by Ramona Koval
And that brings back the name of his finest invention. They were called Mocha Kisses.
Isabel was often depressed and sometimes had to be hospitalised after Marek beat her. Mama would get distressed calls from her. At other times Isabel seemed obsessed with her body. She insisted on showing us how to do exercises that would whittle down our hips. This involved sitting on the floor with our legs straight out in front of us, our arms likewise, and then we had to make our way across the room and back like that, on our bottoms. At age eleven I wasn’t very interested in such activities.
These disparate memories scattered as I entered the foyer of the large nursing home and saw twenty wheelchairs arranged in a semicircle in the half-light of Sunday afternoon. Why were the residents organised like this? It was as if they had all been waiting for me to visit for twenty-five years—you never call, you never write. Which one was she? I searched their faces. Several of them were slumped in their chairs, heads down, beyond easy recognition. Then I looked more closely and saw Isabel, by now nearly eighty: her unmistakeable face, her body swollen and a burden, her left side inert, useless. I offered the flowers, which she couldn’t hold. A nurse took them.
I asked if she remembered me.
‘Sabina’s girl,’ she said. ‘But who is your father?’
How could she have known that this was my reason for coming? It was perfect, cosmically ordained.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ I told her. ‘To find out who my father is.’
She looked puzzled. ‘What is your father’s name? Aron?’ I was struck by the absurdity of my answer to this woman who’d had a momentary memory lapse—she’d had five strokes, after all, according to Dad, who may have been mistaken or exaggerating. She wasn’t asking me a metaphysical question.
Isabel told me to wheel her to her room, which she shared with a bedridden deaf woman who was determined not to turn her television down from its ear-blasting levels. They had a growling conversation in Polish and I sensed hatred. I wouldn’t have lasted a day in this room. If I had a choice, that is, and Isabel didn’t.
She directed me to push the wheelchair again and we went into the corridor to find a dark corner in which to talk. I asked if she remembered working for the Dunne brothers. She did. What were they like? ‘The older one was very nice and the younger one was very handsome.’ Did she remember working with Mama there? ‘Yes, we worked side by side, telling each other how unhappy we were in our marriages.’
Then she asked if I knew why she’d been punished, why she was so sick and helpless. Before I could find an answer, she said, ‘Because’—and now she was whispering.
I was in a labour camp working in Poland during the war, making uniforms, and a woman who was pregnant worked at the same bench as me. And then the time came for her to give birth and she was terrified that the guards would find out, and so she was working and sewing and trying to keep her legs together and finally she just couldn’t and fell on the floor and give birth, and the guard took the baby by the feet and flung its head against the wall and smashed its brains out. I vowed I would never have children and I had two abortions after the war. And that is why I am being punished. Because I am a murderer.
No, you’re not, I whispered. No, you’re not. And then I cried. And then she cried and asked for a cup of tea. What have I done, I thought as I brought the tea—what am I doing here, upsetting a poor old lady and hearing horrible stories I didn’t ask for?
The tea calmed Isabel. She asked what else I wanted to know. I asked her if she knew what Mama thought of the younger Dunne brother, Max.
‘Do you really want to know?’ she said.
Yes, I said. That’s why I came.
‘She loved him.’
My heart missed a beat, and I breathed in deeply. I was thrilled. I didn’t want to breathe out; I wanted to savour the moment.
I told Isabel I thought it was possible that Max was my father.
‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘But I was always too afraid to ask your mother.’
I asked if Max visited Mama after she left the factory. Isabel said she thought he used to visit her in our flat during the day, when Dad was at work.
Then she slumped again in her chair and I wheeled her back to her room, where the other inmate had fallen asleep. I turned off the television. I told Isabel I’d see her again, thanked her and said goodbye.
‘Who are you again?’ she asked.
As I found my car I was overcome by the fear that Isabel might be an unreliable witness, drifting in and out of the here and now. Who are you again? But I put the thought behind me as I drove home. It was raining and bleak, yet I felt that I’d been given a precious gift.
She loved him. I could have been born out of love and not out of violence or carelessness or indifference. It seemed to matter.
But there were new problems, too. I was relying on the memories of a woman who surely had suffered brain damage from her strokes. Did her inability to remember to whom she was speaking invalidate her recollections about what Mama was up to forty-five years earlier? Did my attachment to the idea that my mother and this putative father were in love colour my ability to judge the accuracy of her information?
When I checked the records in the National Archives I saw that Isabel and her husband had arrived in Melbourne in January 1952 on the SS Cyrenia, so at least she was in the country at the right time. I searched for papers on mental competency and brain injuries after strokes. I read that people with intellectual disabilities or limited IQs could give evidence in court, provided they understood the question they were being asked and the need to tell the truth. Sometimes people were judged to be capable of giving unsworn evidence rather than sworn evidence. They had to be able to understand things like where they were and what was wrong with them. They might have short-term memory loss but still be able to understand and remember things that happened before their brain injuries.
