by Ramona Koval
She showed me someone’s Hawaiian shirt that had been mistakenly placed in Dad’s cupboard. But anyway, she said, he doesn’t care anymore.
The slippers fell off his feet and I saw that both of his big toes had grown inwards towards the other toes, so much so that they took a dive underneath them. I was shocked.
I didn’t know he had such disfiguring bunions. I had small bunions. I knew bunions could be hereditary—did Mama also have bunions? I tried to visualise her feet but she’d died young, so maybe her bunions hadn’t developed properly by then. Like her, they had run out of time.
Did Max have bunions? How common were they, anyway? Maybe I could go from bed to bed here and do a bunion survey?
I’d sometimes considered having an operation to straighten my toes, and this discovery settled it. I rang an orthopaedic surgeon who’d operated on me in the past and made an appointment. I would cut off my toes, like the girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Red Shoes’, in order not to be confused about who my father might be. After all this time I was not going to let a couple of stray digits undo all my good work.
My sister called to tell me that Dad was vomiting bile and seemed to be suffering from organ failure. His wife and her daughter had told the nursing home that they wanted him resuscitated under any circumstance, but they hadn’t left formal instructions. His GP was away for the long weekend, and the nursing home couldn’t contact his stepdaughter and her husband, the ones he trusted. He needed assessing, even if only for palliative medication, and the nursing-home people thought it best that an ambulance took him to the hospital. My sister knew about these things, so I left all this to her. What did I know of bile? More, in fact, than I would admit.
I met her at the emergency department and found Dad on a trolley, hooked up to a drip, in an immodest theatre gown. He was very distressed and they had to tape up the needle in his vein, as he kept trying to pull it out. The trolley had been lowered to the floor, to stop him from injuring himself as he threw the cotton blanket off and tried to leap over the edge. I kept covering him up, so firmly did I wish not to look upon his nakedness, and he kept trying to struggle with me. No, I told him. No, no, no. He insisted he was coming home with me. But you’re not well, I said, and you are in hospital and they are helping you. He was wild-eyed, like a sick beast, like the horse in my dream.
I asked my sister to call the nurse. Give him something, I begged her, give him some Largactil. I remembered this from my days as a doctor’s wife: that was what you gave belligerent, psychotic patients. A big fat injection was what I had in mind. They had already given him something, the nurse said. I was struggling with him over the blanket again. Please give him more. I felt like giving it to him myself. Or giving myself a big fat injection to take me away from there.
She explained that he’d had everything they could give him without it being dangerous. Dangerous? What was the danger in settling down a mad old dying man? Settling him right down in his grave.
I was more upset than I had been in years. It was horrible to be unable to calm him, without the power to remove him and not wanting him home with me. It was as if our whole relationship, stunted and hopeless, was being enacted in miniature in the little cubicle, its porous curtains unable to shield us.
Dad was returned to the nursing home without being admitted, as it was deemed the best place for him to die. Why he’d had to go on a nightmare ambulance ride and have me tussle with him at the hospital was beyond my understanding.
A phone call came in the morning from my older daughter to tell me that Dad had died. His stepdaughter and son-in-law made all the arrangements for the funeral. They had his power of attorney, and why not—he was closer to them than to us. I felt like I attended the funeral as a guest, except that I was sitting at the mourners’ bench with my sister in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery, Dad’s wife and stepdaughter sharing it with us.
Dad’s son-in-law gave the eulogy. He read something biographical that my sister and I had written, as well as some of his own thoughts. He was moved to tears. I was not. I was feeling like a fraud there on the bench with my garment rent, as they say in the Torah. I was trying to remember Mama’s funeral but it was so long ago and I was pregnant at the time and all I could recall was that I wore one of her woollen dresses on a cold and rainy October day. As usual, thoughts of her intruded upon this last opportunity for Dad to take centre stage.
We followed the simple pine coffin to the graveside and the rabbi said some prayers and I threw a handful of soil into the hole, as did others. The men took over the digging, and all I could think was that they should hurry up and fill it right to the top, so that he could never get out. I couldn’t forget the terrible night of the hospital trolley and his animal panic to escape.
That night we gathered at my sister’s house for the minyan. The men and women were in different parts of the house, but after the prayers we milled around and people shook our hands and told us how sorry they were. I was only sorry it hadn’t come sooner. Dad’s wife was smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, and I told her what a great job she had done looking after him and that we were grateful to her and that now she would be able to live her life with a bit more ease. And make new friends.
She told me she already had a friend, a man she had been meeting at the coffee shop where she went for years with Dad. They met each other every day at nine in the morning and parted at noon. Where did he go after that? Home to his wife, she said, who—of course—didn’t understand him. I wondered if this woman was a serial understander of men whose wives didn’t understand them.
My sister’s eyebrows rose when I told her. How strange for my father’s wife to be on the prowl on the very day he was buried. I tried to gather a bit of outrage or resentment, but it didn’t feel right. Toes or not, I hardly had a leg to stand on.
