Disguise

Here, where he least expected it, he finds himself standing in front of this random piece of evidence from the past. Lots of people would pass it by thinking it was a perfectly natural dip in the earth. There is nothing growing inside the crater, and maybe that is what has caught his eye.

The funny thing is that he instinctively wishes he could show it to Mara. Wait till she sees this, he finds himself saying almost aloud. How long have they been separated now and still he carries on reporting to her internally? They never divorced. She lived with an architect for years in Berlin, but that came to an end because she could not bring herself to divorce Gregor. He lived abroad for years, but still they continued to keep in touch. A distant, proxy sort of relationship in which they went on with their own separate lives, returning to each other from time to time in order to compare information.

He marks the place in his mind, in case he needs to come back here, should he want to show it to her. A turning to the right off the main sand track, after the spot where he saw the wild boar footprints and some bits of thick, wiry fur, where they must come to drink at night and roll around in the mud and maybe fight. Right in the heart of the forest, where the track straightens out and leads through a dark hall of mature trees. He has the impression that he’s standing in a church or a great mansion, with the occasional beam of light coming down from a high window. The silence is almost absolute. A place from which all sound has been withdrawn.

If memory has a physical shape, then it must be something like this, Gregor thinks. The interior of the forest with paths leading through vast interconnecting rooms where you can get so easily lost.

He finds himself staring into this large hole in the same way that he would stare at an animal, holding his breath and not moving. It’s like being in the presence of some great elk which will be gone again with a burst of movement as soon as he blinks. Not a sound. Not even the soft transfer of indoor air. It seems to be staring back at him, asking him questions, this bomb which has missed its target. He feels the shock of it going through him even sixty years after the event, the wind suck and the earth shower and the violent tremor underfoot. It gives him the sensation that people must get with a near-miss traffic accident, unable to figure out why they have been picked out by this contorted luck, the only person to have escaped unharmed. Standing beside such a vicious bomb crater, he feels like man living in the afterlife.

The crater itself measures about the size of a swimming pool, ten or twelve metres across but shaped like a funnel, perfectly round, almost like something produced by nature itself. There is a thin layer of branches and twigs lying at the centre. The earth has levelled off at the edges over time. There is an old, damaged oak tree standing next to it, but most of the other trees around it are conifers, reaching up straight. Who knows, maybe those trees were all saplings then or maybe didn’t even exist and the bomb actually fell in an open field, on a clear and starry night, with only the ragged oak tree to witness the thud and the scattering of soil and the thunder of planes receding into the distance.

All over the city and the region, they still find unexploded bombs from time to time, on building sites, on road-widening projects. It’s like a folk memory in the ground. Full of shrapnel. And remains. Lots of remains, buried in shallow earth. The remains of soldiers, men of whom it is hard to tell any more on which side they fought and for what? The remains of people who never belonged to any side. People who have gone beyond pain and grief and hunger and resentment. Beyond memory even.

What the hell? Gregor thinks to himself. It’s probably not a bomb crater at all. He spent long enough in forests as a child with his father to know that this might be nothing more than a dumping pit. People used to dig large holes in order to bury their refuse in the forest. And maybe this is the physical shape of memory, ultimately, a common landfill site. A hole in the ground intended for items that once clamoured to be remembered but then turn out to mean nothing after all.

He continues to collect his mushrooms until he feels he has enough. The basket is almost full, and yet so light in comparison to mass. He turns and traces his way back along that instant map he’s made for himself in the forest. By the time he comes past the crater again, he has already dismissed it in his mind. He hardly takes any notice of it now and doesn’t stop to have another look. Instead, he sees only the exit ahead of him, a small green light at the end of the path where the trees cut off and the fields begin. And when he comes back out into the open at last, he has the feeling of lights coming on again after a power cut.

As he drives on, away from the forest once more, he passes through a farm of wind turbines standing in the fields. Dozens of them spreading right across the flat, open landscape. They stretch out into the distance, all facing in the same direction, gliding across the earth in formation. The ones further away look tiny, but those up close look enormous, casting spectacular shadows across the land around them and towering over the road, making him feel small as he drives right through them. Tall, silent birds on either side, with long white necks, lazily turning their wings. There is very little wind and some of them are hardly moving at all. Some are already completely still while others are settling down as though they’ve just landed.

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