by Ramona Koval
On the other side of my cabin, the wallaby family were now under the shade shelter, eating together. The father in the next cabin had taken off his shirt. He had a star-shaped tattoo on his left forearm.
How casual people were about tattoos now. When I was growing up tattoos were a source of shame, especially for women. They were a reminder that people had been viewed as livestock, losing their names and being recorded only by numbers.
Alan says Max never hid his Auschwitz tattoo, that he was proud of surviving. The number was 76200. I wondered if the seven had a line through it. That was how my parents’ card-playing friends used to write their sevens on the scoring records I found next to piles of matchsticks on the Saturday mornings after their games.
Alan says the tattoo was on the top of his forearm, not on the inner arm. Max said that he was one of the earlier inmates. Did they decide later to tattoo the inner forearms?
We had finished the bottle of champagne, eaten vegetarian pizzas and shared a joint. By eight, five hours after I arrived, I was dead tired. Alan kissed me on the cheek, hugged me and went off into the night. I collapsed onto the bed. I couldn’t read, couldn’t think, and fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke the next morning to the sound of kookaburras, alone in the holiday resort on my forty-fifth birthday, I was not unhappy.
I was to wait for Alan to pick me up and take me to the bush block where he lived. He wanted to introduce me to his partner. Their relationship was strained. She was unhappy and pregnant and wanted to split up. They lived on her property, he’d said, but he’d being working it hard for years. He was keen for me to meet their little daughter.
Alan told me that when his younger cousin had called and left the first phone message, he was worried. He thought it might have been about his mother. When he rang back, his cousin said, ‘This might sound strange but you might have a half-sister.’ Tell me more, Alan replied, intrigued. He’d just been listening to me on the radio. She doesn’t want anything from you, he was told, just some information.
I haven’t got anything, Alan said, feeling annoyed that his cousin thought he needed reassurance on that front. Shades of relatives turning up, out of Poland, wanting things.
Someone was playing clarinet in a nearby cabin, practising their scales. I thought that, even if Alan didn’t turn up that morning, the trip had already been worthwhile, and somehow settling.
The day before, I’d read Alan sections of my notebook about the meeting with Isabel. Then I remembered that there was something she didn’t want me to tell anyone. I asked Alan to promise not to say anything about this section. I never promise, said Alan, but I won’t tell anyone.
He never promises. I’d never met a man who’d said that.
What Isabel didn’t want me to repeat was not written there anyway, and I kept it to myself. I’ve since forgotten what it was.
Alan had told me that he was not hiding from the police or the underworld here in the remote reaches of the country. He described how, a long time ago, he’d brought hashish from Goa into Australia by eating glad-wrapped pellets of the drug and shitting them out in the shower. A fortune just sitting there. And how a Lubavitcher group had got him off heroin on a rehabilitation farm where there were horses.
He’d worked in a menswear shop. He’d had an antiques shop called Paradox. He’d worked in Cairns, too, in restaurants, washing dishes. He’d had jobs as a gardener.
I thought of what a paragon of respectability I had been. Good at school, earnest at university; marriage, motherhood; divorce-hood and single-motherhood—all the time working at universities, at freelance journalism and in public broadcasting, living frugally and paying my way. As adults, our paths never crossed in the years we lived in the same city. And here I was, making a connection with Alan of such an intimate kind. I was sharing stories with him, sharing an offer of blood.
The clarinet player was practising ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’—Christmas in mid-July for a Melbourne Jew in the heat of northern Queensland. In a day’s time I’d be back on a plane and headed home.
As the clock headed towards noon, they arrived. Alan with a big cake box; his little daughter holding a bunch of red and yellow flowers, asters, some daisies, big solid red tropical flowers with leaves like hearts; and his partner, visibly pregnant in a wine-coloured crushed-velvet top with a present in her hand, a bottle of herb-scented body oil.
They hugged me and wished me well for my birthday. The cake was revealed: an enormous chocolate mud cake with thick curls of chocolate on top. Had I told Alan that I love chocolate like Max did? Or had he assumed that everyone loves chocolate like Max did?
Alan handed me a plastic bag full of photographs of Max and said that I should keep them because they were at risk of perishing in the humidity. It felt like he had accepted my unlikely tale. Was I to become the keeper of Max’s story?
We set up at the table on the veranda—the cake, the sparklers they had brought—and they sang ‘Happy Birthday’. We drank tea, and looked at the old photographs and took new ones, a new little family together for the first time in the tropical light.
We talked. A couple of hours went by and then we piled into his truck for a quick lunch in town. He introduced me to people there as his sister. Afterwards we got back into the truck, his daughter clutching the blue teddy bear I had brought for her, holding my hand.
The road back to their homestead crossed several small creeks and the Barron River, which they said could flood badly in the wet season, trapping them in or out for weeks. The trick was to always have plenty of provisions. The rough road would run with rivers of mud and the old four-wheel-drive was the only vehicle that could get through it. Getting bogged meant they had to use the ancient tractor, and its brakes were faulty.
