Bloodhound Read online

  Until the second conversation with Bern I’d never thought about it. A child accepts that this is how things are and that they are like this in all families, until she finds out otherwise.

  Mama and Dad didn’t share a bedroom. I assumed this was normal until one of their survivor friends noticed that our master bedroom contained two single beds. ‘How can you do anything in a single bed?’ he shouted at the assembled guests, including us kids. I was puzzled. What did you need to do in a bed but sleep? Then he saw me getting a toy or a book from the room, and he understood that the beds were for my mother and me. He exploded with derision. Single beds were bad enough, but separate rooms—that was pathological.

  Having gleaned what I could from Bern, I scoured the telephone directory. There were several Dunnes, a name that was strangely non-European and unlike those of Mama and Dad’s friends. At first I assumed it had been anglicised, as happened to some who arrived here bearing Polish or Russian or Hungarian names with unfamiliar letters and combinations of consonants that troubled the local authorities. Then it dawned on me that he could have been an Englishman. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

  My sister and I had been brought up as the daughters of Polish Jews. This meant cabbage rolls and poppy-seed cake, bargaining and Yiddish melodies. Now I was toying with the idea that I was half English. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Being English meant being tight-lipped (my ungenerous interpretation of stiff-upper-lippedness), drabness (was this impression just from films like Mrs. Miniver, set during the London Blitz?), and using only one egg to make a cake. I always used at least eight. I scoured my character for latent Englishness.

  But of course! My middle name is Alice: an utterly English name. How did Mama, who called me Ramona on my birth certificate (so that, come the next oppressive time, people wouldn’t assume I was Jewish) and Rivkele at home, come up with my second name? I dismissed the evidence: that my Spanish first name had come about through my mother looking for something non-Jewish starting with ‘R’, and had heard the popular song ‘Ramona’ on the radio. I imagined a less prosaic reason for my second name, perhaps that Mr Dunne’s mother was called Alice and I was named for her. This was the secret sign between them that I was his daughter. My heart pounded—already, it seemed, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

  I tried to think of good Englishness. Garden beds and hollyhocks and cream teas and Jane Austen. I had tried to like Austen, and I was a fan of irony, but I was completely uninterested in marrying well and the affairs of the landed gentry in the southern counties of Regency England. But that was when I wasn’t English. Maybe now I could admit Jane Austen into my being.

  I rang the number for the Dunne in the suburb near the auction all those years before, and a middle-aged man answered the phone. I asked him if he was related to the brothers who’d owned a clothing factory in the 1950s and he said: ‘Who wants to know?’ He sounded like a character from The Sopranos, but without the New Jersey accent.

  I explained that my mother used to work for the Dunne brothers, and I was researching her life and hoping to speak to anyone who might be able to tell me something about the time when she worked at the factory. The man told me that his father was living with him, but he was now deaf and not so good at seeing either. I took a breath and asked if his father was the older or the younger brother.

  The older one. Joseph. The younger one had died some years before. Max Dunne—in the original Polish, Majlech Adunaj. Melech in Hebrew, meaning ‘king’. He used to eat my mother up with his eyes. Now those eyes were closed forever.

  If Max was my father, I was certainly not half English. But was he my father? I’m not sure why I decided to tell the whole story to a stranger on the phone, but I did. He must have sounded open. And to his credit, he didn’t hang up. He was intrigued partly because he recognised my name from my newspaper articles and radio shows, he said; and partly, as I was shortly to learn, because he hated his uncle Max. Perhaps he hoped to hear something scandalous about him. For his uncle had been a married man, and had a son who, we established, was four years old when I was born.

  ‘What does he look like?’ I ventured.

  ‘Blond, blue eyes, curly hair.’

  ‘And what do you look like?’

  ‘Like Paul Newman, only better-looking. But there is something you should know about my uncle. He spent years as a slave labourer in Auschwitz, and he was made into a beast. He was a twisted, difficult man who was cruel to his family and to my father. His son had to run away from him. The war ruined him. Maybe it’s best you never met him.’

  He offered to mail me a photograph of his uncle, and rang off.

  2

  A shame and a disgrace

  I’M asking you to imagine her as I remember her, but not in those last months as she seemed to shrink before me, her hair thinning, her body disappearing, the breasts I used to rest my head against reversing to flatness like a time-lapse film played backwards. In those last months she was light enough for me to carry to the bathroom and back, and soon getting in and out of the bath was too much for her, and I washed her frail body in bed.

  No, I’m thinking of her a few years before that, getting ready for an evening at the theatre with Bern, a beautiful woman, a former model who we once saw in a television commercial for toilet paper. Toilet tissue, it was called. Clothes always looked great on Bern, and she was taller and slimmer than Mama, but as far as I knew she was a Catholic virgin when she married and she didn’t seem entirely comfortable in the body she’d been blessed with. Mama had a different quality, which I now recognise as sex appeal. Before she fell ill, she said that if I had breasts as good as hers when I got to her age, I’d be very lucky. She had seen a lot, and she probably radiated a woman-of-the-world ambience. It was hard for me to pick up on it then, as a teenage daughter called in to zip up the back of her dress.

