A Family Madness

by Keneally, Thomas

  The feat of recognition was even greater in view of the fact that Galina, my mother’s childhood sweetheart, was not dressed like a camp eminent, but nondescriptly, in the remains of a black suit. It went well with her black hair. I have to confess that I recognized her too through the melee of footballers. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, but also, as I admitted with a shock, tougher and so, visibly younger than my mother.

  Coincidentally but not remarkably so, ten years after their first meeting, the two of them had met up in one of Poland’s excellent gymnasia or high schools in the 1920s. There is a worldwide school joke—the joke about the outrageous student who reduces the pompous teacher to human dimensions by putting soda bicarbonate or any fizzing salt likely to react with water in the teacher’s chamber pot. I have heard Australians tell the same story, so that it must be a universal recourse hit upon by the right sort of student. The first time I heard it however, was during the reminiscences of my mother and Galina. Galina had of course been the one who introduced the salts into the headmaster’s chamber pot in the apartment on the top floor of the gymnasium. My mother had been her most enthusiastic applauder. And where had Galina been between this chamber-pot escapade and her appearance on the far side of a circle of grass occupied by Belorussian cops at play? She had been married to a Polish Volksdeutch who had been killed serving with a Ukrainian regiment near Millerova, west of Stalingrad. (I thought it appropriate then that anyone who had the beatitude to lie beside Galina should very appositely die a warrior’s death.) She had received her doctorate for a thesis on the old stone age inhabitants of the Belorussian swamps. Since then she had been teaching paleolithic history at the University of Breslau. Until those new stone age people, the Soviets, had driven her out of her classroom in Silesia.

  This personal history all absorbed hungrily, no one more hungrily than me, while we drank tea in our hut. “And do you have anyone now?” I was astonished to hear my mother ask.

  Galina answered in her superbly husky voice that her fiancé was in another camp, Backnang, fifteen miles along the valley. He was a Pole—he had taught with her at Breslau.

  My mother, indiscreet with joy, said, “We are all Poles!”

  Galina sucked on an American cigarette my mother had offered her—they were the ones to which my father had access in his stature as rations officer. She laughed not at the front of the mouth but with her throat, a sound which filled me with a delicious languor. “It’s better that we all be Poles,” she said. “The Allies have an idealized view of the Poles, who are all victims and martyrs. Whereas we Belorussians are considered either Soviet or fascist collaborators.”

  The weight of that sadly true caricature hung on my mother for a moment. Galina saw this and rushed to say, “But it doesn’t matter. Aside from that bomb the Americans hurled at the Japanese last week, the future is quite golden, Danielle. Believe me. Golden.”

  My mother had an urge in the following weeks to do favors for Galina. I was subtly pleased when Galina refused them, except for the occasional hospitality, glass of brandy, American cigarette. First my mother suggested she was sure her husband could arrange to have Galina’s Polish boyfriend moved down the valley from Backnang to Michelstadt. “But there are so many Poles there,” said Galina, “that he can teach for UNRRA. He also drives a truck to Stuttgart every week for UNRRA and collects me on the way through. Even if he came here and we married,” Galina continued, “I wouldn’t be allowed to live with him.”

  I shuddered at the frank statement of her desire for cohabitation with some Pole unknown to me.

  Similarly my mother offered to find her a job in the camp school, at least a part-time one. “They’ll never take me.” She laughed. “There are already too many Belorussian doctors of philosophy teaching the seven-year-olds.”

  And finally, as the autumn progressed and the dormitory huts began to display their potentialities for drafts, my mother decided that Galina must have an apartment of her own. But Galina again gutturally refused. “But I like the women in my hut,” she said. I knew my mother thought of them as crude, big-boned wives of crass Belorussian officers. But Galina could see the value of loud laughter among exiles. So throughout the winter she was content in the general dormitory and, by leave of the elderly French officer who commanded Michelstadt, with her weekly journey by truck to Stuttgart.

