Disguise (13 page)

She was sitting on the black-and-white chair in the bedroom when he announced that he was leaving. He had found and bought that chair for her in a basement junk shop. It had come from a notorious Berlin café which existed in the late 1890s and which was considered respectable only before noon. The chair was painted black, with striped upholstering and a grip for waiters built into the frame. The name Café Bauer was written underneath the seat and it was mentioned in the famous novel called
Effi Briest.
They had seen the film. It ran for years in the city. Its portent of family betrayal had not entered their minds then. But they could remember the remoteness with which the characters spoke to each other, and the heartbreaking voice of Effi, after she was banished by her husband, saying: ‘I hate your virtue.’

Dressed in a towel after a shower, she sat sideways with her arm over the back of the chair. In the weeks since the revelation about Gregor’s identity, the innocence had been taken out of their eyes. The lightness had gone out of their language and when they reached each other with words, they were tinged with sharpness, accusation, doubt. Everything seemed to have been said before. They felt the weight of history dumped on them, subverting everything she believed, his lifeline, his survival, his entire credibility
as a person. Each time they spoke to each other, the emptiness seemed to enlarge. Christmas was an impostor, a pageant re-enacted to postpone the inevitable.

‘You want me to leave, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Now you’re trying to blame me,’ she said. She was speaking in that laconic, disconnected tone, as though she was the only person left in the world. After all the arguments, she spoke with exhaustion in her voice, not even looking in his direction but at the foot of the bed.

‘You want to be able to say that you were driven out.’

‘I can’t stay,’ he said.

‘The only way you’ll sort this out is by finding out the truth, by going to speak to your mother.’

Mara had some problems with her health at the time, an ache in her joints, possibly from being bitten by a tick in the mountains that summer. She was on medication for it and sometimes had to stay in bed.

‘I’ve got this invitation to play in Toronto,’ Gregor said. ‘I think it would be good for us both if I went away for a while. I want to sort this out. I’m going to get the proof.’

In the meantime, he had teamed up with a new band. He had met an Irish musician by the name of John Joe McDonagh, and there was some chemistry between them, going back to the basics with blues, jazz, folk. After a lacklustre response to Gregor’s compositions, he needed to engage in something more real. John Joe had come to Berlin in a cheap car bought in Holland, parked it outside a bar in Kreuzberg where it remained as a billboard where people left messages under the windscreen wipers until it was towed away.

Why was he so impressed by John Joe? Was it the ability to celebrate? The instant friendship? The way John Joe placed his arm around Gregor’s shoulder when he asked
him if he had ever heard of a song called ‘The Lover’s Ghost’. John Joe knew the song well, ‘but don’t ask me to sing it.’ Gregor felt welcome. He found a wildness inside himself, a longing to start all over again without looking back. That spontaneous energy around John Joe gave momentum to his life. ‘For a laugh’, on a late-night tour through city bars, John Joe dragged him and some other Irish musicians into a sex club. And once inside, they had nothing on their minds but more beer. John Joe even bought drinks for the three women who sat on bar stools in the reddish gloom. Then he got out his harmonica to play a tune. Over the sound of breathing and groaning on-screen in the background, he started huffing and bending the notes of a familiar train song, with a cigarette between his fingers. The rest of the musicians joined in like a strange band of missionaries, getting out their instruments and ripping into a frantic reel which was in complete contrast to the tired sexual signals all around them. The bar stools were pushed back. The women came to life. This small, moribund bar, where the decor had lost its decadence, was transformed into a country dance hall, heaving with perfume and perspiration and smoke. One of the women said afterwards that it was a long time since she had been swung around so mercilessly and now her yellow blouse was sticking to her back. John Joe yelped and they moved on again to the next bar.

