A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  “The Officer” said, like an echo of the “unclesome” voice, “Keep still!” Then he turned to the baby peasant, the baby intellectual. “It’s the Kabbelski kid.” The word he used was in fact halfway between the English “kid” and “brat.” There was no animus in the way he used it. The wonder was that in all the carnage he had time to know my tag, whose kid I was at all. “Stay still there,” I saw him tell the child beneath the table. They left by the kitchen, all three of them, making for the courtyard where Yakov had once saved Onkel Willi’s Mercedes. I maintained my high point of view in the corner of the kitchen door. I heard it all with great dispassion—“The Officer,” “The Peasant,” and “The Intellectual” perishing in a surge of noise on the back stairs as Police Chief Kabbelski arrived from the direction of the front lobby, roared when he saw Onkel Willi, but then with open mouth and a prodigious frown such as I had never seen him wear, stepped over the Rubicon of gore from the Kommissar’s body, lifted the tablecloth, and saw the child. The grunt of delight he uttered was quite as animal as every sound he had made since entering the apartment. He grasped up the child, forced its head into the crook of his shoulder as if he would willingly prevent it from seeing anything more of the butt end of politics, and galloped out through the living room, the lobby, hurdling the bodies of two middle-aged Wehrmacht privates on the stairs and reaching the pavement. He sat the child on the pavement, stood back from it gasping with delight, bending with his hands on his knees. “Thank Christ,” he intoned. “Thank Christ!”

  Still stuck in my high corner of the room, I yelled, “Me! Me!” Though he thought he had found me, he hadn’t. Disappointment—that’s what I believed then anyhow—caused me to faint and fall. It was a brief business. When I found my head again I was on the pavement. A dozen or so Belorussian police stood around, a dozen or so SS men. I could see Obersturmführer Harner frowning at my father’s celebration of his son’s survival. Past him, at the corner of Marka and Bryanska streets, I saw an elderly peasant looking at all of us with fierce concentration. When he saw my eyes were on his, he spread his hands and grinned. “Uncle!” I murmured, but he turned his back and walked away down Bryanska.

  31

  From the night Warwick blew Stevo’s hand off, Delaney achieved the unimaginable and began to take Danielle to a hotel in North Parramatta which, he knew from the casual fornicators and adulterers he played football with, catered for “short-term residency.” The middle-aged brunette on the desk had introduced Delaney to the term. Danielle waited in the car outside—it was late afternoon on a non-training day—and the brunette asked the question with a fake propriety, as if she were running the reception desk at the Regent. “An overnight stay, sir? Or a short-term residency?” Short-term residencies were two-thirds the price, but still too much for Stanton and the widow to afford.

  Delaney hated the place as Danielle did. But Danielle seemed to consider it her fault they’d been forced to it. She would apologize to him as they trembled under the blankets waiting for the radiator to take effect. Behind them hung a print of two white horses running through breakers while the sun set unnoticed on a jagged horizon, a horizon which looked like a peril to shipping. Delaney knew it was an awful picture, standard in every room. He had avoided hanging that sort of thing at his place, and now it mocked his confusion, his desire, his delight. It did however remind him without mercy of Warwick’s tsunami.

  Here for the first time he raised the question of “precautions.” Strangely the maiming of Stevo made it easier for him to ask self-interested questions like that, as if the Kabbel family now owed him a moral debt. As they did. He had firmly lied to the Parramatta CID at the beginning of shift two nights after Warwick’s small ball of fire had maimed Stevo. Two detectives arrived, inspected the Kabbel operation, and took Stanton and Delaney aside separately, asking them if they knew whether Kabbel kept explosives anywhere. “If they’ve got it hidden anywhere damp it’ll explode spontaneously,” a detective sergeant told Delaney, “and you’ll be playing five-eighth in a bloody wheelchair.”

  “Did they talk much about getting even for the damage to their brother?” one of the detectives asked, enabling Delaney to give a cunning answer. No, he’d never heard them talking about it or having fantasies. (Warwick didn’t dream. Warwick did.)

  The composure of the Kabbels under this sort of pressure, their certainty that Delaney would be loyal under a CID grilling (Stanton knowing nothing to start with), irked Delaney.

  “They didn’t worry you, Terry?” asked Kabbel afterwards with that overdone Belorussian twinkle.

  “Yes, Rudi, they bloody did. But not as much as Warwick does.”

  So the Kabbels owed him perhaps the knowledge of whether Danielle was taking precautions or not.

  “Now yes,” she said, “but not at first. The pharmaceuticals don’t agree with me. I had to go to a doctor and get a device.” The old Kabbel correctness of speech: “pharmaceuticals,” “device.” “Does it worry you?” she asked him, echoing what her father had asked him about the CID. For a second he thought, That’s the Kabbels. They know there are certain things that upset normal people—attention from the police, unexpected pregnancies—but they don’t understand why.

  “If you get pregnant,” he said, “I’ll marry you and we’ll run away to one of those Barrier Reef towns up north. I could be the local football star.” It was a daydream charged with aquamarine and pawpaws. “Some people would say it’s not all up to you. I could wear something.”

