A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Miss Tokina, the children’s tutor, insisted on attending with Danielle, and but for them would have been no tears at Ganz’s grave. Danielle has begun to speak as if Ganz had offered his life for Radek’s and it would be too cruel to disabuse her. Bienecke stayed away, not out of sensitivity, but from contempt, and sent his deputy Harner. Major Gnauck, a young one-armed officer—we get lots of physically or mentally maimed garrison commanders here—newly appointed to command the Staroviche garrison, told me Willi Ganz’s ancient father and former wife petitioned von Gottberg for the return of their son/spouse’s corpse to Germany but that request was denied on “war effort” grounds.

  Only when, having briefly celebrated my son’s deliverance, I was traveling to Minsk in a convoy which included old Oberst Lustbader’s battalion—they going into transit camp for eventual posting to the Front, Staroviche receiving Gnauck’s even more geriatric garrison in their place—only then had time to consider particular implications of Semyanov’s (it was Semyanov) words: “It’s the Kabbelski brat, kid.” One implication that my family has some kind of immunity, that I am somehow understood by partisans, that they see me as a moderate influence. They did not however see the even more moderate Ganz in such a light. Other possibility that occurs is that they want to save me for show trial if Staroviche falls to Soviets. They are saving all their cruelty, including that which would usually be directed against Radek, till then. They might intend the same for Ostrowsky and other of his lieutenants. They should know we are professional exiles, will go into exile again, and when the Soviets fall to the West return again, carrying—it can confidently be expected—guarantees of Belorussian sovereignty. So reprieve of Radek, and what Semyanov said, goes largely unexplained.

  Bienecke, though, would love to know all this, would play with the suspicion I am somehow in communication with partizanskie kraya, the partisan machine. Wouldn’t seriously believe the idea but would use it as a lever. In even more desperate days than these, could use it as pretext for my assassination.

  33

  It was nearly noon and not all the mists had risen out of the groins of earth in which Aldo Terracetti grew his tomatoes. Spiked with wooden stakes, the Terracetti land ran at a small cant down toward a creek called Lowes Creek, and under all this vapor looked something like Delaney’s mental image of rustic Italy. Delaney himself stood on a cemented embankment outside Aldo’s poolroom and unofficial winery and sipped a Resch’s Pilsener, eschewing the Terracetti grappa. Aldo, his brother Eduardo, and his son Joe drank beyond the glass doors behind Delaney. His hands were numb, except for the middle finger of his right hand, which he had corked against the spine of a Saint George center the day before. It sang like a stone bruise in the cold air. As well a shoulder ached and the muscles of his lower abdomen—subject to the various strains of his true profession, his new fear of the Kabbels, his true and foredoomed marriage to Danielle, his unterminated and cruel marriage to Gina—tolled with pain.

  Yesterday’s game had been played on Saint George’s hard ground in front of a fanatic crowd. He seemed to himself to spend all the time tackling, preoccupied with the deceptive thighs and upper legs of their young lock, the seventeen-year-old the club heavies said would play for Australia before he was twenty. The kid had all the confidence of someone who doesn’t know yet that the game was a furnace, that it was fueled on unrefined talent, and few gave a damn if unrefined talent was consumed in the flames.

  According to the administration of the game, Saturdays were reserved for the second most important game of the round. It was a rule of thumb hard to believe in when Penrith first grade had lost the last five on the trot. That statistic detracted from the glory of Delaney’s team, which had won the last seven, and through grueling defense and a small margin of very ordinary brilliance made it eight in a row against the Saints. Delaney had not even bothered to write the game up in his diary. He supposed he never would. Love of Danielle had made the game petty and brutish to the happiest man in Australia.

  Gina was inside like the rest of the family. Upstairs where women were loading the tables with ham and salads, she stole glances at her eternally wed aunts, the skeletal one Uncle Eduardo had married, for example, and wondered how they had managed it, why their marriages were like institutions—the Stock Exchange, the Vatican—and why the gates of hell had not prevailed against them. It was cruel to watch her with a smile on her face, rushing about with plates and forks, pretending to be one of them, hoping to pick up the tricks they had not yet confessed to. To Delaney Gina possessed the horrifying look of a woman already widowed. “Hey,” he heard someone call from a point directly above where he was standing. He looked up to the sundeck upstairs. Gina’s sister-in-law Susie was standing there blowing smoke into the cold air. “The Italians won’t let me smoke inside,” she told him. “Mama Terracetti says it buggers the prosciutto. Come up and say g’day to your old sister-in-law.”

