Disguise (10 page)

‘You can’t eat ants,’ he says. ‘They will bite you. Inside in your tummy.’

But then Gregor calmly shows him that it can be done. He tells the boy that they taste a bit like marzipan with cinnamon. He shows him how to crush the ant a little and then places it into his mouth. He chews on it with his front teeth and nods to show that he likes the taste and that he has no fear of being bitten inside. ‘Mmmmmm,’ he says,
but the boy finds it too absurd to try it by himself without the reassurance of his mother. He is being asked to believe something that is not safe. But it won’t be long now, Gregor knows, when the boy will try it out for himself, even if his mother does not approve, exactly in the same way that he did when he was small.

‘Uncle Gregor ate an ant,’ he calls out to everyone in the orchard as he runs back in. He is horrified and boasting at the same time. ‘Uncle Gregor eats ants.’

Daniel looks up with acknowledgement in his eyes. Because he also learned it from Gregor, the same way that Gregor learned it from his father.

Gregor’s father would not tolerate the name of Stalin being mentioned in the house. Nor could he bear Gregor’s grandfather being talked about very much. As far as he was concerned, Emil was a traitor. While he was out there defending his country on the Russian front, Emil was driving around aimlessly in his truck, wasting fuel. While his parents were killed as the Russian Army swept towards Berlin, Emil entertained all kinds of women up and down the country.

His mother and father didn’t talk very much about these things around the dinner table. She spoke about Emil only when she was alone with Gregor.

Right at the end of the war, when it was only a matter of time before it was all over, she waited for her father at the train station. She had slept fitfully, with Gregor waking up frequently and people complaining about the noise. By morning his infection had spread into both ears and he could hardly hear anything. The waiting room was so crowded that many people had decided to sleep on the platform under the awning instead. They were not moving on any more because the news was going around that the American troops were very close and that the town would soon fall. There was no point in going anywhere, only waiting.

Emil had not returned yet. She was worried about him. But she was even more worried now that Gregor would go deaf with his ear infection. She had tried to swaddle him during the night so that he would sweat, but it didn’t break the fever. He kept moving, trying to throw off his blanket, and when he began to scream again in the morning, she decided to go and look for some oil, hoping that somebody in the town could help. She stood Gregor up on his feet, tucked a spare vest in around his neck for a scarf and pulled his hat down. He was a good boy and didn’t complain about the weather, just walked by her side holding her hand. She walked through the town, memorising her way so that she could make it back to the station again later on.

There was some reassurance in moving on. She found a school where charity workers were giving out food. It was even more crowded than the railway station, but she managed to get inside and find a nurse. Everyone else was concentrating on the food, so the nurse got Gregor to lean his head over and poured in some warm cooking oil. It made him whine at first, but the nurse had a quick way of calming him with a little rhyme that ended with a tickle. The nurse went away and came back with a new hat for him, more of a winter hat with a peak over the eyes and flaps that came down over the ears. She kept talking to him as she placed a piece of gauze over each of his ears and then tied the hat down under his chin.

It was noon by the time they went out into the street again, not knowing where they should be going now. There was an old woman sweeping the footpath, cleaning the stains of rain off the pavement, all the way to the edge of her property. With more clouds coming, the old woman looked up. There was a boom of heavy weapons in the distance, and maybe she had mistaken it for thunder.

Gregor’s mother walked down the main street to the town, half hoping to see her father. And then she came across his truck, parked outside a public house.

She walked right up to the bar, holding Gregor with her hand. She looked in the window and saw nobody. When she knocked, a woman came to the door, shouting. Could she not see that they were closed? Did she have no idea what was going on in the town. There were soldiers running in the direction of the fighting, old men mostly, and young boys. The woman said there was nothing left to serve in her bar, no beer, no food, nothing. Everything had been bartered or taken from them. She was full of pessimism, almost envying those who had nothing at all, wishing that she could abandon everything and flee herself, then she would not have to worry about what would happen to her house and her business.

