She was no fool for Gregor, it has to be said. She decided to get on with her own life and had a number of partners over the years. The companionship with Martin asserted itself when he became a surrogate father to Daniel. Even though he was married with children of his own, she began to depend on him and they became lovers on and off over the years, or was it deep friendship with physical love included, less like betrayal, more like an act of loyalty which spilled over into great sexual need? She wanted the fun of life to confirm that she was living in the real world, not only the imaginary. That human certainty, the affirmation of touch. She wanted to laugh and dance and be watched, to feel the music in her arms and legs, somebody to provide the guarantees of toll-free sex.
At first it was all done in great secrecy. They didn’t want Daniel to be burdened by betrayal, of friendship as much as marriage. But then these things had a way of coming out into the open, and even though Daniel never said much, only to ask one day if she was screwing Martin, he internalised it along with everything else.
Martin’s marriage broke up, though it was heading that way all along and Mara was not the only one to blame. What troubled Martin was that she could never make the emotional transfer needed for them to become real partners. He was careful not to say too much against his friend, but he became impatient with her at times.
‘How long are you going to hold out for Gregor?’
‘You’re right,’ Mara would say. ‘I just want Daniel to have a feeling of knowing his real father, which Gregor never had.’
She was lying to herself. She was lying to everyone around her, including Daniel. She had become obsessed, like an addict, unable to give up the search for something which would always remain nothing more than imagined. Even if she had got used to Gregor’s absence, she could not do without the great adventure of solving the mystery of his origins.
‘You’ve got to be realistic about this,’ Martin said to her at one point. ‘You’ve given yourself a crazy mission. You’ve got to let it go, Mara.’
‘I want to find out the truth, that’s all,’ she said.
‘What truth?’
‘The truth about his real identity.’
‘You mean, him being a Jewish survivor?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s become irrelevant at this stage.’
‘How can you say it’s irrelevant? He could have died in the camps.’
‘Mara, look. His identity is not what he was or what the Nazis thought he was. His identity is the people he’s been living with, but he’s denied them each time. He always ran away from anyone who gave him any sense of identity.’
The relationship never went any further than this argument. Martin felt she was wasting his time, abusing his loyalty. Accused her of merely playing the role of somebody who was following her own free will, re-enacting the ecstasy of sex rather than living it.
‘You’ve become obsessed with this thing,’ he told her. You’re infected by this sickness. You refuse to live your own life, basically, because you want to prove some spectacular hunch that he’s a Jewish survivor.’
‘But what if it’s true, Martin? What if he really is a Jewish survivor? Then I would never forgive myself for turning my back on him.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Martin said. ‘This is like some terminal illness. It’s going to destroy you.’
She was unable to live for herself, which was not unlike most other people, except that her quest had gone beyond life, into an obligation to resurrect the dead. She had become a fake, a hologram, a reflection of history, still hoping that some sliver of proof would bring him back to life.
‘You’re trying to catch moonlight,’ Martin said to her. ‘Look at the story he’s told us. The Nazis had a hunch that Emil was up to something. They started torturing Max and asking him where the boy came from. Maybe there was something about his clothes or his appearance. They suspected this was a Jewish child being smuggled back with the refugees. That’s how Max got it into his head and passed it on to Gregor. That’s how delicate the trail of evidence is, Mara.’
‘They must have known something,’ Mara said.
‘This is it, exactly, Mara. I believed it myself. In the end you are trying to substantiate a suspicion in the minds of these Gestapo thugs. They had this notion that Gregor was Jewish and that notion has led all the way to you. You are trying to prove them right. It’s nothing more than a Nazi fabrication.’
He had gone too far. Gregor, the product of Nazi imagination. The idea was much too hurtful and obscene for her to accept, so they separated after that, vowing never to speak to one another again. It had become a contest, her devotion to herself against the loyalty to the past, her oath to happiness against this oath to identity in which she had become a powerless conscript. Martin apologised to her. Begged her to forget what he had said and allow them to remain friends. Said he could not understand what had come over him and promised never to speak like that again about his friend.
‘Mara, please accept my forgiveness,’ he said.
‘What?’
She laughed out loud. Could not stop herself. She was back to herself again, shaking her fist at him and laughing helplessly.
‘I accept your forgiveness,’ she repeated.
She needed him to make her laugh. But the doubt which he had planted in her mind had the opposite effect in the end, driving her even further into this mission to establish the truth.
Twenty-eight
There are people who live their entire lives in exile. People who are never at home. Gregor had turned his life into a search for belonging, though it always remained a distant thing, a vague, utopian memory. Maybe luck and artistic timing were against him. When the band in Toronto split up and his friend John Joe went back to Ireland, Gregor drifted once more from one city to another. He made another attempt to go back to Berlin, but it was hard to find the song-line home. He was at odds with his family and hardly recognised his own son. Daniel remained aloof, cool, never showing any emotion or excitement in his reaction to Gregor’s gifts. Merely thanked his increasingly absent father dutifully and got on with his life. The longer Gregor stayed away, the more the distance grew between truth and memory. There was a threshold of estrangement beyond which it became increasingly difficult to go back. And in the end, he always found himself escaping again, this time going over to Ireland, following his friend John Joe to Dublin in order to see if he could start a life there.
