by Ramona Koval
She wanted to wait and get the formal results so she could read them for herself.
When the report came, I made her a copy. She read it and placed it on the table in front of me. You keep it, she said.
I was confused. She seemed surprised by the result, taken aback. This was my crusade, after all. And the DNA test merely proved that I was on the right track. Excited, my thoughts racing ahead, I left my sister in my wake.
Either I was a mamzer or my sister was, or maybe, if there had been two lovers involved, both of us were. One of us, for sure. But which one? And if we were from different extramarital couplings, and Max Dunne was my father, who might my sister’s father be?
She didn’t want to speculate with me. I was disappointed but remembered that this was not my main interest. If my sister wanted to find out whether she was Dad’s daughter, it was up to her to do so. She seemed disconcerted enough by what I had managed to discover so far.
There was another lead I needed to follow before any more of my informants died or became incapacitated. Spurred on by the DNA test, I reasoned there was no time to lose.
Mama and Dad’s acquaintances included various couples that they’d met on the boat coming to Australia or in factories where they worked, or who were friends of friends. One person who I liked enormously was Mr Lederman. He would play with me, tossing me up in the air. And, more importantly, catching me. He was strong and dark, and had a full head of hair and a moustache. In the film taken at the fancy dress party in 1970 where Mama was a hippie, he appears swathed in sheets as a dashing Arab sheikh.
Mr Lederman was sometimes in our kitchen when my sister and I came home from school in the afternoon. I remember Mama once being in her dressing gown. When I asked why, she told me she hadn’t been feeling well. Though Mama said nothing more, I somehow knew not to mention anything to Dad. Since we rarely talked closely with him, this wasn’t a problem.
Mr Lederman worked as a builder and had been a truck driver when he arrived in Australia. He’d driven trucks in the Soviet army during the war after being taken east from Poland when the Russians arrived. Maybe he reminded Mama of the Russian soldiers who had rescued her and Dad by allowing them to hitch a ride to Berlin in 1946. He seemed less damaged than some others in Mama and Dad’s circle. He’d been a business partner with my mother in a property they bought after Mama received a small sum in war reparations from Germany—an above-board reason for them to meet.
His wife had thick glasses and a nasal voice. She couldn’t have children, so they had adopted a son who was a year or two younger than me and a year or two older than my sister. Mama told me that Mr Lederman’s wife was not really suited to him, but he couldn’t leave her as she had saved him in the war and he felt he owed her loyalty.
I was puzzled by this story. Mrs Lederman was a kind woman, a good cook and very hospitable. Once, I saw that she had set the table for a dinner party a week ahead. This was the only evidence I saw of her strategic planning, and so I wondered how a strong Red Army driver might need rescuing by her.
Did Mama really believe this was the reason they stayed together, the reason Mr Lederman could not come to her?
In the months before her death Mama had told me that Mr Lederman would be there for us in the future if we ever needed anything. Neither of us elaborated on the circumstances in which we might need him, and we didn’t discuss her dying.
He arrived at my house unannounced in the weeks after her funeral, asking what Mama had told me about him. My sister remembered him visiting her some years later and saying that Mama had never told him if he was my father, because she hadn’t been sure. I remember her telling me that Mr Lederman said Mama had never told him if he was her father, because she hadn’t been sure. Her father? My father? We laughed at the madness of this conversation and our mixed-up memories.
Bern, whose phone call got me started on these explorations, had told me that she suspected Mr Lederman was my sister’s father. He was swarthy. But so was Dad. And Dad had said he’d had a reddish beard. My sister had straight red hair. It was a merry-go-round. That beard, these eyes, this chin.
I decided to call him.
The last time I’d seen Mr Lederman he was wearing whites and was on his way to a tennis match with friends. He came to my front door and I asked him in for coffee. I would have been in my late twenties, he in his sixties. He sat on my couch and told me softly how much like my mother I was. At that moment, side by side on the couch—after some years in which I saw him as a substitute father, when he’d given me advice on buying the very house we were sitting in, following the collapse of my first marriage—I had the distinct impression that he was viewing me as a woman, as a desirable substitute for my deceased Mama. I ended the visit abruptly.
Now, nearly twenty years later, I called and asked him to meet my sister and me for coffee. I wanted to talk about some new information that had come to us about Mama, I said, and about what happened around the time we were conceived and born.
At first he agreed. A couple of days later he rang to cancel. He wanted to know more about what I had found, and reluctantly I told him.
‘Why do you want to bring all of these things up so many years later? Will it change anything?’ he asked.
I didn’t even know if I’d been born when he began his relationship with Mama, I replied.
He said he didn’t remember.
‘Wouldn’t you remember if she had a baby or not?’
We talked about what he remembered and didn’t remember, and then I asked him straight if he’d ever wondered whether he was the father of me or my sister. Knowing, of course, that he’d had the conversation with my sister years ago.
‘I’m not ready to consider these things,’ he told me.
‘How old are you now?’ I asked coolly.
‘Eighty-three.’
‘And when exactly do you think you will be ready?’
He said he would ring again soon to arrange a meeting.
