Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘He certainly brought the music with him,’ Uncle Max said. ‘Aren’t you lucky you have found such a talented boy.’

The room went silent. Shocked glances flashing between their eyes, searching the linguistic tilt in the words. An atonal melody left hanging in the room, refusing to fade out.

‘He got it from his grandfather,’ his mother responded. She was indignant. She had a worried expression on her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Uncle Max said. ‘I thought he knew.’

‘Knew what?’ Gregor blurted.

Gregor’s mother burst into tears and left the room. His father became angry, standing up and moving towards the door.

‘What the hell are you saying? Why do you come here to upset her like this?’

The evening came to an abrupt end. An atmosphere of crisis all around the house that night. Gregor remembers hearing his parents talking in raised voices in bed. He remembers not being able to sleep and going downstairs while they were still discussing things, wandering around the house in the dark and coming across the mirror in the hallway, looking at himself and not finding his own reflection, wondering if there was another version of himself that was being kept from him.

His mother explained the following day that Uncle Max was not right in his mind. She placed her arm around him and said Uncle Max was starting to imagine things. She blamed the ill treatment and said he had begun to ramble and say things that didn’t make sense.

Instead, she told him a little more about his grandfather Emil.

‘He could remember the words of every song,’ she said. ‘Even English and Italian songs. You’re very like him, learning songs on your guitar. He was known in every bar and could drink for free anywhere he went. That was his problem, Gregor. That’s why he was separated from my mother. All the women loved him. When he sang, they sighed and had tears in their eyes.’

Gregor was distracted from his enquiries.

‘Everybody wanted him for their birthday parties,’ she said. ‘He even got invited by the military to sing at a party for Hitler’s birthday. And maybe that’s why they were so enraged when they discovered he was tricking them all the time.’

There was nothing more said about Uncle Max. A forgetful old man. But not so forgetful, it seems, because he sent Gregor a package on his birthday almost six months later. His birthday falls on the second of June, the date on his passport, on all his documents. On his seventeenth birthday, Uncle Max sent him a recording of Jewish music. Gregor was more interested in pop music, but he listened to the raw energy of the record, trying to extract some meaning from this gift. It contained a coded message, a virus that became slowly more active with each playing.

On the cover, there was a picture of men in suits, standing under a tree in summer, holding their instruments and smiling at a dog lying down asleep nearby in the shade. There was a card alongside bearing the words, ‘ Good luck with your music, Uncle Max. ’ The affidavit of a delusional man who never came back to the house again.

They walk slowly along the edge of the field towards the lake. They leave barn doors wide open and the swing still going to and fro a little in ever reducing motion. The afternoon is moving on at the same pace, never coming to a complete standstill even after it appears to have come to rest. They have reached a wall of poplar trees with their tambourine leaves, jangling high on the breeze. They have stalled to look at the sunken roof of a wooden hut which has begun to fade back into the landscape. They look back in a sweep of one hundred and eighty degrees to the orchard and the farm buildings and the forest beyond. They can already hear voices from the lake, and the splashing. They talk and laugh and remember and move on. What else can they do now but talk and remember and swing back and forth, suspended along the axis of their own lives?

Mara wears her sun hat and carries a basket containing cake and coffee, everything including silver forks and a tea towel to spread out on the ground. As they move on, Gregor picks up a long blade of grass and turns it into a green reed between his thumbs. He brings it up to his lips and produces a familiar, boyhood country call.

‘Do you remember how Daniel was afraid of that sound?’ Mara says to him.

Memory is like stored energy which has not been spent yet. It comes to life in family folklore. It produces a special kind of identity, like all things collected among people to mark the time they spent together and the times they have been apart. The photographs, the treasured objects, the family medical records, the entire composite of shared experience. They recall the time when they were camping in the mountains and Daniel had no idea where that sound was coming from. He imagined a monster, a prehistoric bird, with a great serrated beak and scaly talons. Ran straight back into the arms of his mother and she laughed, telling him it was only his own father making silly noises with grass.

A shrill echo comes back from the lake. Daniel has taken up the signal and decided to answer with his own croaky screech. A long extinct crane with luminous eyes. As they move closer to the lake, the grass cries converge. Father and son once again making their signature calls to each other across an imaginary distance.

When they come in sight of the lake, Daniel is hanging from one of the trees above the water. His naked body ready to drop, screeching like a boy with legs kicking out in mid-air, penis and testicles dangling free like exotic fruit set in black fur, holding on to the branch until his hands can no longer take the strain and he lets himself descend into the clear water below with an exaggerated splash. Juli comes out of the lake and stands with her body gleaming. Her breasts shimmering and her pubic hair shaped like a black steel arrowhead, pointing down. She picks up a mobile phone from the bank, throws back her head to get the shower curtain of hair out of her face. A mist of tiny droplets fills the sunlit air around her. She turns round towards the lake to say hello, then listens, looks at the caller number before throwing it back onto the grass again. On her lower back there is a piece of body graffiti, also pointing downwards. She dives into the lake again and disappears.

Thorsten is standing some distance away under a tree with Johannes. They have made a boat out of twigs, father and son both crouching in the same posture, same physique, same square buttocks, same belly and bony chest, only thirty-odd years is the difference. They squat down to launch the ship on its maiden voyage. Johannes calls out to his mother in the middle of the lake, lying on her back with her round balloon belly floating on top of the water. A lost beach ball, inflated at the naval, drifting away so that somebody will have to swim out later and steer it back to shore again.

Daniel’s head comes up with the bark of a seal, shouting, overqualifying the beauty of the water, telling those who have come late to get in as quickly as possible.

‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ he says, his green legs dancing a warped foxtrot under the surface.

Mara shouts back, removing her clothes as though she will never need them again after this. She takes a giant evolutionary step backwards, becoming fish. She is naked all at once. Just one brief moment of involuntary sexual lingering as she steps out of her underwear. Her body is strong, healthy, and as she walks into the water, no signs of age can be noticed. Only two small incisions in her right breast for biopsies. An ash-grey bruise on her thigh. She sinks into the lake and floats out with hardly a ripple.

Martin cannot wait to fling himself into the lake after her. He jokes about how much water will be displaced by his body. He hops around, darkened by foreign holidays, trying to get his foot out of his trousers, dragging a bear trap behind him before he finally frees himself. He throws himself into the lake with a splash that sends waves across the surface, reaching a new high watermark along the dusty trunks of the willow trees at the edge.