Two Lives, Intersected

As we approach the northern entrance of the Harbour Tunnel, the traffic grinds to a complete standstill. The rain won’t stop and the repeating squeak coming from the worn-out blades of my windscreen wipers jars on my ears, adding to my irritation.

“I can’t believe it!” Mayumi says. She takes a deep breath and releases the air slowly, barely audibly. “It’s eleven a.m. What could it be?”

“They might say something about it on the radio.” I skip from one station to another erratically, the jumble of words and musical fragments leaving us none the wiser.

“And I was also supposed to call Alfonso this morning.”

He’s the photographer. “You can call him from the airport.”

“Have you got any change?”

“I’ve got a phone card. Don’t worry, sweetie. Everything will be all right.”

Our wedding, originally envisaged as a low-key event with close family and friends, has grown into quite a production. Having to pick up from the airport Mayumi’s grandmother—who due to a convoluted set of circumstances is travelling by herself at the age of eighty—is only one of many steps we have to take before we can sit back and enjoy the day.

Presently, the cars in front of us start moving gingerly ahead and before long we overtake the scene of the minor accident that had caused the congestion. I place my left hand on Mayumi’s bare thigh, feeling the warmth of her smooth skin. She places her hand on mine. We look at each other. Mayumi’s face breaks into a smile, as she slowly shakes her head.

I had met Mayumi’s grandmother only once before. In her generation, the concept of a boyfriend did not exist. A girl could be engaged to be married or could dally with men; until it was established that the former was the case I could not be mentioned, let alone introduced, to her. Even as her granddaughter’s fiancé, being a foreigner I was of questionable merit. Back in her day, the progeny of mixed marriages were viewed as half-castes, torn between two worlds and belonging to neither—not to mention foreign husbands’ proclivity to walking away from their wives at the first sign of difficulty.

She lived in a small flat in a long barracks-style block of an almost Soviet austerity. The claustrophobic living room’s walls were lined with books: bulky hard-cover volumes of the collected works of various Japanese writers, encyclopaedias, a smattering of translated works—Shakespeare (“Hamuretto”), Dostoevsky, Balzac.

She was a small lady, her round face showing little trace of her past ordeals, her eyes almost hidden in their narrow slits. Our brief encounter was mainly an exchange of bows and ceremonious formulas in honorific Japanese. With her bows being deeper than what I could comfortably reciprocate and my knowledge of Japanese not quite up to the task, I had a nagging feeling that I was failing miserably. Just before parting, as I was drinking in small decorous sips the green tea she had served in small fine porcelain cups, she showed me in that day’s edition of the Asahi Shimbun an advertisement for a new series of magazines about Great Japanese Artists, to be collected in special binders, eventually forming an encyclopaedia of Japanese art. The first issue was dedicated to Hokusai.

“Did she want me to buy her the magazine?” I asked Mayumi’s mother later.

“No,” she said. “She wanted you to get it for yourself.”

In the neon-lit arrivals area, there’s a frenzy of uniformed Japanese tour guides with signs in their hands, jostling for position. Every guide who has managed to round up their passengers and proceed to the carpark is greeted with oblique glances of envy. We end up arriving just as the flight has landed and before long we see the small figure of Mayumi’s grandmother advancing warily, pushing a trolley in front of her. Mayumi rushes to the end of the passageway to meet her, bowing.

In the car, we exchange a bit of small talk. Mayumi’s grandmother uses honorific verbs that indicate formal politeness—but can also be used to create a distance—and combines them with casual suffixes that convey intimacy but can also express disdain. The subtle Japanese nuances go well over my head. Glancing sideways, I hunt her impassive face for clues, scrutinising her eyes for signs of her animal spirits. After a while, there’s a lull in the conversation, a bit too long for comfort. When I turn my face towards her self-consciously I see that she has fallen asleep.

More than fifty years earlier, Chie Takeda made her first overseas trip. She was standing on the upper deck of the Houkoku Maru, an ocean liner travelling across the Sea of Japan from Osaka to Dairen, accompanying her husband Shuuichi on his return to his posting as an executive of the South Manchuria Railway Company. As the lights of Osaka drew further and further into the distance, eventually disappearing into the gathering darkness, the salty smell of the fine sea spray wafted into her nostrils, and the wind sent a chill down her spine, she may have drawn a tad closer to her husband. Public displays of affection were not allowed.

