A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  So Ostrowsky simply sent the news to Father that Redich was—as they say—a mole, that Redich may have been a mole even in Michelstadt, and that Mother might have died merely to protect his coyer. I hope Father gave him a good heave and that he did not die at once.

  There it is, Radek. Since it is now late at night and I am exhausted, all I can do is to leave you with the burden of this family news. You must swallow it as I did. You have my affection and best wishes.

  Your loving sister, Genia

  PART THREE

  57

  Delaney had put on his best suit for the visit to the Sinclair Funeral Home, an old and gracious farmhouse which the town, in growing westward toward the river, had subsumed. His mind had for the past week been steadied only by his daily call to Penrith detectives to discover when the bodies would be released for burial. Sergeant Dick Webster—an old footballer who in the time of innocence had sometimes put a meaty, approving hand on Delaney’s shoulder on Leagues Club Sunday nights—had warned him that in view of the wounds there could be no question of open coffins. But it was still worthwhile going to visit the place. Webster had seen enough of the mystery of death and the paradoxes of mourning to know that.

  Delaney got there early in the afternoon of a fine day in early May. He shared the waiting room with a slight, frayed blond woman. The place was well provided with magazines on sailing and photography, as if this were a dentist’s waiting room. Perhaps whoever Sinclair was saw it in those terms, saw himself as the kindly dispenser of the novocaine of funeral rites.

  The blond woman was trying to read a boating magazine. She had turned the pages back on glossies of twelve-meter yachts, none of which she could ever expect to own. She kept glancing at Delaney.

  At last she said, “My condolences.”

  Delaney had to force his vocal cords. “And mine to you,” he muttered.

  “Is it a … a parent of yours, perhaps?”

  “No, it’s a girlfriend.” He began crying, and she came and sat beside him and placed a dry hand on his hand.

  “You’re here for the Kabbels, aren’t you?” she said. “You know my daughter Danielle.”

  The odd use of the present instead of the past was the only betrayal of grief. He looked at her amazed. From this woman came Danielle!

  “I’m Mrs. Kabbel,” she said. “I married Rudi in 1955. We had to put the wedding off because of that other fellow, Redich, falling out of a train at Lidcombe. But oh yes, I knew that all this was going to happen. I left as if my life depended on it. Soon as Scott was thirteen. Dear God, I can’t believe he’d do it, though I knew he would.”

  “He?” asked Delaney. “Which he?”

  “All of them,” she said, her eyes unfocused.

  It was the right time to state his holy intention. “I’m going to take the baby. And Danielle, needless to say. The baby’s my own.”

  “Oh no,” she said, staring at the mid-distance. “No sense in that. Let them go down with Rudi. Danielle wanted to be some sort of chosen person. Let her go down with damn Rudi. The state runs to not such bad funerals for murder victims who leave a bit of property. Let the state put them all down together. Don’t you think?”

  But he knew the woman was mad. The term “put them down”—it was a giveaway. As if two Pekingese she owned were pissing on the carpet. Put them down! She wanted the Kabbels and the child disposed of in a lump. For that reason he recognized her at once as an enemy.

  “Listen,” he said, finding himself with some surprise on his feet. “Don’t try that! Don’t try that on. You’re bloody tired of them, eh? I’m not tired of them, you callous bitch. If I could I’d bury them in bloody northern Queensland.”

  The woman rose because she thought he might offer blows. She was angry enough to return them.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, you damned lout! Because you slept with Danielle a few times doesn’t give you any right! I carried the whole mess for years—the voices and the séances and that terrible old father and the talk about Belorussia and people whose names all ended in chik and sky. I saw Rudi through his fits. So don’t call me a bitch or mess up my funeral plans. My husband, my damn children! And I want to be finished with them at one hit!”

