Disguise (5 page)

When Gregor first arrived in Berlin, he was like a void. They said he was a quiet, sensitive sort of person who didn’t talk very much and was interested mostly in music. He was tall and good-looking, and received a lot of sympathy whenever he told people he was an orphan.

‘You’re a bit of a loner, aren’t you?’ the girls would say to him. It was meant as a compliment, of course. The dark horse. The mystery man. They looked into his eyes the way a climber would stare across a mountain range. They attempted to conquer that frontier and laughed, calling him the great unknown. He was the kind of person who might go out for a packet of cigarettes and never come back. He left the bathroom door open as if he was the only person left in the world. He disappeared at a party, without explanation, leaving his coat behind. He never phoned back when somebody left a message.

Because he hardly spoke, they would speak for him, guessing what was inside his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ they would say. They would set multiple-choice questions, all he had to do was nod or shake his head. Entire monologues would be put into his mouth while he remained mute. And when he revealed that he was an orphan, they became even more curious, passing the news around like a tabloid confession, as though they wanted to
adopt him all over again. And maybe they envied his story. Maybe they were orphans themselves to some degree, disowning their parents, wishing they had no lineage. The freedom of having no family tree.

He placed all of his feelings into his music. He was able to keep a party going with a guitar, but he always sank into a phase of introspection soon afterwards. He was as thin as he was tall. He could ‘live on nothing’, they used to say.

Martin and Gregor got a job together, working in the warehouse of a publishing house. Martin was studying law and Gregor was attending a course on music composition. In the waiting room of Martin’s legal practice in Berlin, there is a framed poster with the word ‘Wanted’ written over the top. It offers a reward for the return of a small painting of the artist Francis Bacon, which was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin. The portrait was done by Bacon’s friend, Lucian Freud, a fellow artist with whom he had a falling-out later on. It shows Bacon with large lips and large eyes turned down, a sad, vulnerable expression in which he appears to be thinking about the nature of friendship and how it never remains static, always increasing or fading. The painting itself has never been recovered. The poster is like a shrine to friendship.

They both wore beards. They often sat on trolleys, holding philosophical debates to pass the time. They kept nix for each other after a hard night so the other person could sleep it off in the bookshelves with a couple of medical dictionaries for a pillow. Gregor still recalls the subsidised dinners in the canteen, pork and red cabbage and salted potatoes, served in a tin tray with tin foil across the top. He refused to eat pork and had to have a special lunch provided. Now and again one of the employees would make remarks about him. There was a residue of
fascism left in the arguments of older men who spoke of ‘back then’, meaning under Hitler. Men who sometimes used Nazi phrases and said weirdos such as Martin and Gregor should be ‘taken away’.

Gregor arrived at work every day with his curly hair and a detective hat on his head. He wore white shoes and a tweed jacket, a full contradiction of styles. Martin was equally noisy in colour and style, with long hair and round glasses, carrying a doctor’s medical bag. Gregor’s beard was very black and he had a bright smile that could disarm people even in the most disastrous circumstances. He was taller than Martin, but he had the habit of hunching over to make up for his height, speaking to people from the side, as though he was uncomfortable with the responsibility that his height gave him and wanted to compensate by giving the impression of being smaller, more crouched, more looked after. Martin had the bigger laugh and could often be heard throughout the warehouse, irritating the hell out of the foreman, while Gregor laughed more in towards himself, a laugh that was shrinking rather than expanding.

Life seemed like one long party at the time, with Gregor playing ‘Riders on the Storm’ like an anthem on his guitar every night. Everything revolved around music and sex and drugs. The genius of youth. All that glorious time-wasting and useless enterprise. Gregor remembers taking acid and staring for five hours at his luminous hands, seeing right through the skin like thin parchment at the veins inside, wondering whose blood flowed through them.

On the autobahn outside Frankfurt one day, he and Martin were hitchhiking back to Berlin in the middle of winter when they were questioned by the police. It was a time of mistrust and tension in Germany. A time of protest
making up for a time of lack of protest. A time of street demonstrations and rioting and potential terrorists.

