A Family Madness

by Keneally, Thomas

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  One morning Herr Hirschmann, winner of the Iron Cross, failed to arrive for the start of our classes. Mother had sent us into the parlor to get ready for the day’s work, which I did and Genia—deeply set now in the sullen rebelliousness which had begun in the war’s first autumn—didn’t. When it was a quarter past nine I began to quiz her about what could have happened to our tutor. Now she took the usual delight in not answering. I began to feel the sort of choking panic the young feel when they are lost from their parents in strange territory, and then—since I was less than ten years of age—I began to cry.

  “Huh!” said Genia and laughed a little to herself while sharpening a pencil. I heard the telephone pealing in the living room.

  My mother came in a few seconds later. She was thinner now—her hair was wispier, and I believe I could see for the first time what she would look like when she was old. There was also a forced liveliness in her voice, the sort that was associated in my mind with the phrase “making an effort for the sake of the children.” Papa had called and said Mr. Hirschmann would not be there today. He had meant to let us know earlier but had forgotten. She put an arm around me. “What’s the matter, Radjiu?” she asked me. Genia said, “He wants to get his day’s supply of algebra from that old Jew.”

  Mother screamed at her. “Don’t talk in that brutal way!”

  She soothed me then with the news that Willi Ganz was coming for morning coffee, and we could join the party. Genia uttered a word I had never heard before, and before I could ask for a repeat and a definition, Mother had again screamed, and I knew it would not be the same as coffees and painting sessions of the golden past, even of the sweet besieged period after Mrs. Kuzich’s murder, as distinct from the bitter besieged period we were now enduring.

  The Kommissar arrived early, to my mother’s obvious pleasure and mine. Yet I felt throughout the coffee and the cakes, delivered that morning from the same Hungry Shepherd Café where Mrs. Kuzich had been gunned down, that Onkel Willi was constrained, would have preferred I wasn’t there. I suppose every child has that experience: waking up to the fact that the adult who has always been his special familiar finds him a bit of a nuisance. Onkel Willi would spend time talking to me fairly loudly and jovially, then turn away as if I had been for the moment adequately served and distracted, and speak quietly and urgently to my mother. I heard partisans mentioned, the Crimean Front situation, a despairing letter he’d had from an old Party friend working in Odessa.

  He enumerated things that were happening which wouldn’t have been permitted by his old friend Kube, whom the partisans had blown to pieces, a dear man, a man of taste; and of all the people the partisans could have chosen to assassinate, it was Kube! He’d been given a good funeral, but really they hadn’t found enough of him to fill a bucket. Then there was the small-minded malice of men like Bienecke. Bienecke was the kind who had brought shame to the race. Bienecke used “the electric methods” pioneered by the SD in France—not the sort of scientific advance to crow about.

  Naturally I did not then understand what Onkel Willi meant by “electric methods” and imagined Bienecke, a crude man I felt a certain distaste for also, experimenting in a laboratory and wearing a white coat.

  He talked also about the affair between Hauptsturmführer Bienecke and his Belorussian secretary Lena, a widely known scandal which disturbed my dreams in ways I could not then put a name to. Onkel Willi raised these matters in a kind of code, and if he had been anyone else, if tears of disappointment hadn’t been at the back of my throat, I would have run inside, hidden behind the curtains, and spied on him without restraint. What I would have learned however would have been no consolation for the loss of that Willi Ganz who could impersonate the Impressionists and the Fauvists and who had hidden and sought in the Brudezh forest.

  When it was time for him to go, Genia was coaxed into kissing him goodbye, but I followed him and my mother without understanding why I should, without being able to break away, out through the porch to the front steps. The sergeant of police who had charge of the security of our house was waiting idly there. “Your car, Herr Oberführer?” he asked. For Ganz’s car was not in sight.

  Ganz asked with some peevishness where it was. The sergeant told Ganz that an SS officer had turned up and ordered Yakov to park beyond the gates and out in the street.

  “For what reason?” Onkel Willi demanded.

  The sergeant could not say, but he sent one of his men to open the gates and fetch the car back in. When it rolled up the driveway there was an SS driver at the wheel.

