Disguise (2 page)

She looked at the boy with revulsion. He was frightened and cold, snivelling and coughing. His eyes were infected. He was holding his ear and sucking a button on the shoulder of his woollen jumper at the same time, staring into the dark outside the windscreen, worried what was keeping his mother and why she was not coming to collect him. There were two barrels of green snot under his nose, which her father tried to wipe off with the sleeve of his uniform, but the boy only flinched and the green lines veered away across his face. He started shaking his head and trying to stand up with the pain in his ear, crying, or whining, a sound that resembled the squeak of a door opening very slowly.

The boy understood little German. God knows where he was from. There were no records, no documents, no indication what had happened to him or how he got here. He had no identity. No name. But none of that mattered any more now, because he would be given a new name and a new identity and a new, ready-made biography.

Her father began to call him Gregor, even though she tried to stop him from doing so. He gave the boy a sweet and started the engine. ‘What am I to do with him now?’ he pleaded. ‘Send him to an orphanage, give him away to the Red Cross, or some convent?’ As they drove on through the night with the rain falling and the windscreen wipers making everyone drowsy, he let the boy hold the steering wheel and he soon stopped crying and fell asleep with the vibrations of the engine and the hot air in the cab and the warmth of two people beside him on either side.

Along the way, he stopped the truck once more and held her hand. Looked her in the eyes with that persuasive intimacy for which he was so well known and so loved by people everywhere. He placed her arm around the sleeping boy’s shoulder and told her in his firm, fatherly way that she would soon learn to love this boy.

‘Promise me one thing,’ he said to her. ‘Promise that you will never, ever tell anyone that this is not your own son. Not even your husband.’

He made her shake hands with him. Then he made her smile and told her that nothing mattered, as long as she called him Gregor. He was her son now, written on her documents. Before long she would forget that she ever lost her baby boy in the bombing. They were not out of trouble yet, but he would bring her to safety. The war would be over very soon. Her husband would come back from the front in time and find her. They would be together again as a family, just as before, eating breakfast around the table and laughing, all three of them. In a big album, she would keep all the funny stories and the photographs of Gregor. He would grow up around her imagination. He would go to school every morning with a big hug and return in the afternoon with his own stories. She would buy him a new
writing pad and new pencils so that he could continue learning the alphabet, just as before, kneeling down in the kitchen with the pad open on one chair and his dinner on another chair, so that he could alternate between eating and writing, one word, then a forkful of food, followed by another word.

Nobody could tell the difference.

He has reached the long avenue of trees now. They stand in a guard of honour lining the road on either side, straight and tall. There is one missing on the right, like a soldier fallen over in a faint, while the rest of them remain upright in position. They say these avenues were created all over Europe long ago to shield the horses and the passengers in their carriages from the sun and also to provide shelter from the cutting wind and snowdrifts in winter. Now the sun flashes between the trees, throwing black and white stripes across the tarmac. Somebody switching a light on and off, making it difficult for him to see while driving. There is a warning sign erected for motorists showing a car bashing into a tree with black exclamation marks springing up from the point of impact.

It’s a warm day at the end of September. Gregor is driving through the flat landscape south of Berlin, down to the disused farm where his former wife Mara is spending the summer with her stepsister Katia and her husband Thorsten. They have invited him to take part in the fruit gathering over two days. Mara phoned to say it would be great if he could join them. He would not be alone for the weekend.

What did she mean by that? Alone without whom? Even solitude is a communal act, so they say. Gregor and Mara have been separated for years. They still live apart,
but lately they have begun to see each other a lot more. And maybe she had invited him in order to prove something, to repair things between them, like a family caretaker, keeping everyone in touch. She explained to him that she had invited a ‘heap of people’ out to the farm to pick the apples and she wanted him to be there.

‘Before your son disappears off to Africa,’ she said.

Their son, Daniel, has inherited money and has decided to spend some of it working in the Sudan with his girlfriend Juli.

