Disguise (7 page)

By midnight she was in despair. The room was packed and the air was stuffy. The people around her were talking up a storm of fatalism. Some of them tried to remain positive, but they were outnumbered by the others, imagining a terrible outcome to their lives, forecasting obscene and cruel endings for themselves and everyone else. Their skills of pessimism allowed them to form friendships and allegiances, it gave them sympathy, even advantage and power. The more they spoke of doom, the more respect they gained. A talent passed down to them over centuries. They had an eye for disaster. They outdid each other preparing for the worst. Glorious, operatic forms of doom which helped them to overcome their own fear. One woman said she was sure that she would not live through this night. Another woman said it was certain that she would never see her husband again. And maybe this, too, was part of the great skill of emotional survival, to accept the worst of all possible so that something better will emerge.

There was no chance of a train. They knew that. It was too late. Nobody had any faith in the timetable in any case,
and they looked out into the rain, knowing what was ahead: another long trek on the roads the next day and maybe nothing more than the shelter of a cold railway station at the end of it all, with a place that was even less comfortable than what they had. Their doomed forecast was the only certainty left.

She tried to get Gregor to sleep with his bad ear down on her lap. The boy was whimpering and sucking on the button of his jumper. She spoke to him, or spoke to herself really, because she was in a confused state, wondering if she should go and search for her father. It was the boy who brought her back to earth and made her think more rationally. She could not watch him suffering any more and began to beg people once more for some oil to put in his ear in order to soothe the pain.

She tried to make him eat some bread. But he refused. He only wanted to suck the button at the top of his jumper. Would not let it go. She could see that the button was hanging on a loose thread, but still she could not get him to let it go.

‘Come on, Gregor,’ she kept saying to him. ‘Give it to me. I’m afraid you might choke on it.’

He was almost deaf with the ear infection and she had no language with which to persuade the boy. In the damp air of the train station that night, she got him to stretch his feet out on the bench and lean his head against her. The button had come off and he had it in his mouth, hiding it at the back of his teeth and refusing to let go. She tried to force him. Tried to take it from him, but the boy put up a huge struggle and screamed with his mouth shut.

‘Gregor, if you don’t give me that button you’ll swallow it in your sleep and then you’ll die,’ she said.

Older women around her advised her not to try it by force. They told her to let him fall asleep first. And then she sat watching him until his eyes finally closed over in exhaustion, but still resisting sleep. In his mouth, his only possession. When he began to drift off, she tried once more to slip her finger into his mouth and dislodge it, but he woke up every time and shook his head from side to side. His lips held tight.

‘Come on, Gregor,’ she said, ‘please give Mama the button.’

She made all the gestures she could in order to explain it to him. She tried to reassure him with smiles, but he returned a look of suspicion. And it was only when she decided to forget about the button and hum a song in his good ear that she eventually won him over. Or maybe it was the other way round. The boy had won her over. It was the great surrender. He pushed the button forward to the tip of his lips.

‘Can I take it now?’ she asked him. And this time he allowed her to remove the little red button at last. She said she would put it away safely and sew it back on the jumper as soon as she could. But the boy was already asleep.

After such a long time in the womb, when an infant is born, it continues to perceive itself as a physical part of the mother, like an arm or a leg. Only very gradually does it begin to understand its own individuality.

When Daniel was a baby, they used to lie in bed for hours watching him. His small fat legs in the air and his hands reaching out to grip one of his own feet without really knowing that it belonged to him. He was still a part of them both that summer, lying naked in the middle of the bed with his eyes open, smiling and making his first sounds. Gregor and Mara naked on either side, with the window wide open and the top branches of the trees in the street swaying in a warm breeze outside. Once, Daniel peed suddenly. His small penis rose up and sent out a fountain of sweet urine, wetting both of them and himself also. They laughed. He became frightened by their sudden laughter and began to cry. So Mara held him close and they all took a bath together.

They were in that timeless zone of early parenthood, enthralled by the reflection in their own baby. They had time to watch every development, every laugh, every burp. The tiny pink pearl that formed on his upper lip after breastfeeding.

Mara was working as a physiotherapist by then. She was able to arrange her appointments so they could be together
like this in the mornings. Gregor was giving music lessons and playing with a cover band at night. He was busy composing by day, and some of his more abstract pieces were getting noticed.

