Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

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.