The farm is situated outside the former East German town of Jüterbog. Daniel got a job as an extra on a film set there a few years back, where the Russian Army had been garrisoned after the war, right up to the nineties. After which everything suddenly seemed to go backwards in time. It must have been quite an event, seeing the soldiers packing up and leaving after such a long time, trucks pulling out and belching fumes for the last time. History receding and the buildings in which they were billeted for all those years through the Cold War torn down and turned into a film set, which ironically made the outskirts of the town look like ruins at the end of the Second World War. For the people living there it was one last glimpse of those terrible years before the town and the landscape finally settled back into a kind of ancient anonymity. It has become quite empty now. Everyone has fled from here into the cities and they say the land is already so deserted in some places that it will eventually be handed back to nature. The forests will grow back one day and the wolves will return, maybe even the bears. Who knows, all the fairy tales that came with them as well?

The mushroom season has begun. It has rained overnight, and Gregor thinks it might be a nice idea to arrive with some fresh wild mushrooms. He’s brought wine, but the
mushrooms would be really thoughtful. He stops the car at the edge of a forest and steps out. He can smell the familiar morning scent of the earth and the vegetation. It gives him a feeling that is hard to describe. An echo of childhood? Of home? Of long ago?

From the boot of the car he takes a fruit basket which belongs to Mara. He walks off into the forest, carrying it on his arm, the way he used to do with his father and mother. He’s good at spotting the dark places where mushrooms grow, those tiny flecks of unusual colour, shades of brown and beige and white along the floor. He’s good at making the connection between varieties of trees and what might be expected to grow in the vicinity. He makes instant decisions about frilly aprons and gaudy shapes that are attractive and treacherous at the same time. A skill that he received from his father, one that he rejected for years and has only recently taken up again.

He’s good at keeping directions in mind. He has always been quick to memorise his surroundings. Always mapping. Always aware of geography. Another skill he was taught by his father, or is that a faculty which has been sharpened by the nature of his own origins?

While concentrating on the natural signposting along the floor, he comes across a bomb crater in the forest. It disturbs the sediment of his memory. He’s always had to manage his past and there were devices, certain skills he developed as a young man, that could filter out the unwanted. Sifting and sorting was a phrase he brought with him from somewhere to describe this mental activity in which each person compiles their own memories in such a way that they can live with themselves.

Here, where he least expected it, he finds himself standing in front of this random piece of evidence from the
past. Lots of people would pass it by thinking it was a perfectly natural dip in the earth. There is nothing growing inside the crater, and maybe that is what has caught his eye.

The funny thing is that he instinctively wishes he could show it to Mara. Wait till she sees this, he finds himself saying almost aloud. How long have they been separated now and still he carries on reporting to her internally? They never divorced. She lived with an architect for years in Berlin, but that came to an end because she could not bring herself to divorce Gregor. He lived abroad for years, but still they continued to keep in touch. A distant, proxy sort of relationship in which they went on with their own separate lives, returning to each other from time to time in order to compare information.

He marks the place in his mind, in case he needs to come back here, should he want to show it to her. A turning to the right off the main sand track, after the spot where he saw the wild boar footprints and some bits of thick, wiry fur, where they must come to drink at night and roll around in the mud and maybe fight. Right in the heart of the forest, where the track straightens out and leads through a dark hall of mature trees. He has the impression that he’s standing in a church or a great mansion, with the occasional beam of light coming down from a high window. The silence is almost absolute. A place from which all sound has been withdrawn.

If memory has a physical shape, then it must be something like this, Gregor thinks. The interior of the forest with paths leading through vast interconnecting rooms where you can get so easily lost.

He finds himself staring into this large hole in the same way that he would stare at an animal, holding his breath and not moving. It’s like being in the presence of some great elk which will be gone again with a burst of movement as soon
as he blinks. Not a sound. Not even the soft transfer of indoor air. It seems to be staring back at him, asking him questions, this bomb which has missed its target. He feels the shock of it going through him even sixty years after the event, the wind suck and the earth shower and the violent tremor underfoot. It gives him the sensation that people must get with a near-miss traffic accident, unable to figure out why they have been picked out by this contorted luck, the only person to have escaped unharmed. Standing beside such a vicious bomb crater, he feels like man living in the afterlife.