I wanted nothing from him, I said—just a story.
When you decide to do something, my sister told me, no matter if I want to know something or not, I have to know it. Everything you do affects me.
She was right. It was true and inevitable. But how could I be my mother’s child from an adulterous relationship and make no waves in my sister’s life? And what was the alternative: should I not pursue the questions about who I was because someone else preferred not to know?
My sister had no doubts about who her father was. Her husband brought out pictures of Dad the next time we were all at their place and compared them to his wife’s face. They had no need to ask anything further. If my assumption was right and she thought that my fantasy would be shattered by the DNA test, she must have been shocked at the result. No more, she told me. You’re going too fast for me.
A few days later old Mr Lederman called again. This time he said he didn’t want to meet me, and that he was uncomfortable and would only talk to me on the phone.
He was uncomfortable.
I thought of the months I spent caring for Mama as she died. She wanted to see Mr Lederman. They’d fallen out months earlier, when Dad left home to live with his girlfriend and didn’t contribute to my sister’s upkeep. She was a full-time student, and Mama was sick and couldn’t work. Mama asked Mr Lederman to approach Dad’s boss to see if some of his wages could go directly towards supporting my sister. Mr Lederman refused. He wasn’t ready for his relationship with Mama to be that public. They argued and she asked him to leave the house.
When I heard her ask for him again during a conversation with Bern, there was a joke about whether she’d ever taken anyone’s husband, and she said she’d never stolen one but had borrowed a few. Such openness was rare for Mama. It may only have been possible because she was talking to Bern, and maybe the morphine had lowered her guard.
Bern told Mr Lederman that Mama was asking for him, but he never came to see her. He arrived in the evening of the day of her funeral, at the miny
an, the gathering in the house of the deceased at which you recite prayers for the dead. She was long past needing him. I wonder now what she’d wanted to say.
Here he was on the end of a phone line, not a silver fox shining in his white tennis gear, but a rather fearful old man in the face of my questions.
I asked him if he remembered how Mama was in those early years in Australia after the war: an orphan, a displaced person; poor, uneducated, unhappy. Was she depressed?
He had no idea. They didn’t talk about personal things. He was only her partner in a minor business transaction.
But, I said gently, she loved you.
‘Who told you that?’
She did.
‘Lots of people liked me, I hope.’
But you were her lover.
‘No, I was not. We were just business partners.’
Mama, Mama, how sad I felt then. That he denied you after all those years. That he’d forgotten his own conversations with me years before, when he’d asked what Mama had told us about him. That he’d forgotten my seeing him with Mama in her dressing gown that afternoon years earlier.
Bern remembered that he’d been a fixture in Mama’s life from the time she met Mama at the kindergarten which her son and my sister attended, and that she herself had interrupted them one afternoon when she had dropped in at our house unannounced. Business partners. How cowardly.
I said goodbye to Mr Lederman, telling him that Mama had said that if we ever needed anything, he would be there to help us.
‘Yes, of course.’
But, I thought, not for this. I hung up the phone and sat at the bay window, staring at the leaves falling in the wind. It was almost winter out there, and it felt like it.
When I told my sister about the conversation, she asked me what I’d really expected of a man who refused to visit Mama as she lay dying. He’d told my sister afterwards that at the time he hadn’t believed Mama was so sick.
Years later I found the cemetery records for Mr and Mrs Lederman. She died seven years after my call to him, and he died eleven months after her. They were buried side by side.
He had eleven months to get in touch with me after his wife was safely out of the picture, if that was why he’d been so coy and untruthful with me. But he never did. Nor was there a letter to be opened after his death. Maybe he was too sick or demented to arrange such a thing.
Mr Lederman left me no note and neither did Max. I was beginning to doubt my mother’s taste in men.
6
Who’s going to pay?
DAD pointed at the dishes spread across the lunch table, shaking his head. There were salads and dips, and smoked salmon with capers, and cream cheese and bagels, and fruit and cakes.
‘I was brought up by a herring and a couple of onions,’ he announced.
Later I repeated his strange syntax to my sister, unable to control my laughter. This explains a lot, I said through my tears. Maybe my real father was a herring and a couple of onions, too?
I was on my own in this. My heightened hysteria found meaning in the slightest of conversational transactions. Everything was possibly something when there was almost nothing to go on.
10 June 1999
Dear Alan,
What a strange call you’ve just had from your cousin, you must be a bit puzzled. And I certainly don’t want to make your life more complicated or disturb you in any way. But recently I’ve been doing some investigations into a story I’ve been wondering about for some time. It’s a pretty long story which I’ll cut short for the sake of clarity, but there are quite a few things which lead me to believe that it’s possible that your father Majlech was my father too. Which may make me your half-sister.
My mother Sabina (Sara) was a Jewish survivor from Poland who worked for your father and your uncle at Dunne Brothers in 1953. She was unhappily married to another Jewish survivor and had been trying to have children for nearly nine years unsuccessfully. After working for your father for some months, she became pregnant and left the factory. I was born in the middle of 1954.
