Disguise (8 page)

Gregor’s mother also explained to him why his grandfather was fat. When Gregor was growing up, she showed him the pictures of Emil before the First World War. A tall, handsome young man. She also showed him the pictures of his grandfather before the Second World War, a bloated man who had trouble with his health and drank too much. He was sometimes unreliable. He was a deserter in the Second World War, but there were reasons for that, she told him. He was not a criminal, only a man who should never have been called up.

She told him that things happened to Emil as a soldier in the First World War. It was a miracle that he ever married after his experiences on the Russian front.

Later in life, Gregor began to call it the poets’ war, not only because there were so many poets on both sides who took part, but because of the great passion with which men threw themselves into that war like lovesick poets. They went to the front in a kind of patriotic haze that was close to being in love. It must have been a time when love was something so much more tragic, more elevated and pernicious, more once in a lifetime. Not something that happened twice. Maybe love has become more transferable now. Back in the time of the First World War love was more apocalyptic, like the love you gave to your country.
His grandfather Emil would have formed the opinion that fighting for his country was the greatest act of love he would ever experience in his lifetime. The act of love to the nation, to the greatness of his people and their noble traditions. And war was the ultimate expression of that love in which he would be embraced by the masses.

When he was given his heavy boots and the itchy uniform as an eighteen-year-old country boy and taught how to hold a rifle in his hand and ordered to spend days practising how to slice his bayonet into straw men lined up in the barracks square, he was convinced how glorious it would be to die in battle. To have an enemy bayonet slice through your own stomach was a wonderful, painless experience to a man who truly loved his nation. The general with the straw moustache who made all these speeches about the manliness of sacrifice described it all as patriotic bliss. Fear was the natural, preliminary rush of excitement that comes with love, and dying in battle was the closest thing you could get to sleeping with a woman.

When Emil got to the front, it was anything but romantic. The men liked him because he brought jokes and songs. Every night, they would ask him to sing his songs about maidens and courtiers, songs about lovers unable to return to each other. But he didn’t go out to fight in order to sing about women. He was expecting the place to be full of women and love. He was waiting for women in white flowing clothes to lie down with him in the fields. He had begun to imagine them semi-naked, walking out of the tall fields of wheat or dancing in the woods. He imagined them leaving the milking and dropping their buckets and the warm white milk running through the grass as they came running towards him. Their embrace and their coy giggles and the freedom of their bodies. But there was not a single
woman in sight. Instead, it was all men shouting orders. Men with bad tempers, men with bad skin, men with bowel problems, men who seemed lost and held photographs of their loved ones or their mothers, knowing they might never see them again. Men stealing from each other. Men cursing and men telling lies about themselves. Men who got drunk and found prostitutes outside the camp, paying for love even though it was promised in such abundance to all fighting men.

Emil was eager to get into battle, eager to feel the dreamy embrace of war. When he heard the cannons in the distance coming closer, he felt the fear which had been described to him so accurately as a first kiss. When he saw the enemy appearing for the first time on the flat landscape ahead, he wanted to get sick. Some of his comrades soiled their trousers without even knowing it. Many of them fell in the first encounter. He saw men groaning with their intestines in their hands. Men with missing limbs staring up into the sky in a state of blissful exhaustion, comrades he knew by name, dying as though they had just fallen asleep on their backs in the middle of it all.

Emil was not blessed with the sacrifice of love himself. He was in shock at the sight of blood and death all around him. Fear kept coming in waves, like a great emptiness in the pit of his stomach, in his sphincter, in his genitals. He could hardly eat any more. He felt the stings of heat under his uniform. He got baby hands whenever he had to lift his weapon. He sometimes suspected there was something wrong with his heart and that he would just drop dead any moment. What he hated most was the lull where nothing happened. That great absence of women when the men spent hours doing nothing but smoking cigarettes and writing letters and listening to other men rambling about
their lovers, real and imaginary. He saw men who could not wait any longer fumble in their trousers. In each other’s trousers. Gentle sounds of dying every night in the tent right beside him, men growling in each other’s arms as they tried to bring that glorious moment of death to each other.

