Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

If memory has a physical shape, then it must be something like this, Gregor thinks. The interior of the forest with paths leading through vast interconnecting rooms where you can get so easily lost.

He finds himself staring into this large hole in the same way that he would stare at an animal, holding his breath and not moving. It’s like being in the presence of some great elk which will be gone again with a burst of movement as soon as he blinks. Not a sound. Not even the soft transfer of indoor air. It seems to be staring back at him, asking him questions, this bomb which has missed its target. He feels the shock of it going through him even sixty years after the event, the wind suck and the earth shower and the violent tremor underfoot. It gives him the sensation that people must get with a near-miss traffic accident, unable to figure out why they have been picked out by this contorted luck, the only person to have escaped unharmed. Standing beside such a vicious bomb crater, he feels like man living in the afterlife.

The crater itself measures about the size of a swimming pool, ten or twelve metres across but shaped like a funnel, perfectly round, almost like something produced by nature itself. There is a thin layer of branches and twigs lying at the centre. The earth has levelled off at the edges over time. There is an old, damaged oak tree standing next to it, but most of the other trees around it are conifers, reaching up straight. Who knows, maybe those trees were all saplings then or maybe didn’t even exist and the bomb actually fell in an open field, on a clear and starry night, with only the ragged oak tree to witness the thud and the scattering of soil and the thunder of planes receding into the distance.

All over the city and the region, they still find unexploded bombs from time to time, on building sites, on road-widening projects. It’s like a folk memory in the ground. Full of shrapnel. And remains. Lots of remains, buried in shallow earth. The remains of soldiers, men of whom it is hard to tell any more on which side they fought and for what? The remains of people who never belonged to any side. People who have gone beyond pain and grief and hunger and resentment. Beyond memory even.

What the hell? Gregor thinks to himself. It’s probably not a bomb crater at all. He spent long enough in forests as a child with his father to know that this might be nothing more than a dumping pit. People used to dig large holes in order to bury their refuse in the forest. And maybe this is the physical shape of memory, ultimately, a common landfill site. A hole in the ground intended for items that once clamoured to be remembered but then turn out to mean nothing after all.

He continues to collect his mushrooms until he feels he has enough. The basket is almost full, and yet so light in comparison to mass. He turns and traces his way back along that instant map he’s made for himself in the forest. By the time he comes past the crater again, he has already dismissed it in his mind. He hardly takes any notice of it now and doesn’t stop to have another look. Instead, he sees only the exit ahead of him, a small green light at the end of the path where the trees cut off and the fields begin. And when he comes back out into the open at last, he has the feeling of lights coming on again after a power cut.

As he drives on, away from the forest once more, he passes through a farm of wind turbines standing in the fields. Dozens of them spreading right across the flat, open landscape. They stretch out into the distance, all facing in the same direction, gliding across the earth in formation. The ones further away look tiny, but those up close look enormous, casting spectacular shadows across the land around them and towering over the road, making him feel small as he drives right through them. Tall, silent birds on either side, with long white necks, lazily turning their wings. There is very little wind and some of them are hardly moving at all. Some are already completely still while others are settling down as though they’ve just landed.

What is Gregor Liedmann’s first real memory?

A moment at night, in the dark, sitting in the cab of a truck between two people. There is a woman on his right-hand side and a fat man on his left, driving. The woman must be his mother and the fat man must be his grandfather, Emil. There is a pain in his ear, like the point of a sharp knife being pushed right into the eardrum. He wants the pain to stop. It must have been a terrible ear infection, he imagines now, so the fat man smiles and gives him two sweets for the journey, one red one for now, and one green one to keep in his pocket. He has the red sweet in his mouth, a hard-boiled sweet with a special raspberry flavour that he has never had before. He still gets the taste of it when he thinks about that journey, sitting between two warm people, watching the needle jumping on the speedometer. The fat man has two hands on the wheel and sometimes he takes one off to change the gears. He watches the steering wheel spinning free, out of the man’s hands, as they make a turn around a corner until the road straightens out and the hands grip the wheel again.

He knows they are talking to each other quietly over the top of his head, but he cannot hear anything or understand what they are saying because it’s not his language. He can just about hear the fat man calling the name Gregor from time to time and patting him on the head. His name is Gregor now and he is sitting in a truck going to a new place with a red sweet in his mouth, as red and shining as the tail lights on the truck. The woman has a blanket spread out over her knees and over his own knees to keep warm.

Then the knife is back in his ear again and he throws off the blanket. He tries to stand up in the cab to get away from the pain, but the woman pulls him down again. The fat man allows him to hold the steering wheel. He takes him on his lap and lets him drive the truck with his arms around him. He feels afraid at first, but it feels very warm, sitting on the man’s knees with the smooth throbbing of the engine in his hands. The man takes a hold of his hand to place it on the gear lever, under his own hand, while he changes gears. He can hear the cogs catching and the engine sounding deeper. He has worked out how to drive the truck by himself and wants to be a truck driver when he grows up. The pain is gone and the road is straight and flat from there on, but he cannot go to sleep because he has to keep his eyes on the wheel and on the lights shining ahead through the rain and the windscreen wiper swinging from side to side. He never wants to get off the truck again. He wants to keep driving forever. He has to do a pee in his pants and feels the warmth spreading around his legs, but the fat man just keeps talking and laughing.

Gregor is now in his early sixties. He has spent years as a musician living in Toronto and also in Ireland, travelling on a strange, empty sort of journey around the world before he eventually came back to live in this calm suburb of Berlin. His face has become quite familiar here, cycling past the red-brick church with its three spires of differing heights and a set of melancholy bells. He’s often seen shuddering along the cobbled streets with his back straight and his trumpet in a case over his shoulder. He makes his living mostly as a music teacher now. For such a tall man, his bike appears to be a little too small, a borrowed child’s bike. His long legs forked over the saddle as he waits at the traffic lights. On his way home, he usually stops at the café with the art deco furniture to read the paper. He’s known by name in most of the shops. In the bakery with the till inside a glass shrine. In the newsagent with the blues playing all day and the candles lit every afternoon. In the Spanish wine dealer’s and in the bar with the stuffed flying seagull hanging from the ceiling.