Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  They have come to a standstill. There is an afternoon courtesy in the silence, to all things growing and resting around them.

  Thorsten talks about how he and Katia went up to the Baltic coast for a few days. He speaks with great enthusiasm about their trip, with Johannes listening, remembering everything for himself. He says they went to Rostock and then took an old steam train across to Heiligendamm. It was wonderful to look out at the sea and there were some great fish restaurants where they ate in the evening.

  ‘Very windy up there on the coast,’ he says.

  After a pause, Daniel talks about how he and Juli went to visit friends in Jena recently. He says they woke up in the morning and stepped out onto the balcony and found dozens of police trucks lining the street, with hundreds of policemen in riot gear below their window.

  ‘Sounds familiar,’ Mara says.

  ‘They were like gladiators,’ Daniel says.

  ‘I hope you never get into combat with them,’ Gregor says. ‘Your head is no match for those truncheons, take it from me.’

  ‘Didn’t do us that much harm,’ Martin laughs.

  Mara pours the remains of the coffee.

  ‘Police everywhere,’ Daniel continues. ‘On the main square we saw a big crowd of anti-fascist protesters.’

  ‘Counter-protesters,’ Juli says. ‘They were demonstrating against a crowd of neo-Nazis.’

  ‘This part of the country needs time to adjust,’ Thorsten puts in.

  ‘They’re everywhere,’ Katia says. ‘Believe me. It’s nothing but thug pride.’

  ‘Funny,’ Daniel says. ‘Less than a hundred neo-Nazis, four times that many anti-fascists, and about five times that many policemen in riot gear.’

  ‘They’re like an endangered species,’ Martin says.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ Juli says. ‘I find it very scary.’

  ‘I got a photograph of one of them,’ Daniel adds, ‘giving us the finger.’

  ‘That’s scary all right,’ Martin remarks.

  ‘Don’t be an asshole,’ Juli snaps.

  ‘He’s only joking,’ Mara says.

  ‘It’s not the Third Reich coming back, Daniel,’ Martin says. ‘The past is not fixed. It keeps changing. Look at how everything has changed since the Wall came down. And 9/11. Nothing is the same since 9/11, since America lost its two front teeth.’

  ‘That’s the problem with you people,’ Daniel says, getting up. ‘You’re more afraid of the past than you are of the future.’

  ‘We have to protect the past,’ Martin says.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s scary,’ Juli says, joining Daniel and turning round to face Martin once more. ‘On the train going back, two of them got on and started yelling abuse at our Sudanese friend. We were very lucky the police got on and threw them off.’

  Daniel and Juli begin to walk away.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand in the kitchen,’ Martin calls after them.

  Daniel has agreed to take on the cooking for the evening. The rest pick themselves up and pack everything together, then drift back slowly in small groups. Johannes carrying the basket and Gregor carrying the towels, talking to each other about dinosaurs. Mara walking barefoot at first, then stopping to put on her shoes while Martin whips the air with a stick, leaving Thorsten and Katia lying alone on their blanket for a while longer in the evening sun, both facing towards the lake, their bodies hooked into each other and his arm across her belly.

  Twenty-five

  By the time Gregor was seventeen years of age, he was convinced that there was no resemblance between himself and his parents. He had examined all the family photographs and studied himself in the mirror many times. He had brown eyes. He was tall. He had become a giant, a monster belonging to a different species. What began as a normal suspicion in the minds of many children at a certain age, had become a raging obsession.

  He started rooting through his mother’s possessions looking for more evidence. All the contents of her life stashed away in her dressing table. Broken watches, old reading glasses, garter clips, concert tickets, odd jewellery, single earrings kept in the hope that the match would turn up. Outdated medication. Discoloured packets of sleeping tablets. A strange instrument with which he once saw his mother sanding off dead skin from her foot. He discovered things without knowing much about their provenance, items with no story attached. He didn’t know what he was looking for and even when he found something worthwhile, he didn’t understand the significance.

  Until he came across the letters from Uncle Max.

  The letters were polite and restrained. Even in writing, this old man was full of silence. The early letters expressed a wish to come and visit, asking about Gregor and how he was doing. In one of the letters, Uncle Max said he was too ill to work in the foundry any more and had taken up a part-time job in a bookshop. A more recent letter said he had given up the job in the bookshop as well.

  Gregor was convinced these banal words contained some hidden message, as long as he read carefully. But it was only the last letter that revealed anything, an apology. Uncle Max said it had not been his intention to hurt anyone. It was a letter of farewell, acknowledging his mistake. He wished them well and said he would not intrude on their lovely family again. And finally, something that made Gregor even more curious.

  ‘Maria, please believe me. I did not tell them anything.’

  He read these words over and over again. What did Uncle Max want her to believe? And what did he not tell? The words had a begging tone, desperate for an answer.

  ‘Please, let me hear from you, Maria. I can’t sleep until you tell me that you believe me.’