And then he killed a man. For weeks he had been shooting aimlessly at everything that moved ahead of him. Who knows where all those bullets went to. But he knew at first hand when he had taken the life of another man, because it changed everything. A Russian soldier of his own age appeared from behind a barn one afternoon and stood a moment with his broad, indestructible chest, defying death as though he was protected in some way by the prayers of his family back home. Emil raised his gun and shot into that chest. The other man blinked, but remained standing. He must have been struck by the same paralysing fear, unable to lift the heavy rifle, even though he seemed like a strong farming type himself. When he eventually tried to aim the rifle back at Emil, he fell down dead. He had been praying. There was a brass icon opened on his chest, a triptych of religious figures carved into panels. The white ribbon that normally kept the icon doors closed still wrapped around his trigger finger.

Emil stood over him wishing he could take the bullet back. He kneeled down to say a prayer for him and lost all regard for his own life, utterly defenceless now, leaving his gun aside on the ground and praying for his enemy with a pool of blood edging like a slow, dark delta towards his knees. He closed the man’s eyes and felt the stubble of his beard as his hand glanced across his chin. He could see the tan line around his neck. Then he cut the icon off with his bayonet. The icon would remain in Emil’s possession
as a kind of reminder of the man he had killed, a man he would spend the rest of his days trying to bring back to life. Gregor has the icon now in his apartment in Berlin. It’s one of the only things which he has brought with him from his family. The white ribbon has gone beige and the brass is dulled with time. Occasionally, he stands it up on the hall table and opens out the doors on their plain hinges, a kind of duty that comes along with this precious possession, to think of the dead Russian soldier.

For Emil, the glorious moment of ecstasy came not long after that. He had been in a numb state for days, stepping over dead bodies from his own ranks and from enemy ranks, all lovers of their own nation now lying in the early agony of decay around the sandy roads and fields. Men lying in orchards, surrounded by apples and baskets. A cow grazing among the dead, as though they were farmers lying idle.

One morning, after another lull, they woke up with the enemy right in front of them, beyond a stand of trees. There was a mist across the fields and they could see nothing, only a family of deer leaping away through the dawn. Roosters crowing in the distance. Through the sleepy emptiness of the landscape came the sound of screaming. Phantom voices of women screaming from the trees with every variation of hurt and anger coming closer through the morning air. The moment had arrived at last. As the sun was beginning to break through, bringing a hint of colour back to the landscape, the screaming became even more shrill, more hostile, more terrifying, until they finally saw a battalion of women soldiers running straight at them out of the mist.

The men seemed unable to move. Men who were so eager to see women of any kind, had no idea what they should do. All that virile longing turned into a spurt of
warm weakness. A hollow, immovable blue ache in the groin that made them unable to walk. Women of all shapes and sizes dressed in men’s uniforms, some with their hair tied and some with their hair wild. Women with big breasts, women with boyish figures and fiery eyes, women with enormous open mouths gone hoarse with screaming. Mothers and daughters and wives and fiancées, charging fully armed, carrying their weapons like ladles, running with open arms, some gone crazy with the instinct of child protection and mother love and passion for motherland. Women running with their bayonets flashing like silver eels in the morning light.

By the time these female warriors came level with them, the men were all ready to submit. The officers ordered them to fire, which some of them began to do, but without any heart, because they were so confused. Unable to make out the difference between love and death, they waited for the warmth of these women to wash over them like a great big blanket of murderous affection. Some of the men dropped their weapons in shock and opened their arms in a great death wish as the women sliced through their straw stomachs. Women gone fierce with screaming, women with ancient kitchen skills wiping bayonets across men’s necks, letting their lives flow out across the mattress of the September fields. Some of the men fought for their lives and were conscious enough of their own mortality to see these women as their enemies. But Emil never saw so many men accept death with such ease of mind. He felt like an infant boy waiting for his mother to wrap a towel around him after his bath, and before he knew it, he blanked out and fell down in the spot where he stood.

