Disguise (15 page)

‘Maybe it’s better if he gets it off his chest before he leaves,’ Mara says.

She settles into the seat and begins to swing in and out. With the help of Martin, she sails into the open air. Her dress rises up in the breeze and she appears to go right out into the landscape with her bare legs pointing towards the lake. The ropes are very long, four metres at least up to the frame of the doorway, and she swings like a young girl defying all instincts for safety, feeling the narcotic, funfair rush inside her stomach. Out into the blinding sunlight and right back into the shade of the farm building, speeding back and forth through the entrance full of hovering dust and flies. Higher and higher with her eyes
closed, as though she wants to continue going all the way up to the sun. Leaning back with the ropes in her hands and her feet stretched out in order to gain the maximum height. Returning with her hair going forward and knees folded so as to keep going, almost up as far as the heavy wooden beams crossing under the roof.

There was a frightening moment soon after Gregor left. Coming back from shopping one day, Mara parked across the street from the apartment. She let Daniel out and went around for the groceries, handed him one of the bags and before she had time to remind him not to cross, he disappeared. She heard the screaming tyres. Saw the car skidding. Daniel shivering and clutching the bag with both hands up to his chin, still waiting for the impact, almost smiling with fear for a split second. She smelled the burning rubber and ran out to grab him in a panic, even though she had all the time in the world now. The car had come to a stop at a slight angle. The driver sat with his hands on the steering wheel, unable to move, unable to speak.

She’s gone over these details a thousand times, trying to put them behind her. The dry mouth, speechless aftershock. Measuring and remeasuring the short distance between luck and disaster. The compound range of confusing emotions springing up between rage and passivity. The urge to kill the driver. Followed by an equal wave of guilt and compassion as he stepped out of the car and leaned over to be sick. The spectators raising their heads over the parked cars in judgement, converting the scene into a parable for their own children. And the
sudden awareness of her own vulnerability. That cold feeling around the shoulders. She had dropped the keys out of her hand. Some of the groceries rolled under the car. Afterwards she discovered that somebody had made off with her purse, while she stood in the middle of the street lifting Daniel up in her arms and turned, out of sheer habit, to say something to Gregor, even though he was no longer there.

‘I thought you were watching him,’ she wanted to say, though she cannot remember if this was actually said out loud or only inside her own head.

Back in the safety of the apartment, she kneeled down and shook Daniel by the shoulders. Clenched her fist, telling him never to do this to her again. Then she cried and hugged him, saying: ‘I’m sorry, Mama didn’t mean to be cross with you.’

She wrote to Gregor and told him about that incident. They were in contact all the time, by letters and by occasional phone calls from Toronto. She would pass the phone to Daniel and allow him to speak to his father for a few precious moments, but there was nothing much to say at that remove. Gregor remarked on how tall the buildings were. How cold it was in the winter. But it was making no sense to Daniel that his father was away and not coming back soon. Gregor sent gifts for them on their birthdays. Mara assured him that Daniel was very happy and well taken care of. He spent time with her sisters, and Martin was also being very good to him, often inviting him to stay overnight with his family.

Daniel sometimes woke up at night, dreaming of hornets. She had to take him into her bed to calm him down, tell him the windows were all shut and there was no possible way that a hornet could enter the house. He heard
buzzing. He imagined them hiding behind wardrobes and nesting in the curtains. Brightly coloured creatures with sickle blades ready to attack as soon as he went to sleep.

They avoided the obvious questions of fidelity. Of course, Gregor would meet other women. The music business was full of drifters and casual adoration and promises of uncomplicated love. It was hard to discuss it on the phone and too blunt to put into letters. The conversations were tough and tearful enough as they were. So they maintained that proxy, long-distance marriage which so many immigrants and seasonal workers all over the world live with all the time.

The only way of getting closer to Gregor now was to go back to Nuremberg. She took Daniel with her on these visits and rebuilt a family relationship from the evidence of ruins. It was soon clear that Daniel meant the world to his grandmother.

‘Look,’ she said, smiling at the boy. ‘He’s the image of his great-grandfather, Emil.’

Mara looked sceptical.

‘Before he got fat, that is.’

They placed the photographs alongside Daniel’s face. A strange family science, comparing eyes and cheekbones and mouths, wishing the resemblances to life.

With all this added attention, Daniel became fond of his grandmother. They formed an immediate friendship, perhaps actively encouraged by Mara so that she could spend more time investigating. A family spy, hoping to uncover some vital piece of information. She took Daniel to the funeral of Gregor’s father when he died. And in the following summer, while Gregor’s mother was grieving, they often stayed over the entire weekend, even going up to the mountain lodge where Gregor and his father used to spend so much time when he was growing up.

