A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Later, more calmly, Ganz tried to get even with Bienecke on procedural grounds. Wrote to von Gottberg, to Lohse, and to Kappeler saying that Jews from his office had been executed but that those working for Oberst Lustbader and the Wehrmacht have been left quite alone, and that this distinction constituted a personal insult to him as Kommissar.

  No doubt Bienecke will win paper war. Already has powerful Dr. Kappeler on side. Also sent off to von Gottberg photographs of Ganz and his driver Yakov in overfriendly stances, including one of Ganz congratulating Yakov, holding him by the arm, the day of Radek’s birthday, when Yakov rescued Ganz’s Mercedes from burning garage. Seems this constitutes a race crime adequate to excite someone like von Gottberg. Other photographs and testimonies Bienecke has collected concerning Ganz-Yakov connection must be enough to blow von Gottberg’s hat off.

  Bienecke, after giving me a summary of the further complaints everyone now had with Ganz, let the remarkably pensive Mayor Kuzich begin to speak. There’s a secretary in the Town Hall named Drusova. One of the clerks had informed Kuzich that Drusova was stealing stationery, secreting it in the lining of her jacket, and even beneath her blouse and underwear. Kuzich had his chief secretary, a middle-aged woman, detain Drusova at the end of the day—that was yesterday. Kuzich and chief secretary thought they were dealing with ordinary pilferage, but also found on the girl’s person carbons used in typing up a number of documents—the names and personal details, for example, of appointees to administer the various Wehrdorfer in the oblast of Staroviche, lists of invitees to the mayor’s Christmas party, memos from Kuzich to me on law-and-order matters, memos from Kuzich to Bienecke on partisan matters, memos from Kuzich to Ganz on ghetto matters. Obvious the girl was passing this species of intelligence to the partisans.

  Drusova has been prisoner since last night. Can’t suppress a surge of pity for her, though Bienecke says that for obvious reasons she hasn’t been touched. Asked of course what the obvious reasons were. He said she could be used to draw the partisans to Ganz. Asked how he intended to turn her, how to ensure that when she speaks to her partisan contacts she will not include a code sentence which will tell them she’s been caught.

  Had he any relatives of hers for surety. Bienecke said, Of course, her fourteen-year-old brother. He is hostage. Drusova’s been told he’ll be released if she does her task properly.

  My pity’s now transferred itself from Drusova to the boy.

  Kuzich said, “She’s the one who sold my wife to the bastards. My wife’s social and official itinerary was typed up in the office. Tell her any lies you wish to, but don’t keep any promises you make to the bitch.”

  It’s clearer than ever how strongly Kuzich also is set against Ganz and his policy of moderation. The man doesn’t have an ally in Staroviche, Kaunas, Riga, or Minsk.

  Bienecke’s method is this: He releases the girl. She tells the partisans she has been chastised for stealing paper and expects to be civilly tried and fined for it. She says that her boss the mayor pleaded for leniency to apply to her case. In a short time, within a few days at the most, before the partisans are aware that the boy is a prisoner of the SS and not away in Gomel with his grandparents, she will give her partisan contact a rundown on the feud growing between Ganz and everyone else, and advise them that through Kuzich’s correspondence with us she knows the SS and I both intend to withdraw our protection, leaving him merely with two or three of Lustbader’s middle-aged asthmatics. This fatal thinning of his protection would happen either outside his office or more likely outside his apartment.

  Question Bienecke asks is whether I will cooperate and withdraw my men?

  Even then not certain. Ganz profoundly flawed. Don’t want him near Danielle or the children. But still a man of brilliant promise. In the end I asked for a few hours. It is not good for my Belorussian purpose to be too supine to the desires of the Gestapo and SS.

  Telegraphed Kappeler asking for assurances that a Belorrusian National Congress would be called and seeking an urgent reply. Three o’clock this P.M. telegraphic assurances from Kappeler arrived on my desk. Have decided to assist Bienecke in what is probably essential for the ultimate security of this oblast.

