A Family Madness

by Keneally, Thomas

  “Just strolling off with apologies. Like I said, haven’t seen Rudi for weeks.”

  “Danielle’s there still?” Delaney couldn’t stop himself asking.

  Stanton looked away, staring at a wall of team photographs, the slick-haired players of the fifties, the crew-cut footballers of the early sixties, and, from Vietnam on, a range of styles, the wild longhairs and those with unisexed locks. Stanton took stock of all these teams grinning, flashing the combined radiance of their expected triumph.

  “What about Danielle?” Delaney insisted.

  “Danielle’s pregnant,” said Stanton. “But listen, they’re not up in arms about it. I’d sit tight if I were you.”

  Delaney drank calmly. It was the word he had been waiting for though. Everything he’d thought solid—marriage, two runs in first grade—had run to water. His fatherhood dominated all. And there was this added in: Danielle would not protect herself from the other Kabbels, but she would protect a child.

  “It mightn’t be yours,” said Stanton.

  “Don’t tell me that, Brian. Don’t give me that incest bullshit. It’s not on. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Jesus, you don’t meet many men who want to claim a bastard.”

  Delaney imagined the child. It would be born fair. When it was two it would show its mother’s solemn smile. Joy briefly distracted him, as Stanton could tell.

  “Sling her a bit of money if you like. First-graders can afford that. But don’t turn your life upside down.”

  Delaney took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. It had always been such an unaccustomed denomination that its sandstone orange hue signified bounty to him. He pushed it toward the pocket on Stanton’s shirt.

  “Listen, let me—”

  “Not on your sweet life,” said Stanton, knocking his hand away. “Listen, I have my plans.”

  Delaney wanted to make friendly declarations—“I won’t let your kids go without or want things at Christmas.” But he knew Stanton couldn’t tolerate that sort of thing. Across the bar one of the heftier poker machines began to bleat like a siren and flash garishly. In imitation of all human forms of relief, hundreds of coins fell from its maw into its metal tray. A middle-aged man wearing a business suit looked across the bar at Stanton and Delaney, as if inviting them to share in his self-congratulation. An Australian hero. A jackpot winner.

  43

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Sept. 18, 1944, Berlin

  Have neglected journal. Busier here than ever in Staroviche or Minsk. Am treated as de facto housing officer by all wives of all members of Belorussian Council. Mrs. Hrynkievich wants me to complain to SS about her blocked cistern. Ostrowsky seems amused by my predicament. Told me, “See how much trouble you’re saving me!”

  Another major part of duty is dealing with Dr. Franz Hilger, the Foreign Office’s liaison with the SS on matters to do with emigrés and governments-in-exile. Hilger from the same mold as our old associate Kappeler. His doctorate is in humanities, like Kappeler’s, like Stankievich’s, for that matter. For some reason too long an association with the humanities, which are meant to make man subtle and humane, seems to stultify people. Hilger has trouble, given his lack of understanding of our history, in distinguishing us from Russians. In conversation with me, throws out such lines as “All you Russians show the same stubbornness!” Cannot understand, despite repeated explanations, why we will not affiliate with NTS, the Alliance of Russian National Solidarists, a council of aging White Russian officers who have waited here and in Paris for the Great Return, who thought it was at hand in 1941, and who for different reasons think it is at hand today. If returned to Moscow, they’d consider Belorussia their front garden, as they always have.

  “I want to bring all the Russian emigré groups under a single umbrella,” Dr. Hilger tells me, as if we’re being abstruse and untidy to oppose it. The fact that history, religion, and culture all cry out against such neat bureaucratic mergers means nothing to the man.

  Hilger also keeps sending round all the others—the Ukrainians, the Estonians, even a Dutch fascist government-in-exile, to look at our model operation. A united and factionless government-in-exile!

  Have grown to like and admire Abramtchik, whose office is along the corridor. Met there a German officer, Otto Skorzeny, famous for his rescue of Mussolini last year. Skorzeny apparently training young officers of Belorussian Defense Force for infiltration behind Soviet lines. This an indication that Ostrowsky considers all talk of Abramtchik’s Soviet connections to be mere talk. Otherwise would not make him minister responsible for such an enterprise.

