Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

There was some reassurance in moving on. She found a school where charity workers were giving out food. It was even more crowded than the railway station, but she managed to get inside and find a nurse. Everyone else was concentrating on the food, so the nurse got Gregor to lean his head over and poured in some warm cooking oil. It made him whine at first, but the nurse had a quick way of calming him with a little rhyme that ended with a tickle. The nurse went away and came back with a new hat for him, more of a winter hat with a peak over the eyes and flaps that came down over the ears. She kept talking to him as she placed a piece of gauze over each of his ears and then tied the hat down under his chin.

It was noon by the time they went out into the street again, not knowing where they should be going now. There was an old woman sweeping the footpath, cleaning the stains of rain off the pavement, all the way to the edge of her property. With more clouds coming, the old woman looked up. There was a boom of heavy weapons in the distance, and maybe she had mistaken it for thunder.

Gregor’s mother walked down the main street to the town, half hoping to see her father. And then she came across his truck, parked outside a public house.

She walked right up to the bar, holding Gregor with her hand. She looked in the window and saw nobody. When she knocked, a woman came to the door, shouting. Could she not see that they were closed? Did she have no idea what was going on in the town. There were soldiers running in the direction of the fighting, old men mostly, and young boys. The woman said there was nothing left to serve in her bar, no beer, no food, nothing. Everything had been bartered or taken from them. She was full of pessimism, almost envying those who had nothing at all, wishing that she could abandon everything and flee herself, then she would not have to worry about what would happen to her house and her business.

Gregor’s mother said she didn’t want anything, she was merely looking for the man who owned the truck outside. She was careful not to reveal too much about herself.

‘My father,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for my father. A fat man, have you seen him?’

‘Emil,’ the woman said. ‘If only he came back, then everything would improve. At least I’d have customers again.’

The woman became more friendly and invited them inside. The boy was drowsy and ready to faint again. She sat him down, explaining that he had a fever. His face was wet with sweating, but she tried to stop him taking his hat off.

They had not sat down for more than two minutes when three men from the Gestapo came in and told her to stand up.

‘Papers,’ the officer barked at her.

She produced her documents from her bag and held them out. The officer smiled and passed her papers over to the other men.

‘Come with us,’ he then said, and she had to get the boy up again. Carried him in her arms this time. One of the men held the door open and she was escorted across the street to the police barracks, though she hardly had time to work any of this out because she kept looking back into the street to see if there was any sign of her father.

At the police station she was taken into a room and questioned. Where had she come from? Where was she going to? It was clear that they knew everything about her father and his bogus mission. They slapped her and told her not to lie, because they already had the facts. Gregor huddled close to her, cowering.

The war was so near the end. In some parts of the country it was already over and soon these buildings would fall into the hands of the enemy, but still these Gestapo men had all the time in the world to interrogate her about her father. She had walked into a trap. At first they demanded to know where Emil was hiding. Then they turned it around and pretended that they had already captured her father, but that they were still looking for his companion, Max. And when she kept crying and repeating that she had no idea where her father was, they threatened to execute her and her boy for assisting deserters.

They told her with some pride that they had been after Emil for quite some time now. They even shared the information they had already uncovered about his ‘pathetic’ little scheme. They knew the location of various check-points through which he had passed over the last month.

‘Your father thinks he can make a fool of us,’ the officer in charge said with a triumphant smile.

She said nothing about waiting at the railway station and nothing about the fuel her father was seeking. But they continued bullying her with so many questions that she could not help herself admitting things they were putting to her. The officer in charge leaned in right close to her and she got the smell of wurst on his breath. Then he turned to question the boy. But Gregor was too young to know what was going on, only that something was wrong. His small body shook as the officer raised his voice.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Gregor,’ she answered. ‘He’s got an ear infection.’

The officer clapped his hand in a test and the boy flinched.

‘He’s almost deaf in both ears,’ she pleaded. ‘He can’t hear a thing.’

She could not think of excuses. She was not clever with answers like her father. She knew from going to school that one excuse was always more believable than three excuses. The officer in charge continued to try and communicate with the boy, but he remained silent.

The officers looked at each other. They examined his clothes and took his hat off to look at him more carefully. The gauze was still stuck in his ears, but they fell out on the floor, thin pieces of linen with a golden nipple in each one where they had been fitted right into the eardrum with the oil. One of the men pointed at the boy’s trousers and she understood this as a command. Unbuttoned his braces and pulled his pants down with the men looking on, examining him, then recoiling. He had soiled himself again. The room filled up with a sweet smell of excrement.

‘Come on, let Mama take care of you.’

She took off his trousers completely, even though he was trying to pull against her. She could see that he was also totally wet, not only with urine but with sweat. He was coughing, a kind of hoarse cough that sounded like the bark of an old dog. Deep in his chest now, whistling every time he took in a breath. His groin was raw and there was a rash developing at the front of his legs.

‘Come on, Gregor, my little sweetheart. It’s not half as bad. Here, let me clean you up.’

She took his underpants off. She cleaned him off as best she could with the vest from around his neck and pulled his trousers up again. Then she hugged him again and rocked him back and forth for a moment, humming to him in a whisper, before she turned back to face her interrogators. They were standing in the corridor now, with the door open, smoking to clear the air and muttering among themselves.

She was worried that it would be her fault if they found her father. Worried about the look of disappointment on his face because she had not stayed at the railway station as he had asked her. And just as she rocked Gregor back and forth, waiting to see what the men would do next, she heard the main door opening and somebody shouting.

‘We have him,’ they repeated again and again. ‘We have him.’

She turned round with an emptiness in her stomach. She felt herself going pale, ready to collapse. She kept her eyes on the door and on the corridor, waiting to see her father being brought in with his hands in manacles behind his back, a common criminal. She waited for that despairing glance that he would throw at her in the room, before he was pushed on past her door into some other cell. She was ready to run out into the corridor and beg for her father’s life, but then she stood still.