  25

  FROM THE MATCH DIARY OF TERRY DELANEY

  Penrith v. Balmain. Least said the better. 37–8. Missed a crucial tackle which set up their first try after twenty minutes. Tuomey of course his usual charming self. “If that shoulder’s not up to it, tell us and we’ll bloody take you off.” Kabbel tells me from his intelligence sources the blond punk who did it copped thirteen stitches in the hand, so that’s some comfort. Sluggish in attack today—couldn’t get anything going in the back line and Terry Mansfield and forwards slow and let the others penetrate up the middle. Reserves and firsts won. Deecock brilliant at five-eighth, so I’m glad the bugger’s retiring this season. Most of our tries from bombs though. Not from real penetrative football. Shoulder so fierce by tonight Gina and I didn’t go to club. Bugger that blond with the hammer!

  He pretended greater shoulder pain than he felt and avoided touching Gina that night. The late night television news he sat up watching was full of lumpy footage from the American networks, which the local stations boasted of as “the full resources of our worldwide satellite hookup.” There were garish ruins in an unimaginable town in Mississippi in whose main street a chemical tanker had exploded. A scrawny dog owned by an obese couple in Orlando, Florida, could use a home computer to do basic calculations and draw diagrams. That was the quality of the stuff for whose sake Delaney avoided Gina’s bed. A yellow flicker bounced across the room from the face of the dog owner as Gina stood watching Delaney from the door.

  “If the damage is permanent, you’ll just have to sue Kabbel,” she said.

  When he came to bed at last he lay straight and still. He was pleased that his status as a professional athlete—that his body was not any body, that people paid at the turnstiles to see its tricks—gave him the extra authority to lie like a board at Gina’s side. Sometimes he would glance at her to ensure she was sullenly asleep, her back to him, her shoulders assuming a hunch which belonged to an older woman, some widow of the future. The sight filled him with bewilderment and misery. He felt an urge to telephone his mother, to get her praying, repetitive prayer on which Mrs. Delaney could spend a whole day, a tide of repeated formulas, of sympathetic utterances.

  “There is nothing wrong with magic,” Father Doig had told his shocked congregation once. “Magic is meant to be potent in all societies, in our society as in Aboriginal society. Magic—the Rosary or some other tribal incantation—can kill a cancer, save a marriage, revive the doomed.”

  “Now we’re bloody myall blacks!” old Greg Delaney had complained, and had spoken—as he often did—of writing to the Cardinal about Doig’s heresies.

  But that was all Delaney wanted—what Doig had talked about. Someone to take the curse off.

  He did not wake until she was getting ready for work. The brisk sound of her dress going over her shoulders and down her body brought him around. It was already after eight and Gina was hurrying. He gave her like charity the small news that his shoulder had improved. He tried to set up the lying impression that that was their reward for not touching all night. The mortgage payment was safe—he would get a match fee on Sunday. She said that was good. He watched her frown at him, her doubt that that was all the distance between them, a few bruised sinews. He grinned candidly, and panic crashed his heart against his ribs. I can’t keep up the lies, I haven’t got the guts for it.

  Then it came to him that it would be better if he’d had Danielle Kabbel, acquired something definite to lie about. Something you could say in a sentence.

  That night Delaney returned to the control room from Blacktown in the middle of his shift. Danielle Kabbel was dozing on the couch, an old-fashioned quilt covering her lower body, a sky blue cardigan crookedly over her shoulders. On her thigh sat an open spine-up copy of Catch-22, a novel which Delaney had once re
ad and been shocked by—the lunacy of its love and war and death. It amazed him to think of her reading it, figuring it out. Yet she was deeply into it, the meat of the book spread evenly across her leg. She gaped and then smiled when he woke her.

  He said, “I believe there’s a painting Warwick did of the two of you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why?” She stretched, yawning on the word. Her breasts lifted within the cardigan.

  “I wanted to see it. That’s all.”

  She swung her legs off the couch and found her shoes. She led him into the hallway and toward the Kabbel kitchen he had never seen. The inner part of the house was immaculate and cold. On either wall were dim and ancient black and white photographs—the Kabbel ancestry, Delaney supposed—and shiny colored prints of the Kabbel children. Danielle turned on the light and Delaney saw the painting. “Good, isn’t he?” Danielle asked him. She smiled again. Delaney was delighted with the smile. He saw in it the simple arrogance of kinship, nothing more.

