Disguise (18 page)

There are people who live their entire lives in exile. People who are never at home. Gregor had turned his life into a search for belonging, though it always remained a distant thing, a vague, utopian memory. Maybe luck and artistic timing were against him. When the band in Toronto split up and his friend John Joe went back to Ireland, Gregor drifted once more from one city to another. He made another attempt to go back to Berlin, but it was hard to find the song-line home. He was at odds with his family and hardly recognised his own son. Daniel remained aloof, cool, never showing any emotion or excitement in his reaction to Gregor’s gifts. Merely thanked his increasingly absent father dutifully and got on with his life. The longer Gregor stayed away, the more the distance grew between truth and memory. There was a threshold of estrangement beyond which it became increasingly difficult to go back. And in the end, he always found himself escaping again, this time going over to Ireland, following his friend John Joe to Dublin in order to see if he could start a life there.

What would it take to turn a lifetime of running away into one great returning?

Gregor arrived in Dublin with a mouth organ belonging to John Joe, an excuse for reunion. He wanted to give it back because he knew it was a very special instrument
which had witnessed many of their craziest moments together and which had emotional value in their touring history. John Joe had lost dozens of harmonicas, many of them mislaid on his travels, but Gregor knew this was quite unique, with a sweet, gravelly sound, best for bending notes. The worn black plate had the words ‘Cross Harp’ written on it, and the brass vents through which John Joe had drawn and pushed his breath had darkened with time. Carrying this small instrument in his pocket, Gregor was hoping to relive some of the times they spent together. They would remember John Joe bartering with a fast-food vendor on the streets of Toronto once, offering a song in exchange for a hamburger.

But the reunion in Dublin was a disaster. What had been billed in his mind as such a high point, became a colourless event. John Joe had given up the music. He had put all that behind him and become a computer technician. Lived in a suburban housing development on the edge of the city. The houses all had the same neo-Celtic stained-glass panels in the front door. The ceilings were low. There was a deep-fry smell settling in the hallway and the radio in the kitchen competing with the TV in the living room. The glass back door was covered in paw marks where a dog made a recurring appearance in the small yard.

It was John Joe’s wife who answered the door and brought Gregor into the living room stepping past a baby’s buggy in the hallway. John Joe was sitting on the sofa, watching the news. He didn’t get up. Asked his wife to get Gregor a beer. Remained in a position of languid mistrust, as though he suspected that Gregor had come to take him away from his family again. With his legs thrown across the armrest and his neck cushioned by the back of the sofa,
he appeared as though he was lying in a hammock. His hand brought the nozzle of a beer bottle up to his mouth, tilting it with his fingers to take a drink.

‘I couldn’t do it any more,’ John Joe said, meaning the music, the late nights, the foreign cities.

He didn’t encourage Gregor to stay. Hardly moved more than once on the patterned sofa and kept his eye on the news as though it was more important than anything else in the world. A remarkable height of friendship had sunk to a remarkable low.

Gregor finished his beer. He held the mouth organ inside his pocket, warmed by his hand, but something stopped him from giving it back. It had become a companion to him, much the same as his grandfather’s brass icon, taken from a dead soldier. He decided to keep it. He left again and walked away with the instrument in his firm grip, knowing that it was more alive, more real, closer to him than the man who once played it could ever be.

In a Dublin bar that evening, he understood for the first time in his life what it meant to be homesick. He drank his beer, aware of his own presence in time and space. He had no story to live inside, no place in the imaginary world. He craved that belonging, something beyond the limitations of his own physical state.

‘You’re not from around here,’ somebody said, and then he was drawn into conversation with a group of office workers.

They asked him questions. It seemed absurd to them that somebody was sitting alone without talking. They had a peculiar gift for creating an ersatz feeling of home.

He decided to stay in Ireland. Rented a cottage from an old woman some distance outside the city. It had a great rose garden which had become neglected but which he
cultivated and brought back to life for the time that he lived there. He found a job working part-time in a recording studio in the city, creating tunes for radio adverts, mortgage companies, insurance brokers. Happy tunes to which people drove to work every morning, jingles that entered into their subconscious traffic-logged stares and adhered like sticky tape to their minds. He made them up and forgot them right away, hardly even remembered composing them when he heard them on the radio himself.

