Disguise (3 page)

He is glad to see the shape of the house where Mara is staying. The low roof surrounded by trees and open farmlands. He has been here before, but it’s some time ago now, in the spring. This time there is a tight blonde stubble left behind in the fields by the machines and rectangular bales of hay placed at intervals. He has switched off the music in the car so he can hear the crows in the nearby woods. Nobody comes out to greet him, so he remains sitting in the car for a moment with the window open, listening. He’s not accustomed to the lack of formality in the country, with no doorbell. He wonders if he should go to the front of the house or whether it’s best to go round the back. He thinks of calling them on his mobile phone, but that seems a little absurd, a real city thing to do.

He takes the bag with the bottles of wine and the basket of mushrooms from the boot of the car. The main door of the farmhouse is facing out towards an ancient cast-iron pump in the middle of the yard. The yard is deserted, surrounded by farm buildings. The porch over the main door is half covered in creeper and some of the windows, too, are overgrown with wild roses. The place looks uninhabited, but then he sees Mara’s car parked at the other end and hears voices round the back. A child laughing somewhere. And Mara coming towards him with her arms out.

‘Gregor. We didn’t hear you coming,’ she says.

‘I thought I was in the wrong place,’ Gregor says.

He gives her the bag with the wine. Then he holds out the basket of wild mushrooms.

‘Mushrooms,’ Mara exclaims.

She seems surprised, but her smile is quick to come back. She doesn’t expect him to explain. She knows the story of mushrooms in his family.

Gregor’s father was a hunting fanatic, shaped by war, a man who wanted his son to stay close to the earth and develop heightened survival instincts. So he taught him how to collect mushrooms and berries and plants which could be cooked and eaten in times of decline. On his birthday, Gregor was often given a survival manual. He was brought up to prepare himself for catastrophe. Ready for things that had already happened and for even worse to come. He grew up with all that Boy Scout knowledge of how to light fires without matches, how to preserve food, how to live in freezing conditions. By the time he was nine, he was ready to spend his first night out in the forest alone. His father wanted him to be able to survive long after the rest of civilisation had been extinguished, though he never explained what he should do if he was the last person left on earth.

As a boy, he loved this challenge. It was a great game. His father was as tough and uncompromising as the elements. He preferred the laws of nature to the conventions of society. He trusted nobody and made comparisons between animals and human behaviour. He wanted Gregor to understand the world as a contest, to respect nature as the only guide to what was genuine and what was false. To stay alive he had to become an expert on poison, on treachery. So his father set tests for him in the forest.
Contrived a family game of Russian roulette with deadly mushrooms in which Gregor would stand in front of three varieties in separate containers, all of them looking very much the same. One of them fatal. The others safe to eat.

His mother would stand looking on from the hunting lodge that his father bought for half-nothing after the war, the one place in the world where he felt his rule was absolute, this brutal contest with the environment in which he triumphed over everything.

‘Have you gone mad?’ she would say. ‘Klaus, is this really necessary? Have we not had enough of this in the war?’

But that was precisely the point of it all. His father never got past the rules of war. Those split-second judgements, those warrior instincts which people had adapted so successfully into sporting activities, were still regarded by him as the ground rules of life and death. You had to be ready to return to the wild, to the most basic forms of life. Perhaps all this was an oblique way of describing what his father went through for years in Russian captivity but never wished to speak about directly. Gregor stood there in the first glorious moment of peacetime in Europe and held his family’s life in his hands. It was his choice. And whatever he picked out would be put into the meal. ‘Are you sure?’ His father would ask him once more with a sceptical expression, because you could not guess. Guessing was defeat.

With his nervous mother looking on, he would pick the variety he thought was safe. She was a martyr, maybe half hoping they would all be poisoned one day so that she could then say to her husband, ‘Look, I told you so.’ She was also profoundly shaped by war and hunger and hated any game with food. She hated seeing food wasted and constantly made people eat up, long after they had no appetite, which is possibly why Gregor never feels hungry, even now.

It was she who cooked the mushrooms and Gregor remembers the smell exploding in the forest air. They would eat the meal and his father would smile to himself. Only he knew for sure whether they were eating the lethal substance or not. They could all be found dead weeks later, lying around the mountain shack in various poses of agony, holding their stomachs, tongues swollen, dehydrated, bowels running, a delusional scrawl made with fingernails along the earth as they dragged themselves away in search of water.

