A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Early in the third week they set their alarms for 2 A.M. and went down to the park to see Kabbel.

  6

  Rudi Kabbel’s business was run from a control room in the front of his old house in Parramatta. The room was brightly painted and had an air of welcome. To come in there after a few weeks of being jobless was a bit like coming home; even Brian felt that. It looked like a professional place too, a good place to bring potential clients in the daytime and say, “This is where we operate.” There were some easy chairs, a Spanish-style table with copies of Guardian on it—the Association magazine. At one end of the room, on a proper computer table, was a computerized alarm receiver already switched on. The code numbers of various clients showed up iridescent in yellow on a black screen. A wire led from the computer to a discreet white siren set high up on the wall. In the corner stood a radio transmitter. On the wall opposite the ornately barred window, a sturdy arms cabinet was fixed.

  Driving down to Kabbel’s earlier, Stanton had said, “I hope to Christ this doesn’t turn out to be hole-in-the-corner operation, with a two-way radio stuck in the corner of a bloody garage or a laundry.” Delaney had feared it too. Businesses like that came and went. Winged ants in September were less transient. Kabbel’s house though, double-brick, Federation style, looked like a permanent seat of business.

  Kabbel welcomed them eloquently and showed them round the room. The two Kabbel boys came in in their turquoise blue uniforms, the one named Warwick, whom Delaney and Stanton had met recently over a pile of BMW hubcaps, and his younger more compact brother. They signed the gun register and took their weapons for the night. The young one took the normal .38 service revolver, but Warwick loaded and put in his holster the weapon which was an infallible sign of gun-happiness—a Magnum .357.

  “Danielle,” said Kabbell, “is still packing the washing machined.” Stanton and Delaney looked at each other. “My daughter,” said Kabbel. “She keeps the office. A wonderful girl. The boys are, as I told you, named with hard-core Aussie names, but Danielle bears my mother’s name. My maternal grandparents were Francophiles—they loved the French.”

  “I know what it means,” said Stanton. “You don’t have to explain every second bloody word for my sake.” (“I was a Croato-bloody-phile,” Stanton would say on the way home.)

  Kabbel began to explain the scope of his business. Two hundred and twenty clients, but most of them in the twenty-five-dollar-a-week range. Now he had taken on a chain of fast-food chicken franchises—Golden Style. They were concerned about systematic damage to their premises, were certain it was engineered by a competing company.

  “Damage?” asked Stanton. He didn’t like the word.

  “Minor gestures—tipped garbage bins. The car park of the branch at Rooty Hill strewn with refuse. A stone through a window. It’s guerrilla warfare at that lower end of the chicken market. Golden Style feel that their former security company failed to patrol energetically enough, and that’s all they ask of us—surveillance and energetic patrolling. It is not required, Mr. Stanton, in a world where so many genuine causes exist, that you endanger your life for Golden Style.”

  It was with the flavor of those words in his mind, the redolence of “Golden Style,” one of those perfect names which are so much richer than the product they attach to, that Delaney first saw Danielle Kabbel. She came in carrying a hardcover book and a notepad, as if she habitually studied while manning—womanning, personning, whatever the feminists wanted it called—the radio. Like the younger of her brothers she bordered on being small. Like him she was perfectly made. And blond—the family of the Kabbels had that blondness gene in a big way. There was a delicate and beautiful furze on her lower arms. Golden Style.

  Kabbel performed the introductions.

  “Reading?” Delaney asked her, awkwardly but in a way that indicated—he hoped—a sympathy for books.

  “I’m taking a novel course at the WEA,” she told him perfunctorily, and then showed how their system worked. If an alarm was activated on any of the client premises the computer screen displayed the code for that particular client; and in case she was asleep (Delaney had an image of her cheek down on her book, seated sleeping at the computer desk) or in case she was out of the room, the siren on the wall went off. She then called one of the patrolmen on the radio and he inspected the particular site. If a peripheral inspection indicated an intruder, she said, then she called the police and the owner. And that’s it, she told Delaney and Stanton. The glamorous side of the business.

  “And when do you sleep?” Delaney wanted to know.

  “Generally between three o’clock and dawn,” she told him, placing a hand over her smile to keep her privacy. “I’m like my father,” she said. “Belorussians never sleep. It’s metabolic.”

  “We’re like that bison I mentioned, gentlemen,” said Kabbel. “We sleep on our feet.”

  “Oh,” murmured the girl, looking up from the radio, “he’s already pushed Belorussian wildlife down your throats.”

  On the way home, Stanton looked out at the sulphurous lights burning above the expressway. They always reminded Delaney of migraine. “A nice little piece, that Danielle, eh?”

  PART TWO

  7

  137 Ave de Suffren,

  75724 PARIS

  Cedex 15

  August 3, 1982

  Dearest Radislaw, Radek, Rudi, or whatever they call you there, I hope this letter is not too unwelcome. I was moved to write it after I met Frau Zusters—remember her?—in Berlin this summer. Albert has an interest in a string of supermarkets in West Germany—“Tante Marthe” they’re called. If a housewife spends more than 65 marks she is given a blow-up plastic model of a cozy-looking woman called “Tante Marthe.” Albert got the idea from a chain in California in which he has an investment.