Mara had taken Daniel to see Gregor’s father in hospital before he died. And maybe the time had come for an open discussion. Perhaps Gregor’s mother had only been obedient to some post-war pact with her husband and would now be in a position to reveal the real story. As they became more familiar, Mara brought up the subject of Gregor’s origins more directly.

‘Why would he have made up a story like this?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘Only Gregor can tell you that.’

She ran into a dead end each time. It was depressing to find nothing at all. They went over the war years and Mara noted every detail in her head, often writing things down afterwards in a notebook. Then she would send letters off to Canada again, though Gregor refused to get into the circle at all and said he was not joining a history club. What amazed Mara during these long discussions in Nuremberg was how close the story of Gregor’s mother tallied with that of Gregor, apart from the one essential fact. He was not an orphan. His identity was clearly that of a German boy, an only son, who had grown up in Nuremberg and began to fantasise about having a different life.

‘Strange,’ Mara would say. ‘Very strange, don’t you think, that he would have made up such an elaborate story?’

‘I blame Uncle Max,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’

‘For what?’

‘For putting all that stuff into Gregor’s head.’

‘And why would he do that?’

‘Because he was going mad. Because he was guilty. Don’t ask me. All I know is that Gregor started becoming obsessed with himself, looking in the mirror, asking
endless questions and imagining things that were completely outlandish.’

Mara was conscripted by this family duty, not so much for Gregor’s but for Daniel’s sake, bringing a lost family back together. She was charged with the task of establishing Daniel’s true identity, even if Gregor’s was beyond reach already.

Sometimes she felt the futility of all this. Was your identity not something you chose, as much as something you rejected? Characterised by those elements you admire as well as those you deny. Daniel’s identity was not so much inherited any more. It had little to do with religion, with history or with geography, even less with his place of birth or his ancestors. His identity was something in the making. Already, Martin was taking Daniel to football matches, buying him a blue-and-white scarf, giving him a feeling of belonging in the city, a family of inhabitants, a spooling of emotions into one large unlikely commune.

She found herself walking around the house in Nuremberg, imagining Gregor when he was Daniel’s age. She observed the reactions of her own son to the antlers on the walls, the guns lined up in a rack behind glass, the hunting prints depicting dogs and men jumping out of bushes to pounce on a wild boar with gleaming tusks. The unimaginable height to which a heavy wild boar could jump to get away from his pursuers. She noticed that, just like his father, Daniel was afraid of the stuffed badger on the landing, until Gregor’s mother finally agreed that the claws looked a bit threatening and placed it somewhere else.

Everywhere the household items that would have been so familiar to Gregor. Were they not part of his identity as well, the fridge, the TV set, the shape and position of
the radiators? The visual content of his memory, the logo of family possessions and home smells and peculiarities. The radio in the kitchen on top of the fridge. The carved wooden pastry print with the faces of Max and Moritz on the wall. The piano in the living room with the pictures of Emil above. The ring of glass trinkets and vases and ornaments on the sideboard every time somebody walked by. Even the handprints and finger marks around the light switches.

She wondered what it was like to have no identity, the loneliness of belonging to a people who had no disguise.

In the hallway, there was a full-length mirror which Gregor had told her about, how he stood there and imagined where he came from in the East. His mother confirmed that he had always been an insomniac. It may have had to do with the antlers. Or maybe it was the clock chiming every half an hour in the living room.

Gregor used to get up and wander around the house at night, creeping down the stairs so as not to wake his parents. He knew every creak in the floorboards. He had to reimagine all the furniture in the dark so that he would not crash into the coffee table or the sideboard. He took fright at the shape of animals on the wall as if they were not quite dead yet. A speck of light coming to life in the eyes of a dead deer. The grimace of a mountain goat. The antique hunting rifles hanging over every doorway. The coat rack in the hallway like another set of antlers with coats hanging down like dripping skins. And the shoes and boots left just inside the door which always made it look as though his parents had evaporated.

‘He used to stand in front of that mirror at night,’ Mara said.

‘I know that.’

‘He told me that he would see no reflection in the dark.’

‘Naturally.’

‘He stood there wondering if he existed at all.’

And when the dawn came up, Gregor would see himself coming back to life again slowly, along with all the other dead things around him in the house. Gradually the image in the mirror would gather light and he had the feeling that he came from nothing.