I look at her wedding photo, taken only a few days earlier at the reception hall of an Osaka hotel: a group shot of twenty-odd family members, arranged in three neat rows like children in a school photo, with the stern faces of people for whom having their photo taken must have been a momentous occasion. The women are dressed in kimonos, the men in dark Western suits, apart from two old men: born in the mid-nineteenth century under the feudal regime of the last Tokugawa shogun, these two wear men’s kimonos.

The newlyweds are seated in the middle of the front row. Shuuichi is sitting upright, clasping in his right hand a pair of white gloves, his features frozen like those of a man holding his breath. He has an elongated face and a high forehead, looking like an intellectual who also knows how to get by. Chie is doll-like in her traditional hairdo, still retaining the plumpness of youth about her. Her body leans slightly towards her husband, the angle detracting from the perfect symmetry that the photographer had laboured to arrange.

Unlike me, Shuuichi was a highly suitable match for a girl from a good family. Born to an old Samurai family whose family tree went back to the fifteenth century (admittedly with lacunae here and there, the longest one a century long), he had graduated from a prestigious university and could speak Chinese, English and French. A few years earlier he had secured for himself a bright future by gaining employment with Japan’s leading company.

Following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan took over the ownership of the Russian-built South Manchuria Railway. The company formed to hold it soon embarked on a massive development spree: it built railways, ports, factories, warehouses and hotels, and became the world’s leading producer and exporter of soybeans, accounting for more than half of global production. During the 1920s, revenue from the company’s operations provided 25 per cent of the Japanese government’s budget. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 (initially a military adventure embarked upon by over-ambitious generals without the government’s authorisation) eventually led to Manchuria being torn away from China. The Japanese installed Puyi, China’s last emperor, as the Emperor of Manchuria, and set up a puppet government whose ministers followed Japanese orders. With Manchuria effectively a Japanese colony, the company increased its activities, developing new industries and setting up schools, hospitals, department stores and other public facilities to attract Japanese settlers.

A spacious house was waiting for them in Mukden, rented two months earlier by Shuuichi in preparation for Chie’s arrival. It was built in Japanese style with tatami-mat rooms, but had a modern kitchen and bathroom and came complete with two local maids—one Manchu, the other Han Chinese. A lone gingko tree grew in the small backyard, its leaves turning a dazzling gold in autumn. Chie soon settled into the life of the wife of a well-paid expatriate executive in the local Japanese enclave. Before long she became pregnant, giving birth to Keiko, Mayumi’s mother; a son followed a year later. She had her hands full looking after the children, doing the daily shopping at the central market and cooking (she never trusted the maids’ cooking skills), while Shuuichi had to work long hours at his office, a fifteen-minute tram ride away. Although around them the world was in flames and in Manchuria Chinese guerrilla groups were still mounting a stubborn if sporadic resistance, their everyday life evolved into the regular mix of chores and little worries interspersed with moments of pleasure: a Hollywood movie at the Ginei Theatre, Sunday lunch at the Yamato Hotel, wandering through the six storeys of the Shichifukuya department store.

There’s an old photo of Shuuichi with half a dozen of his colleagues at a Mukden restaurant, sitting around a long black table strewn with sake decanters and cups that look exactly like those you can still see in Japanese restaurants today. Mingled among Shuuichi’s colleagues are a few women in kimonos, looking very prim and proper in their impeccably coiffed hair. Only a couple of the men are neatly dressed in jackets and ties. The others are in various stages of retreat from the proper corporate look: loosened ties, removed jackets. One wears a sporty jumper while another—his right forearm in a plaster cast—wears a university student uniform, a black collarless button-down tunic similar to that of a hotel porter. The women are all geishas, I’ve been told; the men seem to be making an effort to look as rowdy as possible, lounging, extending their arms around each other’s shoulders, latching on to the nearest geisha, smirking. Shuuichi is in shirtsleeves, leaning back in the midst of the muddle, his arms around the shoulders of two of his mates, his eyes half shut in the expression of someone caught by surprise by the shutter. The group’s most beautiful geisha is seated next to him, upright and composed, her porcelain-white skin accentuating her refined, luscious features.

Earlier that evening, the geisha, Akiko, was pouring sake into Shuuichi’s cup. He was holding the tiny cup with both hands, raising it slightly towards her. Her eyes were trained on the cup, taking care not to spill the drink. When the cup was almost full she tilted back the decanter, and then their eyes met, lingering on each other for what seemed to be a brief eternity until Akiko lowered her eyes. The next day, Shuuichi sent her a note via a Chinese employee, asking to see her that evening in private.