  I believe that Ostrowsky’s reason for asking my father to come to Michelstadt was to prevent it from becoming a stronghold of the papal gang, the Western faction, the Abramtchik-Redich push. It appears from his journal that by the summer of 1945 my father might have been disenchanted with both factions. But he was still on balance an Ostrowsky man.

  I would hear him talk to my mother however about how pleased he was that nowadays he did not do everything Ostrowsky asked him. His decision to stay with us in Berlin until the last (especially with my mother who would have been terrified to flee alone, with just Tokina and two children), his refusal of Ostrowsky’s request that he go west with Hrynkievich looking for Patton’s Army, had been one which placed the family above political duty. He may in fact have been a little guilty at not having traveled with Hrynkievich and therefore took uncommon comfort in, told with uncommon gusto, the story of how Patton’s military police, searching Dr. Hrynkievich, discovered in his pocket the ration card the SS had arranged for Ostrowsky’s Belorussians, a ration card bearing the sort of insignia likely to excite American counterintelligence officers, who were instantly called in.

  Much later Belorussian historians would regret the fact my father had not gone with Hrynkievich. My father would have acted as some brake on the man. As it was, the counterintelligence people used Hrynkievich’s ration card as a lever for extracting from him a picture of the cooperation between the Reich and Belorussian patriots. That description was apparently on file, and only such right-thinking allies as Major Knowles protected us from its consequences.

  In Michelstadt both sides understood there had to be a balance between Ostrowsky people and the papal gang, between Redich and my father. Redich was elected camp leader with the help of the votes of various policemen who had served under my father in the oblast of Staroviche. In return my father was appointed the camp’s senior UNRRA official. Behind this visible balance there must have been other arrangements, factional and personal, particularly personal ones, for my father was in the last year of his ambitiousness, and Redich would never lose his ambition till the day he fell from the train near Lidcombe station in the west of Sydney in 1955.

  Again, briefly, because of this apparently friendly balance and of my mother’s revival at the discovery of Galina, Michelstadt appeared to be a reasonable model of society. But as in the Regensburg DP Camp, between Eden and the Fall lay only the briefest interval.

  49

  At the height of summer the new coach arrived. His name was Barry Golder. In Delaney’s childhood he had been a famous ball handler and maker of bursts up the middle of the field. Now he was unbalanced by weight, had an alcoholic’s complexion, was earthy, jovial, crafty. They gave him a new house at Lapstone with a kidney-shaped pool, and he moved in with his blond wife and quiet daughters.

  He summoned Delaney to the club one evening. “Believe a bit of the tiger came out in you at the end of last season, Terry? I like a bit of the bloody old tiger, even though sillybuggers who get suspended make me ropeable. Listen, I’m bringing in a five-eighth from Brisbane. You know us Queenslanders. We can’t help ourselves doing things like that, just to show you buggers down here we still exist. He’s a year older than you and got heaps of talent. I’ll probably start with him, but one bad game and he’s out on his arse. I might be a Queenslander, but I’m not as fucking stupid as that, eh?”

  “One bad game, you reckon?”

  “Well, maybe one and a half. And the same rule applies to you. When we go north next month to have a trial run at Port Macquarie I’ll play you in the second half. You’re going to earn good wages this year, either way.”
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  These rumors of success came too late. They were barely a whisper of wind across the surface of his flesh. To maintain Gina whether she wanted it or not, to do the same for Stanton, to pay his scandalous rent and have cash in hand for the rescue, he would need to earn like an orthopedic surgeon.

  “Believe your marriage broke up last year?” Golder asked him halfway through a second beer.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Won’t wreck your concentration, will it?”

  “That’s when the tiger started.”

  “Bugger me!” said Golder. He began to laugh, and raised his glass. “Here’s to plenty of woman trouble for you then.”

