by Ramona Koval
I told him how kind his family had been: even his older cousin had been open and had sent me the photo of Max. Did the cousin know this story? Alan asked. I hesitated, and in the hesitation he said: It’s okay if he does.
I said yes, he knew, but I hadn’t spoken to him for months and all of the recent contact was with Alan’s younger cousin. I said that I knew the older cousin didn’t get on with Max, and Alan said he didn’t get on with a lot of people.
I hoped that family politics was not going to deflect me from my task—but Alan reiterated how much he was looking forward to meeting me. He said he’d been looking at my photo in the paper and trying to imagine me without all the curly hair. I said I’d send him up a better photo and he said he’d send me one of himself. I said I’d let him know when I was coming and he said that sometimes it was a week between visits to the post office and he might take some time to respond.
We said see you soon.
And I hung up and rejoiced that another door was opening.
I booked two nights at the Kuranda Rainforest Resort for what happened to be my forty-fifth birthday. I would fly up using frequent-flyer points in just under a month.
In the meantime I rang the DNA laboratory in Sydney for advice about the testing. The doctor said that because I was female and Alan male it would be best to exclude his mother’s genome: could I get her to give a sample, too? No, I could not.
This would necessitate testing for ten or fifteen different alleles, costing another thousand dollars. I’d been a single mother for many years, supporting two daughters on a public broadcaster’s salary, and had little savings. This was getting expensive for what might prove to be a folly, but I felt I had to persist.
On the treadmill at the gym later that morning I remembered that Alan had a daughter. Maybe she could substitute for his mother’s genes. She’d have his X chromosome, which he’d got from his mother. I wasn’t sure what would happen with the rest of the chromosomes, the autosomes. I couldn’t remember the genetics I’d studied twenty-five years before, but I did remember wanting to study genetics because I was fascinated by the way looks were transmitted from one generation to the next—though not in my family.
I was the only one with curly hair. Dad had straight black hair, my sister had lovely straight red hair, and Mama’s hair was brown and slightly wavy. Mama said that when she was a little girl she had curls just like mine, but then they went straight and her hair turned brown.
From what I knew about the way these things go, I expected that a child of Dad’s would have straight dark hair. Mama said that Dad’s beard was reddish and that was why my sister’s hair was reddish, too. ‘Isn’t that right?’ she’d ask him, projecting the question into the space between them rather than speaking directly to him. And he would nod: yes, a red beard, that’s right.
Alan called from the phone box again to say he’d meet me at the airport in Cairns and drive me to the hotel in Kuranda. He seemed as excited as I was. He told me that he and his partner had seen the photograph I’d sent, and I looked even more like Max than he did.
And he said that he remembered vividly a time when he was about five and his mother kicked his father out of their Carlton house. His memory was of looking out through the venetian blinds in the front window and seeing his father with a suitcase in his hands. Years afterwards, when his father was dead, Alan asked his mother what the fight was about. She told him that his father had been having an affair.
I was born when Alan was almost five years old.
I was beside myself with excitement on hearing this. Our stories were beginning to meld into each other’s. What were the odds that a stranger’s story would fit into the gaps left in mine? And only seven months after Dad’s eightieth birthday and the start of my search…
A couple of weeks later Alan rang again, just as he said he would, checking that our plans for the coming Friday were still on track. He told me not to worry, that he and his partner and their daughter were looking forward to meeting me.
He was making me feel wanted. Perhaps he saw me as a lost orphan. Perhaps he recognised the feeling himself.
I asked if there was anything from Melbourne that they wanted me to bring. I’d thought of cakes and chocolates from Acland Street in St Kilda: perhaps he hankered for the sweet things of childhood?
He said to leave my worries behind. Was that what he did when he left for the north? I wasn’t worried, I replied, and I was keen to meet everyone. He said they had read my novel and loved it. He mentioned the Fruit Salad Farm, near Melbourne, which I had called the Strawberry Farm in the book. We laughed at the idea of all those unfit Jewish survivors walking to the top of the small hill and rewarding themselves with huge helpings of strawberries and cream.
It was odd to feel so warmly towards a man I’d never met. And there was danger in feeling too connected too fast. I had to be careful of falling in too deep out of a pathetic need to belong, the way newborn ducklings imprint their mother projections on the first thing they set eyes upon after hatching.
7
The exact same shade as mine
I FLEW from Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane and, at last, to Cairns. A wall of tropical heat hit me as I stepped off the plane to the tarmac, and clung on as I continued down covered walkways into the waiting area.
I saw Alan but looked away, not ready to meet his eyes. He was surprisingly small and wiry, with cropped hair and a little vertical stripe of grey beard and a blond-grey moustache, and an earring in his left ear. He was dressed completely in black, and I could see ropey veins under the skin of his arms, which had been baked in the Queensland sun, like clay. He looked like the survivor of a city drug scene, which is exactly what he was.
He came up to me, spoke my name, and kissed me on the cheek. We each looked into identical blue eyes. I noted the shape of his face. I was surprised that I was taller than him and much sturdier in build. It was as if he could read my mind: he said he was thin now because he was a vegetarian and did a lot of physical work with his four horses.