What would it take to turn a lifetime of running away into one great returning?
Gregor arrived in Dublin with a mouth organ belonging to John Joe, an excuse for reunion. He wanted to give it back because he knew it was a very special instrument which had witnessed many of their craziest moments together and which had emotional value in their touring history. John Joe had lost dozens of harmonicas, many of them mislaid on his travels, but Gregor knew this was quite unique, with a sweet, gravelly sound, best for bending notes. The worn black plate had the words ‘Cross Harp’ written on it, and the brass vents through which John Joe had drawn and pushed his breath had darkened with time. Carrying this small instrument in his pocket, Gregor was hoping to relive some of the times they spent together. They would remember John Joe bartering with a fast-food vendor on the streets of Toronto once, offering a song in exchange for a hamburger.
But the reunion in Dublin was a disaster. What had been billed in his mind as such a high point, became a colourless event. John Joe had given up the music. He had put all that behind him and become a computer technician. Lived in a suburban housing development on the edge of the city. The houses all had the same neo-Celtic stained-glass panels in the front door. The ceilings were low. There was a deep-fry smell settling in the hallway and the radio in the kitchen competing with the TV in the living room. The glass back door was covered in paw marks where a dog made a recurring appearance in the small yard.
It was John Joe’s wife who answered the door and brought Gregor into the living room stepping past a baby’s bu
ggy in the hallway. John Joe was sitting on the sofa, watching the news. He didn’t get up. Asked his wife to get Gregor a beer. Remained in a position of languid mistrust, as though he suspected that Gregor had come to take him away from his family again. With his legs thrown across the armrest and his neck cushioned by the back of the sofa, he appeared as though he was lying in a hammock. His hand brought the nozzle of a beer bottle up to his mouth, tilting it with his fingers to take a drink.
‘I couldn’t do it any more,’ John Joe said, meaning the music, the late nights, the foreign cities.
He didn’t encourage Gregor to stay. Hardly moved more than once on the patterned sofa and kept his eye on the news as though it was more important than anything else in the world. A remarkable height of friendship had sunk to a remarkable low.
Gregor finished his beer. He held the mouth organ inside his pocket, warmed by his hand, but something stopped him from giving it back. It had become a companion to him, much the same as his grandfather’s brass icon, taken from a dead soldier. He decided to keep it. He left again and walked away with the instrument in his firm grip, knowing that it was more alive, more real, closer to him than the man who once played it could ever be.
In a Dublin bar that evening, he understood for the first time in his life what it meant to be homesick. He drank his beer, aware of his own presence in time and space. He had no story to live inside, no place in the imaginary world. He craved that belonging, something beyond the limitations of his own physical state.
‘You’re not from around here,’ somebody said, and then he was drawn into conversation with a group of office workers.
They asked him questions. It seemed absurd to them that somebody was sitting alone without talking. They had a peculiar gift for creating an ersatz feeling of home.
He decided to stay in Ireland. Rented a cottage from an old woman some distance outside the city. It had a great rose garden which had become neglected but which he cultivated and brought back to life for the time that he lived there. He found a job working part-time in a recording studio in the city, creating tunes for radio adverts, mortgage companies, insurance brokers. Happy tunes to which people drove to work every morning, jingles that entered into their subconscious traffic-logged stares and adhered like sticky tape to their minds. He made them up and forgot them right away, hardly even remembered composing them when he heard them on the radio himself.
He found a few clubs where they played jazz and managed to get some stand-in gigs. Ultimately, he found a regular spot, too, but there was no money in it and maybe the will to make it was gone. He was only doing it for his own pleasure now, and that lifted a great weight of expectation off his shoulders, allowing him to play more freely.
He was away for the most important years when Daniel was growing up. He had missed key events in his development, only hearing about them in letters from Mara. He was absent when Daniel had his teenage crisis with drugs and only heard about it weeks later when it was all over.
One day, Mara received a phone call at work to say that Daniel had been rushed to hospital after suffering a seizure. Martin was in the emergency ward with him.
‘He’s all right,’ Martin assured her. ‘The doctors are examining him right now, doing all the tests. He just keeled over in geography class. His classmates said he was shaking and his eyes were rolling around.’
‘My God,’ Mara said. ‘What are they saying?’
‘They suspect it’s epilepsy,’ Martin said. ‘But let’s wait and see.’
She was forced to drop one of her own patients in mid-treatment. Raced over to the hospital and found Daniel sitting up in bed with Martin beside him, already joking about things. He was out of danger, but had to remain under observation until they had done a CAT scan and various other tests.