Thirty minutes out of Kuranda, the homestead’s yard loomed before us on a ridge. We opened the gate and closed it behind us, driving towards an open shed on two levels, one a step above the other. The weather was kept out in winter by clear plastic blinds on two sides. The rest of the place was open, and on the upper level were two beds, a chest of drawers and a central wood burner.
They had an old couch and chairs, an upright stove and a fridge (both of which ran on gas cylinders), a tank for water and a long table at which Alan sat and rolled a joint. We made blackberry tea and ate more chocolate cake.
Alan’s pride and joy were the four horses he’d reared and trained, which were standing in a paddock next to the house. His daughter showed me her favourite and Alan introduced me to the one he called his best friend. They were glossy and healthy compared with the other horses that stood nearby. These belonged to his partner’s ex, who lived in Port Douglas and who rarely got down to look after them. You could see their bones.
Alan saw me looking at the other horses and said it hurt him to see them like that but he couldn’t afford to take care of them. I thought to myself that I could not bear to see them looking so thin. There was some kind of dispute between this couple and her ex, and the horses were caught in the middle of it.
As night fell Alan drove me back to the resort, and I waved to his partner and child though the rear window as we set off over the ridge. When we arrived he bought himself a beer and me a whisky at the bar. We’d been disputing who would pay for things for two days, both of us wanting to treat the other. Mostly I won. I was working and had more money.
These days, Alan said, he lived by picking up itinerant work like tractoring, gardening and building jobs. Things were getting harder. They lived simply and cheaply but they would feel the strain shortly with the new baby. His partner did everything by hand—cleaning, washing, cooking—and they lived by the light of petrol lamps and candles, like nineteenth-century pioneers.
We drank and I told him of my work, my travels and the trip to Poland, and I was pleased as he marvelled at my tenacity in following seemingly ridiculous leads. He told me that Max would have been immensely proud of me and that, while he could only disappoint his father, I would hav
e made him happy.
This too pleased me. I was vulnerable enough to be pleased by the notional pride of a stranger. When he left for home, I looked at my notes again.
Alan certainly had been a troubled child. He was only eight when he began stealing things (money, chocolates) from shops, and from his parents. He was an expert at making the chocolate jar look like it was full, when it was really nearly empty. It was a matter of architecture—building a house of cards. I thought about how I’d been living inside a house of cards.
He liked jumping off the roof with an open umbrella. Lots of kids imagine doing this at some point, but most see that it wouldn’t work. Maybe even then he liked the thrill, the rush, with no thought of the consequences of landing.
He brought home terrible reports from school and his father would read them and then hurl them down the corridor of the house. Alan became adept at changing the marks on the report. If you got twenty per cent, this could be changed to better than forty per cent. He got his pens and blotted the reports with ink and made the changes. The hard part was changing them back for the teachers.
A consummate forger. In a spelling test in Grade One I tried to change my spelling of ‘aeroplane’ to ‘eroplane’ by rubbing out the ‘a’ so hard that I made a hole in the paper. I learned that often the first answer which comes to you is the correct one.
He used to get onto the roof and crunch the tiles with his boots.
Max would rant and rave and make him promise not to break the tiles. The next day Max would come home to see Alan on the roof again, crunching the tiles again. He asked the boy to come down.
No, he’d say, you’ll hurt me.
Come down and I won’t hurt you, I promise.
No, you’ll hit me.
I promise I won’t.
And the boy came down. And the father hit him, and kicked him hard.
My father never hit me, says Alan, till I was thirteen years old. Then he sometimes laid into me, and would catch himself out of control, and then stop.
So, Max did hit Alan. Dad hit me, too. Once, when I was ten, my sister and I were talking to each other after lights-out and he burst into our room in a fury, slapping me hard as I cowered under the blankets. Shapes of his hand were imprinted on my body for days after. Mama hit me, too, sometimes with a belt. Maybe everyone was getting slapped around in those years.
My father, says Alan, would suddenly seize up with anger. We might be driving and you’d see the look on his face turn to rage. He must have been thinking about something that made him angry, and his hands would tense up on the steering wheel.
Max was proud of the numbers on his arm. When he met people, he’d deliberately roll up his sleeve and have his number showing—76200.
The photograph Alan likes best of Max is one of him in Germany after the war, still thin, leaning against a gate or something, his arm across his chest, the number facing outwards.
This was one of the photos that Alan gave me for safekeeping.
Alan stole a bicycle and was on his way to throw it in the river when his mother came down the street:
Where did you get the bicycle?
A boy gave it to me.
Why did he give it to you?
Because he likes me.
The eight-year-old boy stole a tuba from the school. It was half his size. He told his parents he had been put into the band. At night he tried to blow it in his room. His mother rang the school and found that he had stolen it.
Alan is voted sports captain and captain of the football team. His father says, Better you should be captain of mathematics.
I thought about how good I was at mathematics. But not good enough for Max to have been a proper father to me. Was he a proper father to Alan?
Max was frightened, or cowed at least, by men in uniforms—policemen, parking inspectors. He was struck dumb by them, he looked down and away from their gaze.
He liked a good joke but would never tell one. Unlike Dad, who would always tell them, often the same ones, over and over again.
