Disguise (12 page)

They fell into conversation and agreed to address each other informally as Mara and Maria. That alone made Mara feel like a lost daughter returning home. She was brought back to the house where Gregor’s mother prepared something to eat. Surrounded by antlers, they sat looking through the photographs and Mara rested for a long time on one particular image of Gregor as a boy, trying to teach the dog to jump through a hoop. His curly hair rising up in a wave on top of his head. His eyes looking at the camera. It was almost too much to absorb in the space of one afternoon. And yet she wanted to see more, everything. Another picture of him with his own head concealed under his jumper and the dog’s head under his arm as a joke. A further picture of Gregor and his mother standing on the steps of the house beside Uncle Max.

Why had all this been so hidden? Why had Gregor erased this part of his life with such brutal determination? Was there nothing from these tranquil family moments worth keeping?

‘He told me about that dog,’ Mara said. ‘Fritz was his name, am I right?’

‘That’s true,’ Gregor’s mother said.

‘Didn’t he have a big war going with the postman?’

‘That dog was a terrible nuisance. My husband hated him because he used to bark in the forest and chase all the
wild deer away. The postman was terrified. Very nervous man, after the war. I don’t know how many official letters of complaint we received over that dog, and the postman had to deliver them himself.’

‘He was run over in the end, wasn’t he?’

‘The truck driver gave Gregor some money to get a new dog. But he never did.’

‘Why not?’

‘The postman still believed he was alive. Gregor had this funny idea of telling him that the dog was locked up in the back.’

‘So he lived on in the postman’s imagination.’

‘Until I blurted it out one day. The postman asked me where the dog was and I told him he was long dead. Almost a year later. Imagine. And Gregor blamed me. Said I killed the dog by telling the postman.’

The two women scraped over the details like two historians, sharing knowledge, exchanging facts and eccentricities, a well-informed jury examining things from opposite viewpoints. At times it seemed like they were not even talking about the same person. Again and again, there were trademark features which they both recognised and made it feel like an odd reunion of complete strangers. And maybe there was not too much harm done by the fact that Gregor had denied his adoptive mother, as long as Mara could engineer the reconciliation.

‘Gregor hates shopping,’ she said. ‘I buy all his clothes for him because he can’t bear being inside a shop.’

‘He picked that up from his father,’ Gregor’s mother replied.

‘Funny,’ Mara said. ‘Gregor thinks shop assistants are like hyenas, stalking customers, preying on the partner.
He physically pulls me out of the shop and I feel like a shoplifter being arrested.’

But there was something more serious to be discussed.

‘His father was very good to him,’ Gregor’s mother said. ‘He would like to see him again before he dies. He’s forgiven him.’

‘For what?’ Mara asked.

‘He threatened us with a hunting rifle. Just before he ran away. My husband doesn’t hold that against him any longer. If only he would come to see us.’

These new facts began to overturn everything. Gregor’s mother spoke about the bond between father and son. How her husband had helped Gregor to bring home an injured hawk and encouraged him to nurse it until it could fly again. How he explained to him that hunting was not always about killing but also about conservation. There was a tone of regret in her voice as she explained why she had to leave Gregor in care so often, before her husband came back from captivity. She even had a second job cleaning offices at night to keep things going.

‘What else could you do?’

When Gregor’s father returned from the war, he was depressed. Found it difficult to discuss things. He had terrible headaches, so the house often had to be silent. Gregor grew up as a quiet boy, making lists all the time, separate from other children.

‘They used to fight with him because he was so tall,’ she said. ‘But he was always a big softie. He could never stand up for himself.’

As a child he liked looking at gardens. When they went for a walk together through the suburbs of Nuremberg, he would lead her on a trail mapped out in his head in order to pass by the best gardens. He liked growing
things. He became a reclusive teenager, interested mostly in his music.

Her husband was an accountant, a good man, with strong principles. Perhaps it was hard for people who came through war to adjust to life in peacetime. They overcompensated. They loved their son with too much force. Gregor’s father was a survival artist and she laughed at the way he sometimes made his family go through fire drills at the weekend. Maybe life was more about enduring than about living. She said her husband could not bear to see food going to waste and sometimes forced Gregor to eat up, telling him what it was like to starve and to live on ants. Gregor had to be spoon-fed until he was ten. She spent her life running after him with food, with his school lunch box, his jacket, his homework. She described how he often left his scarf behind or lost his coat on the bus, and each time, her husband bought him a new one, an even better one, with better lining and a detachable hood and more inside pockets.

‘He loves his son,’ she said. ‘He’s the only friend he’s ever had.’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ Mara said. ‘I’m sure he’ll come round. It’s just that he’s had so much trouble coming to terms with the fact that he’s an orphan.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He’s adopted, isn’t that so?’

Gregor’s mother looked straight into Mara’s eyes, blinking, unable to grasp what she had just heard. She paused for a moment, sighed, shook her head.

‘That’s totally untrue.’

They looked at each other in disbelief. Now they really were talking about two different people. Gregor’s mother stared across the photographs and family artefacts spread out on the dining-room table. A lifetime turned into fake.

