Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

In the orchard, everything is quiet, a long sustained note stretching into the afternoon. The air is humming in there now. The fruit gatherers have fled and left everything behind them. The ladders. The long poles. The rake leaning against the tree. The wheelbarrows and the boxes and the lines of sacks, full and bulging with red apples. The birds and the insects and the beetles on the ground sneaking back to have a look at what is left, once more reclaiming the place for themselves.

Looking back now, Gregor feels more like an invented character, swept along a predestined narrative. He wishes he could go over his own life with an omnipotent hand, to intervene at vital moments.

It was the year of the hornet sting. Late November, when Daniel was still only five, Gregor received a letter from home. The sender’s name on the back of the envelope was Maria Liedmann, with an address in Nuremberg.

Gregor was out recording in a studio that morning, so the letter lay on the table unopened, with Mara staring at the female handwriting, wondering what was going on. At first she felt the excitement of discovering that Gregor might have an aunt or a cousin still alive. But then it also revealed that Gregor was hiding something.

She stared at the letter, took Daniel to school, went to work and remained inside her own world, unable to get it out of her head. When she got home it was gone.

‘The letter,’ she asked quite innocently. ‘Who is it from?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered.

How could he have thought he might get away with this? She pursued it, naturally, but Gregor went mute as a stone. For a man who could make up good stories for children, he seemed more and more incapable of speaking to adults. She could ask as many questions as she liked, but he sat in front of her, strumming chords on his guitar in answer. Rather than explain things, he sat with Mara in a kind of meaningless twilight, plucking the strangest of notes while she continued to place words in his mouth, as if he came from a different country where it was only possible to communicate through music.

‘Are you hiding something from me, Gregor?’ she asked.

‘Speak to me, Gregor, please,’ she begged him, before breaking down at last in tears. ‘It’s very lonely for me sometimes, when you don’t speak. I never know what you’re thinking, Gregor, unless you say something.’

‘I can’t talk about it,’ he replied. ‘Trust me, Mara. It’s nothing. It’s from the past and I don’t want to go back there.’

She sat wiping the tears with the sleeve of her woollen cardigan over her hand.

‘What am I to think, Gregor? If you say nothing, then you give other people the right to speak for you. If you don’t explain things, then I will start imagining things that might be untrue. Please, Gregor, tell me what it is.’

‘It’s a letter from the past, Mara,’ he repeated. ‘That’s all I can tell you. It’s a long way back in the past, before we met.’

He refused to say any more. Got up and went over to kiss her. She didn’t resist his embrace, but she gave only a half-smile and her eyes were full of questions.

The following evening, she searched for the letter, turning the whole apartment upside down. Finally found it in the bin outside in the courtyard. Smiled at neighbours and explained that she had accidentally thrown a pay cheque out with the rubbish. Found the tiny torn-up pieces of truth at last and salvaged them with great care, bringing them up the stairs to reconstruct as a real-life jigsaw. Later, while Gregor was playing in a bar, Mara put the letter back together, patiently gluing each portion down on a clean sheet of paper, matching the words up with the eagerness of an archaeologist.

It had come from Gregor’s mother. Maria Liedmann.

‘ Your father is dying, ’ the letter said. ‘ This will be his last Christmas. ’

She felt the shock of the words in her stomach. It was bigger than any revelation about a secret lover. He had not broken the silent pact in the railway station after all. She was thrilled to find out that Gregor’s adoptive mother was still alive, but the reasons why he had concealed this from her scared her. Afraid that she no longer understood the man she was living with.

What great emptiness did he construct behind himself? It was easier to deal with no knowledge whatsoever than it was to know that there was something which he was suppressing.

‘Why is he denying everything like this?’ she asked Martin on the phone. ‘Why doesn’t he want to talk about his mother, the woman who rescued him and brought him up? How can he turn his back on her?’

There was something fascinating about deceit. This was an infidelity. Though it had nothing to do with sexual deception, it contained all the subterfuge and secrecy that goes along with being unfaithful. No giveaway signs in the bedroom. This was more about family detective work, about the longing for knowledge, the wish to know everything about him.

For the moment, she kept it to herself.

‘Do you still love me?’ she asked him.

‘Of course,’ he said with some humour. ‘Goes without saying, Mara.’

But since the letter had arrived in their midst, there was some stronger affirmation required.

Was he incapable of integrating in a family? The trapdoor opening up again and taking the ground from under his feet? The disability of an orphan, unable to trust the human trade of giving and accepting love?

Did he find it hard to return that invisible substance that passes between people and which is impossible to measure? Are there people who have no talent for love, just as there are those who cannot sing, or dance, or balance a plate on a stick? Some devastation in their history. Some coldness in the heart. People who have had that precious substance withdrawn from them at one point or another. Those who have found no way of expressing it or receiving it. Was love nothing more than a sign of insecurity? Some form of self-preservation or human investment, dressed up as virtue in movies and books. She had been told by poets and revolutionaries at the university that unconditional love was a myth. Like the lost half of a tea set, like sabretoothed tigers, like Major Tom drifting away into space. But wasn’t it impossible to live without love, like living without breathing, without water, like trying to survive on a loveless planet without trees?

Mara decided to go to Nuremberg herself. There had to be some reason why Gregor was denying his own mother. She wanted to see where he had grown up. This was her chance to imagine his childhood at last, the house, the surrounding streets and shops, the school and the traffic lights where he must have crossed over on his way home every day. She wanted to see the stairs he walked up, the hall door, the surname on the bell. Stalking a living ghost made her feel light-headed with excitement, something she had not felt in years.

She told Gregor that she would be away for two days, visiting her sister who was ill in Köln. She left Daniel with Martin and his wife, Gisela, and drove to Nuremberg with the address she had taken from the letter. A neighbour informed her that Frau Liedmann had gone to visit her husband in hospital. It was too late to come back and call again, so she had to leave it to the following day, and even then she was afraid to ring the bell this time. Afraid of this tidal wave of information which would emerge from the meeting.

She waited until Gregor’s mother came out. Followed her to a nearby café. It was December by then, just before Christmas. The Christmas markets were open and one of the streets was blocked off from traffic. There was snow falling and Gregor’s mother wore a grey woollen coat with imitation fur around the collar. She had on a pair of short brown boots with rings of beige fur around the top. She slapped some of the melting snow from her coat with her gloves and put them away in her handbag, which was kept inside a reusable shopping bag. She opened the buttons of her coat and left her hat on, a purple cashmere hat in the shape of a sugar-coated jelly sweet. With the straw grey hair under the hat, it was possible to imagine her as a small girl, with red cheeks. She seemed nervous and ate her piece of cake, a cream-filled tart with strawberry mousse, in a slightly furtive way, glancing around her first to make sure she was not being watched. Other women greeted her curtly, hardly even looking at her, as though ‘good morning’ meant ‘stay where you are’. Frau Liedmann remained very much on her own, and maybe there was a hint here of Gregor’s solipsism. She consumed the cake in a mechanical way, looking away into the street where the cars were hissing through a lacklustre shower of white, frozen rain.