Disguise (4 page)

‘I thought you knew,’ the man said. ‘I thought that’s why you came here with me.’

‘No,’ Gregor said.

‘Then you’re very naive,’ the man said.

It was true. Gregor had ignored all the questions he should have asked himself. He had been preparing himself for living on wild mushrooms and dealing with wild animals. He was ready to rough it in the wild and knew
how to trap a rabbit without weapons. Knew how to shoot and how to use a knife. But here in the city of London, he was a lost child. Alone, at the mercy of other people.

Gregor felt guilty and stupid to allow himself into this situation.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

And then the man became very polite again. He offered to take him back to the station. They got dressed and the night unravelled in the opposite direction again, back into the plush Jaguar with the wooden dashboard, back along the same route into the city. At Victoria Station, he offered Gregor money. Gregor refused, but he forced a few notes into his rucksack. Then he was gone again.

He was embarrassed using the money, but he continued travelling, this time around the west coast of Ireland. When the money ran out again, he made his way back to Germany and worked for a while in a car plant near Frankfurt. After six months he was off again travelling around Greece. Each time the money ran out he went back to Germany to work in one of the cities again, anywhere but Nuremberg, until he had accumulated enough to travel again. He was in Turkey when the Berlin Wall went up. He was back in Munich when the Cuban Missile Crisis blew up. Drifting back and forth for a number of years like this, meeting people, in and out of relationships, discovering as many countries as possible including Morocco and Spain, until he eventually decided to make his way up to Berlin in the late summer of 1967.

He had heard that things were happening up there and on the train to Berlin he met some young people in the same carriage who were excited about going there also. He drank beer with them and they gave him an address where he could stay in the city. Tell them you’re a friend of Lutz
von Blessing Doehm, they told him. He thought it was a joke, but then he arrived at the apartment and was given a place to stay on the floor of a commune that later became quite famous because the apartment was owned by a well-known writer. A young man who introduced himself as Fritz came down the stairs to tell him he could stay as long as he liked. There was music playing all day and all night. It was hard to sleep. Everybody was stoned. He never met anyone called Lutz. Instead, he met Martin who had also run away from home under a cloud of anger and resentment.

‘I’m not German really,’ Gregor told him. ‘I’m Jewish, from Poland originally.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ Martin answered. ‘I’m half-Russian myself. My father was an officer in the Russian Army.’

Berlin was the place for everyone to begin afresh.

He feels at home here, in this orchard. Is there some distant memory of starting his life in a place like this? Or does everyone get that when they pick apples on a warm day when the summer has spilled over into extra time? That feeling of being connected to the earth in an unbroken chain going all the way back in time, doing what people have done here in this same place for hundreds of years.

The trees are old. Planted long before the war. They must have seen a few things, when this landscape was a battle zone and the farm became a last line of defence. The Russians in the nearby woods and the Germans holding out in the farmhouses. The trees would have witnessed the barn at the far end burning down with the young horses inside. They would have heard their screams. They say the apples from these trees have a unique flavour. Some of the trees are so gnarled that it’s a wonder how they can still deliver the sap to all those distant branches. They are too old to be pruned. And this year has been so dry, the branches are so frail and laden down with fruit that they crack at the touch. Even with no wind, the larger beams sometimes break off overnight.

The orchard was planned to ripen in phases through the summer – cherries, red berries, gooseberries, plum trees, apple trees and pear trees. Isn’t that what mystified the
Russians most when they finally conquered these farms one by one, how well designed and logical everything was in comparison to their own? How insane it must have appeared to them that anyone would want to invade any other land when they already had such manicured farms, designed with the vegetable gardens terraced in neat rows, and the orchard facing south and west to maximise the sunlight. And those strong, brick-built farm buildings to provide shelter from the bitter winds coming from the north and the east.

Each variety of apple was chosen to blossom in staggered succession, but in the great heat this year, everything has been ripening together, more or less. Even in spring, the blossoms were all out at the same time, virtually. The birds got most of the cherries, and the berries, stripping them like strings of pearls. The apple trees have produced such a great crop this year.

When Gregor came to visit the farm in spring, they took him for a walk over to the lake, to hear the frogs. It was late afternoon, with the clouds low overhead and the hint of thunder in the air. They invited him to stay for dinner, and afterwards, when he drove home, he found himself returning to the lake to hear the muddy chorus of frogs once more in the dark. Stayed there for almost an hour listening to the sheer volume of sound around him. Frogs close by going silent for a while, making it possible to hear the ones further away, arguing back and forth. Thousands of invisible voices elaborating at once, like some enormous talk show going all the way round the rim of the lake. Flashes of sheet lightning across the water and a delayed rumble in the air. Quite deafening, he remembers. He could not see any of the frogs and that made them seem larger, more human, more unafraid of the elements out
here. A brash thunderclap right above him made him jump, but the frogs were not bothered and kept on talking. He hardly noticed that he was being savaged by the mosquitoes, alone in the dark with his T-shirt over his head like an old woman. In school some days later, he got the children in class to imitate the sounds, giving each child a random word to utter in exchange for a croak, a glorious dictionary of babbling classroom frogs.

