A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  As central Poland had fallen to the Germans, the Soviets had pushed forward into Polish Belorussia. Belorussia was now once more under the total control of the Soviets—for that had been the arrangement between Hitler and Stalin. My father used to joke at table that this setup was preferable, since only one intruder now had to be dealt with. The German officers would pretend to be scandalized and advise him against being too openly anti-Soviet for the moment.

  My father, of course, knew what would happen. In June 1941 the Germans launched their withering attack on the Soviets, taking all the holy earth of Belorussia within a matter of days. Within a few hours of the capture of Staroviche, my father arrived in that city and took up the post to which the Reich Security Central Office had appointed him, police chief of an entire Belorussian province. A week later, after one of the few happy train journeys in the Kabbelski family history, the rest of his family traveled from Warsaw and joined him in the elegant residence in Drozdy Street.

  10

  “Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum,” said a paper on the radio bench at the headquarters of Uncle Security Services, “is an essay on the limits of nationalism. Discuss this.”

  Danielle Kabbel was not there in the office when Delaney and Stanton signed on. Waiting for her to turn up with the key to the weapons cabinet, Stanton lolled in a chair. His younger hyperkinetic daughter had been home from school all day with an infection. She had woken him up, he claimed, seven times by his count. Once by launching herself from a sideboard directly onto him. He had woken screaming beneath the sudden weight of the child. He had been dreaming flinchingly of Queensland cane toads and had at first thought she was one, the supreme one, “Moby bloody Toad.” He was in no state to show interest in the fragments of an education which Danielle Kabbel had left around in the operations room. Yet Delaney was hungry for such details.

  Grass clearly intends that the midget Oskar should, through his glass-shattering voice, signify and symbolize certain aspects of modern European history. What are these aspects? Whose voice does Oskar’s voice stand for? (In your discussions, do not forget the significance of Kristallnacht or Glass Night, when in 1938 the Nazis destroyed Jewish property, notably windows and glassware, in synagogues and business locations.)

  “Reading her mail, eh?” Stanton asked.

  Delaney smiled but did not answer. He was consumed by a desire to read this book about a midget with a voice that shattered glass, as if dealing with the novel was the way to solve and acquit that image of the girl which was always springing up at the front of his brain. He went on reading her notes.

  Discuss why it is essential to the novel that Oskar be a midget. First you should consider why it is essential in terms of the dynamics of Oskar’s family. Then you should consider whether his dwarfism is a symbol of the deliberately retarded German consciousness which permitted the rise of Hitler.

  Delaney experienced, as if watching a worthy documentary on Channel 2 (known to be good for sport, ratshit for everything else), a sharply focused picture of a crowd of women in a living room all talking about the book, understanding everything and nothing among the coffee cups, and in the middle of the room, in a floral-print dress and quiet as nuns used to be, Danielle Kabbel listening with a half smile.

  “Must read this book,” he found himself saying though he hadn’t intended to.

  Stanton began to laugh, uncertainly and perhaps with envy. He read Wilbur Smith. He could tell this was a different kind of book. “Advanced age bloody student,” said Stanton.

  The novel itself lay on the computer table. Delaney lifted it and began to read. The words meant nothing, he felt them as an August flux. Her face was behind them like Hamlet’s Ophelia caught—as Delaney remembered vividly from the Higher School Certificate—in a shallow and serene drowning. He understood that he was in some sort of danger, touching her course notes like someone with a fetish and looking forward to his shift, so that receiving and signing for his .38 he could pass within the fringes of her dry, sharp, pungent electric field.

  FROM THE MATCH DIARY OF TERRY DELANEY

  Penrith v. Easts, Sports Ground, April 25th. Anzac Day game. Forwards got the Chicka Hays disease, gaining a bit of ground but always getting caught with ball still in their arms. Also Easts spent entire game inside the five meters and referee didn’t seem to care. Lucky thing—what they gained by infringements they lost through lack of good old toe, speed, quickness off the mark. Got a lovely pass away to Eric Samuels then minutes into the second half. I could see Eric going places, so wriggled out of their lock’s tackle and followed the old Eric up. He left the centers standing but their winger caught him, fast young kid, an Abo. Eric got lovely underarm pass to me. I thought I was in, but their fullback hit me from behind. Going down in slow motion and on way down found Steve Mansfield steaming up on inside. Just put it right into his arms and he scored under the posts. Converted own try. Beautiful. Penrith 13, Easts 4.

  Watched first-grade. Kevin Hastings played all over Deecock, our pommy first-grade five-eighth. Deecock had it; they can’t wait for him to retire and go to North Queensland to captain/coach some Banana-bender team up there. Looks like he’ll be the weak link again this season like last. First-grade coach Alan Beamish said to me after game, “Needed you out there, Terry.” I grinned at him. “Give the local boys a chance,” I said. As if I didn’t really mind they’d brought Deecock all the way from Yorkshire just to do local boys out of a job.

