Authors: Ramona Koval
This disturbing inclination to latch on to each possible familial connection drew me to media stories of mysterious parenthood and family secrets. I read about a man who sought the return of seventy-five thousand dollars in school fees and support payments after he discovered that he was not the biological father of his ex-wife's child. He'd become suspicious when he and his new partner had trouble conceiving: he must have found out then that he was sterile. He still loved the child he'd raised with his ex-wife, he said, and still wanted visiting rights. The judge said there could be no rights without responsibilities. I thought again of the timeâalmost a decadeâthat Dad and Mama spent trying to have children before I came along.
Dad wrote to me once after I questioned him about their relationship:
I never did finish the story because you are always in a hurry. I told you how I met your Mother and she stayed with me. It is impossible to describe the loneliness we had losing all our family in one day. The families in Poland were much closer than here. You can imagine when you lose one member of a family it's a tragedy and that we lost both our familiesâthis closeness drew us more and more together. You seek in that single person your brother, sister, mother, everything. I fell in love with her because it was my first love. I cannot recall up to the war and of course in the war I never had a girl for sex, she was all for me. After a short time we start to talk about marriage. I did know a girl before the war, Hanka BiaÅastocka, she wanted me because I was the secretary from Siedlce and had the list of fifty-one survivors from the fourteen thousand Jews before the war. Later when the war finished she came back from Russia where some had survived. I was already hooked up with Mum so I went to the market and bought a piece of new material made of paper mixed with cotton and made myself a suit and for her I bought a piece of pink material with little white flowers and I made a simple wedding frock. This was the first Jewish wedding in the town after the war and all the survivors came, everybody bought some sort of food and there was no rabbi, only a man who knew how to write the
ksuba
, the marriage contractâ¦This ends this story, some other time I will write to you how I wanted to have you and waited for nine years before I got you and this was the happiest day of my life when you were born.
Thank you,
Dad
Framing my birth as the culmination of their having risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of Nazi Europe gave context to many of my parents' actions. Mama had talked about how desperate Dad had been to have a child, about how for him success depended on building a family. She said that they fought whenever she got her period. Maybe her going outside the marriage stemmed from a desire to give him what he wanted, perhaps what she wanted, too? Not so much out of love for him, but out of a need to keep things at home peaceful? It's only in fairytales that people do things for one reason. Real life is far more complex.
Despite the touching letter, I felt sure that Dad's sense of his responsibility for me and my sister ended when he left our house, all those years ago, to take up with a new woman. I was less certain about where my responsibilities to him began and ended.
And there were other relationships to analyse. My sister told me she had explained our story so far to her daughter, who recognised that it was sad and pointed out that she had never felt close to Dad. She then tried to work out whose father he was.
To my relief, she told her mother that she didn't feel any differently about me. In my rush to investigate my hunches, my need to know had been so great that I had not thought about the effect that half-siblingship might have on my relationships with my sister's children. I loved them fiercely, and I couldn't imagine feeling closer to them. My sister was right: anything I needed to know and anything I uncovered directly affected others.
Dad's eighty-fifth birthday arrived, and this time there were fewer people eating Sunday lunch at the same old restaurant. There must have been new owners, because the menu seemed a little changedâbut the food still came piled on massive plates. This time Dad hadn't done the ordering and he was not insisting on paying, as he usually did, so my sister and I split the bill. The children were at one end of the table; they had exams that week or had been up all night at partiesâI noticed that my older nephew, who was not yet a teenager at Dad's eightieth birthday, now noticeably needed a shave.
Dad had been ill, but he'd picked up again, according to his wife. He'd given up playing cards three nights a week. He said he was happy not to be seeing the men he'd played with for fifteen years. Why, I asked, didn't he play during the day? His wife said that was when he had his nap. All day? But they had to go to the coffee shop in the mornings. Their days were precisely organised and the timetable unwavering.
When I arrived at the restaurant, Dad handed me an article which he said I must read. It was from
New Idea
magazine and headed âThe Pregnant Boy of Kazakhstan'. The titular seven-year-old child had been born with his own twin inside him: âThe 2 kg foetus, 20 cm long, was attached to the blood vessels and had continued to grow⦠for seven years it lived like a parasite inside the boy's body, according to Dr Valentina Vostrikova, who led the team of surgeons.' Radioactive pollution was cited as a possible cause. The foetus died during the operation to remove it, and the boy said: âI had a football inside me [making a round shape with his hands] but my mum has told me to stop talking about it.'
How, Dad asked me, did that boy end up with his twin growing inside him?
Why, I asked myself, did Dad cut out the article for me?
Maybe he remembered that I'd studied genetics. But whenever he gave me these clippings and notes, he always put his hand to his mouth in a gesture of keeping a secret and would rush to find a pocket in my clothing in which to bury the paper, as if we had a covert understanding, as if he were giving me cash without his wife knowing about it.
Later I sought a more serious source than the
New Idea
, and found a reference to the boy's condition: foetus-in-foetu
.
A BBC report suggested that the growth was a teratoma cyst, the remains of a misdeveloped twin. It was growing larger and causing the boy to be aware of it, but it wasn't a fully formed foetus, more like a cyst.
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 âtall 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.
âIf 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, âwhere 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: âShe was really going up against the entire familyâ¦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 âsearch' 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 childrenâone of whom was Nathaniel, whose mother, the landscape architect Harriet Pattison, had worked with his father.
In an interview the filmmaker said, âI think you get to a point where your curiosity gets the better of youâ¦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 funeralâalthough, 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 ideaâ
Oh darling
, she could have said
, sisters don't always look alike!
âbut she did say that, whatever happened, we had to look after each other, for we were the only sisters we had.
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: âThese 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.
âShh,' my sister said, replacing the mask. âRelaxâyou're in hospital.'
âWhat do I need this for?' Dad said, pulling off the mask again.
âIt's oxygenâit'll help you breathe,' she said. I saw her jaw clench.
âI'll tell you a joke!' he replied, pulling the mask away completely.
âA man is in hospital'âhe was gasping nowââand 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?'
âDad, put the mask on.' I heard the insistence in my voice.
âOnly one more joke,' he said, and now he was turning blue and coughing blood. âA gynaecologist comes home and kisses his wife, and she says, “What are you kissing me for?” And he says'âDad was shouting now, so the nurses came inââ“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 liveâat 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.