Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Daniel noticed her habits and began to mock his own grandmother in ways that Gregor would never have been allowed. He imitated her accent. He copied the trademark, sing-song yawn that she made from time to time and got her to laugh at herself. He even played tricks on her and put a stuffed otter into her bed one night before she went to sleep, with a hat and glasses on his head. Daniel was good at drawing and passed the time by sketching. He concentrated on gory scenes and his favourite images involved cartoon depictions of chainsaws cutting off legs and blood dripping down the page. People being decapitated. Insides spilling out. Limbs flying through the air after an explosion. A wolf chewing on a human leg. A crocodile with its jaws around a girl’s head. All the stuff that obsessed a young boy. And when his grandmother saw these pictures, she was horrified that Daniel could be entertaining himself with the kind of thing that she had actually witnessed in reality during the war. She was afraid he would grow up and become a killer.

‘It’s very disturbing, I think,’ Gregor’s mother said to Mara. ‘How can he sleep with so much violence in his head?’

‘He’s only exercising his fantasies,’ Mara replied.

‘You don’t know where this is going to lead to,’ his grandmother said. ‘You should stop this before it goes too far.’

‘Better that he draws the stuff than carries it out in real life, don’t you think?’ Mara said.

But Daniel’s grandmother didn’t see the difference between fantasy and reality. She began to hide some of the worst pictures, saying they were disrespectful. And when she saw a drawing of a man with his eyes gouged out, she’d had enough.

‘I don’t want pictures like that in the house,’ she said.

‘But look at all the antlers and stuffed animals,’ Daniel replied.

‘That’s different.’

Mara was eager not to interfere and alienate her. And maybe Daniel found his own way of disarming his grandmother who had already come up with her own solution in the meantime, asking him to stop drawing and rather make a few lists of his favourite things. So Daniel drew up lists of nonsensical things, often with sharp instruments and body parts included, groups of ghoulish items which were more acceptable than the sight of blood and often made his grandmother laugh instead.

Mara was given the cap that Gregor wore for years when he went hunting with his father. Daniel was given a little hunting knife, with a deer’s hoof as a handle. Another time, Mara returned with the letter Gregor had sent from London, saying that he was never coming back. The tone in that letter shocked her and made her feel it was directed at her too. But the collection of family artefacts seemed to bring him closer. She had become a curator. Gregor’s childhood became an archaeology of shards and hints of evidence, guessing, deducing, still hoping to find out the absolute truth.

She once managed to invite Gregor’s mother up to Berlin for a visit. She was getting older by then and Daniel was already a teenager, a tall young man, like his father. It was a shock to her to be back in this city for the first time since the war, but she took a great interest in everything she saw, knowing she could have remained part of it herself if only history had turned on a different plate. The city had changed so much. Trees everywhere, she commented, more than before.

They stood on a wooden parapet to look across the Berlin Wall to the other side. They went to see the house where she had lived during the war before it was bombed. They stood in front of the peeling facade and she remembered fleeing from the city. When one of the occupants came out, Mara rushed forward to keep the door open.

‘Come on,’ she said, encouraging her to go into the courtyard.

Gregor’s mother was reluctant, but Mara took her by the arm and took her right inside. They looked up at the windows of the second-floor apartment where the bomb destroyed the entire back of the building. The trees at the centre of the courtyard had been replaced since then by a young walnut and a cedar which had almost grown to maturity. Mara waited for her to say something, but she remained silent, swallowing her feelings. Mara suggested going up the stairs, maybe to knock on the door to see if the occupants might let her have a look around, but that was going too far.

‘That’s enough for me,’ she said.

On the underground going back that evening, Gregor’s mother examined the passengers. Two girls sharing a plate of pommes frites and ketchup, stabbing them with tiny coloured forks, like a game. A homeless man dragging himself onto the carriage, speaking gently to his dog, politely addressing the carriage to sell his magazine. She gave him money. In the next carriage, there was a man silently playing the saxophone as though he was very thirsty, drinking back an enormous gulp from a long, S-shaped brass bottle.

She was beginning to think of her own death. That evening she told Mara that she had made her will and said she was passing everything over to Daniel, the house, the cottage in the forest, everything, including the savings that her husband had built up. She spoke with some bitterness. She was at the mercy of those she had cared for, the vicarious accumulation of people she had kept in her thoughts throughout her life.

‘He never went to his father’s funeral, so he needn’t bother coming to mine.’

She chose Mara as executor. She left it to her to decide what she wanted to do with the contents of the house when the time came. She wrote down the name of a lawyer friend who would come and take the hunting gear, since Daniel expressed no interest in them.

Gregor came back to Berlin once, but he never went to see his mother in Nuremberg. He only returned to see Mara and Daniel, but even that became like a strange seance in which they stared at each other like strangers across a room. It soon became clear that he hated being back in the city, that it made him feel uneasy, like a ghost or his former self. And she could make no real investment in these rare visits because she knew he would disappear again. It would cause too many tears.

Though it was hard to admit, she realised that some of her happiest moments were spent with Daniel, just the two of them together, joking and talking. When Daniel came into her room on a Saturday morning and woke her up, putting headphones on her ears in order to play his favourite track, she seemed to need nothing else.

She was no fool for Gregor, it has to be said. She decided to get on with her own life and had a number of partners over the years. The companionship with Martin asserted itself when he became a surrogate father to Daniel. Even though he was married with children of his own, she began to depend on him and they became lovers on and off over the years, or was it deep friendship with physical love included, less like betrayal, more like an act of loyalty which spilled over into great sexual need? She wanted the fun of life to confirm that she was living in the real world, not only the imaginary. That human certainty, the affirmation of touch. She wanted to laugh and dance and be watched, to feel the music in her arms and legs, somebody to provide the guarantees of toll-free sex.

At first it was all done in great secrecy. They didn’t want Daniel to be burdened by betrayal, of friendship as much as marriage. But then these things had a way of coming out into the open, and even though Daniel never said much, only to ask one day if she was screwing Martin, he internalised it along with everything else.

Martin’s marriage broke up, though it was heading that way all along and Mara was not the only one to blame. What troubled Martin was that she could never make the emotional transfer needed for them to become real partners. He was careful not to say too much against his friend, but he became impatient with her at times.