  He couldn’t say no.

  Susie was what Delaney’s mother called “well-groomed.” She was proud of her husband’s career (state sales manager, greeting cards), proud of the two sullen and intelligent children she had borne. She lived in North Rocks in a good street. In company she made indirect references, with lots of eyebrow-raising, shaking of the head, and small innocent moans, to the fact that Joe Terracetti was endowed like a drafthorse and drove her to the craziest roaring peaks. She represented therefore all the news, all the certainty Delaney least wished to hear this Sunday of the Terracettis’ wedding anniversary.

  “How’s the football?” she asked.

  “Like the Vietnam War. We’re losing even though we’re winning.”

  “First grade next year?”

  “If they don’t bring in a banana-bender or a pom. They probably will, you know. They only pay lip service to the local blokes.”

  “Most important question of all, what’s wrong with Gina? And with you, if it comes to that?”

  He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t manage even a lie like “Teething troubles.”

  “Listen, Terry,” said Susie, “you know I’m a woman of healthy desires. By the same token I don’t go around talking in a pornographic way; I’ve got no interest in that. But what I’m going to say I said to the husband of a friend of mine when their marriage looked absolutely finito. It’s this. The clitoris is a rudimentary penis. All right? That should tell you what a woman needs. All right? Forgive me if I offend you by being direct. But it’s probably something the Marist Brothers didn’t tell you.”

  Delaney began to laugh, not because she was funny; her seriousness was worth respecting. He laughed with a sort of longing for the innocence Susie had, the idea that a willing hand properly placed could heal. Clutching the wrought-iron railing, he rocked and wept, and then with horror saw Gina staring at him from beyond the glass of the living room, an awesome grievance in her face. It was clear when she slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the veranda that she took his laughter as an insult large enough to justify what she had not intended to do at her parents’ anniversary—parade her injury in front of frowning relatives, weep openly, yell reproaches. Her shoulders were straight and her hands gathered into fists. “You put me to shame in front of my parents,” she said.

  “Oh bugger!” said Susie. “Do you want me to leave you to it?”

  Gina closed her eyes. Her long lips were set in a line of exquisite sorrow. It was terrible to face her dignity. He was awed to discover that the happiness of a thoroughbred like her could depend on a third-grade five-eighth and security man.

  “Don’t stand around laughing,” she told him. “Don’t do that. Denise Stanton tells me Kabbel’s got a daughter, a nice little blonde. Is that the problem?”

  Delaney said, “Yes.”

  Gina had made it easy. She stumbled against one of the outdoor benches and sat sideways on it. Her face contorted and she began to wail. His mother had never made a sound like that. It was a foreign sound—Delaney thought of it as subterranean somehow—it had
run underground great distances and for eternities before emerging from Gina’s mouth in Bringelly and startling the party. “Oh God,” she cried, slowly pounding the bench. “What can I do?”

  Susie put her hands on Gina’s shoulders. She looked paltry beside Gina, her flesh speckled with the wrong expensive makeup.

  Delaney stood muttering. Everything he uttered sounded like a provocation. Her tears became less controlled. There was no limit to how terrifying they could become, and Delaney had an urge to run downstairs and out to the car parked beyond the farmhouse gate. Three women brought their Sicilian faces to the living-room door—Gina’s mother, the skeletal aunt, a Terracetti cousin from Gymea. They seemed like a chorus in an opera and their faces looked beautiful in ways which had not been obvious to him early this dismal morning and which increased his impulse to flee. Downstairs even old Aldo appeared on the concrete apron outside his poolroom, looked at his grieving daughter for some seconds, and disappeared again. “Gina darling,” her mother called, “why don’t you forget it for today? Put your arm around her, Terry, and bring her in here.”

  Gina threw up her hands. “I don’t want the arm of that whoremonger around me. He … he has had foreign whores in Hawaii. Everyone knows that, everyone in Penrith!”

