22 DECEMBER 2005
RACHEL ROSEN woke early. Leah was still asleep. Her back was towards her and Rachel leant across and kissed her lightly, brushing the pale skin above her shoulder blades. Leah, breathing deeply, didn’t stir. Rachel sat up and examined her lover in the soft morning light. She had lost weight, her fine bones were more visible under the contours of her back, where her ribs and the underlying structure of her hips could be plainly seen. There had always been a fragility to Leah’s beauty, but lately she seemed to have become more delicate, more vulnerable.
Rachel knew that the constant, carping pressure from her religious family was taking a psychological toll. Leah seemed distracted and on edge when they made love. There was an evanescent quality to Leah’s happiness, as if it were slipping out of her grasp.
Her own mother hadn’t helped. If only Anna had made more of an effort, Leah might have felt some comfort from knowing she had the support of another family. More than a week had passed since the disastrous dinner, and although Anna had rung to apologise again before she left for Europe Leah had still felt slighted and rejected. She complained to Rachel that Anna had obviously decided that her religious beliefs were an insurmountable obstacle and that she was an intellectual lightweight, unworthy of her daughter’s love. These were Leah’s impressions and nothing Rachel said could assuage them.
But Rachel had a very different view. She knew that, notwithstanding their fierce argument over Israel, her mother would never have deliberately hurt Leah’s feelings. Anna generally enjoyed a passionate debate, accepted differences of opinion, even profound differences. No, something else had been in play that night. Anna had been profoundly distracted, disturbed even. Leah could not possibly understand this but, whatever the problem was, Rachel was convinced that it was nothing to do with her.
Rachel got up carefully, leaving Leah to sleep. She padded into the study, woke up the computer and checked the markets, which were predictably quiet and stable leading up to Christmas. She walked through the living room, where the lights on the little tree were blinking frosty white and then multi-coloured. A handful of wrapped presents nestled beneath it. She remembered how the tree had offended Leah’s brother Eli, who had come to see them as a peacemaker. Eli was the one member of Leah’s family who wanted a reconciliation between his parents and their wayward daughter. Rachel was grateful for his efforts, but even free-thinking Eli, when he saw the stunted pine with its elegant decorations, had accused Rachel of being ‘a Christmas-tree Jew’.
She went into the kitchen, switched on the radio and began the process of making coffee. She was barely paying attention when the news bulletin began with its familiar musical sting.
Our top stories today: A man facing war crimes charges in The Hague has been revealed to be an Australian citizen …
The Hague? That’s where Anna had raced off to to see Pierre, who worked for the war crimes tribunal. What the fuck? Rachel pushed the coffee aside and stared at the radio.
Police have charged a Sydney man with sending text messages inciting violence during the Cronulla riots on the eleventh of December …
Rachel waited, tensed up, both hands flat on the kitchen bench.
The New South Wales Government has lodged an action in the High Court against the Federal Government’s Work Choices legislation.
Another musical sting and then at last the newsreader was back with details of the top story. Rachel turned up the volume:
An investigation in The Hague has revealed that a man who has spent four months behind bars awaiting trial over war crimes committed during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is an Australian citizen. The man was arrested in Croatia and jailed in The Hague in August under the name Tomislav Maric, a false identity. Authorities in the War Crimes Tribunal have discovered that his real name is Marin Katich, an Australian citizen, born in Sydney …
Rachel’s eyes widened. KATICH! It was a name she had known since she was a child.
Marin Katich is believed to be the son of Croatian-born Ivo Katich—
Ivo Katich, thought Rachel, the subject of her mother’s book.
—who in 1987 was due to face the first war crimes trial in Australian history, charged over atrocities committed in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. That trial was abandoned when Mr Katich was found to be unfit to stand trial.
And now his son! What’s going on? What was Anna up to? Why hadn’t she heard from her?
Authorities in The Hague tribunal have confirmed that the war crimes indictment will be adjusted to reflect the true identity of the accused, Marin Katich, who is believed to have had a number of aliases. The Australian is expected to face trial at the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Rachel heard Leah calling from the bedroom.
