Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Mara waited until Frau Liedmann was finished with the cake, then worked up the courage to make a discreet approach. After all, it was Gregor’s mother who had made the first move, sending the letter.

‘Frau Liedmann,’ she said in a quiet voice, smiling. ‘We got the letter. I am Gregor’s wife, Mara.’

There was a shocked exchange of looks between them. It had the effect on Frau Liedmann of being caught by the police, something she had been expecting all along and almost wished for so that it could be over at last.

‘There is nothing wrong, Frau Liedmann,’ Mara reassured her. ‘I don’t want to alarm you. It’s the letter. We got your letter.’

‘Gregor,’ was all that Frau Liedmann could utter.

‘He doesn’t know that I’ve come here,’ Mara said, and maybe that was an important initial connection, a conspiratorial friendship between these two women, two mothers. ‘He cannot find out about this. Gregor is like that, you know, very fixed in his mind about things.’

‘Can we go somewhere more quiet, maybe?’ Frau Liedmann said politely, again searching around, glancing at other people for permission almost.

They walked a hundred metres through the snow to another café where they sat down in a corner. It seemed important to her not to be overheard. Did Frau Liedmann feel that her background did not match up to those of other people around her? Some inadequacy in the black market of confession and gossip and home truth?

The waitress brought better coffee this time and they sat looking at each other with Mara doing all the talking, filling in the absent details. They had a five-year-old boy, named Daniel. Gregor worked as a musician, as well as teaching music part-time. She didn’t tell Frau Liedmann that Gregor had told everyone that his adoptive parents were dead, only that he had started a new life.

‘You have a son,’ Frau Liedmann said. ‘That makes me very happy.’

There was emotion in her voice. Mara searched in her handbag for a photograph, a picture of the three of them together on holiday in Spain that year. Frau Liedmann looked at it for a long time, while Mara told her that it was just after Daniel had been stung by a hornet, which explained why he looked a bit sulky. Frau Liedmann swallowed the image, unable to connect to it across the time gone by.

‘I’ve never seen him with a beard before,’ she said.

She took off her coat at last, and her hat, adjusted her hair and examined the photograph once more in greater detail.

‘You’re welcome to keep it,’ Mara said, but Frau Liedmann placed it on the table in front of her, propped against a small can of milk, perhaps not fully sure if it could really belong to her.

They fell into conversation and agreed to address each other informally as Mara and Maria. That alone made Mara feel like a lost daughter returning home. She was brought back to the house where Gregor’s mother prepared something to eat. Surrounded by antlers, they sat looking through the photographs and Mara rested for a long time on one particular image of Gregor as a boy, trying to teach the dog to jump through a hoop. His curly hair rising up in a wave on top of his head. His eyes looking at the camera. It was almost too much to absorb in the space of one afternoon. And yet she wanted to see more, everything. Another picture of him with his own head concealed under his jumper and the dog’s head under his arm as a joke. A further picture of Gregor and his mother standing on the steps of the house beside Uncle Max.

Why had all this been so hidden? Why had Gregor erased this part of his life with such brutal determination? Was there nothing from these tranquil family moments worth keeping?

‘He told me about that dog,’ Mara said. ‘Fritz was his name, am I right?’

‘That’s true,’ Gregor’s mother said.

‘Didn’t he have a big war going with the postman?’

‘That dog was a terrible nuisance. My husband hated him because he used to bark in the forest and chase all the wild deer away. The postman was terrified. Very nervous man, after the war. I don’t know how many official letters of complaint we received over that dog, and the postman had to deliver them himself.’

‘He was run over in the end, wasn’t he?’

‘The truck driver gave Gregor some money to get a new dog. But he never did.’

‘Why not?’

‘The postman still believed he was alive. Gregor had this funny idea of telling him that the dog was locked up in the back.’

‘So he lived on in the postman’s imagination.’

‘Until I blurted it out one day. The postman asked me where the dog was and I told him he was long dead. Almost a year later. Imagine. And Gregor blamed me. Said I killed the dog by telling the postman.’

The two women scraped over the details like two historians, sharing knowledge, exchanging facts and eccentricities, a well-informed jury examining things from opposite viewpoints. At times it seemed like they were not even talking about the same person. Again and again, there were trademark features which they both recognised and made it feel like an odd reunion of complete strangers. And maybe there was not too much harm done by the fact that Gregor had denied his adoptive mother, as long as Mara could engineer the reconciliation.

‘Gregor hates shopping,’ she said. ‘I buy all his clothes for him because he can’t bear being inside a shop.’

‘He picked that up from his father,’ Gregor’s mother replied.

‘Funny,’ Mara said. ‘Gregor thinks shop assistants are like hyenas, stalking customers, preying on the partner. He physically pulls me out of the shop and I feel like a shoplifter being arrested.’

But there was something more serious to be discussed.

‘His father was very good to him,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘He would like to see him again before he dies. He’s forgiven him.’

‘For what?’ Mara asked.

‘He threatened us with a hunting rifle. Just before he ran away. My husband doesn’t hold that against him any longer. If only he would come to see us.’

These new facts began to overturn everything. Gregor’s mother spoke about the bond between father and son. How her husband had helped Gregor to bring home an injured hawk and encouraged him to nurse it until it could fly again. How he explained to him that hunting was not always about killing but also about conservation. There was a tone of regret in her voice as she explained why she had to leave Gregor in care so often, before her husband came back from captivity. She even had a second job cleaning offices at night to keep things going.

‘What else could you do?’

When Gregor’s father returned from the war, he was depressed. Found it difficult to discuss things. He had terrible headaches, so the house often had to be silent. Gregor grew up as a quiet boy, making lists all the time, separate from other children.

‘They used to fight with him because he was so tall,’ she said. ‘But he was always a big softie. He could never stand up for himself.’

As a child he liked looking at gardens. When they went for a walk together through the suburbs of Nuremberg, he would lead her on a trail mapped out in his head in order to pass by the best gardens. He liked growing things. He became a reclusive teenager, interested mostly in his music.

Her husband was an accountant, a good man, with strong principles. Perhaps it was hard for people who came through war to adjust to life in peacetime. They overcompensated. They loved their son with too much force. Gregor’s father was a survival artist and she laughed at the way he sometimes made his family go through fire drills at the weekend. Maybe life was more about enduring than about living. She said her husband could not bear to see food going to waste and sometimes forced Gregor to eat up, telling him what it was like to starve and to live on ants. Gregor had to be spoon-fed until he was ten. She spent her life running after him with food, with his school lunch box, his jacket, his homework. She described how he often left his scarf behind or lost his coat on the bus, and each time, her husband bought him a new one, an even better one, with better lining and a detachable hood and more inside pockets.