Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  As he got off the train and made his way through the familiar suburbs in which he had grown up, there was a triumph in his walk. Limping with his broken bike, he had outgrown this place.

  His mother stood in the kitchen showing her anger.

  ‘Where were you?’ she demanded.

  ‘I went to see Uncle Max,’ he said, and he could not help an involuntary grin erupting on his face.

  ‘You what?’ she returned with a sigh. ‘Now why did you do that? He’s suffered enough, that poor man, without you tormenting him.’

  ‘He told me everything,’ Gregor continued. ‘I’m not your son.’

  She looked him in the eyes, then turned away. He watched her ironing a shirt, trying to give it a factory neatness. He accused her of not paying attention, until she said: ‘I’m listening all right, go on,’ urging him to get it all off his chest. He made his speech, going through the scant facts, adding all that he had surmised on the train. He didn’t speak very well because he was nervous. Concentrating hard, jumbling his words like an inarticulate child. He reached blank areas in his knowledge and began repeating himself. Ran aground with lack of evidence and blindly accused her of deceit.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said with tears rising.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘That I’m adopted,’ he said in despair. ‘You’re not my real mother, are you?’

  She sat down with her apron covering her face, hands trembling, suppressing an agonising cry that seemed to come from somewhere else in the room, a distant wail, far away in a different street. Her weeping was an admission.

  When she finally dropped the apron from her eyes, they were red. She coughed to clear her throat, turning round to Gregor, unable to find the starting point to explain her life.

  ‘I’m so sad now,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Gregor didn’t know what he wanted any more, further information or just comfort, reassurance, love.

  ‘Poor Max,’ she said. Then she stalled again, shaking her head, reliving the events as though they had never gone away. ‘You had no right to visit him and put him through all that again. He’s never got over it. Still living with all those ghosts, still suffering from what they did to him back then.’

  Gregor waited.

  ‘I never blamed him,’ she said. ‘I never accused him. He just kept trying to convince me that he never said a word.’

  ‘But he didn’t. He said he never told them anything.’

  ‘It destroyed him,’ she said coldly. ‘Losing his best friend like that, having to tell where he was hidden. He denies it, but why did your grandfather Emil not survive the war? How did he disappear? That’s what he cannot answer.’

  She came over to embrace Gregor, but he moved away. Called him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘dear Gregor’, as though she was writing him a letter instead of speaking to his face.

  ‘Uncle Max has lost his mind now,’ she said. ‘He’s going insane with it. I tried to help him after the war. We gave him the old apartment here in Nuremberg, but he became impossible.’

  She seemed calm now. Either she was telling the truth or else she was a brilliant actress. Had she inherited the gift of cunning from her father? Had she rehearsed this answer for years or just spun it out honestly?

  ‘My darling, Gregor,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe a word of what Uncle Max tells you.’

  Her endearments were condescending. Her denial brought out a helpless rage in him, thrashing out accusations. She told him to calm down and said he shouldn’t say hurtful things.

  ‘Please stop,’ she said. ‘Right now. Don’t let this fantasy get any louder in your head, not one more minute.’

  And when he continued, clutching at suspicions, she merely spoke over him, turning him into a child.

  ‘You have no idea what things were like in those times,’ she said, with a finality that excluded him from voicing any further opinion. He had no answer to that. He came from a generation with no experience of war, only questions and attitude and conscience.

  When his father came bursting in from his study, they spoke about Gregor as though he was not even in the room, ganging up as they always did, loyal to their own generation, defending themselves against attack from the outsider which he had become.

  ‘He’s been with Max,’ she said. ‘He’s got it into his head now that we’re not his real parents.’

  His father flew into a rage.

  ‘How dare he?’ he said. ‘I’ve a good mind to go straight over to Max. With my gun. Silence him for good.’

  He marched in a state of war around the living room underneath all the dead animals, making a speech with a tremor in his voice.

  ‘Are you accusing your own mother of being a liar?’

  He listed off the great hardships of their lives, the balance sheet of survival, how they saved and worked their backs off so that he could enter a life of choice and luxury. His mother had done everything after the war, when Gregor’s teeth were grey from malnourishment, keeping everything going until he returned from the Russian camps. She hardly had anything to eat herself.

  ‘Skinny as a knitting needle, she was. I want to show you something,’ he said, taking Gregor’s hand and forcing him to feel his mother’s knees. ‘She spent half a lifetime on her knees for the Americans, just to keep you fed.’

  Gregor had been shamed. A coward defaming his own family.

  ‘Just think of what you’re doing,’ his mother begged.

  Gregor was torn between pity and anger, between forgiveness and rejection.

  ‘I’m Jewish, isn’t that right?’

  ‘What?’

  It was the final test.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ Gregor’s father said.

  Gregor had never heard his parents say a bad word about Jewish people. Professionally, at least, his father had nothing but respect for them. He had started his apprenticeship in accountancy with a Jewish firm in Berlin until the Nazis came to power. He always said he had learned everything he knew from Jewish people.

  ‘I’m Jewish,’ Gregor said once more. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Gregor,’ his mother said, going across the room to win him over with an embrace. ‘This is insane. I love you more than anything in this world.’