  It took Gregor some time to work up the courage to pursue this. But instead of asking his mother, he decided to visit Uncle Max. He had always been afraid of him and unable to interpret those silences from the past. Afraid to ask him questions. Convinced there was some information being held back from him, but still unable to ask the right questions. He needed to speak to Uncle Max alone, without the presence of his mother in the background. He copied the sender address on the back of the last envelope, took his bicycle from the shed very early one morning after his school holidays arrived and rode away from the house without looking back.

  He brought a map with him, and some money, but he forgot to bring any food, only water. Full of great enthusiasm he sped through villages, memorising the chain of names behind him. Cloud shadows raced alongside him on the road. He freewheeled into warm valleys filled with sunshine. Breezes pushed him up the hills and in his mind he invented bicycle sails, spinnakers that could send him speeding as fast as any of the cars that passed him along the way. Rain stopped him once or twice, soaking and stiffening his knees. But nothing could keep him from pressing forward on this mission. Up to a radius of around fifty kilometres he had cycled many times before, both on his own and with the cycling group. But this journey went far beyond that, leaving behind everything that was familiar to him, pushing on and on, repeating the words ‘find out’ in a flat musical cadence inside his head. The more he began to tire the more persistent the melody echoed.

  ‘Find out, find out, find out, find out.’

  He found himself going in the wrong direction for a while and wasted an hour coming back to the road again. He blamed himself for not looking at the map more carefully. He had never learned to celebrate his own mistakes, only to be hard on himself, to regard everything with merciless self-scrutiny. His parents, his schooling, the history of his country had elevated fear of failure to extremes. He was taught to minimise exposure to error. Everything had to be mapped out. Consequences examined. For once he wanted to do something utterly reckless, to claim the right to make his own mistake, the freedom to be wrong.

  Instead, he was worried about his own future, his ability to know what was right and wrong. He recalled some of the taunts of his father, phrases such as ‘waste of intelligence’ and ‘he’ll come to nothing’. Perhaps it was nothing more than physical hunger manifesting it
self, lack of food translated into self-doubt.

  He told himself that he would become a musician. It was the beginning of a journey of artistic endurance. He intended to be like his grandfather Emil, who was looked on as a waster in the family. He would claim the right to create something utterly useless. In fact, he would write that up on the wall of his bedroom as soon as he got home again. ‘Do something useless today.‘ Because music was failure turned into virtue. He would become a musician and travel around the world, free to play without regret.

  It was evening by the time he reached the town where Uncle Max lived. He underestimated the journey, over a hundred kilometres. He was lost and confused by the rain. A car leaped out from the side of his watery vision and sent him skidding across the cobbles of a square. Losing balance, he hit the ground and saw the bike rushing away from him, with a terrible noise that caused more pain than his own injuries. The blood on his elbow meant nothing to him, only the sight of the bike lying on its side with the front wheel spinning.

  A female motorist stepped out appealing her innocence, an instant outdoor courtroom in which he felt guilty, with nothing to say.

  Gregor picked himself up, straightened up the bike, hastily checking that it still functioned. He was afraid the police would come and they would contact his parents, send him home again to face the ultimate failure, so he fled from the scene, limping, running, then jumping on his bike the best he could with the woman driver shouting behind him to come back.

  He stopped by the wall of a graveyard to examine the bike more carefully. The journey was a disaster. This was the shape of his life from here on, running away and crashing. Until the woman in the car stopped again right beside him and got out, full of concern. He was afraid of sympathy. Afraid to give in to self-pity. But she asked to see the cut on his elbow.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she wanted to know. She wore a shiny black raincoat with a yellow collar and looked him straight in the eyes, understanding him in leaps, saying: ‘You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?’ She explained that she had a brother who ran away and never came back. Even changed his name.

  She took him the rest of the way to where Uncle Max lived, with his bike in the boot of the car, stopping to get him some cake, which he ate silently in the passenger seat, staring ahead. He held the address, copied out neatly on a piece of blue paper. A shabby apartment block on the edge of the town, beside a foundry. The orange glow of the fires could be seen through the gate.

  There was no answer from Uncle Max, but then one of the neighbours came out to bang on his door. His hearing wasn’t very good and he didn’t respond to the bell any more. When Uncle Max opened the door he looked tired, even shocked at this late visit. The neighbour told him not to play his TV so loud.

  Gregor had always seen Uncle Max in a suit before. Now he was unshaven, wearing slippers. The apartment was a mess, with a window looking out over the yard of the foundry, where men worked with their shirts off in the heat, shouting to each other over the noise. Living alone in one room, with a sofa against one wall and a bed against another and a small TV on a table. Uncle Max turned the sound down and the football players continued to glide around the green pitch in silence. Shaking, turning away, looking at his watch, he hardly knew what to do with this visitor. He took out his handkerchief constantly to wipe his eye, stared out through the window at the glow from the foundry and then turned round like a condemned man.

  ‘I didn’t betray him,’ he said. Sitting down at the table, he placed his hands together in prayer almost. ‘I didn’t tell them anything. You must believe me, Gregor.’