‘It’s a complete lie, Mara. I should know, I’m his mother.’

‘You’re saying Gregor made this up?’

‘His uncle Max made it up. He put all that stuff into Gregor’s head.’

A mother’s word against that of her son. Mara put forward Gregor’s argument in his absence, describing in detail the story that she had got from him. The journey south on the truck with Emil, the long wait in the train station, the interrogation by the Gestapo. It all seemed to match in every aspect except for one essential detail. The child lost in the bombing. The replacement.

‘But he’s Jewish,’ Mara said. ‘He was rescued by your father. You adopted him in order to replace your lost son. Isn’t that why there was so much trouble with the Gestapo?’

Gregor’s mother stared back, unable to reclaim possession of her own life. The rejection was too much to bear and there was hostility entering into her voice.

‘He’s no more Jewish than me, or his father,’ she said. ‘He’s German. He’s the image of his grandfather Emil. For God’s sake, look at the photographs. He’s a musician and a singer, just like Emil, isn’t that so?’

‘He told me that he came from the East, with the refugees.’

‘He can make up whatever story he likes. I can’t force him to go and visit his own father on his deathbed.’

The truth left nothing to be imagined. The facts were incontrovertible, changing everything, dislodging the entire basis of Mara’s marriage. Maybe his story was more elastic, more redemptive. How often had she passed by the building in Berlin where Gregor died in the bombing. How often had they looked up at the windows where his mother lived during the war and lost her only child while
her husband was away at the front. Gregor’s birthplace. His place of death. His moment of immortality.

‘But he was circumcised,’ Mara said. ‘As a baby.’

‘What are you talking about?’ There was a cynicism in her voice. ‘I would have noticed, don’t you think?’

‘At birth,’ Mara said. ‘I thought he was circumcised at birth.’

‘Nonsense. That’s all part of the fabrication. He must have got that done to himself after he ran away. I thought he would have grown out of that fantasy by now.’

‘I don’t understand anything any more.’

Mara cried openly, holding nothing back. She had spent all this time living with a ghost.

Driving back along the autobahn from Nuremberg, Mara became involved in a strange, disembodied argument with another driver. She had not been concentrating and must have done something stupid. The roads were wet, coming up to Christmas, dark early. She drove in a bruised and remote way. In silence, without the radio on so as to avoid the sentiment of music. Staring past the windscreen wipers sweeping off flakes of snow. Seeing nothing but the watery tail lights of trucks ahead and the crop of water rising up from their wheels. Aware only of how much her world had changed in the last forty-eight hours.

Perhaps she had overtaken without indicating or maybe slipped in ahead without giving enough room. The offence was hardly worth mentioning, but the reaction was instant. Horn screaming, lights flashing right behind her. She slowed down and allowed plenty of room to pass. After you! she muttered to herself. Go ahead, pal, kill yourself. She remembered the funny phrases of her own father, telling her to be careful because there were always ‘other idiots’ on the road. What should she have said? Excuse me, I’ve just found out that my husband is a liar. He’s not an orphan after all. The driver came right alongside, just to hammer home the road courtesy lesson, long enough for her to see his face. A young autobahn idealist with
furious eyes. Get off the road, you fucking asshole, he was shouting, or miming, with his mouth clearly pushed into the shape of a curse and his middle finger raised in supreme insult.

There was a rage in the country. It was there on the autobahn, in the people’s hearts, in the newspapers and in the music. It was a time of self-loathing and self-accusation, a time when everything was being exposed and examined. The science of failure. The lonely momentum of truth. The guilt spreading horizontally, reaching into every heart and every home. Their shame was their identity. Their misery had become their poetry.

At home, she felt exhausted, unable to conceal the distance in her eyes.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gregor asked.

She didn’t know how to start. Or end. Waited until Daniel was asleep before she could work herself up to the right words. Looked at Gregor as though he had just walked in off the street and she had to ask him what he wanted in her home.

‘You can’t lie to me, Gregor,’ she said. ‘I can’t live with lies.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’ve met your mother. She’s told me everything.’

Gregor reeled backwards, as though a door had slammed in his face. It took a moment before he could find the words to reply.

‘What? I don’t believe what you’ve just said. You went behind my back and spoke to her. That’s unforgivable, Mara.’

‘It’s all untrue, isn’t it? You’re not Jewish. You’re not an orphan. You made the whole thing up for some scabby reason I don’t understand. Just to make yourself look good
or feel good, is that it? You lied to me, Gregor. And now I don’t know who you are any more.’

Gregor did not reach for his guitar this time. He remained silent for a moment, clearing the situation in his own head before responding.

‘This is very unfair, Mara.’

‘I believed everything,’ she said, looking at the floor.

‘You went to see her. That’s such a betrayal.’

‘You can’t even speak about betrayal,’ she replied. ‘How can I ever trust you? How can I believe anything you say, ever again?’

‘You have decided not to believe me,’ he said. ‘You’ve decided to believe her. What did she tell you? All lies, I bet.’