  So first grade a bit of a disaster: Easts 27, Penrith 12.

  Gina there. Both felt light in the head after game I’d played. But atmosphere back at Leagues Club tonight like a bloody morgue. Apart from Deecock, they bought that pommy forward Tancred for $60,000. Tancred’s the sort of thickhead who wouldn’t work in an iron lung. That’s the trouble with pommy forwards—always knew it was, average bloke watching the game knows it is—they look sort of fast on muddy Yorkshire grounds, but when they get out here on a hard and fast Australian ground they’re just as slow as they were back in the quagmire. Yet club officials keep buying them! Good at getting the ball away, but leaden-footed. Tancred never played at this pace before, except in one Test Match Australia v. England, which Australia won 34—7! Yet our heroic club secretary sees him, the Aussie forwards outpacing him all over the ground, and thinks, Ah, just what we need to take Penrith to a premiership.

  Lot of mumbling into beer about it in Leagues club tonight.

  When Steve Mansfield made his proposal in the Leagues Club car park, Delaney had been watching a full, ripe moon hanging over Sydney to the east. It was such a vast fact in the sky that Delaney in his half tipsy way felt it had to be concentrated on and absorbed. Its presence distracted him from the job he was attempting, the opening of the passenger-side door of his Holden. Steve Mansfield, further gone than Delaney, sat on the flank of Stew Reilly’s RX-7 and rocked his body merrily as Delaney tried the harsh task of lancing his key exactly into the yielding mechanism of the lock. Gay Mansfield and Gina were still inside the red brick palace, talking in a sisterly way in front of the spotlit mirrors in the women’s toilets. Enjoying the status of players’ wives, for what that was worth. Even in the parking lot though you could hear the poker machines whirring and ringing inside. That was where all the bounty and surplus luxury of the lives of the Delaneys and Mansfields came from, from the frenzy of late-night gamblers who could be separated from the machine that chewed their money only by the closing of the club.

  Delaney gave up trying to find the keyhole and tottered backward, slinging his arm around Mansfield and joining him in stuttering hilarity.

  “Listen, mate,” said Mansfield when they’d stopped hissing with laughter, “come back to our place, eh? Gay’d really like that, if you came back.”

  Delaney said it wasn’t on. He’d already drunk all he could.

  “Fair enough,” said Mansfield, “No more booze, that’s agreed. No, listen.” He grabbed Delaney by the bicep through the cloth of his best metallic blue suit. “No, listen.
Have you two ever, you know, got stuck into it with another couple.” Mansfield raised his hand, palm opened outward in case the idea provoked Delaney. “I know you’re micks, but even micks root around a bit these days. And I mean to say, Hawaii, eh mate? Not exactly a bloody saint in Hawaii, eh?” He grabbed Delaney round the shoulders, and Delaney wondered for a second did his third-grade captain’s amazing offer extend to that sort of sharing as well. He was grateful when Mansfield let him go.

  “Listen, Gay fancies you. She’s pretty candid about these things. I’ve got to say a great little root, watches those videos and goes off like a bloody firecracker—got to say that, though I’m her old man. I mean it’s bloody fantastic, this four-way stuff. Reckon Gina’d enjoy it?”

  Delaney shook his head and could not speak. The immense pagan fact of the moon seemed in alliance with Steve, it bulked up over the urgent line of Steve’s shoulder. All that repeated itself in Delaney’s head was: If he can talk like this, he can tell Gina Hawaiian stories. And then, how do you talk to each other the next morning? When Delaney could speak, he said, “All in the same room.”

  “Well,” said Mansfield, “yeah.” He laughed. “You don’t want your missus gettin’ off by herself with a strange bloke.”

  “How in the bloody hell do you talk to each other the next morning?”

  “Fantastic. You know. Clears the bloody air. Lets some light in. We trust each other, Gay and me.” Laughter again, laughter that sounded unstrained. “I don’t resent if she fancies a skinny bastard like you. It’s better if she’s able to say it. Not keep it a secret. I mean, one thing I’ve discovered—I used to think blokes were raring to go, but a good woman’s a fucking cauldron, let me tell you.”

