by Ramona Koval
The last photograph, the only colour one in the batch, is of Alan standing in front of a VW Kombi. Judging by his long sideburns, it must be the early 1970s. He’s holding his cousin’s daughter, who looks about twelve months old. It’s a full-length half-profile shot.
There are two surprising things about this photo. First, Alan is much fuller in the body than the man who just dropped me at the airport. This must have been in his pre-junkie days.
The second thing makes me sit up in my seat as the plane takes off into the serious blue sky, makes me understand why Alan let me have these precious photographs. He has a full head of curly hair, the exact same shade as mine.
8
Good enough for me
FOUR weeks passed before the laboratory called. Their test standard hadn’t worked properly and they had to repeat the process. I would have to wait. I have never been good at waiting.
Another four weeks passed before the lab rang again to tell me that Alan’s test sample had not been taken correctly and I would have to get another one.
This was odd. I remembered that Alan closed his mouth when he inserted the cotton bud and I couldn’t see if it connected with his cheek. I couldn’t go up north again, so I got a message to Alan and sent him a new test kit. He was going to have to take this sample without my supervision. I was disappointed and a little suspicious. What exactly did he mean when he told me he never promises anyone anything?
Two months passed and Alan called me back, leaving a message. He had no return number to give me. He was on a horse, he said, because he and his partner were not living together at the moment and she had the car. They had just had another child, a boy. He said that he had taken the new sample about a month ago and sent it down to the laboratory in Sydney. And that he hadn’t mentioned anything about me to his mother yet.
It was now about a year since Dad’s eightieth birthday: soon we would be gathering again. I had a few more messages from Alan, who was riding around the tropics on a horse and trying to reach me from the occasional phone box he passed. He said that when he was meant to talk to me, he’d get through.
Without warning a letter arrived from the laboratory. I rushed to tear the envelope open. The report inside was titled ‘Shared single parent for half-sibship test’. The bottom line read: ‘The sibship index = .115 is the ratio of related to unrelated for all the tests. This figure argues against but does not exclude half-sibship.’
Another conversation with the laboratory revealed it was probable that, as Alan’s forebears and mine all came from the same small population of Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, there had been quite a bit of inbreeding over the past five hundred years—and that’s why it was unclear whether Alan and I were half siblings or just cousins a few times removed. More testing might reveal a clearer answer.
I decided to step back and consider my position. How did I feel? Was I disappointed, or maybe a little relieved?
I wasn’t keen to ask for more samples. Alan seemed willing but I sensed distrust below the surface. I couldn’t even say whether the latest sample was taken properly. And I didn’t think I could travel to Kuranda again so soon, or to wherever Alan’s horse had taken him, just to make sure I took it correctly. I had no right to hold Alan down and swab him like a laboratory rat.
But I had to admit there was a sense of relief that I didn’t have a firm obligation to the man who was living like an itinerant, his children in a house without walls, his life disrupted. We had a story which seemed to make sense to both of us, but nothing to confirm it.
Perhaps a story was enough. Perhaps I would never know the truth. And perhaps that didn’t matter.
It was an old human question, nevertheless: where did I come from? A Yiddish poem by Dovid Hofshteyn, written just after the end of World War I, resonated with me. It begins:
We spring from rocks
from rocks ground by millstones of time
We spring from rocks
We have tied our fate
to oceans
to winds
to yonder
I printed the poem and stuck it to the wall above my desk.
It’s true that we started life on this rock orbiting the sun, and that we are the product of geological time. I thought of the story of Moses striking a rock and turning his staff into a snake. A rock was not a warm and human place to come from, but a rock was at least solid, and in a sense we did spring from it—from dust to dust, as it were. But at this point in my quest it felt second-best to claim general evolution as the explanation for why I was here. I felt illegitimate in some essential way, humiliating myself by knocking on strangers’ doors, asking for cell samples and coming up with a result that was inconclusive.
Alan had been kind and welcoming but maybe my visit meant more to him than just a stranger looking for a connection. Maybe he got some credibility from someone outside his circle coming to seek him out. Maybe he thought it might give him clout with his wavering partner. And maybe he was telling me more than I realised when he said he never promised.
I remembered the way he approached me in the Cairns airport, the first time I met him: coming up alongside me. I remembered the conversation about how to gain the confidence of a strange horse. Approach a horse from the side so he can see you’ve got nothing hiding behind your back.
I felt as if I’d been managed by an excellent horse whisperer—another survivor, in his own way. Perhaps, despite welcoming me, he didn’t want me to find a solid link with Max. How could he trust me?
But I had come for a story and I had left with a story and such was its power that I refused to give up on it.
It was Dad’s eighty-first birthday and the family was about to reassemble—except for my younger daughter, who was still in Jerusalem. There was the usual silent ghost, too: Mama. I was beginning to question the impression I’d always had of her, thinking of the subterfuge she had carried off.
I cooked a big pasta sauce while listening to Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’. I always got nervous before Dad was due to arrive, so my elder daughter and I shared a joint in the back garden. She’d rolled it with mint tea—it was meant to be healthier, she said. By the time we sat down at the table with Dad the effect was kicking in, and my daughter and I began to giggle.