  Delaney was aware of his stupid blood blazing in his face.

  Gina was fearsome and went on screaming. “Everyone knows it! Adulterer! Whoremonger!”

  His gorge heaving with shame, Delaney forced himself to the door and told Mrs. Terracetti he was going home. “I don’t want to be impolite—” he said.

  “Impolite don’t matter when my daughter is bleeding.”

  He made for the steps.

  Mrs. Terracetti’s accent thickened, as if falling back on some terrible Sicilian sense of honor. “Would you want your worst-a enemy to cry like that?”

  Downstairs he made more quick apologies to the men, backing as he went. He hoped they had not heard much of the Hawaiian news. Joe Terracetti urged him fraternally to come and stew himself on grappa. By lunchtime Delaney would love every bastard on earth, said Joe. By four o’clock he would be sick and by seven too tired to fight with his wife. Delaney continued to back. From upstairs Mrs. Terracetti called, “You need children. None of this waiting until you got all those things—dishwasher, video? Whatsa your video doing for you today?”

  At last he was out on the Northern Road in his freezing Holden, making for the Blue Mountains, where the mists would be heavier and he would be protected from such gazes he had just suffered at the Terracettis’. He switched on the radio and filled the car to the limits of its steel and glass with the manic warmth of the Match of the Day commentators at Belmore Oval. He worried away at the propositions that he was the happiest man in Australia and that he would not treat an enemy as he was treating Gina. Somewhere beyond Lawson, where the mist and the narrow highway made self-aware driving a matter of necessity, he decided to resign from Uncle Security. He was not sure what this would do for himself or Gina or Danielle. But because it was a direction in which he could move without causing harm, the idea filled him with serenity.

  34

  “Let me tell you in confidence, Terry,” said Kabbel, serenely chewing. “I am pleased you have chosen to go back to your wife.” Beyond the windscreen it was drizzling coldly. Even Kabbel couldn’t sit by the bandstand in this weather, playing windproof and waterproof Belorussian, exposing his Belorussian certainty to the weather.

  Delaney, sitting in the passenger seat, a cup of the usual Kabbel peculiarly fragrant coffee in his hand, said nothing. He still had no idea what in the hell leaving Uncle Security meant—the first move in separating Danielle from the family or a move back to Gina. He didn’t want to strengthen Kabbel by arguing with himself about that point aloud.

  Anyhow it had made Gina something like happy, it had produced in Delaney’s white and papally blessed house in Forth Street an atmosphere of dull misery in which Delaney was able to sleep beside his wife, to regret occasionally sending his hand down the line of her back as if he were settling a Labrador. He knew it was all criminal but believed it gave him time to think. Thinking wasn’t possible. Everywhere—it seemed to Delaney—the air discouraged it.

  “You would have had to go back in the end,” Kabbel went on, crowing. “Danielle sees herself as so inseparable from the lads and myself … She did tell you, my friend, she was more or less married before, didn’t she?”

  “She told me about some séance in Melbourne.”

  Kabbel started to laugh. “Jesus Christ!” It was a rare expletive with Kabbel, and Delaney knew why he came out with it, to get Delaney on his side in laughing at the way women exaggerated. “I wish she wouldn’t use that term.”

  “What should she have called it?” Delaney asked, refusing to join in any “Oh, women!” stunt.

  “That’s the trouble,” said Kabbel. “It was the sort of burning family experience you could never understand, Terry, even if I tried to explain it. I don’t mean you aren’t intelligent and I don’t mean you aren’t ‘a good bloke.’ I mean it would be like a foreign language to you.”

  Delaney felt his face redden before Kabbel’s glistening confidence. “Why don’t you give up this mystifying bullshit, Rudi?” he yelled. “Why don’t you let Warwick and Scott find Australian girls with big tits and sunny bloody temperaments? Why did you have to force Danielle to go to Melbourne to see bloody ghosts? They’re zombies, those poor little buggers, you’re like a bloody pillow over their faces. Get rid of the bloody explosives manuals, Rudi, and let in some bloody fresh air!”

  Kabbel leaned over in his seat and looked frowning into Delaney’s face. “Is this a declaration of hostilities, Terry?”

