Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

The people who came into the station were exhausted. They had left everything behind. They had counted the living and counted the dead. They had been running and walking for weeks, and they had come away with their lives many times over. Their lives were, in fact, the only possession they had left. They had lost most of their belongings and what they had brought with them had often been bartered away, or stolen. They had seen their homes destroyed or taken over. They had seen bridges blown up right behind them. They had seen towns through which they had passed disappearing in a wave of bombing that took no more than five minutes. They had thrown themselves on the ground when low-flying planes came over them, strafing the road. They had picked themselves up each time and moved on. They heard women screaming in barns as they passed by, moving onwards all the time, driven by fear, by the certain knowledge that they could never go back. Clusters of them sticking together to help each other. Others vying with each other, doing business, arguing over the price of things, over the value of an egg. People crouched around a dead horse, cutting sections off a steaming animal from which life had only just departed and which had only moments ago pulled a cart laden with passengers and possessions. Men and women cursing the animal for letting them down in the middle of the journey, having to leave most of their belongings on the road, with only a knapsack full of warm fresh meat, dripping blood on the back of their legs as they walked. They had witnessed hunger and death many times over. They had seen people dying with the cold. Mothers who could not feed their babies because their breasts were frozen. Mothers carrying infants who were already dead. They had seen them huddled by the side of the road and seen the bodies of those who had died, lying like inflated cushions inside their clothes. They had told themselves not to look, but could not avoid the curiosity of a single glance whenever they saw people kneeling in prayer, if only to reassure themselves that they, at least, were still alive and moving on. They had told their children not to look, protecting them from seeing the worst. They had witnessed people who were half dead, covered in blood, dying in the middle of the road with others making a wide arc around them as they passed. People coughing and crying, not knowing whether to stay with the dying or whether to go ahead. Grief that seemed so real at first, until it was seen so often that they became numb. Old people unable to move on. People vomiting. People relieving themselves openly because there was no time to lose and no dignity left. They were all strangers on the road and nobody recognised anyone any more. All kinds of people in mismatched clothes passed on from the living and from the dead, making their way along the road into the unknown. People said the names of towns where they came from, uttering the ordinance of their lives in an attempt to restore their identity, even though the maps were now changed forever and there was no meaning left in those names, only a frail recollection of their place of birth ebbing away as they pressed on. Many of them gone into a kind of voluntary blindness in which they could not accept the realities of the new world into which they had been forced to enter, even when the houses looked similar. The shape of things in front of their eyes only reinforced their loss. They were refugees with nothing, no place in the world, no framework of relatives or friends or neighbours, no landmarks of childhood, steeples, shops and schools. Their orientation was gone. They had lost the grasp of local geography. Nothing was familiar to them any longer and there were things which they could not remember properly because they lacked the known surroundings which might trigger off their memory. There were things they could only remember among their own people, in a place where they were at home. They were on the run, fleeing into a great emptiness, with a deficit of belonging. They had lost the capital of their lives. The entire substance of their identity was nothing more than a story they carried with them in their heads.

Sometimes they would see people going in the wrong direction, unable to carry on because there was somebody they could not live without. Lost expressions on their faces as they went back against the tide, searching for the person left behind, crying as they went, gazing into the eyes of all those on the move in the hope of some recognition. Children calling for their mothers. Everywhere those asking if they had seen or heard of their loved ones, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, giving the names, giving descriptions of those who had only just missed being there by some strange misfit of fate. Three girls who had failed to make it to the last train in some faraway town and had therefore been separated forever because they were unable to meet their father at an arranged meeting point. A twist of grotesque luck which shaped lives beyond all imagination. People who would never see each other again in this great shift of human settlement, no matter how hard they looked, and would remain forever with an image of someone, held firm in time, not growing any older, just like a photograph standing still in memory, kept alive, just short of being forgotten. Sometimes it was more of a relief to know that somebody was dead, because they, at least, had been absolved from grieving, unlike the living for whom each loss was a double grief, as though the other might as well be dead. Sometimes it was not even the loss of another person that was so painful but the thought of them crying and searching in a panic, the inability to let them know that everything was all right and not to worry.

There were moments of extraordinary luck, too, in which loved ones met each other by some unimaginable coincidence when they had already been given up as lost. Some people even got married along the way, blessed in a hasty ceremony by a priest before they moved on again. There were those who considered themselves lucky and those who considered themselves unlucky. Those who put their loss behind them and those who would never be the same again. Those who prayed and those who cursed and resented. Those who stole and those who gave. Jokers and worriers, optimists and pessimists, opportunists with an eye for gain and suckers who were only waiting to be taken advantage of. Those who had been let down and those who had hope. Those who looked forward and those who looked back.

Their pain and indignation was always overshadowed by the news of worse things elsewhere, by reports of concentration camps.

At some intersections along the road, the military were picking out able conscripts from among the young and the old who might still serve in a desperate defence of their country at the end of its days. Men dressed as women to avoid being detected. Mothers hid their sons in trolleys, turning them back into babies, telling officers with tears in their eyes that their sons were sick and useless and unable even to hold a gun in their hands. Teenage sons who bid farewell to their mothers at the last minute with the belief that they could defend them from the enemy. Other sons going off whimpering like infants, pushed along into the prophecy of death, trying to look back and wave and maybe see their mothers waving one last time. Only the weak and defenceless allowed to carry on, as long as they did not block the vital passage of military vehicles heading in the opposite direction back towards the front.

In the middle of all that, they had also witnessed great kindness. A man giving away all the food he had brought with him to a family with seven children. People helping to put a wheel back on the trolley, giving precious time away to others whom they might never see again in their lives. Doctors and nurses setting up a makeshift surgery, staying behind to look after the sick and injured, patching them up so they could carry on on their way. A roadside operating theatre in which a doctor amputated the leg from a screaming young boy, clutching at the uniform of the nurse with his hand as though it might have the properties of an anaesthetic. People passing only metres away who were locked into their own misfortune and could no longer feel the pain of others. And each time they entered a new town, they were seen by the inhabitants with great suspicion, shown only where the train station was, because this was not a place with any permanence either, only a halfway stop along the endless road of refugees.