Disguise (20 page)

Coming back is the hardest thing. After such a long time away, the moment of return seems awkward, mistimed, only half fulfilled. It’s not easy to step back into the physical world, to feel the substance of life rather than the dream of life, to match up the touch world with the inner world. The returning partner has become a ghost, a shape in the imagination, a desire, a longing waiting to be converted into reality.

When Gregor’s father returned from Russian captivity after the war, he was unable to feel anything. He had learned to suppress his dreams in order to survive the extreme hardship of the prison camp. He had watched other men succumb to the heights of longing and turned himself into an expert at wanting less, a denier of desire, a brilliant underestimater, sustained only by what mattered most, the thought of his wife and son waiting for him.

After his release, when he found his wife in Nuremberg and finally walked in the door, it felt like a fake. The embrace seemed unreal. It was too much to believe and he was unable to enter into his own luck, could not understand how he was still alive while millions of others had died. He hardly noticed his surroundings: the table, the two chairs, the stove and the bed at the opposite end of the single-room apartment. There was no sink and the water
had to be carried from the bathroom on the landing. And although these alone were luxuries beyond his imagination, he could only see what had been lost and what needed to be improved. She seemed in shock as much as she was in happiness, cried repeatedly and tried to smile, thanked God for bringing him back and said he looked very gaunt. He remained in a kind of waiting room, like a deep-sea diver spending mandatory time below the surface to decompress before being permitted to rise up.

Gregor stared at him constantly. He knew how lucky he was to have a father, to be crushed in his arms with misjudged force. He was excited to see this man shaving and sitting down at the table, eating bread slowly, chewing with a blank expression. He listened to him coughing, watched him lighting up a cigarette, examined hands, ears, nostrils, taking everything into his belonging with such eagerness that his mother had to tell him to stop, to give his father some time. He saw him taking off his shoes to rub his feet. Saw his big shadow cast against the wall of the room by the lamp on the table. Watched him getting into bed with his mother, taking his own place beside her, while he lay on a cushion on the floor, fully awake. In the middle of the night he got up and stood by the bed for a long time, listening to him breathing, his face only inches away from his own, until his father jumped awake with fright and told him to go back to sleep.

His father told them of his capture, how his leg was caught in a wire fence when he heard the wheels of a tank coming up like the sound of bells ringing right behind him, how he would have gone under those steel straps if he had not ripped himself away at the last moment, tearing into his calf. In a cloud of diesel fumes he received a blow to the chin that broke his jaw. But he was glad of being
alive, almost glad of the pain, too, because it meant the war was over at last. His stories of endurance confirmed life, but they almost meant more to him than being alive itself, as though the living sometimes envied the dead. He would always remain more war veteran than father, more soldier than lover.

It was difficult to accept any warmth. It took weeks before she could hold his hand and stroke it. He felt the comfort of her presence in the bed beside him, but he had become so trained on deprivation that he could not surrender to the intimacy of her body or take possession of what he wanted most. They seemed to fear each other and threw themselves into their work instead, substituting material pleasures for the honesty of love. Between them lay the nightmare of war, the bombing, the horrors of the front which he had experienced. He woke up with those intruder memories every night. He felt only defeat, shame, the cramped, airless awareness of being wrong.

They were restored by the ordinary things. By shopping. By walking through furniture shops and car showrooms. By cake every Sunday. They stayed up late at night listening to live boxing on the American Army radio stations. They loved going out to the forests. The innocence of nature. The optimism of children. Gregor at the table doing his homework, writing with his head bent over the exercise book.

How could she tell him that this was not his own son? How could she destroy that fragile story of survival by telling him the truth?

Maybe there is no such thing as returning. It’s impossible to go back to what was before, like undoing war, like repairing history. After the Berlin Wall came down, after the euphoria of instant love in the streets, it became clear
for the first time how far both parts of the same country had drifted apart in the intervening years. The people in the East seemed more eager and more in love with new things, less cynical, less cool. They had their own ways of being frugal and stocking food, their own idea of bargains, their own kind of intelligence and their own damage. They spoke the same language but with different meaning.

