Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

‘Why don’t you tell us where he is?’ she heard them say.

She tried to obscure the voices by speaking, calming herself as well as the fear she saw reflected in the boy, rocking him back and forth. And when she began to hear the voice of Max, turned into the helpless cries of a child, she began to sing softly. Even if the boy could not hear a thing, she hummed in his ear. He was fidgety and would not settle down. She tried cradling his head in her lap, but he kept getting up and pushing her away and then moving close again. Whimpering for a while and stopping and then remembering to cry again, louder than before.

She found some bread and tried to feed him, but he shook his head. She hummed more forcefully in order to obscure the terror of intimate screams coming down the corridor, stripped of all dignity. Cries beyond endurance, beyond submission, on the extremity of reason, close to death and sometimes almost beyond death itself, but all the more desperate to hold on. Inflicted by men whose confirmation of life came from the debasement of life. Whose self-esteem came at the expense of dehumanising others. Whose merciless skill in keeping people on the edge of life had become their only validity to power.

She could hear nothing any more. She remembered something and began to search in the boy’s pockets until she found the sweet, the green sweet he had been given by Emil and told to keep for later. She took it out and placed it in the boy’s mouth. It calmed him down right away and she rocked him while he sucked on it and stared with his eyes open into the dark.

And then it came to an end. Quite suddenly, she heard them running through the corridor. For a moment she thought they were coming back for her. But they ran past, out into the street. They left behind a crushed silence that went on for hours. She thought it was a trap and could not gather the strength even to call out his name, to say: ‘Max, are you all right?’ She feared the ugliness of human suffering. She feared his silence. Heard nothing until some time near dawn when American soldiers burst in, pointing rifles, finding her sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a boy fast asleep in her arms.

She was standing in the street when they brought Uncle Max out on a stretcher. The medics must have given him something to stop the pain, but his face terrified her and she didn’t want the boy to see any of this. She turned his face in towards her with both hands, almost suffocating him in her coat. Max held a stained cloth up to his eye, and then leaned up on his free arm to speak to her. A cloudy cough, full of gurgling, broken words, spilling blood and saliva down his chin.

‘Emil,’ he said. ‘He’s with Gertrude. Down at the lake.’

It was only years later that she could talk about this to Mara. Details that emerged bit by bit, as though they were in danger of bringing back all the pain once more. The American soldiers questioned her briefly with a translator interpreting her words. They escorted her to a villa close to the lake where Getrude lived, but it was too late and the unfolding events could not be recalled.

The Gestapo officers had gone to the villa in the early hours. They had found nobody there, only the signs of recent occupants, the smell of a cigar, an empty bottle of wine and two glasses. An unmade bed. An old woman, Gertrude’s infirm mother asleep in another bedroom. Max and Emil’s plan had been uncovered earlier that night. The canister of fuel was of no more use to them, so Emil made an alternative plan. Over the last farewell toast with Gertrude, he knew it was time to escape, this time by boat. He would not leave his friend behind, but Gertrude implored him to go before it was too late.

She made up a white flag for him. She went down to the wooden fishing pier with him, to where a small canoe was tied up waiting. They embraced and looked across the lake to where the Americans were, confident that Emil’s white flag would be clearly visible but also afraid they might not take any notice. He was in German uniform after all as he pushed the small boat out from the pier, wobbling a good deal from side to side before he sat down and began to row silently away into the darkness across the calm black water. She stood there until he disappeared out of sight.

Mara has been to visit the town and the villa. There are very few people from that time still alive now. She went to the railway station and stood in the waiting room. She saw the public house on the main street, but the owners had changed hands right after the war, serving schnitzel and hamburgers, converting to a disco bar late in the evening. What used to be the police station had been turned into a fitness centre with kick-boxing classes, extended for weightlifting at the back.

Down by the lake, the town had spread out along the shore with cafés, restaurants, jewellers and designer stores. A pizza restaurant with the smell of charcoal coming from the oven. The lake had become the high end of the town and some Americans still lived around there, even though the US troops had pulled out of the area. As she walked out along the lake, Mara heard children speaking English with an American accent. They were bouncing on a trampoline and there was a small dog underneath barking. She watched as the children lifted the dog up onto the trampoline, but the dog jumped off again because he preferred to bark and jump on solid ground.

The lake was not round but more kidney-shaped, with parts of it wrapped around the forest, disappearing from view. It was hard to get to the water in many places because the land was owned right down to the shore, but she found a place in the forest where she could stand and look back at the town from the other side. There were quite a few sailing boats out, even though there was little wind. They were almost stationary, with their sails flapping. Back in the town, she could see a sailing club with long windows onto the water, reflecting the sun and throwing the light into her eyes.

Standing on the shore, she worked out that he must have rowed straight towards that point where she stood. She wonders what happened. Did he lose the white flag? Did the moon come out suddenly from behind the clouds to expose him?

He must have seen the orange glow of cigarettes in the trees behind him on the far shore, but how could he be sure they belonged to the Americans and not to the Germans. Was he not rowing to his own death all the time? Ever since he woke up in the field hospital after the nightmare of screaming women in the First World War, he had lived in the minds of women, in the optimism of his songs.

It was a fatal decision. With all eyes and all military binoculars scanning every inch of water, it was a bad choice, but fully in character with Emil’s life, to risk everything on that final gamble. At some point, a shot must have rung out across the lake, though it could hardly have been distinguishable from the gunfire reaching right into the town and through the streets until it was all over at last.

His body was never found. He must have slumped over in the boat. The oars must have slipped out of his hands and drifted on the water to go their own way, turning up in different parts of the lake, on a reef or a sandy ledge, depending on the currents and the direction of the breeze. Who knows where his little white tea towel went to? His weight must have taken him over the side of the boat, like somebody asleep in a chair. He must have gone silently into the black water and left the boat rocking for a while, leaving it to drift around for days, possibly even arriving right back where he had started from.

Later, Mara searched through some of the books written about that time. One published in Great Britain covering the very end of the war and the immediate aftermath. While glancing through illustrations and maps, she came across some photographs. One plate held her attention, a black-and-white shot of the body of a large man lying face down in the water. His head was not visible, submerged in the silted water. His trousers had come off and his grey buttocks could be seen, above the surface. The caption underneath read: The corpse of a German soldier.