Max was never depressed. He was filled with rage. What might he have made of me, if he had left his wife and Alan and come to Mama? Would Alan have been an athlete, a happy, strong and handsome devil—would I have been the one to turn to heroin?
Would I have cowered in the face of his rage? How would he have managed my questioning, my radicalism? He voted Liberal. He was fond of Richard Nixon. He and Mama would have fought bitterly about Vietnam. I wonder if she kept her secret to protect me from the man filled with rage.
The following morning I packed my things. I had a few hours before I had to head to the airport. The next day I would be having breakfast with a cultural attaché in Canberra. Two weeks later I would fly to Lake Como in Italy for a holiday with friends, then to Edinburgh to interview writers at the book festival. It was a very different life to that of Alan in Kuranda. And to Max. And to Mama. I kept thinking of the image of Max’s strong forearm with the numbers proudly displayed: 76200. The survivor.
Alan and his little family arrived mid-morning. I hadn’t mentioned DNA testing during my visit. Alan brought up the subject, saying it was my call. He said he was happy to believe the story I’d told, but equally happy to submit to a test.
I took out the swabs, filled in the forms, got him to sign the letter I’d written from him to the doctor, and showed him how to scrape the sampler along the inside of his cheeks. I had the urge to do it myself, to make use of my years of laboratory experience, but it seemed too intimate, and maybe too rude. The sample and the forms and the signed letter went into my suitcase.
He drove me back to the airport in Cairns. On the way, he said that Max went back.
To where?
To Auschwitz.
It was the late 1960s. At the gate a woman offered him a map. I don’t need it, he said. I was here before. I know where everything is.
I told Alan that when I went there I took a recorder and a large stereo microphone on a boom. At the gate I was asked if I had a letter giving me permission to record. I didn’t. I asked how long it would take to get one and was told three weeks. I asked if I was going to be the first Jew to be turned away from Auschwitz, and they hesitated a minute, then let me through.
Alan said Max went to Germany, too, sometime in the 1970s, to testify against an SS guard. We put him away, Max told Alan when he returned home. If a man is ashamed of his actions in the war, Alan asked me, does he go to a German court to bear witness?
I thought of the way my parents avoided everything to do with the war. They didn’t take us to the Holocaust Day commemorations held in survivor communities after the war. Max must have had a very strong constitution to go back to Auschwitz.
Alan said Max didn’t drink much, only a whisky or a beer. He was a big eater, a hungry man. And, like all the survivors I knew, he ate quickly.
He was a snappy dresser. He liked to do things in style. He was generous. But not to me, I thought.
We were nearly at the airport. Alan explained how to tame horses. He told me about the circular paddock, where they can run around and not hurt themselves. He talked about the eye of the trainer, and about the battle of wills between man and horse. When the horse is tired of resisting it puts out its tongue. You have to watch for that: it’s a sign that it’s ready to negotiate. Then the man can look away from the horse’s eyes, glance at his flank or his chest or his neck. But if the struggle is to go on, the trainer looks back into the horse’s eyes.
Approach a horse from the side, Alan said, so he can see you have nothing hidden behind your back. Cougars are the natural predators of the horse, and will attack its chest and flanks and belly. Pat a horse on his most sensitive areas and he’ll learn to trust you. He is programmed to protect these vulnerabilities. If he gives them up to you, he’s yours.
In the plane I looked at the small collection of photographs that Alan had given me. There was the photo of Max taken in 1947. On the back it says Sierpien, Polish for August. Just as Alan had desc
ribed, Max is leaning against a bushy garden wall in rolled-up shirtsleeves, scowling to one side, his left arm crossed over his right, his tattoo displayed and his wedding ring visible. He is handsome and rangy.
There’s a front-on headshot, too, from some kind of identification document, but no clue to when and where it was taken.
Another 1947 shot of Max: this time in a long light-coloured trench coat buttoned up to the top, a darker hat on his head, and both hands in his pockets. It’s May, spring, and the place is identified as Wiesbaden, the site of one of the Displaced Persons camps where the survivors of the war were gathered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. This picture was taken by a professional photographer—the stamp and address are on the back.
The last Wiesbaden shot, dated July 1947, must be the one Alan mentioned with Max standing alongside his friend from Greece. They’re both in sharp suits, double-breasted, the jackets reaching down to mid-thigh level and the pants wide. Max’s suit is of a light colour and he has a flash of white handkerchief in the top pocket, a dark tie and a white shirt. He is holding a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses. The pants have a sharp crease in them. The men do look like Mafiosi. But maybe they were just survivors who revelled in the possibility of being clean, wearing decent clothes and presenting themselves smartly to the world. We are human beings, they seemed to be saying, and we are ready to start living again.
Then there was a 1956 shot of Max and his wife dancing at a party. Max is in a typically elegant jacket, and there’s his white hanky in the top pocket again. His checked tie looks like it’s made of silk. His eyes are closed and he has the tiniest smile forming. His wife looks straight into the camera. She’s wearing a strappy summer dress and her earrings are clip-on round buttons. She looks like she’s enjoying herself. It’s taken by another professional photographer, this shot, but this time they are in Melbourne and the photographer is in Alexandra Parade, Fitzroy. I turned two in that year.
