Bloodhound (6 page)

Before I left, she said she'd try to get me in touch with Max's younger nephew and his family, who were expecting a new granddaughter. True to her word, she soon sent a message saying he was keen to meet me. I made the call. He was lovely on the phone and asked me to dinner.

The next week I was sitting at my sister's table, Dad and his wife at the head, and I felt like I was the one having an illicit affair. I looked across at him, thinking that he had nothing to do with me. I saw him merely as an instrument of my quest. It felt urgent and dangerous to ask him for clues that might help me, to breezily put questions to him without explaining why I was interested. I had taken on Mama's persona. She was the one having the affair, after all—she was the one disguising herself as a wife when she was also a mistress.

We were drinking coffee and eating cakes. ‘Nothing for me,' Dad said. ‘My wife says I'm on a diet.' When we pressed him, he relented. He was always happiest when he was eating, and like all survivors he ate quickly. We ate quickly, too, emulating their anxiety about the plate being taken away. We had to learn how to eat like free people much later. His wife said nothing but shook her head. Her plate was spotless: no cake for her. But she could never be found without a cigarette dangling from her lips.

I asked Dad if he worked in the same factory as Mama did before I was born. I imagined it might have been hard to carry on a clandestine relationship with the boss if your husband was there every day.

‘No,' he said, ‘she worked there because her friend Isabel told her about the job, but she got pregnant a few months after taking it and stopped working. If you want to know something, ask Isabel. But she's in a nursing home after having five strokes.'

He didn't ask why I was interested in their 1950s factory experiences when I had never asked about them before. I was elated to get away with the probing and to have a new clue to follow. I imagined Mama getting pregnant only a few months after starting the new job. Nine years of infertile marriage to Dad, with visits to gynaecologists in Paris and in Melbourne—then she fell pregnant. Was her husband surprised? I know he was pleased, because I'd been told that he'd been disappointed for years that he hadn't become a father like the other men in their circle. In those days men assumed it was the woman whose works were at fault. Why should he be suspicious? What did he know of the mysteries of the female body? He was going to be a father.

We'd hardly said goodbye to the old couple at the door when I called the nursing home from my sister's kitchen to ask if Isabel was well enough to receive visitors. The nurse took the phone to her.

‘It's Ramona here, Sabina's daughter,' I said. ‘Do you remember me? Can I visit you?' Yes, she said, and asked me when. ‘How about twenty minutes?'

I was anxious and in a rush when I stopped on the way to buy a big bunch of flowers: Christmas lilies. I had not seen Isabel or heard from her in twenty-five years.

In the car I tried to remember what I knew about her. She'd been an attractive woman with no children. She would buy us new dresses when Mama was out of money. There was a dramatic portrait of her hanging in her Carlton flat. It reminded me of Vladimir Tretchikoff's ‘Green Lady', a popular interior-design feature at the time. When I found a shot of the Tretchikoff painting online, I realised that Isabel certainly didn't look Chinese. But she was sultry, like the Green Lady, and maybe that's what I remembered. She had short hair and red lips and wore a dress with layers of petticoats. Maybe she only wore the dress once, but that's the one I remember. She might as well have only ever worn that dress.

She was married to a brutal and unpleasant husband, Marek. He was an engineer, or at least that was what he did before the war. Afterwards, in Australia, he invented a new design for a steel coat hanger that could hold several suits suspended from one main vertical hook.

It didn't take off, probably because the horizontal hangers slid from the vertical one and the clothes landed on the floor of the wardrobe. I know this because my parents had a few of the prototypes he'd put aside when he started manufacturing another creation, a kind of mocha cream covered with chocolate and sitting on a thin biscuit base. This was my idea of a great invention.

Marek used to try to touch me when he visited our house. He'd ask me to kiss him hello, as if he was offended that I hadn't already, and it seemed impolite not to. He'd leave sloppy wet smooches on my cheeks. As I got older, he would stand in doorways so that I'd have to squeeze past him to leave the room. Now I can see he was some kind of paedophile but back then I only knew it was a good idea to avoid him.

And that brings back the name of his finest invention. They were called Mocha Kisses.

Isabel was often depressed and sometimes had to be hospitalised after Marek beat her. Mama would get distressed calls from her. At other times Isabel seemed obsessed with her body. She insisted on showing us how to do exercises that would whittle down our hips. This involved sitting on the floor with our legs straight out in front of us, our arms likewise, and then we had to make our way across the room and back like that, on our bottoms. At age eleven I wasn't very interested in such activities.

These disparate memories scattered as I entered the foyer of the large nursing home and saw twenty wheelchairs arranged in a semicircle in the half-light of Sunday afternoon. Why were the residents organised like this? It was as if they had all been waiting for me to visit for twenty-five years—
you never call, you never write.
Which one was she? I searched their faces. Several of them were slumped in their chairs, heads down, beyond easy recognition. Then I looked more closely and saw Isabel, by now nearly eighty: her unmistakeable face, her body swollen and a burden, her left side inert, useless. I offered the flowers, which she couldn't hold. A nurse took them.

I asked if she remembered me.

‘Sabina's girl,' she said. ‘But who is your father?'

How could she have known that this was my reason for coming? It was perfect, cosmically ordained.

‘That's why I'm here,' I told her. ‘To find out who my father is.'

She looked puzzled. ‘What is your father's name? Aron?' I was struck by the absurdity of my answer to this woman who'd had a momentary memory lapse—she'd had five strokes, after all, according to Dad, who may have been mistaken or exaggerating. She wasn't asking me a metaphysical question.