  Amour Amour wafted from her neck as usual, and I could see the small depression in the skin of her upper back, just over the shoulder blade. She once told me it was a bullet hole from the time she was arrested by the Gestapo. If I had the chance now, I would ask her to elaborate. Back then, I was horrified. I knew that the mothers of other kids at school probably didn’t have bullet wounds in their backs. I was forever trying to smooth over the differences between their white-bread families and my dark-rye one, so I avoided difficult subjects.

  Why, I would wonder, did I find it so hard to ask Mama the questions that came to me again and again? Why did she have this force field around her?

  I knew little about her life before me. I did know she was from a deeply religious Orthodox family where the men prayed and worked the fields, and the women in their wigs ran the bakery. For generations the family had lived and farmed in Wyrozęby, a tiny hamlet in eastern Poland. Her parents had been childhood sweethearts, if such a thing was possible, and both sets of grandparents were next-door neighbours in the village. Her father died when she was two months old—he’d developed a fatal case of pneumonia after swimming across an almost frozen river to be home for her birth—and she was brought up in her extended family.

  After the Germans invaded Poland, the family was transported to the ghetto in Sokołów Podlaski, a town a short distance from Wyrozęby. By the summer of 1942 there were rumours about deportations of Jews from the nearby Siedlce ghetto and from Warsaw—they would be killed at Treblinka. Jews from Sokołów Podlaski had been sent to an unknown destination from which nobody had returned.

  Mama was the only one of the family in the Sokołów Podlaski ghetto who was fair and blue-eyed (she took after her father’s people rather than her mother’s, with their darker and more Semitic looks), so she was chosen as the one most likely to escape using false Aryan identity papers. Aged fourteen, she said goodbye to her mother and brother and other relatives, walked the ninety-odd kilometres to Warsaw, and disappeared into the city.

  She became Alina Kołakowska: Catholic, Warsaw-born, twenty-one. She plaited her
hair to straighten its natural waves and pinned the plaits to the top of her head, a traditional Polish hairstyle. Mama was Alina for two and half years, revealing her true identity to no one. This little I gleaned of her life during the war.

  And Dad? Here in Melbourne, he was a cutter in a factory which, by the time I was aware of such things, was mass producing cheap T-shirts and shorts and skivvies for Target. It was many steps down from making men’s suits and women’s ‘costumes’, which he was trained to do before the war, and which he continued to do after it in Paris, then in Melbourne after their arrival in 1949.

  Dad liked his bosses and the people in the factory who responded to his jokes and stories. He wasn’t deep. Not like her. It was hard to imagine them together.

  Each year their survivor friends would gather for a fancy-dress party to dance and celebrate their lives. One of the circle made home movies and from one party there’s a fleeting, trembling sequence showing the guests walking up a stairwell towards the camera. Mama arrives in a white kaftan with bell sleeves which she’d made that day from an old bed sheet. It had a matching trim on the collar, sleeves and the headband. She is wearing a faux-copper peace sign she borrowed from me, so it must be 1970. Her hair is shoulder-length and oddly honey-coloured, and she disconcerts by folding her arms in front as if she were a Native American woman. She smiles faintly and her eyes give nothing away.

  Dad ascends the stairs at least twenty seconds after her arrival, possibly more, as I’m not sure how much time was removed in the editing. He looks like a cross between a Mafiosi hoodlum and a plump Roy Orbison, in an open-necked black-and-white checked shirt, with dark glasses, a silver chain hanging over his belly and his straight dark hair brushed forwards. He holds a cigarette between his fingers and scowls. Maybe he was looking for her, or just needed a drink. They couldn’t even arrive together.

  He liked to be the life of the party and on the surface he was all bluster. It was a shallow crust, though, and you couldn’t ask him questions about his past unless you were prepared to deal with his sobbing. I soon learned not to open the floodgates. Possibly I saved up all the questions for later, for my years as a journalist, a professional asker of questions.

  In the 1960s reparation pensions became available to Holocaust survivors. We’d get letters from Germany via a firm of Melbourne solicitors, Kahn Clahr & Garsa, that dealt with survivors’ claims. The gothic script and long dark-cream envelopes made it seem as if the missives came directly from the Third Reich.

  Each year Mama and Dad had to attend the German consulate in Melbourne to prove they were still alive. This was traumatic for both of them. They went separately. Mama came back from one of these visits and said she’d told the consular officer that Hitler hadn’t succeeded in killing her yet. It must have been traumatic for the younger officers, too: I don’t imagine Mama was the only survivor who took the need for proof of life so personally.

  For their initial assessments my parents had to submit to psychiatric evaluations to determine the extent of their damage. Mama showed me the psychiatric report of Dad’s mental state. The lawyers were claiming that he had ninety per cent incapacitation. Ninety per cent, she repeated. I thought that meant Dad was ninety per cent insane—a humiliation I hoped to keep hidden from my friends. The report described his memories of and dreams about cleaning up the square in his hometown of Siedlce after German soldiers had mown down groups of his school friends and neighbours. He had to pick up the brains of the dead with his hands. I imagined them dripping through his fingers. When I looked at his hands, in my mind’s eye I could see the blood. He seemed tainted and disgusting.