He feels the affection of this gathering in the orchard. Mara says she expected more people to come, but they will probably arrive tomorrow. There will be a huge crowd here for Sunday, she says, and maybe it’s good that they have today for themselves, just the family and their close friend Martin.

Everybody is working now in small groups, talking among themselves, telling stories and joking, discussing local events and world events. Some of them bending over, collecting the apples off the ground after the fall of the past few days. Others high on stepladders picking by hand or catching the fruit with nets on long poles. They treat the apples with great care, grasping them with an upward movement, stem and all, so as not to damage next year’s growth. Johannes, the little boy, is advising them, telling them not to mix up the good apples with the bad apples, speaking to everyone with an authority that he has heard in the voices of the adults.

‘Does that make sense to you?’ he asks, and the adults smile at the sound of their language filtered through the child’s mind.

The rotten apples are thrown onto the wheelbarrows. Those with bruises, those with too many black marks and those that appear to be damaged by worms or by wasps go into boxes and buckets to make apple juice. Thorsten
maintains that you know that an apple is ripe when you see maggots inside. It seems to be timed by nature to fall at the same point. Some of the apples will be cold-pressed on the farm, but the majority will be pressed in a local factory and sterilised before being put into cartons. At Christmas, they will drink hot apple juice with cinnamon. Some of the pears seem almost comically deformed, but still very good to eat. The cooking apples go into separate boxes along with the bruised apples which will go into making cakes or stewed apple while the perfect, edible ones go into small sacks. Thorsten has got the sacks from friends in the Oder region, not far away on the Polish border. One summer when the river burst its banks and caused great flooding, the army was called out and distributed thousands of sandbags to local people so they could create dykes. Strange that time, seeing the German Army going back across the Oder River into Poland with sandbags. This year, the sacks are being put to even better use for storing apples. Over a dozen of them marked with the letters THW are already lined up at the side of the garden, ready to be carried away and stored inside the farm buildings.

Those on ladders can see out beyond the boundary wall across the fields and over to the lake. On the other side, they can see the small forest two hundred metres away where the Russians hid when the farm became the front line. They can imagine the shots being fired across the field between the farm and the forest. There is a car driving along the road, clinging on to the edge of the horizon, and above the field, a kestrel hovering. Every now and again, an apple falls to the ground with a bony kind of thud, such as the sound of a hoof on the earth. The discovery of gravity each time. The grass underneath has been cut so that the fallen apples are easier to find. There is a wide rake leaning
against a tree. At the centre of the orchard, a small table set up with glasses and a jug of water which catches the sunlight. A white cloth is spread over the jug to stop the insects from landing in it and drowning. There is a general hum in the air of wasps and bees and flies and more silent fruit flies. A robin comes to stand on the handles of the wheelbarrow from time to time. The little mechanical chirp he gives is an imitation of the squeak of a wheelbarrow.

Gregor reaches up for one of the high apples. A small sack attached to a long pole catches the apple after he shakes the branch a little. In the blinding sunshine the apple seems to float in the sky and he is afraid it will miss the sack and fall straight down on him instead. He has to look away into the shadows for a moment to regain his sight. A pleasant sunblindness.

Mara has not changed. She sits on an upturned crate, wearing gardening gloves, in charge of the sorting. Katia beside her, sometimes holding her belly for a moment with a heaving kick inside. Mara is very healthy, except for some trouble with her back from time to time, and a cancer scare some years ago. She’s not one for health updates. Her long, bare suntanned arms reach over to pick more apples from a basket and there is a small, powdery thumbprint bruise midway between her right elbow and the shoulder. She’s wearing a loose white top and a skirt with slightly faded colours. She lifts her skirt to carry a bunch of apples in her lap, showing her legs for a moment. She wears bashed-up tennis shoes on her feet, no socks. In the light coming through the trees it would be difficult to say what age she is now. Her hair has flashes of grey, tied up at the back, more wavy.

Martin is standing some distance away, talking to Thorsten. Thorsten is a doctor in the local town and his
wife Katia is a schoolteacher. He has inherited this farm from his aunt who fought for it at the end of the Second World War, then had the farm turned over to the state and fought for the right to live there on her own farm during the GDR years, only finally getting possession of the farm back again in her eighties at the end of the Communist years. Then she passed it on to Thorsten because she was too old to live alone.