  On the strength of this chance of riches, Delaney called the Parramatta private detectives Fielder and Drane. He’d employed them for a week the previous December, as Christmas bore down on him like a deadline. Through the realtors who had auctioned the Kabbel house in Parramatta, one of the agency’s employees, an earnest, sweaty man in his early thirties, stuck with the unpromising name Ralph Margin, exactly the sort of flawed being Delaney had feared would be given such a minor job, had found the lawyer who had handled the sale for Rudi. Margin had been unable to get a Kabbel forwarding address from the lawyer. It was the investigator’s suspicion that the lawyer would let it slip for a sum. He gauged the sum would be $500. Delaney authorized him to make the offer, but the attorney was offended, threatened to report Fielder and Drane to their professional organization, and threw the investigator out of the office.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Margin told Delaney. “It’s probably only a box number somewhere, and no one can watch a box number twenty-four hours a day. You’d have to be Kerry Packer to afford it.” Now Delaney called Ralph Margin and told him to offer someone in the lawyer’s office, a secretary or an articled clerk, $1,500. “So there is no embarrassment, you should deposit that amount with us first,” said Margin. “We would give you a receipt for it and return it to you if the transaction doesn’t take place.” That was the way a reputable business operated.

  Flying to Port Macquarie through choppy columns of humid air, Delaney had not yet received any definite answer from Margin. It was not a rowdy flight, like the one to Hawaii eighteen months before. These were first-graders, saving their chemistry for the game, not wasting it on noisy camaraderie or on the floral-uniformed stewardesses. Delaney sat beside Gorrie, the second-rower who would also be given half a game. Gorrie slept, sunlight jiggling up and down his face as the plane jolted past thunderheads. North of Newcastle, that depressed, depressing city of coal and steel, the coastline lay in primary colors below him. The beaches seemed immense and unpeopled. High plumes of white smoke rose out of the mountains—remote traveling bush fires. Along this coastline lay the escape route he would offer Danielle. It couldn’t be more than a few weeks now before the child was due. It would have its flight into Egypt, or Rockhampton, or some such place.

  The team were to eat at a seafood restaurant beside the water that night. It was something Golder had mentioned at every training session that week. Gorrie and Delaney were dressing for the dinner in their motel room, grunting as they eased their blazers on over all their muscular soreness, both of them with a competent second half behind them (67–7 over the local team), the local television news having just highlighted a sixty-five-yard movement in which they had both had a hand. They were ready to leave the room and go to meet Golder in the bar when Delaney saw the Stanton house on the screen. At first it seemed to him somehow a welcome familiar accompaniment to the afternoon the game had given him. He ran to the set and turned the volume up. A young television journalist, his back to the house, his eyes unmarred, was talking faster than Delaney wanted him to, getting the story through. Even on television the little house cried out for its tree.

  A man had shot someone. The “householder” had shot someone. It had been that morning. A prisoner from Emu Plains low-security prison farm had driven to Flemington markets in the company of a guard to sell a load of tomatoes. The truck had broken down on its return trip, not far from the prison farm gate, in fact in front of Stanton’s place. The guard had worked on the motor and sent the prisoner inside to ask the people in the house if he could use their telephone. The wife had explained her husband was asleep on the lounge in the same room as the telephone. The prisoner could use it if he was quiet. He was obviously a silver-tail prisoner and was in fact an embezzler with a year of his sentence to run (the television newsman supplied these details). The prisoner had been calling the garage at the farm when the husband awoke, surmised that the prisoner had invaded the house and was holding the wife hostage, withdrew a .38 pistol from beneath the lounge, and shot the prisoner dead. The husband had been taken away by Penrith police and, according to the boy newscaster, would be charged with murder. “Murder?” Delaney yelled at Gorrie. “That’s not bloody murder!”

  The wife had said (again the newsman talking) that her husband had been unemployed, and the risk of dangerous criminals breaking out of the prison farm had preyed increasingly on his mind. A young woman journalist interviewed the dead man’s wife at her home in Killara. The embezzler had two daughters aged nine and ten who had been looking forward to their father’s appearance at the next parole board hearing.

  “Looks like bloody murder to me,” said Gorrie.