He found a few clubs where they played jazz and managed to get some stand-in gigs. Ultimately, he found a regular spot, too, but there was no money in it and maybe the will to make it was gone. He was only doing it for his own pleasure now, and that lifted a great weight of expectation off his shoulders, allowing him to play more freely.

He was away for the most important years when Daniel was growing up. He had missed key events in his development, only hearing about them in letters from Mara. He was absent when Daniel had his teenage crisis with drugs and only heard about it weeks later when it was all over.

One day, Mara received a phone call at work to say that Daniel had been rushed to hospital after suffering a seizure. Martin was in the emergency ward with him.

‘He’s all right,’ Martin assured her. ‘The doctors are examining him right now, doing all the tests. He just keeled over in geography class. His classmates said he was shaking and his eyes were rolling around.’

‘My God,’ Mara said. ‘What are they saying?’

‘They suspect it’s epilepsy,’ Martin said. ‘But let’s wait and see.’

She was forced to drop one of her own patients in mid-treatment. Raced over to the hospital and found
Daniel sitting up in bed with Martin beside him, already joking about things. He was out of danger, but had to remain under observation until they had done a CAT scan and various other tests.

When Mara finally got to speak to the registrar herself, she asked lots of anxious questions. She was told that Daniel was a suspected epileptic, and if this proved to be the case, he would probably have to go on lifelong medication to prevent further attacks. They had ruled out blood pressure issues. She was told that seizures like this could mean only one of two things, epilepsy or drugs. People sometimes got seizures from taking cocaine, but they had already ruled that out because Daniel denied taking anything.

She had recently found hash in his bedroom and had told him to be careful.

‘You’re only fifteen,’ she said to him.

She explained that she and Gregor had done all of those things as well, but that you could not allow it to take a hold of your life. She spoke wisely, like a recovered addict, knowing all the trapdoors of addiction, but still unable to get away from her own obsessions which had also made her very detached from reality, still trying to substantiate the life story of a man who had disappeared out of her life.

Around the hospital bed she eventually got Daniel to admit that he had taken cocaine along with a substantial quantity of alcohol.

‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she said after speaking to the doctors once more.

Was this a cry for help too? While Martin and Mara brought chocolates and childish gifts, delivering all his needs, his music, his books, his games, trying desperately to turn him back into a child, what became clear to them
all was that Gregor was absent from this crisis in his life. It was Martin who was present for that remarkable incident and Martin who collected Daniel from the hospital and brought him home. Gregor only heard about all this much later in a letter, as though it was some passing event in life which had already been sorted out by the time the news came.

The people in the town must have wondered why it was all taking so long. It was only a matter of hours before the town fell into the hands of the Americans. They were already on the far side of the lake, probably only waiting for the dawn to come. Already there had been quite a number of air attacks. Bombers on their return from city infernos had casually dropped an excess load on the post office one morning. The bakery had also been hit and fifteen people killed while they queued up for bread. All week the sound of heavy weaponry could be heard in the distance, echoing across the lake, absorbed by the forests. Now and again, the urgency of battle came closer with the abrupt presence of fighter planes overhead and the immediate response of anti-aircraft guns. Trucks racing by. Soldiers running. Orders bawled out in the streets. A tired assortment of old men and boys dragging themselves towards the enemy lines while others watched them carefully for signs of weakness and surrender. It made little sense defending this cluster of streets with nothing more than a church and a graveyard and a public house. A few villas by the lake and a railway station full of refugees. And still the business of holding the lines dragged on endlessly, hour by hour, through the night.

