Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘How long are you going to hold out for Gregor?’

‘You’re right,’ Mara would say. ‘I just want Daniel to have a feeling of knowing his real father, which Gregor never had.’

She was lying to herself. She was lying to everyone around her, including Daniel. She had become obsessed, like an addict, unable to give up the search for something which would always remain nothing more than imagined. Even if she had got used to Gregor’s absence, she could not do without the great adventure of solving the mystery of his origins.

‘You’ve got to be realistic about this,’ Martin said to her at one point. ‘You’ve given yourself a crazy mission. You’ve got to let it go, Mara.’

‘I want to find out the truth, that’s all,’ she said.

‘What truth?’

‘The truth about his real identity.’

‘You mean, him being a Jewish survivor?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s become irrelevant at this stage.’

‘How can you say it’s irrelevant? He could have died in the camps.’

‘Mara, look. His identity is not what he was or what the Nazis thought he was. His identity is the people he’s been living with, but he’s denied them each time. He always ran away from anyone who gave him any sense of identity.’

The relationship never went any further than this argument. Martin felt she was wasting his time, abusing his loyalty. Accused her of merely playing the role of somebody who was following her own free will, re-enacting the ecstasy of sex rather than living it.

‘You’ve become obsessed with this thing,’ he told her. You’re infected by this sickness. You refuse to live your own life, basically, because you want to prove some spectacular hunch that he’s a Jewish survivor.’

‘But what if it’s true, Martin? What if he really is a Jewish survivor? Then I would never forgive myself for turning my back on him.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Martin said. ‘This is like some terminal illness. It’s going to destroy you.’

She was unable to live for herself, which was not unlike most other people, except that her quest had gone beyond life, into an obligation to resurrect the dead. She had become a fake, a hologram, a reflection of history, still hoping that some sliver of proof would bring him back to life.

‘You’re trying to catch moonlight,’ Martin said to her. ‘Look at the story he’s told us. The Nazis had a hunch that Emil was up to something. They started torturing Max and asking him where the boy came from. Maybe there was something about his clothes or his appearance. They suspected this was a Jewish child being smuggled back with the refugees. That’s how Max got it into his head and passed it on to Gregor. That’s how delicate the trail of evidence is, Mara.’

‘They must have known something,’ Mara said.

‘This is it, exactly, Mara. I believed it myself. In the end you are trying to substantiate a suspicion in the minds of these Gestapo thugs. They had this notion that Gregor was Jewish and that notion has led all the way to you. You are trying to prove them right. It’s nothing more than a Nazi fabrication.’

He had gone too far. Gregor, the product of Nazi imagination. The idea was much too hurtful and obscene for her to accept, so they separated after that, vowing never to speak to one another again. It had become a contest, her devotion to herself against the loyalty to the past, her oath to happiness against this oath to identity in which she had become a powerless conscript. Martin apologised to her. Begged her to forget what he had said and allow them to remain friends. Said he could not understand what had come over him and promised never to speak like that again about his friend.

‘Mara, please accept my forgiveness,’ he said.

‘What?’

She laughed out loud. Could not stop herself. She was back to herself again, shaking her fist at him and laughing helplessly.

‘I accept your forgiveness,’ she repeated.

She needed him to make her laugh. But the doubt which he had planted in her mind had the opposite effect in the end, driving her even further into this mission to establish the truth.

There are people who live their entire lives in exile. People who are never at home. Gregor had turned his life into a search for belonging, though it always remained a distant thing, a vague, utopian memory. Maybe luck and artistic timing were against him. When the band in Toronto split up and his friend John Joe went back to Ireland, Gregor drifted once more from one city to another. He made another attempt to go back to Berlin, but it was hard to find the song-line home. He was at odds with his family and hardly recognised his own son. Daniel remained aloof, cool, never showing any emotion or excitement in his reaction to Gregor’s gifts. Merely thanked his increasingly absent father dutifully and got on with his life. The longer Gregor stayed away, the more the distance grew between truth and memory. There was a threshold of estrangement beyond which it became increasingly difficult to go back. And in the end, he always found himself escaping again, this time going over to Ireland, following his friend John Joe to Dublin in order to see if he could start a life there.

What would it take to turn a lifetime of running away into one great returning?

Gregor arrived in Dublin with a mouth organ belonging to John Joe, an excuse for reunion. He wanted to give it back because he knew it was a very special instrument which had witnessed many of their craziest moments together and which had emotional value in their touring history. John Joe had lost dozens of harmonicas, many of them mislaid on his travels, but Gregor knew this was quite unique, with a sweet, gravelly sound, best for bending notes. The worn black plate had the words ‘Cross Harp’ written on it, and the brass vents through which John Joe had drawn and pushed his breath had darkened with time. Carrying this small instrument in his pocket, Gregor was hoping to relive some of the times they spent together. They would remember John Joe bartering with a fast-food vendor on the streets of Toronto once, offering a song in exchange for a hamburger.

But the reunion in Dublin was a disaster. What had been billed in his mind as such a high point, became a colourless event. John Joe had given up the music. He had put all that behind him and become a computer technician. Lived in a suburban housing development on the edge of the city. The houses all had the same neo-Celtic stained-glass panels in the front door. The ceilings were low. There was a deep-fry smell settling in the hallway and the radio in the kitchen competing with the TV in the living room. The glass back door was covered in paw marks where a dog made a recurring appearance in the small yard.

It was John Joe’s wife who answered the door and brought Gregor into the living room stepping past a baby’s buggy in the hallway. John Joe was sitting on the sofa, watching the news. He didn’t get up. Asked his wife to get Gregor a beer. Remained in a position of languid mistrust, as though he suspected that Gregor had come to take him away from his family again. With his legs thrown across the armrest and his neck cushioned by the back of the sofa, he appeared as though he was lying in a hammock. His hand brought the nozzle of a beer bottle up to his mouth, tilting it with his fingers to take a drink.

‘I couldn’t do it any more,’ John Joe said, meaning the music, the late nights, the foreign cities.

He didn’t encourage Gregor to stay. Hardly moved more than once on the patterned sofa and kept his eye on the news as though it was more important than anything else in the world. A remarkable height of friendship had sunk to a remarkable low.

Gregor finished his beer. He held the mouth organ inside his pocket, warmed by his hand, but something stopped him from giving it back. It had become a companion to him, much the same as his grandfather’s brass icon, taken from a dead soldier. He decided to keep it. He left again and walked away with the instrument in his firm grip, knowing that it was more alive, more real, closer to him than the man who once played it could ever be.