she had time to remind him not to cross, he disappeared. She heard the screaming tyres. Saw the car skidding. Daniel shivering and clutching the bag with both hands up to his chin, still waiting for the impact, almost smiling with fear for a split second. She smelled the burning rubber and ran out to grab him in a panic, even though she had all the time in the world now. The car had come to a stop at a slight angle. The driver sat with his hands on the steering wheel, unable to move, unable to speak.

  She’s gone over these details a thousand times, trying to put them behind her. The dry mouth, speechless aftershock. Measuring and remeasuring the short distance between luck and disaster. The compound range of confusing emotions springing up between rage and passivity. The urge to kill the driver. Followed by an equal wave of guilt and compassion as he stepped out of the car and leaned over to be sick. The spectators raising their heads over the parked cars in judgement, converting the scene into a parable for their own children. And the sudden awareness of her own vulnerability. That cold feeling around the shoulders. She had dropped the keys out of her hand. Some of the groceries rolled under the car. Afterwards she discovered that somebody had made off with her purse, while she stood in the middle of the street lifting Daniel up in her arms and turned, out of sheer habit, to say something to Gregor, even though he was no longer there.

  ‘I thought you were watching him,’ she wanted to say, though she cannot remember if this was actually said out loud or only inside her own head.

  Back in the safety of the apartment, she kneeled down and shook Daniel by the shoulders. Clenched her fist, telling him never to do this to her again. Then she cried and hugged him, saying: ‘I’m sorry, Mama didn’t mean to be cross with you.’

  She wrote to Gregor and told him about that incident. They were in contact all the time, by letters and by occasional phone calls from Toronto. She would pass the phone to Daniel and allow him to speak to his father for a few precious moments, but there was nothing much to say at that remove. Gregor remarked on how tall the buildings were. How cold it was in the winter. But it was making no sense to Daniel that his father was away and not coming back soon. Gregor sent gifts for them on their birthdays. Mara assured him that Daniel was very happy and well taken care of. He spent time with her sisters, and Martin was also being very good to him, often inviting him to stay overnight with his family.

  Daniel sometimes woke up at night, dreaming of hornets. She had to take him into her bed to calm him down, tell him the windows were all shut and there was no possible way that a hornet could enter the house. He heard buzzing. He imagined them hiding behind wardrobes and nesting in the curtains. Brightly coloured creatures with sickle blades ready to attack as soon as he went to sleep.

  They avoided the obvious questions of fidelity. Of course, Gregor would meet other women. The music business was full of drifters and casual adoration and promises of uncomplicated love. It was hard to discuss it on the phone and too blunt to put into letters. The conversations were tough and tearful enough as they were. So they maintained that proxy, long-distance marriage which so many immigrants and seasonal workers all over the world live with all the time.

  The only way of getting closer to Gregor now was to go back to Nuremberg. She took Daniel with her on these visits and rebuilt a family relationship from the evidence of ruins. It was soon clear that Daniel meant the world to his grandmother.

  ‘Look,’ she said, smiling at the boy. ‘He’s the image of his great-grandfather, Emil.’

  Mara looked sceptical.

  ‘Before he got fat, that is.’

  They placed the photographs alongside Daniel’s face. A strange family science, comparing eyes and cheekbones and mouths, wishing the resemblances to life.

  With all this added attention, Daniel became fond of his grandmother. They formed an immediate friendship, perhaps actively encouraged by Mara so that she could spend more time investigating. A family spy, hoping to uncover some vital piece of information. She took Daniel to the funeral of Gregor’s father when he died. And in the following summer, while Gregor’s mother was grieving, they often stayed over the entire weekend, even going up to the mountain lodge where Gregor and his father used to spend so much time when he was growing up.

  Mara had taken Daniel to see Gregor’s father in hospital before he died. And maybe the time had come for an open discussion. Perhaps Gregor’s mother had only been obedient to some post-war pact with her husband and would now be in a position to reveal the real story. As they became more familiar, Mara brought up the subject of Gregor’s origins more directly.

  ‘Why would he have made up a story like this?’

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘Only Gregor can tell you that.’

  She ran into a dead end each time. It was depressing to find nothing at all. They went over the war years and Mara noted every detail in her head, often writing things down afterwards in a notebook. Then she would send letters off to Canada again, though Gregor refused to get into the circle at all and said he was not joining a history club. What amazed Mara during these long discussions in Nuremberg was how close the story of Gregor’s mother tallied with that of Gregor, apart from the one essential fact. He was not an orphan. His identity was clearly that of a German boy, an only son, who had grown up in Nuremberg and began to fantasise about having a different life.

  ‘Strange,’ Mara would say. ‘Very strange, don’t you think, that he would have made up such an elaborate story?’

  ‘I blame Uncle Max,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For putting all that stuff into Gregor’s head.’

  ‘And why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he was going mad. Because he was guilty. Don’t ask me. All I know is that Gregor started becoming obsessed with himself, looking in the mirror, asking endless questions and imagining things that were completely outlandish.’

  Mara was conscripted by this family duty, not so much for Gregor’s but for Daniel’s sake, bringing a lost family back together. She was charged with the task of establishing Daniel’s true identity, even if Gregor’s was beyond reach already.

  Sometimes she felt the futility of all this. Was your identity not something you chose, as much as something you rejected? Characterised by those elements you admire as well as those you deny. Daniel’s identity was not so much inherited any more. It had little to do with religion, with history or with geography, even less with his place of birth or his ancestors. His identity was something in the making. Already, Martin was taking Daniel to football matches, buying him a blue-and-white scarf, giving him a feeling of belonging in the city, a family of inhabitants, a spooling of emotions into one large unlikely commune.

  She found herself walking around the house in Nuremberg, imagining Gregor when he was Daniel’s age. She observed the reactions of her own son to the antlers on the walls, the guns lined up in a rack behind glass, the hunting prints depicting dogs and men jumping out of bushes to pounce on a wild boar with gleaming tusks. The unimaginable height to which a heavy wild boar could jump to get away from his pursuers. She noticed that, just like his father, Daniel was afraid of the stuffed badger on the landing, until Gregor’s mother finally agreed that the claws looked a bit threatening and placed it somewhere else.

  Everywhere the household items that would have been so familiar to Gregor. Were they not part of his identity as well, the fridge, the TV set, the shape and position of the radiators? The visual content of his memory, the logo of family possessions and home smells and peculiarities. The radio in the kitchen on top of the fridge. The carved wooden pastry print with the faces of Max and Moritz on the wall. The piano in the living room with the pictures of Emil above. The ring of glass trinkets and vases and ornaments on the sideboard every time somebody walke
d by. Even the handprints and finger marks around the light switches.

  She wondered what it was like to have no identity, the loneliness of belonging to a people who had no disguise.

  In the hallway, there was a full-length mirror which Gregor had told her about, how he stood there and imagined where he came from in the East. His mother confirmed that he had always been an insomniac. It may have had to do with the antlers. Or maybe it was the clock chiming every half an hour in the living room.

  Gregor used to get up and wander around the house at night, creeping down the stairs so as not to wake his parents. He knew every creak in the floorboards. He had to reimagine all the furniture in the dark so that he would not crash into the coffee table or the sideboard. He took fright at the shape of animals on the wall as if they were not quite dead yet. A speck of light coming to life in the eyes of a dead deer. The grimace of a mountain goat. The antique hunting rifles hanging over every doorway. The coat rack in the hallway like another set of antlers with coats hanging down like dripping skins. And the shoes and boots left just inside the door which always made it look as though his parents had evaporated.

  ‘He used to stand in front of that mirror at night,’ Mara said.