Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

The others intend to follow later. In the meantime, Mara is pointing out some of the war damage on the farm buildings. Facing east, on the outer wall of the barns, they can see the holes in the bricks. The bullets have taken chunks away, leaving shards and dust in a red line on the ground along the wall. Nobody has ever swept it away. At the corner where the artillery fire blew large gaps into the side of the barn, it has been repaired with yellow brick replacing the original red ones. The farmhouse itself got the worst of it, almost completely destroyed because the red roof offered such a perfect target. And the barn where the horses were burned alive is still standing as a ruin with no roof.

Martin is smoking a cigarette. So calm is the afternoon that the smoke rises straight and he even manages to blow an effortless smoke ring, making the air seem interior. His sunglasses make him look like a dragonfly stopping to reflect, staring into the distance at the forest on the far side of the field.

‘That’s where the Russians were,’ Mara explains, ‘in those trees.’

‘Us Russians over there,’ Martin says. ‘And us Germans over here.’

‘It took them eight days, apparently, to take over this farm.’

Mara says there were seven German soldiers holding out here, to the last man. The fire came from the trees, day and night, with intervals in between, waiting for the artillery. One night, the Russians sent a young man over to steal his way into the farm, but he was caught by the Germans and when they searched his rucksack they found nothing but a book by Pushkin. He was held hostage, but the Russians eventually swept over all these farms with the sheer force of numbers, even though they suffered great casualties. A minimum of sixty Russian soldiers were said to have fallen in the fight over this farm alone. By that time the house was in ruins and there was nothing much left to defend, but the Germans still refused to surrender. The farm was conquered eventually. The Russian intellectual was found dead and the two remaining German soldiers were taken into captivity before the army moved on in the race to Berlin.

Thorsten’s aunt had fled as the battle over the farm began. Every edible animal had already been slaughtered to provide food for the front, some of the horses turned into sausage. She wasn’t even allowed to take one of her own horses and had to join the thousands who were fleeing to the west on foot. And then she soon found herself overtaken by the advancing army. The war was effectively over and she decided go back to try and hold on to the farm which had been in her family for hundreds of years. But that was her mistake, because she was then at the mercy of a new war of looting and rape. In her twenties at the time, only recently married, alone facing a wave of revenge.

‘It must have been horrible,’ Mara says. ‘They tied her by the neck to the pump.’

And when all that was over, she was forced to defend the farm once again during the GDR times, because it was sequestered by the socialist state. After she and her husband had managed to rebuild most of the buildings, the state took possession and ran the farm while they fought to be allowed to live there. They were offered work at a printing firm in Leipzig, but refused to leave, saying they would kill themselves. Eventually they were kept on as labourers on their own farm. And each day, she must have walked past that pump, trying to forget the memory of those dark moments. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that she finally managed to claim back the farm and then handed it on to Thorsten.

The farm is a bit of a mess now. Maybe it was always like that, even when it was in full swing with cattle moving in and out and the grain being stored in the lofts and the sweet smell of manure all around. It’s a place where nothing was ever finished. Some of the old farm machinery is still lying around, idle and rusted now, like the horse-drawn soil leveller with its thick, heavy wooden wheels and a seat for two people to sit on while driving. Everywhere, items waiting to be taken away or put somewhere else. A car wheel leaning against the wall of the house. A pile of yellow bricks left by the side of the grain store, and further away, a stack of grey slates intended to fix the roof damaged by a storm when the chestnut tree lost one of its branches. Closer to the house, there is a stack of logs and an axe leaning against the wall. Somebody must have decided it was time to have a go at getting the wood ready for the fire but then got distracted and considered something else to be more urgent.

The yard is enclosed in a rectangular shape by buildings on all sides, leaving access to the fields at each corner. Everything seems to have moved on and left this farm behind now. A barn owl comes in the late afternoons from time to time to sit on the roof or in the plum tree at the centre of the yard. The weeds are growing everywhere and maybe nature may yet manage to have the last word.

Could the old fairy tales be coming back? Or did they ever disappear? Once a year in a nearby village, the women wear their traditional dresses, claiming that the legend of Red Riding Hood sprang up here centuries ago. They have marked a place in the forest where they believe a small girl in her red cape was abducted on her way to see her grandmother. Was there something darker about the original story that made it too difficult to tell in any other form but in a fairy tale? Is it possible that the tale of Red Riding Hood was invented in answer to sexual predators of the time, and that the wolf became loaded with all the unspeakable crimes of society? Just as some people now believe the story of the seven dwarfs was based on child labourers working in the mines. Mara has seen the women in the village, around fifty Red Riding Hoods of all ages gathering together. They march into the local bar and order schnapps. Old and young women in red hoods, celebrating the day when the predator was defeated and ended up in the well with a meal of rocks in his stomach.

‘Thorsten was brought up in Berlin,’ Mara says. ‘Katia told me that when his mother was taking him to school on the S-Bahn, they used to pass by the Berlin Wall and see the soldiers and the dogs below them. He would ask her questions and his mother would answer them quite honestly.’

She reconstructs the surreal conversation which Thorsten and his mother had going to school, with everyone on the train listening to the banal, but absolutely correct answers.

‘Mama, why are the dogs there?’ Thorsten asked.

‘To stop people going over the Wall,’ she answered.

‘What is the Wall there for?’

‘To protect us from the capitalists, son.’

‘Who are the capitalists?’

‘People who love money.’

‘Do we not like money?’

‘No,’ his mother answered. ‘We hate money. It makes you sick. It makes you want to buy nice things.’

Mara says there was nothing that anyone listening in on the train could argue with. But the innocence of the questions and the answers must have sounded absurd, mocking the entire socialist system even if what she was saying was absolutely bang in line with Communist dogma. The clarity of the child’s questions and the simplicity of the mother’s answers always revealed the lies inside the system.

‘Are they all sick over there?’ Thorsten asked, pointing across the Berlin Wall to the other side.

‘Yes,’ his mother would answer. ‘They’re all sick over there because they want to do nothing else but shop.’

It went on for weeks like that, his mother answering every question correctly and innocently, everything going along with a socialist view of the world, but all the passengers listening in knowing that the answers sounded completely daft.

‘What did the other passengers say?’ Martin asks.