  Drove out to Dahlwitz to look over this training camp with Abramtchik at latter’s invitation. Camp very impressive and intense. “I can create havoc along the Polish-Belorussian border,” says Skorzeny, walking us down the orderly paths among the pines. Felt an absolute lust, after the chaos and sourness of the city, to be here instead, in this well-scrubbed camp with its air of a mission, of certainty, of brave confidence—to stay here and learn encoding and how to destroy a railway bridge.

  Met squad who are going in first. They call themselves “Black Cats.” Led by young police officer from Vitebsk, Mikhail Vitushka, a fine type, a practical intellectual. He and his party, parachuted in, will stay there, operating from those same ancient forests which were the strength of the Soviet partisans, until the Allied armies arrive. In Staroviche there will be a Soviet police chief whose problems over the next year will mirror my recent ones!

  Abramtchik and Vitushka tell me Redich has been out here a lot to Dahlwitz discussing with the Black Cat squad how to set up secret organizations in the villages and towns. Apparently sees the relocating of the Black Cats into the Berezina forest as within his area of concern. Would be more useful if he applied himself to relocation of Mrs. Stankievich into an apartment of her choice. On way back home, Abramtchik began to speak to me quite freely about what he sees as Ostrowsky problem. “The Germans will train saboteurs for Ostrowsky, but will the Allies continue the training?” he asked.

  It had been such a pleasant day I felt emboldened to answer, “They will if you vouch for him.”

  Abramtchik laughed. “Can you see Pope Pius setting up a parachute school in the Vatican for an Orthodox Belorussian?”

  “I can’t see the Pope doing that for anybody.”

  “You’re wrong,” he told me. “The Pope has undertaken to be host within the Vatican to a training school for loyal Belorussian Catholics.” He began laughing. “I can show you the correspondence or arrange a meeting for you with the Papal Nuncio in Berlin.” He gestured with a hand, deliberately overdoing it. “We shall drop from the skies like angels!”

  Astounded at this news but did best to hide it.

  “I don’t want Ostrowsky to fritter all these chances we have,” said Abramtchik. Asked how Ostrowsky would do that. Abramtchik replied O. would do it by committing our 20,000 soldiers too fully to set-piece battles against the Americans or British.

  “I would be very grateful,” Abramtchik told me, “if as means of employing the Belorussian battalions are suggested to our good Orthodox friend by the War Ministry and the SS, you could inform me of the nature of such suggestions and directives. I take it you approve of the Vatican and the French, and even the Americans, ultimately training our men. If it’s to happen, I should know what pressures are being put on Ostrowsky by the Germans so that I can apply corrective pressure.”

  Implication is Ostrowsky is easy meat for the Germans. Abramtchik does not understand how O. fought Himmler for control of the Belorussian battalions. They now carry the title Waffen Sturmbrigade Belarus and are under Ostrowsky’s control. And all this, I felt like saying, achieved without reference to the Vatican! It is true though that the War Ministry wants to throw them in against Americans. It makes sense that Abramtchik be kept informed of real developments, not just of the developments Ostrowsky and Franz Kushel decide to pass on to other ministers at cabinet me
etings.

  Strangely, sensible decision to pass on intelligence to Abramtchik tastes like betrayal on the palate. And this despite fact Ostrowsky has betrayed me beforehand.

  44

  The house in Parramatta from which Uncle Security had operated carried a FOR SALE BY AUCTION sign with a date which had already passed. Diagonally across it a red and white SOLD sticker had been pasted, so that all the sign did now was satisfy the pride of the realtor. Delaney noticed the notation “4 B/rms” and suffered an image of the Gold and Blue pennant of the Sisters of Mercy declaring Danielle’s triumph in the fifteen-year 800 meters. The sweat and tension of that contest, forgotten by now by the nuns themselves, struck him like a fragrance, like something uncorked she had left behind her when packing up.