Gregor never knew the conclusive result of his decision until much later. He knew the mildly poisonous mushrooms would manifest themselves within hours, but the deadly ones would only show up after twenty-four hours, or after a few days, even weeks later, by which time there was very little that could be done. The best mycologist in the world could not save them. He knew that some mushrooms were very deceptive. After all the vomiting and cramps, there would follow a strange kind of remission where you felt much better and even started laughing at the idea of being poisoned, just before you died. There are some varieties that have only recently been declared poisonous, varieties that people have been eating for years and which have only now begun to kill. In Poland, just across the border from where they stand now, a mother and daughter were recently killed by repeated ingestion of a milky green mushroom that was always safe and that he remembers choosing himself many times in the test.

One day he failed to make the right choice. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a time of innocence, before the truth was revealed to him about many things. One fine day in autumn, just like this one, he suddenly realised he had made the wrong decision. Within an hour
or two of eating, Gregor began to see the world in blue. They were out along the trail, with his father ahead, holding the gun on his arm, pointed downwards, half cocked. His mother had stayed behind at the lodge, reclining in the hammock with a magazine on her lap and the portable radio playing the local American Army station. Country songs fading into the distance behind them as they walked further and further into the trees until the music was only a faint memory, far away on the other side of the mountain.

Everything turned monochrome, as though he was looking through a shard of blue glass. His father had become a giant blue insect ahead of him. The tree trunks turned navy. The grass and the weeds, a mat of blue fur along the ground. He thought of his mother’s fashion magazines, with all the blue handbags and sunglasses and lotions with the prices written underneath. Blue women in brassieres and corsets. Women in tweed suits half sitting on the bonnet of sports cars.

He began to feel the nausea. He went on for a while without saying a word, afraid to stop and tell his father that they were all going to die. Afraid of his father’s disappointment at finding out that his family would be extinguished and the rest of civilisation would go on as before. His father kept striding away to his death without a word. Maybe he could endure much more. In the war he ate maggots. He ate gruel that would have killed a wild boar. He ate insects and bits of fungus and kept it all down with the kind of formidable mental discipline and a stomach as indestructible as an enamel bucket.

Did his father get it wrong? Did he really allow the family to consume the poisonous food as part of the lesson? Did he deliberately place three poisonous varieties in the
bowls, like a double bind, or was it a genuine mistake? He thought of his mother already writhing in her hammock, tearing out photographs of women in brassieres, reaching for the glass of iced blue wine on the porch of the hunting lodge.

Gregor staggered on his feet, his blue father swaying ahead of him along the path. The earth swirling, the same way that it did when he used to spin himself around as a child, his first experience of narcotics. He wanted to call his father back and explain what was happening, but then he collapsed.

He woke up running, half carried by his father. Minutes later, they were driving through the blue landscape, down into the nearest town where all the people were blue in the streets. But then, as soon as he got to the hospital, all the colours became normal once more. Just as suddenly as the blue wash had covered his eyes, it disappeared. The nurses measuring his pulse did not have blue faces. ‘It’s gone,’ he told them. ‘The blue colour is gone.’ He heard his father speaking in a low voice to the doctors, giving the name of the mushroom they had eaten, saying it was absolutely impossible that the boy was poisoned. He swore with his hand on his heart that he would never leave something like that to chance. Luck was not something he would want his son to base his life on. So the only explanation left was that Gregor must have had an allergy. Or more than likely, his father said, that he made it all up. Gregor’s pulse and breathing were fine. So were the blood tests and the urine tests. He told his mother that he never wanted to eat mushrooms again. He said he was finished with the forest, but his father said that was all nonsense, more like falling off the bike. The only thing to be done was to get back up.

Mara has put the mushrooms inside the house in the shade. She comes out and pulls Gregor by the arm, over to a table set under a tree where the rest are sitting under the shade.

‘We’re just having second breakfast,’ she says.

He approaches the table and goes around shaking hands with everyone. Thorsten, Mara’s brother-in-law, rushes around to get him a chair, finding an even spot on the flagstones. Katia is there with her five-year-old boy, Johannes. She is pregnant and sits with the sunshine coming through the tree, landing directly onto her belly. The skin is so taut that her naval protrudes like an embossed symbol. Martin, Gregor’s best friend, gets up to give him a big embrace, slapping him on the back.

‘What kept you?’ he asks in a friendly way. ‘We’ve been working here for hours.’

‘Sure. I believe you,’ Gregor returns.

‘Gregor has collected all these wild mushrooms for the dinner,’ Mara says. She whips away some of the crumbs from the table and sets out a new place, pours coffee. There is a basket of fresh bread in the middle. One or two wasps hover around the jam.

