Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

He still plays some of the clubs in Berlin when he’s asked to join a reunion gig. He likes the relaxed companionship of musicians playing their stuff together and hardly speaking to each other. His big brass larynx. The unmistakable warm, half-drunk, country-wedding sound of the trumpet. A fat, laconic, outdoor echo. The whole inner road movie of feelings that comes out every time he lifts the instrument up to his lips. He jokes about making a big comeback, but he’s really much happier doing his own thing now, playing for fun instead of for a living, listening to younger players, teaching and watching his own trademark licks passing on to another generation. He’s had too many comebacks already. An entire lifetime of departures and comebacks.

It’s lunchtime now. They have barely noticed the time going by in the open air, until Thorsten rings the bell from the house. They see the time only in the amount of apples that have been collected. They come down from the ladders and drop their equipment. They leave the orchard behind and glance back at the work they have done so far and feel that they have earned the break. Gregor is the last to leave, with Martin putting his arm around him.

‘Mara looks great, doesn’t she?’

‘She does.’

Gregor is not really aware of these words or what they are asking him to think. There has never been any animosity between them over Mara. Too much has gone by to begin raking over the fact that Martin was her lover for a short while in the years when Gregor was absent. Friendship is too big a gift to throw away on pride. They have accepted each other’s failures along the way and maybe these things have brought them closer in the end.

Gregor looks at Mara, walking ahead with a basket on her hip. She has remained devoted to those ideals of love and friendship and family, upbeat and optimistic to the extreme. She must have learned this from her parents in the Rhineland, from all the calamities in the past, the rush to put the war behind them, the memory of such loss, when friends were so easily taken away by the most whimsical fate of war logic.

Over lunch, Daniel has begun to needle Martin a little about his diet.

‘You don’t still eat all those meat products, do you?’

‘As long as it’s dead, I’ll eat it,’ Martin returns.

Mara gives them both a warning squint with her eyes.

‘Look, you two,’ she says, ‘we’re not going to have a discussion about GM products or about the agony of the poultry industry. And I don’t want to hear about the ethics of long-distance food. We just want to eat and enjoy the food.’

They smile at her.

‘What about the castration of pigs without anaesthetic?’ Daniel asks.

‘Absolutely not,’ she says.

‘I suppose that rules out force-fed geese too, does it?’

She smiles back at Daniel. Plates are offered around the table. Johannes is sitting on his father’s knee. Katia finds it hard to eat and feeds her son instead of herself.

Martin eats heartily, with even greater defiance under the gaze of moral condescension from Juli. As he looks up, he spots Daniel sniffing some hummus and swallows what is in his mouth in order to go on the counter-attack.

‘Hang on,’ Martin exclaims. ‘You can’t sniff your food, Daniel.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s against the rules as well, Mara. Isn’t it? Even for vegetarians. Sniffing your food at the table. Tell him that’s not allowed.’

Martin slips easily into the role of surrogate father, a cool banter from which Gregor feels excluded at times. Mara has often said they don’t talk enough, and maybe there are still one or two unfinished things between them that need to be sorted out before he can reclaim his place as a father. It was Martin who was always there to help when Daniel was growing up. Martin, not Gregor, who was there at Daniel’s bedside in hospital when he had a seizure once after taking cocaine. Martin, not Gregor, who coaxed Daniel in from the balcony when he started holding his own mother to ransom.

For now, Gregor becomes a spectator in this game between Daniel and Martin. Perhaps there is a sign of regret in his eyes, that he forfeited this close relationship with his son over the years. There is a fine residue of anger in Daniel which comes out now and again in tiny serrated hints. He still blames Gregor, for abandoning him. For travelling off with his band and leaving them behind.

‘Sniffing is an act of doubting,’ Martin says. ‘Isn’t that so, Gregor?’

Gregor laughs and holds his hands up.

‘I’m a chef,’ Daniel replies. ‘I sniff food all the time. It’s part of the gastronomic talent, and the pleasure.’

‘No, it’s not. You make it look like the food’s gone off.’

‘You sniff your wine,’ Daniel says after a pause. ‘Don’t you?’

‘That’s different,’ Martin counters once more. ‘That’s a culture. There is no culture around sniffing food. And we don’t sniff each other either, do we? When I introduce you to my wife, you’re not going to start sniffing her, now are you?’

The laughter rushes in a Mexican wave around the table. Martin begins to sniff at Gregor like an animal, keeping the wave going. It’s an aspiration of their time, to laugh, to enjoy the lightness. Perhaps even the peak of their culture, sitting alone watching somebody on YouTube eating marshmallows for seven minutes running.

Mara takes a detour in the conversation. She turns the discussion towards football and the recent World Cup.

‘Amazing,’ she says. ‘Two months after the World Cup is over and the German flags are still up on the balconies everywhere.’

‘You’re right,’ Gregor says. ‘Never seen so many German flags in my life before.’

‘All made in China,’ Martin points out. ‘I’m not joking. They couldn’t keep up with the demand here and had to send for more from China. They have the production facilities over there to make flags quickly.’

‘In the USA,’ Gregor tells her, ‘they think nothing of having flags on their lawns all year round.’

‘To remind them of what country they live in,’ Martin adds.

‘Is that why you wear those sunglasses, Martin? They’re like big American cop sunglasses,’ Daniel says.

Martin gives Daniel a menacing glare over the top of his sunglasses.

Juli puts her arm around Daniel with exaggerated protection.

‘We had forgotten what country we were living in,’ Mara thinks, ‘until the World Cup came to Germany.’

‘Dreamers,’ Daniel cuts in. ‘Pack of dreamers. With a team like that.’

‘Ah now, Daniel,’ Gregor argues. ‘We didn’t do that badly.’

‘Ploddy,’ Daniel reinforces, with the assurance of a football commentator. ‘Methodical and lame. No imagination. We didn’t even deserve to get to the semi-final.’

‘We were always dreamers,’ Martin agrees. ‘You’re absolutely right there Daniel.’

He takes his sunglasses off completely at this point, then pauses.

‘The Germans have always been the world champions at dreaming. For years, we were forbidden from having our own dreams. Only American dreams. Capitalist dreams, Communist dreams. Rock and roll dreams. Greek island dreams. Biggest dreamers on the planet, the Germans. You should be glad, Daniel, that at least now we’re dreaming about football again.’

They pause and think about this for a while.

‘Still a crap team.’

Mara looks away into the sky.

‘Such a fantastic day,’ she says, this time with a tiny, free note of joy releasing itself from her voice. ‘Thorsten, can we not take a break for a while and come back to the apples later when it’s cooled down a bit?’

It’s not really all that hot, just the idea of exhaustion descending over them. Looking up at the sky over the roofs of the farm buildings, there is only one feathery cloud to be seen, a vague white streak, like the wipe of a cloth left on glass. Even though it rained a few nights ago, it’s only a small relief and the landscape is burned out, hoarse and silent, waiting for water.