Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  She found some bread and tried to feed him, but he shook his head. She hummed more forcefully in order to obscure the terror of intimate screams coming down the corridor, stripped of all dignity. Cries beyond endurance, beyond submission, on the extremity of reason, close to death and sometimes almost beyond death itself, but all the more desperate to hold on. Inflicted by men whose confirmation of life came from the debasement of life. Whose self-esteem came at the expense of dehumanising others. Whose merciless skill in keeping people on the edge of life had become their only validity to power.

  She could hear nothing any more. She remembered something and began to search in the boy’s pockets until she found the sweet, the green sweet he had been given by Emil and told to keep for later. She took it out and placed it in the boy’s mouth. It calmed him down right away and she rocked him while he sucked on it and stared with his eyes open into the dark.

  And then it came to an end. Quite suddenly, she heard them running through the corridor. For a moment she thought they were coming back for her. But they ran past, out into the street. They left behind a crushed silence that went on for hours. She thought it was a trap and could not gather the strength even to call out his name, to say: ‘Max, are you all right?’ She feared the ugliness of human suffering. She feared his silence. Heard nothing until some time near dawn when American soldiers burst in, pointing rifles, finding her sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a boy fast asleep in her arms.

  She was standing in the street when they brought Uncle Max out on a stretcher. The medics must have given him something to stop the pain, but his face terrified her and she didn’t want the boy to see any of this. She turned his face in towards her with both hands, almost suffocating him in her coat. Max held a stained cloth up to his eye, and then leaned up on his free arm to speak to her. A cloudy cough, full of gurgling, broken words, spilling blood and saliva down his chin.

  ‘Emil,’ he said. ‘He’s with Gertrude. Down at the lake.’

  It was only years later that she could talk about this to Mara. Details that emerged bit by bit, as though they were in danger of bringing back all the pain once more. The American soldiers questioned her briefly with a translator interpreting her words. They escorted her to a villa close to the lake where Getrude lived, but it was too late and the unfolding events could not be recalled.

  The Gestapo officers had gone to the villa in the early hours. They had found nobody there, only the signs of recent occupants, the smell of a cigar, an empty bottle of wine and two glasses. An unmade bed. An old woman, Gertrude’s infirm mother asleep in another bedroom. Max and Emil’s plan had been uncovered earlier that night. The canister of fuel was of no more use to them, so Emil made an alternative plan. Over the last farewell toast with Gertrude, he knew it was time to escape, this time by boat. He would not leave his friend behind, but Gertrude implored him to go before it was too late.

  She made up a white flag for him. She went down to the wooden fishing pier with him, to where a small canoe was tied up waiting. They embraced and looked across the lake to where the Americans were, confident that Emil’s white flag would be clearly visible but also afraid they might not take any notice. He was in German uniform after all as he pushed the small boat out from the pier, wobbling a good deal from side to side before he sat down and began to row silently away into the darkness across the calm black water. She stood there until he disappeared out of sight.

  Mara has been to visit the town and the villa. There are very few people from that time still alive now. She went to the railway station and stood in the waiting room. She saw the public house on the main street, but the owners had changed hands right after the war, serving schnitzel and hamburgers, converting to a disco bar late in the evening. What used to be the police station had been turned into a fitness centre with kick-boxing classes, extended for weightlifting at the back.

  Down by the lake, the town had spread out along the shore with cafés, restaurants, jewellers and designer stores. A pizza restaurant with the smell of charcoal coming from the oven. The lake had become the high end of the town and some Americans still lived around there, even though the US troops had pulled out of the area. As she walked out along the lake, Mara heard children speaking English with an American accent. They were bouncing on a trampoline and there was a small dog underneath barking. She watched as the children lifted the dog up onto the trampoline, but the dog jumped off again because he preferred to bark and jump on solid ground.

  The lake was not round but more kidney-shaped, with parts of it wrapped around the forest, disappearing from view. It was hard to get to the water in many places because the land was owned right down to the shore, but she found a place in the forest where she could stand and look back at the town from the other side. There were quite a few sailing boats out, even though there was little wind. They were almost stationary, with their sails flapping. Back in the town, she could see a sailing club with long windows onto the water, reflecting the sun and throwing the light into her eyes.

  Standing on the shore, she worked out that he must have rowed straight towards that point where she stood. She wonders what happened. Did he lose the white flag? Did the moon come out suddenly from behind the clouds to expose him?

  He must have seen the orange glow of cigarettes in the trees behind him on the far shore, but how could he be sure they belonged to the Americans and not to the Germans. Was he not rowing to his own death all the time? Ever since he woke up in the field hospital after the nightmare of screaming women in the First World War, he had lived in the minds of women, in the optimism of his songs.

  It was a fatal decision. With all eyes and all military binoculars scanning every inch of water, it was a bad choice, but fully in character with Emil’s life, to risk everything on that final gamble. At some point, a shot must have rung out across the lake, though it could hardly have been distinguishable from the gunfire reaching right into the town and through the streets until it was all over at last.

