Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Instead of Emil it was Max. She could not help feeling relief, but also a terror at the expression in his eyes. They pushed him along and he disappeared. She heard doors closing behind him at the back of the building.

Their hands are sticky. Their fingernails are dirty. They have flakes of bark in their hair and bits of stiff, dried-out leaves clinging to their clothes. There is a dryness in their throats and occasionally they can see by the light under the trees that the air in the country is not the pure void they believed it was but a dusty substance, thick with particles and hovering insects. They breathe in the scent of apples and deadwood and soil and rotting things all around them. The fruit flies are everywhere. Swarms of them in a veil around the wheelbarrow. Johannes is counting the sacks that have been collected so far, ranked along the side of the orchard. He keeps starting from the beginning, but there are too many for him, more than he has numbers for in his head.

He goes over to whisper in his mother’s ear. Katia gets up slowly, taking her son by the hand. From his movements, it’s clear that he needs to go for a pee. He’s holding on to himself and dancing a little, pulling at her hand. She walks through the trees towards the edge of the orchard, carrying her belly the way she would carry a basket, heavy with apples. She finds a suitable place and helps him to pull his shorts down, but Johannes is afraid to pee because he’s seen an ant.

‘The ants are looking,’ he says.

‘The ants are not one little bit interested in your winkie,’ Katia says to him.

But she has to move somewhere else. She carries him quickly with his trousers around his ankles, over to another spot at the rim of the orchard where the grass is longer, almost the height of the boy himself. And when everything is right, he finally sends a perfect, golden arc into a tall column of grass in the sunshine with his mother holding him.

‘Is Uncle Gregor going to play the trumpet?’ he asks her.

‘You’ll have to ask him,’ Katia says.

Johannes runs off, straight over to Gregor.

‘Are you going to play the trumpet, Uncle Gregor?’

‘We’ll see,’ Gregor answers. It is the same answer that Gregor used with his son, Daniel, the same answer that he heard so often as a child himself from his own father, one that he hated hearing himself. But he can’t help himself repeating the lines of his father. Once again that ventriloquism of generations, parents speaking through their children.

‘We’ll see. Later maybe.’

‘Of course he’ll play,’ Martin says.

Gregor still allows people to speak for him, putting words in his mouth at times when he remains ambivalent. He doesn’t want to promise too much, but then he smiles. How can he refuse? He has the trumpet in the boot of the car, everybody knows that.

‘Yeah, maybe later.’

Johannes runs back to his mother, bringing the news over to her like a town crier, even though she’s heard it already.

‘Uncle Gregor is going to play the trumpet.’

It’s how the news is received that gives it shape. Mara raises her arm, clenching her fist. The very same salute that she made when he put the trumpet to his mouth and blasted out his first chain of profane notes on his birthday one year. It was Mara who got it for him and secretly saved up for months without a word. Up to then he had always played on a trumpet he had borrowed from a friend.

The clenched fist is one of Mara’s trademark gestures. A salute of determination and fun and mischief and support. Something left over from the revolutionary years which she does quite naturally, without any triumph or aggression. Not menacing so much as bolstering. She has always been a motivator and does it with a comic flair, with a hint of self-parody, to agree with something, to make her point in an argument, to show her emotions when she’s listening to music or dancing with her head down and her hair in her eyes. She did it when she heard that Katia was expecting her second baby. She will do it again with tears in her eyes when Daniel and Juli go off to Africa.

Gregor recalls seeing her once, raising her clenched fist towards a bus driver on Wittenbergplatz. Daniel copied her, clenching his small fist at the bus driver, and maybe it was such a funny image of mother and son that instead of feeling offended, the bus driver was forced to smile. She was not merely raging at the bus driver, but at all those other things in the country that were wrong at that time and needed to be put right. At the government for the length of time it was taking to pay reparations to victims. At the way immigrant workers were treated. At the Berlin Wall. At the building of Stammheim maximum security prison. At the news that a young man was shot at a table in a restaurant while he was eating. At the news that the police raided the home of her favourite author. At the arms manufacturers in Germany sending weapons to Africa.

She has always troubled herself with these thoughts. Felt responsible for world events. Now she clenches her fist with more sanguine authority, but she does it in a gesture of fearless innocence that makes her look like she’s just out of school.

It came as a surprise to Gregor every year in May, when Mara announced that it was his birthday. The date of his birth, the date on which he stepped into the place of another child. He remembers the conspiracy of kindness with which she saved up for that trumpet and kept it a secret, until Daniel blurted it out.

Daniel was almost four then, not much younger than Johannes is now. Mara placed a deposit on the instrument he once tested in the shop and which he said he would buy if only he had the money. She got a bit of help from her parents, but never admitted that to him in the end. A few days before his birthday, Gregor walked in the door and Daniel could not wait to tell him what was on his mind.

‘Mama has got you a trumpet,’ Daniel said right away, before Gregor had even taken his jacket off.

‘Wait,’ Gregor said. ‘Was that meant to be a secret?’

‘Yes,’ Daniel answered with eyes wide open. ‘It’s your birthday present,’ he said.

Gregor may have had a hint even before that, because he once mentioned the notion of buying the trumpet his friend had lent to him, but Mara discouraged that, saying they would start saving up for the best. Nonetheless, it was still a surprise when they celebrated with a cake and candles and tablecloth on the table and Mara dressed up. He unwrapped the gift pretending he knew nothing, carefully taking off the paper, embracing her with such life in his eyes. He could work out how long she had been saving up and how hard it was not to say a word.

How often has he played it all over the world, in so many bars and jazz clubs, never once forgetting that moment when she gave it to him, sometimes thinking about it all evening and then putting it out of his head so as not to allow the feeling to get the better of him. Countless bulging notes have been blown through that piece of brass. It has lost its gloss, but it still releases an exceptional musical scream in his hands. The horn has become dented by collisions along the way, but it has character like no other trumpet. A sweetness, a clarity, a pure, lived-in sound that only a well-played trumpet can have and that only fellow trumpet players can really appreciate. He’s been offered money for that instrument. By well-known players. Enough to buy himself a whole suite of new instruments. In fact, he has bought other trumpets since then, for their own particular tone, but none of them play quite like this one. None of them have that much biography in them.

He has often spoken about the weight of it in his hands. The kiss of brass on his lips. He is known for swinging it over his shoulder like a shovel or a pitchfork in a momentary pause at concerts, a style that other musicians have since copied. He was born for that instrument, Mara always said whenever she heard him rip another deep, declamatory note into their small apartment, a note that probably shook the whole block into life, like the sound of a cow lowing in the courtyard. The neighbours must have said: ‘Oh no. Somebody’s bought a shagging trumpet.’