Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  ‘Make a list,’ she would say. And he would take out pencil and paper and put all the items down, ticking them off one by one. If something wasn’t ticked off by the end of the day it would have to be placed at the top of a new list for the next day before they could sleep. Lists of things to do and lists of things they had done together. Even the simplest things that sometimes should be taken for granted were put down, maybe as a kind of reassurance that they were alive and that the world was still moving on. ‘Will I put down brushing your teeth?’ Gregor would ask. And ‘Yes,’ his mother would say, ‘put down brushing your teeth,’ because each one of those daily anchors drove away the fear that he could sometimes see in her eyes.

  He was a nervous child, constantly peeing in his pants at school, always coming home wet and stinking. She traded with him, allowing him to sleep in her bed as long as he didn’t pee. And that’s how things stood for years, a close and sometimes suffocating relationship, until one day when he was suddenly banished from his mother’s bed. A man from nowhere walked in the door and took his place. His father had arrived back from the war and took over the role that Gregor had enjoyed to himself till then.

  The man bought him a scooter. And a mouth organ. He took him hunting and taught him all about nature. But maybe there was always something missing, some absence, some feeling that Gregor was never adequate. A failure in his father’s eyes.

  He retreated into his boyhood fantasies, mostly about trapeze artists. Circus women dressed in spangled tops and the string tights. It was not the animals or the clowns that attracted him as a boy, but the woman who could wrap her legs around the rope and flew through the air, smiling down at him from above. The circus came once a year in the spring and he could not tear himself away. He hung around all day and once saw the trapeze artist standing in the door of her caravan, smoking a cigarette and wearing a pink dressing gown. Another time, he saw her lying on the ground in a field nearby in the long grassy verge with one of the men from the circus, kissing and smiling at him as though she was still gliding through the air with her arms and legs and breasts just barely holding on to the rope.

  Mara used to say that Gregor’s childhood was like the dark side of the moon. There was little evidence of how he grew up. She did not have a single photograph of him when he was a small boy. No heroic images of him with sword or a bow and arrow. No shots of him and his dog. No first ride on his bike, no first day at school, no smiling pictures of him with missing teeth or with his arm around his mother.

  He never talked about that very much. Only the mushroom picking and the endless hunting episodes. He said his mother could be a bit possessive. She could also be a saint sometimes, believing that the whole world was out to wear her down. Please, Gregor, I beg you, don’t ask me any more questions, she would say. Please, Gregor, if you want a bicycle, draw it for yourself. Then she would do the singing yawn again, descending into a segregated mood in which she seemed beyond reach, inside her own world. She sometimes wished the worst on herself. He remembers how she broke her arm falling off a hunting tower in the forest. He can still see the broken bone sticking out, bent like a stick underwater. But instead of calling for help, she became a stoic and proudly climbed back up the ladder with her lips tightened, biting back the pain in order to the show her husband what had happened. She was deeply Catholic. She was the kind of person who found some kind of elegiac, victim comfort in apocalyptic events. She had been forced to look at dead bodies, along with a hundred other women, paraded and photographed as they stood by decomposing corpses. It made her rejoice in calamity. A code of premonition in which she and her husband discussed world events with doomed enthusiasm.

  There is a feeling of vertigo that comes along with memory. Or is it the apples falling? The sight of people high on ladders? The feeling of being upside down in this orchard after looking up into the branches for so long?

  He has a fear of falling back into that emptiness. The strict ambitions of his father, the endless hunting days, the training for survival. When he was a teenager, he remembers coming back from a school trip in the Alps and finding his parents standing in the hallway. They looked him up and down in disbelief, speaking about him in the third person as though he had not quite physically returned yet. ‘There is our son,’ his mother kept saying, to make sure there could be no doubt about it. ‘Make him sit down and tell us everything, slowly. On the balcony? No, make him sit at the table. Wait, don’t begin yet.’ They had to know everything, who he met, what mountains he climbed, what he ate, what mistakes he made, every detail of every day. He was their only child and they had always lived through him, just as he also had the feeling that his trip only became a reality through them, in the making of the story which he brought home with him. You must write all this down, his mother kept repeating. Make a list of everything, so you’ll remember it all later.

  He told them that he was nearly killed. It was a family test, the moment of separation when a boy tries to find out how much his parents would miss him if he was no longer alive. He had lost his footing and almost gone over a cliff. He was lucky, he told them, that they were climbing below the treeline because he was stopped by a single pine tree growing almost horizontally out of the side of the rock. He dangled there on this tree, the last coat hook on the mountain, looking down at cattle the size of grasshoppers in the fields below until his companions cautiously made their way down with ropes to rescue him.