I thought about Isabel and the predicament she was in—she understood it and felt she was being punished. She remembered my mother and the conversations they’d had. And even if she’d forgotten who I was between my arrival and my departure, surely her story would be admissible in a court of law? Long-term memory is the last thing to go in the elderly and the demented. Isabel knew about the nice older brother and the handsome younger one. She remembered being unable to ask Mama who the father of her baby was. Most likely she’d heard that Mama couldn’t conceive for nine years with Dad.
I was especially interested that she was afraid to ask Mama about her baby. My mother’s silent message that enquiries were unwelcome was even directed at her friends and colleagues.
Despite my attempts to rationalise Isabel’s information, I was loath to let the germ of a love story go. And this quest, this obsession, was affecting my morality. I was happy to use an old family friend as a source for my investigation and yet, though I was moved by her plight and her story about why she had no children, I did not visit her again. According to cemetery records, Isabel died eighteen months later.
After my visit to the nursing home, I had thought about how Isabel saw the newborn baby being murdered. At one of the Auschwitz trials the survivor Dunia Wasserstrom described the actions of Wilhelm Boger, known as the Devil of Birkenau, who saw a child who’d just arrived at Auschwitz holding an apple. She described how Boger took the apple from the child, then killed him by smashing his head against a wall, and how, later, she saw the man at his desk eating the apple. From this moment, Wasserstrom said, she could not look at a child without crying and no longer wished to have a child of her own.
I’d heard this kind of story when eavesdropping on the conversations of survivors who were friends with Mama and Dad. Once, my mother talked about a woman they knew who went mad after the war. She had hidden with her baby and some other people, and they were at risk of being found by a patrol. The baby began to cry and the woman had to strangle it to save everyone else.
What could I do with such a story? There were no foll
ow-up conversations about context or meaning. Had I filed away Isabel’s story in the same drawer as these other terrible images? Filed it after our meeting, and moved on?
Perhaps there was little I could have done to help Isabel, anyway. I wasn’t a counsellor or a psychiatrist, and she had been absent when Mama was dying, I recalled. But she was a battered woman, caught up in her own troubles.
All this was conjecture.
I was dependent for my evidence on damaged people who had been subjected to the brutal shifts of history. I needed their stories so that I could weave them into the beginnings of my own little life. Isabel’s information was another piece of the puzzle—a puzzle that was starting to consume my days. To solve it I turned my attention in a different, more scientific direction.
5
My mother’s taste in men
MY sister and I were sitting in big leather armchairs in her lounge room, scraping the inside of our cheeks. DNA testing kits were on our laps. We giggled as we watched each other. She was making elaborate gestures with the sampler to ensure a good specimen.
I placed them in the containers provided, added photos of us and sworn affidavits, and put them in an overnight parcel to Sydney. This was in the period before DNA testing became reasonably common. My sister was doing this as a favour to me.
Possibly she thought that my suspicions about Dad not being my real father were an elaborate fantasy that I had unconsciously concocted because I could not accept the truth: that my father was my father. She may have hoped that these test results would prove me incorrect and put the matter to rest. Whatever the case, I paid the $640 fee, huge at the time, and sent the parcel off on its journey into the future, and the past.
The next week I was standing before another strange house with yet another bunch of flowers. I had bought tulips, as it was autumn. This time the door was opened by Max Dunne’s younger nephew, whose blue eyes and curly hair I recognised from the photo his father had shown me. His wife welcomed me in, his children were at the table with their partners, and there was even a dog padding about. They made a lovely family picture, complete, with no obvious gaps that I could step into.
I felt overwhelmed, aware of the searching looks across my eyes and face and hair. The gap between my front teeth, which up till then I was not aware held any particular significance, was remarked upon. We all seemed keen to talk, and I listened to them speaking, to their voices, and searched their faces, too. Where did those eyes fit, that chin, that colour hair? This is what we do, I reminded myself: we classify. This is how people learn about the world, about new situations.
I told my story yet again, noticing how deft I was getting at the order, the dramas, the nuances. I was building up quite a rich portrait.
They seemed interested. They answered my questions about Max and his relationship with his wife, his brother (their father and grandfather) and Max’s son, Alan.
I learned that Alan had fled Melbourne to get away from Max and to kick a heroin habit. The thought crossed my mind that I was about to swap a full sister, a rock and an upstanding member of society, for a couple of half siblings, one of whom was an ex—I hoped—junkie. I heard Dad’s voice in my ear. He was fond of folk sayings: You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives!
But this group of people who were making me welcome and feeding me were kind, and Max’s nephew said he’d never had a sister or a female first cousin. He told me he was keen to claim me, if the story was true. And one of the ways we could tell if it was true was if Alan would give me a cell sample to DNA test against mine. This was a matter we would have to think about carefully, as—I was reminded—Alan was close to his mother and no one wanted to hurt any of the old people.
I imagined, too, that he’d made sure he couldn’t be easily contacted. He was living on bushland outside the little mountain town of Kuranda, north of Cairns, without a phone. He didn’t always answer his mail, I was told.