When he recovered consciousness in a field hospital, his body was deformed from the shock. His legs were twice
their normal size, his face and neck like a bulging, sheepskin container of water. The first grotesque encounter with women was such a shock, he suffered acute kidney failure. A renal shutdown brought on by overwhelming fear, causing water retention and giving him that inflated appearance which he had for the rest of his life. He survived a battalion of women and eventually married the nurse who looked after him at the field hospital and vowed to calm his nightmares.

He should have been terrified of women, but then he made a remarkable recovery and turned it into his life ambition to be loved by as many women as possible. And that’s what got him into trouble in the end, Gregor’s mother said, as a warning.

‘He was a great singer,’ she said. ‘He should have been on stage. He should have made records. Instead, he became a dealer on the black market.’

Gregor often asked her to tell the rest of the story about his grandfather, but she did not have the answers to that. He disappeared in the end, she told him. He never came back to the railway station to collect them.

Daniel has arrived with his girlfriend, Juli. He is the image of his father, though Gregor cannot see the resemblance himself. He finds it hard to see his own reflection at this point. Daniel is tall, but he’s got brown eyes, and he doesn’t have the curly hair. Maybe it’s the quiet, intense way they both talk, their smiles, their way of speaking with the head bowed a fraction to the side.

Daniel and Juli go around embracing everyone. They all stand back and admire this young couple, their perfection. Juli’s father is a fruit importer from Istanbul and her mother is a true Berliner, born and brought up in the city, though Juli has become a rebel. She dresses in contradictions, wearing a white linen dress and dreadlocks in her hair that make her peer up at everyone through half-pulled curtains. In the sunlight, her white dress lights up like a paper lampshade and there is a stud in her lower lip which shines like a steel pearl. Daniel works as a chef, in a vegetarian restaurant. He is a little older than Juli, but she is the true environmental activist who has been involved in all kinds of protesting and has been arrested for obstructing the police.

They have taken a vow of frugality, refusing to get into private cars, using only public transport, eating only organic food. They intend to make their way to Africa by
ship, first to Egypt, then on to the Sudan, so it seems like a long exile ahead of them. No quick flights home for Christmas or whenever the mood strikes them.

They are the new earth lovers for whom this fruit gathering is more like an elegy, more biblical than a simple day out in the country. They love the hand-to-mouth, subsistence notion of harvesting as much as the socialists of his parents’ generation admired the company of the real working class, people with coal marks on their faces and dirt under their fingernails. They are the believers now. But where does all this purist logic square up with the self-destruction of alcohol and drugs and dancing all night in a techno fit around those clubs in Berlin? Gregor and Martin and Mara were those revolutionaries once, but maybe they all go soft in the end, because revolution is hard work. For the moment, Daniel’s youth-bound principles have remained strong.

They live in this city full of contradictions. A place where nothing matches but where everything blends together in a strange conformity of clashing styles and biographies. The city is vivid with history. Layers of it in every suburb, coming up through the streets, in people’s eyes. A chamber of horrors, but also a place of monuments and devotion to memory. A place that has no time for greatness any more and celebrates instead the ordinary genius of survival. A wounded place at the heart of Europe, eager to heal and laugh. A cut-price city full of mischief and functional chaos, full of thinkers and artists and extremists.

On the street where Daniel lives, there is an ecological slogan reminding them, every time they leave their apartment, to respect their environment. It’s a city full of warnings from the past and warnings from the future. They
live in an area of Berlin where the rents are down to nothing, where the punks and goths hang around outside the underground station with their bottles and their docile dogs, where everything is covered in graffiti like a film of thin paint along the walls and doorways. It’s all very reassuring, like a running commentary of the city’s life. When the Berlin Wall came down, the street art moved into these open spaces in a new search for belonging. Heroic, three-dimensional expressions, most of them making no sense at all. But here, across the street from Daniel’s apartment, where the corresponding apartments have been missing since the war and have been replaced by a repair workshop, some artist has painted a striking image on a red-brick wall. A convex face of a dog with orange teeth and rectangular jaws. It’s hard to say whether this enormous face is meant to be growling or smiling. Menacing or mocking? The dog is smoking a cigarette, a tiny stub balancing at an angle on the lower lip, with a thoughtful, almost human intelligence in his expression, speaking the jagged words of doom: ‘Waiting for the flood.’ A prophet with a sense of humour.

