Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Daniel has arrived with his girlfriend, Juli. He is the image of his father, though Gregor cannot see the resemblance himself. He finds it hard to see his own reflection at this point. Daniel is tall, but he’s got brown eyes, and he doesn’t have the curly hair. Maybe it’s the quiet, intense way they both talk, their smiles, their way of speaking with the head bowed a fraction to the side.

Daniel and Juli go around embracing everyone. They all stand back and admire this young couple, their perfection. Juli’s father is a fruit importer from Istanbul and her mother is a true Berliner, born and brought up in the city, though Juli has become a rebel. She dresses in contradictions, wearing a white linen dress and dreadlocks in her hair that make her peer up at everyone through half-pulled curtains. In the sunlight, her white dress lights up like a paper lampshade and there is a stud in her lower lip which shines like a steel pearl. Daniel works as a chef, in a vegetarian restaurant. He is a little older than Juli, but she is the true environmental activist who has been involved in all kinds of protesting and has been arrested for obstructing the police.

They have taken a vow of frugality, refusing to get into private cars, using only public transport, eating only organic food. They intend to make their way to Africa by ship, first to Egypt, then on to the Sudan, so it seems like a long exile ahead of them. No quick flights home for Christmas or whenever the mood strikes them.

They are the new earth lovers for whom this fruit gathering is more like an elegy, more biblical than a simple day out in the country. They love the hand-to-mouth, subsistence notion of harvesting as much as the socialists of his parents’ generation admired the company of the real working class, people with coal marks on their faces and dirt under their fingernails. They are the believers now. But where does all this purist logic square up with the self-destruction of alcohol and drugs and dancing all night in a techno fit around those clubs in Berlin? Gregor and Martin and Mara were those revolutionaries once, but maybe they all go soft in the end, because revolution is hard work. For the moment, Daniel’s youth-bound principles have remained strong.

They live in this city full of contradictions. A place where nothing matches but where everything blends together in a strange conformity of clashing styles and biographies. The city is vivid with history. Layers of it in every suburb, coming up through the streets, in people’s eyes. A chamber of horrors, but also a place of monuments and devotion to memory. A place that has no time for greatness any more and celebrates instead the ordinary genius of survival. A wounded place at the heart of Europe, eager to heal and laugh. A cut-price city full of mischief and functional chaos, full of thinkers and artists and extremists.

On the street where Daniel lives, there is an ecological slogan reminding them, every time they leave their apartment, to respect their environment. It’s a city full of warnings from the past and warnings from the future. They live in an area of Berlin where the rents are down to nothing, where the punks and goths hang around outside the underground station with their bottles and their docile dogs, where everything is covered in graffiti like a film of thin paint along the walls and doorways. It’s all very reassuring, like a running commentary of the city’s life. When the Berlin Wall came down, the street art moved into these open spaces in a new search for belonging. Heroic, three-dimensional expressions, most of them making no sense at all. But here, across the street from Daniel’s apartment, where the corresponding apartments have been missing since the war and have been replaced by a repair workshop, some artist has painted a striking image on a red-brick wall. A convex face of a dog with orange teeth and rectangular jaws. It’s hard to say whether this enormous face is meant to be growling or smiling. Menacing or mocking? The dog is smoking a cigarette, a tiny stub balancing at an angle on the lower lip, with a thoughtful, almost human intelligence in his expression, speaking the jagged words of doom: ‘Waiting for the flood.’ A prophet with a sense of humour.

Gregor and Daniel are getting on better now than before, making up for lost time. They meet occasionally for a drink. But it’s obvious at times that Martin has remained closer to Daniel, mainly because he became a surrogate father figure to him in Gregor’s absence. They have an amiable duel going that seems lacking between father and son. Only Martin can get away with calling Daniel an ecological missionary.

Once every fortnight, during the summer, Daniel has brought Gregor a basket of fruit, sent to him by Mara with a note. It’s her way of gently pushing them towards each other, getting Daniel to carry the fruit with him the three kilometres from the farm to the station because he won’t accept a lift, delivering these certified, pesticide-free cherries along the least fuel-travelled route. Even if the cherries had little maggots doing back flips around the basket by the time it reached the city, Gregor must admire the effort his son has taken. It’s a message of goodwill from Mara, passed on to him through their son Daniel.

Each time Gregor has invited Daniel inside, they’ve sat on the balcony, drinking coffee and eating fruit, listening to the mournful sound of the six o’clock bells tailing off in a sad, minor key.

‘Are they still complaining about your students?’ Daniel asked one evening.

‘Not so much,’ Gregor said. ‘Maybe they’re getting used to it.’

Gregor has a great reputation for private lessons, though he’s got constant trouble with the people living below. It’s a war of noise and counter-noise in the city. He makes every new student lie on the floor beneath the grand piano in order to listen to the full sound travelling downwards before he even begins to make them sit at the keys to discuss posture. His students love him and maybe parents have begun to trust the eccentric teacher more than the clean-cut, conventional type.

From the playground next door came the wild echoes of football players amplified around the empty court-yards at the back, preventing them from having much of a conversation. At times, the noise of screeching voices was like the seaside, with the ball banging against the fence being mistaken for the hollow thump of the surf folding on the shore. Cars passing by along the cobbles making up the raking swish of the retreating wave across a stony beach. And right underneath them, the people sitting outside the restaurant at the orange tables, chatting and laughing. When the winter comes, all of those sounds will disappear for another year as the acoustic landscape outside becomes every bit as muted as the visual one of bare trees and empty benches and abandoned playgrounds. Only the bells will remain with their holy, melancholy chords. In the summer, the noise of the city conspired to keep them silent.

Daniel has taken his shirt off in the heat, so he can start picking the apples in earnest. One of his shoulders is bigger, better built than the other, a strange physical anomaly that comes from Mara’s side of the family and has been passed on at random. One of her uncles has the same feature and maybe they were all hammer throwers going back in time, or miners in the Ruhr valley with an overdeveloped right shoulder.

Quite suddenly, he is forced to drop his basket when a wasp hovers around him. Everyone else ignores the wasps, but Daniel feels exposed. He runs away. Fights off the unseen wasp in a silent tantrum among the trees, an irrational performance, lashing all around him, punching holes in the air in this peaceful place as though he’s remembered some grotesque dream.

‘Hit him with the rake,’ Martin says. His big laugh fills the entire orchard.