Hugo Hamilton: Disguise

Did his father get it wrong? Did he really allow the family to consume the poisonous food as part of the lesson? Did he deliberately place three poisonous varieties in the bowls, like a double bind, or was it a genuine mistake? He thought of his mother already writhing in her hammock, tearing out photographs of women in brassieres, reaching for the glass of iced blue wine on the porch of the hunting lodge.

Gregor staggered on his feet, his blue father swaying ahead of him along the path. The earth swirling, the same way that it did when he used to spin himself around as a child, his first experience of narcotics. He wanted to call his father back and explain what was happening, but then he collapsed.

He woke up running, half carried by his father. Minutes later, they were driving through the blue landscape, down into the nearest town where all the people were blue in the streets. But then, as soon as he got to the hospital, all the colours became normal once more. Just as suddenly as the blue wash had covered his eyes, it disappeared. The nurses measuring his pulse did not have blue faces. ‘It’s gone,’ he told them. ‘The blue colour is gone.’ He heard his father speaking in a low voice to the doctors, giving the name of the mushroom they had eaten, saying it was absolutely impossible that the boy was poisoned. He swore with his hand on his heart that he would never leave something like that to chance. Luck was not something he would want his son to base his life on. So the only explanation left was that Gregor must have had an allergy. Or more than likely, his father said, that he made it all up. Gregor’s pulse and breathing were fine. So were the blood tests and the urine tests. He told his mother that he never wanted to eat mushrooms again. He said he was finished with the forest, but his father said that was all nonsense, more like falling off the bike. The only thing to be done was to get back up.

Mara has put the mushrooms inside the house in the shade. She comes out and pulls Gregor by the arm, over to a table set under a tree where the rest are sitting under the shade.

‘We’re just having second breakfast,’ she says.

He approaches the table and goes around shaking hands with everyone. Thorsten, Mara’s brother-in-law, rushes around to get him a chair, finding an even spot on the flagstones. Katia is there with her five-year-old boy, Johannes. She is pregnant and sits with the sunshine coming through the tree, landing directly onto her belly. The skin is so taut that her naval protrudes like an embossed symbol. Martin, Gregor’s best friend, gets up to give him a big embrace, slapping him on the back.

‘What kept you?’ he asks in a friendly way. ‘We’ve been working here for hours.’

‘Sure. I believe you,’ Gregor returns.

‘Gregor has collected all these wild mushrooms for the dinner,’ Mara says. She whips away some of the crumbs from the table and sets out a new place, pours coffee. There is a basket of fresh bread in the middle. One or two wasps hover around the jam.

‘You haven’t really started already?’ Gregor asks.

‘They were up at six in the morning,’ Mara says, nodding towards Thorsten and Katia.

‘We were delayed,’ Thorsten says. ‘There was a young deer lost in the orchard when we came to start in the morning. Running in every direction, completely frantic. We had to leave the ladders for a while and disappear until it found its way back out through the gate. Otherwise, it would have run itself against the fence all the time.’

Beyond the orchard wall, Gregor can see the outline of a tall ladder leaning into one of the trees. He wants to tell them about the bomb crater in the forest, but instead he tells them how the forests are full of mushrooms. Mara seems happy that he has arrived. She tells him that Daniel is on his way, with his girlfriend.

He finds himself wondering if he would ever manage alone in the wild without other people. What if the new catastrophe really does come? All those survival skills taught to him by his father seem to be of little use now, sitting here around the table. And how long could you survive mentally, that was the question? Living alone in the city is sometimes a struggle in itself, but there is a comfort in the anonymity and belonging that he finds there. He needs the reassurance of the streets, the clustering of people, the quiet feeling of support provided by their numbers. Even those moments of aggression experienced in the city bring some kind of odd confirmation of life. He needs to be able to sit in a bar, without speaking, just knowing that other people are around him. He is afraid of emptiness. After all that training by his father, he thinks he may be useless in situations of great calamity. When the next great disaster approaches and people are running in all directions again, Gregor feels he might end up being a coward. Who knows, he may not even realise how bad things are and keep going on in some naive delusion that everything is fine. In distress, he might make all the wrong decisions, pick the wrong mushrooms. Ultimately, he may have ended up exactly the same as all the other hopelessly interdependent people living in the city, unable to live without cups and spoons and takeaway coffee. Helpless without newspapers and the Internet and public transport and places to congregate. Helpless without the city’s memory coming up everywhere through the streets. Helpless without the shelter of history.

Gregor Liedmann grew up thinking that he had been preserved, like a dead animal. He had reasons to suspect that he was not the biological son of his parents. There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish. At some point he decided to run away from home and eventually ended up in Berlin in the late sixties, a city full of peeling facades and people on the run from something or another. Whenever he was asked, he would explain that he had been found as a three-year-old boy among refugees during the last days of the war and that he had replaced a child of the same age who had been lost in the bombing. In other words, he had stepped into the shoes of a dead German boy. He had taken on his identity, his name, his date of birth, his religion, his entire existence. He had grown up in the south of Germany, in the suburbs of Nuremberg, the only son in a Catholic family. His parents had revealed nothing to him, but he had come across some evidence which suggested that he was a changeling, an impostor living a surrogate life inside the persona of a deceased German. Every time he looked at himself in the mirror, it strengthened his conviction that he was not one bit like them. His mother was an anxious woman who spent her life making lists to pass the time. His father was an obsessive hunter who filled the house to bursting with antlers and stuffed animals. And maybe it was no wonder that Gregor felt a bit like an exhibit in a natural history museum. It was only when he started a new life in Berlin that he could be himself again. He felt a huge weight lifting off his shoulders being able to tell people that he was originally from the East, that he was a Jewish survivor and that he had no relatives left alive.

There was no proof, however, no document, no testament, no reliable witness, no primary memory to substantiate any of this because he was so small when it all happened. Only the word of his uncle Max, the man with one eye who came to visit and once revealed something unintentionally and whose memory remained contested. Gregor can remember seeing him at the end of the war. Another clear recollection of standing outside a building with his mother and seeing a sick man being carried out by the soldiers. The soldiers are American, he knows that now. And the sick man is Uncle Max. But then his mother stopped him from looking, buried his face in her coat.