Disguise (19 page)

They have all returned to the house now, and in the kitchen, Martin and Daniel are preparing the evening meal. They talk among themselves, sharing hints, remembering to cut the fresh herbs but not to crush them. With the stickiness of garlic on their fingers they plan out the sequencing. Mushrooms picked over. Green beans lying on the counter, washed. Rice soaking. Fruit waiting to be cut up into a fruit salad in a blue porcelain bowl.

The meal will be constructed like a stage play, in acts, with intervals and plot. A performance of dialogue and laughter linking everything together. The big kitchen table has already been laid, with candles and a large jug of water with a mint sprig floating on the top. The windows are left open so the wasps that have come in during the afternoon will now make their way out again towards the light. Thorsten tells everyone once more to check for ticks, especially those who have been lying on the ground or walking through long grass. There is a polite queue for the shower. The house has begun to fill up with the smell of cooking from one end and the smell of soap and deodorant and skin creams at the other. Some have taken the time to have a quick sleep. Some have been making phone calls, or sending text messages to a remote world beyond this farm. Thorsten takes a quick look at the news on TV, but the
events seem unreal, as fictional as the pale blue light from the screen spreading around the room. Johannes plays a computer game and the blip and drip sounds float through the corridor.

There is a reluctance to turn on the lights. They want to hold on to the available light left in the rooms. They put on fresh clothes. Their bodies have changed indoors, more self-conscious, more exposed, more in need of privacy and personal space.

They look in the mirror for reassurance. They construct their physical appearance in the way that they also compose the way they want to be remembered. A face is not so much a physical thing but a story which unfolds in the company of others, a book of interactions, full of smiles and frowns. They should rehearse a range of emotions in the mirror to get any idea of what they look like in company. They should laugh out loud, grimace, cry, give suspicious glances, dagger looks, send hidden messages. The full catalogue of human expressions.

A clang of serving spoons signals that it is time for dinner and they all emerge. All these faces come together around the table. Martin is wearing a bright blue shirt. Mara has put on a necklace with what looks like a hanging plum. Gregor is now wearing a brown linen shirt and Thorsten has draped a white kitchen towel over his arm to show that he is the waiter.

They sit around the long table in the kitchen and talk about Africa.

‘Have you had your shots already?’ Gregor asks.

Martin talks about a time when he visited Dar es Salaam. At the train station, a taxi driver put his suitcase in the boot of the car and sat in the driving seat while eight men came to push the car three hundred yards to the hotel.
He talks about immigrants who have come from Senegal and Guinea, all the way around the coast to the Canaries and on to Germany. In his law practice, he represents an asylum seeker who clung for days onto the rim of a tuna net before he was rescued.

The sun has gone down now, but there is light left in the sky. In the orchard, the ladders are propped up in position, waiting for the big crowd next day. New bottles of wine are being opened. Martin sniffs the wine. Then he sniffs Daniel to bring back the recurring joke. They move in a circle of jokes and facts and anecdotes, a dinner table, web page of consumer advice and gossip. They talk about the closure of the inner-city airport and what an opportunity it would be to create a parkland, an urban green lung, part of the Amazon rainforest reclaimed at the heart of Berlin. They talk about holidays and sport and cooking. They praise the meal. The mushrooms are wonderful. They listen to Gregor talking about how he collected them, how he learned to identify them.

‘I found a bomb crater,’ he says. ‘In the forest.’

‘I’d love to see it,’ Mara says. ‘Is it far from here?’

‘It may not be a crater after all,’ he informs her right away, almost retracting the image again. ‘You know, it may be just one of those dumping pits. Though this one was empty. Right in the middle of the forest, far from any farmhouses.’

‘We could go there early in the morning,’ Mara says. ‘Before they all arrive. Do you think you can find it again?’

‘I think so,’ Gregor says.

And then the argument finally breaks out around the table. It has been brewing all day, all their lives.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Daniel says, confronting his father at last. ‘You’re still leading her up the garden path with this bombing story.’

