A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  This information transfigured the household. I would hear my mother sing in the mornings, and there were a few days when she began to sketch with charcoals even though it was that point of time when the year seemed darkest, between the last of the rain and the first of the snow. My father’s vision of the world improved, and I remember a suppertime when he uttered the peculiarly rosy view favored by most of the visitors to our house—the Germans and their allies would hold indefinitely their shortened line from the Leningrad front through Vitebsk and along the lower swamplands of the Pripet. Give or take a mile or two, the Russians had stalled along the borders of godly Bela Rus, and this seemed to my mother like an answer to prayer. The Russians spoke grandly of their First, Second, and Third White Russian fronts, but Bela Rus remained intact. It was said at our table by many a Belorussian official and even by the colonel of our garrison, Oberst Lustbader, who understood military affairs, that “the antiquated bludgeon of the Red Army has now outrun its logistical possibilities.” It was a formula that seemed to bring great satisfaction to everyone at the Christmas party my father held early that year, since he had to leave for Minsk to confer with the great Ostrowsky and with General von Gottberg.

  So there would be a stalemate in the East, a negotiated peace in the West, one of the codicils of that peace being America’s, Great Britain’s, everyone’s recognition of the independence of a Belorussian Republic under the presidency of my Lincoln-like godfather Ostrowsky. Finally there would be a devotion of all the world’s resources to the destruction of Russia, and then a thousand years of peace and sanity.

  This hope seemed to flame around me particularly in the days immediately following the terrible events in Onkel Willi’s apartment, and the freezing air was full of a brightness which hurt my eyes and which seemed a reflection of the voice I would encounter the promises I would receive, in Onkel Willi’s apartment.

  Three days after his demented behavior Oberführer Ganz turned up again at our place and my mother took him into the living room. It was the late morning. There was a point on the stairwell which was one of my spying places—once a ventilator had been located there giving straight into the living room. It had been taken out when the staircase was replaced and the workmen had simply covered it with a thin plate of painted deal. When I sat on the appropriate stair this plate was at knee level, and conversations other than the most cautious would rise from it to my ear. Onkel Willi had come to beg my mother’s pardon for his uncontrolled behavior. My mother denied there was any cause for him to apologize. “I was beyond control, my dearest Danielle,” Oberführer Ganz insisted. In this terrible phase of history, he said—it was, I have indicated, common for people to invoke history in our household; there was more credibility in their doing so in Staroviche in 1943 than there is here in Penrith now—in this terrible phase of history he had only two polestars of sanity. She understood perfectly, he said, that one of these polestars had been extinguished through the chicanery of Bienecke, who had achieved his goal in the cruelest manner anyone could devise. (Here Willi Ganz made a short reference to dynamite and a groan escaped my mother.) She had never judged him, he said, for his friendship with Yakov, her mind rose above the comic opera narrowness of those who had devised race laws. What he would not be able to live through now was her rejection, if because of his demented behavior he lost the pure affection which had till now prevailed between himself and the Kabbelski family, especially the unsullied understanding which existed between my mother and himself.

  I remember what he said then not because it was different from all the oblique adult references I had been hearing lately, but because for the first time the words seemed to me to carry an adult freight of meaning. It was as if I had cracked the code at last.

  “Believe me, Danielle,” said Herr Kommissar Ganz, “your husband has nothing to be ashamed of. He has acted from motives of the highest nationalism. He has done what he can to moderate the savagery of the Kappelers and the Bieneckes. As time passes, his view of things, like mine, might come to prevail. I look forward to a time when we can work together not simply to administer a region and maintain the anti-terrorist struggle but to restore the honor some of our colleagues have forfeited in the past two years.”

  My mother assured the Oberführer that there was no way in which her friendship for him had been diminished. “We are all unworthy,” she said. (I could not quite understand how.) “And we all have secrets.” I could hear tears in her voice as if she were the one seeking pardon. “I think we ought to pledge that we will always be friends, no matter what, in war and after war and whatever we reveal of ourselves.”

