Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

They have all returned to the house now, and in the kitchen, Martin and Daniel are preparing the evening meal. They talk among themselves, sharing hints, remembering to cut the fresh herbs but not to crush them. With the stickiness of garlic on their fingers they plan out the sequencing. Mushrooms picked over. Green beans lying on the counter, washed. Rice soaking. Fruit waiting to be cut up into a fruit salad in a blue porcelain bowl.

The meal will be constructed like a stage play, in acts, with intervals and plot. A performance of dialogue and laughter linking everything together. The big kitchen table has already been laid, with candles and a large jug of water with a mint sprig floating on the top. The windows are left open so the wasps that have come in during the afternoon will now make their way out again towards the light. Thorsten tells everyone once more to check for ticks, especially those who have been lying on the ground or walking through long grass. There is a polite queue for the shower. The house has begun to fill up with the smell of cooking from one end and the smell of soap and deodorant and skin creams at the other. Some have taken the time to have a quick sleep. Some have been making phone calls, or sending text messages to a remote world beyond this farm. Thorsten takes a quick look at the news on TV, but the events seem unreal, as fictional as the pale blue light from the screen spreading around the room. Johannes plays a computer game and the blip and drip sounds float through the corridor.

There is a reluctance to turn on the lights. They want to hold on to the available light left in the rooms. They put on fresh clothes. Their bodies have changed indoors, more self-conscious, more exposed, more in need of privacy and personal space.

They look in the mirror for reassurance. They construct their physical appearance in the way that they also compose the way they want to be remembered. A face is not so much a physical thing but a story which unfolds in the company of others, a book of interactions, full of smiles and frowns. They should rehearse a range of emotions in the mirror to get any idea of what they look like in company. They should laugh out loud, grimace, cry, give suspicious glances, dagger looks, send hidden messages. The full catalogue of human expressions.

A clang of serving spoons signals that it is time for dinner and they all emerge. All these faces come together around the table. Martin is wearing a bright blue shirt. Mara has put on a necklace with what looks like a hanging plum. Gregor is now wearing a brown linen shirt and Thorsten has draped a white kitchen towel over his arm to show that he is the waiter.

They sit around the long table in the kitchen and talk about Africa.

‘Have you had your shots already?’ Gregor asks.

Martin talks about a time when he visited Dar es Salaam. At the train station, a taxi driver put his suitcase in the boot of the car and sat in the driving seat while eight men came to push the car three hundred yards to the hotel. He talks about immigrants who have come from Senegal and Guinea, all the way around the coast to the Canaries and on to Germany. In his law practice, he represents an asylum seeker who clung for days onto the rim of a tuna net before he was rescued.

The sun has gone down now, but there is light left in the sky. In the orchard, the ladders are propped up in position, waiting for the big crowd next day. New bottles of wine are being opened. Martin sniffs the wine. Then he sniffs Daniel to bring back the recurring joke. They move in a circle of jokes and facts and anecdotes, a dinner table, web page of consumer advice and gossip. They talk about the closure of the inner-city airport and what an opportunity it would be to create a parkland, an urban green lung, part of the Amazon rainforest reclaimed at the heart of Berlin. They talk about holidays and sport and cooking. They praise the meal. The mushrooms are wonderful. They listen to Gregor talking about how he collected them, how he learned to identify them.

‘I found a bomb crater,’ he says. ‘In the forest.’

‘I’d love to see it,’ Mara says. ‘Is it far from here?’

‘It may not be a crater after all,’ he informs her right away, almost retracting the image again. ‘You know, it may be just one of those dumping pits. Though this one was empty. Right in the middle of the forest, far from any farmhouses.’

‘We could go there early in the morning,’ Mara says. ‘Before they all arrive. Do you think you can find it again?’

‘I think so,’ Gregor says.

And then the argument finally breaks out around the table. It has been brewing all day, all their lives.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Daniel says, confronting his father at last. ‘You’re still leading her up the garden path with this bombing story.’

‘Daniel, please,’ Mara attempts, but she is unable to hold back the debate any longer.

‘You made all that up,’ Daniel says. ‘Why don’t you admit it? The whole thing about being a Jewish orphan. It’s all a fabrication, isn’t that so?’

‘What makes you so sure?’ Gregor asks.

‘Because there is no proof, is there? There never was any proof.’

‘Daniel, it’s important where you come from,’ Mara says.

‘Give me a break,’ Juli snaps.

‘If it’s so important,’ Daniel continues, ‘then why don’t we do a DNA test? Get it over with. That will solve the mystery once and for all.’

‘What,’ Martin bursts in, ‘you want to exhume your grandmother?’

‘If that’s what it takes. I’ve got the money for it and all.’

‘Jesus,’ Martin says, ‘she doesn’t deserve that.’

‘At least it would clear up this uncertainty,’ Daniel says. ‘Look, I don’t give a shit where I come from. All I know is that my father wasn’t around when I was growing up.’

He turns to Gregor, once more, pointing his finger this time.

‘Why don’t you do the decent thing and finally tell us that it was all made up?’

There is silence at the table. Mara gets up. She goes around to take Daniel by the arm. Then she goes around to Gregor and takes his arm also.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I want to show you both something.’

While the others remain seated, she escorts them down the corridor to a room at the end. The house was built to accommodate a family of twelve, maybe even more, two sets of grandparents and perhaps a number of other relatives who came to work on the harvest each year. The last room has been used by Mara to store all the furniture that came from Gregor’s home.

Gregor enters like a child. In one corner by the window stands the round dining-room table and chairs which stood for years in his home in the suburbs of Nuremberg. On the walls, the same photographs of his ancestors which stared down on him as a child. It was impossible to escape their gaze.

‘I took photographs,’ Mara says.

‘This is insane,’ Daniel says. ‘Do you not see what you’ve done to her?’

‘Daniel,’ Mara says. ‘Wait. Be patient for a moment. I want you to see this thing I’ve found. Don’t say anything more until we go through this.’

In front of them is the home that Gregor disowned. The curtains, the rug at the centre of the room, the entire nausea of home come to life. The fatigue in the furniture, the boredom trapped in the embroidered tablecloth, the raised voices, the long sigh of Gregor’s teenage years, the martyred silences, all the false hopes and frail family achievements clinging like a musty scent. Plates and knives and napkin rings. Even some of the antlers. All the worthless objects of a lifetime elevated into a family documentary, containing human breath.

‘I tried to keep as much as I could,’ she says. ‘I’ve gone through all the letters.’