Gregor and Daniel are getting on better now than before, making up for lost time. They meet occasionally for a drink. But it’s obvious at times that Martin has remained closer to Daniel, mainly because he became a surrogate father figure to him in Gregor’s absence. They have an amiable duel going that seems lacking between father and son. Only Martin can get away with calling Daniel an ecological missionary.

Once every fortnight, during the summer, Daniel has brought Gregor a basket of fruit, sent to him by Mara with a note. It’s her way of gently pushing them towards each other, getting Daniel to carry the fruit with him the
three kilometres from the farm to the station because he won’t accept a lift, delivering these certified, pesticide-free cherries along the least fuel-travelled route. Even if the cherries had little maggots doing back flips around the basket by the time it reached the city, Gregor must admire the effort his son has taken. It’s a message of goodwill from Mara, passed on to him through their son Daniel.

Each time Gregor has invited Daniel inside, they’ve sat on the balcony, drinking coffee and eating fruit, listening to the mournful sound of the six o’clock bells tailing off in a sad, minor key.

‘Are they still complaining about your students?’ Daniel asked one evening.

‘Not so much,’ Gregor said. ‘Maybe they’re getting used to it.’

Gregor has a great reputation for private lessons, though he’s got constant trouble with the people living below. It’s a war of noise and counter-noise in the city. He makes every new student lie on the floor beneath the grand piano in order to listen to the full sound travelling downwards before he even begins to make them sit at the keys to discuss posture. His students love him and maybe parents have begun to trust the eccentric teacher more than the clean-cut, conventional type.

From the playground next door came the wild echoes of football players amplified around the empty court-yards at the back, preventing them from having much of a conversation. At times, the noise of screeching voices was like the seaside, with the ball banging against the fence being mistaken for the hollow thump of the surf folding on the shore. Cars passing by along the cobbles making up the raking swish of the retreating wave across
a stony beach. And right underneath them, the people sitting outside the restaurant at the orange tables, chatting and laughing. When the winter comes, all of those sounds will disappear for another year as the acoustic landscape outside becomes every bit as muted as the visual one of bare trees and empty benches and abandoned playgrounds. Only the bells will remain with their holy, melancholy chords. In the summer, the noise of the city conspired to keep them silent.

Daniel has taken his shirt off in the heat, so he can start picking the apples in earnest. One of his shoulders is bigger, better built than the other, a strange physical anomaly that comes from Mara’s side of the family and has been passed on at random. One of her uncles has the same feature and maybe they were all hammer throwers going back in time, or miners in the Ruhr valley with an overdeveloped right shoulder.

Quite suddenly, he is forced to drop his basket when a wasp hovers around him. Everyone else ignores the wasps, but Daniel feels exposed. He runs away. Fights off the unseen wasp in a silent tantrum among the trees, an irrational performance, lashing all around him, punching holes in the air in this peaceful place as though he’s remembered some grotesque dream.

‘Hit him with the rake,’ Martin says. His big laugh fills the entire orchard.

‘You must stay calm,’ Thorsten advises. ‘You mustn’t make sudden movements. They won’t harm you as long as you stay calm.’

‘What are you going to be like in Africa?’ Mara laughs.

‘Look, Daniel,’ Thorsten says. He digs his big hand right into the rotten apples on the wheelbarrow. Everyone turns to stare at his bare arm covered in wasps.

‘They’re drunk,’ Mara says. ‘Drunk on food. They are so heavy and full of fruit juice, most of them, that they can hardly even fly. They don’t have the energy to get angry and sting anyone.’

‘Look, they have droopy eyelids,’ Martin adds.

Thorsten says that he’s only been stung once, inside the house when he happened to put his arm right down on the table where a wasp must have been feeding on a spot of jam. Never while picking fruit. They often take up apples or pears off the ground with two or three wasps crawling out, embarrassed at being caught gorging themselves.