All that is mere conjecture, of course, not documented in any old photo. The geisha may have already been retained by Shuuichi’s boss (who’s hard to miss at her other flank, a middle-aged man in round spectacles with a confident, authoritative demeanour who had kept his jacket and tie on). Yet one way or another, Shuuichi must have done something to earn his reputation as a womaniser.

By 1945, although the newspapers were still making a quixotic effort to stir up the spirits of the Japanese and demanding further sacrifice from them, it was increasingly clear to Chie and Shuuichi that Japan’s war was doomed. As agreed at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945. The war in Europe had ended three months earlier and the Red Army—now able to dedicate substantial forces to the campaign—invaded Manchuria in a three-prong movement. The army of the local puppet government, theoretically 200,000-strong, surrendered without a fight, its soldiers even staging mutinies against their Japanese officers in some instances. Japan’s Kwantung Army put up stiff resistance but could not match the superior firepower of the advancing Red Army. Shuuichi listened to the news on the radio obsessively, hoping against hope for a miracle, but although the announcers highlighted the Japanese Army’s heroic resistance, he could see by their reports that the battlefields were drawing ever closer to Mukden.

Before long things came to a head: the Red Army was now only one day away from Mukden. There were already rumours of Chinese guerrillas on the outskirts of the city, and the Japanese authorities had to drop any pretence that things were still under control. Shuuichi came home from his office early and before taking off his shoes announced in quick, breathless, oddly excited phrases that the following morning an evacuation train would be leaving Mukden station, heading to Dairen, where they would board a ship bound for Japan. The city’s senior Japanese military, government and corporate personnel were all going to take the train with their families: it was the last chance of escape. Chie gasped. Then she bombarded Shuuichi with confused, repetitive questions.

Their third child, a baby girl, had been born only six months earlier. I imagine the frantic packing, the breathless to-ing and fro-ing, the near-impossibility and yet inevitability of uprooting a family in just a few hours, under duress. They wouldn’t have slept much that night. In the morning, they went to the station in three trishaws, squeezed in amongst their luggage: oddly enough, the wheels of commerce kept on churning. Before long they could see the elongated facade of the palatial station building, its solid respectability reassuring even if they were seeing it now for the last time. It took them a while to make their way through the restless crowd, but finally they were on the platform with an hour to spare.

The platform was teeming with an overwrought throng of people, chattering feverishly, drawing some comfort from their multitude, their deafening noise like that of a flock of birds gathering on a tree at dusk.

“I have to go back home. I’ve left something behind,” Shuuichi suddenly said.

Chie could not believe her ears. She looked into his eyes, drawing a short shallow breath. He didn’t flinch.

“I’ve left a couple of notebooks at home. If I lose them now they’ll be gone forever.”

“But …”

Shuuichi was adamant that he could make it: they still had an hour to go, and it would only take fifteen minutes each way. In her confusion and exhaustion, Chie found no strength within her to argue.

An hour later, Chie and her three children were sitting squashed against each other inside the second-class carriage, which was crammed with several times its intended capacity. Chie was in tears, holding in her arms her unsettled baby, looking through the half-open window, straining her eyes to detect Shuuichi’s approaching figure. The platform was almost deserted. Only two railway employees remained, both holding flags; a few armed soldiers were standing at a distance. The train’s whistle making its final warning was so loud it sent a shudder down Chie’s spine. The train started moving, creaking noisily, its speed at first so agonisingly slow that if Shuuichi had suddenly burst onto the platform he would still have had the chance to chase it and jump in through a window. But the train accelerated, and the platform disappeared behind them.

They arrived in Japan a few days later. Shuuichi was never seen or heard from again.

While the Red Army was making its rapid advance across Manchuria, the Americans were dropping their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Arriving in Osaka, Chie came to a vanquished city she no longer recognised: entire districts had been turned to ash, burnt to the ground in US Air Force fire-bombing raids, reduced to a surreal black-grey urban desert. The remaining streets, lined with crumbling buildings, were teeming with limbless beggars, some in tattered military uniforms, some in unkempt civilian clothes. Homeless refugees filled makeshift shelters, creating expansive shanty towns. The stores that had survived the air raids could not supply even the limited food rations that were officially available. Instead, food had to be bought on the black market at exorbitant prices.

Chie moved with her children into her parents’ home, which luckily had not been damaged during the war. When Nobuko, her baby girl, fell sick they started selling the family heirlooms one by one—silk kimonos, antique porcelain vases, jewellery—to pay for black-market medicines and food. Nobuko died just as there was almost nothing left to sell.