  Onkel Willi knew at once whom to blame for this transmutation. “This is Bienecke’s doing,” he told my mother. He asked the driver where Yakov was.

  “Wanted down at the SS, sir,” said the SS private.

  “No,” said Onkel Willi. “Wanted here!”

  And he jumped in and ordered the man to drive him to the Natural History Museum.

  Out of the back window, he waved at us once, absentmindedly.

  He came back early in the afternoon, flying into the house as if he did not wish to be stopped by children as he crossed the lobby. My mother and he locked themselves in the living room. I knocked at the door, but my mother told me not to enter. I heard Onkel Willi grow louder and, at last, dissatisfied with the consolations he was receiving from my mother, burst out into the hallway.

  His broad face was awesomely red and blurred and bloated with tears. He moved like a drunk, surging toward the door, but he balked when he saw me. Kneeling, he grabbed me by the shoulders and seemed to try to crush me literally. “You poor little soldier,” he said. “They have done something terrible, Radek. You should block your ears, darling. You should refuse to listen ever again to any of us.”

  His voice was hot, and astringent from the cognac my mother had fed him. Beginning to shed tears again, dreadful tears to see, tears which supersaturated his face and altered it beyond decency, he let go of my shoulders, put his arms entirely around me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. His lips seemed enormous and worked away at and overpowered my mouth. I thought he was trying to spit some unwelcome truth deep into my throat. So it was at first with a sense of rescue and delight that I saw with the edge of my vision the blue sleeve of my father’s coat and, more centrally to my confused sight, his kid-gloved hand descending firmly on Oberführer Ganz’s shoulder.

  “Please, please, Herr Kommissar,” I heard my father say, that tautness of his voice sounding welcome yet alien. Today, I thought, everyone around me has turned into a stranger. “I warn you,” father continued. “Today above all days is one when you should show a calm face. Believe me, Herr Kommissar!” He hauled Ganz to his feet. I could not raise my eyes, for I had been party to what I thought of as Ganz’s shameful act of the mouth. Because I did not know how it had happened, I carried the guilt for it.

  Ganz asked, shuddering with tears, his voice in fragments, “You or Bienecke?”

  My father did not answer, and Ganz raised his voice. “You? Bienecke? That bastard Harner? Some NCO?”

  “Control yourself, Willi.”

  “I trust it was you, Stanek. Since you are the only one with any humanity.”

  “No,” said my father. His voice had narrowed further. He seemed to have lost respect for the Herr Kommissar. “Of course it wasn’t me. It was done in an impersonal manner.”

  “Impersonal?”

  “A method tried in Minsk last month,” said my father in that adult shorthand or “shortspeak” I had been hearing all morning. “Pioneered by that famous barbarian Nebe of the Reich Security Central Office.”

  “What?” yelled Ganz. “What method?”

  “Dynamite,” said my father.

  I still avoided watching my father, but my eyes were on Willi Ganz, who opened his mouth, grabbed a pedestal on which a bust of Chopin stood, and vomited onto the carpet.

  I felt my father’s hand on my head. “Go and play, Radek,” he told me,
while Onkel Willi hawked and gagged.

  I went solemnly, not wishing to flee like the culpable, not breaking into a run in fact until I got to the stairs. As I ran, I performed the mental equivalent of feeling myself all over to discover what was left of the child I had been the hour before.

  At suppertime, I came downstairs again, wary as a hunter. My father was standing at the living-room window, a tumbler of vodka in his hand. He watched the Belorussian rain numbing and darkening the garden. These were the rains which had washed the Grande Armée and, two autumns past, given the Wehrmacht its first halt.

  I knew my father was waiting for the half past six news on the Deutschlandsender. Later on in the night he would attempt to pick up the more distant BBC news transmitted in Polish.

  He saw me. “Ah!” he said, as if meeting me after a long separation. He smiled and extended his hand to me, and obediently I went and stood by his side. “We’ll pull the curtains soon,” he said, “and put the lights on and have a happy evening. Cards? Shall we play cards? I’ve never taught you whist.”

