Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

He is glad to see the shape of the house where Mara is staying. The low roof surrounded by trees and open farmlands. He has been here before, but it’s some time ago now, in the spring. This time there is a tight blonde stubble left behind in the fields by the machines and rectangular bales of hay placed at intervals. He has switched off the music in the car so he can hear the crows in the nearby woods. Nobody comes out to greet him, so he remains sitting in the car for a moment with the window open, listening. He’s not accustomed to the lack of formality in the country, with no doorbell. He wonders if he should go to the front of the house or whether it’s best to go round the back. He thinks of calling them on his mobile phone, but that seems a little absurd, a real city thing to do.

He takes the bag with the bottles of wine and the basket of mushrooms from the boot of the car. The main door of the farmhouse is facing out towards an ancient cast-iron pump in the middle of the yard. The yard is deserted, surrounded by farm buildings. The porch over the main door is half covered in creeper and some of the windows, too, are overgrown with wild roses. The place looks uninhabited, but then he sees Mara’s car parked at the other end and hears voices round the back. A child laughing somewhere. And Mara coming towards him with her arms out.

‘Gregor. We didn’t hear you coming,’ she says.

‘I thought I was in the wrong place,’ Gregor says.

He gives her the bag with the wine. Then he holds out the basket of wild mushrooms.

‘Mushrooms,’ Mara exclaims.

She seems surprised, but her smile is quick to come back. She doesn’t expect him to explain. She knows the story of mushrooms in his family.

Gregor’s father was a hunting fanatic, shaped by war, a man who wanted his son to stay close to the earth and develop heightened survival instincts. So he taught him how to collect mushrooms and berries and plants which could be cooked and eaten in times of decline. On his birthday, Gregor was often given a survival manual. He was brought up to prepare himself for catastrophe. Ready for things that had already happened and for even worse to come. He grew up with all that Boy Scout knowledge of how to light fires without matches, how to preserve food, how to live in freezing conditions. By the time he was nine, he was ready to spend his first night out in the forest alone. His father wanted him to be able to survive long after the rest of civilisation had been extinguished, though he never explained what he should do if he was the last person left on earth.

As a boy, he loved this challenge. It was a great game. His father was as tough and uncompromising as the elements. He preferred the laws of nature to the conventions of society. He trusted nobody and made comparisons between animals and human behaviour. He wanted Gregor to understand the world as a contest, to respect nature as the only guide to what was genuine and what was false. To stay alive he had to become an expert on poison, on treachery. So his father set tests for him in the forest. Contrived a family game of Russian roulette with deadly mushrooms in which Gregor would stand in front of three varieties in separate containers, all of them looking very much the same. One of them fatal. The others safe to eat.

His mother would stand looking on from the hunting lodge that his father bought for half-nothing after the war, the one place in the world where he felt his rule was absolute, this brutal contest with the environment in which he triumphed over everything.

‘Have you gone mad?’ she would say. ‘Klaus, is this really necessary? Have we not had enough of this in the war?’

But that was precisely the point of it all. His father never got past the rules of war. Those split-second judgements, those warrior instincts which people had adapted so successfully into sporting activities, were still regarded by him as the ground rules of life and death. You had to be ready to return to the wild, to the most basic forms of life. Perhaps all this was an oblique way of describing what his father went through for years in Russian captivity but never wished to speak about directly. Gregor stood there in the first glorious moment of peacetime in Europe and held his family’s life in his hands. It was his choice. And whatever he picked out would be put into the meal. ‘Are you sure?’ His father would ask him once more with a sceptical expression, because you could not guess. Guessing was defeat.

With his nervous mother looking on, he would pick the variety he thought was safe. She was a martyr, maybe half hoping they would all be poisoned one day so that she could then say to her husband, ‘Look, I told you so.’ She was also profoundly shaped by war and hunger and hated any game with food. She hated seeing food wasted and constantly made people eat up, long after they had no appetite, which is possibly why Gregor never feels hungry, even now.

It was she who cooked the mushrooms and Gregor remembers the smell exploding in the forest air. They would eat the meal and his father would smile to himself. Only he knew for sure whether they were eating the lethal substance or not. They could all be found dead weeks later, lying around the mountain shack in various poses of agony, holding their stomachs, tongues swollen, dehydrated, bowels running, a delusional scrawl made with fingernails along the earth as they dragged themselves away in search of water.

Gregor never knew the conclusive result of his decision until much later. He knew the mildly poisonous mushrooms would manifest themselves within hours, but the deadly ones would only show up after twenty-four hours, or after a few days, even weeks later, by which time there was very little that could be done. The best mycologist in the world could not save them. He knew that some mushrooms were very deceptive. After all the vomiting and cramps, there would follow a strange kind of remission where you felt much better and even started laughing at the idea of being poisoned, just before you died. There are some varieties that have only recently been declared poisonous, varieties that people have been eating for years and which have only now begun to kill. In Poland, just across the border from where they stand now, a mother and daughter were recently killed by repeated ingestion of a milky green mushroom that was always safe and that he remembers choosing himself many times in the test.

One day he failed to make the right choice. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a time of innocence, before the truth was revealed to him about many things. One fine day in autumn, just like this one, he suddenly realised he had made the wrong decision. Within an hour or two of eating, Gregor began to see the world in blue. They were out along the trail, with his father ahead, holding the gun on his arm, pointed downwards, half cocked. His mother had stayed behind at the lodge, reclining in the hammock with a magazine on her lap and the portable radio playing the local American Army station. Country songs fading into the distance behind them as they walked further and further into the trees until the music was only a faint memory, far away on the other side of the mountain.

Everything turned monochrome, as though he was looking through a shard of blue glass. His father had become a giant blue insect ahead of him. The tree trunks turned navy. The grass and the weeds, a mat of blue fur along the ground. He thought of his mother’s fashion magazines, with all the blue handbags and sunglasses and lotions with the prices written underneath. Blue women in brassieres and corsets. Women in tweed suits half sitting on the bonnet of sports cars.

He began to feel the nausea. He went on for a while without saying a word, afraid to stop and tell his father that they were all going to die. Afraid of his father’s disappointment at finding out that his family would be extinguished and the rest of civilisation would go on as before. His father kept striding away to his death without a word. Maybe he could endure much more. In the war he ate maggots. He ate gruel that would have killed a wild boar. He ate insects and bits of fungus and kept it all down with the kind of formidable mental discipline and a stomach as indestructible as an enamel bucket.