Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Uncle Max brought a big silence with him. There was something even more absurd about his chronic inability to speak freely about ordinary things. He asked questions, how Gregor was doing at school, how his music lessons were going. The visit often revolved entirely around that staccato question-and-answer session. ‘Tell Uncle Max about your new piano lessons,’ his mother would say to fill in the space, and Gregor would be left searching for something to report. It seemed like an extraction each time. Gregor couldn’t imagine how it would interest Uncle Max to know the name of his music teacher. His parents were not very skilled at keeping a conversation going either, so the evening with Uncle Max staggered through a series of agonising silences in which everyone glanced furtively around the table avoiding each other’s eyes. His father sometimes let go in a tirade on some current political issue, but Uncle Max never joined in the debate. His mother didn’t allow herself to have political opinions either and when she asked Uncle Max what he thought, he usually gave a neutral answer like: ‘That may be right.’ Sometimes they all got going together on some major road-building project nearby, but the discussion always ran aground. Sooner or later, they would end up looking at Gregor again for relief. Then his mother would ask Gregor to perform something. ‘Play something for Uncle Max,’ she would say and, for a while at least, the room had a communal focus, followed by an applause that made Gregor feel even more self-conscious and eager to get back to his own room. Uncle Max clapped longest and then brought his handkerchief up to his eye again.

Finally, his father would seize the opportunity to end the evening by offering Uncle Max a lift in the car, and then the house could breathe again.

Afterwards, Gregor would ask questions. ‘What happened to Uncle Max? How did he lose his eye?’ But his mother normally answered with one polite sentence.

‘He was treated very badly during the war,’ she told him. Once, she even used the word ‘torture’ but then regretted having said it. She told him that Max had no friends and that’s why she called him Uncle, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

‘You’re not to ask him anything,’ she would say. ‘Do you hear me now? You don’t ask questions like that.’

Gregor’s father could not bear this kind of talk. As far as he was concerned, Uncle Max was another deserter who betrayed his country. And maybe there was some deeper disgrace in his deformities that could never be discussed around the table. Gregor knew that the piano was a gift from Uncle Max, though his father didn’t want to accept it because the family might be beholden to him. And perhaps they were. His mother spoke with regret, as though there was something shameful which brought up an unimaginable pain of her own.

When he was a teenager, she told him about the bombing of Berlin, the flight from the city when Gregor was three years old. How his grandfather Emil came to collect them in his truck, and how she was questioned by the Gestapo in a small village, right at the end of the war.

‘Your grandfather was not a bad man,’ she said. ‘Only dealing in things on the black market, Gregor, do you understand me?’

She didn’t take any pride in the fact that her father had tricked the Nazis. She didn’t describe it as an act of heroism, only bad luck.

‘Uncle Max was Grandfather Emil’s best friend from school,’ she explained. ‘They had all kinds of cracked ideas for getting into business together. They got a delivery business going and during the war they invented a scheme to avoid being sent to the front. It was awful at the front.’

‘Was he a deserter?’ Gregor asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He broke the law and they slapped me and asked me where he was hiding. I was afraid. I’m not very clever. I didn’t have any intelligent answers to give them.’

‘Did he escape?’

‘I didn’t know where Grandfather Emil was hiding,’ she said. ‘Only Max knew that.’

‘Did they take his eye out?’ Gregor asked.

‘You were only a baby,’ she said. ‘You didn’t hear anything. You had a terrible ear infection.’

She stared Gregor in the eyes.

‘What could I do? I was afraid they would take you away from me. I was no good at keeping things quiet. I had to tell them about Uncle Max, but they knew that already.’

After saying it she would suddenly change her mood. She grew angry, regretting her confession. Afraid of the power which this information gave Gregor over her, the ability to hold her to ransom with her own biography. She withdrew into her martyred frame of mind, begging him to stop ‘tormenting’ her with stupid questions for which she had no answers.

‘Did Uncle Max tell them where Grandfather Emil was hiding?’ Gregor asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said in desperation. ‘Gregor, you’re asking me things I don’t know.’

In the absence of hard facts, Gregor began to imagine things for himself. At the next visit, he stared at Uncle Max with open curiosity. The table was set with the usual care. The same ritual silences. The same questions from Uncle Max and the same minimal answers from Gregor. When the conversation came to a standstill, his father took over and spoke at length about hunting events, giving Gregor a chance to examine Uncle Max’s thin features on the opposite side of the table. His hands and his fingernails, the socket of his missing eye. But the greatest sign of torture was not physical at all but his silence.

Uncle Max would be asked a courteous question about his health. He said he was working part-time in a bookshop, but that he might have to give it up. Health was not a subject that interested Gregor, but he was aware enough to imagine that the torture Uncle Max had endured might be impacting on him much later. All through dinner he imagined him calling out for mercy. The only clue to his suffering was in his good eye. A sensitive thermometer of human feelings. It expressed latent fear, or maybe great strength, he could not tell which.

Gregor understood endurance in the face of extreme physical tasks, from cycling and climbing mountains. Games involving survival instincts and inner strength. In the battle with the environment, mental courage was the ultimate challenge, more than the mountain itself. But torture was inflicted with great imagination, precisely in order to edge past that threshold of endurance. The victim was driven to the edge of reason and kept there. A mountain could kill you, Gregor recalls thinking, but a torturer was an expert at keeping you alive.

Gregor was only three years of age when all this happened, but he was present nonetheless at this man’s worst moments. He was a witness and that produced its own pain. The bystander pain. Uncle Max could, if he was strong enough, put the suffering behind him, but Gregor could not. He stared across the table and felt the obligation to reimagine that moment of torture with obscene clarity. He knew it was impossible to measure suffering. But the pain of the witness went on without stopping, because he had no entitlement to put it behind him.

He remembers trying to make Uncle Max feel happy. He told him with great enthusiasm about the new guitar he had bought with his own money. He ran up to his room and brought it down, along with a folder of lyrics which he had collected from the American Army radio station. All carefully maintained with photographs of rock stars pasted in.

After dinner, Gregor performed something on the guitar first, then on the piano. While they sat around the living room sipping coffee, his father smoked a cigar that sent bonfire clouds through the forest of antlers and skulls and grimacing faces. He played Bach. A gust of chords and interwoven notes. When the piece came to an end, he watched Uncle Max take his handkerchief out again.