‘You haven’t really started already?’ Gregor asks.

‘They were up at six in the morning,’ Mara says, nodding towards Thorsten and Katia.

‘We were delayed,’ Thorsten says. ‘There was a young deer lost in the orchard when we came to start in the morning. Running in every direction, completely frantic. We had to leave the ladders for a while and disappear until it found its way back out through the gate. Otherwise, it would have run itself against the fence all the time.’

Beyond the orchard wall, Gregor can see the outline of a tall ladder leaning into one of the trees. He wants to tell
them about the bomb crater in the forest, but instead he tells them how the forests are full of mushrooms. Mara seems happy that he has arrived. She tells him that Daniel is on his way, with his girlfriend.

He finds himself wondering if he would ever manage alone in the wild without other people. What if the new catastrophe really does come? All those survival skills taught to him by his father seem to be of little use now, sitting here around the table. And how long could you survive mentally, that was the question? Living alone in the city is sometimes a struggle in itself, but there is a comfort in the anonymity and belonging that he finds there. He needs the reassurance of the streets, the clustering of people, the quiet feeling of support provided by their numbers. Even those moments of aggression experienced in the city bring some kind of odd confirmation of life. He needs to be able to sit in a bar, without speaking, just knowing that other people are around him. He is afraid of emptiness. After all that training by his father, he thinks he may be useless in situations of great calamity. When the next great disaster approaches and people are running in all directions again, Gregor feels he might end up being a coward. Who knows, he may not even realise how bad things are and keep going on in some naive delusion that everything is fine. In distress, he might make all the wrong decisions, pick the wrong mushrooms. Ultimately, he may have ended up exactly the same as all the other hopelessly interdependent people living in the city, unable to live without cups and spoons and takeaway coffee. Helpless without newspapers and the Internet and public transport and places to congregate. Helpless without the city’s memory coming up everywhere through the streets. Helpless without the shelter of history.

Gregor Liedmann grew up thinking that he had been preserved, like a dead animal. He had reasons to suspect that he was not the biological son of his parents. There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish. At some point he decided to run away from home and eventually ended up in Berlin in the late sixties, a city full of peeling facades and people on the run from something or another. Whenever he was asked, he would explain that he had been found as a three-year-old boy among refugees during the last days of the war and that he had replaced a child of the same age who had been lost in the bombing. In other words, he had stepped into the shoes of a dead German boy. He had taken on his identity, his name, his date of birth, his religion, his entire existence. He had grown up in the south of Germany, in the suburbs of Nuremberg, the only son in a Catholic family. His parents had revealed nothing to him, but he had come across some evidence which suggested that he was a changeling, an impostor living a surrogate life inside the persona of a deceased German. Every time he looked at himself in the mirror, it strengthened his conviction that he was not one bit like them. His mother was an anxious woman who spent her life making lists to pass the time. His father was an obsessive hunter
who filled the house to bursting with antlers and stuffed animals. And maybe it was no wonder that Gregor felt a bit like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was only when he started a new life in Berlin that he could be himself again. He felt a huge weight lifting off his shoulders being able to tell people that he was originally from the East, that he was a Jewish survivor and that he had no relatives left alive.

There was no proof, however, no document, no testament, no reliable witness, no primary memory to substantiate any of this because he was so small when it all happened. Only the word of his uncle Max, the man with one eye who came to visit and once revealed something unintentionally and whose memory remained contested. Gregor can remember seeing him at the end of the war. Another clear recollection of standing outside a building with his mother and seeing a sick man being carried out by the soldiers. The soldiers are American, he knows that now. And the sick man is Uncle Max. But then his mother stopped him from looking, buried his face in her coat.

There are other flash memories which he still tries to place in order. He recalls seeing people lying on the ground in the street. He recalls planes flying low overhead. The sight of a town being bombed and houses collapsing right behind him. He is always in the company of his mother in these situations, though he cannot be sure if it is the same woman in each scene, only the feeling of holding hands and being taken care of. He has no idea of chronology and finds it difficult to place these recollections in any single line, to verify them or separate them from what he has read or received since then. These memories fit the pattern of flight from the East. They are all associated with being in a hurry, with people running, with great fear all around him.

He remembers waiting in a room. Maybe it was not just one room, but several rooms, one after the other. Long hours sitting on a bench with his mother constantly looking up to see who was coming in the door. He must have read everything in her face, looked at her eyes to try and understand what was going on.

