Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

But that didn’t stop her trying to get Daniel accepted as a Jew. She said there were those who thought nothing of identity, people who felt it was not much of an issue any more, except for those who are dispossessed.

‘You have lost something and we must put it back,’ she said.

He had nothing but the name given to him by his adoptive parents.

‘We’re not going to deny your people any more,’ she added with a finality in her voice. ‘We have a duty to all those relatives of yours who were killed. We want to give them their dignity back.’

He could be sullen sometimes. He could go into himself, a refugee, staying silent for hours, doing nothing but playing his guitar. Alone. An orphan again. Right in the middle of their happiest years, the trapdoor opened up underneath him and he became a loner again. She was concerned about him sometimes. She had a friend whose young husband had killed himself. And Gregor’s favourite book was written by Egon Friedell, a man who ended his life during the Nazi years by throwing himself out the window, even shouting a warning into the street beforehand to avoid injuring pedestrians.

Was it hereditary, that faculty of doubt? Or was it something he got from his adoptive parents. They were refugees, too, and had that dreamy gaze into the past, to what might have been, to empty places in memory. Was there some distance in his mother’s eyes as he grew up? Some feeling that he would never live up to her dreams? The boy who could never match up to the child lost in the bombing.

Was there some companionship in his depression, some fear of happiness, some overproduction of defensive thoughts? Maybe depression is linked in some way to lack of belonging. Was that the old cure for depression, she wondered, the constant reference to tradition, the rituals, the barmitzvahs, the baptisms, the big weddings, the songs and the ceremonies of transition? Is that why people don’t need tradition that much any more because there are other ways of dealing with mental disorder now?

She was all the more determined to restore his sense of belonging. She arranged a meeting with the rabbi, but the same arguments came up again. Lack of proof. No documentation. No evidence in Gregor’s favour, only the word of his dead uncle Max.

The rabbi remained polite, but then Mara became angry, with Daniel on her arm.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Not that long ago, this baby would have been taken away to Auschwitz on less evidence. Now the evidence is not enough.’

She stormed out into the street with Gregor behind her. And that afternoon, it was she who became gloomy. Until a new idea came to her.

‘Go to Warsaw,’ she said, lifting herself up. ‘Go to Danzig, Gregor. Go and see those places where you might be from.’

He did that. He applied for a visa and went to Warsaw some months later in the hope that he might recover some grain of memory. He read about the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising. He learned about the conditions there and about the woman who had smuggled children out through the sewers. The city had awakened something inside him. He cried openly on the street, with people staring at him as they passed by, wondering what his story was and what painful memory had suddenly come up through the asphalt.

Stepping onto the streets of some strange city was not evidence. He could tell people that he had been to Warsaw, but he still felt a fake. Though his friends were not asking for proof. They went to his concerts and heard him play with his band at night. They loved his music and believed his talents had been handed down to him through generations, a quiet cultural evolution which reached a peak every time he performed, a human flaw turned into virtue, a hollow place turned into song. All the evidence they needed to hear was in the minimalist fingertip passion of his notes, in those bent and curtailed riffs, in the raw, breathy survivor blast which filled the empty spaces.

They were aware that biography is never a stationary thing, but something that constantly changes shape. They accepted the facts on trust and began to say it was ‘very likely’ that he came from Warsaw. They were willing to believe him and he only needed to say that it was ‘possible’ that he was one of the children rescued from the ghetto. All they wanted from him was to say that he ‘believed’ he was Jewish. The evidence was inside all of them. It screamed at them from the history books. Who would dare deny it? Who would question a man who escaped from this dark corridor of time and came out alive?

Gregor’s mother also explained to him why his grandfather was fat. When Gregor was growing up, she showed him the pictures of Emil before the First World War. A tall, handsome young man. She also showed him the pictures of his grandfather before the Second World War, a bloated man who had trouble with his health and drank too much. He was sometimes unreliable. He was a deserter in the Second World War, but there were reasons for that, she told him. He was not a criminal, only a man who should never have been called up.

She told him that things happened to Emil as a soldier in the First World War. It was a miracle that he ever married after his experiences on the Russian front.

Later in life, Gregor began to call it the poets’ war, not only because there were so many poets on both sides who took part, but because of the great passion with which men threw themselves into that war like lovesick poets. They went to the front in a kind of patriotic haze that was close to being in love. It must have been a time when love was something so much more tragic, more elevated and pernicious, more once in a lifetime. Not something that happened twice. Maybe love has become more transferable now. Back in the time of the First World War love was more apocalyptic, like the love you gave to your country. His grandfather Emil would have formed the opinion that fighting for his country was the greatest act of love he would ever experience in his lifetime. The act of love to the nation, to the greatness of his people and their noble traditions. And war was the ultimate expression of that love in which he would be embraced by the masses.

When he was given his heavy boots and the itchy uniform as an eighteen-year-old country boy and taught how to hold a rifle in his hand and ordered to spend days practising how to slice his bayonet into straw men lined up in the barracks square, he was convinced how glorious it would be to die in battle. To have an enemy bayonet slice through your own stomach was a wonderful, painless experience to a man who truly loved his nation. The general with the straw moustache who made all these speeches about the manliness of sacrifice described it all as patriotic bliss. Fear was the natural, preliminary rush of excitement that comes with love, and dying in battle was the closest thing you could get to sleeping with a woman.

When Emil got to the front, it was anything but romantic. The men liked him because he brought jokes and songs. Every night, they would ask him to sing his songs about maidens and courtiers, songs about lovers unable to return to each other. But he didn’t go out to fight in order to sing about women. He was expecting the place to be full of women and love. He was waiting for women in white flowing clothes to lie down with him in the fields. He had begun to imagine them semi-naked, walking out of the tall fields of wheat or dancing in the woods. He imagined them leaving the milking and dropping their buckets and the warm white milk running through the grass as they came running towards him. Their embrace and their coy giggles and the freedom of their bodies. But there was not a single woman in sight. Instead, it was all men shouting orders. Men with bad tempers, men with bad skin, men with bowel problems, men who seemed lost and held photographs of their loved ones or their mothers, knowing they might never see them again. Men stealing from each other. Men cursing and men telling lies about themselves. Men who got drunk and found prostitutes outside the camp, paying for love even though it was promised in such abundance to all fighting men.