  “I don’t know what in the bloody hell it is. Listen, Danielle has not once mentioned my wife.”

  He understood straightaway that it was a mistake to mention that, even a betrayal. What he meant it to be was an accusation against Kabbel, because he kept them so locked up that they didn’t see anyone out there beyond the edge of the Kabbel clan campfire.

  “So you wish Danielle would nag you about Mrs. Delaney?” asked Kabbel, with that shrewdness again which made Delaney want to hit him. “Adultery occurs everywhere and in every age and in spite of women’s sisterly concern for each other. You are actually complaining, Terry, that Danielle does not weep hypocritically for your wife?”

  “I’m complaining that you stunted the poor little bitch!”

  Rudi Kabbel sighed, laying his head back against the rest, the extension of the seat which was designed to prevent whiplash injuries. Returning from setting booby traps, the Kabbels would be safe from spinal damage.

  “Sometimes, Mr. Delaney, history does make its claim on people. In places like Los Angeles and Sydney people try to live in an eternal and very base now, without any memory of the dead. The barbecue and the sun are all. Games are all—a game is all to you. But you have to face it: Sometimes—I restate it so that you will know—sometimes even here history can’t be avoided, history comes up and grabs people. Outside coffee bars in Auburn where Armenians wait with knives for the Turks to come out—there it can kill people. What I say is Don’t try to marry Danielle. It will never work. She belongs to forces you can’t negotiate with, Terry. I tell you that as a friend. I too wish it were otherwise. But there can’t be any Aussie coziness in life for her.”

  Mouth open, Delaney was considering making the challenge, yelling, We’ll bloody see, and all the other worn terms of a struggle between a lover and a father, when Kabbel changed direction.

  “I was going to tell you, anyhow. I’m selling out, Terry. The business and the house. I want to buy property—forests, escarpments, meadows. The line can no longer be held, Terry. The line against barbarity.”

  “And poor damn Brian Stanton?” asked Delaney.

  “He’ll work for the new owners. I have to get out, Terry. There is a valley beyond Newnes—two and a half hours away from here if you drive sedately like me.”
/>   “Farming? Or a bloody munitions factory?”

  “The bottomland can be farmed and carry livestock. There are great sandstone gorges, made by glaciers when God was young.”

  The mention of glaciers signaled Delaney. “This is all for the sake of that Wave you crowd talk about!”

  “Everyone knows it’s on its way, Delaney. Every cretin restocking the shelves in supermarkets from Tasmania to Finland. Everyone knows it’s on its way.”

  “So you don’t live now, like sane people. You live for afterwards, you stupid prick, Rudi.”

  “Said like a good Catholic, who doesn’t enjoy fucking now, if you will excuse the term, so that he can fuck without worry in heaven.”

  “God,” said Doig over the heads of mystified parishioners one Sunday, “is glorified by the love with which you treat your own body. This includes drinking wine at the right time and putting the cork back in the bottle at the right time. This includes feasting in season and dieting in time to prevent a coronary.” (“Man thinks he’s bloody Pritikin,” said old Greg Delaney outside.)

  “So you cork up the gorges to stop the rest of us getting in,” Delaney observed. “You put up a gate and anyone who touches it gets the Stevo treatment. The gates of bloody heaven, eh? And the unworthy get their mitts blown off. You know what shits me about you, Rudi? You look at me, a professional player but that means sweet damn-all—a poor stupid bugger who’s worked well and taken deep bruising at the bloody chicken house for you—and you think, Pity about poor Delaney, he’s done for, might as well write him off. I’ve been inside your daughter, you old sod, and it doesn’t mean a thing, I’m just another one of the damned. And what will you do out there with Danielle, in bloody Newnes, in Kabbelburg? A woman, Rudi, a really lovely and healthy woman? Will you give her to Warwick so they can bang out a few cross-eyed kids while you’re waiting for the bloody surf to break over the Blue Mountains?” He noticed Kabbel was regarding him in a strange deliberate way and understood with delight that the man had lost his temper. But it was not the hot loss Delaney had hoped for. There was no chance of punches or screaming. The Kabbels never gave you that.