  Delaney seized her by the upper arms. Full of the ruggedness of a woman who has only to see one simple thing done before she can breathe again, she struck him across the face with her handbag, broke the hold more effortlessly than most professional footballers had in the past two seasons, and fled out into the reception room. Delaney pursued her. A young man in a suit turned up from the inner chambers of the funeral home, the place where Danielle and Alexandra were lying, inadequately prepared for the earth. The receptionist was standing at her typewriter and telephone, wide-eyed. At a nod from the young man in the suit, she called a number. Delaney was sure it was Penrith police the girl had called. He had time for his mad plan. He had not been strong enough to hold Rudi Kabbel’s wife, yet he believed he might yet carry away Danielle and the child.

  He explained the scheme to the young man. The young man said, “Sir, you should compose yourself. It isn’t your place. There was a document the police found with the bodies. I hope you understand that. Requesting a communal grave.”

  Delaney decided to fight his way through into the place where the dead were kept, but the young man, a muscular pallbearer beneath his good suit, did his best to block him. And now, Delaney could hear behind him, Mrs. Kabbel had found her tears, was loudly keening.

  “Cheryl,” the young man groaned, struggling with Delaney, “tell them to hurry!”

  Another man, middle-aged, suntanned from standing beside summer graves and dressed in a more sepulchral suit than the young one, appeared from behind a curtain and helped hold Delaney immobile. This second one was tough. Delaney found himself on the floor, a strong forearm garbed in black serge clamped across his chest. Delaney raved and pleaded, but realized that by his craziness he had forfeited the right to be heard. The argument therefore that at least the child should not be buried with its murderers meant nothing to either muscular undertaker.

  He heard the sirens drawing close down Main Street, heard the police arrive, heard three sets of boots on the parquetry. He saw old Dick Webster’s ageless and ravaged face above him. “Let go of the man,” Dick Webster told the two undertakers, and only then asked Delaney whether he would do the right thing, if he was going to be sensible.

  By now Delaney was beyond sense of resistance. In a short time, without remembering what moves were made to achieve it, he found himself in the back of a patrol car, hunched over his knees, between which he sheltered his hands, and drenching his shirt with tears and saliva.

  58

  “One thing,” said Dick Webster, echoing the wisdom Stanton had once learned from the Serbian husband, “is that family is very strong. And when a family’s got some crazy illusion, that’s strongest of all.”

  Delaney was very familiar with this small and tired truth. But he loved Webster for going on talking like this—it was exactly the sort of talk Delaney wanted to hear—something that passed for an explanation. Webster had all the marks of the New South Wales copper—the crenellated face, the brewer’s goiter slung over his belt. Once, when he was an unimaginable boy, he had played for Wests, before there was any money in the game. All the marks. Seeing him in his suit, you knew at once he was a detective, a cop badly disguised as a member of society. But what he still had was the ability to be shocked. Delaney could gratefully see that Rudi Kabbel had shocked Webster. Warwick and Scott Kabbel had shocked him. Danielle had shocked him profoundly by being passive. His shock was precious to Delaney, a prodigious comfort. And with it came a willingness to speculate about the Kabbels, and why families should go to hell in a group.

  Webster began with his own homely example. “My wife’s family,” he said. “The thing with them was a disinheritance in the bloody Edwardian era, or maybe early World War One, I’m not interested enough to know the date exactly. My wife’s gra
ndfather was cut out of the family wealth because he got into the booze, and that crowd were temperance. Quite a pile of money he missed out on. Now my mother-in-law, when I first met her, lived like bloody nobility-in-exile in a little terrace at Stanmore. She didn’t have any sort of life at all. Her delusions didn’t let her live working class, her poverty wouldn’t stretch to anything else. And that’s the way my wife lived as a girl. It was blokes like me who had to break the news to them, her and her sister, that sorry and all that, but they were just girls from Stanmore.”

  “He was like that,” said Delaney. “They all were. Even Danielle. Nobility in bloody exile. He thought he was somewhere else.”

  Webster drank reflectively. He’s a happy man too, Delaney realized with surprise. Like old Greg? How did they manage it, on a dangerous planet like this?