Dad said he’d like some wine and I passed him the bottle. He poured himself a glass, then topped up the glasses of my twelve-year-old nephew and his seven-year-old brother. I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the end of the table, remembering the way my quest had begun a year earlier.
‘I don’t want my children drinking wine, Dad,’ my sister said.
‘But they asked for it and I gave it to them,’ he said defensively.
My head was in my hands, and I was thinking that I should have started smoking mint tea years ago.
Later, I found a note in my pocket that Dad had passed me across the table.
The last book of Isaac Bashevis Singer—Printed 1999
‘The Shadows of the Hutson’
We can all know everythink, each one learn his own leson. Knowledge can never come only to a simple individual it grows out of experience of the whole human species.
Then, a few days later, he sent me a letter:
Dear Ramona,
Thanks you very much for making for me the Birthday, with cakes and candles. It took me 45 years for it. I like the party but did not like your whispering to your sister’s ear.
We have to meet again at your sister’s or in my place for a brunch, only you organise when it going to be comfortable and just ring me. Thanks again for the party and present. Dad
Enclosed was a twenty-dollar note for my daughter in Israel.
Why was every small interaction with him so fraught? Why did he send money for one of my daughters and not for the other? This was a pattern established years ago: picking out one child for attention. The children were beyond offence; they saw it as a quirk. I was still ready to be stung.
I checked the reference in the note.
The book he’d mentioned was indeed the last by Singer, who died in 1991. Shadows on the Hudson was translated from Yiddish to English and finally published in 1998. Dad hadn’t read more than Time magazine for years, as far as I knew—but what did I really know about him? This was only one of many occasions when he would hand me a gnomic note or an article torn from a magazine without explanation.
Was the quote from the book or from a review of the book in Time? Did it have anything to do with my search for the truth, or was it merely something that had appealed to him?
And the letter. What did he mean about my whispering with my sister? I was whispering with my daughter. Was he confused, or was I?
Two months later, after he’d left seven messages on my answering machine, I finally spoke to Alan. He was calling from a phone box, having come in to town to do his washing. He and his partner had finally split up, and his daughter stayed with him two days a week. His baby son was fine, he said. He sounded all right, although he admitted that things had been hard.
I explained again the results of the DNA tests. He said he would be my spiritual brother if nothing else. I was ashamed of my reticence, embarrassed at having bowled into his life with an outlandish story that now seemed to be unprovable. I thanked him for his kindness in accepting me and going through the testing process.
He said he didn’t mind. That it was interesting. That my voice was up at his place where he listened to me on the radio. And that he and his mates always read my columns in the newspapers.
See you, darling, he whispered, as we said goodbye.
When his younger cousin called, I told him the results of the DNA test. ‘If it was a murder trial, you wouldn’t get a conviction,’ he said. ‘But since it’s a cousin trial, it’s good enough for me.’
The year rolled by. A month before Dad’s next birthday my sister called me and then arrived on my doorstep with my oldest nephew. He was thirteen now, a young man. He had finished The Lord of the Rings and wanted me to buy him another Tolkien book. Our relationship was founded on a love of books and learning new languages.
I took him to the bookshop where I had an account. He was almost too shy to ask for the book he wanted. I saw him blushing at the thought of going up to the counter, and later he was too embarrassed to get a straw for his milkshake. I had forgotten how painful that age can be, when you think everyone is looking at you, judging every action.
I looked at my nephew’s eyes and his fair skin, and I was sad that I couldn’t say for sure that he shared these features with me. Now there was the possibility that these things came from my real father, the one who couldn’t be his mother’s father.
Yet I felt that my sister and I were closer since this story began evolving. Both of us were somewhat adrift and trying to comfort each other. I saw her anew. I saw she had our mother’s hips and legs and narrow shoulders. And smaller stature: I towered over her. Whose shoulders did I have?
I have a photograph of Mama holding me as a baby on St Kilda Beach. Who was holding the camera? I suddenly remembered that she’d told me that Mr Lederman took lots of photos of me—on the potty, for example. So he must have known her when I was a baby. I recalled his claim that he may have met her afterwards, and thought again that he was a liar and a coward. Or maybe she was the liar, and the one who was holding the camera was Max.
There she was in the black-and-white snap with bevelled edges, twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, proud of what she had produced. I tried to be angry with her for messing things up so profoundly, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to sustain the feeling. I was sorry for her and admired her pluck: to have a child who was not her husband’s issue and to get away with it. I saw a news report about ten per cent of paternity tests giving negative results. Mama was not alone.
In the shower I washed my hair and imagined taking a few hairs from Dad’s head while he was still alive, and waiting till he had died to match them to my sister and me. I thought about trying to get a sample unobtrusively. We could lie and say that one of my sister’s kids had an iron deficiency and that the whole family had to have our hair tested for genetic transmission. This would be unethical. But if we held back the testing until he was dead, and then took a sample (from his dead body? his hairbrush? how would I get access to that? what was I thinking?), maybe that would be more ethical.