Throughout the years of heartache and struggle that followed, Shuuichi’s fate remained a mystery. Had he been killed by one of the first advancing Soviet soldiers or a Chinese guerrilla? Was he still alive in a prison camp somewhere? Or—could it be—that he’d had a Chinese mistress all along, and in the moment of truth preferred to stay with her rather than return to Japan with his legitimate wife and family?

On the back of some of the old photos there are pencilled notes: “Taken by Mr Suzuki. October 1, Showa 14 (1939).” Some of them are in Shuuichi’s handwriting, some in Chie’s. There’s one photo of Shuuichi with two of his friends in black university student uniforms, slouched back on a light-coloured couch, their arms across each other’s shoulders. They are looking straight into the camera with the confidence of youth, with no fear, not knowing yet what the future holds in store for them (I do not know what the other two men’s fates were). The pencilled characters on the back are made up of straight lines awkwardly joined to one another at sharp angles, oddly resembling cuneiform writing. It’s the handwriting of the officer at the missing persons’ bureau, recording Shuuichi’s name and Chie’s address. I can imagine a winter morning, the sky lined with leaden clouds. Having left the children with her mother, Chie takes the train on her way to the bureau, clutching the cloth bag where she keeps the photos and some documents, useless pieces of bureaucratic correspondence—confirmations of receipt, rebuttals, apologies—looking at the raindrops racing diagonally down the carriage’s window pane, half believing, momentarily at least, that this time he may be found.

Throughout the long years of post-war strife, as she battled to feed her family—eventually getting a job as a schoolteacher—Chie kept making every effort to find Shuuichi, or at least to discover his fate. The uncertainty gnawed at her from within: was he long dead, or was he languishing in a prison camp somewhere, betrayed by the inadequacy of her attempts to save him? And what if he were living happily with his young Chinese wife, oblivious to Chie’s years of heartache and misery? Should she mourn him? Devote herself to trying to rescue him? Despise him?

When I exit the freeway, Chie tilts up her head suddenly and opens her eyes. She looks around, flustered, struggling to find her bearings. She looks very old now. She never remarried, and almost fifty years later all she knows about Shuuichi’s fate is that he is missing. Presumed dead.

We drop off Chie at her hotel. Back home, my parents are asleep, still jetlagged; my grandfather is sitting in the living room, dozing, his mouth slightly open, a cup of black tea with a slice of lemon in front of him. He arrived a couple of days earlier with my parents, my grandmother unable to join him due to poor health. When I turn off the television, he tilts his head up in a motion that reminds me of the one made by Chie an hour earlier, and wakes up.

“Everything went well?” he asks, composing himself instantaneously.

“Yes, we dropped her off at the hotel.” Mayumi had thought it best to keep the two parties apart.

I touch the tea cup. “It’s already cold, Grandpa. Would you like another one?”

I make him a Twinings Earl Grey tea with two teaspoons of sugar and a slice of lemon and serve it with a dozen Arnott’s Nice biscuits. It’s the closest approximation I can provide to his standard Wissotzky tea and Osem Petit Beurre biscuits.

“You know, there’s an old story: a man asks his friend if he’d like a cup of tea. The …”

I raise both hands, indicating with my fingers the number seven.

He laughs. “Really? The seventh time already? I thought it would be the second—maybe third.”

When I was a little boy, my grandfather used to take me to see the horse, not far from his house. My hand enveloped by the stocky calloused fingers of his tradesman’s hand, he would lead me down the street in a long march into unknown territory (the distance, I’ve just learned on Google Maps, was 270 metres). Then we’d cross a vacant block of land overgrown with weeds to face someone’s backyard: a makeshift fence of unpainted, weather-beaten timber, and behind it a roughly built tin shed, brown-red with rust. My grandfather would lift me up to the gap between the tin wall and the roof, and a tired grey horse would raise its head to look at me with sad watery eyes. I had nothing to give it. A few seconds later, I’d start feeling my grandfather’s thumbs digging into my ribs and I’d ask him to lower me down. The owner of the horse used to deliver with his cart siphon bottles of home-made soda, a vanishing trade in Israel of the early seventies.