  “No.” She put a hand on his wrist. “No.”

  But he may even have been owed something further. “You read about Stevo?” he asked.

  A brief writeup in the Sun said Stevo had lost two fingers and the top joints of two others.

  “Of course,” she said. “Warwick did it.”

  Delaney absorbed that for a time. “Where does he keep the stuff? Fuses and all that. Plastic or dynamite? Where does he keep it?”

  “He’s got a few oddments of that sort out at our little hut near Newnes. Uses it for cracking rocks. Exactly what he does I don’t know. Explosives are his department. He’s very safe and he has the right manuals.”

  “He wasn’t so safe for Stevo,” Delaney said. “Do you approve of what he did?”

  She looked at him. She was calm and intense and did not try to equivocate. He felt a strange temptation to give in to her code, or her brother’s, in which the explosive disfingering of Stevo seemed a reasonable act of war.

  “Most certainly I approve,” she told him. “The reasons are obvious.”

  He laughed, trying to seem tolerant. His secret scheme though was to snatch her out of her family, to slice off at one motion all the rugged Kabbel loyalties. “Do you say that sort of thing to Ron when he asks you questions about all those books? ‘Ron, the reasons are obvious.’”

  But in spite of her certainty about the rightness of Stevo’s punishment, in that room, below the neap-tide horses, she took to weeping regularly. The tears were not noisy but seemed to Delaney like full-scale grief, not mere shame or girlish nostalgia. The tears grew out of the secrets of that Kabbel culture in which he was a stranger and barely held a visa. Stanton had warned him the whole bloody thing would confuse him, and he was confused.

  “It’s just a general sadness—it comes over me,” she told him the first time he kept at her for a reason. “Because I already have a baby,” she said the second time.

  Hearing this, Delaney lay still under the rampaging Clydesdales. The fact that there was a baby somewhere was no small matter, especially not for someone from the Delaney family, Irish and Australian and RC. Where was this child? Did the fact he had never seen it mean that she was an innocent and entrapped girl or a callous mother? It was too dangerous for him to speak. She said, “When I left school I rebelled against my father. I thought he belonged to another world. He kept talking about partisans and Belorussian buffaloes and independence, but it didn’t mean anything in North Parramatta. If it did he wouldn’t have marr
ied my mother—she was a very straightforward Australian girl he met at a dance when he was working in the railways. He would have looked wonderful then—he was twenty-four years old, and yes he was a wog and torn between the old world and the newest of new worlds, Australia. So he married her, and she didn’t leave home until I was eleven years old—it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t hers. They were brought together to produce us, half of us called Scott and Warwick and the other part called Danielle, and once that was done there wasn’t much left over to do. I think he scared her a bit, there were too many layers to him, you know.

  “I took up with this man when I was seventeen. I know you don’t believe it but I was troublesome at school, except in English, history and economics. In mathematics and physics I was an urban guerrilla. I worked in Coles afterwards, and the man I met was assistant manager. He was a decent man, Terry. He was a man worth spending the rest of a lifetime with. He was possessive though. My father asked us to go to a weekend in Melbourne, and my friend or my husband—however you want to define him—was very opposed. I went to Melbourne—Rudi was working there at that stage—and when I got back here found that I was locked out of the flat. The father of my child took great legal pains to prove me an unfit mother, and the longer I was away from the flat the easier it was for him to prove that I was negligently absent instead of just locked out. There were a number of Family Court hearings in Parramatta, and in the end I had to be reconciled to not seeing my own baby.”

  “Not at all?” asked Delaney.

  “Once a week was permitted but in his presence. It was beyond tolerating, and the sorrow made me sick. I found myself in Northmead Psychiatric. There was no other way of doing things but becoming reconciled.”

  “But why would anyone resent you going to Melbourne to see your old man?” Even as he asked it, Delaney could see there might be reasons.

  “He’d quarreled with Rudi.”

  “But what were you all doing on this family weekend?” Perhaps an explosives refresher course, Delaney couldn’t help surmising.

  Danielle began to examine the rim of the bed cover and inhaled, acquiring oxygen for choosing her words. Even athletes did not breathe deeper than that. You would think the brain, even the neat brain of Danielle Kabbel, was a bellows. “Rudi had a dreadful childhood. The Poles, the Germans, the Russians.” What worlds of oppression shone in those three names, though lately, especially with people like Stanton, the Poles had become heroic.

  “We grew up in a different sort of place, a place where there were no politics.”

  “No politics. What have Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke been doing all this time?”

  “I mean the sort of politics that kills people in the street.”

  “They reckon us rich countries export deaths by not exporting our wheat,” he murmured, as if he wanted to slow the argument down.

  “Once Rudi was in a room where the partisans killed three people. And another time he was more or less buried alive in a pit and left there for ages. And his problem was to make all that seem real to us. Now you probably don’t believe in any of this, but in Melbourne there was this Belorussian woman, seventy-two years old, and she was a medium. You know, she holds something like séances. Or she held I should say; she died last year.”

  Delaney’s legs seemed to him to contract, he felt an electric touch at the back of the neck. He was far from home now, with this foreign woman from a weird clan. “He got you to go to Melbourne for a séance?”