They needed nothing from the past. Everything was riding on the future. On their lives and on this little boy who was not even aware enough to notice that he was poking himself in the eye with his own thumb. Mara laughed a lot. Gregor sang a lot. They became babies themselves, barking and buzzing and making baby sounds. Daniel was the shape of their joy, and what more confirmation did they need from life than to hear his tiny sucking noises nearby at night. There was a sweet smell of milk in the bed from breastfeeding. And once or twice, it was milk love between them when her breasts began to leak across his chest. Afterwards, he always paid great attention to some part of her, circling his index finger round and round her kneecap while they whispered late into the night with the milky street light coming in across their bodies, staying awake inside their luck as long as they could. Her head coming to rest on his chest, listening to the resounding hum of his voice in her ear. His singing finally putting her to sleep.

One night, Mara brought up the subject of circumcision.

‘We’ll have to get him circumcised,’ she said.

‘I don’t think there’s any need for that,’ Gregor replied.

‘But of course we have to do it,’ she said.

‘It’s far too late, Mara. It’s meant to be done within eight days of birth,’ Gregor said. ‘Anyway, it’s not that important any more.’

‘Why not? I didn’t think you would be against it?’

She lifted her head up from his chest to look at him.

‘I don’t know, Mara. It’s very traumatic for the child. Also for the parents,’ he said. ‘It has to be done without an anaesthetic. It’s all very strict. They say that some mothers faint at the sight of it.’

‘But it’s all forgotten very quickly.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Gregor thought.

‘You don’t remember it, do you?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

He got himself into a bit of potential trouble then. He had allowed her to assume that it was done as an infant and that he had managed to survive miraculously until the end of the war without being detected. He had allowed her to believe things that were not quite true, without stepping in immediately to correct them. There was so much that remained vague in his life that he was glad sometimes when something was unequivocal. She talked about his penis and said she was glad that it was circumcised. To her it was unique, rough and smooth at the same time on her tongue. She had trapped it inside her mouth until it fused with her palate and finally exploded under pressure.

It was too late to go back now. Too late to say that it would have been virtually impossible, not to mention insane, for any parent to carry that operation out in wartime. He was afraid it would weaken the evidence and he allowed her assumptions to stand.

‘They say it makes a man less sensitive,’ he argued.

‘I haven’t noticed,’ she said.

‘I’d hate to put him through that for nothing,’ he continued. ‘Doctors don’t believe it has a function any more. They don’t think it has anything to do with hygiene. Believe me, Mara. We don’t want to put little Daniel through that horrific pain. For what?’

‘It’s your identity,’ she argued. ‘This is a survivor baby and we want to celebrate all that.’

‘The bloodline comes through the mother,’ he said. ‘You would have to be Jewish.’

In any case, he told her, he had already been to see that rabbi, that it was not that easy to be accepted into the Jewish faith.

‘You see, there’s no real proof,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing on paper, Mara. They won’t accept my word for it. It was only something I was told, by my uncle Max.’

‘Why didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘She didn’t know,’ Gregor said. ‘She wasn’t sure. I was brought up as a Catholic and there was never any talk about me being Jewish. You see, she didn’t have any proof either.’

‘Except the fact that you were circumcised,’ she said.

There was a buoyancy in her voice. She wanted to put all that doubt out of his mind about his true origins. She wanted to bring him back to life and to confirm the existence that he had lost. And maybe she wanted to fight for him and his identity, some atonement for what had gone on in the war.

‘Why are you not more positive about this?’

But they stopped talking about it and lay awake for a long time, drifting in their own thoughts. They heard the sound of a truck outside, parking on the street below their window. They listened to the driver getting out and closing the door. After a short while the door closed again, so they wondered if the driver had been stretching his legs and got back in to rest a few hours before driving away on some long journey across the Continent.

‘Is it one of those big ones, with a separate cab?’ she asked him. ‘The ones where you can sleep overnight in a bunk?’

They described it for themselves, with pin-ups of nude women in straw hats at the back of the cab to keep the driver company. Gregor wanted to get up and have a look for himself, but she would not let him disturb the way they were lying together. They even fell asleep for a while, only to wake up again, wondering if the truck was still there or whether it had moved on. They spoke about the truck that Emil, his grandfather, drove and what it must have looked like. Once again, Gregor wanted to get up and go to the window to check. But she turned him round and lay behind him with her warm, milky breasts against his back. And somehow, that night, he felt that even happiness could sometimes be a lonely thing. They fell asleep and woke up with Daniel’s cries in the morning. Gregor got up and brought him to the bed with Mara so that she could breastfeed him. Then he stood at the window and after a while said: ‘The truck has gone.’