At the same time, they must have been wondering how all this could be over so soon. It was only a few years ago
that all the dreamy optimism swept through the streets like an immortal carnival and everyone hung out their swastikas. Some of the children who were just starting in kindergarten at that time were not even out of school yet. The boys who were in school then hardly had enough time to grow a stubble on their chins before being sent to the front line. It was coming to an end before it even began, and still there was unfinished business in the town. In that last moment before peacetime and justice, they held on to the logic of invincibility with even greater tenacity, defending their own transgressions with suicidal obsession.

In the police station, Gregor’s mother had been allowed to go to the toilet. The corridor was heavy with smoke and kept dark. Only the rectangular outline of light around the door at the back where they were holding Max. An officer directed her with a torch and she was able to clean the boy up in the dark and wash out the soiled cloth. She heard the interrogation, men speaking with great patience one minute, then raising their voices suddenly to a frightening bark that made her jump. They laughed as though they were at a party.

‘Don’t worry,’ she heard one of them bawl. ‘We’ll have him before the night is out.’

As she came back through the corridor again she heard the voice of Max, pleading with them.

‘I don’t know,’ he begged.

‘Who gave you the fuel?’

There was no answer to that, only the sound of a fist, hard and soft, no more than a light click coming from a sports field or a playground, but with incredible violence concealed inside. How breakable the world was. How unfair the game rules. How much the force of the blow was felt by herself, imagined beyond all proportion in the dark.

‘Muncher,’ they shouted. ‘Useless muncher.’

Their failure to find answers was being converted into rage. And their rage needed more justification, more abuse, more derision. They railed in grand terms against all schemers and deserters, defrauders of the Reich in its greatest hour of need. They knew what Emil had been up to all along, singing the right songs on Hitler’s birthday like a great patriot. They vowed to comb every street until they found out where he was hiding. They knew about his trail of lovers. Some of them had already confessed their pathetic treason of bedroom acts.

‘Why don’t you tell us where he is?’ she heard them say.

She tried to obscure the voices by speaking, calming herself as well as the fear she saw reflected in the boy, rocking him back and forth. And when she began to hear the voice of Max, turned into the helpless cries of a child, she began to sing softly. Even if the boy could not hear a thing, she hummed in his ear. He was fidgety and would not settle down. She tried cradling his head in her lap, but he kept getting up and pushing her away and then moving close again. Whimpering for a while and stopping and then remembering to cry again, louder than before.

She found some bread and tried to feed him, but he shook his head. She hummed more forcefully in order to obscure the terror of intimate screams coming down the corridor, stripped of all dignity. Cries beyond endurance, beyond submission, on the extremity of reason, close to death and sometimes almost beyond death itself, but all the more desperate to hold on. Inflicted by men whose confirmation of life came from the debasement of life. Whose self-esteem came at the expense of dehumanising others. Whose merciless skill in keeping people on the edge of life had become their only validity to power.

She could hear nothing any more. She remembered something and began to search in the boy’s pockets until she found the sweet, the green sweet he had been given by Emil and told to keep for later. She took it out and placed it in the boy’s mouth. It calmed him down right away and she rocked him while he sucked on it and stared with his eyes open into the dark.

And then it came to an end. Quite suddenly, she heard them running through the corridor. For a moment she thought they were coming back for her. But they ran past, out into the street. They left behind a crushed silence that went on for hours. She thought it was a trap and could not gather the strength even to call out his name, to say: ‘Max, are you all right?’ She feared the ugliness of human suffering. She feared his silence. Heard nothing until some time near dawn when American soldiers burst in, pointing rifles, finding her sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a boy fast asleep in her arms.

She was standing in the street when they brought Uncle Max out on a stretcher. The medics must have given him something to stop the pain, but his face terrified her and she didn’t want the boy to see any of this. She turned his face in towards her with both hands, almost suffocating him in her coat. Max held a stained cloth up to his eye, and then leaned up on his free arm to speak to her. A cloudy cough, full of gurgling, broken words, spilling blood and saliva down his chin.

‘Emil,’ he said. ‘He’s with Gertrude. Down at the lake.’