It was getting dark early and they were both frozen to the bone. Gregor wore a cashmere coat, which he had picked up for nothing but which was far too small for him, and his detective hat. Martin wore a thin anorak and tennis shoes, hopping around from one foot to the other. There were dirty bits of hardened ice left at the side of the road from the last snow and the only thing keeping them warm was their beards. They cursed each other for the idea of hitching in winter, particularly when Martin’s father had plenty of money and they could easily have taken the train.

They had a hard time getting a lift. Two eccentric figures, one with his bashed-up doctor’s bag and the other with his guitar case, imagining the dreamy heat inside the cars going by. Motorists staring at them with those vacant, alarmist expressions as they passed by. They waited for like-minded people who might take pity on them and kept an eye out for cars like the one-stroke DCV, or the Renault 4, or the Volkswagen; high-mileage, proletarian vehicles that had become a symbol of new, alternative life. They had almost given up hope when a car suddenly pulled up ahead of them. At last, they said, picking up their bags and running towards it. But they stopped short when two men hopped out of the car and confronted them with handguns and badges.

‘Drop your bags,’ one of the men shouted.

They were ordered to step over the rail into an adjoining field. Within seconds, Gregor and Martin found themselves walking away down a slope with the men shouting orders, pointing guns at their backs. It seemed like such a calm place, with crows in the trees, the autobahn out of
sight, like a river in spate behind them, and the winter sky fading to an icy blue.

‘Take off your coats and throw them to the side,’ the policemen demanded.

Martin did as he was told and threw his anorak away.

‘And that stupid fucking hat,’ one of the men bawled at Gregor.

Gregor refused to take off his hat, or his coat.

‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded, turning round towards the policemen.

The policemen directed their weapons at Gregor. He had been turned into a suspect by them, but his refusal took on a moral momentum, contradicting their unspoken accusations. Underneath the hippy clothing, there was a need to assert his identity in public, without any shame, without any doubt. This was the moment for it. He smiled, like a flashlight shining through his black beard, while the officers waved their guns and screamed at him to turn away, using the word ‘asshole’ in every phrase. Gregor then became serious, withdrew his smile and stared straight at the officer, telling him that he was refusing to take off his coat in the middle of winter.

‘You won’t get away with this any more,’ Gregor said. ‘I’m Jewish.’

It was like a grenade going off. He was saying it for the first time with great confidence. Everything changed. It was clear that Martin and Gregor were no terrorists. This was just a routine piece of opportunism, two thug policemen deciding to humiliate two free-living hippy wasters. But now it was all going wrong for them. The officers began to shrink back, looking at each other for reassurance. Out there in this ravine with the sound of civilisation so close by along the autobahn, they were asked to stare into the eyes of
history. One of them continued bawling out orders for a moment, but the other began to weaken and said it was OK, all they needed was to see identification. Martin and Gregor showed their student ID cards and the policemen backed off, out of that history lesson as fast as they could.

When they got back to Berlin, Martin laughed and said it was the best one he had ever heard yet. He embraced Gregor again and again and said he had ‘saved his ass’ out there on the autobahn. Martin had been carrying an almighty knob of hash, enough to land him in jail and disqualify him from ever working in a legal practice if he had been caught in possession. He had told Gregor nothing about it. They had a fierce argument over it, with Gregor asking how Martin thought he could smuggle such a thing all the way through the GDR when people were searched so thoroughly every time that they had to lay out every spoon, every pencil, every item of clothing on a table by the roadside. Women often had to undergo the humiliating ordeal of displaying all their clothes, item by item while the East German border guards examined it all with great fascination. How did Martin think he could get away with carrying hash through that frontier?

‘You’re my guardian angel,’ Martin said.

He kept repeating the story that evening, laughing in irrational bursts. ‘Wait till I tell everybody about this,’ he said. ‘There we are getting searched on the side of the autobahn and Gregor saves the day by saying he’s Jewish.’

‘But I am Jewish,’ Gregor insisted.