  I said nothing, leaned against his hip, heard him finish the glass and give that sigh which comes with the first radiance of liquor in the blood. With his hand on my shoulder, I felt delivered from shame and sin.

  “Herr Hirschmann won’t be teaching you anymore. I’m going to have to find you a good tutor from somewhere in the city. As yet I don’t know who it will be.”

  “Where has Herr Hirschmann gone?” I was able to ask.

  “The Germans sent him east,” my father answered.

  I understood he was lying for my sake, and for the first time I felt a shadow of that onus he had taken on himself for the sake of Belorussian independence.

  23

  She had driven him home in his own car a little after eight. Her father had given her her taxi fare back to North Parramatta, which meant she had to come inside the house to call a cab. Delaney knew Gina had already left for work. He had been working so much overtime for Kabbel that his non-appearance would not have alarmed her. As he led Danielle past the gum trees in his front yard he had the feeling that if he admitted Danielle to the house and its minor secrets—the front-door key, as an instance, waited under a yellow bucket in the laundry at the back of the house—it would be as definite, as final an act as sleeping with her. Yet there was no avoiding it. “Could you get the key?” he asked her. “Under a yellow bucket in the laundry around the back.”

  She let them in. Even her use of the telephone, putting her mouth in the place of Gina’s, seemed to cement the business. He felt a shortage of breath in the shut house as she told the taxi where to come. “Quarter of an hour wait,” she told Delaney with a philosophic grin. She offered to make tea, but Delaney said he’d had enough at the hospital. If she was let loose in the kitchen among Gina’s things—so his suspicion went—life would no longer be controllable.

  She filled in the time until the taxi looking at his family photographs—the wedding photograph outside St. Nicholas’s, himself and best man Eric Samuels in sky blue formal wear, Gina, and her girlfriends beautiful in a brittle way in layers of taffeta, muscular pretty girls who would never dress like this again, unless it was for their own weddings. “Your wife is very pretty,” said Danielle. It sounded like more than politeness, like genuine and gracious envy of Gina’s well-organized substance. “She looks like a woman of character.”

  “That’s right,” said Delaney. “She’s an honest woman.” But he wasn’t there to praise Gina. Gina was praiseworthy without his opening his mouth, and the fact made no difference.

  Danielle inspected the photographs of all the teams for which Delaney since babyhood had made openings, found touch, backed up, got the ball to the centers. “It must be strange to have a game,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a game. Something that’s there year after year.”

  “You’ve got your game,” said Delaney. “Warwick and his scanners. Your father. You can’t tell me it isn’t a game. Trapping Stevo. It was like what your father told me about his old man. Hunting Russian guerrillas.” Delaney laughed. “Your crowd have a game. You’ve just got to see you all together in the control room to know that much.”

  She dropped her head toward one shoulder, making a brief and genuine try at seeing the business of Uncle Security as sport. “No,” she told him. “It’s too serious, I’m afraid.”

  “So is Rugby League when you’re in it for a living. And if I could make first grade next year my life would be transformed.”

  “More glamour?” she asked. In her mouth it sounded a pretty strange word.

  “More business opportunities. If you take them. You can always get a job as cellarman at the Leagues Club, but that’s a dead end unless you’d got the talent to rise. Besides I hate the atmosphere of clubs. Disinfectant and spilled beer and the pale stains on the carpet when some idiot cried ruth. I couldn’t spend my life there. No, there’s real estate or there’s even journalism or public relations.”

  “And we’d lose you at Uncle?”

  “Don’t hold your breath. Anyhow I’m carving out a career there teaching the boss’s daughter to read novels.”

  “Oh yes? Pretty dense, is she?”

  “Bright as a button.” He watched her as she stood by the hall door reading the Papal Blessing which hung there, colored scrollwork on a parchmentlike material, a colored disk with the Pope’s head on it above wording which invoked the Divinity to enrich the lives of Terence and Gina Delaney. His mother had sent away for it through old Father Rushton, and it had arrived—in spite of go-slows at the Redfern Mail Exchange—eight days before the wedding.