We found his truck and I climbed into the cabin, peeling off layers of clothing from the southern winter. I looked surreptitiously at his arms and hands, his nose and profile.
He was talking about horses. Reading them, their body language; what you can learn about how they communicate between themselves. He worked sometimes as a horse whisperer, he said. He and his part-Maori partner and their daughter lived quiet lives in the rainforest.
He coughed and smoked and said he had a lung condition because of what he’d been through in his life, which he’d tell me about later. I guessed it was to do with his heroin addiction, but said nothing. I knew he’d hidden himself away up here and I couldn’t predict his reaction to me already knowing this about him.
I was feeling bulky next to him as I glanced at my well-covered thighs next to his skinny shanks. I realised that part of me had wanted a towering strong brother, like my image of his father. But I was the towering strong one. He must have sensed me looking him over. He told me he was wiry but strong. Either he really was reading my mind or he’d learned something valuable about non-verbal communication from horses.
He’d adopted the northern habit of saying ‘ay’ at the end of some sentences. His vocabulary was alternative, a hippie-dope lexicon. But he was bright and on the ball and intensely interested in the story I had come to tell him.
I began the tale as we drove the twenty kilometres to Kuranda, through the dense green bush, across rivers, all of which I hardly noticed. He quoted from parts of my novel that he thought might not have been strictly fictional. He was an attentive listener, he assured me, and he said ‘wow’ and ‘gee’ and ‘I bet’ to encourage me as I told the story. He told me again how much he’d looked forward to my visit.
We were interrupted by our arrival at the Rainforest Resort on the edge of the Atherton Tablelands and my checking in. The staff there knew him and were friendly, calling out ‘Hi, Al’ when they saw him. I picked up the thread
as we made our way to the cabin on stilts at the edge of the property, next to a wired enclosure where a family of kangaroos was housed.
Another person called out a greeting and I asked why everyone seemed to know him. In the early days—fifteen years before, when Kuranda was not yet a tourist town—he used to cut quite a figure when he rode into town, he said, and everyone knew him as ‘the guy on the horse’. A better horse to be on, I thought, than heroin, the Big H.
We made tea for me and instant coffee for him, and took our cups on to the small veranda. We sat and we talked. I finished the story. He told me he thought I had been courageous. Hours passed in deep conversation. He went to the car to get his chest medication and brought back a bottle of champagne. I thought then that I must have passed some test. I had been horse-whispered.
We went inside when darkness began to fall. It was pleasant for me but it was winter here and Alan found the nights shivery without any body fat to warm him. We sat at the little table and I showed him photos of my daughters. I read him parts of my notebook, and we drank the champagne, and I produced two joints a colleague had given me a few weeks back.
He asked me what I wanted to know about him and seemed relieved when I told him I knew he had been addicted to heroin. Who told you? he asked, and I hesitated, trying to remember. He took this as an indication that I might not want to reveal my source. I told him I couldn’t remember if it was his younger cousin or the family friend, and he smiled. He said that his parents were always worried about people finding out about him when clearly a lot of people already knew anyway.
He told me his story. Sometimes it intersected with mine.
Here are my notes: Flat 1, 326 Beaconsfield Parade, St Kilda. This was my address, the first one I learned by heart as a child, in case I got lost. According to poor Isabel in the nursing home, it was here that Max visited Mama and me when Dad was at work.
Alan remembered the ponies in the Catani Gardens on Beaconsfield Parade, next to the beach. I remembered them, too. We used to ride them, led by their handlers, round and round the small track. I liked to feel their bristly manes. On Sundays, Max took Alan to the gardens and it was there that Alan learned to love horses. He remembered, as I did, the swings and the slides and the daisies for making chains. Maybe, he said, they met in the park on a Sunday, Max with his five- or six-year-old son, and Mama with her little daughter. His daughter, too?
Then Alan remembered that Beaconsfield Parade elicited a fiery response from Max much later on, when Alan said he wanted to be near the sea in a rental place on that street. ‘Why would you want to live there? What for?’ his father said angrily, and they fought about it. We agreed that it was a much more heated response to a street address than seemed reasonable. Alan thought Beaconsfield Parade must have been a trigger for him. Perhaps it was the scene of other memories?
Alan told me again about his parents splitting up for a few days when he was five. His mother found out that his father had been having an affair. So you took him back? Alan asked her years later, and she said yes, but it took her years to forgive him. Then he asked if she really had forgiven him. He couldn’t remember if she answered.
Perhaps his mother knew the identity of this other woman. But did she know that the woman was carrying Max’s child? And how much forgiveness would that have taken?
I pondered whether this was all coincidence. A stranger had an affair in the same period that I was conceived and born. He was touchy about a street in St Kilda where I lived for the first six years of my life. Wouldn’t he be touchy about his son living in a notoriously seedy suburb rife with drug deals? Was Max just one of thousands of men in Melbourne who had affairs at the end of 1953 and through 1954? Who could answer these questions?
There was little time for speculation. I was in Kuranda for two nights, and I wanted to find out from Alan what Max was like. A child’s-eye view of the man in question, as much as that was possible.