  Her love was frightening. He was afraid he would suffocate in it. A possessive, claustrophobic, killer love, strangling him slowly until he could not breathe any more.

  Gregor ran to his room. While they went into the kitchen and continued talking, he collected a few things together in his rucksack, took his bank book with all the savings, his passport, some of his books, his guitar, a number of cards he had written out with the most memorable lines of songs.

  He chose not to leave them a note. That could all be done later. Instead, he stood in the hallway with the bag on his back and decided on one last heroic act. He found himself striding into his father’s study and taking out one of the hunting rifles from the glass case, the one with which he was meant to shoot his first deer.

  Gregor had begun firing practice at the age of thirteen, an essential skill, according to his father, like learning to drive. In a factory warehouse belonging to a friend, they set up a firing range and held competitions which Gregor soon won. His father said he was a born marksman. But target practice was nothing like shooting the real thing. Nothing like those hunting prints all over the house. Nothing like the sound of a gun discharging right beside him and the echo wrapping itself around the trees and the sight of a life-less animal on the ground with its eyes still open. Gregor had seen the blood around the fresh bullet hole. He had heard his father talking about this sacramental moment, the great ecological balance of nature.

  Gregor had carried that same gun through the forest, pointed downwards, with the knowledge of the wild in his bones, listening to every shift in the undergrowth. Every footfall. Distinguishing ground noise from aerial noise. This is where the faculties of hearing and vision evolved many millions
of years ago, when vibrations turned into sound, shadows into sight. It was here that Gregor’s musical ear received its most intense training, in this minimalist auditorium of creaking trunks and sibilating leaves. But with the afternoon lantern light coming through the trees, he allowed the deer to escape. He aimed the gun, shot in the air and watched the animal leaping away.

  His father said he could not believe he had missed it. His migraine returned with great ferocity. Blinding zigzag patterns. Kaleidoscope eyes. Along the way back, there was no friendly hand on the shoulder. It was the end of all that companionship in the forest.

  Now Gregor stood in the door of the kitchen holding that rifle in his hands once again, pointing at hip height. It was no way to hold the gun. His mother looked up in shock. She was ready to become a martyr at last.

  ‘I want you to tell me the truth,’ Gregor shouted.

  His eyes were fixed. The rifle gripped much too firmly in his hands, knowing how worthless the truth was when it came by force.

  His father must have believed it was impossible for him to die. After all his miraculous escapes in the war, he rushed forward with great anger, ready to take the rifle away from his son.

  ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You have no idea how to use that.’

  Gregor was determined to prove him wrong. He turned the rifle at the door of the kitchen. Pulled the trigger and shot at head height through the wood. The room jumped. The crockery sang. The cutlery droned inside the drawers. Great vacuous blasts of aggression came back from the walls, slapping their faces, shouting at them to wake up. The sound filled the entire house like a deafening curse, so foul and so saturated with bitterness that it left a hole in the wood and lumps of plaster all over the kitchen counter. The top half of the door was scorched and the spice of the explosion spread like the pungent mixture of mustard and mint and cigars and used matches. They swallowed. His mother whispered the words, ‘For God’s sake.’ Their mouths were dry, incapable of language. The gap in the door became the only organ of communication between them. A screaming mouth. It must have crossed their minds to say it was a miracle that nobody got killed, but such was the irony of the thought that nobody uttered it. They stood there, with the lingering gunshot hum still fading away, absorbed in their clothes and their hair and their skin. Gregor disappeared almost without anyone noticing. He took on the shape of a ghost. With his mother and father left behind in the kitchen, erased himself out of memory and out of existence.

  Years later, Mara discovered that spot where the bullet had lodged in the wall of the kitchen. It had been plastered over and repainted, hardly noticeable. And the hole in the door where the bullet had passed through had been replaced by a diamond-shaped piece of stained glass. A practical, aesthetic solution to take the place of the mute family mouth blown into it by the gun.

  Twenty-seven

  In his absence, Mara continued to keep in touch with Gregor’s mother. Each time she and Daniel went to Nuremberg, they came back with a new piece of information, a memory of Gregor’s childhood, a photograph of him in the lunar canyons of post-war ruins. Family details such as Gregor’s attempt to grow an apricot tree from the kernel in his room under lights. How Gregor had once organised a home-made raffle in the neighbourhood and ended up giving the prize, a climbing rose, to his own mother. A moment when his father was fixing the car, leaning down over the engine under the bonnet, when Gregor got into the driving seat and blasted the horn, frightening the life out of his father and bringing the bonnet down on top of his head.

  Daniel developed a great fondness for his grandmother. They played cards, late in the evening. An uncomplicated relationship in which a grandparent can play the role of temporary guardian without choreography, without wondering how Daniel might be affected by her influence. The result was a wise, funny, companionship between them which had none of the normal family obligations attached.