  “I pledge that now,” said Ganz, his voice breaking.

  A week before I would have taken an august conversation like that very seriously, whether I could have understood it or not. With the memory of Ganz’s furious mouth on mine, the words were transformed, the way the seaside around Puck had been transformed one day in 1939 after I placed my finger in the maw of a hungry sea anemone and felt its alien ravenous grasp and understood that the sea was not just passive but was a hungry element.

  And my knowledge of Ganz’s strange hunger made the conversation between him and my mother sound a little overdone, like a conversation in one of the romantic radio serials about a typical yet noble German family whose sons, sad and wise, were always coming home on leave from the Eastern Front and talking about honor and history, endless forgiveness, and a phoenix future rising from the ashes.

  “Let me take Radek to lunch,” said Onkel Willi without warning. “I am well escorted—SS and your good Belorussian outriders and Wehrmacht guards. I am afraid I rather disgraced myself in front of Radek the other day and I would like to regain lost ground. Also, Danielle, you must find being trapped in the house with such an active boy exhausting.”

  I tried the novelty of thinking of myself for the first time as an active boy. I had not accustomed myself to the idea before I heard my mother calling for me. I disappeared upstairs as fast as I could and reappeared more loudly a little later, thumping on the steps as if I had come sprinting from my room. My mother was waiting by the parlor door at the bottom of the steps, smiling at me. “Herr Kommissar Ganz has invited you to lunch,” she told me. You could not have said her smile was radiant, but it had no ambiguity, she was not smiling at me in that preventive way she had when some visitor offered me overrich confectionary too close to bedtime: the smile that said, “Refuse politely.” I was both appalled and delighted that she had heard nothing from my father about Oberführer Ganz’s weird, grieving kiss.

  Onkel Willi’s broad face appeared behind her shoulder. “Will you join me, Radek. A gentleman’s lunch. Cigars and cognac afterwards.”

  My mother’s laughter committed me. I got an overcoat and we creaked down the drive in the back of the Oberführer’s car, preceded by four SS men in a limousine, flanked by two sidecar motorcyles manned by my father’s men, and followed by a blitz wagon carrying an Army corporal and a private. Even in this dangerous winter, it occurred to me, we have so many men to stand guard over Onkel Willi’s visits to the Kabbelskis’. I sat still on the seat, very taut. There was the unthinkable risk that Onkel Willi might beg my pardon too, that the kiss might become an open subject between us.

  Herr Kommissar Ganz employed a cook-housekeeper, a heavy Czech spinster named Fräulein Hradek. As Onkel Willi and I sat at the dining-room table, Fräulein Hradek recommended the menu to us, listing dishes like a waitress in a restaurant. “Gentlemen, a full-bodied bean soup, followed by carp in a sweet and sour jelly and then hare in sour cream.” As she recited all this Onkel Willi groaned and rolled his eyes comically at me. It was a richer lunch than anything the Kabbelskis were eating that lean December, but then Oberführer Ganz was the Kommissar of Staroviche. In any case the plenty of his table partly reassured me. Since it was the sort of fare appropriate to an official guest, it elevated me to that status. And a provincial Kommissar could not weep in front of an official guest or kiss him full on the
lips.

  A pale young SS private wearing white gloves appeared and served us our soup and then vanished. Woodenly I spooned the food in. It tasted of my embarrassment, and Onkel Willi could tell. He reached for my free hand and enclosed it in his. An immense hand, it could have been a stevedore’s or a boxer’s if Onkel Willi had come from the appropriate background.

  “This is lunch between friends, Radek,” he told me. “Your Onkel Willi lost a good friend in the most cruel manner. Therefore I behaved like a wounded beast. But I must assure you that no one in the Kabbelski family will ever be knowingly misused by me. And I’ve changed my tack now to a determination that those who were responsible for the cruelty will suffer. You agree the cruel should suffer? Now, eat your soup, unless you don’t like it.” He withdrew his hand and clapped, struck by an extravagant idea, the way the old Willi Ganz so often was. “Why don’t we make a compact to dislike it together, exercise our freedom of taste? Take on the soup dragon together. A Hanseatic knight and the White Russian champion. In league.”