  Here we are, brother and sister, and haven’t written to each other in years, since Father died, God help him, and I talk about inflatable damned dolls, as if it were the purpose of the letter. The doll came up though because of its resemblance to my memory of Frau Zusters. I am now older than widow Zusters was when we were sheltered in her house and I still consider myself a desirable woman—you’d say that’s always been my problem. I make the point only as a reflection of the fact widow Zusters then probably still saw herself as a woman in her prime, even though my memory of her bears a close resemblance to a silly Tante Marthe doll.

  So during our Berlin visit this summer it played on me: Who was in that house these days? Was it still there? Perhaps the Russians destroyed it in those last few days? It’s age, I think, working on me, and it’s made worse by the fact we had lived through too much fatal history before we were fifteen. I could imagine myself now going back to see the DP camps at Michelstadt or Regensburg the way people go back to an old school. Fortunately those two alma maters—or almae matres—see how well Herr Hirschmann and Miss Tokina taught me before, in their different ways, they both “went east”?—fortunately Regensburg and Michelstadt, with all their camp spivs and operators, no longer exist. All the Displaced Persons have been Placed; Europe is finished with that particular piece of its gardening. I can still however make a fool of myself and go looking for Frau Zusters.

  The old house is what passes these days for an easy limousine drive from our hotel near the Europa Center. And you know, I found her without any trouble. The house is divided now, not into two apartments as in our day when half Berlin was bombed out, but into four. Frau Zusters occupies one and rents the other three out to young lawyers and businessmen and their growing families. She has been widowed a second time, so perhaps the dear old thing was a faster mover than she seemed to us to be. Her mind is clear as crystal. She reminded me of the day when we all went and lined up for her 300 grams of meat and that squad of kids turned up and dragged the dentist out of his surgery and beat him up for being defeatist. She told me that I sat on the park fence that day yelling, “I’m going to go and live in Paris.” “And you do,” she said. “You do.”


  She took me to the cellar because she said she had something to give me. She had kept in a trunk all Father’s journals. She apologized that the cover of two of them had grown a little mildewed. I didn’t tell her I was ignorant of the fact that Father had been a diarist, but I realized immediately he was exactly the sort of fellow who would write up a journal. He was vain enough—no, I’m not being a bitch, I use the term forgivingly—and really believed that he lived on what he would have called the cutting edge of history. And he thought we’d be all coming back through Berlin pretty soon, when the Allies turned on the Soviets. He’d pick them up on his way through back to Minsk.

  I took the dozen or so leather-covered notebooks she gave me. I had to. To refuse would have been an insult to her fidelity. I feel no curiosity about them. I suppose I remembered enough. On the other hand, I didn’t want to burn them. He thought I was a bad daughter, but if he went to so much trouble to make special provision for them it wasn’t my business to turn them to ash. You were the one he considered his heir. I became forever the adolescent whore who went off with the French sergeant in the DP camp. You were his little Belorussian survivor, and it is up to you now what is done with the journals.

  As well as this there is the problem, given that the Allies did not turn on the Russians and recapture Minsk and Staroviche, that Europe may not be a safe place for such memoirs. The names of your godfather Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and other Belorussian leaders appear often in histories of that period. There is a book published recently and written by an American intelligence officer of the era which complains that these men were given undue protection by the American Central Intelligence and by the British and French, that Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and Stankievich and all the others are war criminals and should be tried as such. In books of this nature Papa always merits at least a footnote because of a certain massacre carried out by Belorussian police and the SS on the Staroviche-Gomel road in 1941.

  Again, we knew very young that events are subtle and that “war criminal” is a relative and shifting term. It was a term used with a straight face by Stalin, whose crimes against the Belorussians and Ukrainians make the SS seem almost indulgent. Nonetheless I consider it my last daughterly duty to send these journals to a far continent where they are not likely to cause comment or serve as evidence. I place them therefore in the care of a loyal son. My advice to you is nonetheless to burn them. There will be too much in them about Onkel Willi, and that awful man Bienecke, and all the rest. I remember you in that six months we spent in Berlin at the end. You were in a daze, which was merciful given the level of bombing. But it was not a happy daze. It terrified Mother. Remembering that child, my advice to you is at least to store them unread and at best to burn them. You and I know how there are vipers nesting in those pages.

  I hope you and your children are well. As for me, though childless, I have a loving husband. Father thought him a crook and a child molester, but he has been an honorable man all these years.

  The journals are on their way under separate cover.

  Your—believe me—affectionate sister, Genia

  8

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  I am moved at this late hour to produce a history of my family. My purpose is to mark the inroads the struggle for Belorussian freedom made upon the lives of my parents, and so to create the background for my own attempt to prepare a true Belorussia of the spirit here, on this earth which will so soon become a wilderness. I wish as well to place my father’s journals in a suitable context.