It was so easy for Mara to descend into bitterness. She discovered a cynicism creeping into her words. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me that you’re Irish,’ she said. But that was not her style and she punished herself for saying it. Hard as it was, she would have to become more encouraging and stop Daniel from being infected by the negative atmosphere. She was determined not to let anyone
see her sadness. Already, their friends were discussing the news, talking about the doubt over Gregor’s origins. Martin spoke to him about it and said he didn’t want to come between him and Mara, but he felt it was his duty as a friend to warn him.

‘You would tell me if I was being an asshole, Gregor, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look,’ Martin said, ‘I want to tell you something. I have always had a suspicion that my mother was raped by my father. He was in the Russian Army and I have a feeling that at least it was not entirely voluntary on her part, that she went along with him because there was no alternative at the end of the war. I can remember him bringing us to Berlin once when I was small and she didn’t want to go. He insisted and when we came to the city to go shopping, she was crying all the time. Didn’t even want to get off the train, I remember. She’s never been back to Berlin since, even though we lived only an hour and a half away on the train. I asked her about all that much later, but she would never tell me anything. Maybe she knew it would turn me against my father.’

‘What are you telling me this for?’

‘I still have that suspicion,’ Martin said.

‘And so?’

‘Suspicion is all I have,’ Martin said. ‘What can I do about it? I can prove nothing. So I just have to live with it.’

Gregor waited for him to make his point, the advice of a best friend.

‘You can’t live your life on the basis of some hunch,’ Martin said, ‘that’s all I’m saying.’

But none of this had any impact on Gregor, other than to send him deeper into himself, making him even more of an
outsider even within his own circle. Mara decided instead to try and pull him back. Rather than holding on like one of those Velcro women that musicians spoke about, she laid on the support. She went to see his new band playing, waited for him afterwards, in an empty hall, with the crew carrying the equipment out and a door banging in the background. With the roadies moving in and out behind them, she put her arms around him and told him that she loved him.

‘And there’s nothing I can do about that,’ she said.

At moments when they were discussing things at home, Daniel often stood in the doorway in his pyjamas, saying he could not sleep, so they had to snap out of their crisis and behave as though nothing was happening. She would turn to the boy with excessive kindness. He would tell a bedtime story with such enthusiasm that even a fairy tale sounded contrived.

And while Gregor put Daniel to sleep on that night, she sprang out of that dreamy, devolved mood which had slipped like a virus into her blood and stood up from the black-and-white bedroom chair. She got dressed and went into the kitchen to prepare the dinner. A discipline returned to her eyes. He had made the right decision. She was afraid of being alone, but she knew that with Gregor in the apartment, she was already alone.

‘You’re absolutely right, Gregor,’ she said when he came into the kitchen some time after. ‘It’s good for you to go to Toronto.’

Gregor was surprised by her sudden conversion, and waited for the twist. He expected her to reveal some new plan or admission that she had always wanted him to go away. She blessed his decision with a clenched fist.

She had prepared a beautiful meal. The table had already been laid with great style, because she didn’t want the
parting to be like an escape or a banishment. But just as she was about to serve, placing small sprigs of parsley on the fish and readjusting the slice of lemon, the whole thing turned into a disaster. Reaching out to hand him two water glasses from the cupboard, one of them fell, shattering into a thousand beads all over the counter.

‘Jesus, I’m so sorry,’ she said, holding her hands over her mouth. ‘Oh God. How stupid of me.’

She tried to remove the glass from the plates, but there were too many tiny splinters unseen to the eye, hidden in the beautiful black-bean sauce she had made to go with the fish. Glittering diamonds mixed in with the rice.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mara.’

‘I’m so fucking stupid,’ she kept saying. ‘God.’

‘No. Look,’ he said, ‘we can go out instead.’

‘I’ve ruined everything now.’

