Inheritance
For all intents and purposes, I’m an only child, although technically, biologically, this is not the truth. I have a brother, two half-sisters — three half-sisters, depending on who is telling the story. I have fragmented memories: the paternal half-brother, a little blonde boy in overalls; the maternal half-sister, the chubby baby in a bucket hat. Then there’s the half-sister I’ve never met, and the step-sister whom I met when she was a child — a lanky girl with a bowl cut who would cry at the drop of a pin.
A Mandela effect, a rewriting of history, has occurred. People now say she is a blood relation. Don’t worry that you were old enough to remember when her mother started dating your father, with the child already fully formed.
Imagine the amount of deception that goes into such an endeavour — either hiding or denying the paternity of your own daughter for years, decades, or the opposite: deceiving the child along with everyone else, playing make-believe and deluding your stepchild into thinking you’re their biological father.
Whenever I’ve thought of these sisters, I’ve always felt that our father — their father — was grooming them. This is a man who would slow down in his car and glare at prepubescent girls. If a family friend had a young daughter over at the house, he would stroke her hair, her neck, and pay her compliments.
“Last time I saw you, you had an eggshell on your bum.”
He said this to the teenage daughter of a family he delivered furniture to in 1993, the last word drawn out and playfully spoken in a lewd tone.
My grandmother, Alice, often told me age-inappropriate stories. She told me about her stillbirth — a male baby. The nurses kept the stillborn child from her, but she pleaded with them to see it. To see him.
“Maybe your father would have turned out differently if he had a brother.”
It was always your father, and not my son. It was like a game of hot potato with radioactive material; no one wanted to claim kinship with this animal.
Everyone in my family has always told themselves the story they’re most comfortable with.
Origin myth
I exit the bus from Budapest and, before both feet are even on the ground, a Roma woman asks me for money, for food. I shake my head, no. She smiles at me, caresses one of her breasts. I look past her and keep walking, hoping my expression hasn’t changed.
I would not recommend travelling to Romania by bus. There were track works, so I had no other choice.
I’m staying on Eroilor Avenue — Heroes’ Avenue. I walk past a statue of Romulus and Remus suckling on the She-Wolf. A reproduction of the Capitoline Wolf in the heart of Transylvania, gifted by the Italian state, with the inscription: “To the City of Cluj, Mother Rome, 1921.”
Most people know the myth: some kind of domestic incident or line-of-succession dispute which ends with two brothers thrown into the Tiber River. They — Romulus and Remus — are saved by the She-Wolf, who takes the brothers to her cave, where they suckle until they’re found by a shepherd.
There are other stories as well. In one variation of the myth, lupa means not she-wolf but prostitute. In another, the twin brothers are the sons of Hercules. In yet another, the She-Wolf claims the children as her own and raises them to be feral and wild. When confronted, she insists that these are her whelps, her biological children, and that they always have been.
The brothers found a city near the river where they were left to die as babies. Myth states that Romulus killed Remus after being insulted by him. I like to think that many insults were traded — back and forth — before Romulus resorted to violence, unable to think of a comeback.
I send a photo of the statue to the brother I didn’t grow up with, to a person I’m just getting to know now in my midlife. We’ve traded insults with each other, both jokingly and less so, over the years without killing each other. Then again, we weren’t raised by wolves. My brother was raised by people who loved him.
Halloween in Transylvania
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On the same street is Monumentul Memorandiștilor — two stone pillars with a bell between them, representing a petition sent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1892, demanding that ethnic Romanians have the same rights as Hungarians in Transylvania. The petition was ignored, and the signatories were put in jail or killed.
The monument is covered in leaflets, photos, and letters. I look at a photo of two young women — Elena Nita and Anda Ioanna Lapure. I understand they are victims, but of what or whom, I do not know. I look them up: victims of the October 30 2015 Colectiv nightclub fire in Bucharest, two of the sixty-four people who died in the blaze. Hundreds more were injured. Elena was 18. She died from her injuries in a hospital in Liverpool. Anda was 31; she died in the club itself.
I think about the first time I saw my half-sister, in November 1990. I visited my mother in hospital, and she was swaddling her. The impossibly small fingers poking out, the gentle mewing of a newborn.
Later in the evening, I climb Fortress Hill and drink tallboys in the Transylvanian moonlight.
Cain and Abel
Adam and Eve grieve over the dead body of Abel; Cain flees with a look of panic and horror. The mother is twisted and contorted in agony over the body of her second-born.
Cain is cursed to wander the earth.
I buy a print of the painting from the Museum of Fine Arts and present it to my brother. I tell him, jokingly, that I hope he doesn’t take it as a threat.
My brother studies the print and then says, “I’m Cain, you’re Abel.”
“I went back to Hungary, you stayed in Australia and died.”
We are both drunk, and he is joking, but the joke lands somewhere deeper.
Cain leaves. Cain builds cities. Cain fathers children. He is marked by God, not destroyed, but protected.
Abel never becomes anything else.
My brother is not Cain. We both know this. Cain was angry and violent but inheritance doesn’t require murder. Sometimes it’s enough to resemble the man you swore you’d never become.
East of Eden
I used to think my story began with a curse, with estranged and unknown siblings, with blood, with something broken before I arrived.
But the truth is smaller and less mythic.
No river carried us away. No wolf claimed us. No god marked my forehead.
There was only a man in a car, slowing down to look at teenage girls.
There was only silence and deception from people who should have known better.
There is still time to refuse inheritance.