My grandfather would then take me to the playground next door. The paint was peeling off the playing equipment’s metal, exposing past layers of paint in different colours, in some spots all the way down to bare metal. He’d push me on the swing with increasingly forceful motions until I’d scream with exhilaration and then he’d keep pushing the swing higher and higher until I’d ask him to stop. When he was a child, he told me, he’d go on the swing so hard that he ended up making a full circle. I believed him with the blind trust children have in those who love them, and was filled with trepidation: would I be expected to replicate his feat when I got older?

My grandfather Benjamin Verlinsky was born in 1906. He has almost no memory of his parents, Jacob and Rachel: their stories remain obscure. He knows only that the family lived in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, not far from Odessa, back then part of Imperial Russia. Kherson was a small commercial centre inhabited by Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Germans and Greeks. Since my grandfather could never tell me anything about the town where he had spent the first five years of his life, I have to imagine it as a provincial town out of a Chekhov story: the rich riding down the muddy streets in their carriages, wrapped in their furs, the underfed poor wandering about aimlessly with vacant eyes, freezing in their tatters.

Those were the twilight years of the Tsarist regime, and the people’s discontent and bitterness, bred by the hopelessness of their miserable lives under a corrupt, despotic regime, was a constant threat to the Tsar’s hold on power. As news of Russia’s string of losses in the Russo-Japanese War came in, the humiliated regime, defeated by an Asiatic race, faced a popular uprising: the 1905 Russian Revolution. As often was the case in Tsarist Russia, the people’s anger was funnelled by agents of the Okhrana, the secret police, towards the Jews. A year before Benjamin was born, there were anti-Jewish riots in neighbouring Odessa in which hundreds of people were slaughtered. Public opinion around the globe was aghast: the twentieth century had just started and nobody suspected that they would learn during its course to accept much greater atrocities.

As to the Jews, the riots triggered a massive wave of emigration, mainly to the United States. I don’t know why Benjamin’s parents had decided to immigrate to Palestine, then a sleepy malaria-infested backwater in the crumbling Ottoman empire. Religious yearnings for the Holy Land? The influence of Zionist ideology? Inability to afford the cost of travelling to America? One way or another, at the age of five Benjamin found himself with his parents on board a crammed coastal trading ship which made its way across the Black Sea from Odessa to Constantinople, on their way to Jaffa. Benjamin’s father Jacob died on the way in Constantinople, or perhaps in Alexandria. As he was only five at the time, Benjamin’s recollection of what had happened is hazy. After landing in Jaffa, his mother Rachel took him to Jerusalem, where she left him in the care of the Diskin Orphanage, run by members of Jerusalem’s centuries-old Orthodox Jewish community.

It was a Dickensian institution. In 1949, an Israeli State Commission of Inquiry found that the children there suffered from severe neglect and were routinely subjected to corporal punishment for even minor transgressions. The curriculum consisted of mindless parroting of Jewish scriptures, and the children were deprived of anything that could possibly stimulate or divert them. There were no toys, no books, and no playgrounds or sporting equipment. There was no cutlery, so the children never learnt how to use it, having instead to eat with their hands (“for security reasons”, the principal told the commission). A few months after the publication of the commission’s report, one of the boys ran away from the orphanage: the subsequent police investigation found that one of the employees, a forty-year-old Holocaust survivor, had sexually abused eight boys. It is hard to believe that more than three decades earlier—when Benjamin had lived in the orphanage throughout the First World War with its associated shortages of food and other essentials—conditions would have been any better.

At a family gathering, my grandfather once told us one of his funny stories. When he was a kid, he found on the street an empty cigarette tin, covered in dust. He wanted to play with it later but had nowhere to keep it, so he tucked it into the back of his trousers. That day in class the Rabbi wanted to beat him. When he hit Benjamin’s buttocks with his rod he heard a muffled metal clang. The puzzled Rabbi asked Benjamin what it was and when Benjamin pulled out the tin the Rabbi burst into laughter, sending him back to his bench. Coming out of my grandfather’s mouth, it sounded like an amusing anecdote: How I managed to get away with it scot-free against the odds. Years later, the timbre of her voice betraying the pain that a mother feels when confronted with a suffering child, my mother said to me: “Think how he had spent his childhood: deserted by his mother, living in poverty at the mercy of strangers, dressed in hand-me-down rags, having nothing to call his own—no books, no toys—to the point where an empty cigarette tin was for him a treasure worth keeping, having in the crowded dormitory not even one corner, one locker, or one shelf that he could call his own, and throughout all this being regularly beaten.”

