Bloodhound (12 page)

Dad said he'd like some wine and I passed him the bottle. He poured himself a glass, then topped up the glasses of my twelve-year-old nephew and his seven-year-old brother. I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the end of the table, remembering the way my quest had begun a year earlier.

‘I don't want my children drinking wine, Dad,' my sister said.

‘But they asked for it and I gave it to them,' he said defensively.

My head was in my hands, and I was thinking that I should have started smoking mint tea years ago.

Later, I found a note in my pocket that Dad had passed me across the table.

Then, a few days later, he sent me a letter:

Enclosed was a twenty-dollar note for my daughter in Israel.

Why was every small interaction with him so fraught? Why did he send money for one of my daughters and not for the other? This was a pattern established years ago: picking out one child for attention. The children were beyond offence; they saw it as a quirk. I was still ready to be stung.

I checked the reference in the note. The book he'd mentioned was indeed the last by Singer, who died in 1991.
Shadows on the Hudson
was translated from Yiddish to English and finally published in 1998. Dad hadn't read more than
Time
magazine for years, as far as I knew—but what did I really know about him? This was only one of many occasions when he would hand me a gnomic note or an article torn from a magazine without explanation.

Was the quote from the book or from a review of the book in
Time
? Did it have anything to do with my search for the truth, or was it merely something that had appealed to him?

And the letter. What did he mean about my whispering with my sister? I was whispering with my daughter. Was he confused, or was I?

Two months later, after he'd left seven messages on my answering machine, I finally spoke to Alan. He was calling from a phone box, having come in to town to do his washing. He and his partner had finally split up, and his daughter stayed with him two days a week. His baby son was fine, he said. He sounded all right, although he admitted that things had been hard.

I explained again the results of the DNA tests. He said he would be my spiritual brother if nothing else. I was ashamed of my reticence, embarrassed at having bowled into his life with an outlandish story that now seemed to be unprovable. I thanked him for his kindness in accepting me and going through the testing process.

He said he didn't mind. That it was interesting. That my voice was up at his place where he listened to me on the radio. And that he and his mates always read my columns in the newspapers.

See you, darling
, he whispered, as we said goodbye.

When his younger cousin called, I told him the results of the DNA test. ‘If it was a murder trial, you wouldn't get a conviction,' he said. ‘But since it's a cousin trial, it's good enough for me.'

The year rolled by. A month before Dad's next birthday my sister called me and then arrived on my doorstep with my oldest nephew. He was thirteen now, a young man. He had finished
The Lord of the Rings
and wanted me to buy him another Tolkien book. Our relationship was founded on a love of books and learning new languages.

I took him to the bookshop where I had an account. He was almost too shy to ask for the book he wanted. I saw him blushing at the thought of going up to the counter, and later he was too embarrassed to get a straw for his milkshake. I had forgotten how painful that age can be, when you think everyone is looking at you, judging every action.

I looked at my nephew's eyes and his fair skin, and I was sad that I couldn't say for sure that he shared these features with me. Now there was the possibility that these things came from my real father, the one who couldn't be his mother's father.

Yet I felt that my sister and I were closer since this story began evolving. Both of us were somewhat adrift and trying to comfort each other. I saw her anew. I saw she had our mother's hips and legs and narrow shoulders. And smaller stature: I towered over her. Whose shoulders did I have?

I have a photograph of Mama holding me as a baby on St Kilda Beach. Who was holding the camera? I suddenly remembered that she'd told me that Mr Lederman took lots of photos of me—on the potty, for example. So he must have known her when I was a baby. I recalled his claim that he may have met her afterwards, and thought again that he was a liar and a coward. Or maybe she was the liar, and the one who was holding the camera was Max.

There she was in the black-and-white snap with bevelled edges, twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, proud of what she had produced. I tried to be angry with her for messing things up so profoundly, but I couldn't find it in my heart to sustain the feeling. I was sorry for her and admired her pluck: to have a child who was not her husband's issue and to get away with it. I saw a news report about ten per cent of paternity tests giving negative results. Mama was not alone.

In the shower I washed my hair and imagined taking a few hairs from Dad's head while he was still alive, and waiting till he had died to match them to my sister and me. I thought about trying to get a sample unobtrusively. We could lie and say that one of my sister's kids had an iron deficiency and that the whole family had to have our hair tested for genetic transmission. This would be unethical. But if we held back the testing until he was dead, and then took a sample (from his dead body? his hairbrush? how would I get access to that? what was I thinking?), maybe that would be more ethical.

We shouldn't have to live with this uncertainty all of our lives, I thought. We weren't at fault—didn't we have a right to know the answers to these questions? But why was I saying ‘we' when I seemed to be the only person troubled by them?

A friend invited me to a Sabbath meal at a young rabbi's home. His wife was pregnant with their eighth child. The seven children sat quietly waiting for their mother to finish clearing the table. There was no arguing, no restlessness. The rabbi asked the children if they had anything to show him. They slipped off their chairs and surrounded him, holding pictures they had drawn, stories they had written, things they had made. He let the youngest girl, about three years old, climb onto his knee. I ached to be the youngest one, to plant myself on his lap and lean my back against his belly.

When I drove home the men on the street who caught my eyes were the older ones, the greyer ones. If I had to ask a trusted older man for advice, to whom would I go? What would I want to be told? Only that I was a good girl, a clever girl; that he'd look after me, was proud of me and loved me, and that one day another man would love me, too.