Gregor’s mother said she didn’t want anything, she was merely looking for the man who owned the truck outside. She was careful not to reveal too much about herself.

‘My father,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for my father. A fat man, have you seen him?’

‘Emil,’ the woman said. ‘If only he came back, then everything would improve. At least I’d have customers again.’

The woman became more friendly and invited them inside. The boy was drowsy and ready to faint again. She sat him down, explaining that he had a fever. His face was wet with sweating, but she tried to stop him taking his hat off.

They had not sat down for more than two minutes when three men from the Gestapo came in and told her to stand up.

‘Papers,’ the officer barked at her.

She produced her documents from her bag and held them out. The officer smiled and passed her papers over to the other men.

‘Come with us,’ he then said, and she had to get the boy up again. Carried him in her arms this time. One of the men held the door open and she was escorted across the street to the police barracks, though she hardly had time to work any of this out because she kept looking back into the street to see if there was any sign of her father.

At the police station she was taken into a room and questioned. Where had she come from? Where was she going to? It was clear that they knew everything about her father and his bogus mission. They slapped her and told her not to lie, because they already had the facts. Gregor huddled close to her, cowering.

The war was so near the end. In some parts of the country it was already over and soon these buildings would fall into the hands of the enemy, but still these Gestapo men had all the time in the world to interrogate her about her father. She had walked into a trap. At first they demanded to know where Emil was hiding. Then they turned it around and pretended that they had already captured her father, but that they were still looking for his companion, Max. And when she kept crying and repeating that she had no idea where her father was, they threatened to execute her and her boy for assisting deserters.

They told her with some pride that they had been after Emil for quite some time now. They even shared the information they had already uncovered about his ‘pathetic’ little scheme. They knew the location of various check-points through which he had passed over the last month.

‘Your father thinks he can make a fool of us,’ the officer in charge said with a triumphant smile.

She said nothing about waiting at the railway station and nothing about the fuel her father was seeking. But they continued bullying her with so many questions that she
could not help herself admitting things they were putting to her. The officer in charge leaned in right close to her and she got the smell of wurst on his breath. Then he turned to question the boy. But Gregor was too young to know what was going on, only that something was wrong. His small body shook as the officer raised his voice.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Gregor,’ she answered. ‘He’s got an ear infection.’

The officer clapped his hand in a test and the boy flinched.

‘He’s almost deaf in both ears,’ she pleaded. ‘He can’t hear a thing.’

She could not think of excuses. She was not clever with answers like her father. She knew from going to school that one excuse was always more believable than three excuses. The officer in charge continued to try and communicate with the boy, but he remained silent.

The officers looked at each other. They examined his clothes and took his hat off to look at him more carefully. The gauze was still stuck in his ears, but they fell out on the floor, thin pieces of linen with a golden nipple in each one where they had been fitted right into the eardrum with the oil. One of the men pointed at the boy’s trousers and she understood this as a command. Unbuttoned his braces and pulled his pants down with the men looking on, examining him, then recoiling. He had soiled himself again. The room filled up with a sweet smell of excrement.

‘Come on, let Mama take care of you.’

She took off his trousers completely, even though he was trying to pull against her. She could see that he was also totally wet, not only with urine but with sweat. He was coughing, a kind of hoarse cough that sounded like the bark of an old dog. Deep in his chest now, whistling every
time he took in a breath. His groin was raw and there was a rash developing at the front of his legs.

‘Come on, Gregor, my little sweetheart. It’s not half as bad. Here, let me clean you up.’

She took his underpants off. She cleaned him off as best she could with the vest from around his neck and pulled his trousers up again. Then she hugged him again and rocked him back and forth for a moment, humming to him in a whisper, before she turned back to face her interrogators. They were standing in the corridor now, with the door open, smoking to clear the air and muttering among themselves.

She was worried that it would be her fault if they found her father. Worried about the look of disappointment on his face because she had not stayed at the railway station as he had asked her. And just as she rocked Gregor back and forth, waiting to see what the men would do next, she heard the main door opening and somebody shouting.