  It occurred to Delaney for the first time that the bearlike Polish Pope resembled an older Kabbel, had the same sandy Slavic face, basic issue to Eastern Europeans. Danielle Kabbel, one blond Slav, contemplated another, Christ’s Vicar who had lent weight and strength to the Delaney marriage.

  “Stanton reckons,” Delaney told her, “John Paul should have gone to Poland when they declared martial law and dared them to arrest him. That would have been real Solidarity.” Though Delaney knew that the reason Stanton idolized Lech Walesa was that he showed what a workingman could do, could shake a dark empire and get on the cover of Time. Solidarity, to Stanton, was the political equivalent of Star Wars; and the old warrior who possessed the force had let the hero down.

  Mrs. Delaney however loved the Polish Pope. He had delivered her of a tyranny she had lived under since childhood—the necessity of explaining to unbelievers why the Pope was always Italian. She forgave him, if ever she thought of it, for squibbing on high noon in Warsaw or Gdansk.

  Danielle shrugged. “He isn’t a free man,” she said. “Infallibility isn’t sufficient.” She had her father’s gift for uttering arresting sentences. You could wait a lifetime and not hear such a sentence from a slag like Gay Mansfield.

  Ouside, Danielle Kabbel’s taxi honked. Delaney got up from his chair even though she told him not to. At the door he dragged her into his arms and kissed her clumsily on the forehead. She held him at the stretch of her arms and inspected him with that gravity he saw in her all the time. She gave out a small yelp and two parallel tears ran exactly down her face; no messiness, no lack of symmetry, and barely a sound. He asked her why.

  “I wish you were a member of the family,” she said. She left the house. He hoped briefly that the cab driver wasn’t someone who knew him from the club. A girl his mother would describe as “dainty” running from Delaney’s place, tears in her eyes, at such an odd hour!

  He was still awake, sore in the shoulder and afraid, at noon. Training was to begin at five. He would go early and get Wallie the club masseur to treat the damage with all his old-fashioned liniments with their ancient labels featuring goannas and emus and hinting at Aboriginal and magical healing substances. Wallie would be good for the spirit. He treated the bodies of footballers as if they were the temples of the Lord.

  Danielle’s last sentence, when turned end to e
nd, meant nothing and meant too much. You could imagine a girl like that, bear-hugged by a footballer within arm’s length of wedding shots and of John Paul’s blessing, naming Gina as an impediment. But her regret wasn’t for Gina. It was because he was no Kabbel. He fell asleep at last wondering if she was saying—in the indirect, arse-up Kabbel manner—that she wished they were married, that he was incorporated in the Kabbel tribe in that way. He left unexamined, sitting in the dimmest corner of his surmises, the idea that she might be telling him she wished he was her brother.

  24

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Nov. 30, 1943

  Further meeting on Ganz problem today at Natural History Museum next door my office. Was amazed to find Kuzich present. Since his wife’s death our mayor has got by quite happily with occasional solace from Mrs. Dorovina, the department store owner’s wife, but today he looked bereaved, red-eyed, and badly shaven and angry with fate.

  “We’ve got him!” said Bienecke quietly to me, not wanting to seem to crow in front of the widower Kuzich, but his face alive with that excitement peculiar to police work, when events and people seem to cooperate to deliver up to you a long-cherished target. Have not relayed to Bienecke my disgust at excessive aspects of Ganz’s personality nor my horror at the foul pederastic kiss he imposed on Radek. Even if I were anxious for the Kommissar’s destruction I would not share such intimate concerns with Bienecke.

  It seems Bienecke has enough to go on from other sources though. Two months back, within an hour of what Bienecke still calls the Kaffee Aktion, Ganz turned up at Bienecke’s office to accuse him of murder and chicanery. Ganz had already met young Harner in the lobby and, seeing some blood on his trousers, called him a swine. Both officers—Bienecke and Harner—then in a condition of shock, since Bienecke’s foredoomed experiment had not gone well, and some of my men and a platoon of Lustbader’s had to be sent round to end the misery of sundry victims. To have a tear-stained hysteric turning up and yelling accusations at such a time was very hard to take for proud and narrow men like these two.