Disguise (6 page)

His mother told him about the journey at the end of the war. She talked about his grandfather, Emil, and how he brought them south in his truck. They stopped in a town and she waited at the train station with Gregor, while Emil went to get some more fuel. It was too risky to get fuel from any army depot, so his best friend Max was busy getting some on the black market.

She must have been in shock at the time because she could never remember the name of the town. Sitting for hours in the waiting room of the railway station as the place filled up with refugees fleeing from the East. She must have stared at the name of the town in front of her for so long that she tried to forget it afterwards. Every time the door opened, she looked up, hoping that it was her father, coming to collect them.

They waited all afternoon and by nightfall, a large crowd had gathered. Most of them had come on foot, hoping for a train to take them further west. They consulted the timetable outside the office, even though it had become an illusion and nobody really believed any of those promises any more. They spoke of delays and expected departure times, staring at the station master’s door, waiting for news, clinging like an act of faith to the idea of normality, hallucinating the sound of trains in the distance.

Gregor and his mother had not heard the sound of a train in all the time they sat there. She was asked again and again how long she had been waiting and people repeated her answer among themselves.

‘All day,’ they whispered. They didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. When it grew dark, Gregor slept in her arms, but he kept waking up again, fretting with the pain in his ear. She spoke to him in a calm voice, but he was almost deaf with his infection. She asked people if they had any olive oil but they shook their heads. The only thing that would soothe him was the button on the right shoulder of his jumper, which he kept sucking as he rocked himself back and forth.

The people who came into the station were exhausted. They had left everything behind. They had counted the living and counted the dead. They had been running and walking for weeks, and they had come away with their lives many times over. Their lives were, in fact, the only possession they had left. They had lost most of their belongings and what they had brought with them had often been bartered away, or stolen. They had seen their homes destroyed or taken over. They had seen bridges blown up right behind them. They had seen towns through which they had passed disappearing in a wave of bombing that took no more than five minutes. They had thrown themselves on the ground when low-flying planes came over them, strafing the road. They had picked themselves up each time and moved on. They heard women screaming in barns as they passed by, moving onwards all the time, driven by fear, by the certain knowledge that they could never go back. Clusters of them sticking together to help each other. Others vying with each other, doing business, arguing over the price of things, over the
value of an egg. People crouched around a dead horse, cutting sections off a steaming animal from which life had only just departed and which had only moments ago pulled a cart laden with passengers and possessions. Men and women cursing the animal for letting them down in the middle of the journey, having to leave most of their belongings on the road, with only a knapsack full of warm fresh meat, dripping blood on the back of their legs as they walked. They had witnessed hunger and death many times over. They had seen people dying with the cold. Mothers who could not feed their babies because their breasts were frozen. Mothers carrying infants who were already dead. They had seen them huddled by the side of the road and seen the bodies of those who had died, lying like inflated cushions inside their clothes. They had told themselves not to look, but could not avoid the curiosity of a single glance whenever they saw people kneeling in prayer, if only to reassure themselves that they, at least, were still alive and moving on. They had told their children not to look, protecting them from seeing the worst. They had witnessed people who were half dead, covered in blood, dying in the middle of the road with others making a wide arc around them as they passed. People coughing and crying, not knowing whether to stay with the dying or whether to go ahead. Grief that seemed so real at first, until it was seen so often that they became numb. Old people unable to move on. People vomiting. People relieving themselves openly because there was no time to lose and no dignity left. They were all strangers on the road and nobody recognised anyone any more. All kinds of people in mismatched clothes passed on from the living and from the dead, making their way along the road into the unknown. People said the names of towns where they
came from, uttering the ordinance of their lives in an attempt to restore their identity, even though the maps were now changed forever and there was no meaning left in those names, only a frail recollection of their place of birth ebbing away as they pressed on. Many of them gone into a kind of voluntary blindness in which they could not accept the realities of the new world into which they had been forced to enter, even when the houses looked similar. The shape of things in front of their eyes only reinforced their loss. They were refugees with nothing, no place in the world, no framework of relatives or friends or neighbours, no landmarks of childhood, steeples, shops and schools. Their orientation was gone. They had lost the grasp of local geography. Nothing was familiar to them any longer and there were things which they could not remember properly because they lacked the known surroundings which might trigger off their memory. There were things they could only remember among their own people, in a place where they were at home. They were on the run, fleeing into a great emptiness, with a deficit of belonging. They had lost the capital of their lives. The entire substance of their identity was nothing more than a story they carried with them in their heads.

Sometimes they would see people going in the wrong direction, unable to carry on because there was somebody they could not live without. Lost expressions on their faces as they went back against the tide, searching for the person left behind, crying as they went, gazing into the eyes of all those on the move in the hope of some recognition. Children calling for their mothers. Everywhere those asking if they had seen or heard of their loved ones, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, giving the names, giving descriptions of those who had only just missed being there
by some strange misfit of fate. Three girls who had failed to make it to the last train in some faraway town and had therefore been separated forever because they were unable to meet their father at an arranged meeting point. A twist of grotesque luck which shaped lives beyond all imagination. People who would never see each other again in this great shift of human settlement, no matter how hard they looked, and would remain forever with an image of someone, held firm in time, not growing any older, just like a photograph standing still in memory, kept alive, just short of being forgotten. Sometimes it was more of a relief to know that somebody was dead, because they, at least, had been absolved from grieving, unlike the living for whom each loss was a double grief, as though the other might as well be dead. Sometimes it was not even the loss of another person that was so painful but the thought of them crying and searching in a panic, the inability to let them know that everything was all right and not to worry.