‘Can you turn down the radio?’
She switched it off. ‘Sorry, darling, it was something to do with Anna.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
‘Oh, yes please.’
‘Won’t be long.’
Rachel finished filling the coffee machine, put it on the burner and dashed into the study. She rewoke the computer and flicked through to the news websites. It was the lead story on the Sydney Morning Herald site. She read it swiftly, looking for new details. Anna, she thought, why didn’t you tell me? Obviously this was the reason her mother had rushed to The Hague.
One of the sites had a colour picture of a bearded man in a camouflage military uniform. The caption read: Marin Katich, Bosnia 1992. Rachel recalled a grainy black-and-white picture of the same man in her mother’s book. In the foreword of Australian Nazi, Anna had described how the Australian-born Marin Katich had been a militia commander during the Bosnian War and how she’d tried to track him down only to find he’d been killed in an ambush a short time before she got there. Rachel remembered that trip well. Her mother had been blown up and come back with that scar under her eye.
Rachel studied the man on her computer screen. This photo was not grainy at all. It was some kind of high-quality portrait.
‘Rachel!’
Her ears were ringing. Her mind was racing. She tried to remember exactly what Anna had said to explain away her distracted, sullen misbehaviour during the ruined dinner party. She’d got an email from Pierre in The Hague. ‘Something is terribly wrong, darling’—that’s how she’d put it. Terribly wrong. But what would be so terrible about finding this man alive? Surely that would be good news, or at least interesting news, not something terribly wrong. After all, Marin Katich was the man Anna had risked her life to go and find during the murderous conflict. Now he was alive—well, surely that was a whole new chapter in the story she had made her own.
‘Rachel, where are you?’
Where am I? And the other question formed in Rachel’s mind that she just couldn’t let go of: What else has Anna kept from me?
She called to Leah, ‘Coming.’
She needed to think about this calmly, methodically.
•
With an effort of will, Rachel settled herself. She took coffee and toast into Leah and told her a mostly true story about how Anna had tracked down an Australian citizen in the cells of the war crimes prison. She explained how the fellow had been charged under a false name and how it was an especially big story because the man’s father had been charged in Australia nearly twenty years ago with war crimes in Yugoslavia that dated back to the Second World War.
Leah listened dutifully as she ate her toast. She was not at all inclined to celebrate the journalistic coups of the great Anna Rosen, but she did make a grudging acknowledgment.
‘At least when she’s tracking down Nazis she’s not attacking her own people.’
Rachel decided not to respond to that. Repairing relations between the two women in her life was necessarily a long-term project and she was grateful, on this occasion, for Leah’s lack of interest. It relieved her of any obligation to share her concerns about what Anna was up to. Instead, she helped Leah choose an outfit for the day from her side of the capacious walk-in wardrobe, whose meticulous order she always found comforting.
‘Aren’t you getting ready?’ asked Leah.
‘No,’ said Rachel, chafing at her own deception. ‘It’s the stupid office Christmas party, remember? I don’t have to leave till lunchtime.’
•
When Leah had gone, Rachel rang her assistant and told her she was ill and wouldn’t make it to the office party. Then she gathered what she needed and took the lift to the basement car park where her black Audi was waiting. Rachel would never have admitted this to her mother, but, like the luxury of housing her vast collection of clothes in an architect-designed wardrobe, she found the car comforting—the smell of it, the embrace of its leather seat, the resonance of its engine. It was stupid, she knew, but being behind the wheel of this finely engineered machine gave her a sense of control.
She went fast and smooth up the ramp, out of the cool darkness into the glare and clamour of the city on a hot summer’s morning. She navigated expertly through the traffic, barely thinking, clocking landmarks on the route she had taken so many times before: Hyde Park; William Street; the giant Coca-Cola sign; the sad carnival of Kings Cross; the splayed fountain making rainbows for junkies in the ratty park; then Potts Point; the electric gates to Anna’s apartment; and the precious parking spot. She unconsciously drew a breath and climbed out.
