Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

Outside the window, the others are passing by now, carrying a small table and some folding chairs. Martin is singing to himself. Thorsten is heard telling the others to bring glasses. At the same moment, Johannes comes down the hallway, standing at the door.

‘Papa says we’re all going to look at the stars.’

‘Tell them we’re coming soon,’ she replies. ‘Just another few minutes, that’s all.’

The boy answers with another bit of adult language.

‘I can well believe that you want to be alone,’ he says, full of innocence, then runs off happily.

Mara smiles. Daniel has become impatient again and tries to leave.

‘Jesus, we’ll never get out of the past now.’

‘No, wait, Daniel. I want you to see this.’

She takes another box from the sideboard and places it on the table. The letter G is written on the side. One by one, she takes out the contents, each carefully folded and separated with a layer of thin blue paper, gone crisp with age now and smelling of mothballs. First, she takes out a jumper with three red buttons on one shoulder. Then a scarf and a sailor’s cap. She holds them all up for Gregor to see.

‘I never looked at these properly until yesterday,’ she says. ‘These must be the clothes you were found in.’

Daniel sighs.

‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ he says, watching more items emerging from the box and being placed on the table. ‘Here we go again. We’re living in a museum.’

‘There must be some reason why she kept them,’ Mara says, ignoring him.

‘It’s just a box of clothes, Mama.’

A pair of trousers, socks and shoes. The shoes are polished and filled with pieces of newspaper to keep the shape, as though Gregor might come back and wear them again.

‘There must have been so many displaced children at the end of the war,’ Mara continues, taking out more things from the bottom of the box. A tin trumpet. A wooden truck. And some later items such as swimming certificates, music prizes and a picture of Gregor with his friends on a boating trip along the Rhine. She picks up the clothes again, examining each one of them carefully.

‘Maybe she thought it was better for you not to know.’

Gregor’s mother had come from a time when it was a custom to protect children and keep them safe from information. A generation of hope and mistakes, of religion and obedience and privacy, of diaries and secrets and love in the dark.

‘She must have known that we would find them.’

‘Please, Mara. Put them away,’ Gregor says.

‘Have a look at this,’ she tries once again.

She turns the trousers inside out and points out a tiny stitch in blue thread, almost invisible, with the letters JB.

‘Did your mother stitch this in?’

‘My mother?’ Gregor says. ‘I have no idea. These trousers could have belonged to anyone. They may have been handed down.’

‘Could this be some Jewish name?’ Mara suggests.

Are these the limits of existence? A tiny, unsourced mark on the inside of a pair of trousers. A small signifier from the past still fighting against forgetting, still hoping to contain meaning, still clamouring for space in our memory. History is the question we keep trying to answer. It is the shape of our imagination, the accusation in our existence, the guesswork of our decisions, the measure of improvement and decline. We are the answer to history, this corridor of correction, full of intuition and invention and handed-down instruction. Our identity is our instability: the longing, the adjustment, the attempt to answer the question from which we have come, the trace of ourselves left behind.

Gregor takes the trousers out of Mara’s hands and places them back in the box.

‘Mara,’ he says, ‘Thank you for keeping these things.’

Here is the one vital piece of proof they needed. She has kept the memory of a survivor alive in this room, made him real again.

And maybe this is the greatest human achievement of all, to reconstruct the missing in our imagination. He has been brought back to life, this dead Jewish boy. He is standing right there among them, this living monument to the memory of those whose real identity has been erased.

They look at each other, all three of them, as if they have suddenly made a discovery about themselves which had eluded them so far. Daniel smiles. He places one arm around his father and then places the other around his mother.

‘They’re waiting for us,’ he says.

He leads them both out of the room and closes the door. He takes them through the hallway back towards the kitchen where Thorsten stands with an expression of great enthusiasm, holding bottles of wine in both hands. He tells them that he has set up the small table outside in the field. Chairs and glasses for everyone. Beer mats to put over the glasses to stop the insects from falling in. He says the mosquitoes have lost all their aggression at this time of the year and they can sit there for a while, looking at the stars and the glow of light on the horizon coming from Berlin.

‘Hang on,’ Gregor says. ‘Let me get the trumpet.’

The light is fading now. A monochrome blue that makes Gregor wonder if his mushroom allergy has come back. But then he steps out to discover that it is the moon. He returns carrying the trumpet and a guitar. They stand in the kitchen like schoolchildren, waiting for instructions. He hands the guitar to Daniel and tells him to play a simple progression of chords. He rushes around taking out pots, giving each person an instrument. They understand his plan. Johannes is holding the white enamel lid of a bread bin in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other, banging the lid so that the throbbing vibrations carry through his arm.

They are arranged in a line, a troop of eccentric country musicians, ready for the march. Everyone ranked in order of their height, with Martin at the very end carrying a drum fashioned from a bin, hastily strapped to his belly. Johannes in front and Thorsten somewhere in the middle with an old washboard that he has produced from the storeroom. Gregor takes his place at the top of the line and blows a stout note of departure. The first, brash note of an old Balkan wedding march, followed by the raucous band behind him, beating their wild accompaniment, scraping and banging on the way out towards the orchard.

They have gone to bless the trees. A protection march. A procession of pale blue faces, tramping through the orchard, past the ladders and the wheelbarrows. Juli knocking a spoon against a stainless-steel pot. Mara with a child’s tambourine in one hand and jar of coffee beans in the other. Martin banging and sending ecstatic animal sounds into the sky. Daniel strumming wild punk rhythms and Katia, carrying the drum of her belly out in front, clacking two wooden boards together. The humming sound of the trumpet settling along the silvery branches. A fat, warm, bulging word in a brass language which is understood by all creatures, even the worms inside the apples. A long, living note spreading out across the flat landscape and floating away beyond the blue roofs of the farm buildings.

Special thanks to Hans Christian Oeser, Georg Reuchlein, Petra Eggers, Henning Ahrens, Rainer Milzkott, Christiane Wartenberg, Reinhard Förster, Moira Reilly, Peter Straus and Nicholas Pearson.

Hugo Hamilton is the author of five novels, two memoirs and a collection of short stories. He was born and lives in Dublin.

The Sailor in the Wardrobe

The Speckled People

Sad Bastard

Headbanger

Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow

The Love Test