‘I know,’ Martin said. ‘But it’s such a great story. There’s me standing with a fucking massive lump of dope in my pocket, not knowing what the hell to do with it, whether to throw it away into the grass or swallow it or what, and then you tell them you’re Jewish. Brilliant.’

‘I’m not joking, Martin.’

And then it dawned on Martin for the first time to ask questions.

‘How do you know you’re Jewish?’ he asked.

‘I was told by my uncle,’ Gregor replied. ‘Uncle Max. He’s dead now, but he told me the whole story.’

Gregor continued to bring out the facts in small increments, always enough but not any more. Martin absorbed the information, becoming his spokesperson, telling people in advance about Gregor’s background.

‘Saved by a Jew,’ he would say, putting his arm around Gregor and ruffling his hair.

There was no proof that Gregor Liedmann was Jewish, but that didn’t stop people from believing him. In the next few weeks, Gregor went to a doctor and asked to be circumcised. The doctor naturally wanted to know why he was doing this, and once again, Gregor boldly explained that it was for his faith. The doctor arranged the operation, and after that, Gregor made further attempts to place his identity on record. He had marked down his religion as Jewish on official documents. Dues were deducted from his pay packet each month which went directly to the Jewish community, but when he approached the rabbi in Berlin, there were difficulties in establishing any Jewish parentage.

He spoke to the rabbi on a number of occasions, explained that in the nature of things during the war, it was impossible for anyone to admit that he was Jewish. He was in hiding, brought from the East under cover as a German refugee. It was understandable that he had not been circumcised as a child, but he had rectified that in the meantime and was now ready to enter the faith fully to make up for lost time.

The rabbi shook his head and said he could not accept him into the community. He understood Gregor’s wish to become Jewish, but he was not in a position to take anyone who came in off the street and accept their word for it. He urged Gregor to find some solid evidence of parentage, particularly on the mother’s side, then he would welcome him with open arms.

Despite his efforts, Gregor didn’t get very far. He had no great wish to attend the synagogue or to go through any religious customs. He merely wanted to belong to the Jewish community in Berlin. And maybe it didn’t matter to him all that much ultimately, because everyone already believed him. They never asked too many intrusive questions because it seemed grotesque to demand identity papers from a Jewish survivor. They were in the process of altering their society with new music and new habits and new forms of tolerance that would make up for all that was gone by. They accepted the fact that Gregor was Jewish, simple as that.

But as with everything in Gregor’s life, there has always been a question mark floating behind him. Every statement contains a hint of the opposite. Some filament of doubt inside every utterance which calls that very thing into question. They say that every YES contains a NO. Every book title, every line from a song, every clip of dialogue in a movie is always in conflict with itself. Some innate cynicism in the words that shows up the reverse of what was meant. The only strong statement left is the question itself. Who am I? Where do I belong?

Gregor first met Mara after a street demonstration in Berlin. He and Martin found themselves on the periphery of a protest, observers sitting on top of an advertising hoarding alongside a newspaper photographer when a baton charge came their way. Policemen came and whacked them around the ankles from below, forcing them to get down. This time Gregor had no defence. It was the photographer who called out with great indignation, bawling out the name of the right-wing paper he worked for. So the policemen apologised to the photographer and turned on Gregor with redoubled hysteria. He received two blows, one to the shoulder, one to the side of the head, before he could limp away around the corner. They must have assumed Martin was with the photographer because he got away unscathed.

Mara came across them, crouched beside the wall outside a shop, right underneath a cigarette machine. Gregor was naked from the waist up. He had taken off his T-shirt and Martin was holding it up to his forehead to stem the blood. She took them upstairs to the apartment where she lived, bandaged his head and washed his face and chest. She was a nurse, training to become a physiotherapist. She gave Gregor a clean shirt belonging to her boyfriend who was away at the time. Then she tried to teach them yoga and
had them both lying on the floor with their legs in the air to increase the healing power of circulation.