The crater itself measures about the size of a swimming pool, ten or twelve metres across but shaped like a funnel, perfectly round, almost like something produced by nature itself. There is a thin layer of branches and twigs lying at the centre. The earth has levelled off at the edges over time. There is an old, damaged oak tree standing next to it, but most of the other trees around it are conifers, reaching up straight. Who knows, maybe those trees were all saplings then or maybe didn’t even exist and the bomb actually fell in an open field, on a clear and starry night, with only the ragged oak tree to witness the thud and the scattering of soil and the thunder of planes receding into the distance.

All over the city and the region, they still find unexploded bombs from time to time, on building sites, on road-widening projects. It’s like a folk memory in the ground. Full of shrapnel. And remains. Lots of remains, buried in shallow earth. The remains of soldiers, men of whom it is hard to tell any more on which side they fought and for what? The remains of people who never belonged to any side. People who have gone beyond pain and grief and hunger and resentment. Beyond memory even.

What the hell? Gregor thinks to himself. It’s probably not a bomb crater at all. He spent long enough in forests
as a child with his father to know that this might be nothing more than a dumping pit. People used to dig large holes in order to bury their refuse in the forest. And maybe this is the physical shape of memory, ultimately, a common landfill site. A hole in the ground intended for items that once clamoured to be remembered but then turn out to mean nothing after all.

He continues to collect his mushrooms until he feels he has enough. The basket is almost full, and yet so light in comparison to mass. He turns and traces his way back along that instant map he’s made for himself in the forest. By the time he comes past the crater again, he has already dismissed it in his mind. He hardly takes any notice of it now and doesn’t stop to have another look. Instead, he sees only the exit ahead of him, a small green light at the end of the path where the trees cut off and the fields begin. And when he comes back out into the open at last, he has the feeling of lights coming on again after a power cut.

As he drives on, away from the forest once more, he passes through a farm of wind turbines standing in the fields. Dozens of them spreading right across the flat, open landscape. They stretch out into the distance, all facing in the same direction, gliding across the earth in formation. The ones further away look tiny, but those up close look enormous, casting spectacular shadows across the land around them and towering over the road, making him feel small as he drives right through them. Tall, silent birds on either side, with long white necks, lazily turning their wings. There is very little wind and some of them are hardly moving at all. Some are already completely still while others are settling down as though they’ve just landed.

What is Gregor Liedmann’s first real memory?

A moment at night, in the dark, sitting in the cab of a truck between two people. There is a woman on his right-hand side and a fat man on his left, driving. The woman must be his mother and the fat man must be his grandfather, Emil. There is a pain in his ear, like the point of a sharp knife being pushed right into the eardrum. He wants the pain to stop. It must have been a terrible ear infection, he imagines now, so the fat man smiles and gives him two sweets for the journey, one red one for now, and one green one to keep in his pocket. He has the red sweet in his mouth, a hard-boiled sweet with a special raspberry flavour that he has never had before. He still gets the taste of it when he thinks about that journey, sitting between two warm people, watching the needle jumping on the speedometer. The fat man has two hands on the wheel and sometimes he takes one off to change the gears. He watches the steering wheel spinning free, out of the man’s hands, as they make a turn around a corner until the road straightens out and the hands grip the wheel again.

He knows they are talking to each other quietly over the top of his head, but he cannot hear anything or understand what they are saying because it’s not his language. He can just about hear the fat man calling the name Gregor from
time to time and patting him on the head. His name is Gregor now and he is sitting in a truck going to a new place with a red sweet in his mouth, as red and shining as the tail lights on the truck. The woman has a blanket spread out over her knees and over his own knees to keep warm.

