Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

The orchard was planned to ripen in phases through the summer – cherries, red berries, gooseberries, plum trees, apple trees and pear trees. Isn’t that what mystified the Russians most when they finally conquered these farms one by one, how well designed and logical everything was in comparison to their own? How insane it must have appeared to them that anyone would want to invade any other land when they already had such manicured farms, designed with the vegetable gardens terraced in neat rows, and the orchard facing south and west to maximise the sunlight. And those strong, brick-built farm buildings to provide shelter from the bitter winds coming from the north and the east.

Each variety of apple was chosen to blossom in staggered succession, but in the great heat this year, everything has been ripening together, more or less. Even in spring, the blossoms were all out at the same time, virtually. The birds got most of the cherries, and the berries, stripping them like strings of pearls. The apple trees have produced such a great crop this year.

When Gregor came to visit the farm in spring, they took him for a walk over to the lake, to hear the frogs. It was late afternoon, with the clouds low overhead and the hint of thunder in the air. They invited him to stay for dinner, and afterwards, when he drove home, he found himself returning to the lake to hear the muddy chorus of frogs once more in the dark. Stayed there for almost an hour listening to the sheer volume of sound around him. Frogs close by going silent for a while, making it possible to hear the ones further away, arguing back and forth. Thousands of invisible voices elaborating at once, like some enormous talk show going all the way round the rim of the lake. Flashes of sheet lightning across the water and a delayed rumble in the air. Quite deafening, he remembers. He could not see any of the frogs and that made them seem larger, more human, more unafraid of the elements out here. A brash thunderclap right above him made him jump, but the frogs were not bothered and kept on talking. He hardly noticed that he was being savaged by the mosquitoes, alone in the dark with his T-shirt over his head like an old woman. In school some days later, he got the children in class to imitate the sounds, giving each child a random word to utter in exchange for a croak, a glorious dictionary of babbling classroom frogs.

He feels the affection of this gathering in the orchard. Mara says she expected more people to come, but they will probably arrive tomorrow. There will be a huge crowd here for Sunday, she says, and maybe it’s good that they have today for themselves, just the family and their close friend Martin.

Everybody is working now in small groups, talking among themselves, telling stories and joking, discussing local events and world events. Some of them bending over, collecting the apples off the ground after the fall of the past few days. Others high on stepladders picking by hand or catching the fruit with nets on long poles. They treat the apples with great care, grasping them with an upward movement, stem and all, so as not to damage next year’s growth. Johannes, the little boy, is advising them, telling them not to mix up the good apples with the bad apples, speaking to everyone with an authority that he has heard in the voices of the adults.

‘Does that make sense to you?’ he asks, and the adults smile at the sound of their language filtered through the child’s mind.

The rotten apples are thrown onto the wheelbarrows. Those with bruises, those with too many black marks and those that appear to be damaged by worms or by wasps go into boxes and buckets to make apple juice. Thorsten maintains that you know that an apple is ripe when you see maggots inside. It seems to be timed by nature to fall at the same point. Some of the apples will be cold-pressed on the farm, but the majority will be pressed in a local factory and sterilised before being put into cartons. At Christmas, they will drink hot apple juice with cinnamon. Some of the pears seem almost comically deformed, but still very good to eat. The cooking apples go into separate boxes along with the bruised apples which will go into making cakes or stewed apple while the perfect, edible ones go into small sacks. Thorsten has got the sacks from friends in the Oder region, not far away on the Polish border. One summer when the river burst its banks and caused great flooding, the army was called out and distributed thousands of sandbags to local people so they could create dykes. Strange that time, seeing the German Army going back across the Oder River into Poland with sandbags. This year, the sacks are being put to even better use for storing apples. Over a dozen of them marked with the letters THW are already lined up at the side of the garden, ready to be carried away and stored inside the farm buildings.

Those on ladders can see out beyond the boundary wall across the fields and over to the lake. On the other side, they can see the small forest two hundred metres away where the Russians hid when the farm became the front line. They can imagine the shots being fired across the field between the farm and the forest. There is a car driving along the road, clinging on to the edge of the horizon, and above the field, a kestrel hovering. Every now and again, an apple falls to the ground with a bony kind of thud, such as the sound of a hoof on the earth. The discovery of gravity each time. The grass underneath has been cut so that the fallen apples are easier to find. There is a wide rake leaning against a tree. At the centre of the orchard, a small table set up with glasses and a jug of water which catches the sunlight. A white cloth is spread over the jug to stop the insects from landing in it and drowning. There is a general hum in the air of wasps and bees and flies and more silent fruit flies. A robin comes to stand on the handles of the wheelbarrow from time to time. The little mechanical chirp he gives is an imitation of the squeak of a wheelbarrow.

Gregor reaches up for one of the high apples. A small sack attached to a long pole catches the apple after he shakes the branch a little. In the blinding sunshine the apple seems to float in the sky and he is afraid it will miss the sack and fall straight down on him instead. He has to look away into the shadows for a moment to regain his sight. A pleasant sunblindness.

Mara has not changed. She sits on an upturned crate, wearing gardening gloves, in charge of the sorting. Katia beside her, sometimes holding her belly for a moment with a heaving kick inside. Mara is very healthy, except for some trouble with her back from time to time, and a cancer scare some years ago. She’s not one for health updates. Her long, bare suntanned arms reach over to pick more apples from a basket and there is a small, powdery thumbprint bruise midway between her right elbow and the shoulder. She’s wearing a loose white top and a skirt with slightly faded colours. She lifts her skirt to carry a bunch of apples in her lap, showing her legs for a moment. She wears bashed-up tennis shoes on her feet, no socks. In the light coming through the trees it would be difficult to say what age she is now. Her hair has flashes of grey, tied up at the back, more wavy.

Martin is standing some distance away, talking to Thorsten. Thorsten is a doctor in the local town and his wife Katia is a schoolteacher. He has inherited this farm from his aunt who fought for it at the end of the Second World War, then had the farm turned over to the state and fought for the right to live there on her own farm during the GDR years, only finally getting possession of the farm back again in her eighties at the end of the Communist years. Then she passed it on to Thorsten because she was too old to live alone.

Gregor is talking to Johannes. He asks the boy what he would like most at this moment in time. Johannes thinks for a while with his hand on his chin and says he would like an elephant to come into the orchard. Gregor agrees this would be wonderful.