  Daniel noticed her habits and began to mock his own grandmother in ways that Gregor would never have been allowed. He imitated her accent. He copied the trademark, sing-song yawn that she made from time to time and got her to laugh at herself. He even played tricks on her and put a stuffed otter into her bed one night before she went to sleep, with a hat and glasses on his head. Daniel was good at drawing and passed the time by sketching. He concentrated on gory scenes and his favourite images involved cartoon depictions of chainsaws cutting off legs and blood dripping down the page. People being decapitated. Insides spilling out. Limbs flying through the air after an explosion. A wolf chewing on a human leg. A crocodile with its jaws around a girl’s head. All the stuff that obsessed a young boy. And when his grandmother saw these pictures, she was horrified that Daniel could be entertaining himself with the kind of thing that she had actually witnessed in reality during the war. She was afraid he would grow up and become a killer.

  ‘It’s very disturbing, I think,’ Gregor’s mother said to Mara. ‘How can he sleep with so much violence in his head?’

  ‘He’s only exercising his fantasies,’ Mara replied.

  ‘You don’t know where this is going to lead to,’ his grandmother said. ‘You should stop this before it goes too far.’

  ‘Better that he draws the stuff than carries it out in real life, don’t you think?’ Mara said.

  But Daniel’s grandmother didn’t see the difference between fantasy and reality. She began to hide some of the worst pictures, saying they were disrespectful. And when she saw a drawing of a man with his eyes gouged out, she’d had enough.

  ‘I don’t want pictures like that in the house,’ she said.

  ‘But look at all the antlers and stuffed animals,’ Daniel replied.

  ‘That’s different.’

  Mara was eager not to interfere and alienate her. And maybe Daniel found his own way of disarming his grandmother who had already come up with her own solution in the meantime, asking him to stop drawing and rather make a few lists of his favourite things. So Daniel drew up lists of nonsensical things, often with sharp instruments and body parts included, groups of ghoulish items which were more acceptable than the sight of blood and often made his grandmother laugh instead.

  Mara was given the cap that Gregor wore for years when he went hunting with his father. Daniel was given a little hunting knife, with a deer’s hoof as a handle. Another time, Mara returned with the letter Gregor had sent from London, saying that he was never coming back. The tone in that letter shocked her and made her feel it was directed at her too. But the collection of family artefacts seemed to bring him closer. She had become a curator. Gregor’s childhood became an archaeology of shards and hints of evidence, guessing, deducing, still hoping to find out the absolute truth.

  She once managed to invite Gregor’s mother up to Berlin for a visit. She was getting older by then and Daniel was already a teenager, a tall young man, like his father. It was a shock to her to be back in this city for the first time since the war, but she took a great interest in everything she saw, knowing she could have remained part of it herself if only history had turned on a different plate. The city had changed so much. Trees everywhere, she commented, more than before.

  They stood on a wooden parapet to look across the Berlin Wall to the other side. They went to see the house where she had lived during the war before it was bombed. They stood in front of the peeling facade and she remembered fleeing from the city. When one of the occupants came out, Mara rushed forward to keep the door open.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, encouraging her to go into the courtyard.

  Gregor’s mother was reluctant, but Mara took her by the arm and took her right inside. They looked up at the windows of the second-floor apartment where the bomb destroyed the entire back of the building. The trees at the centre of the courtyard had been replaced since then by a young walnut and a cedar which had almost grown to maturity. Mara waited for her to say something, but she remained silent, swallowing her feelings. Mara suggested going up the stairs, maybe to knock on the door to see if the occupants might
let her have a look around, but that was going too far.

  ‘That’s enough for me,’ she said.

  On the underground going back that evening, Gregor’s mother examined the passengers. Two girls sharing a plate of pommes frites and ketchup, stabbing them with tiny coloured forks, like a game. A homeless man dragging himself onto the carriage, speaking gently to his dog, politely addressing the carriage to sell his magazine. She gave him money. In the next carriage, there was a man silently playing the saxophone as though he was very thirsty, drinking back an enormous gulp from a long, S-shaped brass bottle.

  She was beginning to think of her own death. That evening she told Mara that she had made her will and said she was passing everything over to Daniel, the house, the cottage in the forest, everything, including the savings that her husband had built up. She spoke with some bitterness. She was at the mercy of those she had cared for, the vicarious accumulation of people she had kept in her thoughts throughout her life.

  ‘He never went to his father’s funeral, so he needn’t bother coming to mine.’

  She chose Mara as executor. She left it to her to decide what she wanted to do with the contents of the house when the time came. She wrote down the name of a lawyer friend who would come and take the hunting gear, since Daniel expressed no interest in them.

  Gregor came back to Berlin once, but he never went to see his mother in Nuremberg. He only returned to see Mara and Daniel, but even that became like a strange seance in which they stared at each other like strangers across a room. It soon became clear that he hated being back in the city, that it made him feel uneasy, like a ghost or his former self. And she could make no real investment in these rare visits because she knew he would disappear again. It would cause too many tears.

  Though it was hard to admit, she realised that some of her happiest moments were spent with Daniel, just the two of them together, joking and talking. When Daniel came into her room on a Saturday morning and woke her up, putting headphones on her ears in order to play his favourite track, she seemed to need nothing else.