by Ramona Koval
All I could think of was that sixty years earlier they would have gassed him, and now they hailed him. It was as if he was their pet monster, homunculus extraordinaire.
The man sitting next to me was with his ancient mother, who was in a wheelchair. She was severe, and kept insisting he get things for her—her shawl, a program, her lunettes. When I returned to my seat at the end of the intermission I saw her up and pushing her wheelchair, staggering behind it, wraithlike yet determined. ‘Mama, Mama!’ the man said. ‘I can’t leave you for two minutes.’ But she had wanted something and wanted it right away.
When we sat down again the orchestra began playing Wagner, and the man and his mother adored it. The music was beautiful—the whole orchestra swayed. Wagner reminded me of the history of hatred in this city, and the old woman was now beating perfect time with the orchestra, her arthritic fingers tapping on her armrest. She let out small noises of approval and her son nodded.
I found her chilling, and imagined that she had been a proud Nazi in years gone by. In the three months I was away I was treated well by my hosts and made friends with the woman with whom I was billeted, and I didn’t think about Dad much at all. But I was constantly aware of being a stranger, of being from a group that had been despised in these streets not so long ago, constantly aware of where I had come from and how the people around me might view me if they knew who I really was.
But who was I, really?
Dad was now eighty-four. I could hear a slight slurring on the phone when I called him to tell him about my younger daughter’s new job. He told me he was having trouble with his tear ducts, which meant he couldn’t stop crying and he would get highly emotional. I wondered how much more emotional he could possibly be, as I had always found him on the verge of hysteria.
But he was still dancing. Every Saturday night he and his wife went to the German Club near my house. I could never understand why a Holocaust survivor wanted to spend his Saturday nights with Germans. Though what did I know about his whims and wishes? His second wife had been born into a Christian family in Germany and her first husband had been Jewish, too. Maybe Dad enjoyed having Germans serve him. He said that once the music started up at the club he ‘danced non-stop for the whole night’.
He was particularly upset this day because one of his card-playing friends had rung him to say that he had pancreatic cancer and was going to die. Dad told me that he’d replied: ‘Why did you tell me this? Don’t you know how emotional I get?’ Then he hung up on his friend.
But Dad, I said, it isn’t you who has the cancer—it’s him.
‘But why did he tell me?’
It’s a privilege, I said, to be the one who is told.
‘But I can’t stand the emotion when a friend of mine dies.’
I suggested he play cards with younger people.
‘Someone said I should go to a psychiatrist,’ he said.
I told him that I thought it was a good idea. That I had done so and it did me a lot of good.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Then perhaps I will.’
He had stopped driving recently, after he ploughed his new car into a parked vehicle.
‘I’m getting old,’ he said, his voice thickening in my ear.
I thought he might have a stroke, and silently I wished him a massive one, a final one, right there on the dance floor in full flight before the assembled Germans.
Shortly after this conversation, his dancing came to a halt. He went to hospital with heart failure, which may have been what I heard in the thickening of his tongue on the phone, but my sister said his GP had told her that Dad had kidney and liver failure, and that he’d been drinking heavily.
Maybe he had been drunk when we spoke. I was never good at working out if people were drinkers. I once had a long-distance relationship with someone whose obvious alcoholism was hard for me to diagnose even with the starkest of clues, like piles of empty bottles stacked up in his shed, and bruises and cuts on his forehead where he had landed face down on his brick floor after a long night’s secret drinking.
I called Dad in hospital several times but he was hard to engage with and insisted he didn’t want to be visited. My sister took over monitoring him by phone. My older daughter made a few doctorly calls. According to my sister, Dad’s wife and stepdaughter had given their views to the hospital about what his treatment plan should be if his condition worsened.
I was relieved that it was not going to be up to me to decide if he should be treated or when treatment should be withdrawn. He was an often confused, unhappy, unhealthy old man. Those who were close to him should decide.
I felt like he was an old friend of the family, not my father, that I was not in the position of the daughter who was obliged to do something. My sister was taking responsibility, and I hoped this was a role she was more comfortable in playing than I would be. I had taken responsibility for Mama when she was dying, as my sister was four years younger and had just started university. And maybe she genuinely thought Dad was her father—though I’d never seen him show her any real care or understanding either.
I was relieved of duty. In truth, I relieved myself of duty.
On the phone a few days later Dad said, ‘The main thing in life is to be friendly.’ He was sharing a room with a man whom he described as blind, deaf and mute. He reported that the man’s family laughed at Dad’s jokes and were amazed that he was the same age as their poor benighted relative. He assumed they were delighted by him, preferring him to their own kin.
I noted that although he didn’t want us to visit he was eagerly expecting his stepson-in-law at any moment. Obviously he felt more comfortable with his new family, and who could blame him? I was glad to just make phone calls and not to have his care on my conscience. Perhaps this was the best evidence yet that we were not related. Could I have such sangfroid if I thought that I was losing my dear old father?