  “No,” I said with something like a natural smile. “I like the soup and I don’t think we need to go to war with anyone.” I thought there was gratitude in his barking laughter, as if we were really going back to hide and seek in lightly guarded woods. The dining room possessed in fact the same solitude which had existed in Brudezh forest. The SS waiter was not to be seen, Fräulein Hradek—without Hanseatic knights to battle—sat silent in the kitchen. The apartment building was largely empty—the ground floor a sandbagged storeroom, and two civilian officials from Oberführer Ganz’s Kommissariat office occupying the next level. On the top floor both apartments belonged to the Kommissar himself, so that what had once been the hallway between two separate dwellings was Onkel Willi’s lobby.

  In a busy world, surrounded by busy causes, we sat at the core of genteel silence. That was my impression anyhow. He began to ask me when-you-grow-up sorts of questions. These were similar to when-the-war-is-over questions. Would I ever consider emigrating to America? Marrying an American? I raised the problem that I was their enemy and so they were mine.

  “Won’t always be like that,” said Onkel Willi, bread in his mouth. “What if we made peace with the Americans? What if within a year there were British and Americans here in the streets of Staroviche?”

  Because of American films I had seen, because of the glamour of the name, I felt an obscure excitement at the idea. I imagined smiling loose-limbed boys in Bryanska Street, lolling on tanks adorned with America’s white and Christian star.

  “I predict it,” he said. “By next midsummer. And … it will make some people at the Natural History Museum behave better than they have up to the moment.”

  I concluded he must have meant Hauptsturmführer Bienecke, a man I agreed with Onkel Willi in disliking.

  “We might all end up in California,” murmured Onkel Willi with a misty and conspiratorial grin. “Learn a little English and make our living as extras in cowboy films.”

  I tried to envisage Oberführer Ganz without his uniform and realized that he would have made a very good sad heroic Indian chief.

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, POLICE CHIEF, STAROVICHE. Dec 2, 1943.

  Removed police guard from outside Kommissar’s apartment 12:30 P.M., sent them to search suspected partisan safe house near Gomelska bridge. Since three arrests made there, my action in removing guards will cause less comment, even if it has been guaranteed there will be no comment in any case.

  Units of SS and my men ready to move on Ganz apartment post factum.

  Called Danielle at house and discovered to my unutterable horror that she had permitted Radek to go to lunch with that sodomite. Lost control perhaps twenty seconds, raged at Danielle—she will never understand why. Fortunately my screamings conveyed little hard intelligence. “I don’t want my son with him!” I ranted. Despaired for my son. Called on Yuri to get the car and drive me full speed to Ganz’s apartment, Marka Street. Armed squad following behind. Self and Yuri armed Gewehr automatics. These plausibly adequate to save son if Wehrmacht guards also alerted. To hell with von Gottberg, Kappeler, Bienecke et al. Let them get the Kommissar another way!

  30

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  The luncheon conversation with Onkel Willi had—through my host’s efforts to settle his young guest down—reached safe ground. I could talk films with great ease, and Onkel Willi had the grace to pretend he had not seen Stagecoach, which I had been taken to at the Paris Cinema in Warsaw the month before the war began. As a result I was able to begin a ramified account of the story line, subplots included, even snatches of dialogue.

  My narration was interrupted by the sound of some outer door in the apartment slamming twice. I heard Fraulein Hradek exclaiming with unexpected passion and then a torrent of sound from the stairway and front hall. I saw Onkel Willi’s face turn bloodless and the corners of his mouth hang anciently as he stood. The door between the dining room and the kitchen opened, and through it fell the pale young private with the white gloves. Nothing could be heard except the furious sound of what I knew yet could not believe were guns, though indistinct yells and screams lay behind the noise. I saw Onkel Willi’s lips frame the words “Jesus Christ!”