When Mara finally got to speak to the registrar herself, she asked lots of anxious questions. She was told that Daniel was a suspected epileptic, and if this proved to be the case, he would probably have to go on lifelong medication to prevent further attacks. They had ruled out blood pressure issues. She was told that seizures like this could mean only one of two things, epilepsy or drugs. People sometimes got seizures from taking cocaine, but they had already ruled that out because Daniel denied taking anything.
She had recently found hash in his bedroom and had told him to be careful.
‘You’re only fifteen,’ she said to him.
She explained that she and Gregor had done all of those things as well, but that you could not allow it to take a hold of your life. She spoke wisely, like a recovered addict, knowing all the trapdoors of addiction, but still unable to get away from her own obsessions which had also made her very detached from reality, still trying to substantiate the life story of a man who had disappeared out of her life.
Around the hospital bed she eventually got Daniel to admit that he had taken cocaine along with a substantial quantity of alcohol.
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she said after speaking to the doctors once more.
Was this a cry for help too? While Martin and Mara brought chocolates and childish gifts, delivering all his needs, his music, his books, his games, trying desperately to turn him back into a child, what became clear to them all was that Gregor was absent from this crisis in his life. It was Martin who was present for that remarkable incident and Martin who collected Daniel from the hospital and brought him home. Gregor only heard about all this much later in a letter, as though it was some passing event in life which had already been sorted out by the time the news came.
Twenty-nine
The people in the town must have wondered why it was all taking so long. It was only a matter of hours before the town fell into the hands of the Americans. They were already on the far side of the lake, probably only waiting for the dawn to come. Already there had been quite a number of air attacks. Bombers on their return from city infernos had casually dropped an excess load on the post office one morning. The bakery had also been hit and fifteen people killed while they queued up for bread. All week the sound of heavy weaponry could be heard in the distance, echoing across the lake, absorbed by the forests. Now and again, the urgency of battle came closer with the abrupt presence of fighter planes overhead and the immediate response of anti-aircraft guns. Trucks racing by. Soldiers running. Orders bawled out in the streets. A tired assortment of old men and boys dragging themselves towards the enemy lines while others watched them carefully for signs of weakness and surrender. It made little sense defending this cluster of streets with nothing more than a church and a graveyard and a public house. A few villas by the lake and a railway station full of refugees. And still the business of holding the lines dragged on endlessly, hour by hour, through the night.
At the same time, they must have been wondering how all this could be over so soon. It was only a few years ago that all the dreamy optimism swept through the streets like an immortal carnival and everyone hung out their swastikas. Some of the children who were just starting in kindergarten at that time were not even out of school yet. The boys who were in school then hardly had enough time to grow a stubble on their chins before being sent to the front line. It was coming to an end before it even began, and still there was unfinished business in the town. In that last moment before peacetime and justice, they held on to the logic of invincibility with even greater tenacity, defending their own transgressions with suicidal obsession.
In the police station, Gregor’s mother had been allowed to go to the toilet. The corridor was heavy with smoke and kept dark. Only the rectangular outline of light around the door at the back where they were holding Max. An officer directed her with a torch and she was able to clean the boy up in the dark and wash out the soiled cloth. She heard the interrogation, men speaking with great patience one minute, then raising their voices suddenly to a frightening bark that made her jump. They laughed as though they were at a party.
‘Don’t worry,’ she heard one of them bawl. ‘We’ll have him before the night
is out.’
As she came back through the corridor again she heard the voice of Max, pleading with them.
‘I don’t know,’ he begged.
‘Who gave you the fuel?’
There was no answer to that, only the sound of a fist, hard and soft, no more than a light click coming from a sports field or a playground, but with incredible violence concealed inside. How breakable the world was. How unfair the game rules. How much the force of the blow was felt by herself, imagined beyond all proportion in the dark.
‘Muncher,’ they shouted. ‘Useless muncher.’
Their failure to find answers was being converted into rage. And their rage needed more justification, more abuse, more derision. They railed in grand terms against all schemers and deserters, defrauders of the Reich in its greatest hour of need. They knew what Emil had been up to all along, singing the right songs on Hitler’s birthday like a great patriot. They vowed to comb every street until they found out where he was hiding. They knew about his trail of lovers. Some of them had already confessed their pathetic treason of bedroom acts.
‘Why don’t you tell us where he is?’ she heard them say.
She tried to obscure the voices by speaking, calming herself as well as the fear she saw reflected in the boy, rocking him back and forth. And when she began to hear the voice of Max, turned into the helpless cries of a child, she began to sing softly. Even if the boy could not hear a thing, she hummed in his ear. He was fidgety and would not settle down. She tried cradling his head in her lap, but he kept getting up and pushing her away and then moving close again. Whimpering for a while and stopping and then remembering to cry again, louder than before.
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