And that one solid memory remains of standing in the street with soldiers all around. Unable to understand what anyone was saying to him, he refused to take anything from them, didn’t want the black stone they put into his hand and only later understood that that this must have been chocolate. The soldier smiled and bit off a bit and chewed it in his mouth. But he still didn’t want a piece of this black thing, only the sweets which the fat man on the truck gave him. The soldiers and the people in the street were waiting for somebody, and then the sick man was brought out on the stretcher with blood around his eyes and nose. But then he was not allowed to see any more.

These memories were never fully explained by his mother and when he eventually ran away from home, he was in a state of confusion. He had made his own attempts to figure out the mystery of his origins and felt there was something being kept from him. He was only a young boy, not even eighteen, full of doubt and anger and fear. He had not yet found a way of explaining himself or telling his own story.

He never even waited to do his final exam in school. Just packed his bag with the minimum of clothes one day after a terrible argument at home. He got his guitar, rolled up his sleeping bag and took his passport from the glass cabinet. Went to the post office to withdraw all the money he had saved up. He sent his mother a note later on, giving a list of reasons for leaving. He said he could no longer
sleep in a house full of antlers and dead creatures. His whole life had been a preparation for catastrophe, being able to live on nothing, surviving on roots and eating ants. He gave his parents no right to reply. It had all gone beyond that point of no return. He knew what they would be saying as they stood in the living room, reading the note over and over again. ‘Let him see what it’s like’ or ‘See how long he survives out there in the big world, paying his own bills.’ He knew that his mother would be worried about him and maybe he wanted to prove to himself that she had nothing more to worry about.

And then he was off. Right from the start he had a clear idea where he was going. Scotland. There was something he had read about the place. He had seen a film about the Battle of Culloden and had an old Scottish tune in his head. In his mind, the Scottish people were like himself, people who had things done to them. When he arrived in Glasgow he didn’t understand a word. His English had all come from the American radio stations, phrases such as ‘give ‘em hell’ which sounded funny to people in Scotland. They thought he was a German comedian. He moved on up through the Highlands and slept in barns to save money. He was hoping to stretch his savings out so that he could stay away forever. The survival instincts that his father instilled in him were coming in handy now.

As the light began to fade every evening, he would walk the road searching for a barn or a shed situated away from dwelling houses, away from people. Once or twice he had trouble with dogs, but he was able to get around them. He would bed down and make a mattress for himself on the hay. He was amazed how warm it was to lie on straw. He was sleeping rough and proud of it. Sometimes he was scared
of the dark and stayed awake, listening to the sounds, imagining people creeping up towards him, but then he would fall asleep, and by morning, he would find himself laughing at his own fear. One night he heard a terrible scream nearby, almost human. He scrambled further back along the hay. He had no knife with him for protection. His father had once ceremoniously given him a hunting knife with a handle made from a deer’s foot. But he wanted none of those things to come on this journey. He wanted to be able to trust the world. In the morning, when he moved on, he found out the reason for the scream in the night. A dead deer, caught in a wire fence, hanging from his hind leg.

He wanted to get out of the museum of the dead and travelled as far as he could, all the way up to Inverness. He had no trouble getting into pubs because even though he was only seventeen, he was quite tall. The only trouble he had was getting through the narrow doors with his rucksack and his guitar. In Inverness he ran into a group of young people who invited him to stay. He thought they were out to rob him. When they found that he could play the guitar, they insisted on taking him home to one of their small council houses.

‘You big lanky fucking German bastard,’ they kept calling him. They slapped him on the back affectionately and forced him to have another whisky. He sang his heart out and they sang along. They told him he could stay as long as he liked, though he could hardly make out what they were saying because of the Scottish accent. He found himself saying ‘yes’ very frequently when he was asked a question. They asked him if he had any sisters. They said he didn’t sound like a German when he sang. They told jokes that he didn’t understand, so he laughed, pretending that he got it. And next morning over breakfast, he did get
one of their jokes. A fly landed on somebody’s cornflakes. The boy chased the fly away with his hand and then examined his cornflakes for a long time before he said: ‘I do-nae think he ate any of it.’ The others grunted, but Gregor laughed out loud. He kept on repeating it like somebody with learning difficulties.

‘I do nae think he ate any of it,’ he said slowly. They stared at him as he learned the joke off by heart.

He had trained himself to live on nothing. His father would have been proud of him. When he started running out of money, he lived on tea and toast, and jam. He did not allow himself to phone home or ask them to send money. He was determined not to fall into that trap, so he made his way down to London to try and get a job.