  Stanton’s description of the thing had been pretty exact. Danielle and Warwick were blank-eyed. But that was because Warwick’s craft didn’t stretch to living eyes. The Wave, breaking over the Harbor Bridge and the ugly Centerpoint Tower silhouetted like a vast folded clothes hoist, was beautifully marbled with sea spume and had a depth to it. It was the sort of schoolboy painting that was hung on construction hoardings in the city during Education Week. If you saw it there, you’d guess that the deep blue costumes with the four brass circles on the collars were the uniform of some minority-group high school.

  “Hey, you never wear the uniform!” said Delaney.

  He heard a faint sigh of fabric as she shrugged. “Warwick must have thought he’d put me in it for some symbolic reason.” She laughed quietly. “It isn’t as if I don’t slave for the business.”

  “Why the four rings?”

  “That’s symbolic. My father’s design. It stands for the four of us. Interlocked. My father goes in for that sort of thing. It’s the—”

  He knew what she was going to say: “The Belorussian in him, I suppose.”

  She laughed again. “Exactly, Terry. You’re catching on.”

  “I love you too, Danielle,” he said, hoping it would loosen somehow the Kabbels’ interlocking rings.

  Danielle said, “Oh,” made a little squeak with her lips, and put her hand to his jaw.

  “Can I be your lover?” It was a strange thing for him to say. He had never used that term with Gina. With Gina he had always been his honest, Delaney, five-eighth self. Such a word as “lover” may have alarmed Gina or seemed to crowd out the boundaries of life so that there would be no space left for practical matters, including practical marital affection.

  Danielle Kabbel’s hand closed on the flesh of his cheek. “You can be my lover,” she said. “Certainly you can be my lover.”

  He had that feeling he’d had the morning before, the feeling he often had with the Kabbels, that the rest of his life didn’t count with them, that they viewed it with what he thought of as a giant innocence, with the sort of flattened-out eyes Warwick had painted, and that these did not take in his marriage. With disappointment and joy he knew he would never have to explain Gina away to Danielle Kabbel, would never have to plead that in spite of his crimes against Gina he was an honest man.

  “Where?” he asked. “Where, Danielle?”

  “My room,” she murmured. She reached up and drew her lips across his cheek. “My room, please.”

  It was a reasonable plea from a sensitive girl. Please, nothing alien, no motel, no vinyl car seat, no park embankment.

  Her room was a schoolgirl’s—she still kept all her textbooks; and a gold on blue pennant hanging on her wall, midway above her bed, announced Danielle Kabbel had won the Under 15 800 meters at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Parramatta in 1978. Ecstasy is such a ridiculous state (so he would tell himself later) that he forgot to wonder if her good Catholic 800 meters, so proudly and singularly stated on her wall, prevented her from taking the sort of precautions even he and Gina took these days.

  26

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Dec. 1, 1943

  Arranged. Drusova has assured her contacts that after the Kommissar arrives at his apartment for lunch tomorrow, c. 12:30, Bienecke and I will be withdrawing the normal guards. Kommissar will be left only with a few Wehrmacht sentries who have not seen combat or really encountered the Satanic determination with which Oberführer Ganz’s apartment is likely to be assaulted. Even partisans must know Willi values lunch highly, so that Bienecke’s choice of the apartment for the appropriate location very deft. No one in SS or in Dr. Kappeler’s office seems to care the partisans will milk Ganz’s liquidation for all it is worth in propaganda terms. Bienecke intends to cancel any partisan sense of triumph by surrounding those involved in the attack as soon as they have fulfilled the intentions of the Reich Security Central Office toward Oberführer Ganz. I imagine friend Bienecke will keep no promises to Drusova or her brother either, unless he wants to use Drusova for future security work. Surmise he may send Drusova and brother east out of pure vanity, however useful Drusova might be in future, just to show partisans they’ve been used by Bienecke. Bienecke like most men of limited intelligence out to prove even to Bolsheviks that he’s smart, that we’re all smart on this side of fence, that we possess dangerous cunning.

  Both Radek and Danielle still confused and depressed about Ganz’s outburst. As gentle a soul as Danielle is, believe she has been distanced from him now.

