Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Gregor told them his knees were shaking so much after the fall that he could barely stand up or even feel his own feet inside his boots. They had turned to liquid with terror. One of his friends stood him up and told him to get a grip of himself, to put the fear behind him or else he would live the rest of his life as a ghost. He said he could not even feel his bruises.

His father looked at him with great disappointment. And his mother kept pulling out the dirty laundry from his rucksack as the only true confirmation of life. Never before had Gregor been so disillusioned by his family. His father took the story as a personal offence while his mother stood clutching a pair of underpants as if that was the last thing left remaining of him.

‘I’ve heard enough,’ his father said. ‘This is not my son.’

Did he always suspect something? Or was it just one of those phrases he had inherited from his own father, the kind of ventriloquism that goes down through generations with everyone repeating the same branded family admonishment in perpetuity. ‘No son of mine would shake in his boots like that. And then be proud of it. Where’s your courage, man?’

‘Don’t be hard on him,’ his mother said. ‘He’s had a shock.’

‘A shock,’ his father bawled. ‘He doesn’t know what a shock is.’

His father expected a more heroic tale from the Alps and might have preferred his son to have been one of those rescuers. He wanted his son to talk tough, to tell it like a man with indestructible testicles.

‘Be a man about it,’ he kept repeating. ‘When I think of what we went through in the war.’

Next thing his father would start going back over all the stories out there in the East with best friends dying in combat at the hands of a merciless enemy. Descriptions of survival against all odds in the bitter Russian winter, with scraps of newspaper inside the uniform to shield against the cold. Stories of sharing a last cigarette with fellow soldiers who never came back. The bottle of schnapps would come out and he would continue right into the night, clinging to the last few ‘if onlies’, hoping that things might have been a little different and the war would not have been so badly lost. Defeat supplanted in later years by hunting victories in which he would often photograph his son beside dead animals. Every deer, every set of antlers on the wall of the living room, every stuffed otter and every wild boar mounted on wood was a kind of consoling trophy which might settle the score of this vast failure in war. Followed by the whole slide of self-pity and blame, with his father still at war inside the family and finally pointing the finger at Gregor’s grandfather Emil who had let the Germans down. And ultimately, the tears and the slamming doors and all that silence for days and weeks which made the home feel like the inside of an upholstered coffin.

‘No son of mine.’ The strange acoustic of those words echoed through his childhood, calling for him to be more like his father but actually pushing him away. All those fake memories collected over years into a phoney album. He no longer wanted to be the smiling boy in all the hunting photographs. The boy with a line of ten hares hanging behind him, or the boy with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, holding on to the antlers of a recently killed stag. He began to reject all that bogus family folklore, all those duties of lineage and pride and expectation. He had tried to be an adequate son, tried to match up to the son that his father wanted to have, but he was always a disappointment.

Mara is looking over at Gregor now. She wants to tell him that all this has been sorted out now. There is nothing to fear from memory. No need to be on the run from your own life any more. She wants to send a message of calmness across the orchard, so she tells Johannes to go over to him.

‘Go and ask Uncle Gregor if he wants to see the big anthill,’ she says.

Gregor smiles back. He puts away the long pole and allows himself to be led away towards the gate. They pass by the compost heap and stop to look at the covering of rotten apples, layers and layers of miniature brown skulls strewn across the top. They leave the orchard and walk along the outside wall to a small stand of trees. Johannes tells him that you cannot go out into the field on your own, because that’s how people get lost. When they come to the anthill, Johannes continues to hold hands because they must look at it together. It’s heaving with movement. Gregor listens to Johannes explaining what ants do. He wants to show the boy something he discovered when he was small himself. He takes a stick and places it into the anthill, so they can watch the alarming reaction of ants gathering around it. He shakes the stick and the fury of the ants grows, spreading their toxic fumes to fight off the intrusion. The boy pulls his hand away and moves back. Gregor picks the stick out and plucks one of the ants off in his fingers. He tells Johannes that he is going to eat it. The boy smiles, but it’s more a smile of mistrust.

‘You can’t eat ants,’ he says. ‘They will bite you. Inside in your tummy.’

But then Gregor calmly shows him that it can be done. He tells the boy that they taste a bit like marzipan with cinnamon. He shows him how to crush the ant a little and then places it into his mouth. He chews on it with his front teeth and nods to show that he likes the taste and that he has no fear of being bitten inside. ‘Mmmmmm,’ he says, but the boy finds it too absurd to try it by himself without the reassurance of his mother. He is being asked to believe something that is not safe. But it won’t be long now, Gregor knows, when the boy will try it out for himself, even if his mother does not approve, exactly in the same way that he did when he was small.

‘Uncle Gregor ate an ant,’ he calls out to everyone in the orchard as he runs back in. He is horrified and boasting at the same time. ‘Uncle Gregor eats ants.’

Daniel looks up with acknowledgement in his eyes. Because he also learned it from Gregor, the same way that Gregor learned it from his father.

Gregor’s father would not tolerate the name of Stalin being mentioned in the house. Nor could he bear Gregor’s grandfather being talked about very much. As far as he was concerned, Emil was a traitor. While he was out there defending his country on the Russian front, Emil was driving around aimlessly in his truck, wasting fuel. While his parents were killed as the Russian Army swept towards Berlin, Emil entertained all kinds of women up and down the country.

His mother and father didn’t talk very much about these things around the dinner table. She spoke about Emil only when she was alone with Gregor.

Right at the end of the war, when it was only a matter of time before it was all over, she waited for her father at the train station. She had slept fitfully, with Gregor waking up frequently and people complaining about the noise. By morning his infection had spread into both ears and he could hardly hear anything. The waiting room was so crowded that many people had decided to sleep on the platform under the awning instead. They were not moving on any more because the news was going around that the American troops were very close and that the town would soon fall. There was no point in going anywhere, only waiting.

Emil had not returned yet. She was worried about him. But she was even more worried now that Gregor would go deaf with his ear infection. She had tried to swaddle him during the night so that he would sweat, but it didn’t break the fever. He kept moving, trying to throw off his blanket, and when he began to scream again in the morning, she decided to go and look for some oil, hoping that somebody in the town could help. She stood Gregor up on his feet, tucked a spare vest in around his neck for a scarf and pulled his hat down. He was a good boy and didn’t complain about the weather, just walked by her side holding her hand. She walked through the town, memorising her way so that she could make it back to the station again later on.