Disguise Read Free

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    Her father began to call him Gregor, even though she tried to stop him from doing so. He gave the boy a sweet and started the engine. ‘What am I to do with him now?’ he pleaded. ‘Send him to an orphanage, give him away to the Red Cross, or some convent?’ As they drove on through the night with the rain falling and the windscreen wipers making everyone drowsy, he let the boy hold the steering wheel and he soon stopped crying and fell asleep with the vibrations of the engine and the hot air in the cab and the warmth of two people beside him on either side.
    Along the way, he stopped the truck once more and held her hand. Looked her in the eyes with that persuasive intimacy for which he was so well known and so loved by people everywhere. He placed her arm around the sleeping boy’s shoulder and told her in his firm, fatherly way that she would soon learn to love this boy.
    ‘Promise me one thing,’ he said to her. ‘Promise that you will never, ever tell anyone that this is not your own son. Not even your husband.’
    He made her shake hands with him. Then he made her smile and told her that nothing mattered, as long as she called him Gregor. He was her son now, written on her documents. Before long she would forget that she ever lost her baby boy in the bombing. They were not out of trouble yet, but he would bring her to safety. The war would be over very soon. Her husband would come back from the front in time and find her. They would be together again as a family, just as before, eating breakfast around the table and laughing, all three of them. In a big album, she would keep all the funny stories and the photographs of Gregor. He would grow up around her imagination. He would go to school every morning with a big hug and return in the afternoon with his own stories. She would buy him a newwriting pad and new pencils so that he could continue learning the alphabet, just as before, kneeling down in the kitchen with the pad open on one chair and his dinner on another chair, so that he could alternate between eating and writing, one word, then a forkful of food, followed by another word.
    Nobody could tell the difference.

Two
    He has reached the long avenue of trees now. They stand in a guard of honour lining the road on either side, straight and tall. There is one missing on the right, like a soldier fallen over in a faint, while the rest of them remain upright in position. They say these avenues were created all over Europe long ago to shield the horses and the passengers in their carriages from the sun and also to provide shelter from the cutting wind and snowdrifts in winter. Now the sun flashes between the trees, throwing black and white stripes across the tarmac. Somebody switching a light on and off, making it difficult for him to see while driving. There is a warning sign erected for motorists showing a car bashing into a tree with black exclamation marks springing up from the point of impact.
    It’s a warm day at the end of September. Gregor is driving through the flat landscape south of Berlin, down to the disused farm where his former wife Mara is spending the summer with her stepsister Katia and her husband Thorsten. They have invited him to take part in the fruit gathering over two days. Mara phoned to say it would be great if he could join them. He would not be alone for the weekend.
    What did she mean by that? Alone without whom? Even solitude is a communal act, so they say. Gregor and Mara have been separated for years. They still live apart,but lately they have begun to see each other a lot more. And maybe she had invited him in order to prove something, to repair things between them, like a family caretaker, keeping everyone in touch. She explained to him that she had invited a ‘heap of people’ out to the farm to pick the apples and she wanted him to be there.
    ‘Before your son disappears off to Africa,’ she said.
    Their son, Daniel, has inherited money and has