In the first photo of Benjamin ever taken, he is standing upright in his Sabbath clothes wearing a dark cap, the uneven folds of the curtain in the photographer’s studio behind him. His eyes look straight at the camera with a quiet confidence, a resilience which makes me think he has somehow managed to resurface from the dark abyss of the orphanage years unbroken. The writing on the back says 924/377, presumably the photographer’s serial number. If the first three digits refer to the year, Benjamin was eighteen at the time. He was working then as an apprentice for the Brüder Wagner, a metal foundry in the German colony of Sarona, on the outskirts of Jaffa. Sarona was founded by the Templers, a small Protestant sect from Württemberg whose adherents believed that, by settling in the Holy Land and leading a life of work and piety, they were helping to bring about the Second Coming of Christ. The factory owner was Gotthilf Wagner; Benjamin once told my mother that Wagner was “a hard man”, and when asked to elaborate changed the topic. Nevertheless, I don’t think that after his upbringing at the orphanage anything Wagner could dish out was too much for Benjamin to take. Benjamin had to travel around the country to help install mechanical equipment, venturing into Trans-Jordan and once travelling as far as Cairo.

In the next photo, Benjamin, wearing a black beret at a slight angle, his arm around a mate’s shoulder, is in Paris, where he moved in 1929. There’s a spark in his eyes; a man about town. He had lived there for five years, working as a turner at a local factory, his time there reduced (or perhaps distilled) by him to half a dozen repeatedly-told anecdotes, some of them of dubious authenticity. When asked why he wouldn’t take my grandmother to Europe on a holiday, he said: “I lived in Paris for five years, and travelled once as far as Ostend; beyond Ostend the rest is all the same.” He would go after work to the local bistro where he and his workmates shouted each other rounds of cheap wine. One of them said to him once: Tu es un boche. You’re a Kraut. My grandfather replied defiantly: Non, je suis israélite! Back then it was still better to be a Jew than a German in Paris. A female co-worker’s hair got caught in one of the machines and she was scalped, leaving her with a bald patch of raw pink skin. She’d taken to wearing a head scarf ever since. “It’s a terrible thing to happen to a woman,” he said to me, and although more than fifty years had passed since the incident I could still hear the pity and sadness in his voice.

Beyond the anecdotes, there was little else to bear witness to his Paris years. No old friends who had known him there, no remaining letters. In an old metal box that he had made himself at the workshop he had a few black-and-white postcards: an Indo-Chinese temple and a half-naked African warrior, brandishing a spear, from the Paris Exposition coloniale internationale of 1931; intrepid French aviators Costes and Bellonte and their biplane Point d’Interrogation—“Question Mark”—which had made the first direct Atlantic crossing westbound from Paris to New York in 1930. Why did he go to France? When asked about it he was always non-committal, escaping to yet another anecdote. Why did he leave? Could he see the darkening clouds over Europe when Hitler came to power, or was there another reason? And then how did he actually spend his time in Paris in the early thirties? Did he have any romantic relationships? Was the story about the injured factory worker his way of telling us that he had hurt a woman there? I never dared to ask him; the topic seemed so far removed from the range of our conversations, two and a half octaves apart. Maybe he had a petite amie, the little seamstress of romantic lore, or perhaps he just used to go to the local brothel on payday.

In the late seventies, the husband of Rachel, his eldest daughter, became the manager of the Geneva office of El Al Airlines, and my grandparents flew over there for a visit—my grandmother’s first overseas trip ever and my grandfather’s first in forty-odd years. My aunt’s house was in the suburb of Meyrin, within walking distance of the French border. My grandfather wouldn’t hear of making a day trip to Annecy across the border, let alone spending a week in Paris, clamming up when asked to explain the reason. Did he have an old tax debt? Was he a draft dodger, fearing that at seventy-odd years of age the long arm of the French Republic would finally reach him? Was he scared of an ancient paternity suit? Whatever the case was, he wouldn’t budge.

The next photo is a black-and-white New Year’s greeting: a view of the fountain in Dizengoff Square in central Tel Aviv, surrounded by clean-lined Bauhaus buildings. Back then, Tel Aviv was still the little “White City” that had sprouted miraculously on the sand dunes near Jaffa almost overnight, like Jonah’s shady plant. In an oval inset, there’s a photo of Benjamin in a fedora (he must have lost his hair by then), his wife Zipporah in her best dress and, between them, their one-year-old daughter Rachel. The legend says, “Happy New Year, 5701! Cordial Greetings from Erez Israel”—the Jewish year 5701 commenced in October 1940. The Bauhaus buildings in their white render look bright under the Mediterranean sun; Benjamin and Zipporah are beaming with pride; and Rachel, though looking a bit flustered, her eyes shying away from the camera, still looks happily, or at least comically, flustered—as toddlers are wont to be.