We shouldn’t have to live with this uncertainty all of our lives, I thought. We weren’t at fault—didn’t we have a right to know the answers to these questions? But why was I saying ‘we’ when I seemed to be the only person troubled by them?
A friend invited me to a Sabbath meal at a young rabbi’s home. His wife was pregnant with their eighth child. The seven children sat quietly waiting for their mother to finish clearing the table. There was no arguing, no restlessness. The rabbi asked the children if they had anything to show him. They slipped off their chairs and surrounded him, holding pictures they had drawn, stories they had written, things they had made. He let the youngest girl, about three years old, climb onto his knee. I ached to be the youngest one, to plant myself on his lap and lean my back against his belly.
When I drove home the men on the street who caught my eyes were the older ones, the greyer ones. If I had to ask a trusted older man for advice, to whom would I go? What would I want to be told? Only that I was a good girl, a clever girl; that he’d look after me, was proud of me and loved me, and that one day another man would love me, too.
Throughout this time I had been making notes about who I’d met and what I’d found. It was odd to be keeping a secret diary, morbid to be waiting for Dad to die. I wondered if I would grieve for him. I had a sense I’d be sad for everything he didn’t have and everything I didn’t have, and for the world that had made his life so difficult and my life with him so confused.
I imagined myself at Dad’s funeral, not being able to cry, not being able to seem bereft in front of others, their judgements clear. Maybe my sister and I would laugh, as we often do when we’re hysterical. We cackled uncontrollably when Mama was in her final coma. She’d been taken unconscious from her bed at our home to a small hospital nearby, and died there three days later.
I had felt like an orphan. Dad didn’t see me for months—not until he visited the hospital when I had my second daughter. He didn’t mention Mama’s death and only stayed for a few minutes. The father I had couldn’t look after me. Nor did he take an interest in me. Everything seemed to be too much trouble for him. He was always tired, or trying to make sure he was the centre of attention. He hated the competition of children.
At my niece’s school play a few weeks after his latest birthday, Dad stood up at the end during the applause, as if they were showering him with appreciation. He bowed from the front row. Looking back now, I suspect this must have been a sign of growing dementia, but it was intriguing to see his behaviour become more obvious, rather than being masked as before.
In the new year I had dinner with my sister. As we were walking back to her car we bumped into a friend of hers from high school, a woman I knew too, sitting with her family out the front of a restaurant.
Her husband was next to their nine-year-old daughter, and it was hard to take my eyes from the loving scene. Father and daughter chatted about what music she wanted to buy and what food she wanted to order. He stroked her hair and she leaned on him. When she said she was cold, he gave her his jumper.
My sister talked to her friend about all the things that had happened in the past year. And then she said, ‘Oh, and yes, we found out something else. Perhaps you should tell this, Ramona?’
But I was interested to hear how she would tell it, what she would say.
She said that I had made enormous efforts and had found out that we were half-sisters, and that neither of us knew who our biological father was. She joked that she had had enough to deal with that year but that I had needed to follow the story and so she had been dragged along.
Her friend asked if it was like being in the sidecar of a motorbike
I was driving. My sister agreed enthusiastically.
I thought of my secret diary. I was a writer, and writers want to write books. I wanted to tell people what I had been thinking about. How was I going to bring along others in my family on this part of my journey: how many sidecars was I attaching to this motorbike of mine?
I asked my younger daughter about the implications of my quest in the religious or Halakhic sense. She responded in the true spirit of the rabbis. If my sister and I didn’t know for sure who our fathers were, then maybe Dad was our father.
But, I said, he can only be the father of one of us. So one of us is a bastard. And that bastard has broken Halakhic law by marrying a person who is not a bastard, instead of finding another bastard to marry. For ten generations, or possibly until the end of time. According to this law, either she and her sister or their cousins are bastards. I had to remind her, and myself, that I didn’t accept these rules.
I entertained the thought of writing the story into a novel that could take the weight of truth. But I kept coming up against the obvious logical conundrum. How could a story about hidden truths, shame and disgrace, secrets and lies, be told anything less than truthfully after all these years?
9
Who likes funerals?
DESPITE the lack of unequivocal genetic evidence about my connection to Max, I was not ready to forsake him. I especially liked the story of the tattooed number on his arm—the way he thought about it marking his survival.
I’d found an account by Mayer Abramowitz, an American army rabbi serving in the Schlachtensee Displaced Persons’ Camp in Germany—where Mama and Dad spent time after the war—of a young woman who was dismissed from her job. She was a waitress in a dining room for military personnel at the nearby airbase. He described being absorbed by the ‘bluish green number, written in large, upper case lettering, stretching along her forearm…I couldn’t look away from the tattoo. I couldn’t look at her face. Do I ask about the number? Do I act normally as though it wasn’t there?’ He was reminded of the time he saw a farmer brand a cow. The reason given for the woman’s dismissal was that the staff and the military men who ate there were disturbed by her tattoo. She was reinstated after Abramowitz intervened.
