Free Bloodhound by Ramona Koval Page A

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