  His body was never found. He must have slumped over in the boat. The oars must have slipped out of his hands and drifted on the water to go their own way, turning up in different parts of the lake, on a reef or a sandy ledge, depending on the currents and the direction of the breeze. Who knows where his little white tea towel went to? His weight must have taken him over the side of the boat, like somebody asleep in a chair. He must have gone silently into the black water and left the boat rocking for a while, leaving it to drift around for days, possibly even arriving right back where he had started from.

  Later, Mara searched through some of the books written about that time. One published in Great Britain covering the very end of the war and the immediate aftermath. While glancing through illustrations and maps, she came across some photographs. One plate held her attention, a black-and-white shot of the body of a large man lying face down in the water. His head was not visible, submerged in the silted water. His trousers had come off and his grey buttocks could be seen, above the surface. The caption underneath read: The corpse of a German soldier.

  Thirty

  They have all returned to the house now, and in the kitchen, Martin and Daniel are preparing the evening meal. They talk among themselves, sharing hints, remembering to cut the fresh herbs but not to crush them. With the stickiness of garlic on their fingers they plan out the sequencing. Mushrooms picked over. Green beans lying on the counter, washed. Rice soaking. Fruit waiting to be cut up into a fruit salad in a blue porcelain bowl.

  The meal will be constructed like a stage play, in acts, with intervals and plot. A performance of dialogue and laughter linking everything together. The big kitchen table has already been laid, with candles and a large jug of water with a mint sprig floating on the top. The windows are left open so the wasps that have come in during the afternoon will now make their way out again towards the light. Thorsten tells everyone once more to check for ticks, especially those who have been lying on the ground or walking through long grass. Th
ere is a polite queue for the shower. The house has begun to fill up with the smell of cooking from one end and the smell of soap and deodorant and skin creams at the other. Some have taken the time to have a quick sleep. Some have been making phone calls, or sending text messages to a remote world beyond this farm. Thorsten takes a quick look at the news on TV, but the events seem unreal, as fictional as the pale blue light from the screen spreading around the room. Johannes plays a computer game and the blip and drip sounds float through the corridor.

  There is a reluctance to turn on the lights. They want to hold on to the available light left in the rooms. They put on fresh clothes. Their bodies have changed indoors, more self-conscious, more exposed, more in need of privacy and personal space.

  They look in the mirror for reassurance. They construct their physical appearance in the way that they also compose the way they want to be remembered. A face is not so much a physical thing but a story which unfolds in the company of others, a book of interactions, full of smiles and frowns. They should rehearse a range of emotions in the mirror to get any idea of what they look like in company. They should laugh out loud, grimace, cry, give suspicious glances, dagger looks, send hidden messages. The full catalogue of human expressions.

  A clang of serving spoons signals that it is time for dinner and they all emerge. All these faces come together around the table. Martin is wearing a bright blue shirt. Mara has put on a necklace with what looks like a hanging plum. Gregor is now wearing a brown linen shirt and Thorsten has draped a white kitchen towel over his arm to show that he is the waiter.

  They sit around the long table in the kitchen and talk about Africa.

  ‘Have you had your shots already?’ Gregor asks.

  Martin talks about a time when he visited Dar es Salaam. At the train station, a taxi driver put his suitcase in the boot of the car and sat in the driving seat while eight men came to push the car three hundred yards to the hotel. He talks about immigrants who have come from Senegal and Guinea, all the way around the coast to the Canaries and on to Germany. In his law practice, he represents an asylum seeker who clung for days onto the rim of a tuna net before he was rescued.

  The sun has gone down now, but there is light left in the sky. In the orchard, the ladders are propped up in position, waiting for the big crowd next day. New bottles of wine are being opened. Martin sniffs the wine. Then he sniffs Daniel to bring back the recurring joke. They move in a circle of jokes and facts and anecdotes, a dinner table, web page of consumer advice and gossip. They talk about the closure of the inner-city airport and what an opportunity it would be to create a parkland, an urban green lung, part of the Amazon rainforest reclaimed at the heart of Berlin. They talk about holidays and sport and cooking. They praise the meal. The mushrooms are wonderful. They listen to Gregor talking about how he collected them, how he learned to identify them.

  ‘I found a bomb crater,’ he says. ‘In the forest.’

  ‘I’d love to see it,’ Mara says. ‘Is it far from here?’

  ‘It may not be a crater after all,’ he informs her right away, almost retracting the image again. ‘You know, it may be just one of those dumping pits. Though this one was empty. Right in the middle of the forest, far from any farmhouses.’

  ‘We could go there early in the morning,’ Mara says. ‘Before they all arrive. Do you think you can find it again?’

  ‘I think so,’ Gregor says.

  And then the argument finally breaks out around the table. It has been brewing all day, all their lives.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Daniel says, confronting his father at last. ‘You’re still leading her up the garden path with this bombing story.’

  ‘Daniel, please,’ Mara attempts, but she is unable to hold back the debate any longer.

  ‘You made all that up,’ Daniel says. ‘Why don’t you admit it? The whole thing about being a Jewish orphan. It’s all a fabrication, isn’t that so?’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Gregor asks.

