Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  Why does Gregor remember that moment in the truck so well, more than any other? Why is everything else such a blur, before and after? Sometimes he cannot distinguish between his memory and what he has been told, between what he experienced and what he has read in books. He is made up of all those things that he has heard about and read about. All the things he rejected as much as the things he accepted, what he believed as much as what he didn’t believe.

  This journey in the truck remains a real memory. A concrete recollection. No question about that. Gregor recalls the pictures of his grandfather at home when he grew up. The innocent appearance of Grandfather Emil in uniform just after he enlisted in the First World War, that boyish idealism before battle. He remembers the photographs of the bloated, beer-drinking grandfather, much later at the start of the Second World War, that mischievous smile for which he was so well liked.

  He can remember him singing, or humming, as he drove the truck. Even though Gregor must have been half deaf with the ear infection, he could feel the vibrations broad-casting through his chest. He will never forget the warmth of this man behind him, letting him drive the truck. And maybe it’s so vivid in his memory now because that journey came to an end. In the middle of the night, the truck stopped and they had to get out, with the blanket over their heads now to hold off the rain. Is that the reason why he remembers it so well, because he wanted to get back on the truck and never get off again?

  He cannot remember when he ate the second sweet, because he has no memory of a green sweet, only the red one. He thinks he lost it, because he searched for it in his pocket. He doesn’t know how it went missing.

  Are the happiest memories always overshadowed by loss? Just as the bad memories must be counterweighted by good times? Maybe this missing boiled sweet is somehow caught up with the larger loss which cannot be accessed any more. It replaces all the missing people and places and events that he has forgotten. Even as an adult, he still has the recurring dream of finding the green sweet in a place where he never looked before. Some inside pocket he forgot to check.

  He can recall very little else from that night. He must have fallen asleep in the truck, because the fat man woke him up, calling, ‘Gregor, Gregor.’ Again and again he heard his soft, singing voice, two descending notes that will forever be associated with the journey being over, the cruelty of waking up with a pain in his ear and the time in the truck coming to an end.

  The fat man opened the door and the cold morning air came in. He lifted him down and helped the woman out. He had to stay with the woman, because the fat man had to go elsewhere. He promised to be back soon, that much he could understand from his gestures alone. The fat man smiled and held up a fuel canister, shook it to show that it was empty and pointed down the street. He saw him getting on the truck and driving away. There was a house on fire at the end of the road, he remembers. The rain was falling and the flames were going up into the sky at the same time. The sky was orange. The fire brigade was standing in front of the house spraying water through the windows. The woman took him into the train station, where they waited, wrapped in the blanket, with lots of other people in the same room and steam rising from their wet clothes. They waited and waited and waited, but the fat man never came back.

  Four

  He is glad to see the shape of the house where Mara is staying. The low roof surrounded by trees and open farmlands. He has been here before, but it’s some time ago now, in the spring. This time there is a tight blonde stubble left behind in the fields by the machines and rectangular bales of hay placed at intervals. He has switched off the music in the car so he can hear the crows in the nearby woods. Nobody comes out to greet him, so he remains sitting in the car for a moment with the window open, listening. He’s not accustomed to the lack of formality in the country, with no doorbell. He wonders if he should go to the front of the house or whether it’s best to go round the back. He thinks of calling them on his mobile phone, but that seems a little absurd, a real city thing to do.

  He takes the bag with the bottles of wine and the basket of mushrooms from the boot of the car. The main door of the farmhouse is facing out towards an ancient cast-iron pump in the middle of the yard. The yard is deserted, surrounded by farm buildings. The porch over the main door is half covered in creeper and some of the windows, too, are overgrown with wild roses. The place looks uninhabited, but then he sees Mara’s car parked at the other end and hears voices round the back. A child laughing somewhere. And Mara coming towards him with her arms out.

  ‘Gregor. We didn’t hear you coming,’ she says.

  ‘I thought I was in the wrong place,’ Gregor says.

  He gives her the bag with the wine. Then he holds out the basket of wild mushrooms.

  ‘Mushrooms,’ Mara exclaims.

  She seems surprised, but her smile is quick to come back. She doesn’t expect him to explain. She knows the story of mushrooms in his family.

  Gregor’s father was a hunting fanatic, shaped by war, a man who wanted his son to stay close to the earth and develop heightened survival instincts. So he taught him how to collect mushrooms and berries and plants which could be cooked and eaten in times of decline. On his birthday, Gregor was often given a survival manual. He was brought up to prepare himself for catastrophe. Ready for things that had already happened and for even worse to come. He grew up with all that Boy Scout knowledge of how to light fires without matches, how to preserve food, how to live in freezing conditions. By the time he was nine, he was ready to spend his first night out in the forest alone. His father wanted him to be able to survive long after the rest of civilisation had been extinguished, though he never explained what he should do if he was the last person left on earth.

