A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  They halved a can of beer between them, and it was only as Stanton walked out to the car with Delaney that he began to talk about the questions raised by their encounter with Rudi Kabbel.

  “Bloody marvelous. Here’s a bloke who comes from a place no one’s heard of. Below Russia. I watch the bloody Eye Witness News like a hawk, but I never heard of Below Russia. And here he is giving us lectures about bloody buffaloes, and employing blokes who all wear this bloody wog uniform of his. My people’ve been in this country four generations and never worked for themselves. Beats me how the bastards are able to do it. Straight from Below Russia into a business of their own.”

  “They’re better at business, that’s all,” said Delaney.

  But Stanton went on talking as if there were a secret he hadn’t been let into, as if he’d been denied a vote.

  Across the paddocks, from the direction of the prison farm, came the sound of a tractor. Stanton glanced away briefly at it, and when he looked back at Delaney the grievance in his eyes had grown.

  “Makes me aware I’m a bloody fool,” said Stanton.

  But when Delaney was on his own, driving home to Penrith, he understood that Kabbel had enlarged the night rather than narrowed it down.

  3

  It became a regular matter—perhaps four nights of the week but certainly three—for Delaney and Stanton to emerge from the laneway behind Franklin’s supermarket and find Kabbel seated in his baggy uniform at the picnic table by the bandstand. A thermos and an array of rolls, slightly more than even a large man could eat at that hour of the morning, that security man’s lunch hour, waited loosely wrapped on the table before him, as if for sale, as if Kabbel would—as Stanton said—really prefer to be one of those wog delicatessen owners. Eventually even Stanton let himself drink a full cup of Kabbel’s coffee. It was full-bodied and very sweet, a strange robust sweetness. Delaney found himself considering the stuff distinctively Belorussian, a sort of proof-by-beverage of the validity of Belorussian claims to an identity.

  “Security,” Rudi Kabbel used to say during these meetings, “is the wave of the future.”

  Delaney noticed that Kabbel often talked in terms of waves, cleansing fires, earthquakes which would leave the earth vacant and pure. But before that great wiping of the slate, the future of security was enormous. Kabbel had been to a security seminar in Los Angeles and reported from that megalopolis that there security was an industry employing hundreds of thousands. A Beverly Hills mansion, for example, could provide three or four security men with employment. The same was about to happen here, for Sydney was no longer the innocent and distant city to which his father had immigrated. “The wave that breaks on the West Coast this afternoon breaks on Bondi Beach tomorrow morning,” Kabbel would say.

  Delaney’s father often echoed Kabbel, though Delaney senior would never meet the White Russian. Delaney’s father remembered Penrith before there were traffic lights on the Great Western Highway. Property lay all night unprotected under the wide rustic moon—for in those days Penrith was considered to be beyond the western limits of the city. What had been in the childhood of Delaney senior the earth’s most modest and least thrustful car yards, pharmacies, furniture stores now however required guardians.

  Stanton continued hostile to Kabbel’s Eastern European palaver, but Delaney enjoyed the meetings. Granted, it was not hard to interest a security man, who apart from a private in the infantry had the most boring job on earth.

  “A good life, gentlemen,” Kabbel said one night in his perfect though vaguely accented English. “Society has achieved the point of decay where it needs our gentle services, but not to the extent that we cannot sit here by the bandstand in the true dead of night and eat our red cabbage and sausage. We carry weapons we never use unless, as happens with some security men, we take casual work holding up Westpac branches. But imagine this: The ice cap in Antarctica melts and raises the level of the sea by seventy meters, destroying the banks, which you notice are always coastal institutions. Foothills become beaches, currency has no meaning—it has no meaning now, for that matter, is kept aloft by a faith which makes belief in the Virgin Birth, say, a small matter. When this happens, no man can pose as Mr. Security.” He bit into a roll. Then he asked, “Do Castle Security let you take your guns home with you each day, gentlemen?”

  “That’s the company’s business,” said Stanton.

