Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

Perhaps he fits in best here with all the other ageing anarchists and draft dodgers from the late sixties. All those stone throwers with long hair and beards and dirty fingernails who turned their backs on their parents and shook the country by the neck and then settled down eventually to become parents themselves. The true veterans of sixties optimism, the anti-Vietnam War brigade who shook off militarism and authority. Flower-power people who blurred the boundaries forever between men and women during that golden era when craziness became a virtue and things took on an inspired, meaningless beauty of their own.

Many of the people around here have also travelled a lot, collecting cultural idiosyncrasies from around the world before returning to live in this semi-eccentric, semi-chic and ethnically mixed suburb of Berlin. It’s a district full of borderline people who never fully gave up their anarchism. Musicians and actors and activists and socialists who altered course at one point or another to become second-hand clothing merchants or furniture dealers or tea specialists or small-time importers of rugs and African art, goods that cannot be had in mainstream shops. People who worked as tour guides all over South America and Indochina for years and then came back to start up quiet businesses which would allow them to stay at home and have a late family, but not look like they surrendered. Anything but orthodox medicine or law or public service. People with a trail of marriages and relationships behind them. Like the man in the organic cheese shop who studied architecture and had two girlfriends at the same time and could not make up his mind between them and ended up losing both. Like the lesbian mother in the hairdresser’s with the Virgin Mary in the window who has one child from each of three marriages. Like the owner of the second-hand furniture store who sits at the back of the shop playing his electric guitar all day until a customer comes in and he has to switch off.

Every city has its cultural and ethnic frontiers. Up on the main street, he lines up at the checkout in the Turkish supermarket with women in headscarves. Mothers who are unable to correct their own Berlin-born children in the host language, mothers who cannot tell the difference between hazelnuts and chestnuts until they hear the words in their home language. Turkish men outside on the benches talking and touching each other gently at the elbow to make a point with the same care and affection that they give to aubergines or apples. Families together on benches in summer drinking tea. The edgy tension of young Turkish men and the throbbing Eastern beat blasting out from a car. He hears the impact of their culture taking shape in his own language, a cool kind of slouching, immigrant slang that has taken hold in the city.

He has become part of the older generation, replacing the war generation that went before them, soon to be replaced themselves by new generations of fathers and mothers from all kinds of places, sitting on the little wall watching their children in the sandy playground at the side of the church. They once grew vegetables in this church-yard during the war. Now the children dig in the sand with little spades. Voices of children echoing around the streets. Lots of children everywhere and cool fathers pushing buggies with iPods to mark the progress of generations going forward all the time and everything becoming younger and newer and more modern than anyone ever thought possible.

And maybe this is the right time to start reclaiming his memory. His wife Mara still wants him to search for things that might place his true origins beyond doubt.

Lately, they have been meeting for coffee, setting off on their bikes, sitting in the Greek restaurant with a candle between them. She arrives round at his apartment carrying a basket of fruit or a cake, holding it with a flat hand underneath. She’s usually dressed up with earrings, ringing the bell and running her fingers through her hair. Her bicycle has been left outside his apartment frequently, locked up against the railings in the inner courtyard overnight. She appears on his balcony, watering the flowers. All these outward signs of intimacy must mean something. Their lives are far more relaxed now. They have become more accepting. They have reached a point where they can live with contradictions. They can surrender to a cheap pop song, for instance, which they might have switched off when they were younger and more uncompromising about the kind of things they allowed themselves to be shaped by. Now they can look back at a lifetime without accusation. Perhaps even with fondness, nostalgia. They can now calmly go back and sift through everything again.

Why does Gregor remember that moment in the truck so well, more than any other? Why is everything else such a blur, before and after? Sometimes he cannot distinguish between his memory and what he has been told, between what he experienced and what he has read in books. He is made up of all those things that he has heard about and read about. All the things he rejected as much as the things he accepted, what he believed as much as what he didn’t believe.

This journey in the truck remains a real memory. A concrete recollection. No question about that. Gregor recalls the pictures of his grandfather at home when he grew up. The innocent appearance of Grandfather Emil in uniform just after he enlisted in the First World War, that boyish idealism before battle. He remembers the photographs of the bloated, beer-drinking grandfather, much later at the start of the Second World War, that mischievous smile for which he was so well liked.

He can remember him singing, or humming, as he drove the truck. Even though Gregor must have been half deaf with the ear infection, he could feel the vibrations broad-casting through his chest. He will never forget the warmth of this man behind him, letting him drive the truck. And maybe it’s so vivid in his memory now because that journey came to an end. In the middle of the night, the truck stopped and they had to get out, with the blanket over their heads now to hold off the rain. Is that the reason why he remembers it so well, because he wanted to get back on the truck and never get off again?

He cannot remember when he ate the second sweet, because he has no memory of a green sweet, only the red one. He thinks he lost it, because he searched for it in his pocket. He doesn’t know how it went missing.

Are the happiest memories always overshadowed by loss? Just as the bad memories must be counterweighted by good times? Maybe this missing boiled sweet is somehow caught up with the larger loss which cannot be accessed any more. It replaces all the missing people and places and events that he has forgotten. Even as an adult, he still has the recurring dream of finding the green sweet in a place where he never looked before. Some inside pocket he forgot to check.

He can recall very little else from that night. He must have fallen asleep in the truck, because the fat man woke him up, calling, ‘Gregor, Gregor.’ Again and again he heard his soft, singing voice, two descending notes that will forever be associated with the journey being over, the cruelty of waking up with a pain in his ear and the time in the truck coming to an end.

The fat man opened the door and the cold morning air came in. He lifted him down and helped the woman out. He had to stay with the woman, because the fat man had to go elsewhere. He promised to be back soon, that much he could understand from his gestures alone. The fat man smiled and held up a fuel canister, shook it to show that it was empty and pointed down the street. He saw him getting on the truck and driving away. There was a house on fire at the end of the road, he remembers. The rain was falling and the flames were going up into the sky at the same time. The sky was orange. The fire brigade was standing in front of the house spraying water through the windows. The woman took him into the train station, where they waited, wrapped in the blanket, with lots of other people in the same room and steam rising from their wet clothes. They waited and waited and waited, but the fat man never came back.