Authors: Ramona Koval
Max had lung cancer, for which he had an operation. Then he had adrenal cancer which killed him.
I should look up the familial patterns of adrenal cancer.
Max told his life story to a South African man he knew when he was in the hospital. It may have been Vimy in Kew. Alan can't remember the man's name. Zoshu?
How could I find a South African whose name might be Zoshu? I lived near that hospital in the time that Max was dying. Maybe I drove straight past it as he was taking his last breath?
Max could get angry and throw furniture around, smashing things. It was frightening. He could rip his own shirt off when he was full of fury. Alan grabs his own shirt and mimes tearing it from the collar, popping the buttons, and ripping it backwards over each shoulder.
I imagined crouching behind the couch with Alan, waiting for the storm to pass as Max ripped the shirt off his shoulders.
Max said he had blond curly hair as a child. He had grey-blue eyes. After the war his hair went dark, and he wore it slicked back like an Italian. He always wore sharp suits. He was hopeless at doing repair jobs around the house. He employed people to do this.
Max was upset and appalled when Alan told him of the suggestions (from whom?) that his behaviour in Auschwitz may have been something of which to be ashamed.
He was a tailor and he made uniforms. Then he got âa good job', where he got more food. This was working in the infirmary.
Where they did medical experiments? I asked. Alan said he'd never thought about that. He didn't know.
Max was quiet. His wife was louder, a party girlâ¦attractive, outgoing.
Mama was quiet and dignified and proud. Maybe she suited Max better?
Max and his brother Joe didn't get on. Max and his older nephew were sworn enemies. Max called him a bad seed.
Max told Alan of the reception he received on arrival in Australia. He expected warmth from his older brother Joe, as the only survivor of the family. His brother was cool.
(A bush turkey lands on the rail of the porch as I write, pecks and moves on.)
Joe was very proud of the solid-walnut dining table in his home. Max asked him, âWhat year did you buy the table and what did you pay for it?' Max was furious that his brother could have bought the table in the year that the money could have been used to rescue some of the family from Poland. Max always said that the table represented their sister.
I imagined the atmosphere around the table at family dinners. I saw Joe and his family waiting for the moment when Max's seething temper would erupt. I wondered if his wife would put her fingers in her ears then, too.
Alan said that it would have been just like Max to go to an auction in Kew, around the area in which they lived. And it would have been in character for him to be interested in what kind of work I was doing. And pleased at the answer. âSounds like Max,' says Alan.
Wallabies were padding about, thirty feet from where I was writing. Lush tropical ferns, an avocado tree, palms, poinsettia, bananas. Lots of birds. In the neighbouring cabin, a young father and his daughter of twelve or thirteen were horsing around. He was teasing her; she teased him back. She belted him playfully on the bum; he pushed her hand away. âDad! Dad! I want to show you something!' He was laughing and saying, âYou tone yourself down.' They bantered. I was transfixed, fascinated by the warmth between them.
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, âThis 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-motherhoodâall 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 âSilent Night, Holy Night'âChristmas 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 verandaâthe cake, the sparklers they had broughtâand they sang âHappy 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 handâcleaning, washing, cookingâand 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 have 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 architectureâbuilding 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 âaeroplane' to âeroplane' by rubbing out the âa' 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.