Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Uncle Max drew into himself.

‘Then he started helping people. And that was dangerous. Emil wouldn’t listen to me. When all those refugees started coming from the East, he started doing things for non-profit, do you follow me?’

The clues began to fall into place.

‘Your grandfather—if I can call him that—he went to get your mother and bring her to safety in the south. She had lost all that she had in the bombing.’

‘Am I an orphan?’ Gregor asked.

‘Emil didn’t tell me everything,’ Uncle Max said. ‘The Gestapo were on to him. It must have been one of the husbands who came back from the front who pointed the finger at him.’

He explained how he had managed to get some more fuel and how they were ready to move on. They had arranged to meet, but then Uncle Max was arrested by the Gestapo.

‘They questioned me for a long time. They wanted to know where you had come from. They kept asking me if you were Jewish.’

‘If I’m Jewish?’

‘Yes,’ Uncle Max said. ‘They suspected you were Jewish.’

Gregor felt like a fraud, an impostor dwelling in the human frame of another person. He didn’t know how to react, with fear or with rage. How could he ever return home again? How could he ever take part in the fake family that had been created for him? How could he live in this country any longer, in this language which had been imposed on him? He didn’t belong here. He had no contract with this country.

‘I told them I didn’t know anything, but they started beating me.’

Uncle Max began to descend into his own fear once more.

‘You must believe me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell them where Emil was hiding.’

They were in such a hurry, right at the end of the war, Uncle Max explained. They had to use torture to try and get the information they wanted. He didn’t describe the details, but the proof was there in his missing eye.

‘I swear to you, Gregor, I didn’t tell them.’

‘I know,’ Gregor said, trying to reassure him.

This was everything that Uncle Max needed to hear. Somebody had come at last to take his suffering away. Gregor had become the bystander, taking all the information home with him. Already he was maximising each tiny detail inside his head.

It was late at night when Uncle Max took him to the train station. He bought the ticket and got him a pretzel for the way home as well. He told him to take his best wishes to his mother. He asked Gregor what he was going to do when he grew up and Gregor told him that he had made up his mind to become a musician. Uncle Max clapped his hands together and said that made him so happy to hear that.

‘You’ll be like your grandfather, Emil,’ he said. ‘One of these days I’ll see your photograph in the paper.’

On the platform, Uncle Max smiled and waved. As the train pulled out, he took his handkerchief from his pocket and held it up to his good eye.

Even on the train coming back from Uncle Max, with his bike strapped to a hook, he knew that he was leaving. With the night landscape of early-summer fields rotating by his window, he thought of the big atlas on the wall of his classroom moving in the breeze. He thought of schoolboy theories of people moving forward on trains, travelling faster than the speed of the train itself. Of being able to see into the future as the train curved round a bend. Of theo-retically being able to wave out the window to himself if he ran fast enough from the front of the train to the back. Of the discovery that there was only one thing faster than the speed of light, and that was the speed of thought. He was going back to put his parents on trial. He would expose this fabrication of home with which he had lived for so long and define his real origins at last. He would become a separate being, an individual, with an identity of his own.

As he got off the train and made his way through the familiar suburbs in which he had grown up, there was a triumph in his walk. Limping with his broken bike, he had outgrown this place.

His mother stood in the kitchen showing her anger.

‘Where were you?’ she demanded.

‘I went to see Uncle Max,’ he said, and he could not help an involuntary grin erupting on his face.

‘You what?’ she returned with a sigh. ‘Now why did you do that? He’s suffered enough, that poor man, without you tormenting him.’

‘He told me everything,’ Gregor continued. ‘I’m not your son.’

She looked him in the eyes, then turned away. He watched her ironing a shirt, trying to give it a factory neatness. He accused her of not paying attention, until she said: ‘I’m listening all right, go on,’ urging him to get it all off his chest. He made his speech, going through the scant facts, adding all that he had surmised on the train. He didn’t speak very well because he was nervous. Concentrating hard, jumbling his words like an inarticulate child. He reached blank areas in his knowledge and began repeating himself. Ran aground with lack of evidence and blindly accused her of deceit.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said with tears rising.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘That I’m adopted,’ he said in despair. ‘You’re not my real mother, are you?’

She sat down with her apron covering her face, hands trembling, suppressing an agonising cry that seemed to come from somewhere else in the room, a distant wail, far away in a different street. Her weeping was an admission.

When she finally dropped the apron from her eyes, they were red. She coughed to clear her throat, turning round to Gregor, unable to find the starting point to explain her life.

‘I’m so sad now,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

Gregor didn’t know what he wanted any more, further information or just comfort, reassurance, love.

‘Poor Max,’ she said. Then she stalled again, shaking her head, reliving the events as though they had never gone away. ‘You had no right to visit him and put him through all that again. He’s never got over it. Still living with all those ghosts, still suffering from what they did to him back then.’

Gregor waited.

‘I never blamed him,’ she said. ‘I never accused him. He just kept trying to convince me that he never said a word.’

‘But he didn’t. He said he never told them anything.’

‘It destroyed him,’ she said coldly. ‘Losing his best friend like that, having to tell where he was hidden. He denies it, but why did your grandfather Emil not survive the war? How did he disappear? That’s what he cannot answer.’

She came over to embrace Gregor, but he moved away. Called him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘dear Gregor’, as though she was writing him a letter instead of speaking to his face.

‘Uncle Max has lost his mind now,’ she said. ‘He’s going insane with it. I tried to help him after the war. We gave him the old apartment here in Nuremberg, but he became impossible.’

She seemed calm now. Either she was telling the truth or else she was a brilliant actress. Had she inherited the gift of cunning from her father? Had she rehearsed this answer for years or just spun it out honestly?

‘My darling, Gregor,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe a word of what Uncle Max tells you.’

Her endearments were condescending. Her denial brought out a helpless rage in him, thrashing out accusations. She told him to calm down and said he shouldn’t say hurtful things.

‘Please stop,’ she said. ‘Right now. Don’t let this fantasy get any louder in your head, not one more minute.’

And when he continued, clutching at suspicions, she merely spoke over him, turning him into a child.

‘You have no idea what things were like in those times,’ she said, with a finality that excluded him from voicing any further opinion. He had no answer to that. He came from a generation with no experience of war, only questions and attitude and conscience.