  He gave them the cartoon description, the light bravado with which the other boys put the shock behind them when they got back to the hostel that evening, knowing that he was safe. That fucking pine tree had your name written on it, they kept saying. They described it as though Gregor had suddenly decided to put on an acrobatic performance on the side of the mountain. They worked up the funny side and said he had an expression of surprise on his face as he leaped upwards, trying to do the cartwheel in the air. He looked so flexible, double-jointed almost, indifferent to gravity and immune to pain. Rubber man, or action man, with his head turned back one hundred and eighty degrees, his torso twisted to the opposite side, his legs and arms all belonging to different men who could not agree on which way they should be heading from now on. His right foot kicked upwards into the sky like an extremely clever soccer trick, a bicycle kick with which he was trying to score a last-minute goal before falling off the mountain. They described him waving his hand in a desperate farewell, before he began to slide towards the edge of the cliff. They embraced him and smiled at him, slapping him on the back like a hero for days.

  ‘We thought you were gone, Gregor,’ they said. ‘You were a dead man there for a moment.’

  His mother stood up and began to rifle through his rucksack. What was so urgent about the washing? Gregor remembers thinking. He thought his father would be proud, but instead he remained sitting at the table with fierce eyes while Gregor continued. He was expecting the sympathy of a family homecoming, the kind of back-from-the-dead welcome. Instead, he found their eyes bearing down on him as though he had been careless and damaged some precious belonging that he had been entrusted with. He felt like a family asset, such as the car of which they were so proud. Even the way they had explained the facts of life to him had a proprietorial basis. His mother was deeply Catholic and spoke about purity, while his father clung to a kind of fascist simplicity where sexual organs seemed more like state property, not to be abused or tampered with. A man was given one set of testicles and was under obligation to take care of them because they could not be replaced. They were like standard army equipment or like a passport which didn’t actually belong to the person to whom it was issued, but to the larger family. You could not let anyone punch you there in that irreplaceable region because that would mean that you would never have children. With the result that Gregor sometimes felt his testicles were made of porcelain and should have been locked away safely in the glass cabinet with all those other figurines of miniature deer and miniature people in the costumes of another century.

&nb
sp; Gregor told them his knees were shaking so much after the fall that he could barely stand up or even feel his own feet inside his boots. They had turned to liquid with terror. One of his friends stood him up and told him to get a grip of himself, to put the fear behind him or else he would live the rest of his life as a ghost. He said he could not even feel his bruises.

  His father looked at him with great disappointment. And his mother kept pulling out the dirty laundry from his rucksack as the only true confirmation of life. Never before had Gregor been so disillusioned by his family. His father took the story as a personal offence while his mother stood clutching a pair of underpants as if that was the last thing left remaining of him.

  ‘I’ve heard enough,’ his father said. ‘This is not my son.’

  Did he always suspect something? Or was it just one of those phrases he had inherited from his own father, the kind of ventriloquism that goes down through generations with everyone repeating the same branded family admonishment in perpetuity. ‘No son of mine would shake in his boots like that. And then be proud of it. Where’s your courage, man?’

  ‘Don’t be hard on him,’ his mother said. ‘He’s had a shock.’

  ‘A shock,’ his father bawled. ‘He doesn’t know what a shock is.’

  His father expected a more heroic tale from the Alps and might have preferred his son to have been one of those rescuers. He wanted his son to talk tough, to tell it like a man with indestructible testicles.

  ‘Be a man about it,’ he kept repeating. ‘When I think of what we went through in the war.’

  Next thing his father would start going back over all the stories out there in the East with best friends dying in combat at the hands of a merciless enemy. Descriptions of survival against all odds in the bitter Russian winter, with scraps of newspaper inside the uniform to shield against the cold. Stories of sharing a last cigarette with fellow soldiers who never came back. The bottle of schnapps would come out and he would continue right into the night, clinging to the last few ‘if onlies’, hoping that things might have been a little different and the war would not have been so badly lost. Defeat supplanted in later years by hunting victories in which he would often photograph his son beside dead animals. Every deer, every set of antlers on the wall of the living room, every stuffed otter and every wild boar mounted on wood was a kind of consoling trophy which might settle the score of this vast failure in war. Followed by the whole slide of self-pity and blame, with his father still at war inside the family and finally pointing the finger at Gregor’s grandfather Emil who had let the Germans down. And ultimately, the tears and the slamming doors and all that silence for days and weeks which made the home feel like the inside of an upholstered coffin.

  ‘No son of mine.’ The strange acoustic of those words echoed through his childhood, calling for him to be more like his father but actually pushing him away. All those fake memories collected over years into a phoney album. He no longer wanted to be the smiling boy in all the hunting photographs. The boy with a line of ten hares hanging behind him, or the boy with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, holding on to the antlers of a recently killed stag. He began to reject all that bogus family folklore, all those duties of lineage and pride and expectation. He had tried to be an adequate son, tried to match up to the son that his father wanted to have, but he was always a disappointment.

  Mara is looking over at Gregor now. She wants to tell him that all this has been sorted out now. There is nothing to fear from memory. No need to be on the run from your own life any more. She wants to send a message of calmness across the orchard, so she tells Johannes to go over to him.

  ‘Go and ask Uncle Gregor if he wants to see the big anthill,’ she says.

