Bloodhound (11 page)

This was one of the photos that Alan gave me for safekeeping.

I thought about how good I was at mathematics. But not good enough for Max to have been a proper father to me. Was he a proper father to Alan?

Max was frightened, or cowed at least, by men in uniforms—policemen, parking inspectors. He was struck dumb by them, he looked down and away from their gaze.

He liked a good joke but would never tell one.
Unlike Dad, who would always tell them, often the same ones, over and over again.

Max was never depressed. He was filled with rage.
What might he have made of me, if he had left his wife and Alan and come to Mama? Would Alan have been an athlete, a happy, strong and handsome devil—would I have been the one to turn to heroin?

Would I have cowered in the face of his rage? How would he have managed my questioning, my radicalism? He voted Liberal. He was fond of Richard Nixon. He and Mama would have fought bitterly about Vietnam. I wonder if she kept her secret to protect me from the man filled with rage.

The following morning I packed my things. I had a few hours before I had to head to the airport. The next day I would be having breakfast with a cultural attaché in Canberra. Two weeks later I would fly to Lake Como in Italy for a holiday with friends, then to Edinburgh to interview writers at the book festival. It was a very different life to that of Alan in Kuranda. And to Max. And to Mama. I kept thinking of the image of Max's strong forearm with the numbers proudly displayed: 76200. The survivor.

Alan and his little family arrived mid-morning. I hadn't mentioned DNA testing during my visit. Alan brought up the subject, saying it was my call. He said he was happy to believe the story I'd told, but equally happy to submit to a test.

I took out the swabs, filled in the forms, got him to sign the letter I'd written from him to the doctor, and showed him how to scrape the sampler along the inside of his cheeks. I had the urge to do it myself, to make use of my years of laboratory experience, but it seemed too intimate, and maybe too rude. The sample and the forms and the signed letter went into my suitcase.

He drove me back to the airport in Cairns. On the way, he said that Max went back.

To where?

To Auschwitz.

It was the late 1960s. At the gate a woman offered him a map. I don't need it, he said. I was here before. I know where everything is.

I told Alan that when I went there I took a recorder and a large stereo microphone on a boom. At the gate I was asked if I had a letter giving me permission to record. I didn't. I asked how long it would take to get one and was told three weeks. I asked if I was going to be the first Jew to be turned away from Auschwitz, and they hesitated a minute, then let me through.

Alan said Max went to Germany, too, sometime in the 1970s, to testify against an SS guard. We put him away, Max told Alan when he returned home. If a man is ashamed of his actions in the war, Alan asked me, does he go to a German court to bear witness?

I thought of the way my parents avoided everything to do with the war. They didn't take us to the Holocaust Day commemorations held in survivor communities after the war. Max must have had a very strong constitution to go back to Auschwitz.

Alan said Max didn't drink much, only a whisky or a beer. He was a big eater, a hungry man. And, like all the survivors I knew, he ate quickly.

He was a snappy dresser. He liked to do things in style. He was generous. But not to me, I thought.

We were nearly at the airport. Alan explained how to tame horses. He told me about the circular paddock, where they can run around and not hurt themselves. He talked about the eye of the trainer, and about the battle of wills between man and horse. When the horse is tired of resisting it puts out its tongue. You have to watch for that: it's a sign that it's ready to negotiate. Then the man can look away from the horse's eyes, glance at his flank or his chest or his neck. But if the struggle is to go on, the trainer looks back into the horse's eyes.

Approach a horse from the side, Alan said, so he can see you have nothing hidden behind your back. Cougars are the natural predators of the horse, and will attack its chest and flanks and belly. Pat a horse on his most sensitive areas and he'll learn to trust you. He is programmed to protect these vulnerabilities. If he gives them up to you, he's yours.

In the plane I looked at the small collection of photographs that Alan had given me. There was the photo of Max taken in 1947. On the back it says
Sierpien
, Polish for August. Just as Alan had described, Max is leaning against a bushy garden wall in rolled-up shirtsleeves, scowling to one side, his left arm crossed over his right, his tattoo displayed and his wedding ring visible. He is handsome and rangy.

There's a front-on headshot, too, from some kind of identification document, but no clue to when and where it was taken.

Another 1947 shot of Max: this time in a long light-coloured trench coat buttoned up to the top, a darker hat on his head, and both hands in his pockets. It's May, spring, and the place is identified as Wiesbaden, the site of one of the Displaced Persons camps where the survivors of the war were gathered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. This picture was taken by a professional photographer—the stamp and address are on the back.

The last Wiesbaden shot, dated July 1947, must be the one Alan mentioned with Max standing alongside his friend from Greece. They're both in sharp suits, double-breasted, the jackets reaching down to mid-thigh level and the pants wide. Max's suit is of a light colour and he has a flash of white handkerchief in the top pocket, a dark tie and a white shirt. He is holding a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses. The pants have a sharp crease in them. The men do look like Mafiosi. But maybe they were just survivors who revelled in the possibility of being clean, wearing decent clothes and presenting themselves smartly to the world. We are human beings, they seemed to be saying, and we are ready to start living again.

Then there was a 1956 shot of Max and his wife dancing at a party. Max is in a typically elegant jacket, and there's his white hanky in the top pocket again. His checked tie looks like it's made of silk. His eyes are closed and he has the tiniest smile forming. His wife looks straight into the camera. She's wearing a strappy summer dress and her earrings are clip-on round buttons. She looks like she's enjoying herself. It's taken by another professional photographer, this shot, but this time they are in Melbourne and the photographer is in Alexandra Parade, Fitzroy. I turned two in that year.

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:

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.