Disguise

by Hugo Hamilton

  He started going to a late-night bar called the Pinguin. He could not get out of the habit of staying awake, spending time in this half-light, under the mirrored globe hanging from the ceiling. A big disco sun rotating continuously, sending yellow pennies of light circling around the walls and bottles and faces, sweeping across the floor and leaping onto the seats.

  He has become part of this late-night shrine of rock himself now, the hall of has-beens, the place in which everything has gone by, eclipsed by cultural innovation accelerating into the future. The world has rushed on into a new set of obsessions. When Gregor was growing up, the planet seemed like an enormous place, full of sections all devoted to staying apart with their own culture and their own separate identities. North America was far away. Peru was unimaginably remote. The past was close behind, was the phrase from a song which described how everyone felt. Nowhere is far away now. Even the most distant places in Alaska are on everyone’s doorstep, over-filmed, over-reported.

  In the Pinguin bar, people still come here to pay homage to their era, listening to the sounds of their own time, recalling moments of great potential and adventure. For a few hours late at night, they can still imagine the world being a big arena, full of undiscovered places. They reimagine their own innocence and their own big-eyed wonder. A poster of Elvis in his tight, glittering white suit just inside the door. A reign of icons all along the walls. A black-and-white Telecaster guitar propped up at forty-five degrees on a ledge over the doorway like a musical anti-aircraft weapon. The decor has not been touched up since the high tide of punk in the eighties when people like Bowie and Depeche Mode came here regularly. The toilets are the same. Same plastic sofas. Same Formica bar, dotted with cigarette burns. In the corner, the same bumper car, rescued from some carnival, come to a halt for the night and turned into a table surrounded by bar stools.

  It’s not a live-performance venue, but once in a while when the mood strikes him, Gregor picks up a guitar and sings ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’. A question they all ask themselves. One of the other patrons at the bar doing air drums on the counter with his hands. We are never more than the sum of our aspirations. Three-minute peaks of clarity in which everything seems possible. He has become a playlist of those temporary successes and failures, a man who has left no significant mark on the culture tree himself, but who has been a witness to a time in transformation. He has gone through all the self-searching profundity, wondering if anything was achieved in the end. He has been through the mental hall of mirrors and come out the other side. The man with no answers. The man with no explanations.

  Since he has come back, he looked up some of his old friends in the music business, but most of them have moved on to other things. He still plays a few gigs around the city, but he gets most of his satisfaction from teaching now. He’s happy to teach everything from Chopin to Cobain. The students love him because he gives them real gossip about the music scene, how they lived and how some of the most famous songs were constructed. He’s got himself into trouble once or twice with such gossip and parents have phoned up the school in outraged tones, wondering if some of it is appropriate. He drifted into a conversation with his students one day about the cult of groupies and starlets around some of the great legends. Told them about one woman keeping a lock of hair from each one of her conquests. Another young woman who made a plaster cast of each rock star’s penis. When they asked him who had the biggest, he told them it was Jimi Hendrix, by a mile, and then the principal started getting the heat from the parents. But in the end, he defended Gregor and said it was all part of the education of young people to be aware of what their forefathers did, not only in the Second World War, but also in the great madness of the post-war era of protest and cult worship.

  One of the band members Gregor played with years ago in Berlin had taken up a job working in a school for disabled children. He goes there now and again to play the trumpet for them and he can see the music instantly taking shape in their reactions, maybe the best audience he’s ever had. He has accompanied his friend taking one of the older children out around the city, shouting under bridges to hear the echo, sitting in a café with fizzy apple juice, listening to the profane joy of slurping sounds, when the straw reaches the end of the glass and there is nothing left only ice.

  Mara surprised him late one afternoon at his apartment. Left her bike in the courtyard. Stood in front of his door carrying a basket with a bottle of wine and the ingredients for a salad. Heard music on the piano coming from inside and decided to wait there, listening until it came to an end. When she rang the bell, it turned out that he had a student with him.

  ‘Just give me a few minutes,’ he said.

  So she waited in the kitchen until he was finished and ushered the student out. When he brought her into the living room, she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, an embrace that was like an inverse measure of the distance between them. She gave him the news, the family gossip. She told him that she had brought a salad and some wine. Stood looking around, taking possession of his environment, examining the guitars he had standing in each corner, commenting on the brightness of the apartment. The tall balcony doors were open and the voices came in from the tables outside the bar in the street below, as though he still needed the protection of public spaces around him.

  He explained to her that the student he had been teaching could hardly play music at all and was suicidal. It was clear that he would never become a musician, even though his heart was set on it.

