Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘He told me that he would see no reflection in the dark.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘He stood there wondering if he existed at all.’

  And when the dawn came up, Gregor would see himself coming back to life again slowly, along with all the other dead things around him in the house. Gradually the image in the mirror would gather light and he had the feeling that he came from nothing.

  Twenty-three

  There was something unwelcome about Uncle Max. Gregor remembers his mother being quite nervous whenever he came to the house and his father remained aloof, even hostile. His presence created an uncomfortable tension and everyone was relieved afterwards when he was gone. A quiet, introverted old man who was not actually related, only called Uncle because he was a family friend. Perhaps it was his physical appearance that made him seem so grotesque. Uncle Max was missing one eye and his false teeth didn’t fit very well, so he smiled awkwardly and lisped and spat across the table whenever he spoke. Bits of food occasionally landed on the tablecloth at dinner and Gregor remembers the fascination and revulsion of watching his mother discreetly sweep away some offending morsel or hiding a stain with the jug. On top of that, his missing eye wept frequently so that he had to wipe away the discharge with his handkerchief, and perhaps it was that sad appearance that made everyone feel afraid of him.

  Uncle Max brought a big silence with him. There was something even more absurd about his chronic inability to speak freely about ordinary things. He asked questions, how Gregor was doing at school, how his music lessons were going. The visit often revolved entirely around that staccato question-and-answer session. ‘Tell Uncle Max about your new piano lessons,’ his mother would say to fill in the space, and Gregor would be left searching for something to report. It seemed like an extraction each time. Gregor couldn’t imagine how it would interest Uncle Max to know the name of his music teacher. His parents were not very skilled at keeping a conversation going either, so the evening with Uncle Max staggered through a series of agonising silences in which everyone glanced furtively around the table avoiding each other’s eyes. His father sometimes let go in a tirade on some current political issue, but Uncle Max never joined in the debate. His mother didn’t allow herself to have political opinions either and when she asked Uncle Max what he thought, he usually gave a neutral answer like: ‘That may be right.’ Sometimes they all got going together on some major road-building project nearby, but the discussion always ran aground. Sooner or later, they would end up looking at Gregor again for relief. Then his mother would ask Gregor to perform something. ‘Play something for Uncle Max,’ she would say and, for a while at least, the room had a communal focus, followed by an applause that made Gregor feel even more self-conscious and eager to get back to his own room. Uncle Max clapped longest and then brought his handkerchief up to his eye again.

  Finally, his father would seize the opportunity to end the evening by offering Uncle Max a lift in the car, and then the house could breathe again.

  Afterwards, Gregor would ask questions. ‘What happened to Uncle Max? How did he lose his eye?’ But his mother normally answered with one polite sentence.

  ‘He was treated very badly during the war,’ she told him. Once, she even used the word ‘torture’ but then regretted having said it. She told him that Max had no friends and that’s why she called him Uncle, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

  ‘You’re not to ask him anything,’ she would say. ‘Do you hear me now? You don’t ask questions like that.’

  Gregor’s father could not bear this kind of talk. As far as he was concerned, Uncle Max was another deserter who betrayed his country. And maybe there was some deeper disgrace in his deformities that could never be discussed around the table. Gregor knew that the piano was a gift from Uncle Max, though his father didn’t want to accept it because the family might be beholden to him. And perhaps they were. His mother spoke with regret, as though there was something shameful which brought up an unimaginable pain of her own.

  When he was a teenager, she told him about the bombing of Berlin, the flight from the city when Gregor was three years old. How his grandfather Emil came to collect them in his truck, and how she was questioned by the Gestapo in a small village, right at the end of the war.

  ‘Your grandfather was not a bad man,’ she said. ‘Only dealing in things on the black market, Gregor, do you understand me?’

  She didn’t take any pride in the fact that her father had tricked the Nazis. She didn’t describe it as an act of heroism, only bad luck.