Her mother had clearly left the apartment quickly. Anna had cleaned up their dinner plates and packed the dishwasher, but she had forgotten to turn it on and the kitchen stank of rotting fish. Rachel pressed the start button and the washer’s swooshing and jugging filled the silence as she moved through the apartment. She threw open the tall windows in the living room for fresh air and poked her head into Anna’s room: discarded winter clothes were strewn across the bed; shoes and boots were scattered across the floor.
She was most anxious to search the study. She sat in Anna’s old captain’s chair and powered up the computer and the dial-up modem, which Anna had steadfastly refused to upgrade. Rachel found something nostalgic about the modem’s squealing handshake with the internet. She knew Anna’s passwords and after a moment of agonising about violating her mother’s privacy she went ahead and logged into her email account. There were many new messages, but she ignored them for now, scrolling back to the night of their dinner party until she found the one brief email Pierre Villiers had sent that night:
Have a look at the attached photos. Do you recognise this man? Call me!
One by one, the attachments opened sideways and Rachel flipped them upright. At first, she thought she wasn’t going to learn much. She passed quickly over the first three images: two of a hooded and shackled man in an orange jumpsuit being led from a plane; the third a police-ID photo of man with a badly bruised face labelled with the name Tomislav Maric. She recalled Maric was the alias of the person now known to be Marin Katich. Then she opened the fourth attachment, a photo taken in a hospital room. The swelling and bruises on the man’s face had subsided. It was in this photo that Rachel saw what she presumed had so disturbed her mother. The man’s eyes were very clear in the photo.
Rachel’s hands were trembling and she moved the mouse unsteadily, tapping the magnifying glass icon to blow the image up. She kept tapping it until the man’s eyes filled the screen and, as they did, she felt a coldness spreading through her body, an icy wind of recognition, katabatic in its force, eroding her doubts. Rachel felt tears welling up in her own eyes and then she was sobbing, her chest heaving with emotions she could barely comprehend. She ran into the bathroom, wiped her eyes dry and stared at them in the mirror. The photo was not proof-positive of her suspicions, but at some deep level she knew.
When she had recovered sufficiently, Rachel resumed her search.
The filing cabinet was locked. After a fruitless attempt to locate the key, she went to the laundry and found a hammer and a crowbar in the tool box. It was not the kind of high-security cabinet in which sensitive financial documents were kept at her own office, so Rachel was soon able to jimmy open the drawers. Her mother’s filing cabinet was ruined, but if Anna complained—a big if under the circumstances—she would buy her a new one.
Rachel searched the drawers systematically. Naturally the extensive files under K for Katich were of primary interest and she piled them on the desk. Then she found a box labelled ASIO pics. She was well aware that Anna had used Freedom of Information Laws to access her secret ASIO files. Years ago, Anna had shown Rachel some of the old surveillance photos of her dressed in full radical-chic mode in the 1970s. They’d had a good laugh about them.
Rachel opened the box, not sure what she was looking for, and found it immediately. Sitting on top of the pile—presumably this was no coincidence—were three photos, in a sequence, that had been taken at some distance using a telephoto lens. Written in pencil on the back of each of them was the date, September 1970. The two subjects of the surveillance were her mother, she guessed aged nineteen or twenty, and a strikingly handsome young man. Anna was running to him. She was pulling him towards her, clearly distressed. A close-up of the young man showed what Rachel had anticipated: he had unmistakably green eyes.
Rachel knew a good deal about the recessive gene involved. Throughout her life, so many people had commented on it. Her eyes were her most striking feature. She knew that she and this man were both in the tiny subset of humans, less than two per cent, who shared this distinctive green eye colour. But beyond that superficial marker there was a deeper sense of recognition. There was something familiar in his bearing, his facial expressions, his complexion. She knew enough to distrust these feelings. For as long as she could remember, she had longed to find her father, to fill the terrible gap that Anna had left her with by refusing to ever discuss the possibilities. Now here was evidence of her mother in the arms of a man who might well be him.
Father!