‘Daniel, please,’ Mara attempts, but she is unable to hold back the debate any longer.

‘You made all that up,’ Daniel says. ‘Why don’t you admit it? The whole thing about being a Jewish orphan. It’s all a fabrication, isn’t that so?’

‘What makes you so sure?’ Gregor asks.

‘Because there is no proof, is there? There never was any proof.’

‘Daniel, it’s important where you come from,’ Mara says.

‘Give me a break,’ Juli snaps.

‘If it’s so important,’ Daniel continues, ‘then why don’t we do a DNA test? Get it over with. That will solve the mystery once and for all.’

‘What,’ Martin bursts in, ‘you want to exhume your grandmother?’

‘If that’s what it takes. I’ve got the money for it and all.’

‘Jesus,’ Martin says, ‘she doesn’t deserve that.’

‘At least it would clear up this uncertainty,’ Daniel says. ‘Look, I don’t give a shit where I come from. All I know is that my father wasn’t around when I was growing up.’

He turns to Gregor, once more, pointing his finger this time.

‘Why don’t you do the decent thing and finally tell us that it was all made up?’

There is silence at the table. Mara gets up. She goes around to take Daniel by the arm. Then she goes around to Gregor and takes his arm also.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I want to show you both something.’

While the others remain seated, she escorts them down the corridor to a room at the end. The house was built to accommodate a family of twelve, maybe even more, two sets of grandparents and perhaps a number of other relatives who came to work on the harvest each year. The last room
has been used by Mara to store all the furniture that came from Gregor’s home.

Gregor enters like a child. In one corner by the window stands the round dining-room table and chairs which stood for years in his home in the suburbs of Nuremberg. On the walls, the same photographs of his ancestors which stared down on him as a child. It was impossible to escape their gaze.

‘I took photographs,’ Mara says.

‘This is insane,’ Daniel says. ‘Do you not see what you’ve done to her?’

‘Daniel,’ Mara says. ‘Wait. Be patient for a moment. I want you to see this thing I’ve found. Don’t say anything more until we go through this.’

In front of them is the home that Gregor disowned. The curtains, the rug at the centre of the room, the entire nausea of home come to life. The fatigue in the furniture, the boredom trapped in the embroidered tablecloth, the raised voices, the long sigh of Gregor’s teenage years, the martyred silences, all the false hopes and frail family achievements clinging like a musty scent. Plates and knives and napkin rings. Even some of the antlers. All the worthless objects of a lifetime elevated into a family documentary, containing human breath.

‘I tried to keep as much as I could,’ she says. ‘I’ve gone through all the letters.’

Against the wall stands the sideboard, with neat stacks of letters on top. Each pile bound together with a ribbon and marked with a small card. Letters from Uncle Max. Letters from Gregor. Letters from people on the far side of the Berlin Wall. Magazines from the sixties. Gregor’s school reports. A box full of rubbers and pens and nibs and jars of ink that have gone dry by now. A sharpener and a glass jar full of colouring pencils.

‘Look, your records,’ Mara points out. His first collection of albums. There were posters on the walls. Bedroom graffiti. Music scores. Notes taken down from books at a time when there were so few words in his life he could trust.

There, too, the photograph of his grandfather Emil, laughing. A tall, handsome man, thin as a pin, standing in his uniform before he went off to the First World War. Alongside it, the other photograph of the same man in later years, almost unrecognisable, after he had put on so much weight. The fat man who lifted him up on the truck and gave him the red sweet to eat right away and the other green one to keep for later. All the recurring dreams of searching for that second sweet and never finding it. All the unanswered questions. All the gaps filled by his own imagination, guessing what was out of reach.