  He drove over the Blue Mountains the next Saturday morning. The lies were on again: He told Gina it was a conditioning run at Katoomba for the whole team, who had a bye that weekend. It was credible. Some of the forwards needed it. He crossed the mountains morbidly. The switchbacks above Lithgow, which he had once greeted as a trying ground, going into them with a Nikki Lauda style, terrified him, looked set to silence him before he’d spoken to the two women who had to be spoken to. When the suicide bends at last brought him down to the plains, he turned north. Either side of the road, which soon turned to dirt, great gray ledges of sandstone rose covered with dull green foliage—“Ancient, ancient,” as Gina had said at the lighthouse. Farms looked large and vacant, the sort of farms at whose core, in the farmhouse kitchen, sat a crotchety owner with a shotgun handy. It had never been a great place for crops and cattle, but that gave it its grandeur and a loneliness which, if you were pushing down this rock-based red-dust road for the fun of it, you could find lovely and intriguing and say to your wife, “I wish we had a weekend cottage here!”

  This was the country you would choose to hide in too if you were certain the world would unravel. It was easy to believe this would remain no matter what else befell the balance of the world. He stopped at the pub at Newnes to ask about the Kabbels, and a tanned cooperative drinker wearing a blue undershirt drew a map for him. “Little shack on two acres,” said the drinker, drawing a roof.

  “He’s got more than two acres now though.”

  “Not yet. Bought up all the country behind, Heather’s Gully it’s called. But they haven’t got round to signing contracts.”

  The road got so rough Delaney wondered how the stone marks and the dust on his car could be explained to Gina. The cliffs narrowed in to verge the road, gum-tree roots grew thick and sinewy across its surface, and his car ascended and descended platforms of rock. At last he had to leave it for fear his sump would be punctured, his muffler cracked. He began to jog, watching his feet. A professional shouldn’t run in uneven country, but the breath of night was in this defile. He wanted to be back at the car by dark.

  At a point where a cliff rose on his left and another fell away below him on his right, he came upon the gate. It sported an orderly sign, good lettering, none of the consonants running from too much turpentine. R, W, D, S KABBEL—TRESPASSING PROHIBITED. You could vault it, but was there a minefield beyond? The Kabbels had taught him to ask questions of that kind. You could jiggle the lock, but would it leave you with your thumb intact? He was a professional footballer and his limbs were his fortune. Even if they weren’t, the gate terrified him, and he looked over the edge of the road, into a gully already filling with turquoise shadows, and felt an urgency to get out, wash his car, sit with Gina all evening.

  For the child’s sake he levered himself upright on the crossbar of the gate and looked down into a widening valley, a natural pen, a perfect pound, gulch, hole in the wall. Down in the bed of the pound, sheltered by she-oaks, an old low-sunk farmhouse waited with vacant windows. No smoke came from its chimney. There were no farm boots lying around drying on its veranda. Behind it on a rise sat a newer structure—cement-based, steel-framed—you could see the steel rooftree emerging from the eaves. Secure, well-ventilated, waterproof. “If they store it anywhere damp,” the CID man had told him, “you’ll be playing five-eighth in a wheelchair.” But the Kabbels had too much professionalism to store it somewhere unsafe. Especially if the kingdom afterwards depended on it.

  People would drag their desperate limbs up this road only to have them blown off by Warwick. They talked in those terms, bearded and well-built young men Delaney saw on the satellite news, infecting the world with their cool blue-eyed panic. They had no doubt that once the Wave struck or the sun fell they would have to defend their chosen acre against those other members of the race who stumbled up to their fence. They couldn’t wait. You needed a wealth of landmines, plastique, shotgun pellets, because the darkness—or so they boasted—would last an age.

  Delaney began to call but knew there was no one there. His voice went racing away into that gorge beyond the house, into that unownable country on which the contracts had not yet been signed.

  45

  He met Doig in the new coffee shop opened in Main Street that winter by two women rumored to be lesbians and so, in Penrith terms, fantastic creatures. Doig, boyish in his white shirt with the crosses on its collar, seemed to enjoy a rapport with them he lacked with many of his older parishioners. “Their carrot cake is a triumph,” he confided to Delaney, and Delaney dutifully ordered some.

