Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

He tapped at the crown, dabbed it with a swab of ether, compared it to other healthy teeth which instantly sent an icy chill shooting into the roof of his mouth.

‘It’s only a stump,’ he kept saying.

‘I’m not making this up,’ Gregor said. ‘It’s killing me.’

‘Tell me exactly where the pain is,’ Eckstein asked.

Gregor pointed at the crown.

‘This is impossible,’ Eckstein repeated. ‘It is physically impossible for you to have pain there. Unless it’s a phantom pain, like an amputated leg.’

There was nothing Eckstein could do. Gregor left again, but the pain returned. He was back to swallowing painkillers. He went back, telling the dentist that the pain had shot up into his eye. Eckstein carried out more investigations, even going so far as to remove the crown and replacing it.

‘I can take it out if you like,’ Eckstein said finally. ‘If it’s giving you that much trouble. Maybe I can put in a bridge instead.’

Gregor began to suspect that Eckstein had done all this deliberately in order to keep his practice going. He couldn’t bear to have any more work done. He decided to try and live with it. Pinched his cheek sometimes to distract from the pain. And finally, when it got so bad that he could no longer endure it, he went back one more time to get it extracted for good.

Around the same time, the news was out that the Berlin Wall had come down. In the TV shop downstairs from the dentist, Gregor saw the pictures of people standing on top of the Wall duplicated twenty times across the various screens. Again and again the same images of people driving through the barriers, embracing, drinking champagne, while bewildered border guards stood by. The first section of the colourful Wall being removed by crane, reminding him of his own imminent extraction. He put his finger on the buzzer and walked up the stairs along the green carpet. This time he was not asked to go into the waiting room and the door of the surgery had been left open. Eckstein was sitting in his own dentist’s chair, reading the newspaper.

‘Have you seen this?’ Eckstein said.

‘You mean the Wall?’

‘Yes,’ Eckstein said, slapping the paper. ‘You must go. You should be there, right now.’

‘It’s hard to believe all right,’ Gregor said.

‘If I were you, I’d be over there like a light. I’d go myself but for the practice here. Can’t let my patients down.’

He pointed at the pictures. He didn’t get up and Gregor never sat down in the chair again. They never talked about the tooth and it was never extracted.

‘You have to go home,’ Eckstein said. ‘You’ve got to be there to see this thing happening.’

The first Mara heard of Gregor’s return was a call from the nursing home in Nuremberg. Mara phoned to see how Gregor’s mother was getting on and was told by the nurse that Gregor was there with her.

At that point, she could no longer tell the difference between him and Daniel. She was very frail and her mind was going. She didn’t speak any more, only looked up to see who was in the room. They were all present when she died. Gregor, Mara and Daniel. A rainy night in autumn. Rain that stopped and left the chestnut trees outside the hospital stained in streaks of liquorice black. A strange reunion, sitting around the bed, watching her last moments, holding hands, all four of them in a circle, free-falling like parachutists and finally letting her go. They stayed on after she was gone, sitting without a word while Mara cried. They embraced each other in that great emptiness with the long, final breath still lingering like an inaudible whisper in the room.

Coming back is the hardest thing. After such a long time away, the moment of return seems awkward, mistimed, only half fulfilled. It’s not easy to step back into the physical world, to feel the substance of life rather than the dream of life, to match up the touch world with the inner world. The returning partner has become a ghost, a shape in the imagination, a desire, a longing waiting to be converted into reality.

When Gregor’s father returned from Russian captivity after the war, he was unable to feel anything. He had learned to suppress his dreams in order to survive the extreme hardship of the prison camp. He had watched other men succumb to the heights of longing and turned himself into an expert at wanting less, a denier of desire, a brilliant underestimater, sustained only by what mattered most, the thought of his wife and son waiting for him.

After his release, when he found his wife in Nuremberg and finally walked in the door, it felt like a fake. The embrace seemed unreal. It was too much to believe and he was unable to enter into his own luck, could not understand how he was still alive while millions of others had died. He hardly noticed his surroundings: the table, the two chairs, the stove and the bed at the opposite end of the single-room apartment. There was no sink and the water had to be carried from the bathroom on the landing. And although these alone were luxuries beyond his imagination, he could only see what had been lost and what needed to be improved. She seemed in shock as much as she was in happiness, cried repeatedly and tried to smile, thanked God for bringing him back and said he looked very gaunt. He remained in a kind of waiting room, like a deep-sea diver spending mandatory time below the surface to decompress before being permitted to rise up.

Gregor stared at him constantly. He knew how lucky he was to have a father, to be crushed in his arms with misjudged force. He was excited to see this man shaving and sitting down at the table, eating bread slowly, chewing with a blank expression. He listened to him coughing, watched him lighting up a cigarette, examined hands, ears, nostrils, taking everything into his belonging with such eagerness that his mother had to tell him to stop, to give his father some time. He saw him taking off his shoes to rub his feet. Saw his big shadow cast against the wall of the room by the lamp on the table. Watched him getting into bed with his mother, taking his own place beside her, while he lay on a cushion on the floor, fully awake. In the middle of the night he got up and stood by the bed for a long time, listening to him breathing, his face only inches away from his own, until his father jumped awake with fright and told him to go back to sleep.

His father told them of his capture, how his leg was caught in a wire fence when he heard the wheels of a tank coming up like the sound of bells ringing right behind him, how he would have gone under those steel straps if he had not ripped himself away at the last moment, tearing into his calf. In a cloud of diesel fumes he received a blow to the chin that broke his jaw. But he was glad of being alive, almost glad of the pain, too, because it meant the war was over at last. His stories of endurance confirmed life, but they almost meant more to him than being alive itself, as though the living sometimes envied the dead. He would always remain more war veteran than father, more soldier than lover.

It was difficult to accept any warmth. It took weeks before she could hold his hand and stroke it. He felt the comfort of her presence in the bed beside him, but he had become so trained on deprivation that he could not surrender to the intimacy of her body or take possession of what he wanted most. They seemed to fear each other and threw themselves into their work instead, substituting material pleasures for the honesty of love. Between them lay the nightmare of war, the bombing, the horrors of the front which he had experienced. He woke up with those intruder memories every night. He felt only defeat, shame, the cramped, airless awareness of being wrong.

They were restored by the ordinary things. By shopping. By walking through furniture shops and car showrooms. By cake every Sunday. They stayed up late at night listening to live boxing on the American Army radio stations. They loved going out to the forests. The innocence of nature. The optimism of children. Gregor at the table doing his homework, writing with his head bent over the exercise book.