15
Certified and apostilled
SHORTLY after Dad died, towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, I was looking at a map showing projections of the world’s climate with global warming taken into account. I saw that, according to one source, by 2050 Poland was going to be tropical and lush, while Australia would be hotter, drier and windier.
I thought about how my parents (whoever my father might have been) had made the decision to get on a boat and travel beyond the horizon to the bottom of the world, and of all the movements of history that had made them leave their Polish landscapes. They had been made stateless when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and had remained so until they were permitted to take up Australian citizenship in 1955.
Mama had told me that before the war there had been a plan to go to Argentina, where part of her extended family had migrated, but the paperwork and permissions were too difficult and, besides, they couldn’t get visas for the grandparents and they didn’t want to leave the old ones behind. Old ones. I am probably older now than they were then.
Because of these stories, having all the correct documents was important to me. I always liked to apply early for whatever papers I needed. I was keen to make sure everything was in order, no slip-ups. Alles in Ordnung.
Mama and Dad’s decision to get as far away from Europe as possible might well result in a hundred years of peace and prosperity for their children and their grandchildren. But their great-grandchildren, I suspected, might not thank them for having moved to the driest continent on a warming planet, especially if the place where they might have been born, had the path of history been otherwise, turned out to be paradise after all.
I wondered if it were possible to restore the family’s citizenship rights in the country that might one day be a leafy tropical glade. I imagined acres of lush grasses and fruit trees and bison roaming the hills, which sat oddly alongside Dad’s old stories of walking miles to school in snow and mud, wearing only thin garments. How would bison manage in the tropics with their woolly coats?
So began my long attempt to reclaim my Polish heritage, and to ensure that I could bestow it upon my grandchildren.
I was sure I would be dead by 2050, but they might still have the chance to move to the northern hemisphere, if that was what they wanted.
It had been a longstanding family joke to rib me about my tendency to arrive early for everything, but the idea of my preparing for an event forty years hence that might not even happen would set a new, surely unsurpassable benchmark. I imagined my great-great-grandchildren being told of their eccentric but prescient foremother whose planning guaranteed their happy and comfortable lives.
Although Mama and Dad often spoke Polish to each other at home, and often within their circle of friends, they didn’t teach me the language. What I picked up was mainly swear words or greetings. Their antipathy to Poland was understandable. One might avoid an enemy, Germany, but a former friend who had betrayed them, Poland, made them sadder and more hurt. Both Mama and Dad had been helped by Poles during the war, but these examples must have been outnumbered by those who were a threat to their lives. They had not been welcomed back to their homes when the war was over. They had escaped Poland because of the post-war murders of survivors by their former neighbours.
They had friends in Melbourne who did speak Polish to their children, so I’d heard a few more phrases to add to my meagre stockpile. There were those who spoke ‘excellent Polish’, which I knew meant they had no discernible Yiddish accent and they knew all the correct forms in the language, which has many cases and irregular rules and strict lines of formality. My parents had spoken only Yiddish till they were sent to school, so Polish was a second language for them, even though they were citizens of the country and their families had been living there for many centuries.
I could identify Polish when I heard it being spoken in the street or on SBS news. I could pick out a few words, and it sometimes made me nostalgic for a time when I heard Mama speaking the soft sh, zh and ch sounds. I could even parrot phrases well, but I couldn’t understand what I was saying. It also made me anxious, though, precisely because I didn’t know what was being said. It confounded me to hear Polish spoken or to read it—it was both familiar and impenetrable, a sweet-sour state of confusion.
I started looking for online websites offering introductory Polish lessons. Kawa is the word for ‘coffee’. That I knew, and it made sense—and this was only the first day. The internet course I chose was seductive, the little sound files instructive, and I immediately got going with a few familiar-sounding words: for ‘film’, ‘gauze’, ‘garage’ and ‘hyena’.
The days of the month were poetic and descriptive: January was Styczen—from stykać, ‘to bring into contact’, when the old and new years join together; February was Luty, the word in Old Polish for ‘bitter frost’; the spring of April was Kwiecien, from the word for ‘flowers’; July was Lipiec, from lipa, the linden tree which flowered then; Grudzien was from gruda, the name for the cold, hard ground of December.
These were charming, and especially appealing to a lover of languages. But they made me nervous, too, as they were so different from the words I knew in English for the days and months. Nervous and curious. This was a good description of my general state.
I browsed online and learned that, at least according to Wikipedia, if you go to Poland as a Polish citizen and you don’t have a Polish passport and travel instead on your Australian passport—well, this is illegal, and they won’t let you out of the country unless you get a Polish passport, which another website said could take years to arrange. I panicked and thought about never going to Poland and avoiding the Polish authorities, with whom I could converse about a hyena being filmed in the garage but nothing much else. I felt I was stepping onto dangerous ground, gruda, cold and hard. Why was I wanting to send my poor little grandchildren to Poland?