It was only years later that she could talk about this to Mara. Details that emerged bit by bit, as though they were in danger of bringing back all the pain once more. The American soldiers questioned her briefly with a translator interpreting her words. They escorted her to a villa close to
the lake where Getrude lived, but it was too late and the unfolding events could not be recalled.

The Gestapo officers had gone to the villa in the early hours. They had found nobody there, only the signs of recent occupants, the smell of a cigar, an empty bottle of wine and two glasses. An unmade bed. An old woman, Gertrude’s infirm mother asleep in another bedroom. Max and Emil’s plan had been uncovered earlier that night. The canister of fuel was of no more use to them, so Emil made an alternative plan. Over the last farewell toast with Gertrude, he knew it was time to escape, this time by boat. He would not leave his friend behind, but Gertrude implored him to go before it was too late.

She made up a white flag for him. She went down to the wooden fishing pier with him, to where a small canoe was tied up waiting. They embraced and looked across the lake to where the Americans were, confident that Emil’s white flag would be clearly visible but also afraid they might not take any notice. He was in German uniform after all as he pushed the small boat out from the pier, wobbling a good deal from side to side before he sat down and began to row silently away into the darkness across the calm black water. She stood there until he disappeared out of sight.

Mara has been to visit the town and the villa. There are very few people from that time still alive now. She went to the railway station and stood in the waiting room. She saw the public house on the main street, but the owners had changed hands right after the war, serving schnitzel and hamburgers, converting to a disco bar late in the evening. What used to be the police station had been turned into a fitness centre with kick-boxing classes, extended for weightlifting at the back.

Down by the lake, the town had spread out along the shore with cafés, restaurants, jewellers and designer stores.
A pizza restaurant with the smell of charcoal coming from the oven. The lake had become the high end of the town and some Americans still lived around there, even though the US troops had pulled out of the area. As she walked out along the lake, Mara heard children speaking English with an American accent. They were bouncing on a trampoline and there was a small dog underneath barking. She watched as the children lifted the dog up onto the trampoline, but the dog jumped off again because he preferred to bark and jump on solid ground.

The lake was not round but more kidney-shaped, with parts of it wrapped around the forest, disappearing from view. It was hard to get to the water in many places because the land was owned right down to the shore, but she found a place in the forest where she could stand and look back at the town from the other side. There were quite a few sailing boats out, even though there was little wind. They were almost stationary, with their sails flapping. Back in the town, she could see a sailing club with long windows onto the water, reflecting the sun and throwing the light into her eyes.

Standing on the shore, she worked out that he must have rowed straight towards that point where she stood. She wonders what happened. Did he lose the white flag? Did the moon come out suddenly from behind the clouds to expose him?

He must have seen the orange glow of cigarettes in the trees behind him on the far shore, but how could he be sure they belonged to the Americans and not to the Germans. Was he not rowing to his own death all the time? Ever since he woke up in the field hospital after the nightmare of screaming women in the First World War, he had lived in the minds of women, in the optimism of his songs.

It was a fatal decision. With all eyes and all military binoculars scanning every inch of water, it was a bad choice, but fully in character with Emil’s life, to risk everything on that final gamble. At some point, a shot must have rung out across the lake, though it could hardly have been distinguishable from the gunfire reaching right into the town and through the streets until it was all over at last.

His body was never found. He must have slumped over in the boat. The oars must have slipped out of his hands and drifted on the water to go their own way, turning up in different parts of the lake, on a reef or a sandy ledge, depending on the currents and the direction of the breeze. Who knows where his little white tea towel went to? His weight must have taken him over the side of the boat, like somebody asleep in a chair. He must have gone silently into the black water and left the boat rocking for a while, leaving it to drift around for days, possibly even arriving right back where he had started from.

Later, Mara searched through some of the books written about that time. One published in Great Britain covering the very end of the war and the immediate aftermath. While glancing through illustrations and maps, she came across some photographs. One plate held her attention, a black-and-white shot of the body of a large man lying face down in the water. His head was not visible, submerged in the silted water. His trousers had come off and his grey buttocks could be seen, above the surface. The caption underneath read:
The corpse of a German soldier.