He found London dreary. He could not afford accommodation, so he slept in Victoria Station. He started looking for work, knowing that he could go back to Germany any time to work there. But he wanted to live in a foreign place, without support. It was a mission of survival, sleeping in one of the alcoves of the station every night, and in the morning, putting his stuff in a locker to continue looking for work. He managed to get a job on a building site, but he got fired at the end of the day because he was so thirsty and kept going away to the tap for water. He was not really a worker like that. If only he could play music, but nobody wanted to hear his songs.

He saw a rat once or twice, but that didn’t bother him. He slept in his clothes with his empty wallet and his passport in his trousers where he would feel it most if somebody touched him while he was asleep. He trained himself to detect the proximity of another human being, even in sleep. If somebody stared at him for a moment too long, he would open his eyes. The presence of a person
nearby would wake him up. If there was no danger, he would go back to sleep again in an instant. He lived the way that his father had imagined for him, ready for the worst. And one night, curled up in his sleeping bag on the floor, monitoring the sound of trains echoing in his head and the sound of London voices drifting past, he woke up with a man standing right next to him. A well-dressed man, carrying a briefcase.

‘You seem like a respectable lad,’ the man said. ‘Why are you sleeping rough like this?’

Gregor told him that he was looking for work. The man smiled and asked more questions. Where was he from? Why were his parents not helping him out? Gregor told him that he was on his own now and had no parents. So the man offered to help him get on his feet in London. He said he could give him a place to stay until he got settled.

‘Look, I’ve got two sons of my own, travelling off somewhere in Australia at the moment. I’d hate to think of them lying around in railway stations.’

Gregor told him he was fine. But then he took up the offer when the man insisted. He had a politeness in his voice which Gregor felt he could trust. So he got into the man’s car, a Jaguar, Gregor remembers, and they drove to the suburbs where he lived in a large detached house, with well-kept gardens and Alsatian dogs patrolling the grounds. There was something welcoming about this wealth and he gave in to the luxury for once.

It was only when the man served him a meal in the middle of the night that Gregor realised how hungry he was and how fed up he was of toast and jam. He was given beer and the man drank whisky. Gregor was soon drunk and elated. He told some of the stories about Scotland, about the fly in the cornflakes.

‘I do nae think he ate any of it,’ he said, and the man laughed heartily.

Then everything went wrong. Gregor was tired, knocked out by the rush of luxury and kindness. It was warm in the house and he fell asleep in the chair. Maybe it was the feeling of being at home. He never suspected anything until he woke up lying on a bed, with most of his clothes off, down to his underpants. The whole thing was a trick. The man was on the bed beside him in his silk dressing gown, stroking Gregor’s chest.

‘Fuck off,’ Gregor shouted, pulling away. In his German accent, it was comical, not even remotely hostile.

‘Relax,’ the man said, smiling. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re a tired little monkey, I’m going to put you to bed now.’

Gregor got into bed, but then he found the man getting in beside him.

‘I’m not like that,’ Gregor said.

‘Nonsense,’ the man said. ‘Every boy is like that, only you have been denying it.’

The man was right. Gregor had had some encounters with other boys at school, on long weekends in the country. They sometimes ganged up to pull each other’s trousers down. And once or twice it led to things that would have counted as homosexual, though it was only experimental. A test to see which direction was right for him.

The man must have sensed hesitation. He slid his hand down to his groin and Gregor leaped away from the bed, though he didn’t get far because the man came after him and forced him back on the bed, face down, pulling off his underpants. The politeness was gone. Gregor could feel his erect penis and his balls behind him, like a soft, wiry brush
or cleaning utensil from the kitchen, stroking across his buttocks.

‘My lovely German boy,’ the man said.

‘Fuck off,’ Gregor shouted. ‘I’m Jewish.’

The man stalled and backed off, allowing Gregor room enough to move away at last and pull up his underpants again. He stood there with the words echoing inside his head. He was transformed by them, untouchable, unafraid.

‘You’re lying,’ the man said. ‘You’re not even circumcised. Look.’

Gregor found himself having to back it up. He explained that he was an orphan. He told the story of how he had been brought from the East as a refugee. He explained that no Jewish boys would have been circumcised during the war. It would have meant certain death.

That calmed the situation down. Gregor continued his story, as much as he knew of it. And where the facts failed him, he began to make it up. He said he had no parents at all now, that his adoptive parents were dead. For a moment he wondered if it was a mistake to portray himself as a victim, inviting people to prey on him. Would it not have been better to say that he was a prize-winning boxer, to make up a story of how violent he could be? But he had said the right thing after all.