  After a handsome girl in overalls and head scarf had served them, Delaney tried to explain that Doig was the only neutral party he could talk to. He rushed to say he did not seek confession, or what they called these days “the rite of reconciliation.”

  Doig put a firm hand on Delaney’s elbow and spoke urgently through the residue of crumbs which had half glued his mouth up. “Wherever two friends talk to each other,” he said, “that is a rite of reconciliation.”

  It was September, and what Danielle called “his game” was over. Delaney had played in the semifinals—again it was only the third-graders who carried the honor of Penrith to the Cricket Ground. There were rumors that Alan Beamish, the first-grade coach, would be sacrificed in the manner of unproductive generals in armies and football teams, would be replaced by an old international from Queensland, and would take into exile in his hometown, Cobar, the blame for the failure of all strategies. He would also take with him a regard for Terry Delaney. After Deecock’s fumbling season, a new coach would probably make it one of the conditions of his contract that Terry be let go, and being unfamiliar with the reserves, would probably have some Queenslander in mind as a replacement.

  This scale of development would have once put Delaney into a fever. Now it seemed a minor matter. What was significant was that the Kabbels had vanished from the earth. On weekends he tried to trace them at the pub at Newnes, but they were not in residence in their sandstone canyon. Yes, said all the drinkers, contracts had been signed, settlement had taken place. Did any of them know if the Kabbels had used a local attorney to handle the purchase for them? A lawyer from Lithgow say? No, none of them knew that.

  It was clear to Delaney that the place in the wilderness was reserved only for after the catastrophe. So, where were they dug in now? He called information for Sydney and Penrith every day in the hope a telephone had been connected. Now and then he would call a string of county councils. Waiting for the Wave, the Kabbels would need electricity. He would pretend to be a clerk in a rental company. As he told the story, one R. Kabbel had applied for a rental agreement on a refrigerator and he wanted to know if R. Kabbel paid his electricity account punctually. With some councils it worked, but there were no Kabbels, no Uncles, not under any initials. No Kabbels at all. No Kabbels switching lights on anywhere.

  Delaney explained all this to Doig. His coffee grew cold as Delaney stated what had to be done. He had to leave Gina. Even if the Kabbels had disappeared forever—and he knew they hadn’t—the claim of Danielle and the baby made Gina’s life awful, absolutely bloody degrading.

  “Claim?” asked Doig. “What sort of claim?”

  “To be
rescued,” said Delaney. “You know. From the other Kabbels.” The urgency claimed him once more, making acid in his stomach as he spoke. “Rudi Kabbel believes there’ll be something—a Wave or a flood or some damn thing—which will finish off the known world. Then the Kabbels will be king. He’ll breed—or the brothers will breed—from his own daughter. The idea of that sort of thing is in the bugger’s head already. Where does that put my child, Andrew? Eh? Tell me that.”

  Doig asked the usual questions. If the Kabbels thought like that, was he sure the child was his?

  “It’s certainly mine,” he said.

  “Why certainly?” asked Doig. “From what you say …”

  Delaney felt he could not convey his instincts about Danielle, not to a priest or even to a swinging heretic like Doig.

  “Gina can live on if the marriage finishes. It’s the other two who don’t have a future.”

  Doig said, “Are you telling me you’re going to give up a marriage so that you can dedicate yourself to a search for people who might have gone anywhere—Tasmania, New Zealand? They’re both good places to await the end of the world in.”

  “No. The Kabbels are still here. They’ve bought land on the other side of the mountains. For when it happens, you know. And it won’t happen. So what will Rudi do then?”

  Doig groaned. It struck Delaney for the first time that Doig might be a man of compassion and not just a fashionable priest in an unfashionable parish. “You may have to leave this girl and her child to destiny, Terry. You have a marriage contract, and that is binding. Whereas your responsibility to the girl is vague.”

  “No,” Delaney said. “Sorry. It’s the other way around. For Christ’s sake, it’s the kid, don’t you see? I can’t let it be born into that lunatic’s family.”

  “What if Gina had a child?” Doig seemed for a second pleased with himself for coming up with this new and unsettling idea. “Yours? What would that do to your plans?”