Then, calming down, I remembered that they had parents, and no one knew what the politico-cultural climate would be after I was dead. Everything changes, sometimes even for the better. I would be giving them options. They were the ones who would have to work out which choices to make.
I found a local historian whose speciality was Polish–Jewish relations and Holocaust history, and whose parents were Polish Catholics. Her father was a World War II survivor who’d narrowly escaped the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviets, and her great-uncle had been sent to Auschwitz for so-called collaboration. She ran a small business helping Jewish people to regain their Polish citizenship. This involved proving that at least one of your grandparents was Polish and thereby being able to stake a legitimate claim.
My mother’s parents were both born in Poland. And probably both of my father’s parents, too, but as I didn’t know exactly who he was I decided to use whatever I could of the records available and hope that it would be enough to make my Polishness indisputable.
First, I had to answer a series of questions about my connection to Poland. Many people have tried to claim citizenship since Poland joined the European Union, often to further their chances of work, and the authorities would presumably be keen to see if I had a more honourable reason for my application.
I had to list all the usual things—my names, names of children, names of parents, names of grandparents, mother’s siblings, father’s siblings, towns of birth, last home address of people who lived in Poland—and if I’d ever visited Poland and knew anyone there. I’d met the former Polish ambassador to Australia, who helped me arrange some author interviews for my trip in the 1990s, so I mentioned her and the people I’d interviewed—the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz, the novelist Tadeusz Konwicki and the literary editor Piotr Sommer—during that visit. I thought that this would seem impressive.
What did the family do before the war? Occupations, home addresses, and what happened to them during the Nazi occupation? When did my parents leave Poland? Who was left behind? Where did my parents go after leaving? Dates, places? What did they do in Australia, and where did they live? When did they die? Were they naturalised? Did my father serve in any army? Is there any family alive in Poland today? Many of the answers to these questions were ‘no’, ‘none’, ‘nobody’ and ‘don’t know’.
There were documents to be found, scanned, translated, certified and apostilled: certificates of birth, death, marriage and changes of name. Archival records from Poland: registration of addresses, school reports, old passports, documents from Mama and Dad’s stay in the Displaced Persons camp in Germany after the war.
There were some records available in the National Archives of Australia—migration documents, incoming-passenger cards, boat-arrival lists, naturalisation certificates—but the rest of the tasks seemed impossibly onerous given the time since my mother’s death, and the burning of the families and their histories in the cauldron of war. The application process appeared to be designed to evoke defeatism in the face of massive concrete Soviet-style bureaucracy.
It seemed unjust, but I was determined to succeed. I rolled up my sleeves. It was an irresistible demand, one that required a bold response.
I started with the National Archives in Canberra. There were records of Dad’s arrival: Hryniewiecki, Aron Lejzor—Nationality: Polish—Arrived Melbourne per Caboto 28 October 1949. Mama was there, too: Sara, nee Kawer.
I imagined them arriving on the dock at Port Melbourne. Mama had told me that Dad bought a second-hand wicker suitcase in Paris before they left, and it had fallen apart on the dock when they disembarked. She was humiliated: strangers had to help her collect all her clothes and personal belongings from the ground. Dad remembered going to the beach on Melbourne Cup day four days later and getting badly sunburnt. This was the sort of thing I knew about them. I doubted if the Polish authorities would find these stories sufficient.
I became a denizen of the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, going to the office for copies of certificates and then for new copies when the copies I’d sent on had been misplaced. It seemed that almost no document was sufficient in itself. Each had to be further stamped and guaranteed. I had to get documents apostilled at the Department of For
eign Affairs. I had to have a document sworn by a notary. I’d had no previous experience with apostilles and notaries, but I became adept at queuing and applying and paying and collecting.
I knew of no formal change-of-name document for my parents. They’d changed their last name from Hryniewiecki by selecting five consecutive letters from the Polish name and seemed not to have formally told anyone. Later, I found a 1950 letter in the National Archives from an agent of the Commonwealth Migration Officer to a solicitor, advising that
under existing Departmental ruling it is not permissible for an alien, residing in Australia, to adopt a name in an accepted Anglicised form. As the name Ryon is, phonetically, of this type I regret to inform you that approval for the proposed change of name cannot be granted.
So they were stymied by bureaucrats suspicious of the motives of these aliens trying to pass themselves off as Irish, albeit with a crazy spelling which would have had its own annoying consequences had they been able to go ahead.
There was no register of their formal marriage, save for the unfilled-in form with their signatures that I’d unearthed on my trip to Poland years earlier. But my sister remembered that there must have been a record for their Jewish marriage, in order for us to have been married in Orthodox synagogues. I discovered there’d been a fire in the records office of the synagogue I was married in, and there was nothing in the way of official Jewish divorce documents either. Then I remembered that I’d supervised my parents’ divorce, which was a rush job in the months before Mama died in 1977, and straight away I chased down the lawyer who helped us. I recalled how he’d come down to the car, which I’d parked in a no-standing zone in the centre of the city, outside his office. He needed my mother’s signature but she was too weak to come up to his office.