  As a boy, he loved this challenge. It was a great game. His father was as tough and uncompromising as the elements. He preferred the laws of nature to the conventions of society. He trusted nobody and made comparisons between animals and human behaviour. He wanted Gregor to understand the world as a contest, to respect nature as the only guide to what was genuine and what was false. To stay alive he had to become an expert on poison, on treachery. So his father set tests for him in the forest. Contrived a family game of Russian roulette with deadly mushrooms in which Gregor would stand in front of three varieties in separate containers, all of them looking very much the same. One of them fatal. The others safe to eat.

  His mother would stand looking on from the hunting lodge that his father bought for half-nothing after the war, the one place in the world where he felt his rule was absolute, this brutal contest with the environment in which he triumphed over everything.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ she would say. ‘Klaus, is this really necessary? Have we not had enough of this in the war?’

  But that was precisely the point of it all. His father never got past the rules of war. Those split-second judgements, those warrior instincts which people had adapted so successfully into sporting activities, were still regarded by him as the ground rules of life and death. You had to be ready to return to the wild, to the most basic forms of life. Perhaps all this was an oblique way of describing what his father went through for years in Russian captivity but never wished to speak about directly. Gregor stood there in the first glorious moment of peacetime in Europe and held his family’s life in his hands. It was his choice. And whatever he picked out would be put into the meal. ‘Are you sure?’ His father would ask him once more with a sceptical expression, because you could not guess. Guessing was defeat.

  With his nervous mother looking on, he would pick the variety he thought was safe. She was a martyr, maybe half hoping they would all be poisoned one day so that she could then say to her husband, ‘Look, I told you so.’ She was also profoundly shaped by war and hunger and hated any game with food. She hated seeing food wasted and constantly made people eat up, long after they had no appetite, which is possibly why Gregor never feels hungry, even now.

  It was she who cooked the mushrooms and Gregor remembers the
smell exploding in the forest air. They would eat the meal and his father would smile to himself. Only he knew for sure whether they were eating the lethal substance or not. They could all be found dead weeks later, lying around the mountain shack in various poses of agony, holding their stomachs, tongues swollen, dehydrated, bowels running, a delusional scrawl made with fingernails along the earth as they dragged themselves away in search of water.

  Gregor never knew the conclusive result of his decision until much later. He knew the mildly poisonous mushrooms would manifest themselves within hours, but the deadly ones would only show up after twenty-four hours, or after a few days, even weeks later, by which time there was very little that could be done. The best mycologist in the world could not save them. He knew that some mushrooms were very deceptive. After all the vomiting and cramps, there would follow a strange kind of remission where you felt much better and even started laughing at the idea of being poisoned, just before you died. There are some varieties that have only recently been declared poisonous, varieties that people have been eating for years and which have only now begun to kill. In Poland, just across the border from where they stand now, a mother and daughter were recently killed by repeated ingestion of a milky green mushroom that was always safe and that he remembers choosing himself many times in the test.

  One day he failed to make the right choice. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a time of innocence, before the truth was revealed to him about many things. One fine day in autumn, just like this one, he suddenly realised he had made the wrong decision. Within an hour or two of eating, Gregor began to see the world in blue. They were out along the trail, with his father ahead, holding the gun on his arm, pointed downwards, half cocked. His mother had stayed behind at the lodge, reclining in the hammock with a magazine on her lap and the portable radio playing the local American Army station. Country songs fading into the distance behind them as they walked further and further into the trees until the music was only a faint memory, far away on the other side of the mountain.

  Everything turned monochrome, as though he was looking through a shard of blue glass. His father had become a giant blue insect ahead of him. The tree trunks turned navy. The grass and the weeds, a mat of blue fur along the ground. He thought of his mother’s fashion magazines, with all the blue handbags and sunglasses and lotions with the prices written underneath. Blue women in brassieres and corsets. Women in tweed suits half sitting on the bonnet of sports cars.

  He began to feel the nausea. He went on for a while without saying a word, afraid to stop and tell his father that they were all going to die. Afraid of his father’s disappointment at finding out that his family would be extinguished and the rest of civilisation would go on as before. His father kept striding away to his death without a word. Maybe he could endure much more. In the war he ate maggots. He ate gruel that would have killed a wild boar. He ate insects and bits of fungus and kept it all down with the kind of formidable mental discipline and a stomach as indestructible as an enamel bucket.

  Did his father get it wrong? Did he really allow the family to consume the poisonous food as part of the lesson? Did he deliberately place three poisonous varieties in the bowls, like a double bind, or was it a genuine mistake? He thought of his mother already writhing in her hammock, tearing out photographs of women in brassieres, reaching for the glass of iced blue wine on the porch of the hunting lodge.

  Gregor staggered on his feet, his blue father swaying ahead of him along the path. The earth swirling, the same way that it did when he used to spin himself around as a child, his first experience of narcotics. He wanted to call his father back and explain what was happening, but then he collapsed.