First, I needed to get the result from the DNA test I’d done with my sister. I promised to keep the family posted, and took my leave.
My younger daughter called me from Jerusalem, where she was doing a few subjects towards her politics degree. She’d taken an extra one in Jewish rabbinic law—Halakhah—to make up points, she said. Had I thought about the laws of mamzerim? These laws governed the children, the bastards, born from adulterous relationships.
Like me, I said, or my sister, or both of us.
My daughter suggested that maybe there were things we’d rather not know. Rather not know? When had there ever been anything I’d rather not know?
She reminded me that mamzers were forbidden to marry anyone except other mamzerim for ten generations. But I’ve only ever married bastards, I thought.
I could tell that this quest of mine had been reviewed in family conversations that I hadn’t be privy to. When my sister said that Dad had been over for lunch, my daughter said, ‘Oh, you mean the artist formerly known as zayde [Yiddish for “grandfather”]?’ A joke about Prince, and about me, too.
But she was right that the semantic categories were becoming more strained. I didn’t know much about the laws pertaining to bastardy: I could imagine that Mama might not have wanted to bring up the subject when I was young. I scoured the texts for the laws of mamzerim. So long as a couple could marry each other if they wanted to, their child was not a mamzer. On the other hand, if my mother was unable to marry my father, if she was already married, or if he was (as was the case with Max) or might be, then I and ten generations of my offspring would be classified as mamzers. It would be the same had I been the product of an incestuous coupling. Would I have to seek out a registry of mamzers, a dating site for mamzers?
So severe are the implications of this law that rabbis have found myriad ways to avoid declaring someone a mamzer. If there was no foolproof way of proving that an adulterous relationship had led to a pregnancy, the rabbis assumed the child was not a mamzer. Even if the mother declared that she thought her child belonged to a man not her husband, but she’d slept with her husband during the previous twelve months—twelve, mind you—the child was assumed to be the husband’s. Why did rabbis make these outrageous laws and then spend centuries working out ways around them? This is what happens when you follow a set of ancient tribal principles.
The sages admitted that it was harsh to punish the children of a forbidden relationship. They also pointed out that in the next life, or in heaven, or when the messiah came, mamzers will be free to stand tall with the rest.
Thanks, I thought. I have never been a patient person, and I was certainly not happy to wait till the next life to be considered equal. Then why did I care what a group of excessively strict rabbis had to say on my status and my ability to marry freely? It was crazy for an educated twenty-first-century woman to care about what a small group of zealots thought of a tribal ruling many thousands of years old; all the same, I felt insulted by the law. I felt the injustice of punishing children for the faults of their parents, and miffed that I might be in the same category as those born from incestuous relationships. I felt cast aside, passed over, resentful.
Even in the age of DNA testing there were ways around a ruling. Unless it was possible to eliminate all false positives and false negatives from the results, the testing could never be used to declare mamzer status. And even if the testing showed that the woman’s husband couldn’t be the father, then the question of who the father was, and whether the father could theoretically marry the mother, was another point to debate.
My thoughts shifted to the shtetl, the village where Mama was born, and the Orthodox family in which she was brought up. Although she was intellectually rebellious, she still had habits from her religious childhood, such as saying a blessing over the first fruits from the trees in our garden or over new clothes. Or spitting three times if anyone said we were pretty or clever, and making us hold a piece of red cotton in our mouths when she was sewing a hem or a button on some clothing while we were wearing it—both
acts to ward off the evil eye. And lighting candles on Friday nights, fasting on Yom Kippur, having a Seder at Passover. All of these were confusing habits from someone who gave us ham sandwiches for lunch, and who cooked milk and meat together.
Part of her may have recognised the seriousness of her actions, the implications for her daughters had they wished to marry into the Orthodoxy, no matter how unlikely that might have been. Would she have risked the happiness of her daughters and grandchildren (for ten generations, no less) by making an admission like this? Why would such an expert evader tell a truth so profoundly disruptive?
I came across a website offering mamzer alerts in which they accused some Orthodox women of coercing their husbands into giving them divorces, and subsequently remarrying. There was a ruling that, if there was coercion, the divorces were not legitimate; the alert names the women and warns men not to go out with them because, if they marry, any children of this new marriage will be considered mamzers till the end of time. Such was the curse of the mamzer, which I idly considered as I shifted my status as the daughter of Dad, the little Jewish tailor from Siedlce, Poland, to the daughter of—whom, exactly?
I rang the laboratory. The results should have come back days before. The doctor said they were being typed up at that moment. Would I like him to tell me over the phone? Yes. I’d waited long enough for this—forty-four years, in fact—and I thought nothing could surprise me.
He talked about alleles and matches and percentages but the sentence that stayed in my mind was: ‘All this says beyond a doubt is that you and your sister are half-siblings.’
As I breathed out, he said that he was never sure what to say about these kinds of results. I thanked him and said that he had confirmed what I suspected anyway.
I rang my sister and told her. She was silent. Then she said, God, Ramona.