  ‘Because there is no proof, is there? There never was any proof.’

  ‘Daniel, it’s important where you come from,’ Mara says.

  ‘Give me a break,’ Juli snaps.

  ‘If it’s so important,’ Daniel continues, ‘then why don’t we do a DNA test? Get it over with. That will solve the mystery once and for all.’

  ‘What,’ Martin bursts in, ‘you want to exhume your grandmother?’

  ‘If that’s what it takes. I’ve got the money for it and all.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Martin says, ‘she doesn’t deserve that.’

  ‘At least it would clear up this uncertainty,’ Daniel says. ‘Look, I don’t give a shit where I come from. All I know is that my father wasn’t around when I was growing up.’

  He turns to Gregor, once more, pointing his finger this time.

  ‘Why don’t you do the decent thing and finally tell us that it was all made up?’

  There is silence at the table. Mara gets up. She goes around to take Daniel by the arm. Then she goes around to Gregor and takes his arm also.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I want to show you both something.’

  While the others remain seated, she escorts them down the corridor to a room at the end. The house was built to accommodate a family of twelve, maybe even more, two sets of grandparents and perhaps a number of other relatives who came to work on the harvest each year. The last room has been used by Mara to store all the furniture that came from Gregor’s home.

  Gregor enters like a child. In one corner by the window stands the round dining-room table and chairs which stood for years in his home in the suburbs of Nuremberg. On the walls, the same photographs of his ancestors which stared down on him as a child. It was impossible to escape their gaze.

  ‘I took photographs,’ Mara says.

  ‘This is insane,’ Daniel says. ‘Do you not see what you’ve done to her?’

  ‘Daniel,’ Mara says. ‘Wait. Be patient for a moment. I want you to see this thing I’ve found. Don’t say anything more until we go through this.’

  In front of them is the home that Gregor disowned. The curtains, the rug at the centre of the room, the entire nausea of home come to life. The fatigue in the furniture, the boredom trapped in the embroidered tablecloth, the raised voices, the long sigh of Gregor’s teenage years, the martyred silences, all the false hopes and frail family achievements clinging like a musty scent. Plates and knives and napkin rings. Even some of the antlers. All the worthless objects of a lifetime elevated into a family documentary, containing human breath.

  ‘I tried to keep as much as I could,’ she says. ‘I’ve gone through all the letters.’

  Against the wall stands the sideboard, with neat stacks of letters on top. Each pile bound together with a ribbon and marked with a small card. Letters from Uncle Max. Letters from Gregor. Letters from people on the far side of the Berlin Wall. Magazines from the sixties. Gregor’s school reports. A box full of rubbers and pens and nibs and jars of ink that have gone dry by now. A sharpener and a glass jar full of colouring pencils.

  ‘Look, your records,’ Mara points out. His first collection of albums. There were posters on the walls. Bedroom graffiti. Music scores. Notes taken down from books at a time when there were so few words in his life he could trust.

  There, too, the photograph of his grandfather Emil, laughing. A tall, handsome man, thin as a pin, standing in his uniform before he went off to the First World War. Alongside it, the other photograph of the same man in later years, almost unrecognisable, after he had put on so much weight. The fat man who lifted him up on the truck and gave him the red sweet to eat right away and the other green one to keep for later. All the recurring dreams of searching for that second sweet and never finding it. All the unanswered questions. All the gaps filled by his own imagination, guessing what was out of reach.

  Thirty-one

  After Gregor went back to live in Germany, they found the door of his cottage in Ireland wide open. A young boy
wandering around the fields by the shore on the east coast discovered that it had been abandoned and reported to his parents that the German was gone. The boy had heard him playing the trumpet a number of times in the distance and spoken to him on occasion on his way home from school. He had asked him questions and Gregor had told him that he was from Berlin. The boy was impressed by the fact that he had played in bands and said he would love to go and hear him play, but he seemed too young to be allowed into bars at night. Instead, he managed to get Gregor to play the trumpet for him one afternoon outside the cottage. But when he went back again on another occasion, he found the door open and nobody inside. Cats had got in and already sniffed over everything to see if there was anything left to eat. The place was unoccupied, only a few books left behind, and some newspapers, nothing of any value, just enough to indicate that the place had been inhabited up to a particular date and then suddenly abandoned.

  Did this Irish boy remind Gregor too much of his own son? Did he perceive in these random meetings, all that time and all the conversations which had been lost with Daniel? The innocence. The admiration. That loose way of talking without obligation.

  The local people wondered what brought him to this remote place by the sea. They said he kept to himself pretty much. They often saw him cycling to the train station and they heard him playing the trumpet and some of them said it was like a miracle growth promoter, because it was great for the roses. What was he hiding from? they asked themselves. And what made him disappear so suddenly, dropping everything and leaving without a trace? Some of them got it into their heads that he might have been a war criminal. They must have uncovered his hideout and he was forced to find himself a new sanctuary, possibly in South America. Older people, better at guessing his age, knew that he would have been too young to have taken any part in the Second World War. So maybe he was more a spy, from the East German state.