Bloodhound (7 page)

I placed them in the containers provided, added photos of us and sworn affidavits, and put them in an overnight parcel to Sydney. This was in the period before DNA testing became reasonably common. My sister was doing this as a favour to me.

Possibly she thought that my suspicions about Dad not being my real father were an elaborate fantasy that I had unconsciously concocted because I could not accept the truth: that my father
was
my father. She may have hoped that these test results would prove me incorrect and put the matter to rest. Whatever the case, I paid the $640 fee, huge at the time, and sent the parcel off on its journey into the future, and the past.

The next week I was standing before another strange house with yet another bunch of flowers. I had bought tulips, as it was autumn. This time the door was opened by Max Dunne's younger nephew, whose blue eyes and curly hair I recognised from the photo his father had shown me. His wife welcomed me in, his children were at the table with their partners, and there was even a dog padding about. They made a lovely family picture, complete, with no obvious gaps that I could step into.

I felt overwhelmed, aware of the searching looks across my eyes and face and hair. The gap between my front teeth, which up till then I was not aware held any particular significance, was remarked upon. We all seemed keen to talk, and I listened to them speaking, to their voices, and searched their faces, too. Where did those eyes fit, that chin, that colour hair? This is what we do, I reminded myself: we classify. This is how people learn about the world, about new situations.

I told my story yet again, noticing how deft I was getting at the order, the dramas, the nuances. I was building up quite a rich portrait.

They seemed interested. They answered my questions about Max and his relationship with his wife, his brother (their father and grandfather) and Max's son, Alan.

I learned that Alan had fled Melbourne to get away from Max and to kick a heroin habit. The thought crossed my mind that I was about to swap a full sister, a rock and an upstanding member of society, for a couple of half siblings, one of whom was an ex—I hoped—junkie. I heard Dad's voice in my ear. He was fond of folk sayings:
You can pick your friends but you can't pick your relatives!

But this group of people who were making me welcome and feeding me were kind, and Max's nephew said he'd never had a sister or a female first cousin. He told me he was keen to claim me, if the story was true. And one of the ways we could tell if it was true was if Alan would give me a cell sample to DNA test against mine. This was a matter we would have to think about carefully, as—I was reminded—Alan was close to his mother and no one wanted to hurt any of the old people.

I imagined, too, that he'd made sure he couldn't be easily contacted. He was living on bushland outside the little mountain town of Kuranda, north of Cairns, without a phone. He didn't always answer his mail, I was told.

First, I needed to get the result from the DNA test I'd done with my sister. I promised to keep the family posted, and took my leave.

My younger daughter called me from Jerusalem, where she was doing a few subjects towards her politics degree. She'd taken an extra one in Jewish rabbinic law—Halakhah—to make up points, she said. Had I thought about the laws of
mamzerim
? These laws governed the children, the bastards, born from adulterous relationships.

Like me, I said, or my sister, or both of us.

My daughter suggested that maybe there were things we'd rather not know. Rather not know? When had there ever been anything I'd rather not know?

She reminded me that
mamzers
were forbidden to marry anyone except other
mamzerim
for ten generations. But I've only ever married bastards, I thought.

I could tell that this quest of mine had been reviewed in family conversations that I hadn't be privy to. When my sister said that Dad had been over for lunch, my daughter said, ‘Oh, you mean the artist formerly known as
zayde
[Yiddish for “grandfather”]?' A joke about Prince, and about me, too.

But she was right that the semantic categories were becoming more strained. I didn't know much about the laws pertaining to bastardy: I could imagine that Mama might not have wanted to bring up the subject when I was young. I scoured the texts for the laws of
mamzerim
. So long as a couple could marry each other if they wanted to, their child was not a
mamzer
. On the other hand, if my mother was unable to marry my father, if she was already married, or if he was (as was the case with Max) or might be, then I and ten generations of my offspring would be classified as
mamzers
. It would be the same had I been the product of an incestuous coupling. Would I have to seek out a registry of
mamzers
, a dating site for
mamzers
?

So severe are the implications of this law that rabbis have found myriad ways to avoid declaring someone a
mamzer
. If there was no foolproof way of proving that an adulterous relationship had led to a pregnancy, the rabbis assumed the child was not a
mamzer
. Even if the mother declared that she thought her child belonged to a man not her husband, but she'd slept with her husband during the previous twelve months—
twelve
, mind you—the child was assumed to be the husband's. Why did rabbis make these outrageous laws and then spend centuries working out ways around them? This is what happens when you follow a set of ancient tribal principles.

The sages admitted that it was harsh to punish the children of a forbidden relationship. They also pointed out that in the next life, or in heaven, or when the messiah came,
mamzers
will be free to stand tall with the rest.

Thanks, I thought. I have never been a patient person, and I was certainly not happy to wait till the next life to be considered equal. Then why did I care what a group of excessively strict rabbis had to say on my status and my ability to marry freely? It was crazy for an educated twenty-first-century woman to care about what a small group of zealots thought of a tribal ruling many thousands of years old; all the same, I felt insulted by the law. I felt the injustice of punishing children for the faults of their parents, and miffed that I might be in the same category as those born from incestuous relationships. I felt cast aside, passed over, resentful.

Even in the age of DNA testing there were ways around a ruling. Unless it was possible to eliminate all false positives and false negatives from the results, the testing could never be used to declare
mamzer
status. And even if the testing showed that the woman's husband couldn't be the father, then the question of who the father was, and whether the father could theoretically marry the mother, was another point to debate.

My thoughts shifted to the
shtetl
, the village where Mama was born, and the Orthodox family in which she was brought up. Although she was intellectually rebellious, she still had habits from her religious childhood, such as saying a blessing over the first fruits from the trees in our garden or over new clothes. Or spitting three times if anyone said we were pretty or clever, and making us hold a piece of red cotton in our mouths when she was sewing a hem or a button on some clothing while we were wearing it—both acts to ward off the evil eye. And lighting candles on Friday nights, fasting on Yom Kippur, having a Seder at Passover. All of these were confusing habits from someone who gave us ham sandwiches for lunch, and who cooked milk and meat together.

Part of her may have recognised the seriousness of her actions, the implications for her daughters had they wished to marry into the Orthodoxy, no matter how unlikely that might have been. Would she have risked the happiness of her daughters and grandchildren (for ten generations, no less) by making an admission like this? Why would such an expert evader tell a truth so profoundly disruptive?

I came across a website offering
mamzer alerts
in which they accused some Orthodox women of coercing their husbands into giving them divorces, and subsequently remarrying. There was a ruling that, if there was coercion, the divorces were not legitimate; the alert names the women and warns men not to go out with them because, if they marry, any children of this new marriage will be considered
mamzers
till the end of time. Such was the curse of the
mamzer
, which I idly considered as I shifted my status as the daughter of Dad, the little Jewish tailor from Siedlce, Poland, to the daughter of—whom, exactly?

I rang the laboratory. The results should have come back days before. The doctor said they were being typed up at that moment. Would I like him to tell me over the phone? Yes. I'd waited long enough for this—forty-four years, in fact—and I thought nothing could surprise me.

He talked about alleles and matches and percentages but the sentence that stayed in my mind was: ‘All this says beyond a doubt is that you and your sister are half-siblings.'

As I breathed out, he said that he was never sure what to say about these kinds of results. I thanked him and said that he had confirmed what I suspected anyway.

I rang my sister and told her. She was silent. Then she said,
God, Ramona
.

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.