  ‘Uncle Max was Grandfather Emil’s best friend from school,’ she explained. ‘They had all kinds of cracked ideas for getting into business together. They got a delivery business going and during the war they invented a scheme to avoid being sent to the front. It was awful at the front.’

  ‘Was he a deserter?’ Gregor asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He broke the law and they slapped me and asked me where he was hiding. I was afraid. I’m not very clever. I didn’t have any intelligent answers to give them.’

  ‘Did he escape?’

  ‘I didn’t know where Grandfather Emil was hiding,’ she said. ‘Only Max knew that.’

  ‘Did they take his eye out?’ Gregor asked.

  ‘You were only a baby,’ she said. ‘You didn’t hear anything. You had a terrible ear infection.’

  She stared Gregor in the eyes.

  ‘What could I do? I was afraid they would take you away from me. I was no good at keeping things quiet. I had to tell them about Uncle Max, but they knew that already.’

  After saying it she would suddenly change her mood. She grew angry, regretting her confession. Afraid of the power which this information gave Gregor over her, the ability to hold her to ransom with her own biography. She withdrew into her martyred frame of mind, begging him to stop ‘tormenting’ her with stupid questions for which she had no answers.

  ‘Did Uncle Max tell them where Grandfather Emil was hiding?’ Gregor asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said in desperation. ‘Gregor, you’re asking me things I don’t know.’

  In the absence of hard facts, Gregor began to imagine things for himself. At the next visit, he stared at Uncle Max with open curiosity. The table was set with the usual care. The same ritual silences. The same questions from Uncle Max and the same minimal answers from Gregor. When the conversation came to a standstill, his father took over and spoke at length about hunting events, giving Gregor a chance to examine Uncle Max’s thin features on the opposite side of the table. His hands and his fingernails, the socket of his missing eye. But the greatest sign of torture was not physical at all but his silence.

  Uncle Max would be asked a courteous question about his health. He said he was working part-time in a bookshop, but that he might have to give it up. Health was not a subject that interested Gregor, but he was aware enough to imagine that the torture Uncle Max had endured might be impacting on him much later. All through dinner he imagined him calling out for mercy. The only clue to his suffering was in his good eye. A sensitive thermometer of human feelings. It expressed latent fear, or maybe great strength, he could not tell which.

  Gregor understood endurance in the face of extreme physical tasks, from cycling and climbing mountains. Games involving survival instincts and inner strength. In the battle with the environment, mental courage was the ultimate challenge, more than the mountain itself. But torture was inflicted with great imagination, precisely in order to edge past that threshold of endurance. The victim was driven to the edge of reason and kept there. A mountain could kill you, Gregor recalls thinking, but a torturer was an expert at keeping you alive.

  Gregor was only three years of age when all this happened, but he was present nonetheless at this man’s worst moments. He was a witness and that produced its own pain. The bystander pain. Uncle Max could, if he was strong enough, put the suffering behind him, but Gregor could not. He stared across
the table and felt the obligation to reimagine that moment of torture with obscene clarity. He knew it was impossible to measure suffering. But the pain of the witness went on without stopping, because he had no entitlement to put it behind him.

  He remembers trying to make Uncle Max feel happy. He told him with great enthusiasm about the new guitar he had bought with his own money. He ran up to his room and brought it down, along with a folder of lyrics which he had collected from the American Army radio station. All carefully maintained with photographs of rock stars pasted in.

  After dinner, Gregor performed something on the guitar first, then on the piano. While they sat around the living room sipping coffee, his father smoked a cigar that sent bonfire clouds through the forest of antlers and skulls and grimacing faces. He played Bach. A gust of chords and interwoven notes. When the piece came to an end, he watched Uncle Max take his handkerchief out again.

  ‘He certainly brought the music with him,’ Uncle Max said. ‘Aren’t you lucky you have found such a talented boy.’