During the Second World War, the British Army required most of the building materials produced in Palestine, and so civil construction there came to a halt. This, coupled with the mass arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe, led to an acute housing shortage which lingered for years after the war. Benjamin, employed as a turner at the central workshop of a Tel Aviv bus co-operative where he soon became a shareholding member, had a secure job and was earning good wages, but the family still had to share a two-bedroom flat with another family; they took turns using the kitchen and shared the bathroom. The other tenants became like family; my mother would refer to them as Aunt and Uncle and play with their two daughters every day. Their eldest daughter, Drora, who was several years older than my mother, told her decades later a story she had overheard her parents talking about in hushed tones.

One day, a few weeks after the birth of Benjamin and Zipporah’s first daughter, two elegantly-dressed women came to the flat and asked to see Benjamin. When Zipporah said he was at work, they said they were his friends and had a present for the baby. They gave Zipporah a gift-wrapped sweater, a substantial gift in those days of wartime rationing. When Benjamin came back from work and heard the story he was livid. The mild-mannered man, who had always shunned conflict, was beside himself with anger, demanding that Zipporah return the gift immediately. The two women, Drora overheard her mother saying, her voice dropping to an almost inaudible whisper, were prostitutes.

Back then, a “prostitute” could also be a divorcee who had a boyfriend, or a girl who was seeing a British or Australian soldier (those women were on occasion attacked by Jewish paramilitary groups, and had their hair shorn off and their faces smeared in tar). My mother thought that the two women may have been Benjamin’s sisters. According to her theory, his mother had remarried and her new husband refused to let her keep her son with her. When his half-sisters showed up, Benjamin, still feeling the old hurt of his mother’s desertion and seeing the two as accomplices by association, erupted with pain. When questioned about this story by my mother, half a century later, my grandfather responded in complete denial. He didn’t know what she was talking about; he had no family beyond the one he had created for himself.

Two days later, Mayumi’s mother Keiko arrives. An elegant, energetic lady in her early fifties dressed in a cream-coloured two-piece suit, she clutches in her hand a Louis Vuitton bag. Having lost her father at the age of five and her husband five years ago, there’s a certain coolness about her, an amiable detachment like that of a seasoned bartender who’s seen everything and has learnt not to judge. Mayumi and her mother talk to each other non-stop all the way to the hotel, catching up on family news. As I navigate the traffic my mind drifts away. When we arrive at the hotel, Mayumi says they were talking about the venue for the two families’ pre-wedding get-together, and suggests lunch at Jonah’s at Whale Beach, an old Sydney institution.

The next day, my grandfather gets into my car in his full regalia: a navy three-piece suit, a gold tiepin, gold cufflinks and his new Borsalino fedora. My parents get into the back seat. My car climbs gingerly up the steep meandering road, slowly making its way to the cliff top. I negotiate the turns hesitantly, thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have to do this in my old manual car. We finally arrive. Mayumi’s car is already there. It’s a picture-perfect day with not a cloud in the clear blue sky. Outside the restaurant windows the ocean stretches below us into the horizon, its turquoise surface glowing in the midday sun, looking the same way—I imagine—it had looked before humans inhabited the earth and contaminated it with their entanglements, their complicated ways of hurting each other.

In the restaurant anteroom, we conduct brief introductions. Keiko and Chie can’t speak English, so I translate the exchanges from Japanese to Hebrew and back. My grandfather shakes their hands, my mother gives them a kiss on each cheek, and my father shakes their hands again. Chie and Keiko also lower their heads, unable to shake off a lifetime of conditioning. My family members don’t make any attempt to bow, and the scene runs its course without any noticeable awkwardness.

The waiter leads us to our table. We are seated, the two families facing each other. Mayumi orders sparkling mineral water. A pregnant silence ensues. My parents can speak English, but my grandfather’s languages are useless here: Yiddish, Hebrew, French, some German, a smattering of Palestinian Arabic. Benjamin then rises slightly in his chair, clears his throat and says, looking at Chie straight across the table: Parlez-vous français, Madame? Back in his day, French still laid claim to being a major international language. Chie looks at him, impassive. A few seconds pass. She then turns to Keiko and whispers something in her ear. Keiko’s face is also impassive. Mayumi, though, looks a bit startled for some reason. Chie tries to get up, Keiko rising to assist her, and Mayumi announces that they have to go to the toilet.

