Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Emil was eager to get into battle, eager to feel the dreamy embrace of war. When he heard the cannons in the distance coming closer, he felt the fear which had been described to him so accurately as a first kiss. When he saw the enemy appearing for the first time on the flat landscape ahead, he wanted to get sick. Some of his comrades soiled their trousers without even knowing it. Many of them fell in the first encounter. He saw men groaning with their intestines in their hands. Men with missing limbs staring up into the sky in a state of blissful exhaustion, comrades he knew by name, dying as though they had just fallen asleep on their backs in the middle of it all.

Emil was not blessed with the sacrifice of love himself. He was in shock at the sight of blood and death all around him. Fear kept coming in waves, like a great emptiness in the pit of his stomach, in his sphincter, in his genitals. He could hardly eat any more. He felt the stings of heat under his uniform. He got baby hands whenever he had to lift his weapon. He sometimes suspected there was something wrong with his heart and that he would just drop dead any moment. What he hated most was the lull where nothing happened. That great absence of women when the men spent hours doing nothing but smoking cigarettes and writing letters and listening to other men rambling about their lovers, real and imaginary. He saw men who could not wait any longer fumble in their trousers. In each other’s trousers. Gentle sounds of dying every night in the tent right beside him, men growling in each other’s arms as they tried to bring that glorious moment of death to each other.

And then he killed a man. For weeks he had been shooting aimlessly at everything that moved ahead of him. Who knows where all those bullets went to. But he knew at first hand when he had taken the life of another man, because it changed everything. A Russian soldier of his own age appeared from behind a barn one afternoon and stood a moment with his broad, indestructible chest, defying death as though he was protected in some way by the prayers of his family back home. Emil raised his gun and shot into that chest. The other man blinked, but remained standing. He must have been struck by the same paralysing fear, unable to lift the heavy rifle, even though he seemed like a strong farming type himself. When he eventually tried to aim the rifle back at Emil, he fell down dead. He had been praying. There was a brass icon opened on his chest, a triptych of religious figures carved into panels. The white ribbon that normally kept the icon doors closed still wrapped around his trigger finger.

Emil stood over him wishing he could take the bullet back. He kneeled down to say a prayer for him and lost all regard for his own life, utterly defenceless now, leaving his gun aside on the ground and praying for his enemy with a pool of blood edging like a slow, dark delta towards his knees. He closed the man’s eyes and felt the stubble of his beard as his hand glanced across his chin. He could see the tan line around his neck. Then he cut the icon off with his bayonet. The icon would remain in Emil’s possession as a kind of reminder of the man he had killed, a man he would spend the rest of his days trying to bring back to life. Gregor has the icon now in his apartment in Berlin. It’s one of the only things which he has brought with him from his family. The white ribbon has gone beige and the brass is dulled with time. Occasionally, he stands it up on the hall table and opens out the doors on their plain hinges, a kind of duty that comes along with this precious possession, to think of the dead Russian soldier.

For Emil, the glorious moment of ecstasy came not long after that. He had been in a numb state for days, stepping over dead bodies from his own ranks and from enemy ranks, all lovers of their own nation now lying in the early agony of decay around the sandy roads and fields. Men lying in orchards, surrounded by apples and baskets. A cow grazing among the dead, as though they were farmers lying idle.

One morning, after another lull, they woke up with the enemy right in front of them, beyond a stand of trees. There was a mist across the fields and they could see nothing, only a family of deer leaping away through the dawn. Roosters crowing in the distance. Through the sleepy emptiness of the landscape came the sound of screaming. Phantom voices of women screaming from the trees with every variation of hurt and anger coming closer through the morning air. The moment had arrived at last. As the sun was beginning to break through, bringing a hint of colour back to the landscape, the screaming became even more shrill, more hostile, more terrifying, until they finally saw a battalion of women soldiers running straight at them out of the mist.

The men seemed unable to move. Men who were so eager to see women of any kind, had no idea what they should do. All that virile longing turned into a spurt of warm weakness. A hollow, immovable blue ache in the groin that made them unable to walk. Women of all shapes and sizes dressed in men’s uniforms, some with their hair tied and some with their hair wild. Women with big breasts, women with boyish figures and fiery eyes, women with enormous open mouths gone hoarse with screaming. Mothers and daughters and wives and fiancées, charging fully armed, carrying their weapons like ladles, running with open arms, some gone crazy with the instinct of child protection and mother love and passion for motherland. Women running with their bayonets flashing like silver eels in the morning light.

By the time these female warriors came level with them, the men were all ready to submit. The officers ordered them to fire, which some of them began to do, but without any heart, because they were so confused. Unable to make out the difference between love and death, they waited for the warmth of these women to wash over them like a great big blanket of murderous affection. Some of the men dropped their weapons in shock and opened their arms in a great death wish as the women sliced through their straw stomachs. Women gone fierce with screaming, women with ancient kitchen skills wiping bayonets across men’s necks, letting their lives flow out across the mattress of the September fields. Some of the men fought for their lives and were conscious enough of their own mortality to see these women as their enemies. But Emil never saw so many men accept death with such ease of mind. He felt like an infant boy waiting for his mother to wrap a towel around him after his bath, and before he knew it, he blanked out and fell down in the spot where he stood.

When he recovered consciousness in a field hospital, his body was deformed from the shock. His legs were twice their normal size, his face and neck like a bulging, sheepskin container of water. The first grotesque encounter with women was such a shock, he suffered acute kidney failure. A renal shutdown brought on by overwhelming fear, causing water retention and giving him that inflated appearance which he had for the rest of his life. He survived a battalion of women and eventually married the nurse who looked after him at the field hospital and vowed to calm his nightmares.

He should have been terrified of women, but then he made a remarkable recovery and turned it into his life ambition to be loved by as many women as possible. And that’s what got him into trouble in the end, Gregor’s mother said, as a warning.

‘He was a great singer,’ she said. ‘He should have been on stage. He should have made records. Instead, he became a dealer on the black market.’

Gregor often asked her to tell the rest of the story about his grandfather, but she did not have the answers to that. He disappeared in the end, she told him. He never came back to the railway station to collect them.