Isabel told me to wheel her to her room, which she shared with a bedridden deaf woman who was determined not to turn her television down from its ear-blasting levels. They had a growling conversation in Polish and I sensed hatred. I wouldn't have lasted a day in this room. If I had a choice, that is, and Isabel didn't.

She directed me to push the wheelchair again and we went into the corridor to find a dark corner in which to talk. I asked if she remembered working for the Dunne brothers. She did. What were they like? ‘The older one was very nice and the younger one was very handsome.' Did she remember working with Mama there? ‘Yes, we worked side by side, telling each other how unhappy we were in our marriages.'

Then she asked if I knew why she'd been punished, why she was so sick and helpless. Before I could find an answer, she said, ‘Because'—and now she was whispering.

No, you're not, I whispered. No, you're not. And then I cried. And then she cried and asked for a cup of tea. What have I done, I thought as I brought the tea—what am I doing here, upsetting a poor old lady and hearing horrible stories I didn't ask for?

The tea calmed Isabel. She asked what else I wanted to know. I asked her if she knew what Mama thought of the younger Dunne brother, Max.

‘Do you really want to know?' she said.

Yes, I said. That's why I came.

‘She loved him.'

My heart missed a beat, and I breathed in deeply. I was thrilled. I didn't want to breathe out; I wanted to savour the moment.

I told Isabel I thought it was possible that Max was my father.

‘It's possible,' she said. ‘But I was always too afraid to ask your mother.'

I asked if Max visited Mama after she left the factory. Isabel said she thought he used to visit her in our flat during the day, when Dad was at work.

Then she slumped again in her chair and I wheeled her back to her room, where the other inmate had fallen asleep. I turned off the television. I told Isabel I'd see her again, thanked her and said goodbye.

‘Who are you again?' she asked.

As I found my car I was overcome by the fear that Isabel might be an unreliable witness, drifting in and out of the here and now.
Who are you again
? But I put the thought behind me as I drove home. It was raining and bleak, yet I felt that I'd been given a precious gift.

She loved him
. I could have been born out of love and not out of violence or carelessness or indifference. It seemed to matter.

But there were new problems, too. I was relying on the memories of a woman who surely had suffered brain damage from her strokes. Did her inability to remember to whom she was speaking invalidate her recollections about what Mama was up to forty-five years earlier? Did my attachment to the idea that my mother and this putative father were in love colour my ability to judge the accuracy of her information?

When I checked the records in the National Archives I saw that Isabel and her husband had arrived in Melbourne in January 1952 on the SS
Cyrenia
, so at least she was in the country at the right time. I searched for papers on mental competency and brain injuries after strokes. I read that people with intellectual disabilities or limited IQs could give evidence in court, provided they understood the question they were being asked and the need to tell the truth. Sometimes people were judged to be capable of giving unsworn evidence rather than sworn evidence. They had to be able to understand things like where they were and what was wrong with them. They might have short-term memory loss but still be able to understand and remember things that happened before their brain injuries.

I thought about Isabel and the predicament she was in—she understood it and felt she was being punished. She remembered my mother and the conversations they'd had. And even if she'd forgotten who I was between my arrival and my departure, surely her story would be admissible in a court of law? Long-term memory is the last thing to go in the elderly and the demented. Isabel knew about the nice older brother and the handsome younger one. She remembered being unable to ask Mama who the father of her baby was. Most likely she'd heard that Mama couldn't conceive for nine years with Dad.

I was especially interested that she was afraid to ask Mama about her baby. My mother's silent message that enquiries were unwelcome was even directed at her friends and colleagues.

Despite my attempts to rationalise Isabel's information, I was loath to let the germ of a love story go. And this quest, this obsession, was affecting my morality. I was happy to use an old family friend as a source for my investigation and yet, though I was moved by her plight and her story about why she had no children, I did not visit her again. According to cemetery records, Isabel died eighteen months later.

After my visit to the nursing home, I had thought about how Isabel saw the newborn baby being murdered. At one of the Auschwitz trials the survivor Dunia Wasserstrom described the actions of Wilhelm Boger, known as the Devil of Birkenau, who saw a child who'd just arrived at Auschwitz holding an apple. She described how Boger took the apple from the child, then killed him by smashing his head against a wall, and how, later, she saw the man at his desk eating the apple. From this moment, Wasserstrom said, she could not look at a child without crying and no longer wished to have a child of her own.

I'd heard this kind of story when eavesdropping on the conversations of survivors who were friends with Mama and Dad. Once, my mother talked about a woman they knew who went mad after the war. She had hidden with her baby and some other people, and they were at risk of being found by a patrol. The baby began to cry and the woman had to strangle it to save everyone else.

What could I do with such a story? There were no follow-up conversations about context or meaning. Had I filed away Isabel's story in the same drawer as these other terrible images? Filed it after our meeting, and moved on?

Perhaps there was little I could have done to help Isabel, anyway. I wasn't a counsellor or a psychiatrist, and she had been absent when Mama was dying, I recalled. But she was a battered woman, caught up in her own troubles.

All this was conjecture.

I was dependent for my evidence on damaged people who had been subjected to the brutal shifts of history. I needed their stories so that I could weave them into the beginnings of my own little life. Isabel's information was another piece of the puzzle—a puzzle that was starting to consume my days. To solve it I turned my attention in a different, more scientific direction.

5

My mother's taste in men

MY sister and I were sitting in big leather armchairs in her lounge room, scraping the inside of our cheeks. DNA testing kits were on our laps. We giggled as we watched each other. She was making elaborate gestures with the sampler to ensure a good specimen.