Martin turns it all into a larger joke, pretending that he has been attacked by the same wasp. He imitates Daniel’s erratic motions of terror, chopping the air, kicking and running to pick up the rake to defend himself against an invisible monster.

‘Down with this sort of thing,’ he shouts, and it is Mara who laughs more than anyone else.

Thorsten mentions that they had bees for a while, in one of the barns. Nesting in the loam floor. A beekeeper came to transfer them to a proper hive out in the open, close to the orchard. For a few years, they thrived there until the colony died out. The hive was attacked by wasps and there was nothing left of them, only the dark honeycomb all empty and the shells of dead bees.

Gregor talks about a house he stayed in that was full of wasps, when he was travelling in the USA, out there in the mountains of Colorado, in one of those mining towns where the frontier men went to dig for lead and other metals.

‘I swear, they were everywhere,’ Gregor says. He speaks with a husk of protection around his words, without metaphor. It is not easy to extract any secondary meaning.

‘It was a big old wooden house and they were crawling up and down the sash windows, trying to get out to the light. Desperate for water. I told the woman of the house about them, so she came and killed a whole load of them, then she tried to flush them down the toilet but they were still floating around when I came back that night after the concert. They were all over the bed, alive again, so I had to kill about a dozen of them myself. Next morning there were dozens more alive again at the window. Must have been nesting right in the walls.’

Daniel goes back to pick up the apples he dropped, still keeping his eye on every wasp in his vicinity.

‘For an environmentalist,’ Martin comments, ‘you’re very mistrustful of insects, Daniel.’

Daniel smiles. ‘They have it in for me, those things.’

‘He was stung by a hornet when he was a boy,’ Mara explains.

Why does she mention the hornet? Why here? The mood has turned serious and Gregor finds Daniel staring at him now.

‘They’re protected,’ Thorsten says, as a fact. ‘It’s illegal to kill a hornet.’

‘How would you like to be stung by a hornet?’ Juli says, turning on Gregor as though she felt the pain herself.

Her words reveal the hurt passed on. She must know that the hornet sting all those years ago is still associated with Gregor leaving. Daniel crying at night as a boy and the neighbours in the town where they were staying on holiday in the mountains coming over with aloe vera ointment. The pain is gone now, but the memory of it returns, prolonged by each year that Gregor spent away from his family. Daniel crying months later because his father was gone. Still asking for his father years later and
pointing to the spot where the hornet sent the hot, poisoned sword into the back of his leg.

‘You fucked off after that,’ Daniel says. ‘You left your family.’

The orchard is thrown into silence. The outburst seems at odds with the calmness and the intense hum draped over this gathering. The pain has come back and everyone looks at Gregor.

‘Daniel, please,’ Mara intervenes. ‘You promised.’

Martin sucks the hostility out of the air by changing the subject. He smooths over the tension by ignoring Daniel’s words, pretending there is some acoustic black hole in the orchard by which nobody heard anything. Instead, he mentions a Beach Boys’ song he heard in the car on the way down. ‘Good Vibrations’.

He begins to howl some of the words of the hit song. ‘
Good, good, good
…‘

‘That’s your era, isn’t it?’ Daniel mocks.

‘It’s a classic that,’ Martin says. ‘I never knew that the wobbly instrument was invented by a Russian.’

‘Theremin,’ Gregor says. ‘Leon Theremin. He tried to sell it in the USA, but then Stalin sent the KGB after him. Ended his days in the Gulag.’

‘Then the Beach Boys got a hold of it.’

Once again Martin begins to imitate the sound of the theremin. Gregor joins in, adding the instrumentation and the harmonies. Martin picks up the rake and plays air guitar with it for a moment. When they calm down again, Martin leans the rake back up against the tree and quotes one of the lines from the hit song with a puzzled expression.

‘
I don’t know where but she sends me there.
’

He pauses for a moment and translates the words into German.

‘
Ich weiss nicht wohin aber sie treibt mich dahin.
’

They laugh together for a while at that and then go back to concentrating on picking the apples.