by Ramona Koval
Dad’s communications seemed ever more gnomic. Either he was trying to tell me something, or I was reading too much into every exchange.
Another news report caught my eye: a story about a ‘tall strawberry blonde with blue eyes [who] struggled to work out why she looked so different from her family of short, dark-haired Mexicans’. The hospital had switched two children at birth in 1958; now these women, both of whom had felt out of step with the families they grew up in, were suing the hospital administration.
It was easy to find cases like this once you were attuned to spotting them. The story of Bobby Dunbar was featured on the popular NPR program This American Life. He went missing in 1912, during a camping trip in Louisiana with his parents. Eight months later a child found with an itinerant handyman was identified by the distraught parents as their missing Bobby, although another woman also claimed the boy was hers. The Dunbars went to court and won. The program followed the investigations of Dunbar’s granddaughter, who interviewed members of both families generations later, determined to find out if her grandfather really was Bobby Dunbar.
‘If my past is wrong, Bobby Dunbar, all the legends, all the stories, and then all of a sudden you find out, well, that’s not who your blood says you are,’ she said, ‘where does that leave me? If my grandpa isn’t my grandpa, who am I?’
It was a question that disturbed others in her family, too. One relative said: ‘She was really going up against the entire family…I felt like she is alienating everybody else… Why do this? Why do you need to do this? Nobody in the family wants to know.’
Then I saw the documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey, Nathaniel Kahn’s ‘search’ for his father, Louis I. Kahn, who designed some of the most iconic twentieth-century American buildings. He died of a heart attack in the men’s room of Penn Station in 1974, and the obituaries said he was survived by his wife Esther and daughter Sue Ann. But he had other children—one of whom was Nathaniel, whose mother, the landscape architect Harriet Pattison, had worked with his father.
In an interview the filmmaker said, ‘I think you get to a point where your curiosity gets the better of you…There’s always a risk of embarrassing yourself: here comes what appears to be a nearly middle-aged man asking questions that a child asks. That was difficult.’ This echoed my feelings of pathos and embarrassment over the previous five years, knocking on the doors of strangers, asking if they might be related to me.
I found the film compelling but I couldn’t help feeling envious that Nathaniel Kahn was searching for a man whose identity was known to him. His father had acknowledged him, had sent him postcards; he joined his mother at the funeral—although, as with another mistress who’d had a daughter to Louis I. Kahn, they were uninvited guests who believed nonetheless that they had a right to be there.
I wondered how the daughter and son of Kahn’s mistresses had felt at encountering each other, and how they felt about the legitimate daughter sitting at the front with the official mourners. They must have searched each other’s faces, observed the mothers, tried to see the common features inherited from their father.
I remembered a photograph of my sister and me standing in front of Mama’s friend Isabel, like matryoshka dolls, my sister at the front. I was eight and she was four, and we were wearing outfits that Isabel had given us. I can still remember the sheen and softness of my blue-and-white paisley polished-cotton shirt and matching skirt. Someone looking at the photograph had said that we didn’t look like sisters. Mama didn’t dismiss the idea—Oh darling, she could have said, sisters don’t always look alike!—but she did say that, whatever happened, we had to look after each other, for we were the only sisters we had.
11
A man is in hospital
A WEEK before my younger daughter’s wedding, my sister and I heard from Dad’s stepdaughter. Dad had again been admitted to hospital with heart failure.
We went to the hospital together. Believe me, two more ambivalent daughters you would never meet. Dad was propped up on pillows with an oxygen mask fixed to his face. When he saw us he pulled it off, shouting: ‘These are my daughters, one is married but the other one isn’t married anymore, but she’s still young, who can look after her? I worry so much.’
This performance of The Good Father was directed at two comatose men in the beds opposite. It reminded me of one of Dad’s previous roles: The Good Husband required him to rush to the kitchen sink when visitors came for Sunday afternoon tea and pretend to be washing up, a sight rarely seen at other times.
‘Shh,’ my sister said, replacing the mask. ‘Relax—you’re in hospital.’
‘What do I need this for?’ Dad said, pulling off the mask again.
‘It’s oxygen—it’ll help you breathe,’ she said. I saw her jaw clench.
‘I’ll tell you a joke!’ he replied, pulling the mask away completely.
‘A man is in hospital’—he was gasping now—‘and he says, “Doctor, can you make me live to one hundred?” And the doctor says, “How old are you?” And the man says ninety-one, and the doctor says, “Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you sleep with women?” And the man says no, and the doctor says, “Well, what do you want to live for?” Gettit? What does he want to live for if he doesn’t sleep with women?’
‘Dad, put the mask on.’ I heard the insistence in my voice.
‘Only one more joke,’ he said, and now he was turning blue and coughing blood. ‘A gynaecologist comes home and kisses his wife, and she says, “What are you kissing me for?” And he says’—Dad was shouting now, so the nurses came in—‘“Because I haven’t seen a face all day!” Gettit? Gettit?’
Now I was thinking of putting a pillow over his face. I pressed the oxygen mask on him instead, and he showed me his blood-stained tissue. I moved away, disgusted, and hoped my sister had more composure. (Re-reading this account, I realise I should’ve pocketed the tissue and sent it to a laboratory for genetic testing, but at the time I was not thinking strategically and instead I started to laugh, and my sister furrowed her brow.)