  “Ah yes. It is certainly that. The company’s business.” At that he laughed a little, as if he had agents who kept him posted on Castle’s laxities.

  “So you take all your men’s guns back off them at the end of each shift?” Delaney asked him.

  “I have to. I cannot afford to cultivate friends in the police force who will turn a blind eye. I cannot afford to have my company’s weaponry used in domestic disputes and other private enterprises. Two men like yourselves don’t worry me. If left to my own devices I would say to you, Take home your firearms. This industry however is full of disappointed policemen and deluded cowboys.”

  In the subsequent silence, Delaney knew Stanton would speak. “I used to be a copper,” Stanton murmured at last. “And I’m not bloody-well disappointed. Retired on a disability allowance.” Stanton often said that, implied a pension or insurance. Delaney knew by an accidental reference by Denise Stanton that there was no such leeway in the Stantons’ life, that Brian and Denise Stanton and their two daughters, the dreamer and the bouncer, lived without any special benefit from the state of New South Wales. It was a harmless conceit of Stanton’s though, and Delaney would not betray it to Kabbel.

  “Disability,” Kabbel said. It sounded like fraternal concern.

  “Nothing serious,” said Stanton.

  “So,” said Rudi Kabbel, “you’ve had this valuable professional experience?”

  “Too right I have. What about you?”

  “Not me,” Kabbel confessed. “I could say the closest I got to any police force was when my father was chief of police in the city of Staroviche in Belorussia. I don’t think the statutes there bear much resemblance to those of New South Wales.” He proffered his thermos of coffee in Delaney’s direction. “You, Terry?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I meant, have you had police experience?”

  “No, Rudi. I’m too young.”

  Kabbel laughed at that.

  Stanton said, “He’s only filling in time between football matches.”

  They all laughed, Delaney especially, since he knew how true that was. When people say that to someone like Delaney a sport is a religion they are uttering something more than a metaphor. A sport could be to people like Delaney not merely a sect but a cosmology, a perfected model of an imperfect world. Rugby League was a game whose laws had been codified by workers in the forlorn north of England. Miners and mill workers of Bradford and Wigan, Hull and Warrington were invaded by that peculiar genius which concerns itself with the serious business of human games, and produced what was to Delaney the supreme code, a cellular structure composed of thirteen players which mimicked life and art and war so exactly that it became them. Delaney had all the mental attributes necessary to the professional athlete. The mystery of why his talent was not greater was one he accepted together with the other mysteries. These others included the passion and dignity of Gina, the grace of the lemon-scented gum, the literalness of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ (since Delaney was of Irish stock), and the question of why the Holy Spirit should descend upon slew-voweled Yorkshiremen meeting in a second-rate commercial hotel in Bradford in 1888 to decide on rules by which workingmen could play and be paid for time they took off work to glorify the game.

  Delaney’s talent, though not of national note, was adequate to double what he earned from Castle Security. The poker machines in Penrith Leagues Club, smelling acrid with the spilled beer and exhaled tobacco of gamblers, and fed eight hours a day with twenty-cent coins—the duckbilled platypus aswim on one side, the monarch whose ancestors had oppressed Delaney’s ance
stors on the other—these mechanisms were largely what paid for Delaney’s occasional brilliance at five-eighth.

  Delaney never mentioned his earnings as a professional League player to Stanton because he knew Stanton had to manage out of his wage, had no margin. The scar tissue which showed fish-white on Stanton’s chest and abdomen went entirely uncompensated by the state, and the superannuation he had brought with him from the police force had gone into the Stanton cottage.

  Stanton was to Delaney an example of how a life could be destroyed by an unlucky passion. Delaney intended to suffer no such unlucky passions in his own life.