Then the knife is back in his ear again and he throws off the blanket. He tries to stand up in the cab to get away from the pain, but the woman pulls him down again. The fat man allows him to hold the steering wheel. He takes him on his lap and lets him drive the truck with his arms around him. He feels afraid at first, but it feels very warm, sitting on the man’s knees with the smooth throbbing of the engine in his hands. The man takes a hold of his hand to place it on the gear lever, under his own hand, while he changes gears. He can hear the cogs catching and the engine sounding deeper. He has worked out how to drive the truck by himself and wants to be a truck driver when he grows up. The pain is gone and the road is straight and flat from there on, but he cannot go to sleep because he has to keep his eyes on the wheel and on the lights shining ahead through the rain and the windscreen wiper swinging from side to side. He never wants to get off the truck again. He wants to keep driving forever. He has to do a pee in his pants and feels the warmth spreading around his legs, but the fat man just keeps talking and laughing.

Gregor is now in his early sixties. He has spent years as a musician living in Toronto and also in Ireland, travelling on a strange, empty sort of journey around the world before he eventually came back to live in this calm suburb of Berlin. His face has become quite familiar here, cycling past the red-brick church with its three spires of differing heights and a set of melancholy bells. He’s often seen shuddering along the cobbled streets with his back straight
and his trumpet in a case over his shoulder. He makes his living mostly as a music teacher now. For such a tall man, his bike appears to be a little too small, a borrowed child’s bike. His long legs forked over the saddle as he waits at the traffic lights. On his way home, he usually stops at the café with the art deco furniture to read the paper. He’s known by name in most of the shops. In the bakery with the till inside a glass shrine. In the newsagent with the blues playing all day and the candles lit every afternoon. In the Spanish wine dealer’s and in the bar with the stuffed flying seagull hanging from the ceiling.

Perhaps he fits in best here with all the other ageing anarchists and draft dodgers from the late sixties. All those stone throwers with long hair and beards and dirty fingernails who turned their backs on their parents and shook the country by the neck and then settled down eventually to become parents themselves. The true veterans of sixties optimism, the anti-Vietnam War brigade who shook off militarism and authority. Flower-power people who blurred the boundaries forever between men and women during that golden era when craziness became a virtue and things took on an inspired, meaningless beauty of their own.

Many of the people around here have also travelled a lot, collecting cultural idiosyncrasies from around the world before returning to live in this semi-eccentric, semi-chic and ethnically mixed suburb of Berlin. It’s a district full of borderline people who never fully gave up their anarchism. Musicians and actors and activists and socialists who altered course at one point or another to become second-hand clothing merchants or furniture dealers or tea specialists or small-time importers of rugs and African art, goods that cannot be had in mainstream shops. People who worked as
tour guides all over South America and Indochina for years and then came back to start up quiet businesses which would allow them to stay at home and have a late family, but not look like they surrendered. Anything but orthodox medicine or law or public service. People with a trail of marriages and relationships behind them. Like the man in the organic cheese shop who studied architecture and had two girlfriends at the same time and could not make up his mind between them and ended up losing both. Like the lesbian mother in the hairdresser’s with the Virgin Mary in the window who has one child from each of three marriages. Like the owner of the second-hand furniture store who sits at the back of the shop playing his electric guitar all day until a customer comes in and he has to switch off.

Every city has its cultural and ethnic frontiers. Up on the main street, he lines up at the checkout in the Turkish supermarket with women in headscarves. Mothers who are unable to correct their own Berlin-born children in the host language, mothers who cannot tell the difference between hazelnuts and chestnuts until they hear the words in their home language. Turkish men outside on the benches talking and touching each other gently at the elbow to make a point with the same care and affection that they give to aubergines or apples. Families together on benches in summer drinking tea. The edgy tension of young Turkish men and the throbbing Eastern beat blasting out from a car. He hears the impact of their culture taking shape in his own language, a cool kind of slouching, immigrant slang that has taken hold in the city.

