Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

Against the wall stands the sideboard, with neat stacks of letters on top. Each pile bound together with a ribbon and marked with a small card. Letters from Uncle Max. Letters from Gregor. Letters from people on the far side of the Berlin Wall. Magazines from the sixties. Gregor’s school reports. A box full of rubbers and pens and nibs and jars of ink that have gone dry by now. A sharpener and a glass jar full of colouring pencils.

‘Look, your records,’ Mara points out. His first collection of albums. There were posters on the walls. Bedroom graffiti. Music scores. Notes taken down from books at a time when there were so few words in his life he could trust.

There, too, the photograph of his grandfather Emil, laughing. A tall, handsome man, thin as a pin, standing in his uniform before he went off to the First World War. Alongside it, the other photograph of the same man in later years, almost unrecognisable, after he had put on so much weight. The fat man who lifted him up on the truck and gave him the red sweet to eat right away and the other green one to keep for later. All the recurring dreams of searching for that second sweet and never finding it. All the unanswered questions. All the gaps filled by his own imagination, guessing what was out of reach.

After Gregor went back to live in Germany, they found the door of his cottage in Ireland wide open. A young boy wandering around the fields by the shore on the east coast discovered that it had been abandoned and reported to his parents that the German was gone. The boy had heard him playing the trumpet a number of times in the distance and spoken to him on occasion on his way home from school. He had asked him questions and Gregor had told him that he was from Berlin. The boy was impressed by the fact that he had played in bands and said he would love to go and hear him play, but he seemed too young to be allowed into bars at night. Instead, he managed to get Gregor to play the trumpet for him one afternoon outside the cottage. But when he went back again on another occasion, he found the door open and nobody inside. Cats had got in and already sniffed over everything to see if there was anything left to eat. The place was unoccupied, only a few books left behind, and some newspapers, nothing of any value, just enough to indicate that the place had been inhabited up to a particular date and then suddenly abandoned.

Did this Irish boy remind Gregor too much of his own son? Did he perceive in these random meetings, all that time and all the conversations which had been lost with Daniel? The innocence. The admiration. That loose way of talking without obligation.

The local people wondered what brought him to this remote place by the sea. They said he kept to himself pretty much. They often saw him cycling to the train station and they heard him playing the trumpet and some of them said it was like a miracle growth promoter, because it was great for the roses. What was he hiding from? they asked themselves. And what made him disappear so suddenly, dropping everything and leaving without a trace? Some of them got it into their heads that he might have been a war criminal. They must have uncovered his hideout and he was forced to find himself a new sanctuary, possibly in South America. Older people, better at guessing his age, knew that he would have been too young to have taken any part in the Second World War. So maybe he was more a spy, from the East German state.

His colleagues at the basement recording studio in the city shortened his name to Greg. They don’t remember him being all that reclusive. He had a quiet sense of humour and could make people laugh without changing his expression. He made a name for himself writing clever jingles for radio ads. He had a lot of trouble with his teeth and used to swallow painkillers with his coffee. In the pale basement where no daylight ever penetrated, where the air was full of smoke and static, people lived on biscuits and takeaway food. Noxious curries that were left lying around on the floor by the mixing desk to be found by the late-night cleaners.

One of his molars had been giving him trouble for years on the road. He said he could well understand why cowboys in the American West used to have all their teeth removed before they went out to work on the ranches. And possibly why they sang sad songs to the longhorn cattle all night to stop them from stampeding. A rotten tooth was like the enemy within.

He sat in agony one day, holding his jaw, and finally decided to go to a dentist. One of his colleagues recommended an old dentist in the suburb by the name of Eckstein. He had regular appointments from there on, stopping off on his way home. The dentist took on a reconstruction job, sorting him out after years of neglect. His gums were in a terrible state, red and inflamed with periodontal disease.

‘Your two front teeth are already as long as your legs,’ Eckstein said.

The dental practice was on the main shopping street, above a TV and hi-fi shop. The door was green. An old, dusty green that people no longer use, except on garden sheds. The buzzer automatically let Gregor in each time and he walked up the stairs with the green carpet and the scent of disinfectant in his nostrils. Every time he arrived up the stairs, Eckstein would come out and usher him into the waiting room, saying his assistant was off ill. He would sit down on the leather sofa and stare around the green walls, listening to the sound of the water drill working in the room next door. On the walls, a number of strange art objects, giant shells and molluscs made of wool and wax and other substances that turned out to have been produced by the dentist’s daughter.

After a number of visits, Gregor began to suspect that the dentist had no other patients. The waiting room was always empty. He never heard any other voices. He had the feeling that Eckstein was only pretending to run a busy practice, keeping him waiting, making all the usual drilling sounds, telling some phantom patient to chew on the other side for a day before finally coming to show Gregor into the surgery.

Eckstein did all the talking, while Gregor stared out through the blinds at the upper windows of the house across the street which had no glass in them and where the pigeons were flying in and out, nesting in the upper rooms. Gregor’s mouth wide open, forced to be silent, while the dentist told him how he came to Ireland from Poland before the Nazis came to power in Germany. Some of his family had made it to America but his grandparents and most of his cousins were killed in the camps. When he was finished, Eckstein spent a lot of time clearing up his equipment, still talking, saying he would love to go to America to visit all his Jewish relatives, but he could never take the time off. Eventually he would say: ‘That’s it for today,’ but they would keep on talking for a while longer, because there was no other patient waiting. With a swollen cheek, drooling from the corner of his mouth, Gregor told his own story.

Gregor asked what the treatment would cost, roughly, so he could prepare himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ Eckstein said. ‘The bill is never as bad as the toothache.’

Eckstein fitted a crown and when the treatment came to an end, Gregor felt like the last man ever to sit in that chair.

Some weeks later, the trouble started again with the ache coming back in the same tooth. Every time he got out of bed and stood on his feet. A constant throbbing as he walked along the pavements. Vibrating like a tuning fork every time he played the trumpet. Gregor felt he had gone to an incompetent dentist who had done a bad job. He had paid and would have to go back to get it put right.

‘You cannot have pain there,’ Eckstein said. ‘There is no nerve left in that tooth, Gregor. You cannot be experiencing pain in a tooth that is dead.’