Fifteen minutes later, Chie is sitting on one of the white chairs on the lawn facing the ocean, her back to us. The lush green lawn, the turquoise ocean and the clear blue sky belie the mayhem she has just created by deserting the table and refusing to return. I take Mayumi outside for a quick consultation. “My grandfather could speak a few languages,” she says in a steady voice, “and my mother says that he used to tease my grandmother about being such a provincial hick, speaking only Japanese. Now she feels she’s been humiliated in front of everyone and doesn’t want to come back.” I look at Mayumi: she does not seem to be surprised.

I go back to the table, explaining the situation to my parents. They look at each other and then at my grandfather with raised eyebrows, not sure what to make of it. My mother frowns, her eyes a bit teary. My grandfather looks a bit downcast, crestfallen. He’d be happy to make an apology, but how?

Keiko engages in some shuttle diplomacy. She squats near Chie’s chair, remaining at a short distance from her. I can see through the windows Keiko’s lips moving. Only the back of Chie’s head is visible but, as Keiko seems to be doing most of the talking, I deduce that Chie’s responses are curt and most likely negative. The roles of the mother and the petulant child have been reversed. The waiter returns, trying again to take our orders. In the end, it is agreed that since Chie is still ill-disposed Mayumi will take her back to her hotel and Keiko will stay to have lunch with us.

Back home I am greeted with the news that Chie now refuses to attend the wedding. Mayumi bursts in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. I hold her in my arms, trying to absorb the spasms of her shaking body, to drain away her anguish. I can smell her new shampoo. “Don’t worry, sweetie. She’ll change her mind. She wouldn’t want to have come all the way to Australia for nothing.”

A year before her death, my grandmother made a pile of old letters and documents and burned them in the backyard. “Some secrets will go with me to the grave,” she told my mother.

Rachel had once seen an old document—a birth certificate or something similar, she wasn’t sure—which stated that Benjamin’s birthplace was Alexandria. Could it be that Benjamin’s parents had moved from Kherson to Alexandria, where he was born, and only when his mother had remarried she moved on to Palestine? During the First World War, Russian subjects were regarded by the Ottomans as enemy aliens and faced arrest and deportation. Could it be that the orphanage had him registered as having been born in Alexandria (in nominally Ottoman territory) in order to protect him from deportation? Or maybe Rachel’s memory was simply betraying her?

Ten years ago, my mother saw an obituary notice in Yediot Aharonot: Jacob Verlinsky and Rachel Farbstein (née Verlinsky) were mourning the death of their father. The combination—both the uncommon surname and the first names of Benjamin’s parents—could not be a coincidence, she thought. Were they the descendants of one of Benjamin’s sisters?

She called Rachel Farbstein six weeks later, identifying herself and explaining that she was only trying to solve an old family mystery, not sniffing around for an inheritance. Rachel Farbstein flatly denied any connection. Was she fearing my mother would make a claim on the estate? On second thought, wouldn’t the sisters (if they indeed existed), carry their own father’s surname, and even that only until they got married?

We never found out why my grandfather had refused so vehemently to set foot on French territory.

When Hitler rose to power, a branch of the Nazi Party—headed by Gotthilf Wagner, Benjamin’s first employer—was established in Sarona, the German colony near Jaffa. On March 22, 1946, Wagner was making his way to Sarona, where he was going to pay his workers’ wages; he had with him an envelope containing 800 Palestine pounds in cash. Three other Templers and a policeman were in the car with him. In Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Street a car blocked their way. Two men approached Wagner’s car’s front windows from both sides, and one of them shot Wagner twice from point blank range, killing him on the spot. No one else was harmed and the cash was left untouched. Later that day the Jewish Resistance Movement claimed responsibility for the assassination.

Five years after our wedding, the Russian government declassified some old Soviet archives. In a typewritten list of inmates who died while held at a Siberian prison camp the following entry appeared: Takeda, Moriichi. The kanji characters used in Japanese can be pronounced in different ways, depending on context. The two characters used to write Shuuichi’s name could also be read as “Moriichi”. At last Shuuichi’s fate was known with certainty—well, almost with certainty, since “Moriichi” can also be written in other ways and the Soviets didn’t keep a record of the original Japanese spelling.

Despite Keiko’s best efforts to sway her, Chie didn’t come to our wedding.