  Gregor smiles back. He puts away the long pole and allows himself to be led away towards the gate. They pass by the compost heap and stop to look at the covering of rotten apples, layers and layers of miniature brown skulls strewn across the top. They leave the orchard and walk along the outside wall to a small stand of trees. Johannes tells him that you cannot go out into the field on your own, because that’s how people get lost. When they come to the anthill, Johannes continues to hold hands because they must look at it together. It’s heaving with movement. Gregor listens to Johannes explaining what ants do. He wants to show the boy something he discovered when he was small himself. He takes a stick and places it into the anthill, so they can watch the alarming reaction of ants gathering around it. He shakes the stick and the fury of the ants grows, spreading their toxic fumes to fight off the intrusion. The boy pulls his hand away and moves back. Gregor picks the stick out and plucks one of the ants off in his fingers. He tells Johannes that he is going to eat it. The boy smiles, but it’s more a smile of mistrust.

  ‘You can’t eat ants,’ he says. ‘They will bite you. Inside in your tummy.’

  But then Gregor calmly shows him that it can be done. He tells the boy that they taste a bit like marzipan with cinnamon. He shows him how to crush the ant a little and then places it into his mouth. He chews on it with his front teeth and nods to show that he likes the taste and that he has no fear of being bitten inside. ‘Mmmmmm,’ he says, but the boy finds it too absurd to try it by himself without the reassurance of his mother. He is being asked to believe something that is not safe. But it won’t be long now, Gregor knows, when the boy will try it out for himself, even if his mother does not approve, exactly in the same way that he did when he was small.

  ‘Uncle Gregor ate an ant,’ he calls out to everyone in the orchard as he runs back in. He is horrified and boasting at the same time. ‘Uncle Gregor eats ants.’

  Daniel looks up with acknowledgement in his eyes. Because he also learned it from Gregor, the same way that Gregor learned it from his father.

  Fourteen

  Gregor’s father would not tolerate the name of Stalin being mentioned in the house. Nor could he bear Gregor’s grandfather being talked about very much. As far as he was concerned, Emil was a traitor. While he was out there defending his country on the Russian front, Emil was driving around aimlessly in his truck, wasting fuel. While his parents were killed as the Russian Army swept towards Berlin, Emil entertained all kinds of women up and down the country.

  His mother and father didn’t talk very much about these things around the dinner table. She spoke about Emil only when she was alone with Gregor.

  Right at the end of the war, when it was only a matter of time before it was all over, she waited for her father at the train station. She had slept fitfully, with Gregor waking up frequently and people complaining about the noise. By morning his infection had spread into both ears and he could hardly hear anything. The waiting room was so crowded that many people had decided to sleep on the platform under the awning instead. They were not moving on any more because the news was going around that the American troops were very close and that the town would soon fall. There was no point in going anywhere, only waiting.

  Emil had not returned yet. She was worried about him. But she was even more worried now that Gregor would go deaf with his ear infection. She had tried to swaddle him during the night so that he would sweat, but it didn’t break the fever. He kept moving, trying to throw off his blanket, and when he began to scream again in the morning, she decided to go and look for some oil, hoping that somebody in the town could help. She stood Gregor up on his feet, tucked a spare vest in around his neck for a scarf and pulled his hat down. He was a good boy and didn’t complain about the weather, just walked by her side holding her hand. She walked through the town, memorising her way so that she could make it back to the station again later on.

  There was some reassurance in moving on. She found a school where charity workers were giving out food. It was even more crowded than the railway station, but she managed to get inside and find a nurse. Everyone else was concentrating on the food, so the nurse got Gregor to lean his head over and poured in some warm cooking oil. It made him whine at first, but the nurse had a quick way of ca
lming him with a little rhyme that ended with a tickle. The nurse went away and came back with a new hat for him, more of a winter hat with a peak over the eyes and flaps that came down over the ears. She kept talking to him as she placed a piece of gauze over each of his ears and then tied the hat down under his chin.

  It was noon by the time they went out into the street again, not knowing where they should be going now. There was an old woman sweeping the footpath, cleaning the stains of rain off the pavement, all the way to the edge of her property. With more clouds coming, the old woman looked up. There was a boom of heavy weapons in the distance, and maybe she had mistaken it for thunder.

  Gregor’s mother walked down the main street to the town, half hoping to see her father. And then she came across his truck, parked outside a public house.

  She walked right up to the bar, holding Gregor with her hand. She looked in the window and saw nobody. When she knocked, a woman came to the door, shouting. Could she not see that they were closed? Did she have no idea what was going on in the town. There were soldiers running in the direction of the fighting, old men mostly, and young boys. The woman said there was nothing left to serve in her bar, no beer, no food, nothing. Everything had been bartered or taken from them. She was full of pessimism, almost envying those who had nothing at all, wishing that she could abandon everything and flee herself, then she would not have to worry about what would happen to her house and her business.

  Gregor’s mother said she didn’t want anything, she was merely looking for the man who owned the truck outside. She was careful not to reveal too much about herself.

  ‘My father,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for my father. A fat man, have you seen him?’

  ‘Emil,’ the woman said. ‘If only he came back, then everything would improve. At least I’d have customers again.’