  BBC news came through clear in Polish and even if halfway unreliable is alarming. At least even BBC say German Fourth Army holding in front of Orsha. More optimistic officers you meet speak of defeats in southern Russia as if they are positive blessing, creating a shorter, more rational, more defensible line. The loss of Smolensk and then Bryansk has weighed on Danielle—you can see the fright and a sort of yellow insomnia come up in her eyes whenever I turn the radio on. Smolensk is something intimate to Danielle. Before the first war her family had interests in a brickworks there and she visited the place as a child. It is the first city of the East, she always said, the place where the last traces of those Catholic allegiances which connect us to the West end, and that other world emphatically begins. It is also—as am always saying to reassure her—a good 350 kilometers from Staroviche, and on this front that seems a great distance, even though in the south last summer the Russians would make advances of seventy kilometers in a day.

  Am taking heavy dosage of laudanum tonight. Don’t want to face tomorrow with the usual ashen fatigue.

  3 A.M. woken from heavy sleep by telephone call from Ostrowsky in Minsk. Wanted me to know that final plans for a Belorussian Republican Congress have been thrashed out with von Gottberg’s office and with Political Section in a meeting which went on in Minsk until an hour ago. Wanted me to know. “If there’s anyone likely to resent the hours he spent in sleep while this glorious news hung around his bed unspoken, I knew it was you, my dear Stanek.”

  Poor Danielle waiting in corridor, a wraith in her nightdress, sure the call was bad news. We celebrated with brandy and then slept happily in each other’s arms till dawn.

  27

  Delaney could tell there was a window ajar at Dyson Engineering. Beyond a yard littered with trailer bodies and the frames of caravans—Dyson’s business—stood a two-storied brick blockhouse, and the window that was open declared itself, on the top floor by the stairs, in a faint stutter of metal venetian blinds. Delaney stood in the deep shadow of a compressor and considered the window. There was something like a shimmer of light up there, but whether it came from inside or was reflected from a distant source across the rooftops he could not decide. This degree of inspection was called in the industry a “perimeter survey,” and unless someone emerged from the window carrying Dyson Engineering’s petty cash box, patent drawings, or photocopier, he would be justified in holding this position until the police came.

&
nbsp; After ninety seconds of further observation, he walked back to his car in the alley and switched in the base. There was the huskiness of sleep in Danielle’s voice when she answered. He pictured her, blanket dropped around her bare ankles, leaning toward the mike. In the cold car he intoned, “My bride!”

  “That place is alarmed,” she told him. “Something should have shown up here on the computer.”

  “The wiring could be out,” he said. Love talk, he thought.

  “Or the intruder disconnected it. Terry, stay clear. I’ll call Saint Mary’s police.”

  “I love you better than anyone living,” he said. Because she never mentioned Gina he was liberated to speak fantastically, the way he had always wanted to. Ti mon seul desir. I love you better than anyone living. But he never heard back from her any wild utterances, nothing like that. And she never used his name. She used his name in sentences like “Or the intruder disconnected it.”

  He knew that she was the most strange woman, that when he married her people would say that behind his back.

  He let himself inside the gate again and stood in the shadow of the compressor. He knew that from the outside, from the point of view of a perimeter survey, his intention to marry Danielle Kabbel made him a deadshit, a despicable bastard. Even Stanton would use such terms. Double bloody deadshit to string Gina along, to play at being married when a stench of indifference filled the house in Forth Street, threatened to warp the timbers and poison the lemon-scented gums by the roots. He thought that if he waited, there might turn up a kinder way to let Gina know than he could think of today. But he couldn’t think anyhow. All his mind went into Danielle Kabbel, his mind was absorbed and jangled. Like the monster’s brain sitting in a glass retort in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, his sat and waited in Danielle Kabbel’s schoolgirl bedroom. He spent his time at home joking, singing, sometimes slapping Gina on the hip or shaping up to her like a boxer. Rowdiness—he wanted to fill the house with it to cover for his lost head. On his nights off he sheltered in the bathroom until Gina had fallen sourly asleep. Soon it would be the Sunday after Corpus Christi, the date of the elder Terracettis’ marriage in Palermo. Their son and daughter, with spouses and children, were required to visit the tomato farm in Bringelly and drink grappa and eat sweet cakes. How would he occupy a day like that? With a confused and suspicious Gina in the shadow of the Terracettis’ monumental marriage.