  Stanton had been a constable in Petersham, a suburb of solid old terraces which had begun life as an enclave for British artisans but which, when Stanton worked there, housed men and women of sixty-seven nationalities, many of them volatile both in private affairs and in political memory. Like Kabbel, but sometimes less rationally, they remembered the intricate wrongs of their racial histories. The Greeks remembered what the Turks had done, as did the Armenians. The Christian Lebanese spat at the shadows of Muslim Lebanese. Egytian milk-bar owners mourned Sadat and cherished a memory of the hubris of the pyramids. Croatians told their daughters not to talk to Serbians, and in coffee shops Serbians muttered complicated curses at Croatians. The domestic argument was run in the same full-throated manner as were ethnic politics. Policemen representing Anglo-Saxon law were faced daily with mad-eyed Mediterranean husbands who believed in a tribal code which said that a wronged husband had the right to impale an unfaithful wife.

  Stanton was the young partner of a middle-aged senior constable called Gorman on the day they looked into a complaint from a number of neighbors in a row of Edwardian cottages. Between spells of work, a Serbian shift worker had been loudly beating his wife over the past two days.

  Gorman, said Stanton later, relating the incident to Delaney, was out to lunch, tuned off, bored, and too fat, with a tendency to beat his own wife but less flamboyantly than Serbs do. Constables Gorman and Stanton approached the house believing they knew what to expect—a peasant baggage of a woman, face bruised with tears and blows, and a dark Slavic banshee of a husband uttering curses even a police translator might find beyond him. Gorman would sit the wife down and try to get a statement from her, while Stanton would, as matter-of-factly as he could, remove the kitchen knife from the husband’s hand, wave a truncheon at him, and tell him that in countries where cricket was played they had Family Law courts for dealing with the matters which in more primitive non-cricket and non-Rugby nations were dealt with by marital disembowelment. And all of it would be a waste of breath, and within a week Gorman and Stanton, or two like them, would be called back to the terraces for a second loud conjugal bout.

  It was early evening when Gorman and Stanton knocked on the door. At last it was opened by a Serbian girl with a distended lower lip and bloody mouth. The two policemen at the door saw these injuries for an instant only. The girl raised a blood-soaked tea towel to her lower face, lifted her head, and looked over her threshold as if defying their pity. The house was silent. The husband had already left for his shift at a tire factory in Balmain. They would be able to ask the Balmain police to call in there and strong-arm him. Stanton thought that if the husband’s exit from home that evening had any of the style the girl-bride showed at the door, it must have been quite a scene.

  Neither Gorman nor Stanton was in a hurry to leave the house once she let them in. They sat in the kitchen with her, and she spoke clearly through her damaged lips, which at last she let them inspect but not treat. Her English was first class; she had taken courses at the University of Belgrade. Her husband was of country stock but an engineer. It was very hard for him to get qualified in a new country. That was what made trouble between them—jealousy was his only way, she said, to ease the boredom.

  “She sits there at a kitchen table,” Stanton later confided in Delaney, “with a mouth like raspberry bloody jam. Not touching the tea because it hurts her too much but not letting us know that. I mean Gorman, she wouldn’t want to share the sleeves out of a vest with a bloody yobbo like Gorman, and she certainly doesn’t want to let him into the secret that she’s in pain. We suggest taking her to the outpatient clinic for some stitches, but she says offhandedly that a million bloody Serbs were killed in the war and that she doesn’t think a cut mouth would kill her. Then she has to excuse herself to go and spit blood down the loo—she moves off as though she’s going to a bloody Government House investiture. And this bloody awful dickhead Gorman says to me while we’re waiting in the kitchen, ‘We could both get our end in here.’ I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘her old man’s gingered her up and she’s ready to go.’ I told him if he suggested it I’d report him. I mean he spent an hour a day at the cathouse down near the railway, rooting himself stupid—or stupider more like it. Our station took thirty-five percent of that place, and the young blokes used to have this joke about Gorman eating the proceeds. And now he wants to get his putrid bloody end into this absolutely grade-A Serbian girl. I couldn’t stand it—I stamped round the bloody kitchen telling him I’d rupture him. He got very cranky and we left quickly, without giving Danka much good advice. Who were we anyhow? She had the best advice she could possibly get just from her bloody genes.”

