Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

In the Pinguin bar, people still come here to pay homage to their era, listening to the sounds of their own time, recalling moments of great potential and adventure. For a few hours late at night, they can still imagine the world being a big arena, full of undiscovered places. They reimagine their own innocence and their own big-eyed wonder. A poster of Elvis in his tight, glittering white suit just inside the door. A reign of icons all along the walls. A black-and-white Telecaster guitar propped up at forty-five degrees on a ledge over the doorway like a musical anti-aircraft weapon. The decor has not been touched up since the high tide of punk in the eighties when people like Bowie and Depeche Mode came here regularly. The toilets are the same. Same plastic sofas. Same Formica bar, dotted with cigarette burns. In the corner, the same bumper car, rescued from some carnival, come to a halt for the night and turned into a table surrounded by bar stools.

It’s not a live-performance venue, but once in a while when the mood strikes him, Gregor picks up a guitar and sings ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’. A question they all ask themselves. One of the other patrons at the bar doing air drums on the counter with his hands. We are never more than the sum of our aspirations. Three-minute peaks of clarity in which everything seems possible. He has become a playlist of those temporary successes and failures, a man who has left no significant mark on the culture tree himself, but who has been a witness to a time in transformation. He has gone through all the self-searching profundity, wondering if anything was achieved in the end. He has been through the mental hall of mirrors and come out the other side. The man with no answers. The man with no explanations.

Since he has come back, he looked up some of his old friends in the music business, but most of them have moved on to other things. He still plays a few gigs around the city, but he gets most of his satisfaction from teaching now. He’s happy to teach everything from Chopin to Cobain. The students love him because he gives them real gossip about the music scene, how they lived and how some of the most famous songs were constructed. He’s got himself into trouble once or twice with such gossip and parents have phoned up the school in outraged tones, wondering if some of it is appropriate. He drifted into a conversation with his students one day about the cult of groupies and starlets around some of the great legends. Told them about one woman keeping a lock of hair from each one of her conquests. Another young woman who made a plaster cast of each rock star’s penis. When they asked him who had the biggest, he told them it was Jimi Hendrix, by a mile, and then the principal started getting the heat from the parents. But in the end, he defended Gregor and said it was all part of the education of young people to be aware of what their forefathers did, not only in the Second World War, but also in the great madness of the post-war era of protest and cult worship.

One of the band members Gregor played with years ago in Berlin had taken up a job working in a school for disabled children. He goes there now and again to play the trumpet for them and he can see the music instantly taking shape in their reactions, maybe the best audience he’s ever had. He has accompanied his friend taking one of the older children out around the city, shouting under bridges to hear the echo, sitting in a café with fizzy apple juice, listening to the profane joy of slurping sounds, when the straw reaches the end of the glass and there is nothing left only ice.

Mara surprised him late one afternoon at his apartment. Left her bike in the courtyard. Stood in front of his door carrying a basket with a bottle of wine and the ingredients for a salad. Heard music on the piano coming from inside and decided to wait there, listening until it came to an end. When she rang the bell, it turned out that he had a student with him.

‘Just give me a few minutes,’ he said.

So she waited in the kitchen until he was finished and ushered the student out. When he brought her into the living room, she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, an embrace that was like an inverse measure of the distance between them. She gave him the news, the family gossip. She told him that she had brought a salad and some wine. Stood looking around, taking possession of his environment, examining the guitars he had standing in each corner, commenting on the brightness of the apartment. The tall balcony doors were open and the voices came in from the tables outside the bar in the street below, as though he still needed the protection of public spaces around him.

He explained to her that the student he had been teaching could hardly play music at all and was suicidal. It was clear that he would never become a musician, even though his heart was set on it.

‘Terrible to see a young person like that,’ Gregor said to her. ‘He’s unable to keep a beat. He tries his best, sticking his tongue out all the time as he plays, but even after an hour we’ve hardly got any further really. He’s like somebody with a learning disability. I see him twice a week, but I can’t charge any money for it. We’re making some progress, I suppose. Slow progress, and maybe that’s good.’

She listened to him talking and walked around picking up some of his belongings as if this was the highest, most intimate contact achievable between two people. She saw his passport, his medication, his diary lying open with all his meetings entered in. In her hands she examined the Russian icon. Then she picked up the souvenir harmonica. Even blew a childish note into it and reclaimed, with that one gesture, all the impetus of their former lives together.

And maybe this was the moment of immortality, the moment where they began to convert each other back into real people. Nothing is real in the end, not until it’s reported. Nobody is real unless they have a witness to their lives. We exist only in the imagination. We may inhabit the physical world, we may be flesh-and-blood creatures in this material place, but it is along the axis of imagination that we come to life. We can only coexist, at most, reflected in the blur of human interaction and media events around us. Gregor Liedmann has been brought to life by Mara, by his family, by the external story created around him, existing only inside those experiences he has shared with others. These are the ingredients of his identity, his narrative, that strange human genius of belonging.

And maybe for the first time ever, with Mara in the same room, he was standing in the real world. While she walked back into the kitchen and took out plates and wine glasses he finally stopped being a ghost. While he watched her slicing radishes into minted white coins, while she smiled and lifted up her wine glass in both hands, both elbows on the table, he felt for the first time that he was at home.

They’re washing the dishes now. The remote clatter of pots comes down the hallway from the kitchen along with their voices. Bursts of laughter drifting through the house as they stack plates and slip cutlery into drawers. The doors of presses opening and closing, and glasses ringing. They are not laughing at anything in particular, nothing that might be remembered later on, only laughing for the sake of it.

At the other end of the house, Gregor, Mara and Daniel are going through the contents of the house in Nuremberg. She unties a green ribbon around a package of papers containing nothing but lists. Big childish handwriting, a series of words sloping down along the page. Another list saying thank you for the ‘sweets, pencils, rubber, folder, Gregor’. A further list of things to do. ‘Fold up my clothes, brush my teeth, say my prayers, go to sleep, dream about ships’—all ticked off. A list of names. ‘Thilo, Gudrun, Marlies, Werner, Wilhelm’, with Thilo and Marlies crossed out. Followed by another list of objects on a birthday wish list, such as ‘mouth organ, a torch to see in the dark, a telescope, a book about outer space or stars, a book about bears, not any sad book about animals, not any book about losing a rowing race, thank you’.