There were moments of extraordinary luck, too, in which loved ones met each other by some unimaginable coincidence when they had already been given up as lost. Some people even got married along the way, blessed in a hasty ceremony by a priest before they moved on again. There were those who considered themselves lucky and those who considered themselves unlucky. Those who put their loss behind them and those who would never be the same again. Those who prayed and those who cursed and resented. Those who stole and those who gave. Jokers and worriers, optimists and pessimists, opportunists with an eye for gain and suckers who were only waiting to be taken advantage of. Those who had been let down and those who had hope. Those who looked forward and those who looked back.

Their pain and indignation was always overshadowed by the news of worse things elsewhere, by reports of concentration camps.

At some intersections along the road, the military were picking out able conscripts from among the young and the old who might still serve in a desperate defence of their country at the end of its days. Men dressed as women to avoid being detected. Mothers hid their sons in trolleys, turning them back into babies, telling officers with tears in their eyes that their sons were sick and useless and unable even to hold a gun in their hands. Teenage sons who bid farewell to their mothers at the last minute with the belief that they could defend them from the enemy. Other sons going off whimpering like infants, pushed along into the prophecy of death, trying to look back and wave and maybe see their mothers waving one last time. Only the weak and defenceless allowed to carry on, as long as they did not block the vital passage of military vehicles heading in the opposite direction back towards the front.

In the middle of all that, they had also witnessed great kindness. A man giving away all the food he had brought with him to a family with seven children. People helping to put a wheel back on the trolley, giving precious time away to others whom they might never see again in their lives. Doctors and nurses setting up a makeshift surgery, staying behind to look after the sick and injured, patching them up so they could carry on on their way. A roadside operating theatre in which a doctor amputated the leg from a screaming young boy, clutching at the uniform of the nurse with his hand as though it might have the properties of an anaesthetic. People passing only metres away who were locked into their own misfortune and could no longer feel the pain of others. And each time they entered a new
town, they were seen by the inhabitants with great suspicion, shown only where the train station was, because this was not a place with any permanence either, only a halfway stop along the endless road of refugees.

In the waiting room of the train station they looked for available spaces to settle themselves for the night, for a few hours of sleep. Because they had lost everything and had no homes to go back to, they had an instinct for finding the best places away from the doors. These were occupied first, as though they had a value. Even if they would inevitably forsake their places in order to move on again, they settled into them with a touch of permanence, laying out their coats, packing a pillow out of some garment, making sure they were out of the draught, as though this could replace the idea of home. There was some pride in having found a place by the wall. Those who came later had to sleep right in the middle of the floor where they were vulnerable, where their belongings were not as safe. Those close to the doors complained about being stepped over as they slept, even though they had the advantage of being the first up and out if a train came.

Some people talked all evening, comparing the journey so far, telling each other the terrible stories they had witnessed or heard along the way. There were rumours of worse to come, at the mercy of the enemy now as much they were at the mercy of their own beliefs. There was a man who had left his house in Silesia with nothing, only his camera and a few rolls of film with which he had preserved every part of the house, every corner, every picture on the wall, every piece of furniture. He had even photographed the contents of the drawers and the storage space under the stairs. Captured the view from each window, even from the attic skylight. Later he would settle
down somewhere and recreate his entire life and belongings and family history. No matter what happened to his house, he would have everything intact in an album. He kept his bag firmly by his side, patting it as though it was full of money, or food, things he would fight to the death over.

There was some comfort in numbers. Mostly they talked about their loved ones and about where it might be possible to get some food. Some of them took off their shoes and talked about the terrible state of their feet, asking for nail scissors, asking what should be done with an ingrown toenail. Some began sewing and repairing clothes, looking at what other people wore and exchanging items that were more suitable. They reappraised the value of everything against the background of their chances. Out of despair came ingenuity and invention, self-help and self-analysis. People began to correct each other on tiny details, a brutal trade of criticism and counter-criticism in which they established a code of survival and self-surrender. Rational thought suppressed the emotional. They elevated themselves above their misery with intelligence, with frugality, by being hard on themselves, by biting back pain, by having no sympathy for weakness. It was the start of a new contest of correctness. Some of them argued about the correct time, saying the clock on the platform was slow. Some said it was a mistake to leave your coat on at night. Some blamed themselves for not seeing all this coming.

Gregor’s mother did not talk very much about herself. Though they asked her questions, she remained silent, under instruction from her father not to reveal anything.

Some people became worried, weighing up their chances and suddenly deciding to leave, giving up precious space in the corner. Even though they were giving up the best place in the whole station and might never get such a good spot
again, it was better to move on and get a bit further west while the roads were less congested. And what if a train came, those who remained behind said, just after they had set out on the road? Then they would be sorry not to have been more patient.

The door squeaked every time it opened. A tiny whistle in the hinges that became so familiar that she could not settle down to sleep. She sat with Gregor on her knees, twisting and turning all night with his bad ear. She imagined her father in the doorway with his great smile, telling her it was time to go. All the envious glances of other people around her who wished they had a father like that coming to rescue them.