  The next evening Stanton went back to Danka’s house to give her some home-grown legal counseling on her position under the common law of assault. We have the Code Napoleon in Yugoslavia, she explained, looking at him limpidly over her healing lips. “The way she said it,” he would later tell Delaney, “it sounded like a bloody liqueur or something. It made you want to travel.

  “I was gone a million for her,” said Stanton. “I thought of leaving poor bloody Denise. Danka thought of leaving her old man. His name was Sima, but at the factory they called him Steve. Danka and I used to daydream we’d shoot through to northern Queensland and farm or run a little country shop, but she kept saying, ‘I have to see Sima qualified as an engineer first.’”

  The affair lasted four months. One morning Stanton got a call from her—she wanted him to come to her place. She sounded demented, and he knew that that was uncharacteristic, that a cool fury was her nature. He had known from his visit there the evening before that Sima and some other Serbs had chartered a boat for fishing that day, and would probably be at the time of Danka’s call a reckless number of miles out in the variable currents off Sydney Heads.

  It was summer by now, and the door of the terrace stood open. Stanton went into the deep shade of that hallway. These houses were built not with regard for Australian light and sun but on the British model, as if they were meant to keep out the mists and intensify the dimness of a Midlands winter’s day. Stanton, coming in out of the full brassiness of the day, had not been able to see much as he loped up the hallway, confident of his power to soothe the girl. He called out her name as he went and found her in the kitchen sitting at the table. There was a strange lack of any answering sound or gesture from her. Stanton laid the keys of the patrol car down on the kitchen table and put both his hands on her shoulders.

  He saw six or seven men jogging up the hallway. As they emerged into the kitchen they stood still. Stanton was aware that at least four of them carried kitchen knives, or perhaps the knives with which they had intended to gut the day’s catch. Stanton would never discover what old loyalty or threat they had exploited to force her to set him up. He tried to get his .38 out of its stiff leather holster, but by then Sima had stepped up and put a knife in his chest. Sima muttered away as he plunged the knife in a dozen times.

  “I was in this cold tingly shock,” Stanton would relate. “It was the grating on the ribs I really found bloody disgusting.”

  It seemed to Stanton, halfway through this torment, that Sima had in mind an exact blood tax and did not intend to kill him unless it was more or less by accident. Toward the twelfth thrust, said Stanton later, confiding in his friend Delaney, Sima’s Yugoslav fishing mates began
to crowd in, to restrain him from dealing Stanton some coup de grace. The bastard was throughout, said Stanton, cool as a bloody cucumber, and Stanton could remember Danka saying something like that, that he just mumbled away, and that it was always her cries which made the neighbors dial for the police.

  Sima stepped away at last. Stanton inspected his own tattered and bloody uniform and began weeping and yelling threats. “I thought, Malicious damage to a police bloody shirt. I didn’t even think of using my gun. I still didn’t believe I’d been stuck a dozen times. An exact dozen, you know, three for every month of bloody rapture. But at the time I didn’t feel like he’d done me much damage. I was really hurt that Danka could give me up like that, but you know … marriages are very strong, stronger than the buggers that are in them will ever let on. If you’re coming in from outside there are rules they don’t tell you. You might get into the wife’s bed, but she doesn’t let you see the rule-book.

  “I wandered off down the hallway yelling how I’d be back with the whole fucking Central Western Metropolitan Division, but I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, no way. The walls began to move but I hung on. I didn’t want old Superintendent Monty Walsh to find me stuck like this and laid out on Danka’s hall carpet—he’d know what I’d been up to.

  “I came out of the door and the sun nearly flattened me. I got to the wrought-iron gate, creaked it open, creaked it shut, bled my way across the pavement to the patrol car, and found I’d left the bloody keys on her kitchen table.” His fear of seeing Danka again was worse than any concern he had about being further knifed or falling on the carpet in a coma. He crept up the corridor, no more wanting to re-enter the familiar musks of that kitchen than the hosts wanted to have him. He called twice, “Excuse me, I’ve left my keys.” When Sima appeared and thrust the keys into his hand, he suffered a flush of gratitude so sharp it nearly took his consciousness.