He cleared the plates away, dumping the lethal food into the bin, hoovering across the counter, while she got the woman next door to look after Daniel for the evening. The normal arrangement was that if they arrived home before twelve, they would drop in and pick him up. Gregor was such an expert at lifting the boy out of the bed with the blanket still around him. He was able to carry him out onto the landing and in through the hallway of their own apartment, then lay him down in his own bed without ever waking him up. He would slip his hand under Daniel’s neck, holding up his head, not allowing his arms to fall down. While Mara rushed ahead opening doors, he held his head to ensure that it was not exposed to the draught, sheltering his eyes from the light.

They chose a restaurant in another part of the city, a place where they had never been before. The disaster of the splintering glass changed to an accidental celebration.
Mara spoke with renewed enthusiasm. And this time, her anger was beginning to turn into something else, into a kind of desperate loyalty to the story she once believed. If she could no longer hold on to the person she had loved, then she could at least carry on believing his story, as though the biography had always amounted to more than the person to whom it belonged.

‘I want to believe that you’re Jewish,’ she said. ‘While you’re away in Toronto, I’m going to go and meet your mother again. I’m going to go through the whole thing with her and get to the truth. If she’s hiding something, then I’ll find out.’

And with this declaration began an obsession. She seemed to have entered into a private crusade, conscripting herself into a lifelong duty to establish the true facts so that she could rescue him from oblivion. It was like some oath of allegiance to the family, to the truth, to the past, and she sounded more excited again, full of energy, as though she couldn’t wait to begin her quest. Already she was dreaming of digging up some vital piece of evidence to prove his true identity which might allow him to return to her. With his imminent disappearance, she seemed to cling to this crazy undertaking, to bring him back to the real world, to establish his story at least, if not his physical presence.

‘Mara,’ he said, ‘leave it.’

‘No, I’m serious, Gregor,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to let me do this. If you’re Jewish and she’s denying it, then that’s something that needs to be cleared up.’

The other guests in the restaurant looked up. The word ‘Jewish’ echoed across the tables around the restaurant like some illicit term. There was nothing Gregor could do to stop her resolve to pursue her investigations in Nuremberg.
Besides, it was only right for Daniel to get to know the people Gregor had grown up with. It was impossible to get Gregor to go and see his father, so she and Daniel would have to do all that on his behalf.

In the car outside, just before she started the engine, she could not help herself asking one final question that was close to her heart but which had not been formulated before. She waited as though she could not drive until she got the answer.

‘There’s one thing I need to ask you,’ she said, looking him in the eyes. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Gregor. I just need to know for myself. Is this about dealing with the past? Some kind of atonement?’

Was this something she admired or was it an accusation? He didn’t answer. An entire history had been placed into his mouth. Everything that had gone on in their country, everything that was being spoken about in the media was hanging in the silence between them. She had dared to suggest that by declaring himself to be Jewish, he was turning himself into some kind of human monument to make up for the past. Perhaps she intended it to sound more supportive, but he was trapped by the taunt inside the words.

She switched on the engine, but he told her to stop.

‘I want to walk,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, Gregor,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

He got out and walked away. She watched him turn the corner and drove after him for a while, like a police tail. But he marched on and she then decided to drive home.

He drifted through the city for hours, in a wide arc. But he was merely stalling the moment of return when he would have to answer her question. The walking brought exhaustion in his mind and, with it, a clarity, a submission.
He only allowed the streets to lead him home again when he was sure that Mara was already asleep. She would have gone in to the woman next door and brought Daniel back. She would have woken the boy up and put on his slippers and made him walk on his sleepy legs, shuffling through the corridor. She probably made him go to the toilet while he yawned and rubbed his eyes and shivered with the warmth of his pee escaping from him. She would have put him into the cold bed and tucked him in with a kiss on the forehead. She might have made herself some camomile tea with honey and waited up for him a while, but then gone to sleep in the end.

When Gregor finally turned the corner onto the street where they lived, he glanced up at the windows. There were no lights on. He had the keys in his hand, ready to steal in like an intruder. But then, at the last minute, before stepping up to the main door with silver graffiti over the carved oak features, he turned to the parked beige Renault and found her sitting inside.