  He woke up running, half carried by his father. Minutes later, they were driving through the blue landscape, down into the nearest town where all the people were blue in the streets. But then, as soon as he got to the hospital, all the colours became normal once more. Just as suddenly as the blue wash had covered his eyes, it disappeared. The nurses measuring his pulse did not have blue faces. ‘It’s gone,’ he told them. ‘The blue colour is gone.’ He heard his father speaking in a low voice to the doctors, giving the name of the mushroom they had eaten, saying it was absolutely impossible that the boy was poisoned. He swore with his hand on his heart that he would never leave something like that to chance. Luck was not something he would want his son to base his life on. So the only explanation left was that Gregor must have had an allergy. Or more than likely, his father said, that he made it all up. Gregor’s pulse and breathing were fine. So were the blood tests and the urine tests. He told his mother that he never wanted to eat mushrooms again. He said he was finished with the forest, but his father said that was all nonsense, more like falling off the bike. The only thing to be done was to get back up.

  Mara has put the mushrooms inside the house in the shade. She comes out and pulls Gregor by the arm, over to a table set under a tree where the rest are sitting under the shade.

  ‘We’re just having second breakfast,’ she says.

  He approaches the table and goes around shaking hands with everyone. Thorsten, Mara’s brother-in-law, rushes around to get him a chair, finding an even spot on the flagstones. Katia is there with her five-year-old boy, Johannes. She is pregnant and sits with the sunshine coming through the tree, landing directly onto her belly. The skin is so taut that her naval protrudes like an embossed symbol. Martin, Gregor’s best friend, gets up to give him a big embrace, slapping him on the back.

  ‘What kept you?’ he asks in a friendly way. ‘We’ve been working here for hours.’

  ‘Sure. I believe you,’ Gregor returns.

  ‘Gregor has collected all these wild mushrooms for the dinner,’ Mara says. She whips away some of the crumbs from the table and sets out a new place, pours coffee. There is a basket of fresh bread in the middle. One or two wasps hover around the jam.

  ‘You haven’t really started already?’ Gregor asks.

  ‘They were up at six in the morning,’ Mara says, nodding towards Thorsten and Katia.

  ‘We were delayed,’ Thorsten says. ‘There was a young deer lost in the orchard when we came to start in the morning. Running in every direction, completely frantic. We had to leave the ladders for a while and disappear until it found its way back out through the gate. Otherwise, it would have run itself against the fence all the time.’

  Beyond the orchard wall, Gregor can see the outline of a tall ladder leaning into one of the trees. He wants to tell them about the bomb crater in the forest, but instead he tells them how the forests are full of mushrooms. Mara seems happy that he has arrived. She tells him that Daniel is on his way, with his girlfriend.

  He finds himself wondering if he would ever manage alone in the wild without other people. What if the new catastrophe really does come? All those survival skills taught to him by his father seem to be of little use now, sitting here around the table. And how long could you survive mentally, that was the question? Living alone in the city is sometimes a struggle in itself, but there is a comfort in the anonymity and belonging that he finds there. He needs the reassurance of the streets, the clustering of people, the quiet feeling of support provided by their numbers. Even those moments of aggression experienced in the city bring some kind of odd confirmation of life. He needs to be able to sit in a bar, without speaking, just knowing that other people are around him. He is afraid of emptiness. After all that training by his father, he thinks he may be useless in situations of great calamity. When the next great disaster approaches and people are running in all directions again, Gregor feels he might end up being a coward. Who knows, he may not even realise how bad things are and keep going on in some naive delusion that everything is fine. In distress, he might make all the wrong decisions, pick the wrong mushrooms. Ultimately, he may have ended up exactly the same as all the other hopelessly interdependent people living in the city, unable to live without cups and spoons and takeaway coffee. Helpless without newspapers and
the Internet and public transport and places to congregate. Helpless without the city’s memory coming up everywhere through the streets. Helpless without the shelter of history.

  Five

  Gregor Liedmann grew up thinking that he had been preserved, like a dead animal. He had reasons to suspect that he was not the biological son of his parents. There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish. At some point he decided to run away from home and eventually ended up in Berlin in the late sixties, a city full of peeling facades and people on the run from something or another. Whenever he was asked, he would explain that he had been found as a three-year-old boy among refugees during the last days of the war and that he had replaced a child of the same age who had been lost in the bombing. In other words, he had stepped into the shoes of a dead German boy. He had taken on his identity, his name, his date of birth, his religion, his entire existence. He had grown up in the south of Germany, in the suburbs of Nuremberg, the only son in a Catholic family. His parents had revealed nothing to him, but he had come across some evidence which suggested that he was a changeling, an impostor living a surrogate life inside the persona of a deceased German. Every time he looked at himself in the mirror, it strengthened his conviction that he was not one bit like them. His mother was an anxious woman who spent her life making lists to pass the time. His father was an obsessive hunter who filled the house to bursting with antlers and stuffed animals. And maybe it was no wonder that Gregor felt a bit like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was only when he started a new life in Berlin that he could be himself again. He felt a huge weight lifting off his shoulders being able to tell people that he was originally from the East, that he was a Jewish survivor and that he had no relatives left alive.