‘We have him,’ they repeated again and again. ‘We have him.’

She turned round with an emptiness in her stomach. She felt herself going pale, ready to collapse. She kept her eyes on the door and on the corridor, waiting to see her father being brought in with his hands in manacles behind his back, a common criminal. She waited for that despairing glance that he would throw at her in the room, before he was pushed on past her door into some other cell. She was ready to run out into the corridor and beg for her father’s life, but then she stood still.

Instead of Emil it was Max. She could not help feeling relief, but also a terror at the expression in his eyes. They pushed him along and he disappeared. She heard doors closing behind him at the back of the building.

Their hands are sticky. Their fingernails are dirty. They have flakes of bark in their hair and bits of stiff, dried-out leaves clinging to their clothes. There is a dryness in their throats and occasionally they can see by the light under the trees that the air in the country is not the pure void they believed it was but a dusty substance, thick with particles and hovering insects. They breathe in the scent of apples and deadwood and soil and rotting things all around them. The fruit flies are everywhere. Swarms of them in a veil around the wheelbarrow. Johannes is counting the sacks that have been collected so far, ranked along the side of the orchard. He keeps starting from the beginning, but there are too many for him, more than he has numbers for in his head.

He goes over to whisper in his mother’s ear. Katia gets up slowly, taking her son by the hand. From his movements, it’s clear that he needs to go for a pee. He’s holding on to himself and dancing a little, pulling at her hand. She walks through the trees towards the edge of the orchard, carrying her belly the way she would carry a basket, heavy with apples. She finds a suitable place and helps him to pull his shorts down, but Johannes is afraid to pee because he’s seen an ant.

‘The ants are looking,’ he says.

‘The ants are not one little bit interested in your winkie,’ Katia says to him.

But she has to move somewhere else. She carries him quickly with his trousers around his ankles, over to another spot at the rim of the orchard where the grass is longer, almost the height of the boy himself. And when everything is right, he finally sends a perfect, golden arc into a tall column of grass in the sunshine with his mother holding him.

‘Is Uncle Gregor going to play the trumpet?’ he asks her.

‘You’ll have to ask him,’ Katia says.

Johannes runs off, straight over to Gregor.

‘Are you going to play the trumpet, Uncle Gregor?’

‘We’ll see,’ Gregor answers. It is the same answer that Gregor used with his son, Daniel, the same answer that he heard so often as a child himself from his own father, one that he hated hearing himself. But he can’t help himself repeating the lines of his father. Once again that ventriloquism of generations, parents speaking through their children.

‘We’ll see. Later maybe.’

‘Of course he’ll play,’ Martin says.

Gregor still allows people to speak for him, putting words in his mouth at times when he remains ambivalent. He doesn’t want to promise too much, but then he smiles. How can he refuse? He has the trumpet in the boot of the car, everybody knows that.

‘Yeah, maybe later.’

Johannes runs back to his mother, bringing the news over to her like a town crier, even though she’s heard it already.

‘Uncle Gregor is going to play the trumpet.’

It’s how the news is received that gives it shape. Mara raises her arm, clenching her fist. The very same salute that she made when he put the trumpet to his mouth and blasted out his first chain of profane notes on his birthday
one year. It was Mara who got it for him and secretly saved up for months without a word. Up to then he had always played on a trumpet he had borrowed from a friend.

The clenched fist is one of Mara’s trademark gestures. A salute of determination and fun and mischief and support. Something left over from the revolutionary years which she does quite naturally, without any triumph or aggression. Not menacing so much as bolstering. She has always been a motivator and does it with a comic flair, with a hint of self-parody, to agree with something, to make her point in an argument, to show her emotions when she’s listening to music or dancing with her head down and her hair in her eyes. She did it when she heard that Katia was expecting her second baby. She will do it again with tears in her eyes when Daniel and Juli go off to Africa.

