Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘You must stay calm,’ Thorsten advises. ‘You mustn’t make sudden movements. They won’t harm you as long as you stay calm.’

‘What are you going to be like in Africa?’ Mara laughs.

‘Look, Daniel,’ Thorsten says. He digs his big hand right into the rotten apples on the wheelbarrow. Everyone turns to stare at his bare arm covered in wasps.

‘They’re drunk,’ Mara says. ‘Drunk on food. They are so heavy and full of fruit juice, most of them, that they can hardly even fly. They don’t have the energy to get angry and sting anyone.’

‘Look, they have droopy eyelids,’ Martin adds.

Thorsten says that he’s only been stung once, inside the house when he happened to put his arm right down on the table where a wasp must have been feeding on a spot of jam. Never while picking fruit. They often take up apples or pears off the ground with two or three wasps crawling out, embarrassed at being caught gorging themselves.

Martin turns it all into a larger joke, pretending that he has been attacked by the same wasp. He imitates Daniel’s erratic motions of terror, chopping the air, kicking and running to pick up the rake to defend himself against an invisible monster.

‘Down with this sort of thing,’ he shouts, and it is Mara who laughs more than anyone else.

Thorsten mentions that they had bees for a while, in one of the barns. Nesting in the loam floor. A beekeeper came to transfer them to a proper hive out in the open, close to the orchard. For a few years, they thrived there until the colony died out. The hive was attacked by wasps and there was nothing left of them, only the dark honeycomb all empty and the shells of dead bees.

Gregor talks about a house he stayed in that was full of wasps, when he was travelling in the USA, out there in the mountains of Colorado, in one of those mining towns where the frontier men went to dig for lead and other metals.

‘I swear, they were everywhere,’ Gregor says. He speaks with a husk of protection around his words, without metaphor. It is not easy to extract any secondary meaning.

‘It was a big old wooden house and they were crawling up and down the sash windows, trying to get out to the light. Desperate for water. I told the woman of the house about them, so she came and killed a whole load of them, then she tried to flush them down the toilet but they were still floating around when I came back that night after the concert. They were all over the bed, alive again, so I had to kill about a dozen of them myself. Next morning there were dozens more alive again at the window. Must have been nesting right in the walls.’

Daniel goes back to pick up the apples he dropped, still keeping his eye on every wasp in his vicinity.

‘For an environmentalist,’ Martin comments, ‘you’re very mistrustful of insects, Daniel.’

Daniel smiles. ‘They have it in for me, those things.’

‘He was stung by a hornet when he was a boy,’ Mara explains.

Why does she mention the hornet? Why here? The mood has turned serious and Gregor finds Daniel staring at him now.

‘They’re protected,’ Thorsten says, as a fact. ‘It’s illegal to kill a hornet.’

‘How would you like to be stung by a hornet?’ Juli says, turning on Gregor as though she felt the pain herself.

Her words reveal the hurt passed on. She must know that the hornet sting all those years ago is still associated with Gregor leaving. Daniel crying at night as a boy and the neighbours in the town where they were staying on holiday in the mountains coming over with aloe vera ointment. The pain is gone now, but the memory of it returns, prolonged by each year that Gregor spent away from his family. Daniel crying months later because his father was gone. Still asking for his father years later and pointing to the spot where the hornet sent the hot, poisoned sword into the back of his leg.

‘You fucked off after that,’ Daniel says. ‘You left your family.’

The orchard is thrown into silence. The outburst seems at odds with the calmness and the intense hum draped over this gathering. The pain has come back and everyone looks at Gregor.

‘Daniel, please,’ Mara intervenes. ‘You promised.’

Martin sucks the hostility out of the air by changing the subject. He smooths over the tension by ignoring Daniel’s words, pretending there is some acoustic black hole in the orchard by which nobody heard anything. Instead, he mentions a Beach Boys’ song he heard in the car on the way down. ‘Good Vibrations’.

He begins to howl some of the words of the hit song. ‘ Good, good, good …‘

‘That’s your era, isn’t it?’ Daniel mocks.

‘It’s a classic that,’ Martin says. ‘I never knew that the wobbly instrument was invented by a Russian.’

‘Theremin,’ Gregor says. ‘Leon Theremin. He tried to sell it in the USA, but then Stalin sent the KGB after him. Ended his days in the Gulag.’

‘Then the Beach Boys got a hold of it.’

Once again Martin begins to imitate the sound of the theremin. Gregor joins in, adding the instrumentation and the harmonies. Martin picks up the rake and plays air guitar with it for a moment. When they calm down again, Martin leans the rake back up against the tree and quotes one of the lines from the hit song with a puzzled expression.

‘ I don’t know where but she sends me there. ’

He pauses for a moment and translates the words into German.

‘ Ich weiss nicht wohin aber sie treibt mich dahin. ’

They laugh together for a while at that and then go back to concentrating on picking the apples.

He knows only that he was left alone a lot as a child. There are certain doorways, certain architectural features, entrance hallways and stairwells of a green or beige colour which will always remind him of the house where he stayed every day after school. Because his mother had to work in order to keep things going after the war, he was kept in a home until she came to collect him. For a while she worked at night, in a bakery, so then he had to stay overnight in the care centre. To this day, he still gets the chalky taste of pea soup at the back of his throat every time he’s reminded of that place. He knows they were not very nice to him there. He knows that he was left for long periods in the cot. He knows that he was calling the nurse, but when she came it was already too late. She smiled as she slapped him in the face. She said it was the most disgusting painting she had ever seen in her whole life, a train at the end of the cot and tracks going all the way along the wall. He remembers them hosing him down with cold water in the bath. He must have been crying afterwards, because a woman came over to his cot. She was collecting her own son, but stopped to stroke Gregor’s head and told him he would be collected very soon, too. He remembers the worried look on the other boy’s face watching his mother sharing that precious affection around so indiscriminately.

His own mother didn’t like him playing in the rubble with other children as he grew up. He had died in those ruins before. She preferred him to stay inside with her, making lists together. It was her way of dealing with life, holding everything in place, writing it all down methodically.

‘Make a list,’ she would say. And he would take out pencil and paper and put all the items down, ticking them off one by one. If something wasn’t ticked off by the end of the day it would have to be placed at the top of a new list for the next day before they could sleep. Lists of things to do and lists of things they had done together. Even the simplest things that sometimes should be taken for granted were put down, maybe as a kind of reassurance that they were alive and that the world was still moving on. ‘Will I put down brushing your teeth?’ Gregor would ask. And ‘Yes,’ his mother would say, ‘put down brushing your teeth,’ because each one of those daily anchors drove away the fear that he could sometimes see in her eyes.