After Gregor went back to live in Germany, they found the door of his cottage in Ireland wide open. A young boy wandering around the fields by the shore on the east coast discovered that it had been abandoned and reported to his parents that the German was gone. The boy had heard him playing the trumpet a number of times in the distance and spoken to him on occasion on his way home from school. He had asked him questions and Gregor had told him that he was from Berlin. The boy was impressed by the fact that he had played in bands and said he would love to go and hear him play, but he seemed too young to be allowed into bars at night. Instead, he managed to get Gregor to play the trumpet for him one afternoon outside the cottage. But when he went back again on another occasion, he found the door open and nobody inside. Cats had got in and already sniffed over everything to see if there was anything left to eat. The place was unoccupied, only a few books left behind, and some newspapers, nothing of any value, just enough to indicate that the place had been inhabited up to a particular date and then suddenly abandoned.

Did this Irish boy remind Gregor too much of his own son? Did he perceive in these random meetings, all that time and all the conversations which had been lost with
Daniel? The innocence. The admiration. That loose way of talking without obligation.

The local people wondered what brought him to this remote place by the sea. They said he kept to himself pretty much. They often saw him cycling to the train station and they heard him playing the trumpet and some of them said it was like a miracle growth promoter, because it was great for the roses. What was he hiding from? they asked themselves. And what made him disappear so suddenly, dropping everything and leaving without a trace? Some of them got it into their heads that he might have been a war criminal. They must have uncovered his hideout and he was forced to find himself a new sanctuary, possibly in South America. Older people, better at guessing his age, knew that he would have been too young to have taken any part in the Second World War. So maybe he was more a spy, from the East German state.

His colleagues at the basement recording studio in the city shortened his name to Greg. They don’t remember him being all that reclusive. He had a quiet sense of humour and could make people laugh without changing his expression. He made a name for himself writing clever jingles for radio ads. He had a lot of trouble with his teeth and used to swallow painkillers with his coffee. In the pale basement where no daylight ever penetrated, where the air was full of smoke and static, people lived on biscuits and takeaway food. Noxious curries that were left lying around on the floor by the mixing desk to be found by the late-night cleaners.

One of his molars had been giving him trouble for years on the road. He said he could well understand why cowboys in the American West used to have all their teeth removed before they went out to work on the ranches.
And possibly why they sang sad songs to the longhorn cattle all night to stop them from stampeding. A rotten tooth was like the enemy within.

He sat in agony one day, holding his jaw, and finally decided to go to a dentist. One of his colleagues recommended an old dentist in the suburb by the name of Eckstein. He had regular appointments from there on, stopping off on his way home. The dentist took on a reconstruction job, sorting him out after years of neglect. His gums were in a terrible state, red and inflamed with periodontal disease.

‘Your two front teeth are already as long as your legs,’ Eckstein said.

The dental practice was on the main shopping street, above a TV and hi-fi shop. The door was green. An old, dusty green that people no longer use, except on garden sheds. The buzzer automatically let Gregor in each time and he walked up the stairs with the green carpet and the scent of disinfectant in his nostrils. Every time he arrived up the stairs, Eckstein would come out and usher him into the waiting room, saying his assistant was off ill. He would sit down on the leather sofa and stare around the green walls, listening to the sound of the water drill working in the room next door. On the walls, a number of strange art objects, giant shells and molluscs made of wool and wax and other substances that turned out to have been produced by the dentist’s daughter.

After a number of visits, Gregor began to suspect that the dentist had no other patients. The waiting room was always empty. He never heard any other voices. He had the feeling that Eckstein was only pretending to run a busy practice, keeping him waiting, making all the usual drilling sounds, telling some phantom patient to chew on
the other side for a day before finally coming to show Gregor into the surgery.

Eckstein did all the talking, while Gregor stared out through the blinds at the upper windows of the house across the street which had no glass in them and where the pigeons were flying in and out, nesting in the upper rooms. Gregor’s mouth wide open, forced to be silent, while the dentist told him how he came to Ireland from Poland before the Nazis came to power in Germany. Some of his family had made it to America but his grandparents and most of his cousins were killed in the camps. When he was finished, Eckstein spent a lot of time clearing up his equipment, still talking, saying he would love to go to America to visit all his Jewish relatives, but he could never take the time off. Eventually he would say: ‘That’s it for today,’ but they would keep on talking for a while longer, because there was no other patient waiting. With a swollen cheek, drooling from the corner of his mouth, Gregor told his own story.