Throughout this time I had been making notes about who I'd met and what I'd found. It was odd to be keeping a secret diary, morbid to be waiting for Dad to die. I wondered if I would grieve for him. I had a sense I'd be sad for everything he didn't have and everything I didn't have, and for the world that had made his life so difficult and my life with him so confused.

I imagined myself at Dad's funeral, not being able to cry, not being able to seem bereft in front of others, their judgements clear. Maybe my sister and I would laugh, as we often do when we're hysterical. We cackled uncontrollably when Mama was in her final coma. She'd been taken unconscious from her bed at our home to a small hospital nearby, and died there three days later.

I had felt like an orphan. Dad didn't see me for months—not until he visited the hospital when I had my second daughter. He didn't mention Mama's death and only stayed for a few minutes. The father I had couldn't look after me. Nor did he take an interest in me. Everything seemed to be too much trouble for him. He was always tired, or trying to make sure he was the centre of attention. He hated the competition of children.

At my niece's school play a few weeks after his latest birthday, Dad stood up at the end during the applause, as if they were showering him with appreciation. He bowed from the front row. Looking back now, I suspect this must have been a sign of growing dementia, but it was intriguing to see his behaviour become more obvious, rather than being masked as before.

In the new year I had dinner with my sister. As we were walking back to her car we bumped into a friend of hers from high school, a woman I knew too, sitting with her family out the front of a restaurant.

Her husband was next to their nine-year-old daughter, and it was hard to take my eyes from the loving scene. Father and daughter chatted about what music she wanted to buy and what food she wanted to order. He stroked her hair and she leaned on him. When she said she was cold, he gave her his jumper.

My sister talked to her friend about all the things that had happened in the past year. And then she said, ‘Oh, and yes, we found out something else. Perhaps you should tell this, Ramona?'

But I was interested to hear how she would tell it, what she would say.

She said that I had made enormous efforts and had found out that we were half-sisters, and that neither of us knew who our biological father was. She joked that she had had enough to deal with that year but that I had needed to follow the story and so she had been dragged along.

Her friend asked if it was like being in the sidecar of a motorbike I was driving. My sister agreed enthusiastically.

I thought of my secret diary. I was a writer, and writers want to write books. I wanted to tell people what I had been thinking about. How was I going to bring along others in my family on this part of my journey: how many sidecars was I attaching to this motorbike of mine?

I asked my younger daughter about the implications of my quest in the religious or Halakhic sense. She responded in the true spirit of the rabbis. If my sister and I didn't know for sure who our fathers were, then maybe Dad was our father.

But, I said, he can only be the father of one of us. So one of us is a bastard. And that bastard has broken Halakhic law by marrying a person who is not a bastard, instead of finding another bastard to marry. For ten generations, or possibly until the end of time. According to this law, either she and her sister or their cousins are bastards. I had to remind her, and myself, that I didn't accept these rules.

I entertained the thought of writing the story into a novel that could take the weight of truth. But I kept coming up against the obvious logical conundrum. How could a story about hidden truths, shame and disgrace, secrets and lies, be told anything less than truthfully after all these years?

9

Who likes funerals?

DESPITE the lack of unequivocal genetic evidence about my connection to Max, I was not ready to forsake him. I especially liked the story of the tattooed number on his arm—the way he thought about it marking his survival.

I'd found an account by Mayer Abramowitz, an American army rabbi serving in the Schlachtensee Displaced Persons' Camp in Germany—where Mama and Dad spent time after the war—of a young woman who was dismissed from her job. She was a waitress in a dining room for military personnel at the nearby airbase. He described being absorbed by the ‘bluish green number, written in large, upper case lettering, stretching along her forearm…I couldn't look away from the tattoo. I couldn't look at her face. Do I ask about the number? Do I act normally as though it wasn't there?' He was reminded of the time he saw a farmer brand a cow. The reason given for the woman's dismissal was that the staff and the military men who ate there were disturbed by her tattoo. She was reinstated after Abramowitz intervened.

Like this woman's, Max's tattoo was in large digits on the top of his forearm rather than the smaller ones I'd seen, often on the inner arm. I wrote to Dr Stephen Feinstein at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, asking him about this discrepancy. He explained that there seemed to have been a general pattern of placing the tattoo so that it could be read when the inmate held the arm across the chest—to the eye of the bearer it was usually upside down. He said that size varied. One woman he met whose numbers were at least two inches high told him that she'd had an encounter with some skinhead types in an American mall who were impressed with it and ‘wanted to know where she had it done'.

In camp slang, Feinstein said, the tattoo was a ‘cremation number'—Auschwitz was part of the Third Reich and all deaths theoretically required a death certificate. But I knew that only those selected for work were tattooed. Those slated for immediate death did not have ink wasted on them.

Still, the ‘cremation number' was new to me. Shame would turn to pride, surely, if you could look down at your arm and see that you had outwitted death.

Dad had turned eighty-two and we'd gathered at his place for lunch. My older daughter was at a ten-day silent retreat in the Blue Mountains. I could think of nothing worse. Even being here at this table was better than ten days without speaking.

My younger daughter had brought her new boyfriend, who was eagerly asking Dad about his life. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and politeness but my sister and I rolled our eyes when we heard Dad telling familiar anecdotes, punctuated with his theatrical sighs.

As we were leaving, Dad approached me with a copy of
Time
magazine in his hand. He gripped my forearm with his other hand and said, ‘You always wanted Utopia, but read this story on page fifty-six. It doesn't exist!' I said it was a shocking way to break the news to me and rushed to tell my sister.