  “Not a séance. Not talking to spirits. Though in some ways yes. We all sat together, linked hand to hand, and the old lady made it real to us, the things that separated us from Rudi.”

  “Did you hear voices?” asked Delaney in dread, breathing harshly himself now.

  “It was more that we all felt the most terrible terror and then the greatest relief and safety. So it wasn’t like a voice. It was like Rudi had predicted: a powerful hand against the small of the back.” She smiled as an apology. “That’s the trouble with the Kabbels. None of us ever felt as secure, really secure, as we did that night.”

  “If you felt secure as all that,” Delaney asked, the logic crackling at the back of his throat, “why did you end in Northmead?”

  “I hadn’t worked out what to do,” she explained. “Which way to jump. I was a good mother, Terry. Being called a bad one was the price for the other thing.”

  “The other thing? The hand in the small of the back?”

  She smiled up at him. “You’re a very bright fellow, Delaney. I love you very much.”

  Delaney felt the awful bleakness of that Melbourne séance, he could sense the fetid cold of some old Coburg terrace, smell the strangeness of the clothing, picture the old medium’s creased lips.

  “Why did he need a séance?” asked Delaney, remembering something he had heard from Kabbel on the night of the hubcaps. “I thought he could talk to this old uncle of his in Parramatta any time he chose to?”

  “It’s not his uncle strictly speaking. He goes and talks with an old man in Parramatta who reminds him of the old man who pulled him out of a hole in the ground once, one my grandfather’s enemies put him in. And this old man—the one in Parramatta—Rudi only found him a few years back.”

  “And do the lot of you sit on the floor and listen to this old fellow and do whatever he says?”

  “Of course not. We can’t speak Belorussian for a start.”

  “Is he the one who suggested to Rudi blowing Stevo’s hand off?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him, choosing to laugh. “We don’t intrude between Rudi and the old man.”

  “Does the old man talk about the bloody Wave, Danielle?”

  “Everyone does, Terry. Even the afternoon papers.”

  He considered where he could take Danielle, what Rugby League and pearl-diving port in far Queensland where she would be safe from calls to séances. Where she could live on a beach beyond the radius of Rudi’s terrible Belorussian infancy.

  32

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

  Would not let them question the boy. To hell with Bienecke! What can he stand to learn from the miraculous survival of my son? Since he had urinated and was shivering, I wrapped Radek in a blanket and drove home with him. Behind us, Bienecke and Harner had the bodies of the assassins placarded and hung from lampposts.

  Radek was popeyed and wore an excited half smile. You’d think he’d been given a present. “Shock,” Yuri told me with heavy wisdom. He reached his hand over into the back seat as if he would gladly offer it when needed.

  Halfway home the boy began to babble like a sleepwalker, using bits of words, putting syllables and ideas together with their wrong partners. Shook him gently and at last he stopped. Then held him against me—he lay half across my lap. What he told me then astonished me somewhat. “The oldest one,” he said—you’d think he was telling me an exciting detail of an excursion—“looked under the table and said, ‘It’s the Kabbelski brat.’”

  I blinked and gave thanks the absolutely reliable Yuri was at the wheel and not some Bienecke planted spy.

  Leader of the assassination team is believed to be Semyanov, major in the NKVD. Credible he might know the members of my family on sight, though to believe so makes me feel naked. Harder to understand his acquitting of Radek from the same sentence he had just imposed on Willi Ganz. Both sides in these brutal exchanges have not stopped before for children. Both sides have raised the stakes to include the very young, the very old, all women including and, by report, especially those bearing children. Semyanov therefore had every ideological reason to do to Radek what the SS have done to the children of villagers. That he didn’t could be a temperamental thing, a pulse of compassion and therefore, in partisan and NKVD terms, a lapse.

  Already concerned that whatever happened in Ganz’s apartment, Bienecke might conclude Radek had had some form of exemption, and would ferret away at that idea. We have already done enough for
the man without feeding him fancies as well. So hastily put together a compact with Radek in the back of the car that we would not tell anyone about Semyanov’s words, that it was to be a secret like Hirschmann’s medal but better kept.

  Willi Ganz buried quickly. Disgraceful funeral—all the Belorussian officials but no one from Minsk or Kaunas, no one from General von Gottberg’s office and only a minor secretary from Dr. Kappeler’s Political Section. Messages of condolence from von Gottberg to the people of Staroviche on the loss of their beloved Kommissar were read by priest during sermon of Requiem Mass, likewise messages from the Ostministerium. But everyone supposedly too busy with current emergencies—hardly more intense than the emergencies of the past six months—to come to Staroviche and say a Pater Noster for poor sybaritic Ganz or to throw a clod of Belorussian earth into his grave. Fool of a cleric preached on Jeremiah: “Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings.” He predicted the Soviets would be smitten specifically for this death, which is a little unworldly of him if he really believes so. I’m sure Willi Ganz, at least in his better days, would have preferred something a little less vengeful and grim. Maybe something about many mansions and seraphim and cherubim, a heaven of sweet Italianate limbs and good food.