  The outburst was frightening. Gregor could not think of what to say in reply. He apologised for coming so late.

  ‘Thank you, for sending the record.’

  Uncle Max could not recall any record.

  ‘The record with the music from Warsaw.’

  Uncle Max turned away, examining his memory, his good eye rolling around, searching.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he finally asked.

  He began fussing around, getting out a bottle of apple juice and pouring two glasses, then forgetting to hand out the drink.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘No thank you. I’ve eaten,’ Gregor said.

  Uncle Max wanted to know how long the journey had taken and where he was going to stay the night. War language. Questions from a time of great distress and upheaval. Fear and pain which had slipped into his body, like a tropical disease entering through the soles of the feet.

  It had been a mistake to disturb him. How could he ask any questions? He got up to leave again and said it was time he was heading back home.

  But then Uncle Max became more rational. He looked at his watch and said Gregor could get a train, there was still time.

  ‘It’s been so long,’ Uncle Max said. ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Gregor said.

  ‘I know why you’ve come,’ he said. He began to speak about Emil. He was rambling, saying things that Gregor already knew. Emil should have been an actor. ‘He would have made a great film star. He could make people think day was night.’

  And then Uncle Max left one of his great silences.

  ‘Emil always went too far,’ he said. ‘With the women, with the Nazis. He wanted to see just how far his luck could hold out.’

  Gregor had not asked a single question. He listened to Uncle Max weaving through his memory, spitting as he talked, then wiping his eye, then going in circles and starting from the beginning again.

  ‘We just wanted to survive, do you understand me? And have a good time. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? The place was full of women without men. They all wanted to hear Emil singing. They threw themselves at him. Emil brought gifts with him, meat and cognac. He was great on the black market. Nowadays, he would have become a successful industrialist or a property developer or maybe even an impresario, running a theatre company or a film company. Your grandfather would have been a millionaire if he had survived the war.’

  Uncle Max drew into himself.

  ‘Then he started helping people. And that was dangerous. Emil wouldn’t listen to me. When all those refugees started coming from the East, he started doing things for non-profit, do you follow me?’

  The clues began to fall into place.

  ‘Your grandfather—if I can call him that—he went to get your mother and bring her to safety in the south. She had lost all that she had in the bombing.’

  ‘Am I an orphan?’ Gregor asked.

  ‘Emil didn’t tell me everything,’ Uncle Max said. ‘The Gestapo were on to him. It must have been one of the husbands who came back from the front who pointed the finger at him.’

  He explained how he had managed to get some more fuel and how they were ready to move on. They had arranged to meet, but then Uncle Max was arrested by the Gestapo.

  ‘They questioned me for a long time. They wanted to know where you had come from. They kept asking me if you were Jewish.’

  ‘If I’m Jewish?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Max said. ‘They suspected you were Jewish.’

  Gregor felt like a fraud, an impostor dwelling in the human frame of another person. He didn’t know how to react, with fear or with rage. How could he ever return home again? How could he ever take part in the fake family that had been created for him? How could he live in this country any longer, in this language which had been imposed on him? He didn’t belong here. He had no contract with this country.

  ‘I told them I didn’t know anything, but they started beating me.’

  Uncle Max began to descend into his own fear once more.

  ‘You must believe me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell them where Emil was hiding.’

  They were in such a hurry, right at the end of the war, Uncle Max explained. They had to use torture to try and get the information they wanted. He didn’t describe the details, but the proof was there in his missing eye.

  ‘I swear to
you, Gregor, I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘I know,’ Gregor said, trying to reassure him.

  This was everything that Uncle Max needed to hear. Somebody had come at last to take his suffering away. Gregor had become the bystander, taking all the information home with him. Already he was maximising each tiny detail inside his head.

  It was late at night when Uncle Max took him to the train station. He bought the ticket and got him a pretzel for the way home as well. He told him to take his best wishes to his mother. He asked Gregor what he was going to do when he grew up and Gregor told him that he had made up his mind to become a musician. Uncle Max clapped his hands together and said that made him so happy to hear that.

  ‘You’ll be like your grandfather, Emil,’ he said. ‘One of these days I’ll see your photograph in the paper.’

  On the platform, Uncle Max smiled and waved. As the train pulled out, he took his handkerchief from his pocket and held it up to his good eye.

  Twenty-six

  Even on the train coming back from Uncle Max, with his bike strapped to a hook, he knew that he was leaving. With the night landscape of early-summer fields rotating by his window, he thought of the big atlas on the wall of his classroom moving in the breeze. He thought of schoolboy theories of people moving forward on trains, travelling faster than the speed of the train itself. Of being able to see into the future as the train curved round a bend. Of theo-retically being able to wave out the window to himself if he ran fast enough from the front of the train to the back. Of the discovery that there was only one thing faster than the speed of light, and that was the speed of thought. He was going back to put his parents on trial. He would expose this fabrication of home with which he had lived for so long and define his real origins at last. He would become a separate being, an individual, with an identity of his own.