Above all, there was an overwhelming sense of relief that seemed to thaw the chill that had gripped her entrails. She knew other feelings were waiting at the edge that would soon come crowding in, but at this moment the lifetime of longing for an answer, her longing to know, seemed finally to be at an end.
My father is a man named Marin Katich!
She stared at the photos for a long time, trying to read something more in his face. It was not, she thought—she hoped—the face of an evil man. She opened up the news website on Anna’s computer and found the image of the much older man in a camouflage uniform that she had seen this morning, the Marin Katich they were calling a war criminal.
She put the photo up against the screen and looked at them side by side—the man in his twenties, the man in his forties. The older one was harder, tougher—crueller perhaps? Was it cruelty she saw or was it that the uniform and the headlines about war crimes had created that impression?
Rachel resumed her search for answers in Anna’s files, and as she worked her way through her mother’s extensive notes and documents she gradually began to see how careful Anna had been. There were many references to Marin as the son of Ivo Katich, but nothing, save for the three photos, that indicated her personal connection to the younger Katich.
She reviewed in the files the documented details of the horrific crimes, crimes against humanity, which had been perpetrated by his father, Ivo Katich, when he was a senior officer in the Ustasha in Bosnia during the Second World War. The facts of those unspeakable crimes, which she had read years earlier in her mother’s book, were now freighted with terrible consequence, and Rachel was no longer immune to them.
She remembered travelling to the Ravensbrück camp with her grandmother, Eva, together with Anna; she remembered her tears as Eva for the first time told them her story of life in the camp. As the granddaughter of a survivor, the Holocaust had been central to Rachel’s identity for as long as she could remember. But now she would have to reimagine it all with a sense of blood guilt as the offspring of one of its perpetrators. She felt a profound shift in her soul. Tears formed again in her eyes, trailed down her cheeks and dropped onto the files she was reading.
When she felt able to work, Rachel took notes of every mention of Marin Katich, building the most complete picture she could. The photos had been taken in September 1970, so Anna and Marin Katich must have been together then, when Anna was at university, but there was no other reference to him in that period. The first actual reference in the Katich file was dated June 1972, when Marin was believed to have been part of an incursion into Bosnia, one of twenty armed insurgents who crossed into Yugoslavia on a mission to foment a revolution against the communist regime of Marshal Tito. There was no documentary proof that Marin was there, only strong rumours in the police and intelligence communities. If he had been among the twenty, Anna had noted, then he was the only survivor of that mission.
In September of that same year, Marin’s younger brother, Petar, was suspected of having carried out the terrorist bombing of two Yugoslav travel agencies in the centre of Sydney. Again, there was no documentary proof. Petar had disappeared and Anna’s notes showed that she believed he had been murdered by agents of the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret service. Then Rachel found typed notes about Marin Katich dated March 1973. The notes were incomplete and confusing, but they related to his involvement in a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Yugoslavia, a man called Bijedic, when he came to Australia on an official visit. Two names reappeared again and again: one was a Commonwealth policeman called Al Sharp; the other an ASIO officer with the unusual name of Tom Moriarty, beside which Anna had written: Russian-born, Timur Morashev. Rachel guessed that these two men, if they were still alive, would likely be in their late seventies. She resolved to try to find them.
The final reference to Marin Katich was in notes from Anna’s trip to Bosnia in 1992. She had received information that Katich, or someone closely resembling him, had been commanding a large militia, headquartered in the town of Ljubuski in the region of Herzegovina in Southern Bosnia. When Anna got there, the second-in-command, an officer called Jure Rebic, had told her that the man she was looking for had been killed only days earlier, ambushed at a roadblock. This account, in dramatic form, became the foreword in later editions of Anna’s book, Australian Nazi.
Rachel paused, thinking for a moment before she wrote down the name Jure Rebic and underlined it. Then she looked through her notes, reviewing the incomplete biography of the man she now believed to be her father. Rachel had realised why Anna’s notes about him ended in 1992: she had thought Marin Katich was dead and so there was no need to burden her daughter with the fact of his existence. She knew her mother. Anna would have kept this secret forever to protect Rachel from the pain of that knowledge. But now, it turned out, he was alive.