  ‘Terrible to see a young person like that,’ Gregor said to her. ‘He’s unable to keep a beat. He tries his best, sticking his tongue out all the time as he plays, but even after an hour we’ve hardly got any further really. He’s like somebody with a learning disability. I see him twice a week, but I can’t charge any money for it. We’re making some progress, I suppose. Slow progress, and maybe that’s good.’

  She listened to him talking and walked around picking up some of his belongings as if this was the highest, most intimate contact achievable between two people. She saw his passport, his medication, his diary lying open with all his meetings entered in. In her hands she examined the Russian icon. Then she picked up the souvenir harmonica. Even blew a childish note into it and reclaimed, with that one gesture, all the impetus of their former lives together.

  And maybe this was the moment of immortality, the moment where they began to convert each other back into real people. Nothing is real in the end, not until it’s reported. Nobody is real unless they have a witness to their lives. We exist only in the imagination. We may inhabit the physical world, we may be flesh-and-blood creatures in this material place, but it is along the axis of imagination that we come to life. We can only coexist, at most, reflected in the blur of human interaction and media events around us. Gregor Liedmann has been brought to life by Mara, by his family, by the external story created around him, existing only inside those experiences he has shared with others. These are the ingredients of his identity, his narrative, that strange human genius of belonging.

  And maybe for the first time ever, with Mara in the same room, he was standing in the real world. While she walked back into the kitchen and took out plates and wine glasses he finally stopped being a ghost. While he watched her slicing radishes into minted white coins, while she smiled and lifted up her wine glass in both hands, both elbows on the table, he felt for the first time that he was at home.

  Thirty-three

  They’re washing the dishes now. The remote clatter of pots comes down the hallway from the kitchen along with their voices. Bursts of laughter drifting through the house as they stack plates and slip cutlery into drawers. The doors of presses opening and closing, and glasses ringing. They are not laughing at anything in particular, nothing that might be remembered later on, only laughing for the sake of it.

  At the other end of the house, Gregor, Mara and Daniel are going through the contents of the house in Nuremberg. She unties a green ribbon around a package of
papers containing nothing but lists. Big childish handwriting, a series of words sloping down along the page. Another list saying thank you for the ‘sweets, pencils, rubber, folder, Gregor’. A further list of things to do. ‘Fold up my clothes, brush my teeth, say my prayers, go to sleep, dream about ships’—all ticked off. A list of names. ‘Thilo, Gudrun, Marlies, Werner, Wilhelm’, with Thilo and Marlies crossed out. Followed by another list of objects on a birthday wish list, such as ‘mouth organ, a torch to see in the dark, a telescope, a book about outer space or stars, a book about bears, not any sad book about animals, not any book about losing a rowing race, thank you’.

  Outside the window, the others are passing by now, carrying a small table and some folding chairs. Martin is singing to himself. Thorsten is heard telling the others to bring glasses. At the same moment, Johannes comes down the hallway, standing at the door.

  ‘Papa says we’re all going to look at the stars.’

  ‘Tell them we’re coming soon,’ she replies. ‘Just another few minutes, that’s all.’

  The boy answers with another bit of adult language.

  ‘I can well believe that you want to be alone,’ he says, full of innocence, then runs off happily.

  Mara smiles. Daniel has become impatient again and tries to leave.

  ‘Jesus, we’ll never get out of the past now.’

  ‘No, wait, Daniel. I want you to see this.’

  She takes another box from the sideboard and places it on the table. The letter G is written on the side. One by one, she takes out the contents, each carefully folded and separated with a layer of thin blue paper, gone crisp with age now and smelling of mothballs. First, she takes out a jumper with three red buttons on one shoulder. Then a scarf and a sailor’s cap. She holds them all up for Gregor to see.

  ‘I never looked at these properly until yesterday,’ she says. ‘These must be the clothes you were found in.’

  Daniel sighs.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ he says, watching more items emerging from the box and being placed on the table. ‘Here we go again. We’re living in a museum.’

  ‘There must be some reason why she kept them,’ Mara says, ignoring him.

  ‘It’s just a box of clothes, Mama.’

  A pair of trousers, socks and shoes. The shoes are polished and filled with pieces of newspaper to keep the shape, as though Gregor might come back and wear them again.

  ‘There must have been so many displaced children at the end of the war,’ Mara continues, taking out more things from the bottom of the box. A tin trumpet. A wooden truck. And some later items such as swimming certificates, music prizes and a picture of Gregor with his friends on a boating trip along the Rhine. She picks up the clothes again, examining each one of them carefully.

  ‘Maybe she thought it was better for you not to know.’

  Gregor’s mother had come from a time when it was a custom to protect children and keep them safe from information. A generation of hope and mistakes, of religion and obedience and privacy, of diaries and secrets and love in the dark.

