Disguise (14 page)

She had been waiting for him all this time, frozen, staring ahead with that ghostly sadness, beyond crying. There was no escape from those eyes. The questions in them. He walked up to the car and opened the door.

‘Mara, what are you doing here, sitting alone?’

He brought her inside and linked arms with her on the stairs going up. They went straight into the bedroom. She dropped her clothes on the black-and-white chair as usual and got into bed, exhausted, without words. They made love. A farewell love. On the eve of departure. With fatigue in their limbs and with hot tears rolling across his chest. The genius of it. Staying in the car all night and waiting for him to come back. Sitting there with the keys in her hand, staring ahead, knowing that some time, sooner or
later, even if the dawn was coming and the noise of refuse trucks was advancing through the streets, he would eventually have to walk past and find her there. The courage it took her to see it through, to be noticed by neighbours coming out to walk their dogs. Waiting only for his tall, familiar shape to appear, with his ghostly face coming up under the street light to ask her, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ Keeping herself awake inside the cramped car, hoping that he would not go in without seeing her, as if it didn’t matter.

The good apples have already been stored away. Thorsten has stacked them up on a wooden trolley and taken them over to one of the barns. He has opened the big sliding doors and wheeled the trolley in, carrying the sacks into the basement with Johannes following him all the way, watching everything.

The others are wandering around the farm in the early afternoon. Katia has disappeared for a rest, while Mara has taken Gregor and Martin by the arm, one on either side, on a guided tour. In the yard, Juli is trying to get the pump going. It squeaks like an old donkey and she keeps laughing with the effort, pumping the big lever up and down but not drawing any water. Daniel watches her with a condescending smile, enjoying the way she struggles with such a redundant piece of cast-iron equipment. ‘Does this not work any more?’ she asks, smiling, with the stud under her bottom lip reflecting the sun. Daniel nods, but refuses to show her because he likes to watch the furious determination on her face. The laughter has taken the power out of her arms and her lips are pursed in mock distress, but she tries once more, throwing back her hair to put in one more genuine effort and prove that she can figure this out by herself.

‘You must put the water in first,’ Thorsten calls out from the door of the barn. Juli is not really all that pushed about
getting water and he fails to notice that there is a game going on here between them.

Thorsten connects the yellow hose to the tap and explains to her that the tubular upright sink has to be filled with water first, otherwise the lever will only pull up air. When that’s been done, he asks her to start pumping again and the cool underground water comes gushing jubilantly across the stones. She takes a drink from her cupped hand. Then she fills an enamel basin with water to throw over Daniel. And even though he wouldn’t mind cooling down, he flees like a chicken across the farmyard, still laughing. Most of the water from the basin spills on Juli herself and on her white dress, so that her thighs now look as though they are wrapped in cling film. But she has also managed to hit Daniel with some drops of water across his bare shoulders. She heaves the basin back down and walks away in triumph, bowing to an invisible audience with her hands silently clapping above her head.

Is this a high point? An afternoon in the sunshine with Daniel and Juli laughing helplessly and the clang of the empty enamel basin echoing around the farmyard? Are the contortions of history not mere pilgrim stations on the way to this peak of freedom?

They are taking it easy now. Juli and Daniel leave the pump behind to go down to the lake with Johannes. In winter, they threw a rock out onto the lake and it remained suspended on top of the frozen water for weeks before it sank. Now, Daniel says he’s going to dive down to see if he can bring it up again.

The others intend to follow later. In the meantime, Mara is pointing out some of the war damage on the farm buildings. Facing east, on the outer wall of the barns, they can see the holes in the bricks. The bullets have taken
chunks away, leaving shards and dust in a red line on the ground along the wall. Nobody has ever swept it away. At the corner where the artillery fire blew large gaps into the side of the barn, it has been repaired with yellow brick replacing the original red ones. The farmhouse itself got the worst of it, almost completely destroyed because the red roof offered such a perfect target. And the barn where the horses were burned alive is still standing as a ruin with no roof.

Martin is smoking a cigarette. So calm is the afternoon that the smoke rises straight and he even manages to blow an effortless smoke ring, making the air seem interior. His sunglasses make him look like a dragonfly stopping to reflect, staring into the distance at the forest on the far side of the field.

‘That’s where the Russians were,’ Mara explains, ‘in those trees.’