  ‘Now you might understand why your father is the way he is,’ Mama said. She didn’t show me her evaluation, and I didn’t ask to see it. One report like that was enough for any girl. It was already one too many.

  And now, a few decades later, I was about to cloud the mix with the twisted and cruel (according to his nephew) Max Dunne. A photograph of the man who might have been my real father was en route, yet my willingness to believe was wavering. The father I had was infuriating and inadequate, but I remembered that he had given me my first typewriter, an old Olivetti portable that someone offered him; he had taught me to drive; and at least he hadn’t been made into a beast in Auschwitz. I thought about being the daughter of a cruel and twisted man. I thought about my mother lying down with that man.

  And I remembered her picking me up at the end of one of my shifts at a knitting factory in Collingwood. I worked there over the summer after my fourteenth birthday, fixing the labels onto acrylic jumpers and cardigans. It was 1968 and psychedelics were all the rage: hot pink and purple, lime green and navy blue, orange and brown in swirly geometric patterns.

  Mama took me to a room off the large open factory floor: windowless and concrete-walled, with a naked globe hanging down, like an interrogation room in a spy film. There was a low metal bed with a small pillow and a rough grey blanket. She asked me what I thought went on in here, and I said that it must be the sick bay, like at school, and this was where you could rest if you had a headache or period pain.

  Mama laughed scornfully. This, she said, was where the owner of the factory took any girl he summoned from the floor if he wanted to have sex with her. And she had to go, or she’d lose her job. If I was having thoughts about leaving school and working in a factory, she wanted me to understand that this was what I would face.

  I was baffled. I was an excellent student; I loved going to school; and I had no intention of leaving behind my beloved maths and science, English and French for a job in the rag trade. What was she talking about?

  Now I could think about this encounter in a new light. Was she showing me what happened in the factory when she worked for the Beast of Auschwitz? Was I the result of a tawdry transaction at work—was that the reason she couldn’t bring herself to tell me? But what kind of secret-keeping made her introduce me to such an unexpected, ugly scenario: was it subconscious?

  At the time I filed the episode away with Mama’s other mysterious lessons on life. Like being careful not to fall asleep in the snow, no matter how tired and hungry you were, because you could freeze to death. I hadn’t even seen snow, but I remembered the lesson, just in case.

  And when it came, the envelope, the holder of all this mystery, the clue to an answer for my many questions, was small and unprepossessing.

  Just before I opened it, I sat in the bay window of my sitting room, looking out into the garden. I loved the comfortable yellow couch, which I had bought with the money I earned from writing, and I liked to read there, stretched out on my own words, as I imagined it. I knew that I had to use all of my critical faculties—my training as a scientist and my experience as a journalist—to evaluate whatever evidence was before me, despite what I wanted to find.

  I was looking for evidence that supported my deeply held conviction about a hidden story. I thought that searching the faces of strangers for hints of a connection seemed pathetic. And here I was, about to do it.

  In my hands was a photograph taken in 1937 of a twenty-four-year-old man, before he embarked on his journey to the inferno. The man looked familiar, and I wondered if I had seen him before. He was handsome and taller than the people next to him, who’d been cut out of this photo except for their shoulders. And there was something especially familiar about the eyes, their depth, their set, and the shape of the face.

  A thought, alarming yet moving, came to me. It was my face. This is what I might have looked like, had I been a man of twenty-four in 1937. I drove with the photograph on the seat beside me to several friends, and asked them to tell me what they saw. ‘The eyes,’ they said, ‘and the shape of the face.’ I carried the photograph with me, and tested it with workmates and with strangers. They all agreed.

  I called Max’s nephew and told him that everyone said the man in the picture looked like me.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you’d better come over and meet us. But don’t tell my father that yo
u think we’re related. He’s nearly ninety, and for him it would be a shame and a disgrace.’ A shandeh un a charpeh is the way you say it in Yiddish.

  This I agreed to do, but I felt resistance. Why should I be ashamed of the possible story of my birth? It was hardly my decision to have my parents go outside the bonds of holy matrimony. Was I the sort of person a man might be ashamed of having as a relative? Still, I held back my feelings, because I was on a roll and I was following a trail, and made an appointment for four o’clock the next day.

  It was a Friday in summer when the temperature was over forty degrees, and there I was, in a summer frock and clutching a large wooden-framed photograph of Mama with me at age three on her knee, ostensibly so that the old man could look at it and might even recognise the woman who worked for him forty-five years before, and shopped at his wholesale showroom later, and was the mother of his secret, shameful niece.

  When his son opened the door, the first thing I saw was his wavy hair and blue eyes. In his late fifties, he was still a striking man. We shook hands and laughed at the absurdity of the situation, me clutching the photo frame, sworn not to mention that I had already seen a photo of his father’s dead brother. Soon I was sitting at their kitchen table and, while the old man was charming and friendly, he didn’t recognise Mama, although he said what an attractive woman she’d been.

  I wondered why he couldn’t place her. Did they have so many underlings in the days of vast numbers of women bent over Singer treadle machines, like those you see in old newsreels? How could the centre of my being, my Mama, mean so little to him?