There was something unwelcome about Uncle Max. Gregor remembers his mother being quite nervous whenever he came to the house and his father remained aloof, even hostile. His presence created an uncomfortable tension and everyone was relieved afterwards when he was gone. A quiet, introverted old man who was not actually related, only called Uncle because he was a family friend. Perhaps it was his physical appearance that made him seem so grotesque. Uncle Max was missing one eye and his false teeth didn’t fit very well, so he smiled awkwardly and lisped and spat across the table whenever he spoke. Bits of food occasionally landed on the tablecloth at dinner and Gregor remembers the fascination and revulsion of watching his mother discreetly sweep away some offending morsel or hiding a stain with the jug. On top of that, his missing eye wept frequently so that he had to wipe away the discharge with his handkerchief, and perhaps it was that sad appearance that made everyone feel afraid of him.

Uncle Max brought a big silence with him. There was something even more absurd about his chronic inability to speak freely about ordinary things. He asked questions, how Gregor was doing at school, how his music lessons were going. The visit often revolved entirely around that staccato question-and-answer session. ‘Tell Uncle Max
about your new piano lessons,’ his mother would say to fill in the space, and Gregor would be left searching for something to report. It seemed like an extraction each time. Gregor couldn’t imagine how it would interest Uncle Max to know the name of his music teacher. His parents were not very skilled at keeping a conversation going either, so the evening with Uncle Max staggered through a series of agonising silences in which everyone glanced furtively around the table avoiding each other’s eyes. His father sometimes let go in a tirade on some current political issue, but Uncle Max never joined in the debate. His mother didn’t allow herself to have political opinions either and when she asked Uncle Max what he thought, he usually gave a neutral answer like: ‘That may be right.’ Sometimes they all got going together on some major road-building project nearby, but the discussion always ran aground. Sooner or later, they would end up looking at Gregor again for relief. Then his mother would ask Gregor to perform something. ‘Play something for Uncle Max,’ she would say and, for a while at least, the room had a communal focus, followed by an applause that made Gregor feel even more self-conscious and eager to get back to his own room. Uncle Max clapped longest and then brought his handkerchief up to his eye again.

Finally, his father would seize the opportunity to end the evening by offering Uncle Max a lift in the car, and then the house could breathe again.

Afterwards, Gregor would ask questions. ‘What happened to Uncle Max? How did he lose his eye?’ But his mother normally answered with one polite sentence.

‘He was treated very badly during the war,’ she told him. Once, she even used the word ‘torture’ but then regretted having said it. She told him that Max had no
friends and that’s why she called him Uncle, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

‘You’re not to ask him anything,’ she would say. ‘Do you hear me now? You don’t ask questions like that.’

Gregor’s father could not bear this kind of talk. As far as he was concerned, Uncle Max was another deserter who betrayed his country. And maybe there was some deeper disgrace in his deformities that could never be discussed around the table. Gregor knew that the piano was a gift from Uncle Max, though his father didn’t want to accept it because the family might be beholden to him. And perhaps they were. His mother spoke with regret, as though there was something shameful which brought up an unimaginable pain of her own.

When he was a teenager, she told him about the bombing of Berlin, the flight from the city when Gregor was three years old. How his grandfather Emil came to collect them in his truck, and how she was questioned by the Gestapo in a small village, right at the end of the war.

‘Your grandfather was not a bad man,’ she said. ‘Only dealing in things on the black market, Gregor, do you understand me?’

She didn’t take any pride in the fact that her father had tricked the Nazis. She didn’t describe it as an act of heroism, only bad luck.

‘Uncle Max was Grandfather Emil’s best friend from school,’ she explained. ‘They had all kinds of cracked ideas for getting into business together. They got a delivery business going and during the war they invented a scheme to avoid being sent to the front. It was awful at the front.’

‘Was he a deserter?’ Gregor asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He broke the law and they slapped me and asked me where he was hiding. I was afraid. I’m not very clever. I didn’t have any intelligent answers to give them.’

‘Did he escape?’

‘I didn’t know where Grandfather Emil was hiding,’ she said. ‘Only Max knew that.’

‘Did they take his eye out?’ Gregor asked.

‘You were only a baby,’ she said. ‘You didn’t hear anything. You had a terrible ear infection.’

She stared Gregor in the eyes.

‘What could I do? I was afraid they would take you away from me. I was no good at keeping things quiet. I had to tell them about Uncle Max, but they knew that already.’

After saying it she would suddenly change her mood. She grew angry, regretting her confession. Afraid of the power which this information gave Gregor over her, the ability to hold her to ransom with her own biography. She withdrew into her martyred frame of mind, begging him to stop ‘tormenting’ her with stupid questions for which she had no answers.

‘Did Uncle Max tell them where Grandfather Emil was hiding?’ Gregor asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said in desperation. ‘Gregor, you’re asking me things I don’t know.’