I was glad when Dad’s wife arrived and told him how much she’d been missing him; I was astonished and pleased that someone loved him. I slunk off with my sister to drink coffee, and we agreed that we were not the right people to be giving directions about plans for his treatment or resuscitation. But he was telling jokes like a man who wanted to live—at least until the applause had subsided.
He’d been out of hospital for a few months after this episode when he called to tell me that his sixty-two-year-old heart specialist had just had a fatal heart attack. How had he outlived the doctor who’d told my sister he had grave doubts about Dad’s capacity to pull through his last crisis?
Dad had been hard to find. He’d been going to restaurants and cafés all day, every day since he’d been released from his hospital bed. He’d come to my younger daughter’s wedding straight from a big morning of telling jokes to people, and he could hardly stand up at the ceremony. He wasn’t dressed for a wedding anyway, as he had decided not to come to the reception, which at first made me angry and then relieved.
He was the centre of his world. At my fiftieth-birthday party he arrived amid a blaze of old jokes, and I had reports of his stellar performances from those friends of mine he hadn’t met before. His wife kept approaching the musicians, who were playing Django Reinhardt tunes, and asking them to stop, as she hated jazz.
Dad was now eighty-six. Would he ever die? We decided against the big lunch and instead gathered for afternoon tea at my sister’s house. Dad came with his wife and her daughter and son-in-law. He sat at the end of the table and, as usual, took the presents we had given him and put them on the floor next to his chair, feigning a lack of interest. I insisted that he open them.
He told the same stories. My sister showed him a Moses action-man doll complete with detachable Ten Commandments that she’d bought in Hong Kong. Dad and his wife seemed engrossed at their end of the table, playing like children with the doll. Dad was es
pecially enamoured of the commandments and Moses’ staff, which was also detachable.
My oldest nephew and I talked about editing the commandments down to six, as the modern world was too fast for ten. I suggested removing the one about adultery. I couldn’t remember if you were supposed not to covet your neighbour’s ass or his wife or his wife’s ass.
On New Year’s Day my older daughter was passing through Melbourne on her way from Darwin, where she was now living, to New Zealand for a trekking holiday, so we called Dad to see if we could drop by for a cup of tea. She wanted to see him because she was worried that he might die soon. He told us he was having lunch and couldn’t see us. We’d already eaten, we said, and would just have a cup of tea. He resisted, said he’d see her next time. Next time? He must have thought he would live forever, and I wondered if he might outlast me.
I’d heard that Max’s wife was very sick. I thought that I’d be closer to being able to write my story if she were nearing death. I was like a vulture waiting for a body to fall. It was unedifying, I knew, but there it was.
I turned my mind to the war-crimes trial that Alan had mentioned his father—our father?—attending in Germany. After which, Alan had recounted, Max came back saying, ‘We got him.’ Who the ‘him’ was, I had no idea, but I searched the internet for mentions of Max’s name as a witness. I looked for Max Dunne and Majlech Adunaj in reports of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which lasted from the end of 1963 to the middle of 1965, and found no clues.
Maybe it was a false trail? Maybe Max was trying to have a few weeks away from his wife and ended up on the Riviera for a holiday? It wouldn’t be the first time a married man contrived a story to allow himself a spell away with a mistress. And it wasn’t as if Max didn’t have form.
One summer afternoon I sat on my veranda, looking across at my garden and the quiet street, and up at the blue, almost cloudless sky. I thought of how lucky I was to be here in this place and at this time, when it would have been so different had I been born somewhere else, twenty years earlier. I thought that this story might end prematurely, with the recognition that waiting for old people to die so that I might complete my investigations was unworthy.
I wondered how much anyone could know in this situation, and how important it really was to find a conclusion. It might be time to look to the future, instead of being obsessed with the past.
My son-in-law had survivor relatives who gave talks at the local Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre. I’d asked them if there was a community response to the call to give evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and mentioned this in passing to my younger daughter.
She asked if I’d told them my story and I said no, that I’d just said I was researching for something I was writing. She asked if I was writing a book and I said of course I was, that she knew this. She told me she hadn’t realised that I wanted to publish it. I shrugged her off, saying I’d wait till everyone was dead, and she replied, ‘Including me?’
Dad was eighty-seven. Again we met at my sister’s house for lunch. My older daughter was in Darwin; she and her husband were expecting their first child.
I’d bought a concrete duck for Dad at a garden-furniture place. I was running out of ideas. I’d looked for something suitable every year, yet his reaction to the last few presents had rattled me. He didn’t read much anymore: he was in his own world. He had more or less constant lapses in understanding; he was deaf, and just repeated his stories. Why a duck? I thought of the old Marx Brothers routine. Why not a duck? A concrete duck was as good as anything.
His wife was short with him now. She corrected him loudly and complained about him, but still she looked after him. Good on her, I thought. I couldn’t do it.