10
The pregnant boy of Kazakhstan
BY the time of his eighty-fifth birthday, Dad had been out of hospital for several months. I called to ask him where he’d like to go to celebrate. Same place, he said, according to his wife, who now answered all their phone calls. I imagined the food being served on forklift trucks.
This time my older daughter would be studying at Berkeley, in California, with her new husband. My younger daughter was coming with her fiancé, who would not be eating, as this wasn’t a kosher restaurant.
Dad’s wife said that he had slowed down and wasn’t walking around the neighbourhood anymore, though he was still reading. He was in bed by nine-thirty each night. Ah, what can you expect when you get old, she said. That’s my bedtime, too, I thought.
I asked her if she was coping, hoping she would say yes and that I wouldn’t have to offer to do anything for them. I volunteered to ring my sister and daughter to tell them the date of the lunch. This was in lieu of doing anything really helpful, for which I could not muster the enthusiasm.
My sister was indignant when I called, partly because it was only 8 a.m. on a work day and partly because Dad hadn’t invited her himself. Everyone in this family hated being overlooked, even by people to whom they were not necessarily related. I had to tell her that I’d suggested the party and that I hadn’t even spoken to Dad, only to his wife.
When people asked about my father—if I had one, if I saw him much—I was at a loss for words. I called him sometimes but he could hardly hear me, as he refused to wear his hearing aid. He told me, over and over again, stories about how other people had failed him, about how hard it was to get old.
I didn’t feel guilty about this. I didn’t feel anything much. I had little emotional connection with Dad, except in an abstract way.
Now I thought of him as an old man, a survivor. A man who had somehow persuaded his wife to look after him for all the years since he’d left my mother. He must have made her happy, at least for a while, and I felt she deserved every cent of the meagre estate he would leave when he died.
Ple
ase, God, I prayed sometimes, if you are there, make her outlast him.
Every time I went away for work I imagined he would die and I would be summoned to the funeral but, because of the Jewish rules of a quick burial, I wouldn’t be able to make it in time and so my sister and the rest of the family would have to shoulder the burden alone. I was refusing, in my imagination, to take on the role of the eldest child—after all, I had never felt entitled to anything from him.
I hadn’t asked him for money since he declined to pay sixty dollars in union fees for my first year of university. Even though I had won a scholarship, he was worried that a university education would spoil my chances of marriage. Like Mama, I would read too many books—in his opinion, that was always the problem with her.
I never asked him for help of any kind, through the hardship of bringing up my kids alone and the scrapes I got myself into with disappointing love affairs, and it was never forthcoming. Why then, I thought, should I put myself out, except to behave in a decent way, the way you might for a neighbour or an old retainer?
What kind of an old retainer was he, anyway? What did he do for me that you might pay someone to do?
I was ashamed of thinking like this; it was very bad. Dad had supported me when I was a child, through his work at the factory, and later at the shop, and then at the factory again. But then, he was supposed to be my father. Surely he got kudos for having two girls who were good at school and who went to university on scholarships and got married and had children? That was what we were supposed to do. And now I had set him adrift, the man for whom I felt no love, the man who shared our house for all those years, the man with whom I shared no understanding and no deep connection. I had, I reasoned, been passed over, and so I could set myself free.
Later, Dad called to invite me to the lunch I had organised for him. He had called my sister, too, and told her that the gift we gave him the year before was a ‘terrible, stupid present’.
We’d banded together and bought him and his wife season passes to the cinema near their home. ‘I haven’t even used one of the tickets,’ he told my sister.
We were hurt. I thought it was a good present, she said. It was a good present, I said. It was a typical response from him. Nothing was ever right: we were never right, he was never right, we were a mismatch.
I thought of my ridiculous trip to Poland to research my roots and the time I spent in Siedlce, his hometown, which was pointless now, except for having found Mama and Dad’s incomplete marriage certificate. The certificate was not the only thing incomplete about their marriage. Even the remnants they left behind were disintegrating.
I restarted my quest on a different tack, researching a new part of Poland, Max Dunne’s hometown of Mława. Online I found a memoir written by Dr Izhak Ze’ev Yunis from Tel Aviv. It was dated 1949 and called ‘The Old Hometown’. I started by searching for Max’s birth surname, Adunaj, but none of the memories of rabbis and butchers and leather workers and mad grocers’ wives mentioned anyone by that name.
Next I looked at the records held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Between 1968 and 1992 Mormons microfilmed more than two thousand reels of nineteenth-century Jewish records from the Polish State Archives. It was something to do with their interests in reverse-baptising people—that is, baptising dead people as Mormons. Regardless of whether my dead relatives were now officially Mormons, or were indeed my relatives, I was pleased to see the energy with which these people had pursued the collection of names in far-flung places. There were Adunajs listed in the records, and it felt slightly pathetic to be sidling up to yet another lot of strangers, this time dead ones, in an attempt to be tied in some way to the town of Mława. Not long before I’d been ready to throw my lot in with Siedlce. Any port in a storm—a storm of my own making.