Alan says his father loved him. But that after the age of thirteen he was a great disappointment to his father. Would he have been proud of me? Is that why he asked Bern what work I did and if I was married and if I had children and if I was happy?
Max was tall, and strong and handsome. He was a very natty dresser. Alan has photographs taken after the war of his father standing with a Greek Jew he knew and they both look like they were in the Mafia. His father may have killed a couple of people ‘afterwards’—after Auschwitz, for retribution.
May have killed a few people? A few? How did Alan know? Was my real father capable of murder? And how would this make me feel: threatened, protected, proud?
Max was a hard man. He was physically able to be violent, but he never hit his wife or his son. He once bashed up a man in a pub who had insulted him. I liked the idea of a strong man, my father being able to take down a man who’d insulted him. He would have been able to protect me, too. But he didn’t.
Max was obsessed with anything to do with the Holocaust. History. Biography. He read Solzhenitsyn. When there was a program on the history of the SS on television he would set himself up half an hour early in front of the TV set, organised for the big night. His wife would leave the room and sit in the kitchen with her fingers in her ears. Alan thinks something terrible happened to her during the war. She was in the Majdanek camp. She was five years older than Mama.
Max was trying to understand what had happened long after it was over. But maybe it was never really over for him. I thought of his wife with her fingers in her ears. Mama didn’t want to see the pictures and hear the raised German voices either.
Max loved his wife, says Alan. More so than she loved him. We talked about the possibility of his affair with Mama being about sex rather than love. Who knows? Isabel said that Mama loved Max. Maybe she did. Or maybe she loved the idea of rescue. I once heard her remind Dad in an argument that he had promised to carry her in his arms for the rest of her life. She laughed at the thought of this. He didn’t rescue her, and neither did Max.
Max loved chocolates. He loved to go to Acland Street on a Sunday morning and buy sweet things to eat. I love chocolates, too. I’d thought of bringing Alan cakes from Acland Street. Maybe Max and I could have gone together to Acland Street to buy beautiful cakes and sweet chocolates. But lots of people like chocolates and cakes. That’s why there are shops full of them, and why there are chocoholics and desserts called Death by Chocolate.
Max had lung cancer, for which he had an operation. Then he had adrenal cancer which killed him. I should look up the familial patterns of adrenal cancer.
Max told his life story to a South African man he knew when he was in the hospital. It may have been Vimy in Kew. Alan can’t remember the man’s name. Zoshu? How could I find a South African whose name might be Zoshu? I lived near that hospital in the time that Max was dying. Maybe I drove straight past it as he was taking his last breath?
Max could get angry and throw furniture around, smashing things. It was frightening. He could rip his own shirt off when he was full of fury. Alan grabs his own shirt and mimes tearing it from the collar, popping the buttons, and ripping it backwards over each shoulder.
I imagined crouching behind the couch with Alan, waiting for the storm to pass as Max ripped the shirt off his shoulders.
Max said he had blond curly hair as a child. He had grey-blue eyes. After the war his hair went dark, and he wore it slicked back like an Italian. He always wore sharp suits. He was hopeless at doing repair jobs around the house. He employed people to do this.
Max was upset and appalled when Alan told him of the suggestions (from whom?) that his behaviour in Auschwitz may have been something of which to be ashamed.
He was a tailor and he made uniforms. Then he got ‘a good job’, where he got more food. This was working in the infirmary.
Where they did medical experiments? I asked. Alan said he’d never thought about that. He didn’t know.
Max was quiet. His wife was louder, a party girl…attractive, outgoing. Mama was q
uiet and dignified and proud. Maybe she suited Max better?
Max and his brother Joe didn’t get on. Max and his older nephew were sworn enemies. Max called him a bad seed.
Max told Alan of the reception he received on arrival in Australia. He expected warmth from his older brother Joe, as the only survivor of the family. His brother was cool.
(A bush turkey lands on the rail of the porch as I write, pecks and moves on.)
Joe was very proud of the solid-walnut dining table in his home. Max asked him, ‘What year did you buy the table and what did you pay for it?’ Max was furious that his brother could have bought the table in the year that the money could have been used to rescue some of the family from Poland. Max always said that the table represented their sister.
I imagined the atmosphere around the table at family dinners. I saw Joe and his family waiting for the moment when Max’s seething temper would erupt. I wondered if his wife would put her fingers in her ears then, too.
Alan said that it would have been just like Max to go to an auction in Kew, around the area in which they lived. And it would have been in character for him to be interested in what kind of work I was doing. And pleased at the answer. ‘Sounds like Max,’ says Alan.
Wallabies were padding about, thirty feet from where I was writing. Lush tropical ferns, an avocado tree, palms, poinsettia, bananas. Lots of birds. In the neighbouring cabin, a young father and his daughter of twelve or thirteen were horsing around. He was teasing her; she teased him back. She belted him playfully on the bum; he pushed her hand away. ‘Dad! Dad! I want to show you something!’ He was laughing and saying, ‘You tone yourself down.’ They bantered. I was transfixed, fascinated by the warmth between them.