  “You know,” Webster said, “he was a cluey bastard, Terry. He left a family history, he translated his old man’s diary from bloody Belorussian and his sister’s letters from French. The state psychiatrist from Long Bay—he’s going to give evidence at the inquest—said Kabbel reminds him of that Polish sailor who started writing novels in English. You know, Joseph Conrad.”

  Delaney flinched. Danielle had at one time been studying Heart of Darkness.

  “Talent to burn, poor bloody Rudi Kabbel. But he believed in this voice he heard, this character called “Uncle.” There are some people of the same nationality have a coffee shop in Parramatta, and Rudi—intelligent Rudi Kabbel—would go round there and talk to these people’s old uncle, who could only speak that language, and Rudi took everything the poor old bugger said literally. Whereas the old man was senile, the family knew that. He’s in Lidcombe Geriatric right now, in a coma and on life support.”

  “I searched for the old man everywhere,” said Delaney. “In all the bloody ethnic dives.”

  Webster laughed gently and then stifled the laughter. “It wasn’t any wog cafe the old man came from. It was a place called the “Boomerang Milk Bar.” Owned by Belorussians, sure, but catering to hard-core Aussies.”

  Delaney himself began to laugh, and Webster joined him uncertainly. What camouflage! The Boomerang Milk Bar!

  It was upstairs at the Boomerang, in the flat above the shop, that the old fellow had given the date when civilization would cease—when the great Wave would cleanse the earth—had slipped the news to Rudi. And on account of that Rudi had bought his farm, stocked it with explosives, had sold his house, and let his business go to hell. To keep this holy date, he had taken his family in two cars, towing two trailers, into Heather’s Glen and, nothing happening, had come back down to the plains again to consult his Belorussian prophet at the Boomerang Milk Bar. The relatives said there had been a frightful scene, the old man had grown terrified and yelled, “His father killed his mother! His father killed his mother!” He could just as easily have yelled, “Fish live underwater!” It was all senile gibberish. But on hearing it Rudi had suffered a fit and passed out. Apparently it related to some idea Rudi already harbored about his father.

  “Did you know he had all those weapons?” Dick Webster asked Delaney. “Magnum .357s—two of those: Two .22 rifles, three shotguns, a carbine.”

  “Warwick threatened me with a shotgun once.”

  “Could’ve sold them to pay the rent and electricity if that’d been the point. Warwick—Warwick had a bloody crossbow. All prepared to shoot wild pigs west of Lithgow when civilization ended!”

  Civilization had ended, Delaney came close to telling the policeman. Mothers died placidly without begging for their babies’ lives.

  “And bloody manuals of booby traps. Would have been damned difficult to get into the Kabbel property once that tidal Wave he talked about turned up.”

  Delaney was pleased to be where they were, in this particular crowded bar. Webster, after calming him down at the station, had offered to take him to the Leagues Club, but Delaney hadn’t wanted that, hadn’t wanted footballers coming up to commiserate with him on his suspension or surreptitiously congratulate him for breaking Lynch’s mandible. They had come to the saloon bar of the Oarsman therefore. Webster drank scotch for, as he said, the sake of his waterworks, which must have been extensive in that mass of flesh. Delaney had no such inhibition. He was young and muscular, had nothing any more to do with his body. He could sin with impunity, if it made any sense. He drank as quickly as he could, feeling a blunt ache at the back of his neck, the first sign of the leaden irrational hope which liquor could generate in him.

  Webster asked him, “Remember that Jonestown thing a few years back now. Someone like Rudi took a thousand people into the South American bush and made a town. Same idea—the world would end and only that little group would come up trumps. Same thing happened—people began to close in, police and politicians. The bloke in charge just like Kabbel, mad as a meat-axe, and suddenly the world isn’t going to end for his convenience, isn’t going to come his way. So they all drink Kool-Aid full of cyanide. Some had to be forced, but most were willing. And the thing is, some took it because they still believed in the miracle bloody man, and others took it because they’d lost faith but didn’t want to live on without someone divine telling them which way to jump. Same thing here. Same thing exactly.”

