Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘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.

His mother told him about the journey at the end of the war. She talked about his grandfather, Emil, and how he brought them south in his truck. They stopped in a town and she waited at the train station with Gregor, while Emil went to get some more fuel. It was too risky to get fuel from any army depot, so his best friend Max was busy getting some on the black market.

She must have been in shock at the time because she could never remember the name of the town. Sitting for hours in the waiting room of the railway station as the place filled up with refugees fleeing from the East. She must have stared at the name of the town in front of her for so long that she tried to forget it afterwards. Every time the door opened, she looked up, hoping that it was her father, coming to collect them.

They waited all afternoon and by nightfall, a large crowd had gathered. Most of them had come on foot, hoping for a train to take them further west. They consulted the timetable outside the office, even though it had become an illusion and nobody really believed any of those promises any more. They spoke of delays and expected departure times, staring at the station master’s door, waiting for news, clinging like an act of faith to the idea of normality, hallucinating the sound of trains in the distance.

Gregor and his mother had not heard the sound of a train in all the time they sat there. She was asked again and again how long she had been waiting and people repeated her answer among themselves.

‘All day,’ they whispered. They didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. When it grew dark, Gregor slept in her arms, but he kept waking up again, fretting with the pain in his ear. She spoke to him in a calm voice, but he was almost deaf with his infection. She asked people if they had any olive oil but they shook their heads. The only thing that would soothe him was the button on the right shoulder of his jumper, which he kept sucking as he rocked himself back and forth.