Free Bloodhound by Ramona Koval

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 minyan , 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.
    â€˜Who told you that?’
    She did.
    â€˜Lots of people liked me, I hope.’
    But you were her lover.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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