Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

They avoided the obvious questions of fidelity. Of course, Gregor would meet other women. The music business was full of drifters and casual adoration and promises of uncomplicated love. It was hard to discuss it on the phone and too blunt to put into letters. The conversations were tough and tearful enough as they were. So they maintained that proxy, long-distance marriage which so many immigrants and seasonal workers all over the world live with all the time.

The only way of getting closer to Gregor now was to go back to Nuremberg. She took Daniel with her on these visits and rebuilt a family relationship from the evidence of ruins. It was soon clear that Daniel meant the world to his grandmother.

‘Look,’ she said, smiling at the boy. ‘He’s the image of his great-grandfather, Emil.’

Mara looked sceptical.

‘Before he got fat, that is.’

They placed the photographs alongside Daniel’s face. A strange family science, comparing eyes and cheekbones and mouths, wishing the resemblances to life.

With all this added attention, Daniel became fond of his grandmother. They formed an immediate friendship, perhaps actively encouraged by Mara so that she could spend more time investigating. A family spy, hoping to uncover some vital piece of information. She took Daniel to the funeral of Gregor’s father when he died. And in the following summer, while Gregor’s mother was grieving, they often stayed over the entire weekend, even going up to the mountain lodge where Gregor and his father used to spend so much time when he was growing up.

Mara had taken Daniel to see Gregor’s father in hospital before he died. And maybe the time had come for an open discussion. Perhaps Gregor’s mother had only been obedient to some post-war pact with her husband and would now be in a position to reveal the real story. As they became more familiar, Mara brought up the subject of Gregor’s origins more directly.

‘Why would he have made up a story like this?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘Only Gregor can tell you that.’

She ran into a dead end each time. It was depressing to find nothing at all. They went over the war years and Mara noted every detail in her head, often writing things down afterwards in a notebook. Then she would send letters off to Canada again, though Gregor refused to get into the circle at all and said he was not joining a history club. What amazed Mara during these long discussions in Nuremberg was how close the story of Gregor’s mother tallied with that of Gregor, apart from the one essential fact. He was not an orphan. His identity was clearly that of a German boy, an only son, who had grown up in Nuremberg and began to fantasise about having a different life.

‘Strange,’ Mara would say. ‘Very strange, don’t you think, that he would have made up such an elaborate story?’

‘I blame Uncle Max,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’

‘For what?’

‘For putting all that stuff into Gregor’s head.’

‘And why would he do that?’

‘Because he was going mad. Because he was guilty. Don’t ask me. All I know is that Gregor started becoming obsessed with himself, looking in the mirror, asking endless questions and imagining things that were completely outlandish.’

Mara was conscripted by this family duty, not so much for Gregor’s but for Daniel’s sake, bringing a lost family back together. She was charged with the task of establishing Daniel’s true identity, even if Gregor’s was beyond reach already.

Sometimes she felt the futility of all this. Was your identity not something you chose, as much as something you rejected? Characterised by those elements you admire as well as those you deny. Daniel’s identity was not so much inherited any more. It had little to do with religion, with history or with geography, even less with his place of birth or his ancestors. His identity was something in the making. Already, Martin was taking Daniel to football matches, buying him a blue-and-white scarf, giving him a feeling of belonging in the city, a family of inhabitants, a spooling of emotions into one large unlikely commune.

She found herself walking around the house in Nuremberg, imagining Gregor when he was Daniel’s age. She observed the reactions of her own son to the antlers on the walls, the guns lined up in a rack behind glass, the hunting prints depicting dogs and men jumping out of bushes to pounce on a wild boar with gleaming tusks. The unimaginable height to which a heavy wild boar could jump to get away from his pursuers. She noticed that, just like his father, Daniel was afraid of the stuffed badger on the landing, until Gregor’s mother finally agreed that the claws looked a bit threatening and placed it somewhere else.

Everywhere the household items that would have been so familiar to Gregor. Were they not part of his identity as well, the fridge, the TV set, the shape and position of the radiators? The visual content of his memory, the logo of family possessions and home smells and peculiarities. The radio in the kitchen on top of the fridge. The carved wooden pastry print with the faces of Max and Moritz on the wall. The piano in the living room with the pictures of Emil above. The ring of glass trinkets and vases and ornaments on the sideboard every time somebody walked by. Even the handprints and finger marks around the light switches.

She wondered what it was like to have no identity, the loneliness of belonging to a people who had no disguise.

In the hallway, there was a full-length mirror which Gregor had told her about, how he stood there and imagined where he came from in the East. His mother confirmed that he had always been an insomniac. It may have had to do with the antlers. Or maybe it was the clock chiming every half an hour in the living room.

Gregor used to get up and wander around the house at night, creeping down the stairs so as not to wake his parents. He knew every creak in the floorboards. He had to reimagine all the furniture in the dark so that he would not crash into the coffee table or the sideboard. He took fright at the shape of animals on the wall as if they were not quite dead yet. A speck of light coming to life in the eyes of a dead deer. The grimace of a mountain goat. The antique hunting rifles hanging over every doorway. The coat rack in the hallway like another set of antlers with coats hanging down like dripping skins. And the shoes and boots left just inside the door which always made it look as though his parents had evaporated.

‘He used to stand in front of that mirror at night,’ Mara said.

‘I know that.’

‘He told me that he would see no reflection in the dark.’

‘Naturally.’

‘He stood there wondering if he existed at all.’

And when the dawn came up, Gregor would see himself coming back to life again slowly, along with all the other dead things around him in the house. Gradually the image in the mirror would gather light and he had the feeling that he came from nothing.

There was something unwelcome about Uncle Max. Gregor remembers his mother being quite nervous whenever he came to the house and his father remained aloof, even hostile. His presence created an uncomfortable tension and everyone was relieved afterwards when he was gone. A quiet, introverted old man who was not actually related, only called Uncle because he was a family friend. Perhaps it was his physical appearance that made him seem so grotesque. Uncle Max was missing one eye and his false teeth didn’t fit very well, so he smiled awkwardly and lisped and spat across the table whenever he spoke. Bits of food occasionally landed on the tablecloth at dinner and Gregor remembers the fascination and revulsion of watching his mother discreetly sweep away some offending morsel or hiding a stain with the jug. On top of that, his missing eye wept frequently so that he had to wipe away the discharge with his handkerchief, and perhaps it was that sad appearance that made everyone feel afraid of him.