Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘I would like an elephant to come into the orchard, too,’ Gregor replies to the boy, ‘and an orchestra behind it.’

Johannes goes around asking everybody else in turn, what they would like best. An idle conversation in which the adults have been turned into children. His father wants a group of elves to come and pick all the apples overnight and put them into the store and turn them into apple juice, but that seems not to be so far from reality. Martin says that his greatest wish at that very moment would be to see an enormous chocolate cake appear on a table with a white tablecloth and a bowl of sweet cream.

‘You’ll just have to wait,’ Mara shouts.

‘But I need something sweet,’ Martin says.

Martin has always been able to declare his appetite. He has not changed much either, only become more rounded in a self-assured way, wearing trousers with red braces over his white shirt. He needs to be near food, and it makes Gregor think of his grandfather Emil who also had to be near food at all times. Maybe that’s why they became friends and got on so well in the first place, because Martin in some way replaced his grandfather who went missing when he was very small. Martin is always joking. Always talking about food. And sex. Somebody who is able to keep the conversation going and not talk about serious things always. Mara says he can go a little over the top sometimes. ‘You must have stewed apple coming out your ears,’ he said earlier on. And when he arrived at the farm, kissing everyone and shaking hands, he leaned down without any shame to listen to Katia’s baby, with his ear right beside her belly. In front of her husband Thorsten, he spoke to the foetus inside, saying, ‘Hello. Everything all right in there?’ Martin gets away with that public intimacy. He’s been married twice before, has two children. Now he’s living with a young woman from Croatia, though she’s at home visiting her parents. He runs a legal practice in Berlin, but he would love to give it all up to concentrate on more enjoyable things, such as taking up a job as a chef. He loves the idea of cooking as a performance.

‘Have you tasted one of these?’ Mara asks, showing him a perfect Grafensteiner.

‘I can’t,’ Martin says. ‘I can only eat shop apples.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘I’m allergic to organic. All those minced up worms they put into the apple juice.’

‘Look,’ Mara says, holding up a perfect apple. ‘There’s not a single worm in it. It’s the most un-damaged, un-spoiled, yet un-eaten piece of fruit ever created.’

‘No thanks,’ Martin replies. ‘I can’t eat anything that has not been made safe through commerce.’

As a student living in the commune in Berlin, Martin used to sit down at night with a wooden board, the way people sometimes eat cheese and crackers. He would smoke a joint and then set about cutting up an apple and a bar of chocolate, systematically. It would take ages, while they were listening to music. It was done with relentless technique, resembling an assembly line, cutting everything up first with great care into a series of apple boats and chocolate triangles the way his own mother used to do it for him, then sitting back to look at the arrangement for a moment like a child before he would begin to eat.

Everyone begins to reveal their own chocolate confessions and Thorsten says Katia hides chocolate all around the farm, the same way that alcoholics hide schnapps. A premeditated vice. Every now and again he finds one of the secret places where she has stashed her supplies, and still there are more, he’s certain of that.

‘You never put on any weight, Mara,’ Katia says in a tone of exaggerated envy.

Martin talks about his own ‘limited baggage allowance’. And then, before anyone has noticed anything, Thorsten returns from one of the farmhouses with a bar of Swiss chocolate. They hear the rustle of the silver paper. And the little crack of chocolate breaking off at an angle, never neatly along the squares. Martin is the first to get some, and when Gregor is offered a piece, he declines.

‘He’s never liked chocolate,’ Mara says.

Gregor remembers the black stone offered to him as a child by an American soldier.

When Johannes comes around offering the chocolate, Gregor tells him to give his bit to Martin. Then Johannes asks Mara what her wish is, and she says she would like all the clocks and all the watches in the world to stop, right this minute. She is not wearing a watch herself and neither is Katia beside her, so Johannes runs over to his father to find out what time it is.

‘It’s eleven fifty-five,’ he calls out.

‘Eleven fifty-five,’ Mara says. ‘What’s keeping Daniel?’

Everyone laughs quietly at this sudden urgency in her voice. She smiles at herself. At that moment, her wish seems to be granted. The insects hover. Everyone is motionless. The sunlight floods in through the branches. She is blinded and lifts her hand up to shield her eyes so she can just about see the outline of Gregor stretching up with his long pole into the top branches. Everything in the orchard stands still.

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’.