Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

When his father came bursting in from his study, they spoke about Gregor as though he was not even in the room, ganging up as they always did, loyal to their own generation, defending themselves against attack from the outsider which he had become.

‘He’s been with Max,’ she said. ‘He’s got it into his head now that we’re not his real parents.’

His father flew into a rage.

‘How dare he?’ he said. ‘I’ve a good mind to go straight over to Max. With my gun. Silence him for good.’

He marched in a state of war around the living room underneath all the dead animals, making a speech with a tremor in his voice.

‘Are you accusing your own mother of being a liar?’

He listed off the great hardships of their lives, the balance sheet of survival, how they saved and worked their backs off so that he could enter a life of choice and luxury. His mother had done everything after the war, when Gregor’s teeth were grey from malnourishment, keeping everything going until he returned from the Russian camps. She hardly had anything to eat herself.

‘Skinny as a knitting needle, she was. I want to show you something,’ he said, taking Gregor’s hand and forcing him to feel his mother’s knees. ‘She spent half a lifetime on her knees for the Americans, just to keep you fed.’

Gregor had been shamed. A coward defaming his own family.

‘Just think of what you’re doing,’ his mother begged.

Gregor was torn between pity and anger, between forgiveness and rejection.

‘I’m Jewish, isn’t that right?’

‘What?’

It was the final test.

‘This is outrageous,’ Gregor’s father said.

Gregor had never heard his parents say a bad word about Jewish people. Professionally, at least, his father had nothing but respect for them. He had started his apprenticeship in accountancy with a Jewish firm in Berlin until the Nazis came to power. He always said he had learned everything he knew from Jewish people.

‘I’m Jewish,’ Gregor said once more. ‘I know it.’

‘Gregor,’ his mother said, going across the room to win him over with an embrace. ‘This is insane. I love you more than anything in this world.’

Her love was frightening. He was afraid he would suffocate in it. A possessive, claustrophobic, killer love, strangling him slowly until he could not breathe any more.

Gregor ran to his room. While they went into the kitchen and continued talking, he collected a few things together in his rucksack, took his bank book with all the savings, his passport, some of his books, his guitar, a number of cards he had written out with the most memorable lines of songs.

He chose not to leave them a note. That could all be done later. Instead, he stood in the hallway with the bag on his back and decided on one last heroic act. He found himself striding into his father’s study and taking out one of the hunting rifles from the glass case, the one with which he was meant to shoot his first deer.

Gregor had begun firing practice at the age of thirteen, an essential skill, according to his father, like learning to drive. In a factory warehouse belonging to a friend, they set up a firing range and held competitions which Gregor soon won. His father said he was a born marksman. But target practice was nothing like shooting the real thing. Nothing like those hunting prints all over the house. Nothing like the sound of a gun discharging right beside him and the echo wrapping itself around the trees and the sight of a life-less animal on the ground with its eyes still open. Gregor had seen the blood around the fresh bullet hole. He had heard his father talking about this sacramental moment, the great ecological balance of nature.

Gregor had carried that same gun through the forest, pointed downwards, with the knowledge of the wild in his bones, listening to every shift in the undergrowth. Every footfall. Distinguishing ground noise from aerial noise. This is where the faculties of hearing and vision evolved many millions of years ago, when vibrations turned into sound, shadows into sight. It was here that Gregor’s musical ear received its most intense training, in this minimalist auditorium of creaking trunks and sibilating leaves. But with the afternoon lantern light coming through the trees, he allowed the deer to escape. He aimed the gun, shot in the air and watched the animal leaping away.

His father said he could not believe he had missed it. His migraine returned with great ferocity. Blinding zigzag patterns. Kaleidoscope eyes. Along the way back, there was no friendly hand on the shoulder. It was the end of all that companionship in the forest.

Now Gregor stood in the door of the kitchen holding that rifle in his hands once again, pointing at hip height. It was no way to hold the gun. His mother looked up in shock. She was ready to become a martyr at last.

‘I want you to tell me the truth,’ Gregor shouted.

His eyes were fixed. The rifle gripped much too firmly in his hands, knowing how worthless the truth was when it came by force.

His father must have believed it was impossible for him to die. After all his miraculous escapes in the war, he rushed forward with great anger, ready to take the rifle away from his son.

‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You have no idea how to use that.’

Gregor was determined to prove him wrong. He turned the rifle at the door of the kitchen. Pulled the trigger and shot at head height through the wood. The room jumped. The crockery sang. The cutlery droned inside the drawers. Great vacuous blasts of aggression came back from the walls, slapping their faces, shouting at them to wake up. The sound filled the entire house like a deafening curse, so foul and so saturated with bitterness that it left a hole in the wood and lumps of plaster all over the kitchen counter. The top half of the door was scorched and the spice of the explosion spread like the pungent mixture of mustard and mint and cigars and used matches. They swallowed. His mother whispered the words, ‘For God’s sake.’ Their mouths were dry, incapable of language. The gap in the door became the only organ of communication between them. A screaming mouth. It must have crossed their minds to say it was a miracle that nobody got killed, but such was the irony of the thought that nobody uttered it. They stood there, with the lingering gunshot hum still fading away, absorbed in their clothes and their hair and their skin. Gregor disappeared almost without anyone noticing. He took on the shape of a ghost. With his mother and father left behind in the kitchen, erased himself out of memory and out of existence.

Years later, Mara discovered that spot where the bullet had lodged in the wall of the kitchen. It had been plastered over and repainted, hardly noticeable. And the hole in the door where the bullet had passed through had been replaced by a diamond-shaped piece of stained glass. A practical, aesthetic solution to take the place of the mute family mouth blown into it by the gun.

In his absence, Mara continued to keep in touch with Gregor’s mother. Each time she and Daniel went to Nuremberg, they came back with a new piece of information, a memory of Gregor’s childhood, a photograph of him in the lunar canyons of post-war ruins. Family details such as Gregor’s attempt to grow an apricot tree from the kernel in his room under lights. How Gregor had once organised a home-made raffle in the neighbourhood and ended up giving the prize, a climbing rose, to his own mother. A moment when his father was fixing the car, leaning down over the engine under the bonnet, when Gregor got into the driving seat and blasted the horn, frightening the life out of his father and bringing the bonnet down on top of his head.

Daniel developed a great fondness for his grandmother. They played cards, late in the evening. An uncomplicated relationship in which a grandparent can play the role of temporary guardian without choreography, without wondering how Daniel might be affected by her influence. The result was a wise, funny, companionship between them which had none of the normal family obligations attached.