  50

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  In the interests of finding a pattern to the confusing events of Europe’s first winter of peace in Michelstadt, I have consulted my sister Genia. She had then already begun to spin away from the gravitational pull of the Kabbelski family. The spin was in the direction of a French sergeant, Albert Pointeaux, only seven years older than her, though it was a gap which made him seem middle-aged to me. Genia, from the time she fell in love with Pointeaux, saw us therefore with something like an outsider’s critical gaze.

  I add her letter to this account.

  Paris,

  Jan. 27, 1984

  Dearest Radek,

  If I had half a brain, I would have understood but of course you would want to translate Father’s journals. You are a good son and a curious one, and I suppose that to translate a document is the next most intimate connection with it other than actually writing the damn thing.

  Needless to say, I remember that winter vividly. It was at a screening of Beau Geste in the recreation hall that Sergeant Pointeaux approached my father between reels and asked him would he permit me to sit beside him, with all the other French guards, in the second row. Albert, as you know, was not acting out of propriety, but on a dare from the other soldiers. Father told him to clear out.

  They knew each other already though. Albert did all the paperwork on UNRRA—quite self-educated, a man of natural talent. He had a senile commandant and a lazy and venal lieutenant called Pucheu, who let him do whatever he wanted as long as Pucheu himself got a cut. That’s why Albert will still say—though sensitive to my grief over Mother—that for him Michelstadt was as good as a university education.

  I thought Albert was wonderful from the start. You could all tell that I thought he was wonderful. Despite the loutish angle of his cap, the greased hair, the minute strand of black mustache. Despite all his legerdemain with cigarettes. I know now—I knew then but could not express it—that he could tell that we were a family marred by history, that it was compassion as well as honest lust which drew him to me.

  That winter some of the elder Belorussians, the ones who were too old for politics but had not wanted to live under the Soviets either, went to the commandant, Colonel Nouges, and complained that there were inequities in the distribution of rations and that some people were going hungry. The elderly wife of a professor of philology from Lwow died in early December of malnutrition, and ordinary camp inhabitants believed it was due to racketeering, not by Father but by Redich. A postmortem which showed that the old woman had a tumor of the stomach did not defuse the rumor. Colonel Nouges, the sort of old fool who only wants reassur
ance, called Redich and Father in to tell them it wasn’t true. Of course Father kept solidarity with Redich but was, I believe, secretly outraged.

  Father then approached Albert and discovered that Redich had been raiding the UNRRA warehouse, taking truckloads of goods for what Father would have called factional rather than national interests. Albert had covered up with the bookwork. He says my father raged at him. “Why didn’t you tell me right away! Redich has no authority. Etc. Etc.” But Albert says he did not want to buy into the conflict he could sense between the two wedges of Belorussians. He knew enough from his childhood in Montparnasse to understand that Redich and some of his heftier sergeants were the type of people who could arrange for disappearances. His instinct would soon be borne out by what happened to you. Albert didn’t want to die for Belorussian politics. I think his attitude supremely sensible!

  Father, the idealist, went to Redich and had a screaming row. In your dream world, halfway between John Wayne and Galina, you may not have noticed. But it was the talk of the camp, and among ordinary people it did Father great credit. He asked what in hell the Abramtchik faction, the papal gang, needed extra black market revenue for if they had such good friends in the French government, in General Anders’s Polish contingent, and in the Vatican? Some Ostrowsky people had also been beaten up in interfactional fights. Our father told Redich this sort of divisive nonsense was to stop. Otherwise papal gang people in camps dominated by the Ostrowsky faction would find life uncongenial.

  Meanwhile Albert, circling the camp on his old Czech 500cc motorcycle, continued to court me. What I was attracted to was that he was not a tragic and dedicated figure. He did not believe in tragedy, he did not pick his wounds like the Belorussians. He was an unheeding and generous lout—exactly what I wanted. He already foresaw a future—and he was more accurate in crystal gazing than any of the Belorussian dreamers in Michelstadt—in which we lived well and had no politics. In me, he was the liberation. He did not propose endless returns and exiles, coalitions, changed names, midnight flights. He promised a good time, and unlike most other men in the world, he delivered it.