Gregor recalls seeing her once, raising her clenched fist towards a bus driver on Wittenbergplatz. Daniel copied her, clenching his small fist at the bus driver, and maybe it was such a funny image of mother and son that instead of feeling offended, the bus driver was forced to smile. She was not merely raging at the bus driver, but at all those other things in the country that were wrong at that time and needed to be put right. At the government for the length of time it was taking to pay reparations to victims. At the way immigrant workers were treated. At the Berlin Wall. At the building of Stammheim maximum security prison. At the news that a young man was shot at a table in a restaurant while he was eating. At the news that the police raided the home of her favourite author. At the arms manufacturers in Germany sending weapons to Africa.

She has always troubled herself with these thoughts. Felt responsible for world events. Now she clenches her fist with more sanguine authority, but she does it in a gesture
of fearless innocence that makes her look like she’s just out of school.

It came as a surprise to Gregor every year in May, when Mara announced that it was his birthday. The date of his birth, the date on which he stepped into the place of another child. He remembers the conspiracy of kindness with which she saved up for that trumpet and kept it a secret, until Daniel blurted it out.

Daniel was almost four then, not much younger than Johannes is now. Mara placed a deposit on the instrument he once tested in the shop and which he said he would buy if only he had the money. She got a bit of help from her parents, but never admitted that to him in the end. A few days before his birthday, Gregor walked in the door and Daniel could not wait to tell him what was on his mind.

‘Mama has got you a trumpet,’ Daniel said right away, before Gregor had even taken his jacket off.

‘Wait,’ Gregor said. ‘Was that meant to be a secret?’

‘Yes,’ Daniel answered with eyes wide open. ‘It’s your birthday present,’ he said.

Gregor may have had a hint even before that, because he once mentioned the notion of buying the trumpet his friend had lent to him, but Mara discouraged that, saying they would start saving up for the best. Nonetheless, it was still a surprise when they celebrated with a cake and candles and tablecloth on the table and Mara dressed up. He unwrapped the gift pretending he knew nothing, carefully taking off the paper, embracing her with such life in his eyes. He could work out how long she had been saving up and how hard it was not to say a word.

How often has he played it all over the world, in so many bars and jazz clubs, never once forgetting that moment when she gave it to him, sometimes thinking about it all
evening and then putting it out of his head so as not to allow the feeling to get the better of him. Countless bulging notes have been blown through that piece of brass. It has lost its gloss, but it still releases an exceptional musical scream in his hands. The horn has become dented by collisions along the way, but it has character like no other trumpet. A sweetness, a clarity, a pure, lived-in sound that only a well-played trumpet can have and that only fellow trumpet players can really appreciate. He’s been offered money for that instrument. By well-known players. Enough to buy himself a whole suite of new instruments. In fact, he has bought other trumpets since then, for their own particular tone, but none of them play quite like this one. None of them have that much biography in them.

He has often spoken about the weight of it in his hands. The kiss of brass on his lips. He is known for swinging it over his shoulder like a shovel or a pitchfork in a momentary pause at concerts, a style that other musicians have since copied. He was born for that instrument, Mara always said whenever she heard him rip another deep, declamatory note into their small apartment, a note that probably shook the whole block into life, like the sound of a cow lowing in the courtyard. The neighbours must have said: ‘Oh no. Somebody’s bought a shagging trumpet.’

He still plays some of the clubs in Berlin when he’s asked to join a reunion gig. He likes the relaxed companionship of musicians playing their stuff together and hardly speaking to each other. His big brass larynx. The unmistakable warm, half-drunk, country-wedding sound of the trumpet. A fat, laconic, outdoor echo. The whole inner road movie of feelings that comes out every time he lifts the instrument up to his lips. He jokes about making a big comeback, but he’s really much happier doing his own
thing now, playing for fun instead of for a living, listening to younger players, teaching and watching his own trademark licks passing on to another generation. He’s had too many comebacks already. An entire lifetime of departures and comebacks.