Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘He loves his son,’ she said. ‘He’s the only friend he’s ever had.’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ Mara said. ‘I’m sure he’ll come round. It’s just that he’s had so much trouble coming to terms with the fact that he’s an orphan.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He’s adopted, isn’t that so?’

Gregor’s mother looked straight into Mara’s eyes, blinking, unable to grasp what she had just heard. She paused for a moment, sighed, shook her head.

‘That’s totally untrue.’

They looked at each other in disbelief. Now they really were talking about two different people. Gregor’s mother stared across the photographs and family artefacts spread out on the dining-room table. A lifetime turned into fake.

‘It’s a complete lie, Mara. I should know, I’m his mother.’

‘You’re saying Gregor made this up?’

‘His uncle Max made it up. He put all that stuff into Gregor’s head.’

A mother’s word against that of her son. Mara put forward Gregor’s argument in his absence, describing in detail the story that she had got from him. The journey south on the truck with Emil, the long wait in the train station, the interrogation by the Gestapo. It all seemed to match in every aspect except for one essential detail. The child lost in the bombing. The replacement.

‘But he’s Jewish,’ Mara said. ‘He was rescued by your father. You adopted him in order to replace your lost son. Isn’t that why there was so much trouble with the Gestapo?’

Gregor’s mother stared back, unable to reclaim possession of her own life. The rejection was too much to bear and there was hostility entering into her voice.

‘He’s no more Jewish than me, or his father,’ she said. ‘He’s German. He’s the image of his grandfather Emil. For God’s sake, look at the photographs. He’s a musician and a singer, just like Emil, isn’t that so?’

‘He told me that he came from the East, with the refugees.’

‘He can make up whatever story he likes. I can’t force him to go and visit his own father on his deathbed.’

The truth left nothing to be imagined. The facts were incontrovertible, changing everything, dislodging the entire basis of Mara’s marriage. Maybe his story was more elastic, more redemptive. How often had she passed by the building in Berlin where Gregor died in the bombing. How often had they looked up at the windows where his mother lived during the war and lost her only child while her husband was away at the front. Gregor’s birthplace. His place of death. His moment of immortality.

‘But he was circumcised,’ Mara said. ‘As a baby.’

‘What are you talking about?’ There was a cynicism in her voice. ‘I would have noticed, don’t you think?’

‘At birth,’ Mara said. ‘I thought he was circumcised at birth.’

‘Nonsense. That’s all part of the fabrication. He must have got that done to himself after he ran away. I thought he would have grown out of that fantasy by now.’

‘I don’t understand anything any more.’

Mara cried openly, holding nothing back. She had spent all this time living with a ghost.

Driving back along the autobahn from Nuremberg, Mara became involved in a strange, disembodied argument with another driver. She had not been concentrating and must have done something stupid. The roads were wet, coming up to Christmas, dark early. She drove in a bruised and remote way. In silence, without the radio on so as to avoid the sentiment of music. Staring past the windscreen wipers sweeping off flakes of snow. Seeing nothing but the watery tail lights of trucks ahead and the crop of water rising up from their wheels. Aware only of how much her world had changed in the last forty-eight hours.

Perhaps she had overtaken without indicating or maybe slipped in ahead without giving enough room. The offence was hardly worth mentioning, but the reaction was instant. Horn screaming, lights flashing right behind her. She slowed down and allowed plenty of room to pass. After you! she muttered to herself. Go ahead, pal, kill yourself. She remembered the funny phrases of her own father, telling her to be careful because there were always ‘other idiots’ on the road. What should she have said? Excuse me, I’ve just found out that my husband is a liar. He’s not an orphan after all. The driver came right alongside, just to hammer home the road courtesy lesson, long enough for her to see his face. A young autobahn idealist with furious eyes. Get off the road, you fucking asshole, he was shouting, or miming, with his mouth clearly pushed into the shape of a curse and his middle finger raised in supreme insult.

There was a rage in the country. It was there on the autobahn, in the people’s hearts, in the newspapers and in the music. It was a time of self-loathing and self-accusation, a time when everything was being exposed and examined. The science of failure. The lonely momentum of truth. The guilt spreading horizontally, reaching into every heart and every home. Their shame was their identity. Their misery had become their poetry.

At home, she felt exhausted, unable to conceal the distance in her eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gregor asked.

She didn’t know how to start. Or end. Waited until Daniel was asleep before she could work herself up to the right words. Looked at Gregor as though he had just walked in off the street and she had to ask him what he wanted in her home.

‘You can’t lie to me, Gregor,’ she said. ‘I can’t live with lies.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’ve met your mother. She’s told me everything.’

Gregor reeled backwards, as though a door had slammed in his face. It took a moment before he could find the words to reply.

‘What? I don’t believe what you’ve just said. You went behind my back and spoke to her. That’s unforgivable, Mara.’

‘It’s all untrue, isn’t it? You’re not Jewish. You’re not an orphan. You made the whole thing up for some scabby reason I don’t understand. Just to make yourself look good or feel good, is that it? You lied to me, Gregor. And now I don’t know who you are any more.’

Gregor did not reach for his guitar this time. He remained silent for a moment, clearing the situation in his own head before responding.

‘This is very unfair, Mara.’

‘I believed everything,’ she said, looking at the floor.

‘You went to see her. That’s such a betrayal.’

‘You can’t even speak about betrayal,’ she replied. ‘How can I ever trust you? How can I believe anything you say, ever again?’

‘You have decided not to believe me,’ he said. ‘You’ve decided to believe her. What did she tell you? All lies, I bet.’

There was a long pause. Mara went around the kitchen, clearing things away, stacking plates, doing things that had no urgency. Gregor sat at the table with the newspaper opened out in front of him, staring down, but not allowing any of it to enter. His credibility in shreds. His identity gone. The trapdoor underneath him had opened up and swallowed him.

‘She’s your real mother,’ Mara said. ‘Why would she lie to me?’

He waited for a while in silence, only slowly realising how serious this was. She talked about a fraud. She accused him of destroying the family.

‘What am I supposed to tell Daniel when he grows up? That I married a con man who said he was a Jewish orphan? What will I tell everybody, all our friends? That you live in a fantasy?’

‘Tell them what you like, Mara.’

‘For whatever reason, you made up a story about being Jewish, because you couldn’t face up to the truth. You preferred to be the victim, is that it? You fabricated this story about being replaced as a child, so you could escape from our history, isn’t that so?’