Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘Can I take it now?’ she asked him. And this time he allowed her to remove the little red button at last. She said she would put it away safely and sew it back on the jumper as soon as she could. But the boy was already asleep.

After such a long time in the womb, when an infant is born, it continues to perceive itself as a physical part of the mother, like an arm or a leg. Only very gradually does it begin to understand its own individuality.

When Daniel was a baby, they used to lie in bed for hours watching him. His small fat legs in the air and his hands reaching out to grip one of his own feet without really knowing that it belonged to him. He was still a part of them both that summer, lying naked in the middle of the bed with his eyes open, smiling and making his first sounds. Gregor and Mara naked on either side, with the window wide open and the top branches of the trees in the street swaying in a warm breeze outside. Once, Daniel peed suddenly. His small penis rose up and sent out a fountain of sweet urine, wetting both of them and himself also. They laughed. He became frightened by their sudden laughter and began to cry. So Mara held him close and they all took a bath together.

They were in that timeless zone of early parenthood, enthralled by the reflection in their own baby. They had time to watch every development, every laugh, every burp. The tiny pink pearl that formed on his upper lip after breastfeeding.

Mara was working as a physiotherapist by then. She was able to arrange her appointments so they could be together like this in the mornings. Gregor was giving music lessons and playing with a cover band at night. He was busy composing by day, and some of his more abstract pieces were getting noticed.

They needed nothing from the past. Everything was riding on the future. On their lives and on this little boy who was not even aware enough to notice that he was poking himself in the eye with his own thumb. Mara laughed a lot. Gregor sang a lot. They became babies themselves, barking and buzzing and making baby sounds. Daniel was the shape of their joy, and what more confirmation did they need from life than to hear his tiny sucking noises nearby at night. There was a sweet smell of milk in the bed from breastfeeding. And once or twice, it was milk love between them when her breasts began to leak across his chest. Afterwards, he always paid great attention to some part of her, circling his index finger round and round her kneecap while they whispered late into the night with the milky street light coming in across their bodies, staying awake inside their luck as long as they could. Her head coming to rest on his chest, listening to the resounding hum of his voice in her ear. His singing finally putting her to sleep.

One night, Mara brought up the subject of circumcision.

‘We’ll have to get him circumcised,’ she said.

‘I don’t think there’s any need for that,’ Gregor replied.

‘But of course we have to do it,’ she said.

‘It’s far too late, Mara. It’s meant to be done within eight days of birth,’ Gregor said. ‘Anyway, it’s not that important any more.’

‘Why not? I didn’t think you would be against it?’

She lifted her head up from his chest to look at him.

‘I don’t know, Mara. It’s very traumatic for the child. Also for the parents,’ he said. ‘It has to be done without an anaesthetic. It’s all very strict. They say that some mothers faint at the sight of it.’

‘But it’s all forgotten very quickly.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Gregor thought.

‘You don’t remember it, do you?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

He got himself into a bit of potential trouble then. He had allowed her to assume that it was done as an infant and that he had managed to survive miraculously until the end of the war without being detected. He had allowed her to believe things that were not quite true, without stepping in immediately to correct them. There was so much that remained vague in his life that he was glad sometimes when something was unequivocal. She talked about his penis and said she was glad that it was circumcised. To her it was unique, rough and smooth at the same time on her tongue. She had trapped it inside her mouth until it fused with her palate and finally exploded under pressure.

It was too late to go back now. Too late to say that it would have been virtually impossible, not to mention insane, for any parent to carry that operation out in wartime. He was afraid it would weaken the evidence and he allowed her assumptions to stand.

‘They say it makes a man less sensitive,’ he argued.

‘I haven’t noticed,’ she said.

‘I’d hate to put him through that for nothing,’ he continued. ‘Doctors don’t believe it has a function any more. They don’t think it has anything to do with hygiene. Believe me, Mara. We don’t want to put little Daniel through that horrific pain. For what?’

‘It’s your identity,’ she argued. ‘This is a survivor baby and we want to celebrate all that.’

‘The bloodline comes through the mother,’ he said. ‘You would have to be Jewish.’

In any case, he told her, he had already been to see that rabbi, that it was not that easy to be accepted into the Jewish faith.

‘You see, there’s no real proof,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing on paper, Mara. They won’t accept my word for it. It was only something I was told, by my uncle Max.’

‘Why didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘She didn’t know,’ Gregor said. ‘She wasn’t sure. I was brought up as a Catholic and there was never any talk about me being Jewish. You see, she didn’t have any proof either.’

‘Except the fact that you were circumcised,’ she said.

There was a buoyancy in her voice. She wanted to put all that doubt out of his mind about his true origins. She wanted to bring him back to life and to confirm the existence that he had lost. And maybe she wanted to fight for him and his identity, some atonement for what had gone on in the war.

‘Why are you not more positive about this?’

But they stopped talking about it and lay awake for a long time, drifting in their own thoughts. They heard the sound of a truck outside, parking on the street below their window. They listened to the driver getting out and closing the door. After a short while the door closed again, so they wondered if the driver had been stretching his legs and got back in to rest a few hours before driving away on some long journey across the Continent.

‘Is it one of those big ones, with a separate cab?’ she asked him. ‘The ones where you can sleep overnight in a bunk?’

They described it for themselves, with pin-ups of nude women in straw hats at the back of the cab to keep the driver company. Gregor wanted to get up and have a look for himself, but she would not let him disturb the way they were lying together. They even fell asleep for a while, only to wake up again, wondering if the truck was still there or whether it had moved on. They spoke about the truck that Emil, his grandfather, drove and what it must have looked like. Once again, Gregor wanted to get up and go to the window to check. But she turned him round and lay behind him with her warm, milky breasts against his back. And somehow, that night, he felt that even happiness could sometimes be a lonely thing. They fell asleep and woke up with Daniel’s cries in the morning. Gregor got up and brought him to the bed with Mara so that she could breastfeed him. Then he stood at the window and after a while said: ‘The truck has gone.’

By morning she had changed her mind. Gregor had managed to put her off with his talk of the scalpel violating her baby boy, cutting into his foreskin. The sound of him crying. The distress in his eyes. A moment of helpless self-awareness in which he felt totally alone in the world, with the pain darting through his entire body. His mouth opening in a silent cry, full of terror, before he found the breath to actually scream. That bright moment of cruelty entering into his memory forever.