  Let me say first that in Belorussia itself, in certain parts of Berlin, Paris, New Jersey, where Belorussian exiles live, it would be a matter of surprise that my father ended in Australia. For he was, while still young in political terms, a minister of the Belorussian government and a familiar of the great Belorussian patriot Ostrowsky. Most of his government colleagues would spend their later years in South River, New Jersey, as intimates of various intelligence and counterintelligence bodies—the Office of Policy Coordination for one. Others lived in Paris, trusted employees of the French Secret Service. My father, far from running a research group at a nice address in Rue de Granillers or speaking at anti-Soviet seminars in London or Edinburgh, would finish his life as a guard (retired) on the Government Railways of New South Wales.

  When my father came to Australia with me in the late 1940s, it was the theory that he would be a fund-raiser among Belorussian refugees in Sydney and Melbourne. The money he raised in this distant latitude was to stand against the day when the Belorussians would return east to their homeland. Money would also be needed by the Belorussian government-in-exile, still largely scattered around various Displaced Persons camps in Germany. There was always the risk that under Soviet pressure they would be arrested by the Allies and forced to stand trial for various incidents which had taken place in our homeland between 1941 and 1944.

  My father was also meant to make friends in Australia of the fledgling Australian security and intelligence groups. There was some contact in this regard. The Australians, like most Western countries, were very frightened of being infiltrated by Communists masquerading as refugees. If the Australian files were looked at, it would probably be seen that for some twenty years my father was an adviser to the Australians on the political probity of this or that Belorussian immigrant.

  But the true reason for my father’s flight to the antipodes was that by his mid-forties he was already exhausted by politics. It is scarcely too dramatic to say that history had looted him. As well as that, through the incidents I am now going to consider in this history, he had by the time he immigrated to Australia lost all his political influence among those arch and crafty Belorussian politicians and patriots. Even as a teenager I knew and understood this. My father was being retired by his colleagues, sent like the early British convicts to a distance from which he was unlikely to return.

  Before I look at the European causes of my family’s decline, let me say that my father achieved Australian visibility only once, in 1955. In that year Australian Belorussian communities were visited by an old political enemy of my father, Mikolai Redich. Redich had been dispatched on a fund-raising mission. His task was—as they say in this country—to “ginger up” the Belorussians here. One winter’s evening that year, after Redich had delivered a lecture in the suburb of Ashfield and was returning home with my father to Parramatta, a Sydney suburb where he was being accommodated by old friends from the Displaced Persons camps, Redich fell from a train at Lidcombe station, suffered extensive injuries, and died almost at once.

  It was remarkable that at the inquest numerous Australian officials appeared to testify to my father’s good character. But among the Belorussian community here there was much gossip about the cause of Redich’s death, and this event marked the beginning both of my father’s decline in health and of our increasing estrangement from other Belorussian refugees in the city of Sydney.

  Trains have figured crucially in the Kabbel family history. For all of us they have been vehicles of exile. At the center of my own history I place our escape from Minsk, together with the families of other Belorussian officials, in a train especially provided by the SS. This train rolled out of Minsk some five days before the Russians captured the city in June 1944. I was then eleven years of age. Aides of General von Gottberg, German Kommissar of Belorussia, waved us all off from Minsk Central. My mother was not impressed by this show of SS formality. She would not forgive von Gottberg’s crowd for failing to attend the funeral of Oberführer Willi Ganz, her favorite guest among the Germans, her confidant and—with my father’s approval—closest friend. Oberführer Ganz had been Onkel Willi to me. His body lay in the Catholic cemetery in Staroviche—it was von Gottberg’s fault that it had never been shipped home. It would now fall to the Russians. His mute grave would go unmarked, or even be desecrated. It had to be admitted, as my father, until recently police chief of Staroviche, pointed out to my mother, that Oberführer Ganz had been burie
d in an autumn of heavy rains and fierce partisan activity, both factors making a muddy hundred-mile journey by von Gottberg unreasonably dangerous. She had not been persuaded however.

  The young and highly polished SS men seeing us off from Minsk seemed to imply by the joviality with which they shook hands with our President, Radislaw Ostrowsky (my godfather as it happens), that we were off to some Baltic beach for the summer, perhaps that same one at Puck where we had spent the war’s first autumn waiting for Warsaw to fall. My parents of course knew better than that. For them it was not the first flight from that ancient and revered city of the Belorussians. For me however it was the first departure. I took it for granted that I would be back after a month or two, that my parents would then continue the debate about whether to keep that elegant house in Staroviche or, now that my father was a Belorussian cabinet minister, to find a large apartment in Minsk.

  The train left Minsk Central a half an hour after first light, an hour when those old cities can look ideal and eternal, especially on a translucent June morning. The spires of the Mariinski shone. Until the train began to roll out my mother had been tense, since this journey was parallel to a physically damaging departure she herself had made with her parents from Minsk to Grodno a quarter of a century before. To add to her anxiety, fighting between Russian partisans and German units had begun the day before all over the city, and as a sort of bass to the partisan activity, Marshal Rokossovski’s artillery had been heard all night hammering away twenty miles outside the city. Despite all this Soviet bombast Minsk looked itself to me, I mean it looked immutable. There had been some damage to it in the fighting of 1941, some damage by bombing since, but the dawn light seemed to put a gloss over those small defects. I knew that Minsk had of its essence to stand forever.