That week, for my radio show I interviewed the poet and writer Jacob Rosenberg, whose memoir had just won the National Biography Award. He had worked with Mama in a Melbourne clothing factory before she went to work for the Dunne brothers. I’d seen him the week before, at a book launch, and we had talked about her. He said that she was like a nineteenth-century woman.
‘Madame Bovary?’ I asked.
Perhaps, he said. And he added that she was a bohemian at heart and had been trapped in a middle-class life.
I invited him to have coffee with me after our interview, and he sat with me at a little table in the busy open space of the atrium in the ABC headquarters. He remembered having lunch with Mama four or five times a week at the factory where they worked.
‘She used to bring her lunch to my sewing machine and we talked. She was hungry for culture. And we would discuss books and I would recite for her my poems. And she would give me a kiss for a poem. She had thin lips but warm.’
They would sit close and talk—he described her as audacious and uninhibited, and I wondered how this manifested itself. I told him of my quest, as I knew I could trust him. He seemed a wise and thoughtful man, and I felt he would not disappoint me like the other elderly men I had been pursuing for my story. His friendship with her was platonic, he explained, and I asked why, thinking of the thin-lipped kisses, and he said it was perhaps because he was too immature at the time.
He asked why I wanted to know all this: wasn’t it better to let sleeping dogs lie? I was interested in truth, I said, and he answered with a disquisition on truth. In response I quoted him something from his book: ‘sometimes even the cruellest truth is preferable to the gentlest lie.’
He argued softly with me, back and forth. ‘What does it profit us to know who made the world, was it God or was it the Big Bang?’
‘In the scheme of things it’s not important, but for me it’s nice to know,’ I replied. I ventured that it might be hard for him to understand, as he knew who his parents were. And anyway, I said, it was also about learning to trust your own intuition. I’d thought something was amiss for my whole life, and piecing together a story helped me begin to trust my own sense of reality.
Jacob’s next book would be about his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, when he became in his words ‘a free animal’, no longer having any family member to worry about, only himself. Thinking of this I became self-conscious: I was telling an Auschwitz survivor that he couldn’t understand my little difficulty, in the face of everything he did understand.
He suggested I write all this down to relieve myself of it. Otherwise, he said, it would eat me up and make me unhappy. He told me to write a fictional account and not mention any names, and that it should be a detective novel.
I told him the interesting thing for me was that it was a search for the truth; it was about evidence and identity—why should it hide behind a cloak of fiction?
He became philosophical again about the meaning of truth. Before long his taxi arrived and he kissed me goodbye, heading off into the bright day.
A month later he sent me a card with a photo of a red rose on the cover. ‘Darling Ramona,’ he wrote, ‘the enclosed picture is actually the cause of my belated thanks for your generosity and friendship. Love, Jacob.’
He had made a copy of a photo of Mama and him sitting together in a park, their faces framed by trees and lawn. They are both young, clear-eyed and smooth-skinned, with similar low-key smiles playing on their lips. Mama wears a light blouse with a Peter Pan collar under a darker tunic, and her hair is combed to one side. Jacob’s tie needs straightening and he wears a knitted vest over a white shirt. Just a few years before, they had both faced certain death.
It is hard to read Mama’s expression. Although she looks directly into the camera, the light seems to glance off the surface of her eyes; their depths are impossible to fathom.
12
What we had to tell
I WAS at an impasse. There was no one else I could call upon for more details of Max’s life. I wrote to a handful of academics, trying to locate any testimony he’d given to war-crimes tribunals, and waited for a response. I could find nothing by perusing digital collections and suspected that what I wanted was probably filed under a misspelling in German in
a dusty archive somewhere, in an ancient manila folder tied with red ribbon. I imagined these were the documents that would give me access to the voice of my father, or the voice of a man who was nothing to me.
Faced with silence, and a burning need to know more about Max, I decided I might be able to fill in some gaps using the testimonies of those who were likely to have been in the same place at the same time: people from Mława, who might have been with him in the Mława ghetto and transported with him to Auschwitz. I would shadow Max until I could find something more solid.
I went back to the memoir of the town written in Hebrew in 1949 by Dr Izhak Ze’ev Yunis and translated into English. When I had first found it I was only looking for a mention of Max’s family name, but this time I read it properly. It is a charming account of Mława, which existed officially from 1429 on the long-range cattle-trade route between Russia and what eventually became Austria. From its early days the town had brewers, blacksmiths, potters, tailors, carpenters and butchers. Its fortunes declined in the seventeenth century and the Swedes invaded. Two fires ravaged the town in the eighteenth century, and it wasn’t till the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that things looked up. Mława was only seven kilometres from the border with Prussia: the establishment of a railway brought new prospects for business. Factories making leather goods, soap and oil, and then a big brewery, sprang up. With them came the smuggling of horses, gold watches, diamonds, silk and even people.
Jews were present in the town from the beginning, remaining part of its social fabric through good times and bad for over five hundred years. By the time Dr Yunis was growing up there were steam mills, a cement works, a cigarette-box manufacturer, an ink factory and a hub for wheat trading. Jews of all persuasions lived there: Orthodox, Zionist, secular, politically left and right; they formed a drama club and established a theatre, and there were newspapers catering for all shades of opinion.