There was a long pause. Mara went around the kitchen, clearing things away, stacking plates, doing things that had no urgency. Gregor sat at the table with the newspaper opened out in front of him, staring down, but not allowing any of it to enter. His credibility in shreds. His identity gone. The trapdoor underneath him had opened up and swallowed him.

‘She’s your real mother,’ Mara said. ‘Why would she lie to me?’

He waited for a while in silence, only slowly realising how serious this was. She talked about a fraud. She accused him of destroying the family.

‘What am I supposed to tell Daniel when he grows up? That I married a con man who said he was a Jewish orphan? What will I tell everybody, all our friends? That you live in a fantasy?’

‘Tell them what you like, Mara.’

‘For whatever reason, you made up a story about being Jewish, because you couldn’t face up to the truth. You
preferred to be the victim, is that it? You fabricated this story about being replaced as a child, so you could escape from our history, isn’t that so?’

‘Stop it,’ Gregor said. ‘If you continue like this, I’m leaving. I’m not going to listen to you accusing me like this.’

‘Answer the question then,’ she said. ‘Are you an orphan or not?’

‘She’s lying, Mara. Don’t you see it? I found out, believe me. She’s making this whole thing up. She never told him, her own husband. Now she can’t get out of it.’

‘It’s hard to believe that a mother would lie about her own child.’

‘There you go,’ Gregor said. ‘You want to believe her instead.’

‘Can I call her?’ Mara said. ‘Can you discuss this on the phone with her at least?’

‘No. I will not speak to her.’

‘You told me they were dead. You told me you had no relatives. You told me you were circumcised at birth. All lies, Gregor. You’re no more Jewish than I am.’

‘Is that all you married me for?’ he then said. ‘Because I’m Jewish?’

They were throwing everything at each other now and it was difficult to see how they could find a way back from this confrontation. Soon they would fall over the cliff and bring the marriage to an end. Or maybe it was already over and they were merely justifying themselves to some invisible family tribunal.

‘You have to get your story right,’ she said.

She was crying. A helpless burst of tears, full of fatigue. She sat down at the table opposite him, looking up every now and again to see him through a watery prism. He stood up and came round to her side, placed his hand on
her shoulder. Tried to embrace her, but she didn’t want to be touched.

‘You see, there’s no proof, Mara,’ he admitted finally.

She listened without looking up.

‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘I told you that. There’s no proof, only what Uncle Max told me. It’s her word against mine.’

He went over his story again. His entire existence was in Mara’s hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces. He placed the facts in front of her, holding on, desperately trying to save himself.

‘Let me ask you this,’ she said finally. ‘If what you say is true. If you were adopted and your mother saved you, then how can you treat them like that? How can you turn your back on them?’

‘Because they lied to me, Mara. Don’t you see it?’

‘Your father is on his deathbed and you can’t get yourself to forgive him. That’s not something you are entitled to do if you’re an orphan. You can’t be that cold-hearted, Gregor.’

She could not understand the ruthlessness with which he had cut them out of his life. Was that part of the self-loathing? He had walked away and now she was afraid that he would also walk away from her and Daniel.

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s over between us.’

She uttered those terrifying words in the hope that they were not true. She desperately wanted him to contradict her, to give some explanation which would allow her to believe him again. He tried to disarm those terrible words by saying that they would soon get this behind them. He swore that nothing had changed between them and that he
felt every bit the same about her as he always did. All that mattered was that they stayed together.

‘I’ll find you the proof,’ he said. ‘Give me time, Mara. I’ll get the proof, you’ll see.’

He stood behind her and kissed the top of her head. He placed his hands under her arms and lifted her up from the kitchen chair. Her elbows were planted on the table and her fists glued to her cheeks, and they remained like that for a moment until he released the tension which had locked them in that position. Her face was indented with knuckle marks. Blotches around her eyes. She could hardly stand with the weakness in her legs, as if the truth was the only thing that kept people alive.

He virtually carried her into bed. Left the light on in the hall. Took her shoes off and helped her with her jeans. And in that drowsy swirl of thoughts before she fell asleep, she turned to put her arm around him.

‘You looked so sweet, Gregor,’ she said, half dreaming, half crying. ‘You must have been such a sweet little boy.’

And maybe it was too soon to spring to conclusions. What did it matter now? she thought to herself in a blur of emotions. Everybody needs an identity, a disguise, a story in which they can feel at home. He had managed to knock a good enough life out of that survivor body of his, whoever it belonged to. Was he not making good use of the name he was given by his mother, regardless of his true origins? Whether he was inhabiting the soul of a dead boy or a living boy, he had made it his own now. And maybe he was not unlike all other people in that respect, part human, part fabrication. Part ghost, part living being. Part real, part invented. Existing mostly in the minds of those around him, his family and friends, his fellow inhabitants in the city where he lived. He
claimed a place in their imagination. A semi-successful, semi-failed individual with a complex narrative which was perhaps a little in the vein of fiction itself, something you want to believe rather than something you have been told to believe.