When Thorsten first met Katia in Berlin amid the celebrations, they knew instantly without having to say very much that he was from the East and she was from the West. It was part of the attraction that when they spoke to each other in German, they still had to translate some of the expressions. There were different words for so many things, different concepts, different superlatives. As they fell in love and got married, they created a new family language of their own. Their work forced them to spend time apart. Long before they moved to the farm, Thorsten spent a year as an intern in Bremen while Katia continued teaching in her home town of Köln, so he often had to commute home in his spare time to see her and the baby Johannes. Life moved on in large sections of time and he could hardly catch up before he had to leave again.

When Juli recently had to go to Istanbul for a funeral, she was away for two days and it seemed to Daniel like an eternity. After a few hours it felt to him as though he might never see her again. Walking through the streets of a different city with thousands of other people around her, she seemed to belong to those who laid eyes on her at that very moment. That same evening he discovered he could not remember her face. He tried to visualise her smiling at him, but his imagination lacked the ability to recreate the features which had become so familiar. He could remember all kinds of vivid parts of her. The kinetic texture of her
skin as she slid into her jeans, the imprint of her nipple in the palm of his hand, the curve of her neck, but not her face.

Perhaps the face is too much of a disguise. Something which is constantly in motion, a story unfinished, a mask, a representation full of incoherence and guessing, more in the realm of fiction than fact.

When Gregor returned to Berlin after his long time abroad, there was a familiar tension in the architecture, in the sound of the underground doors closing, in the echo of street names. The city was still full of excitement and confusion after the Wall had come down. He felt like a tourist and an inhabitant at the same time. Everything reminded him of Mara. He could see her face, like a portrait accompanying him around the streets. For years he had not had any dreams at night. He wondered if all that brain activity had stopped or if he had got out of the habit and suppressed them. Back in Berlin he found himself waking up once more with an overflow of illogical imagery in his head. Whole movies full of strange, half-material, time-travelling realities. He saw Mara vividly in his thoughts, in every crowd, on every platform. Merely walking down certain streets brought back random images of great intimacy, highlights re-enacted with great precision in his memory. Insane, unrepeatable moments which seemed more real now than when they actually occurred. He recalled standing in the doorway of a bookshop with her one night on the way home from a concert, a hasty, insurgent act. He even found himself going back to see if the bookshop still existed, to see where they had stood once in a different time and where he had almost left his trumpet behind. It was enough to push him beyond the boundaries of memory, back into the physical world. Never before had
he felt so much alive in the present, with his feet on the ground, living in the real world of touch and taste. Her presence was everywhere. He could clearly recall the rounded shape of her lower lip and the sound of her breath beside his ear. He could recall inhaling the scent of her hair and the height of her head and the unique angle in which he had to lean down towards her face.

She had almost become too real. When they began to meet again, there was an awkward distance between them, as though memory could never catch up with reality. Painful reunions in which things would have to be said first and explained, apologies made before that gap could be closed. There was a duty to make up for lost time and to convert themselves back into living beings. After such a long time, he had to put the absence behind them before they could exist in the same place on earth, breathing the same air.

His solitude had become an obstacle. He was afraid of her forgiveness, afraid of her loyalty.

‘I’ve left it very late,’ he said to her on one of those occasions when he invited her to go for a walk with him. There were things he had to say to her which were difficult to say while she stared into his eyes across the table of some café, so it was better to walk with both of them looking ahead in the same direction at the path in the forest.

‘I don’t really deserve your company,’ he said.

‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’

He had expressed his regret before in letters. But these words needed to fall between them, out loud, in her presence.

‘I’m sorry that I ruined everything for you,’ he said.

‘You made it up to your mother,’ she said. ‘That’s important to me. You and Daniel are talking, that’s what matters most.’

What really mattered was that he had come back, that they were walking side by side, that his physical presence was also a confirmation of her life.