Afterwards, they drank beer and smoked and talked. Each of them had their own protest stories. She told them about the time she was caught shoplifting and tried to argue that she did it because she disapproved of capitalism. Martin told the story of how he was caught without a ticket on the underground and tried to escape, only to run straight into a newspaper stand on the platform. Mara told them that the apartment had once been raided and ransacked by the police. Martin pointed out that it didn’t help that everything was painted red. Red doors, red window frames, even a red fridge which Mara told them had been turned upside down, literally, in the middle of the kitchen one day when she returned. Gregor announced with great solemnity that he was retiring from protests. He said he was not very good at getting his head broken by truncheons and would leave that to people with bigger heads, like Martin. She asked Gregor if there was anything he did better than getting his head cracked, and when he said nothing, it was Martin who spoke for him.

‘He’s a musician,’ Martin told her.

‘A musician,’ she said, staring at Gregor.

‘I’m lucky they didn’t get my hands,’ Gregor said.

‘And a composer,’ Martin added. ‘He’s a Jewish composer.’

‘Wow,’ Mara said. ‘And that’s the way the bastards treat you.’

Martin then retold the story of the autobahn. Mara clenched her fist and shook it towards the balcony. By then, both sides of the street outside were lined with police vans and policemen dressed in riot gear sitting inside.

It was a time of engagement with society, with history. A time for casting off constraints. A time of truth and
self-accusation. And nudity. The naked body had become a provocation and great symbol of freedom in the aftermath of war. There were ‘happenings’ everywhere and speeches given at the university about the importance of open relationships.

Mara took Gregor’s bloodied T-shirt and carried it over to the window, stepped out onto the small balcony and tied it to the railings. She then came back in and sang a song that she had learned in school, an unusual song that one of her revolutionary teachers had heard from a German folk group, a sad marching song that was written by the inmates of a concentration camp in the north of Germany.

‘
Wir sind die Moorsoldaten, und ziehen mit dem Spaten.
’

She then found a guitar in one of the rooms of the apartment and Gregor sang a few songs. Other occupants came back and told more stories of street battles. Martin eventually found himself a place to crash out in a corner for the night and Mara took Gregor by the hand. She pulled him into her room and he felt as though he had been connected to a powerful battery, sending a high voltage surge through his limbs.

With the bandage round his head and his bloodied T-shirt hanging out like a flag of resistance from the balcony, they lay down on the mattress on the floor, surrounded by posters and Trotskyite flyers. There was no wardrobe, only a rail for the clothes. There was a suitcase set up in the corner on two boxes, like an altar, with a mirror and some make-up. Her favourite possessions, a nice pair of shoes, beige and black, with laces and clacking heels. That and a sun hat and a frame full of butterflies with pins stuck into them.

‘Is that not a bit cruel?’ he asked her.

‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘It’s giving them life after life.’

They exchanged more information about themselves. She was from Köln, had three sisters. A conservative father who had remarried and was deeply disappointed not to have a son. She had escaped to Berlin, it turned out, freeing herself from a rigid Catholic, Rhineland upbringing. She asked him plenty of questions and he told his story, how he had grown up not far from the site of the Nuremberg Rallies, in the shadows of where the Nazis staged their great pageant, the triumph of the will. It came as a shock to him when he was taken there on a school trip one day, standing with his school friends on the steps where Hitler held his speeches, a place which had become so iconic in world history.

‘What surprised me most of all was how small and insignificant it had become,’ he said to her. ‘Overgrown with weeds. Not much bigger than the school soccer pitch, really.’

He talked about his adoptive parents. They were people who felt things had been done to them. His mother regarded herself as a helpless victim in life, unable to affect any change, either during the Nazi period or in the aftermath of the war. He spoke about her habit of praying out loud when she heard shocking events on the radio, but always retreating into her private life of anxieties and obsessions, as though her existence had nothing to do with the rest of the world.

‘She had the habit of doing the singing yawn,’ Gregor said. ‘The real doh-re-mi yawn, C, D and F sharp.’

‘My mother is the same,’ Mara said. ‘Only two notes, though.’

She was excited and emotional and wanted to stay awake for a few more hours, listening to him talking, looking at him lying on his back, staring up as though he could see his childhood projected onto the ceiling. She told friends later that he made love as though he was steering a riverboat into the sunset, with his eyes closed, humming. And Gregor said very little about that first encounter, only that she moved like a washing machine, going into spin.

