Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘Stop it,’ Gregor said. ‘If you continue like this, I’m leaving. I’m not going to listen to you accusing me like this.’

‘Answer the question then,’ she said. ‘Are you an orphan or not?’

‘She’s lying, Mara. Don’t you see it? I found out, believe me. She’s making this whole thing up. She never told him, her own husband. Now she can’t get out of it.’

‘It’s hard to believe that a mother would lie about her own child.’

‘There you go,’ Gregor said. ‘You want to believe her instead.’

‘Can I call her?’ Mara said. ‘Can you discuss this on the phone with her at least?’

‘No. I will not speak to her.’

‘You told me they were dead. You told me you had no relatives. You told me you were circumcised at birth. All lies, Gregor. You’re no more Jewish than I am.’

‘Is that all you married me for?’ he then said. ‘Because I’m Jewish?’

They were throwing everything at each other now and it was difficult to see how they could find a way back from this confrontation. Soon they would fall over the cliff and bring the marriage to an end. Or maybe it was already over and they were merely justifying themselves to some invisible family tribunal.

‘You have to get your story right,’ she said.

She was crying. A helpless burst of tears, full of fatigue. She sat down at the table opposite him, looking up every now and again to see him through a watery prism. He stood up and came round to her side, placed his hand on her shoulder. Tried to embrace her, but she didn’t want to be touched.

‘You see, there’s no proof, Mara,’ he admitted finally.

She listened without looking up.

‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘I told you that. There’s no proof, only what Uncle Max told me. It’s her word against mine.’

He went over his story again. His entire existence was in Mara’s hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces. He placed the facts in front of her, holding on, desperately trying to save himself.

‘Let me ask you this,’ she said finally. ‘If what you say is true. If you were adopted and your mother saved you, then how can you treat them like that? How can you turn your back on them?’

‘Because they lied to me, Mara. Don’t you see it?’

‘Your father is on his deathbed and you can’t get yourself to forgive him. That’s not something you are entitled to do if you’re an orphan. You can’t be that cold-hearted, Gregor.’

She could not understand the ruthlessness with which he had cut them out of his life. Was that part of the self-loathing? He had walked away and now she was afraid that he would also walk away from her and Daniel.

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s over between us.’

She uttered those terrifying words in the hope that they were not true. She desperately wanted him to contradict her, to give some explanation which would allow her to believe him again. He tried to disarm those terrible words by saying that they would soon get this behind them. He swore that nothing had changed between them and that he felt every bit the same about her as he always did. All that mattered was that they stayed together.

‘I’ll find you the proof,’ he said. ‘Give me time, Mara. I’ll get the proof, you’ll see.’

He stood behind her and kissed the top of her head. He placed his hands under her arms and lifted her up from the kitchen chair. Her elbows were planted on the table and her fists glued to her cheeks, and they remained like that for a moment until he released the tension which had locked them in that position. Her face was indented with knuckle marks. Blotches around her eyes. She could hardly stand with the weakness in her legs, as if the truth was the only thing that kept people alive.

He virtually carried her into bed. Left the light on in the hall. Took her shoes off and helped her with her jeans. And in that drowsy swirl of thoughts before she fell asleep, she turned to put her arm around him.

‘You looked so sweet, Gregor,’ she said, half dreaming, half crying. ‘You must have been such a sweet little boy.’

And maybe it was too soon to spring to conclusions. What did it matter now? she thought to herself in a blur of emotions. Everybody needs an identity, a disguise, a story in which they can feel at home. He had managed to knock a good enough life out of that survivor body of his, whoever it belonged to. Was he not making good use of the name he was given by his mother, regardless of his true origins? Whether he was inhabiting the soul of a dead boy or a living boy, he had made it his own now. And maybe he was not unlike all other people in that respect, part human, part fabrication. Part ghost, part living being. Part real, part invented. Existing mostly in the minds of those around him, his family and friends, his fellow inhabitants in the city where he lived. He claimed a place in their imagination. A semi-successful, semi-failed individual with a complex narrative which was perhaps a little in the vein of fiction itself, something you want to believe rather than something you have been told to believe.

She was sitting on the black-and-white chair in the bedroom when he announced that he was leaving. He had found and bought that chair for her in a basement junk shop. It had come from a notorious Berlin café which existed in the late 1890s and which was considered respectable only before noon. The chair was painted black, with striped upholstering and a grip for waiters built into the frame. The name Café Bauer was written underneath the seat and it was mentioned in the famous novel called Effi Briest. They had seen the film. It ran for years in the city. Its portent of family betrayal had not entered their minds then. But they could remember the remoteness with which the characters spoke to each other, and the heartbreaking voice of Effi, after she was banished by her husband, saying: ‘I hate your virtue.’

Dressed in a towel after a shower, she sat sideways with her arm over the back of the chair. In the weeks since the revelation about Gregor’s identity, the innocence had been taken out of their eyes. The lightness had gone out of their language and when they reached each other with words, they were tinged with sharpness, accusation, doubt. Everything seemed to have been said before. They felt the weight of history dumped on them, subverting everything she believed, his lifeline, his survival, his entire credibility as a person. Each time they spoke to each other, the emptiness seemed to enlarge. Christmas was an impostor, a pageant re-enacted to postpone the inevitable.

‘You want me to leave, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Now you’re trying to blame me,’ she said. She was speaking in that laconic, disconnected tone, as though she was the only person left in the world. After all the arguments, she spoke with exhaustion in her voice, not even looking in his direction but at the foot of the bed.

‘You want to be able to say that you were driven out.’

‘I can’t stay,’ he said.

‘The only way you’ll sort this out is by finding out the truth, by going to speak to your mother.’

Mara had some problems with her health at the time, an ache in her joints, possibly from being bitten by a tick in the mountains that summer. She was on medication for it and sometimes had to stay in bed.

‘I’ve got this invitation to play in Toronto,’ Gregor said. ‘I think it would be good for us both if I went away for a while. I want to sort this out. I’m going to get the proof.’

In the meantime, he had teamed up with a new band. He had met an Irish musician by the name of John Joe McDonagh, and there was some chemistry between them, going back to the basics with blues, jazz, folk. After a lacklustre response to Gregor’s compositions, he needed to engage in something more real. John Joe had come to Berlin in a cheap car bought in Holland, parked it outside a bar in Kreuzberg where it remained as a billboard where people left messages under the windscreen wipers until it was towed away.