By morning she had changed her mind. Gregor had managed to put her off with his talk of the scalpel violating her baby boy, cutting into his foreskin. The sound of him crying. The distress in his eyes. A moment of helpless self-awareness in which he felt totally alone in the world, with the pain darting through his entire body. His mouth opening in a silent cry, full of terror, before he found the breath to actually scream. That bright moment of cruelty entering into his memory forever.

But that didn’t stop her trying to get Daniel accepted as a Jew. She said there were those who thought nothing of identity, people who felt it was not much of an issue any more, except for those who are dispossessed.

‘You have lost something and we must put it back,’ she said.

He had nothing but the name given to him by his adoptive parents.

‘We’re not going to deny your people any more,’ she added with a finality in her voice. ‘We have a duty to all those relatives of yours who were killed. We want to give them their dignity back.’

He could be sullen sometimes. He could go into himself, a refugee, staying silent for hours, doing nothing but playing his guitar. Alone. An orphan again. Right in the middle of their happiest years, the trapdoor opened up underneath him and he became a loner again. She was concerned about him sometimes. She had a friend whose young husband had killed himself. And Gregor’s favourite book was written by Egon Friedell, a man who ended his life during the Nazi years by throwing himself out the window, even shouting a warning into the street beforehand to avoid injuring pedestrians.

Was it hereditary, that faculty of doubt? Or was it something he got from his adoptive parents. They were refugees, too, and had that dreamy gaze into the past, to what might have been, to empty places in memory. Was there some distance in his mother’s eyes as he grew up? Some feeling that he would never live up to her dreams? The boy who could never match up to the child lost in the bombing.

Was there some companionship in his depression, some fear of happiness, some overproduction of defensive thoughts? Maybe depression is linked in some way to lack of belonging. Was that the old cure for depression, she wondered, the constant reference to tradition, the rituals, the barmitzvahs, the baptisms, the big weddings, the songs and the ceremonies of transition? Is that why people don’t need tradition that much any more because there are other ways of dealing with mental disorder now?

She was all the more determined to restore his sense of belonging. She arranged a meeting with the rabbi, but the
same arguments came up again. Lack of proof. No documentation. No evidence in Gregor’s favour, only the word of his dead uncle Max.

The rabbi remained polite, but then Mara became angry, with Daniel on her arm.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Not that long ago, this baby would have been taken away to Auschwitz on less evidence. Now the evidence is not enough.’

She stormed out into the street with Gregor behind her. And that afternoon, it was she who became gloomy. Until a new idea came to her.

‘Go to Warsaw,’ she said, lifting herself up. ‘Go to Danzig, Gregor. Go and see those places where you might be from.’

He did that. He applied for a visa and went to Warsaw some months later in the hope that he might recover some grain of memory. He read about the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising. He learned about the conditions there and about the woman who had smuggled children out through the sewers. The city had awakened something inside him. He cried openly on the street, with people staring at him as they passed by, wondering what his story was and what painful memory had suddenly come up through the asphalt.

Stepping onto the streets of some strange city was not evidence. He could tell people that he had been to Warsaw, but he still felt a fake. Though his friends were not asking for proof. They went to his concerts and heard him play with his band at night. They loved his music and believed his talents had been handed down to him through generations, a quiet cultural evolution which reached a peak every time he performed, a human flaw turned into virtue, a hollow place turned into song. All the evidence they
needed to hear was in the minimalist fingertip passion of his notes, in those bent and curtailed riffs, in the raw, breathy survivor blast which filled the empty spaces.

They were aware that biography is never a stationary thing, but something that constantly changes shape. They accepted the facts on trust and began to say it was ‘very likely’ that he came from Warsaw. They were willing to believe him and he only needed to say that it was ‘possible’ that he was one of the children rescued from the ghetto. All they wanted from him was to say that he ‘believed’ he was Jewish. The evidence was inside all of them. It screamed at them from the history books. Who would dare deny it? Who would question a man who escaped from this dark corridor of time and came out alive?