But there was more to this meeting. After a number of other random encounters, Mara moved in with Gregor. She left her boyfriend behind, a medical student from Austria with lots of money, who kept the fridge stocked up with beer and food and followed her everywhere, to her classes, into bars. Even hung around in the distance among the trees when she and Gregor were lying in the grass along the canal together. Gregor had his own entanglements. The commune which Martin had set up had egalitarian, anti-consumer principles, with strict rules about private possessions. Even personal relationships were open to plunder. On the night that Mara moved in, Gregor’s guitar was stolen. Days later Mara found it in a junk shop nearby and bought it back again. And when Gregor played it that same evening in the apartment, a young woman burst into tears and admitted that she was the one who had stolen it, out of jealousy. Members of the commune discussed the issue methodically around the table later on, like a revolutionary subcommittee. In principle, the guitar was communal, but she had transgressed the laws by selling it off for private gain.

Not long after that, Gregor and Mara moved into their own apartment. Now and again, she would try to coax childhood recollections from him. His adoptive parents were very strange. His mother was a bit of a martyr, he told her.
His father was obsessed with hunting. The house was full of antlers. He grew up with a stuffed badger standing on a dresser on the landing, snarling with his claws up in the air. The living room was like an assembly hall full of dead creatures staring down at them while they sat watching TV.

Mara became an archaeologist, trying to restore his lost life. While he composed pieces of music on the piano, she pinned the notes up on the walls. Rows of score sheets going all around the room and out into the little corridor of their apartment. The pages fluttered every time they walked by or opened a window. Notes rising and falling. Bursts and bouquets. Chords like solid oak furniture. Lazy notes that dragged their feet and other notes that could not be held back. Together they would work and travel and reinvent the void he had come from. They would reimagine his true origins like a lost piece of music that had been burned in a fire.

When Mara became pregnant some years later, they got married. She took him home to her parents, announcing that she was getting married to a Jewish survivor. They didn’t want a big wedding, because Gregor had no relatives.

‘The bigger the wedding the smaller the marriage,’ he joked. So they had the smallest wedding in history, at a Berlin registry office, with no ceremony and no photographs and no witnesses present, except Martin.

They went to a bar afterwards to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and to break a glass. But the real wedding came some weeks later when Gregor and Mara were travelling around France together. In a railway station in Paris, they met an Irish building worker who had worked on construction sites in Germany and spoke a few phrases in German to them. He was drinking beer early in the morning at Gare Montparnasse and kept quoting the lines of a song he
remembered called ‘The Lover’s Ghost’, working himself up to the point where he could sing it to them. All around them in the café, the people with their luggage listened. Even the trains seemed to pause for a moment while he sang.

You are welcome home again, said the young man to his love.

We will never from this moment have to part.

It was the story of a man who dreams that his lover has returned to him, even though she is already dead. While he is in mourning, she has come back to him for one night and is allowed to stay only until morning, until the dawn comes up. They lie in each other’s arms once again and the man begs the cock not to crow so that the night will never end and she will never have to leave again.

When it was time for the Irish builder to get his train, he shook hands as though he didn’t want to leave, as though he recognised something in them that had disappeared from his own life, some girl he had left behind, some break-up which had conscripted him forever into a lifetime of regret.

‘Stay as you are,’ he said to them with more than a hint of confession, as he picked up the small shoulder bag containing all his possessions. ‘Don’t ever fall apart.’

An Irishman on his way around Europe warning young couples in train stations to stay faithful to each other. They dismissed the romance of it. But the steely, calloused grip of his handshake remained imprinted on them. Every nail, every splinter, every frozen piece of scaffolding, an entire cement-bitten biography etched into the palm of his hand. This was their real wedding. The wedding in the railway station. With the noise of trains and loudspeakers and the hiss of a coffee machine, they had sworn a silent,
undocumented pact with only the Irish construction worker as a witness. They would never run into him again and he would never know whether they had kept their promises to each other, but there was some binding significance in this railway wedding that was unlike any other marriage contract.