‘I still believe you,’ she said to him with a great surge of emotion. ‘I have always believed your story, Gregor. I never doubted it. Even though I never found the proof, I still believe that you’re Jewish and that you were an orphan.’

He was shocked by that declaration. It was her way of saying that she still loved him, but instead it sounded as though she loved an effigy, a story, a version of Gregor that had existed in the imagination long ago. He could not get himself to say anything, and maybe he had gone beyond caring about those things. Her devotion to his story seemed to distance them, preventing them from being together without judgement, without that ancient duty to establish an identity, to explain, to say who you are. It was as if life was always merely some kind of confirmation of status rather than just a flow of air and words and time and careless love between people. Perhaps she had become more of an obstacle in the meantime, keeping them apart with her obsession with the past.

He started going to a late-night bar called the Pinguin. He could not get out of the habit of staying awake, spending time in this half-light, under the mirrored globe hanging from the ceiling. A big disco sun rotating continuously, sending yellow pennies of light circling around the walls and bottles and faces, sweeping across the floor and leaping onto the seats.

He has become part of this late-night shrine of rock himself now, the hall of has-beens, the place in which everything has gone by, eclipsed by cultural innovation accelerating into the future. The world has rushed on into a new set of obsessions. When Gregor was growing up, the
planet seemed like an enormous place, full of sections all devoted to staying apart with their own culture and their own separate identities. North America was far away. Peru was unimaginably remote. The past was close behind, was the phrase from a song which described how everyone felt. Nowhere is far away now. Even the most distant places in Alaska are on everyone’s doorstep, over-filmed, over-reported.

In the Pinguin bar, people still come here to pay homage to their era, listening to the sounds of their own time, recalling moments of great potential and adventure. For a few hours late at night, they can still imagine the world being a big arena, full of undiscovered places. They reimagine their own innocence and their own big-eyed wonder. A poster of Elvis in his tight, glittering white suit just inside the door. A reign of icons all along the walls. A black-and-white Telecaster guitar propped up at forty-five degrees on a ledge over the doorway like a musical anti-aircraft weapon. The decor has not been touched up since the high tide of punk in the eighties when people like Bowie and Depeche Mode came here regularly. The toilets are the same. Same plastic sofas. Same Formica bar, dotted with cigarette burns. In the corner, the same bumper car, rescued from some carnival, come to a halt for the night and turned into a table surrounded by bar stools.

It’s not a live-performance venue, but once in a while when the mood strikes him, Gregor picks up a guitar and sings ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’. A question they all ask themselves. One of the other patrons at the bar doing air drums on the counter with his hands. We are never more than the sum of our aspirations. Three-minute peaks of clarity in which everything seems possible. He has become a playlist of those temporary successes and failures,
a man who has left no significant mark on the culture tree himself, but who has been a witness to a time in transformation. He has gone through all the self-searching profundity, wondering if anything was achieved in the end. He has been through the mental hall of mirrors and come out the other side. The man with no answers. The man with no explanations.

Since he has come back, he looked up some of his old friends in the music business, but most of them have moved on to other things. He still plays a few gigs around the city, but he gets most of his satisfaction from teaching now. He’s happy to teach everything from Chopin to Cobain. The students love him because he gives them real gossip about the music scene, how they lived and how some of the most famous songs were constructed. He’s got himself into trouble once or twice with such gossip and parents have phoned up the school in outraged tones, wondering if some of it is appropriate. He drifted into a conversation with his students one day about the cult of groupies and starlets around some of the great legends. Told them about one woman keeping a lock of hair from each one of her conquests. Another young woman who made a plaster cast of each rock star’s penis. When they asked him who had the biggest, he told them it was Jimi Hendrix, by a mile, and then the principal started getting the heat from the parents. But in the end, he defended Gregor and said it was all part of the education of young people to be aware of what their forefathers did, not only in the Second World War, but also in the great madness of the post-war era of protest and cult worship.