He has become part of the older generation, replacing the war generation that went before them, soon to be replaced themselves by new generations of fathers and
mothers from all kinds of places, sitting on the little wall watching their children in the sandy playground at the side of the church. They once grew vegetables in this church-yard during the war. Now the children dig in the sand with little spades. Voices of children echoing around the streets. Lots of children everywhere and cool fathers pushing buggies with iPods to mark the progress of generations going forward all the time and everything becoming younger and newer and more modern than anyone ever thought possible.

And maybe this is the right time to start reclaiming his memory. His wife Mara still wants him to search for things that might place his true origins beyond doubt.

Lately, they have been meeting for coffee, setting off on their bikes, sitting in the Greek restaurant with a candle between them. She arrives round at his apartment carrying a basket of fruit or a cake, holding it with a flat hand underneath. She’s usually dressed up with earrings, ringing the bell and running her fingers through her hair. Her bicycle has been left outside his apartment frequently, locked up against the railings in the inner courtyard overnight. She appears on his balcony, watering the flowers. All these outward signs of intimacy must mean something. Their lives are far more relaxed now. They have become more accepting. They have reached a point where they can live with contradictions. They can surrender to a cheap pop song, for instance, which they might have switched off when they were younger and more uncompromising about the kind of things they allowed themselves to be shaped by. Now they can look back at a lifetime without accusation. Perhaps even with fondness, nostalgia. They can now calmly go back and sift through everything again.

Why does Gregor remember that moment in the truck so well, more than any other? Why is everything else such a blur, before and after? Sometimes he cannot distinguish between his memory and what he has been told, between what he experienced and what he has read in books. He is made up of all those things that he has heard about and read about. All the things he rejected as much as the things he accepted, what he believed as much as what he didn’t believe.

This journey in the truck remains a real memory. A concrete recollection. No question about that. Gregor recalls the pictures of his grandfather at home when he grew up. The innocent appearance of Grandfather Emil in uniform just after he enlisted in the First World War, that boyish idealism before battle. He remembers the photographs of the bloated, beer-drinking grandfather, much later at the start of the Second World War, that mischievous smile for which he was so well liked.

He can remember him singing, or humming, as he drove the truck. Even though Gregor must have been half deaf with the ear infection, he could feel the vibrations broad-casting through his chest. He will never forget the warmth of this man behind him, letting him drive the truck. And maybe it’s so vivid in his memory now because that journey came to an end. In the middle of the night, the truck stopped and they had to get out, with the blanket over their heads now to hold off the rain. Is that the reason why he remembers it so well, because he wanted to get back on the truck and never get off again?

He cannot remember when he ate the second sweet, because he has no memory of a green sweet, only the red one. He thinks he lost it, because he searched for it in his pocket. He doesn’t know how it went missing.

Are the happiest memories always overshadowed by loss? Just as the bad memories must be counterweighted by good times? Maybe this missing boiled sweet is somehow caught up with the larger loss which cannot be accessed any more. It replaces all the missing people and places and events that he has forgotten. Even as an adult, he still has the recurring dream of finding the green sweet in a place where he never looked before. Some inside pocket he forgot to check.

He can recall very little else from that night. He must have fallen asleep in the truck, because the fat man woke him up, calling, ‘Gregor, Gregor.’ Again and again he heard his soft, singing voice, two descending notes that will forever be associated with the journey being over, the cruelty of waking up with a pain in his ear and the time in the truck coming to an end.

The fat man opened the door and the cold morning air came in. He lifted him down and helped the woman out. He had to stay with the woman, because the fat man had to go elsewhere. He promised to be back soon, that much he could understand from his gestures alone. The fat man smiled and held up a fuel canister, shook it to show that it was empty and pointed down the street. He saw him getting on the truck and driving away. There was a house on fire at the end of the road, he remembers. The rain was falling and the flames were going up into the sky at the same time. The sky was orange. The fire brigade was standing in front of the house spraying water through the windows. The woman took him into the train station, where they waited, wrapped in the blanket, with lots of other people in the same room and steam rising from their wet clothes. They waited and waited and waited, but the fat man never came back.