In the absence of hard facts, Gregor began to imagine things for himself. At the next visit, he stared at Uncle Max with open curiosity. The table was set with the usual care. The same ritual silences. The same questions from Uncle Max and the same minimal answers from Gregor. When the conversation came to a standstill, his father took over and spoke at length about hunting events, giving Gregor a chance to examine Uncle Max’s thin features on the opposite side of the table. His hands and his fingernails, the socket of his missing eye. But the greatest sign of torture was not physical at all but his silence.

Uncle Max would be asked a courteous question about his health. He said he was working part-time in a bookshop, but that he might have to give it up. Health was not a subject that interested Gregor, but he was aware enough to imagine that the torture Uncle Max had endured might be impacting on him much later. All through dinner he imagined him calling out for mercy. The only clue to his suffering was in his good eye. A sensitive thermometer of human feelings. It expressed latent fear, or maybe great strength, he could not tell which.

Gregor understood endurance in the face of extreme physical tasks, from cycling and climbing mountains. Games involving survival instincts and inner strength. In the battle with the environment, mental courage was the ultimate challenge, more than the mountain itself. But torture was inflicted with great imagination, precisely in order to edge past that threshold of endurance. The victim was driven to the edge of reason and kept there. A mountain could kill you, Gregor recalls thinking, but a torturer was an expert at keeping you alive.

Gregor was only three years of age when all this happened, but he was present nonetheless at this man’s worst moments. He was a witness and that produced its own pain. The bystander pain. Uncle Max could, if he was strong enough, put the suffering behind him, but Gregor could not. He stared across the table and felt the obligation to reimagine that moment of torture with obscene clarity. He knew it was impossible to measure suffering. But the pain of the witness went on without stopping, because he had no entitlement to put it behind him.

He remembers trying to make Uncle Max feel happy. He told him with great enthusiasm about the new guitar he had bought with his own money. He ran up to his room and
brought it down, along with a folder of lyrics which he had collected from the American Army radio station. All carefully maintained with photographs of rock stars pasted in.

After dinner, Gregor performed something on the guitar first, then on the piano. While they sat around the living room sipping coffee, his father smoked a cigar that sent bonfire clouds through the forest of antlers and skulls and grimacing faces. He played Bach. A gust of chords and interwoven notes. When the piece came to an end, he watched Uncle Max take his handkerchief out again.

‘He certainly brought the music with him,’ Uncle Max said. ‘Aren’t you lucky you have found such a talented boy.’

The room went silent. Shocked glances flashing between their eyes, searching the linguistic tilt in the words. An atonal melody left hanging in the room, refusing to fade out.

‘He got it from his grandfather,’ his mother responded. She was indignant. She had a worried expression on her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Uncle Max said. ‘I thought he knew.’

‘Knew what?’ Gregor blurted.

Gregor’s mother burst into tears and left the room. His father became angry, standing up and moving towards the door.

‘What the hell are you saying? Why do you come here to upset her like this?’

The evening came to an abrupt end. An atmosphere of crisis all around the house that night. Gregor remembers hearing his parents talking in raised voices in bed. He remembers not being able to sleep and going downstairs while they were still discussing things, wandering around the house in the dark and coming across the mirror in the hallway, looking at himself and not finding his own reflection, wondering if there was another version of himself that was being kept from him.

His mother explained the following day that Uncle Max was not right in his mind. She placed her arm around him and said Uncle Max was starting to imagine things. She blamed the ill treatment and said he had begun to ramble and say things that didn’t make sense.

Instead, she told him a little more about his grandfather Emil.

‘He could remember the words of every song,’ she said. ‘Even English and Italian songs. You’re very like him, learning songs on your guitar. He was known in every bar and could drink for free anywhere he went. That was his problem, Gregor. That’s why he was separated from my mother. All the women loved him. When he sang, they sighed and had tears in their eyes.’

Gregor was distracted from his enquiries.

‘Everybody wanted him for their birthday parties,’ she said. ‘He even got invited by the military to sing at a party for Hitler’s birthday. And maybe that’s why they were so enraged when they discovered he was tricking them all the time.’

There was nothing more said about Uncle Max. A forgetful old man. But not so forgetful, it seems, because he sent Gregor a package on his birthday almost six months later. His birthday falls on the second of June, the date on his passport, on all his documents. On his seventeenth birthday, Uncle Max sent him a recording of Jewish music. Gregor was more interested in pop music, but he listened to the raw energy of the record, trying to extract some meaning from this gift. It contained a coded message, a virus that became slowly more active with each playing.

On the cover, there was a picture of men in suits, standing under a tree in summer, holding their instruments and smiling at a dog lying down asleep nearby in the shade. There was a card alongside bearing the words, ‘
Good luck with your music, Uncle Max.
’ The affidavit of a delusional man who never came back to the house again.