She died of leukaemia in 1977 at the age of forty-nine, and with her died the possibility of asking her directly about my paternity. But for all of my childhood I was aware that there was a secret and that it concerned the identity of my father. Recently a close friend of my mother’s told me about your father meeting the friend at an auction in Kew quite a few years ago and recognising her from when my mother used to go with her to your father’s factory to buy wholesale suits.
She remembers the man at the auction asking about my mother, who had died, and then asking her many questions about me. What was I doing? What kind of work did I have? Did I have children? Was I happy? She said he seemed very pleased and impressed that I worked for the ABC [at the time I was doing a daily current-affairs talkback program]. This was all very strange because I can’t remember ever meeting your father. Why did he show such interest? Then my mother’s friend told me that if I wanted to find out more about my paternity, she thought that following up the Dunne connection would be fruitful, although she never knew for certain, but she suspected something.
Since then I have had confirmation from another source that my mother was in love with your father, and that they at least had a relationship which lasted till after I was born. He used to visit her in her flat in Beaconsfield Parade, St Kilda. The man I grew up with as my father knows nothing of all this, and I expect that your mother doesn’t either, although I may be wrong. I certainly don’t want to upset any of the old folks.
Everyone I know (including your cousin and his kids) says that I bear a strong resemblance to the photograph of Majlech as a young man. I’m tall and have curly dark-blond hair and blue eyes. I look much more like your family than any of the ones I’ve thought of as mine. I have two grown daughters—one nearly twenty-four, and the other twenty-one.
My sister and I have just had a DNA test done which confirms that we did not have the same father, and so are half-sisters.
It’s a simple procedure which just involves scraping the inside of the cheek with a cotton bud supplied by the laboratory—no blood required.
I’d like to ask you to think about this. They tell me that the only way to find out if Majlech was my father is to compare your cells with mine. Possible first cousins are not closely enough related to say for sure.
If you agree to help me with this mystery, I’ll take all responsibility for the costs involved. I’m happy to come up to Kuranda anytime and meet you to talk in detail and perhaps to take the sample. (I used to be a geneticist and microbiologist before I was a journalist.)
You can call me reverse charges, or write to me, or send me an email.
So, when you have time to digest all this, please let me know what you think. I know it must come as a shock.
But then again, I was delighted to hear that you’ve heard me on Radio National for some time, and so you know something about me and hopefully the way I think and the integrity with which I work and live my life. I have no need to disrupt your life, or that of your mother, or any of your family. I’m not interested in anything beyond establishing my origins.
Yours sincerely,
Ramona
The absurdity of waiting for the nod from a stranger in a northern backwater before I could continue my pursuit did not escape me. I could have progressed on another tack by getting a sample from Dad and confirming if either my sister or I was his issue, as they say.
Some years ago, she said, my sister had asked Dad if he’d ever considered that he might not be our father. I’m not sure why she did this, but it may have been after a phone call or visit from one of Mama’s old friends. Dad was flabbergasted, she said. He’d never considered such a thing and found it ridiculous.
I wondered how much denial there might have been in Dad’s response. Mama had told me how desperate to be a father he’d become by the time I was born. They’d fought each time her period arrived. Such was the urgency of his need, perhaps he banished all
doubts he might have had about my blondness and curly hair and blue eyes.
Dad was the sole survivor from his family. His marriage to Mama was unhappy. At least he had two daughters to boast about and to assuage his manly pride.
Now we knew he couldn’t be the biological father of both of us. And that he might not be the father of either. Telling him and testing him might leave him without any relatives—save for his devoted second wife, her daughter and son-in-law, and their two sons, who seemed to make him happy. Would it be right to do such a thing?
If Alan agreed to be tested, and proved to be my half-brother through Max, the story of Mr Lederman and Mama and Dad belonged to my sister. It would be hers to pursue if she chose to. I hoped Alan would agree.
A few weeks later the phone rang seconds before I was about to leave the house. Beeps indicated an interstate call; they stopped, and I said hello. Silence. I said hello again.
It’s Alan from Kuranda, he said.
Ah, Alan, thanks so much for calling me, but give me your number and I’ll call you back.
No, he said, don’t worry. I’m in a public phone box. I don’t have a phone or any electricity.
So ring me again reverse charges.
No, really, he said. If we keep arguing about who’s going to pay…
And then he said: You may be my sister, so I can spend a few dollars on you after nearly fifty years.
This seemed to be a good beginning. It was tinged with warmth and acceptance. But I had been wrong about the warmth of men many times before.
I thanked him for responding to what must have been a strange letter to receive.
Why wouldn’t someone respond? he said.
He’d love to meet me, he continued, but he wouldn’t be coming to Melbourne in the near future.
I’d come up there, I replied. When would be convenient?
Anytime—just write to tell him.
Mid-July might be a good time. I’d stay in a motel in Kuranda and he could come in to find me.
He said that he’d listened to me on the radio and read my newspaper column and had thought what a clever girl I was. Girl. Maybe he used that word because I was becoming his little sister. Clever girl. I liked that. I needed that. How did this stranger know?