  The room went silent. Shocked glances flashing between their eyes, searching the linguistic tilt in the words. An atonal melody left hanging in the room, refusing to fade out.

  ‘He got it from his grandfather,’ his mother responded. She was indignant. She had a worried expression on her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Uncle Max said. ‘I thought he knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ Gregor blurted.

  Gregor’s mother burst into tears and left the room. His father became angry, standing up and moving towards the door.

  ‘What the hell are you saying? Why do you come here to upset her like this?’

  The evening came to an abrupt end. An atmosphere of crisis all around the house that night. Gregor remembers hearing his parents talking in raised voices in bed. He remembers not being able to sleep and going downstairs while they were still discussing things, wandering around the house in the dark and coming across the mirror in the hallway, looking at himself and not finding his own reflection, wondering if there was another version of himself that was being kept from him.

  His mother explained the following day that Uncle Max was not right in his mind. She placed her arm around him and said Uncle Max was starting to imagine things. She blamed the ill treatment and said he had begun to ramble and say things that didn’t make sense.

  Instead, she told him a little more about his grandfather Emil.

  ‘He could remember the words of every song,’ she said. ‘Even English and Italian songs. You’re very like him, learning songs on your guitar. He was known in every bar and could drink for free anywhere he went. That was his problem, Gregor. That’s why he was separated from my mother. All the women loved him. When he sang, they sighed and had tears in their eyes.’

  Gregor was distracted from his enquiries.

  ‘Everybody wanted him for their birthday parties,’ she said. ‘He even got invited by the military to sing at a party for Hitler’s birthday. And maybe that’s why they were so enraged when they discovered he was tricking them all the time.’

  There was nothing more said about Uncle Max. A forgetful old man. But not so forgetful, it seems, because he sent Gregor a package on his birthday almost six months later. His birthday falls on the second of June, the date on his passport, on all his documents. On his seventeenth birthday, Uncle Max sent him a recording of Jewish music. Gregor was more interested in pop music, but he listened to the raw energy of the record, trying to extract some meaning from this gift. It contained a coded message, a virus that became slowly more active with each playing.

  On the cover, there was a picture of men in suits, standing under a tree in summer, holding their instruments and smiling at a dog lying down asleep nearby in the shade. There was a card alongside bearing the words, ‘Good luck with your music, Uncle Max.’ The affidavit of a delusional man who never came back to the house again.

  Twenty-four

  They walk slowly along the edge of the field towards the lake. They leave barn doors wide open and the swing still going to and fro a little in ever reducing motion. The afternoon is moving on at the same pace, never coming to a complete standstill even after it appears to have come to rest. They have reached a wall of poplar trees with their tambourine leaves, jangling high on the breeze. They have stalled to look at the sunken roof of a wooden hut which has begun to fade back into the landscape. They look back in a sweep of one hundred and eighty degrees to the orchard and the farm buildings and the forest beyond. They can already hear voices from the lake, and the splashing. They talk and laugh and remember and move on. What else can they do now but talk and remember and swing back and forth, suspended along the axis of their own lives?

  Mara wears her sun hat and carries a basket containing cake and coffee, everything including silver forks and a tea towel to spread out on the ground. As they move on, Gregor picks up a long blade of grass and turns it into a green reed between his thumbs. He brings it up to his lips and produces a familiar, boyhood country call.

  ‘Do you remember how Daniel was afraid of that sound?’ Mara says to him.

  Memory is like stored energy which has not been spent yet. It comes to life in family folklore. It produces a special kind of identity, like all things collected among people to mark the time they spent together and the times they have been apart. The photographs, the treasured objects, the family medical records, the entire composite of shared experience. They recall the time when they were camping in the mountains and Daniel had no idea where that sound was coming from. He imagined a monster, a prehistoric bird, with a great serrated beak and scaly talons. Ran straight back into the arms of his mother and she laughed, telling him it was only his own father making silly noises with grass.