  When the row stopped for a second, I heard boots entering from the kitchen and the living room. Onkel Willi pushed me under the table. Kneeling aghast in the under-table dimness, I saw two separate triangles of reality—furniture legs, the base of a sideboard, drapes, the bottoms of Oberführer Ganz’s knife-sharp trousers—segmented from each other by the triangular-cornered hang of the tablecloth. I felt as if buried alive, and chewed for comfort on the back of my hand. The boots ceased to move—a pair of them entered the leftmost of those three lightning-sharp triangles of mine. Onkel Willi spoke in Russian as if he were talking to a plumber or a housepainter.

  “Well then,” he said.

  A young voice said, “Fascist sowfucker!” Then the tower of intolerable sound fell on me once more.

  Then for the first time in my existence I was delivered from the awful geometry of that kind of event which lay at the limits of earthly peril in which I found myself. It was as if there had been a gravity in my blood, pulling me down to boot level, dragging me against the cutting edges of the triangles. And then the gravity was released. In all the racket, the universe produced a voice which made the earth habitable. I say a voice, and I would always claim it was a Belorussian voice. But it was more as well, it was a firm hand in the small of the back. It enunciated this to me: Keep still. This isn’t the only place you’re going to see in a long life.

  To speak of an unspeakable experience is impossible to do without debasing it. Nonetheless I can say that no other voice has ever made me so welcome to the wide world. For some reason I responded to it by uttering one word. “Uncle.” I was aware of laughter. And the sentence After the Wave breaks, you’ll still be in place. I knew at once what the Wave was. It was what would cancel the benighted politics which were killing Onkel Willi.

  An instant later, I suffered the experience of being lifted on a fountain of light high into the corner of the dining room. I could see the ruined meal, the tubercular private, and Onkel Willi staggering. The grief I felt for him was that he probably did not possess any elevated view of the act, such as I enjoyed from this vantage point. He likely felt in his last seconds as I had when I first perceived the triangles beneath the table, and my grief for him was not for his death so much as for his terror.

  The stupefying sound ceased. Now that it lifted like a curtain between Onkel Willi and his assassins, I saw them for who they were. One looked like a peasant, another like an intellectual. These two were perhaps in their early twenties. They wore caps and overcoats, both sets worn, but the provenance of one of the overcoats was better than that of the other. The intellectual had extremely childlike puckered lips, as unsuitable for terrorism as Mrs. Kuzich’s hips had been for martyrdom. Their leader was a man
my father’s age. There were no embarrassing immaturities in his face and I had the impression that he was an Army officer in mufti, since he looked as strange in his street clothes as Bienecke did in a suit. There was a second of awe as they considered what they had done—even the leader had to give in to it. Onkel Willi’s broad brow faced the ceiling and—tidiest of men—his good white shirt had been torn loose from his trousers and hung bloodied over them as if he’d been caught before he had tucked the tail in. From the throat to the waist he was not recognizably a human being. The tubercular private’s body had suffered more lightly. Through a corner of the kitchen door I could see Fräulein Hradek’s horizontal and homely ankle and thought what a terrible world it was when the making of hare in sour cream carried with it the fatal penalty.

  I saw the senior assassin, the one who was already in my mental vocabulary “The Soldier,” lift the corner of the tablecloth and peer under the table at the child beneath, that child who lay galvanized beneath the tyranny of the triangular view. This child felt he should explain that Onkel Willi was not a target, was not Bienecke, was not even Chief of Police Kabbelski, was only of relevance to children and to women widowed by their husband’s career. Was an extra in a Western, as it turned out: with his broad nearly Mongolian face a certainty for the role of firm young adviser to the elderly Sioux chief who has seen the buffalo hunting grounds shrink. “The Officer” looked in under the table at the child panting animal-like on its four limbs, and the child could not manage a word.