This disturbing inclination to latch on to each possible familial connection drew me to media stories of mysterious parenthood and family secrets. I read about a man who sought the return of seventy-five thousand dollars in school fees and support payments after he discovered that he was not the biological father of his ex-wife’s child. He’d become suspicious when he and his new partner had trouble conceiving: he must have found out then that he was sterile. He still loved the child he’d raised with his ex-wife, he said, and still wanted visiting rights. The judge said there could be no rights without responsibilities. I thought again of the time—almost a decade—that Dad and Mama spent trying to have children before I came along.
Dad wrote to me once after I questioned him about their relationship:
I never did finish the story because you are always in a hurry. I told you how I met your Mother and she stayed with me. It is impossible to describe the loneliness we had losing all our family in one day. The families in Poland were much closer than here. You can imagine when you lose one member of a family it’s a tragedy and that we lost both our families—this closeness drew us more and more together. You seek in that single person your brother, sister, mother, everything. I fell in love with her because it was my first love. I cannot recall up to the war and of course in the war I never had a girl for sex, she was all for me. After a short time we start to talk about marriage. I did know a girl before the war, Hanka Białastocka, she wanted me because I was the secretary from Siedlce and had the list of fifty-one survivors from the fourteen thousand Jews before the war. Later when the war finished she came back from Russia where some had survived. I was already hooked up with Mum so I went to the market and bought a piece of new material made of paper mixed with cotton and made myself a suit and for her I bought a piece of pink material with little white flowers and I made a simple wedding frock. This was the first Jewish wedding in the town after the war and all the survivors came, everybody bought some sort of food and there was no rabbi, only a man who knew how to write the ksuba, the marriage contract…This ends this story, some other time I will write to you how I wanted to have you and waited for nine years before I got you and this was the happiest day of my life when you were born.
Thank you,
Dad
Framing my birth as the culmination of their having risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of Nazi Europe gave context to many of my parents’ actions. Mama had talked about how desperate Dad had been to have a child, about how for him success depended on building a family. She said that they fought whenever she got her period. Maybe her going outside the marriage stemmed from a desire to give him what he wanted, perhaps what she wanted, too? Not so much out of love for him, but out of a need to keep things at home peaceful? It’s only in fairytales that people do things for one reason. Real life is far more complex.
Despite the touching letter, I felt sure that Dad’s sense of his responsibility for me and my sister ended when he left our house, all those years ago, to take up with a new woman. I was less certain about where my responsibilities to him began and ended.
And there were other relationships to analyse. My sister told me she had explained our story so far to her daughter, who recognised that it was sad and pointed out that she had never felt close to Dad. She then tried to work out whose father he was.
To my relief, she told her mother that she didn’t feel any differently about me. In my rush to investigate my hunches, my need to know had been so great that I had not thought about the effect that half-siblingship might have on my relationships with my sister’s children. I loved them fiercely, and I couldn’t imagine feeling closer to them. My sister was right: anything I needed to know and anything I uncovered directly affected others.
Dad’s eighty-fifth birthday arrived, and this time there were fewer people eating Sunday lunch at the same old restaurant. There must have been new owners, because the menu seemed a little changed—but the food still came piled on massive plates. This time Dad hadn’t done the ordering and he was not insisting on paying, as he usually did, so my sister and I split the bill. The children were at one end of the table; they had exams that week or had been up all night at parties—I noticed that my older nephe
w, who was not yet a teenager at Dad’s eightieth birthday, now noticeably needed a shave.
Dad had been ill, but he’d picked up again, according to his wife. He’d given up playing cards three nights a week. He said he was happy not to be seeing the men he’d played with for fifteen years. Why, I asked, didn’t he play during the day? His wife said that was when he had his nap. All day? But they had to go to the coffee shop in the mornings. Their days were precisely organised and the timetable unwavering.
When I arrived at the restaurant, Dad handed me an article which he said I must read. It was from New Idea magazine and headed ‘The Pregnant Boy of Kazakhstan’. The titular seven-year-old child had been born with his own twin inside him: ‘The 2 kg foetus, 20 cm long, was attached to the blood vessels and had continued to grow… for seven years it lived like a parasite inside the boy’s body, according to Dr Valentina Vostrikova, who led the team of surgeons.’ Radioactive pollution was cited as a possible cause. The foetus died during the operation to remove it, and the boy said: ‘I had a football inside me [making a round shape with his hands] but my mum has told me to stop talking about it.’
How, Dad asked me, did that boy end up with his twin growing inside him?
Why, I asked myself, did Dad cut out the article for me?
Maybe he remembered that I’d studied genetics. But whenever he gave me these clippings and notes, he always put his hand to his mouth in a gesture of keeping a secret and would rush to find a pocket in my clothing in which to bury the paper, as if we had a covert understanding, as if he were giving me cash without his wife knowing about it.
Later I sought a more serious source than the New Idea, and found a reference to the boy’s condition: foetus-in-foetu. A BBC report suggested that the growth was a teratoma cyst, the remains of a misdeveloped twin. It was growing larger and causing the boy to be aware of it, but it wasn’t a fully formed foetus, more like a cyst.