  ‘She must have known that we would find them.’

  ‘Please, Mara. Put them away,’ Gregor says.

  ‘Have a look at this,’ she tries once again.

  She turns the trousers inside out and points out a tiny stitch in blue thread, almost invisible, with the letters JB.

  ‘Did your mother stitch this in?’

  ‘My mother?’ Gregor says. ‘I have no idea. These trousers could have belonged to anyone. They may have been handed down.’

  ‘Could this be some Jewish name?’ Mara suggests.

  Are these the limits of existence? A tiny, unsourced mark on the inside of a pair of trousers. A small signifier from the past still fighting against forgetting, still hoping to contain meaning, still clamouring for space in our memory. History is the question we keep trying to answer. It is the shape of our imagination, the accusation in our existence, the guesswork of our decisions, the measure of improvement and decline. We are the answer to history, this corridor of correction, full of intuition and invention and handed-down instruction. Our identity is our instability: the longing, the adjustment, the attempt to answer the question from which we have come, the trace of ourselves left behind.

  Gregor takes the trousers out of Mara’s hands and places them back in the box.

  ‘Mara,’ he says, ‘Thank you for keeping these things.’

  Here is the one vital piece of proof they needed. She has kept the memory of a survivor alive in this room, made him real again.

  And maybe this is the greatest human achievement of all, to reconstruct the missing in our imagination. He has been brought back to life, this dead Jewish boy. He is standing right there among them, this living monument to the memory of those whose real identity has been erased.

  They look at each other, all three of them, as if they have suddenly made a discovery about themselves which had eluded them so far. Daniel smiles. He places one arm around his father and then places the other around his mother.

  ‘They’re waiting for us,’ he says.

  He leads them both out of the room and closes the door. He takes them through the hallway back towards the kitchen where Thorsten stands with an expression of great enthusiasm, holding bottles of wine in both hands. He tells them that he has set up the small table outside in the field. Chairs and glasses for everyone. Beer mats to put over the glasses to stop the insects from falling in. He says the mosquitoes have lost all their aggression at this time of the year and they can sit there for a while, looking at the stars and the glow of light on the horizon coming from Berlin.

  ‘Hang on,’ Gregor says. ‘Let me get the trumpet.’

  The light is fading now. A monochrome blue that makes Gregor wonder if his mushroom allergy has come back. But then he steps out to discover that it is the moon. He returns carrying the trumpet and a guitar. They stand in the kitchen like schoolchildren, waiting for instructions. He hands the guitar to Daniel and tells him to play a simple progression of chords. He rushes around taking out pots, giving each person an instrument. They understand his plan. Johannes is holding the white enamel lid of a bread bin in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other, banging the lid so that the throbbing vibrations carry through his arm.

  They are arranged in a line, a troop of eccentric country musicians, ready for the march. Everyone ranked in order of their height, with Martin at the very end carrying a drum fashioned from a bin, hastily strapped to his belly. Johannes in front and Thorsten somewhere in the middle with an old washboard that he has produced from the storeroom. Gregor takes his place at the top of the line and blows a stout note of departure. The first, brash note of an old Balkan wedding march, followed by the raucous band behind him, beating their wild accompaniment, scraping and banging on the way out towards the orchard.

  They have gone to bless the trees. A protection march. A procession of pale blue faces, tramping through the orchard, past the ladders and the wheelbarrows. Juli knocking a spoon against a stainless-steel pot. Mara with a child’s tambourine in one hand and jar of coffee beans in the other. Martin banging and sending ecstatic animal sounds into the sky. Daniel strumming wild punk rhythms and Katia, carrying the drum of her belly out in front, clacking two wooden boards together. The humming sound of the trumpet settling along the silvery branches. A fat, warm, bulging word in a brass language which is understood by all creatures, even the worms inside the apples. A long, living note spreading out across the flat landscape and floating away beyond the blue roofs of the farm buildings.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Hans Christian Oeser, Georg Reuchlein, Petra Eggers, Henning Ahrens, Rainer Milzkott, Christiane Wartenberg, Reinhard Förster, Moira Reilly, Peter Straus and Nicholas Pearson.

  About the Author

  Hugo Hamilton is the author of five novels, two memoirs and a collection of short stories. He was born and lives in Dublin.

  Also by Hugo Hamilton

/>   The Sailor in the Wardrobe

  The Speckled People

  Sad Bastard

  Headbanger

  Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow

  The Love Test

  The Last Shot

  Surrogate City

  Copyright

  FOURTH ESTATE • London

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Hugo Hamilton 2008

  The right of Hugo Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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