‘Us Russians over there,’ Martin says. ‘And us Germans over here.’

‘It took them eight days, apparently, to take over this farm.’

Mara says there were seven German soldiers holding out here, to the last man. The fire came from the trees, day and night, with intervals in between, waiting for the artillery. One night, the Russians sent a young man over to steal his way into the farm, but he was caught by the Germans and when they searched his rucksack they found nothing but a book by Pushkin. He was held hostage, but the Russians eventually swept over all these farms with the sheer force of numbers, even though they suffered great casualties. A minimum of sixty Russian soldiers were said to have fallen in the fight over this farm alone. By that time the house was in ruins and there was nothing
much left to defend, but the Germans still refused to surrender. The farm was conquered eventually. The Russian intellectual was found dead and the two remaining German soldiers were taken into captivity before the army moved on in the race to Berlin.

Thorsten’s aunt had fled as the battle over the farm began. Every edible animal had already been slaughtered to provide food for the front, some of the horses turned into sausage. She wasn’t even allowed to take one of her own horses and had to join the thousands who were fleeing to the west on foot. And then she soon found herself overtaken by the advancing army. The war was effectively over and she decided go back to try and hold on to the farm which had been in her family for hundreds of years. But that was her mistake, because she was then at the mercy of a new war of looting and rape. In her twenties at the time, only recently married, alone facing a wave of revenge.

‘It must have been horrible,’ Mara says. ‘They tied her by the neck to the pump.’

And when all that was over, she was forced to defend the farm once again during the GDR times, because it was sequestered by the socialist state. After she and her husband had managed to rebuild most of the buildings, the state took possession and ran the farm while they fought to be allowed to live there. They were offered work at a printing firm in Leipzig, but refused to leave, saying they would kill themselves. Eventually they were kept on as labourers on their own farm. And each day, she must have walked past that pump, trying to forget the memory of those dark moments. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that she finally managed to claim back the farm and then handed it on to Thorsten.

The farm is a bit of a mess now. Maybe it was always like that, even when it was in full swing with cattle
moving in and out and the grain being stored in the lofts and the sweet smell of manure all around. It’s a place where nothing was ever finished. Some of the old farm machinery is still lying around, idle and rusted now, like the horse-drawn soil leveller with its thick, heavy wooden wheels and a seat for two people to sit on while driving. Everywhere, items waiting to be taken away or put somewhere else. A car wheel leaning against the wall of the house. A pile of yellow bricks left by the side of the grain store, and further away, a stack of grey slates intended to fix the roof damaged by a storm when the chestnut tree lost one of its branches. Closer to the house, there is a stack of logs and an axe leaning against the wall. Somebody must have decided it was time to have a go at getting the wood ready for the fire but then got distracted and considered something else to be more urgent.

The yard is enclosed in a rectangular shape by buildings on all sides, leaving access to the fields at each corner. Everything seems to have moved on and left this farm behind now. A barn owl comes in the late afternoons from time to time to sit on the roof or in the plum tree at the centre of the yard. The weeds are growing everywhere and maybe nature may yet manage to have the last word.

Could the old fairy tales be coming back? Or did they ever disappear? Once a year in a nearby village, the women wear their traditional dresses, claiming that the legend of Red Riding Hood sprang up here centuries ago. They have marked a place in the forest where they believe a small girl in her red cape was abducted on her way to see her grandmother. Was there something darker about the original story that made it too difficult to tell in any other form but in a fairy tale? Is it possible that the tale of Red Riding Hood was invented in answer to sexual predators of
the time, and that the wolf became loaded with all the unspeakable crimes of society? Just as some people now believe the story of the seven dwarfs was based on child labourers working in the mines. Mara has seen the women in the village, around fifty Red Riding Hoods of all ages gathering together. They march into the local bar and order schnapps. Old and young women in red hoods, celebrating the day when the predator was defeated and ended up in the well with a meal of rocks in his stomach.

‘Thorsten was brought up in Berlin,’ Mara says. ‘Katia told me that when his mother was taking him to school on the S-Bahn, they used to pass by the Berlin Wall and see the soldiers and the dogs below them. He would ask her questions and his mother would answer them quite honestly.’

She reconstructs the surreal conversation which Thorsten and his mother had going to school, with everyone on the train listening to the banal, but absolutely correct answers.