  A shrill echo comes back from the lake. Daniel has taken up the signal and decided to answer with his own croaky screech. A long extinct crane with luminous eyes. As they move closer to the lake, the grass cries converge. Father and son once again making their signature calls to each other across an imaginary distance.

  When they come in sight of the lake, Daniel is hanging from one of the trees above the water. His naked body ready to drop, screeching like a boy with legs kicking out in mid-air, penis and testicles dangling free like exotic fruit set in black fur, holding on to the branch until his hands can no longer take the strain and he lets himself descend into the clear water below with an exaggerated splash. Juli comes out of the lake and stands with her body gleaming. Her breasts shimmering and her pubic hair shaped like a black steel arrowhead, pointing down. She picks up a mobile phone from the bank, throws back her head to get the shower curtain of hair out of her face. A mist of tiny droplets fills the sunlit air around her. She turns round towards the lake to say hello, then listens, looks at the caller number before throwing it back onto the grass again. On her lower back there is a piece of body graffiti, also pointing downwards. She dives into the lake again and disappears.

  Thorsten is standing some distance away under a tree with Johannes. They have made a boat out of twigs, father and son both crouching in the same posture, same physique, same square buttocks, same belly and bony chest, only thirty-odd years is the difference. They squat down to launch the ship on its maiden voyage. Johannes calls out to his mother in the middle of the lake, lying on her back with her round balloon belly floating on top of the water. A lost beach ball, inflated at the naval, drifting away so that somebody will have to swim out later and steer it back to shore again.

  Daniel’s head comes up with the bark of a seal, shouting, overqualifying the beauty of the water, telling those who have come late to get in as quickly as possible.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ he says, his green legs dancing a warped foxtrot under the surface.

  Mara shouts back, removing her clothes as though she will never need them again after this. She takes a giant evolutionary step backwards, becoming fish. She is naked all at once. Just one brief moment of involuntary sexual lingering as she steps ou
t of her underwear. Her body is strong, healthy, and as she walks into the water, no signs of age can be noticed. Only two small incisions in her right breast for biopsies. An ash-grey bruise on her thigh. She sinks into the lake and floats out with hardly a ripple.

  Martin cannot wait to fling himself into the lake after her. He jokes about how much water will be displaced by his body. He hops around, darkened by foreign holidays, trying to get his foot out of his trousers, dragging a bear trap behind him before he finally frees himself. He throws himself into the lake with a splash that sends waves across the surface, reaching a new high watermark along the dusty trunks of the willow trees at the edge.

  Thorsten tells them that the lake contains a rare species of crayfish which goes to prove how pure it is. Swimming in mineral water, Martin responds, before he spins away in a fierce, one-man race to the far side.

  And Gregor with his long indoor limbs, disrobing himself of all that time spent in half-lit, smoky jazz clubs, all the anonymity of public spaces and air-conditioned interiors. He removes his clothes as well as all that long accumulation of solitude. He immerses himself into this quiet baptism of belonging, with his goat-like genitals dangling low between his thin legs, visible from behind as much as from the front as he sinks down into this sacred, unspoiled font. A scraggy, elongated, soft leather sack which has carried his testicles around the world and a circumcised penis, dipping cautiously into the lake. The water like a cool hand fondling before he turns and throws himself on his back.

  They have rediscovered the lightness of their true nature, this half-human species of people-fish. They have returned to water as though to a primal memory, to the outer limits of their freedom. They swim and float and remember and move on, with the clear water washing away all catastrophes gone by and yet to come.

  When they have finished swimming, Mara spreads the tea towel on the ground and shares out slices of cake. The smell of coffee rises up to overpower the scent of the lake and the earth around them. They eat the tart, with a fault line of marzipan in the middle and wild berries on top. They sit gazing across the lake, at the insects buzzing. The wasps are back as well, alerted by the smell of cake. Martin lights a cigarette to fight them off and Johannes watches the smoke rising and dipping as it veers across the water.