  He waved to a barmaid, who came at once to serve them. He had some pull over her—perhaps once he’d let her off possession of marijuana.

  “You don’t have to remember any of this,” Webster, draining the watery scotch he still had left, told Delaney. “I’m the officer assisting the coroner’s investigation, and I won’t forget it for some time yet. But you’re under no obligation. Clean slate. Will your missus take you back?”

  “She’s Italian,” Delaney said, hoping—not for the first time—that that would do as a total explanation. After giving it, he found himself weeping against his best will not to. He was shamed because Webster might think it was merely marital remorse, doubt about whether his Italian wife might forgive him.

  “Okay, son,” Webster murmured, “it’s been fucking horrifying, I know.” The mountainous detective took him at once by the elbow and helped him out of the saloon. It might have looked a bit comic, Delaney understood without caring a damn. It might have looked halfway between arrest and protective custody. No one in the saloon took any notice except an idiot by the door looking up from the afternoon Sun, the sort of fool who bought the paper not to find out if the geriatric President intended to fry us all in our tracks, but to play the Bingo card thrown in with each copy. “Did a Rabbitoh hit ’im back?” the man asked Webster.

  “Watch your bloody mouth,” said Webster.

  There were thunderclouds over the mountains, a sheet of falling water over Brian Stanton’s way. Stanton waited on bail, under that torrent, for his case to come up. If he did something irrational, fled to the Northern Territory, say, it would break Delaney for life.

  Webster propped him against the trunk of his Holden and asked him how he was.

  “I know,” said Webster, repeating his original thesis. “You thought you could lever her out of that mob. We all have ourselves on about that. But it’s their hutch, you know, their original nest, that’s what counts with them. While they’re becoming the very woman their old woman was, they keep on being the girl they were there, you know, in a home you know bugger-all about, a foreign country. I mean if you don’t believe me, I’ll lend you some of the stuff Kabbel wrote.”

  Choking on the words, Delaney said, “I’d like to read that stuff.”

  “No you wouldn’t. Besides, it’s really not available until after the inquest. Look, I’ve got to go, taking the missus to Parramatta for dinner. Forget it, eh? Give yourself a chance. And don’t fight the burial arrangements. The message they left was in favor of the present setup. They want to be interred together. Wouldn’t surprise me if they all bloody expect to rise again.”

  “They didn’t ask the child for its opinion. All right for them to bloody lie together!”

  Webster said, “O
h Jesus!” and kicked one of the front tires of Delaney’s car. “Listen, the people next door heard Danielle talking at the back of the house that morning. They heard her say to her father, ‘Don’t be cruel!’ She wasn’t shouting, just conversational. Don’t be cruel. Did I mention that to you?”

  “No.”

  Delaney could hear her, the sentence was palpable. It was the dominant aspect of the earth. It hung over the parking area, the automobile-crazed highway, the hacking voices of men on their way to drink. Delaney saw Webster anxious all at once that he had made a mistake, that he had given a further argument for the rescue of Danielle’s body and the child’s from the Kabbel shambles. And that Delaney would use the news rashly, build it into a system of faith that would cause him mischief in the end.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” said the detective quickly. “You can’t look at her as a victim in the normal sense of the word. She lay on the bed, Terry, and pulled her pillow over her head and waited for Warwick to finish her. It was a calm death. Believe me, I’ve seen all the variations.”

  After Webster had gone to take his wife to dinner, Delaney sat on in his car. His hands were slung over the steering wheel, but the clammy tedium of the thing, manufactured of something chemical which mimicked both cloth and steel, revolted him at last and made him drop his hands into his lap. The rain made marks like tiny fractures on his windscreen and then fell without stint.

  “Don’t be cruel,” said a voice to his left.

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