Gregor is talking to Johannes. He asks the boy what he would like most at this moment in time. Johannes thinks for a while with his hand on his chin and says he would like an elephant to come into the orchard. Gregor agrees this would be wonderful.

‘I would like an elephant to come into the orchard, too,’ Gregor replies to the boy, ‘and an orchestra behind it.’

Johannes goes around asking everybody else in turn, what they would like best. An idle conversation in which the adults have been turned into children. His father wants a group of elves to come and pick all the apples overnight and put them into the store and turn them into apple juice, but that seems not to be so far from reality. Martin says that his greatest wish at that very moment would be to see an enormous chocolate cake appear on a table with a white tablecloth and a bowl of sweet cream.

‘You’ll just have to wait,’ Mara shouts.

‘But I need something sweet,’ Martin says.

Martin has always been able to declare his appetite. He has not changed much either, only become more rounded in a self-assured way, wearing trousers with red braces over his white shirt. He needs to be near food, and it makes Gregor think of his grandfather Emil who also had to be near food at all times. Maybe that’s why they became friends and got on so well in the first place, because Martin
in some way replaced his grandfather who went missing when he was very small. Martin is always joking. Always talking about food. And sex. Somebody who is able to keep the conversation going and not talk about serious things always. Mara says he can go a little over the top sometimes. ‘You must have stewed apple coming out your ears,’ he said earlier on. And when he arrived at the farm, kissing everyone and shaking hands, he leaned down without any shame to listen to Katia’s baby, with his ear right beside her belly. In front of her husband Thorsten, he spoke to the foetus inside, saying, ‘Hello. Everything all right in there?’ Martin gets away with that public intimacy. He’s been married twice before, has two children. Now he’s living with a young woman from Croatia, though she’s at home visiting her parents. He runs a legal practice in Berlin, but he would love to give it all up to concentrate on more enjoyable things, such as taking up a job as a chef. He loves the idea of cooking as a performance.

‘Have you tasted one of these?’ Mara asks, showing him a perfect Grafensteiner.

‘I can’t,’ Martin says. ‘I can only eat shop apples.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘I’m allergic to organic. All those minced up worms they put into the apple juice.’

‘Look,’ Mara says, holding up a perfect apple. ‘There’s not a single worm in it. It’s the most un-damaged, un-spoiled, yet un-eaten piece of fruit ever created.’

‘No thanks,’ Martin replies. ‘I can’t eat anything that has not been made safe through commerce.’

As a student living in the commune in Berlin, Martin used to sit down at night with a wooden board, the way people sometimes eat cheese and crackers. He would smoke a joint and then set about cutting up an apple and a bar of
chocolate, systematically. It would take ages, while they were listening to music. It was done with relentless technique, resembling an assembly line, cutting everything up first with great care into a series of apple boats and chocolate triangles the way his own mother used to do it for him, then sitting back to look at the arrangement for a moment like a child before he would begin to eat.

Everyone begins to reveal their own chocolate confessions and Thorsten says Katia hides chocolate all around the farm, the same way that alcoholics hide schnapps. A premeditated vice. Every now and again he finds one of the secret places where she has stashed her supplies, and still there are more, he’s certain of that.

‘You never put on any weight, Mara,’ Katia says in a tone of exaggerated envy.

Martin talks about his own ‘limited baggage allowance’. And then, before anyone has noticed anything, Thorsten returns from one of the farmhouses with a bar of Swiss chocolate. They hear the rustle of the silver paper. And the little crack of chocolate breaking off at an angle, never neatly along the squares. Martin is the first to get some, and when Gregor is offered a piece, he declines.

‘He’s never liked chocolate,’ Mara says.

Gregor remembers the black stone offered to him as a child by an American soldier.

When Johannes comes around offering the chocolate, Gregor tells him to give his bit to Martin. Then Johannes asks Mara what her wish is, and she says she would like all the clocks and all the watches in the world to stop, right this minute. She is not wearing a watch herself and neither is Katia beside her, so Johannes runs over to his father to find out what time it is.

‘It’s eleven fifty-five,’ he calls out.

‘Eleven fifty-five,’ Mara says. ‘What’s keeping Daniel?’

Everyone laughs quietly at this sudden urgency in her voice. She smiles at herself. At that moment, her wish seems to be granted. The insects hover. Everyone is motionless. The sunlight floods in through the branches. She is blinded and lifts her hand up to shield her eyes so she can just about see the outline of Gregor stretching up with his long pole into the top branches. Everything in the orchard stands still.