Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

How could she tell him that this was not his own son? How could she destroy that fragile story of survival by telling him the truth?

Maybe there is no such thing as returning. It’s impossible to go back to what was before, like undoing war, like repairing history. After the Berlin Wall came down, after the euphoria of instant love in the streets, it became clear for the first time how far both parts of the same country had drifted apart in the intervening years. The people in the East seemed more eager and more in love with new things, less cynical, less cool. They had their own ways of being frugal and stocking food, their own idea of bargains, their own kind of intelligence and their own damage. They spoke the same language but with different meaning.

When Thorsten first met Katia in Berlin amid the celebrations, they knew instantly without having to say very much that he was from the East and she was from the West. It was part of the attraction that when they spoke to each other in German, they still had to translate some of the expressions. There were different words for so many things, different concepts, different superlatives. As they fell in love and got married, they created a new family language of their own. Their work forced them to spend time apart. Long before they moved to the farm, Thorsten spent a year as an intern in Bremen while Katia continued teaching in her home town of Köln, so he often had to commute home in his spare time to see her and the baby Johannes. Life moved on in large sections of time and he could hardly catch up before he had to leave again.

When Juli recently had to go to Istanbul for a funeral, she was away for two days and it seemed to Daniel like an eternity. After a few hours it felt to him as though he might never see her again. Walking through the streets of a different city with thousands of other people around her, she seemed to belong to those who laid eyes on her at that very moment. That same evening he discovered he could not remember her face. He tried to visualise her smiling at him, but his imagination lacked the ability to recreate the features which had become so familiar. He could remember all kinds of vivid parts of her. The kinetic texture of her skin as she slid into her jeans, the imprint of her nipple in the palm of his hand, the curve of her neck, but not her face.

Perhaps the face is too much of a disguise. Something which is constantly in motion, a story unfinished, a mask, a representation full of incoherence and guessing, more in the realm of fiction than fact.

When Gregor returned to Berlin after his long time abroad, there was a familiar tension in the architecture, in the sound of the underground doors closing, in the echo of street names. The city was still full of excitement and confusion after the Wall had come down. He felt like a tourist and an inhabitant at the same time. Everything reminded him of Mara. He could see her face, like a portrait accompanying him around the streets. For years he had not had any dreams at night. He wondered if all that brain activity had stopped or if he had got out of the habit and suppressed them. Back in Berlin he found himself waking up once more with an overflow of illogical imagery in his head. Whole movies full of strange, half-material, time-travelling realities. He saw Mara vividly in his thoughts, in every crowd, on every platform. Merely walking down certain streets brought back random images of great intimacy, highlights re-enacted with great precision in his memory. Insane, unrepeatable moments which seemed more real now than when they actually occurred. He recalled standing in the doorway of a bookshop with her one night on the way home from a concert, a hasty, insurgent act. He even found himself going back to see if the bookshop still existed, to see where they had stood once in a different time and where he had almost left his trumpet behind. It was enough to push him beyond the boundaries of memory, back into the physical world. Never before had he felt so much alive in the present, with his feet on the ground, living in the real world of touch and taste. Her presence was everywhere. He could clearly recall the rounded shape of her lower lip and the sound of her breath beside his ear. He could recall inhaling the scent of her hair and the height of her head and the unique angle in which he had to lean down towards her face.

She had almost become too real. When they began to meet again, there was an awkward distance between them, as though memory could never catch up with reality. Painful reunions in which things would have to be said first and explained, apologies made before that gap could be closed. There was a duty to make up for lost time and to convert themselves back into living beings. After such a long time, he had to put the absence behind them before they could exist in the same place on earth, breathing the same air.

His solitude had become an obstacle. He was afraid of her forgiveness, afraid of her loyalty.

‘I’ve left it very late,’ he said to her on one of those occasions when he invited her to go for a walk with him. There were things he had to say to her which were difficult to say while she stared into his eyes across the table of some café, so it was better to walk with both of them looking ahead in the same direction at the path in the forest.

‘I don’t really deserve your company,’ he said.

‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’

He had expressed his regret before in letters. But these words needed to fall between them, out loud, in her presence.

‘I’m sorry that I ruined everything for you,’ he said.

‘You made it up to your mother,’ she said. ‘That’s important to me. You and Daniel are talking, that’s what matters most.’

What really mattered was that he had come back, that they were walking side by side, that his physical presence was also a confirmation of her life.

‘I still believe you,’ she said to him with a great surge of emotion. ‘I have always believed your story, Gregor. I never doubted it. Even though I never found the proof, I still believe that you’re Jewish and that you were an orphan.’

He was shocked by that declaration. It was her way of saying that she still loved him, but instead it sounded as though she loved an effigy, a story, a version of Gregor that had existed in the imagination long ago. He could not get himself to say anything, and maybe he had gone beyond caring about those things. Her devotion to his story seemed to distance them, preventing them from being together without judgement, without that ancient duty to establish an identity, to explain, to say who you are. It was as if life was always merely some kind of confirmation of status rather than just a flow of air and words and time and careless love between people. Perhaps she had become more of an obstacle in the meantime, keeping them apart with her obsession with the past.

He started going to a late-night bar called the Pinguin. He could not get out of the habit of staying awake, spending time in this half-light, under the mirrored globe hanging from the ceiling. A big disco sun rotating continuously, sending yellow pennies of light circling around the walls and bottles and faces, sweeping across the floor and leaping onto the seats.

He has become part of this late-night shrine of rock himself now, the hall of has-beens, the place in which everything has gone by, eclipsed by cultural innovation accelerating into the future. The world has rushed on into a new set of obsessions. When Gregor was growing up, the planet seemed like an enormous place, full of sections all devoted to staying apart with their own culture and their own separate identities. North America was far away. Peru was unimaginably remote. The past was close behind, was the phrase from a song which described how everyone felt. Nowhere is far away now. Even the most distant places in Alaska are on everyone’s doorstep, over-filmed, over-reported.