‘Mama, why are the dogs there?’ Thorsten asked.

‘To stop people going over the Wall,’ she answered.

‘What is the Wall there for?’

‘To protect us from the capitalists, son.’

‘Who are the capitalists?’

‘People who love money.’

‘Do we not like money?’

‘No,’ his mother answered. ‘We hate money. It makes you sick. It makes you want to buy nice things.’

Mara says there was nothing that anyone listening in on the train could argue with. But the innocence of the questions and the answers must have sounded absurd, mocking the entire socialist system even if what she was saying was absolutely bang in line with Communist dogma. The clarity of the child’s questions and the
simplicity of the mother’s answers always revealed the lies inside the system.

‘Are they all sick over there?’ Thorsten asked, pointing across the Berlin Wall to the other side.

‘Yes,’ his mother would answer. ‘They’re all sick over there because they want to do nothing else but shop.’

It went on for weeks like that, his mother answering every question correctly and innocently, everything going along with a socialist view of the world, but all the passengers listening in knowing that the answers sounded completely daft.

‘What did the other passengers say?’ Martin asks.

‘They kept their mouths shut, mostly,’ Mara says. ‘They stared ahead and ignored it. Except for one man, who once said her attitude was disgraceful and that she should stay quiet. So she barked back at him and asked him what he would answer to all those questions. “You answer them,” she said. After they got off, another woman quietly came up to her and, without saying anything, shook her hand. Thorsten kept asking the same questions every day going to school, because he was fascinated by the sight of the soldiers and the dogs and the barbed wire and the lookout towers. But even more than that, he was obsessed with the strange answers that his mother gave. Eventually, an official came to the house one day and told her she was no longer permitted to travel on the S-Bahn. And it was not long after that that only special people could travel that close to the Wall.’

With the large doors open on both sides of the building, the farm almost looks operational again, as though the cattle are merely out in the fields and will soon be returning for the night. The sunlight slopes into these dusty, forsaken halls now, along the loam floor and through
the empty pens, casting shadows. The air is full of sound memories, hooves, chains, clanging buckets, the lowing of cows and the whistling farmhands. The reimagined smells of dung and straw. Old leather straps and blinkers and cobwebbed harnesses still hang on the walls. At the centre of the doorway onto the fields, a swing has been erected on long ropes.

‘How do you think Daniel will manage in Africa?’ Gregor wonders.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Mara says. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘As long as they get all their shots.’

‘He’s got Juli with him,’ Mara says. ‘And she’s a tough one.’

‘Like a bodyguard,’ Martin says. ‘I don’t think Putin has a better security team around himself than that.’

Mara steps towards the swing and sits in the wooden seat. Martin stands behind her, ready to push. They fall into the roles of children without giving it a thought.

‘Remember that rash he got once,’ Martin says.

‘What rash?’ Gregor asks.

‘He got this terrible rash behind the knees,’ Mara explains. ‘Lasted for about a year. We took him to all kinds of specialists.’

‘Leprosy,’ Martin says.

‘I actually thought it had something to do with the hornet sting,’ Mara says. ‘Had to get him a dozen different ointments. We even tried acupuncture. In the end it just disappeared again. Complete mystery.’

Gregor becomes aware of how much has been lost by his former absence. He would like to claim back some of those details, but they don’t belong to him. She has used the word ‘we’ to incorporate Martin into those intimate family episodes, because he was there to help at the time
when Gregor was abroad. Looking out into the fields at the stubble and the blonde rectangles of straw still waiting to be picked up and brought in for storage, he feels what is missing.

‘His outburst this morning,’ Gregor says. ‘There’s something he wants to get off his chest.’

‘He hasn’t mentioned anything to me,’ Mara says.

‘He’s never really forgiven me,’ Gregor says.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I feel it. There’s something on his mind,’ Gregor says.

‘You haven’t really talked much recently, have you?’

‘I thought we’d sorted everything out,’ Gregor says. ‘But there’s something wrong. I know he still blames me. I can feel it coming. From her, from Juli as much as from Daniel.’

‘He needs to go away and clear his head,’ Martin says.

‘Maybe Africa will change him.’

‘He’s just like you,’ Martin says. ‘He has to travel and discover himself. You’ll see. He’ll come back in a year’s time and the two of you will have so much to talk about.’