Gregor asked what the treatment would cost, roughly, so he could prepare himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ Eckstein said. ‘The bill is never as bad as the toothache.’

Eckstein fitted a crown and when the treatment came to an end, Gregor felt like the last man ever to sit in that chair.

Some weeks later, the trouble started again with the ache coming back in the same tooth. Every time he got out of bed and stood on his feet. A constant throbbing as he walked along the pavements. Vibrating like a tuning fork every time he played the trumpet. Gregor felt he had gone to an incompetent dentist who had done a bad job. He had paid and would have to go back to get it put right.

‘You cannot have pain there,’ Eckstein said. ‘There is no nerve left in that tooth, Gregor. You cannot be experiencing pain in a tooth that is dead.’

He tapped at the crown, dabbed it with a swab of ether, compared it to other healthy teeth which instantly sent an icy chill shooting into the roof of his mouth.

‘It’s only a stump,’ he kept saying.

‘I’m not making this up,’ Gregor said. ‘It’s killing me.’

‘Tell me exactly where the pain is,’ Eckstein asked.

Gregor pointed at the crown.

‘This is impossible,’ Eckstein repeated. ‘It is physically impossible for you to have pain there. Unless it’s a phantom pain, like an amputated leg.’

There was nothing Eckstein could do. Gregor left again, but the pain returned. He was back to swallowing painkillers. He went back, telling the dentist that the pain had shot up into his eye. Eckstein carried out more investigations, even going so far as to remove the crown and replacing it.

‘I can take it out if you like,’ Eckstein said finally. ‘If it’s giving you that much trouble. Maybe I can put in a bridge instead.’

Gregor began to suspect that Eckstein had done all this deliberately in order to keep his practice going. He couldn’t bear to have any more work done. He decided to try and live with it. Pinched his cheek sometimes to distract from the pain. And finally, when it got so bad that he could no longer endure it, he went back one more time to get it extracted for good.

Around the same time, the news was out that the Berlin Wall had come down. In the TV shop downstairs from the dentist, Gregor saw the pictures of people standing on top of the Wall duplicated twenty times across the various
screens. Again and again the same images of people driving through the barriers, embracing, drinking champagne, while bewildered border guards stood by. The first section of the colourful Wall being removed by crane, reminding him of his own imminent extraction. He put his finger on the buzzer and walked up the stairs along the green carpet. This time he was not asked to go into the waiting room and the door of the surgery had been left open. Eckstein was sitting in his own dentist’s chair, reading the newspaper.

‘Have you seen this?’ Eckstein said.

‘You mean the Wall?’

‘Yes,’ Eckstein said, slapping the paper. ‘You must go. You should be there, right now.’

‘It’s hard to believe all right,’ Gregor said.

‘If I were you, I’d be over there like a light. I’d go myself but for the practice here. Can’t let my patients down.’

He pointed at the pictures. He didn’t get up and Gregor never sat down in the chair again. They never talked about the tooth and it was never extracted.

‘You have to go home,’ Eckstein said. ‘You’ve got to be there to see this thing happening.’

The first Mara heard of Gregor’s return was a call from the nursing home in Nuremberg. Mara phoned to see how Gregor’s mother was getting on and was told by the nurse that Gregor was there with her.

At that point, she could no longer tell the difference between him and Daniel. She was very frail and her mind was going. She didn’t speak any more, only looked up to see who was in the room. They were all present when she died. Gregor, Mara and Daniel. A rainy night in autumn. Rain that stopped and left the chestnut trees outside the hospital stained in streaks of liquorice black. A strange
reunion, sitting around the bed, watching her last moments, holding hands, all four of them in a circle, free-falling like parachutists and finally letting her go. They stayed on after she was gone, sitting without a word while Mara cried. They embraced each other in that great emptiness with the long, final breath still lingering like an inaudible whisper in the room.