  Ti mon seul desir, Delaney nearly uttered. One day when he was sixteen, Brother Aubin had brought into doctrine class a print of some ancient French tapestry. A slim girl in a red robe, wearing a medieval headdress, was drawing jewelry out of a chest held by a small maid. Beside the girl on a bench sat a silky Pekingese—a rare commodity in medieval Europe, said Brother Aubin, a gift which was a mark of love. Behind the girl stood a rich tent of blue and gold fabric, its flaps held aside by a lion on one side—symbol of honest passion—and a unicorn on the other, symbolizing faithfulness, chastity. And embroidered across the door of the tent the message: Ti mon seul desir, old French for “you my only desired one.” Given the stresses on modern marriage, said Aubin, given even the statistics of old De la Salle Brothers boys who had experienced separation and divorce, you boys must be able to say when you come to the altar, Ti mon seul desir, and to mean it totally and to go on meaning it.

  It was the only French Delaney brought with him from school, except of course for the fragments anyone had from watching films and listening to music. Delaney could remember that as Aubin talked about the print, the school prop forward Marchetti represented with his hands a great phallic marrow and began jerking it. Delaney, who was secretly melting with the phrase, abominated Marchetti in that second. Ti mon seul desir was the banner he wanted his manhood to sail under. That was his nature. “Get it where you can” was Marchetti’s nature.

  As Mansfield had already pointed out, Ti mon seul desir had taken a beating in Hawaii. But Delaney felt a genuine curiosity about how it could survive a night like the one Steve Mansfield proposed.

  “Is it a matter of Gay fancying me, or you wanting Gina?” he asked. He suddenly hated Mansfield as much as he had once hated Marchetti and his watermelon dick. “Italian girls don’t go in for that sort of thing,” he said before Mansfield solved his curiosity. It was another way of explaining that after such a night he and Gina would be without a map, without a banner: There were no words they had exchanged up to this stage, no pattern of words, for dealing with the morning after that kind of night. He was angry too because in spite of himself he had begun to swell.

  “Listen,” said Steve, “we’re not bloody perverts or anything. Take Chicka Hays—Gay can’t stand a bar of the bastard. He belongs to a rooting club, blokes and birds, who get going by watching snuff movies, Chinese girls getting murdered right on camera, make a decent person bloody puke. Then everyone goes home and makes the kiddies breakfast!”

  “Bloody Chicka plays football like that,” yelled Delaney, knowing he was being too loud. “No fucking finesse. All elbows and making three yards up the middle with half a dozen blokes hanging on to him. And it’s bloody Christmas before he gets the ball away, can’t set up a man coming fast onto the ball. If you and I had ten kilos less we’d still be fucking footballers. He wouldn’t get a social game!”

  Delaney saw that the two women had appeared in the avenue of cars. He could tell Gina by her leonine Italian head. Gay was not as raw, not as challenging in her looks. She was smaller and pretty and Mansfield’s confessions about her appetites didn’t surprise him—she looked more sexual than Gina. She was laughing at him.

  “He’s getting stuck into Chicka Hays’s reputation,” Mansfield explained to the women. He sounded tremulous.

  “What reputation?” said Gay.

  “Coming home with us?” asked Mansfield, having to cough to clear the question from his throat.

  “Yes, come home,” said Gay, reaching her arm up around Gina’s shoulder. Delaney could barely stand to watch the gesture. His skin crept with old-fashioned embarrassment.

  “No,” said Delaney. He felt the question would still stand if he said anything more polite. And knew his brusqueness could be excused because of what he’d drunk.

  “I’ve got to start work early,” said Gina more sanely. “Stock taking.”

  Safely in the car, Delaney pulled her to him, pushed his tongue lasciviously into her mouth. She made noises of amused protest, the kind that promised much once she had attended to the business of driving home. His hand moved on her thigh and felt her dewiness beneath the fabric. “Ti mon seul desir,” he murmured; but as he spoke the aphorism evoked not Gina’s features, at the moment indistinct above the steering wheel, but the neat-boned face of Danielle Kabbel.

  11

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Sept. 4, 1941

  An afternoon meeting at SS headquarters, Natural History Museum, Bryanska Street. Otto Ohlendorf, a really impressive doctor of jurisprudence and economic expert, presently commander of SS Special Action Group D, in the chair. Rank: Brigadeführer. Very young—thirty-three years or so. Story is he fell out with Reich Security Central Office and has been sent to Belorussia to be taught a lesson. Others present were Mayor Kuzich, local SS and SD officers, my division chiefs, and the chief of police of Gomel, from whom we are borrowing personnel for the next two days. Also there, he says as an observer, Dr. Kappeler of the Political Section in Kaunas.

  We Belorussians under test. Kappeler is the examiner, there’s no doubt about that. All Lithuania and Belorussia presently labeled Ostland. If we hope to have our nation labeled by its correct and desired name, we have to get on right side of men like Kappeler.

  The charming Oberführer Ganz, our Kommissar here in Staroviche, so visible at dinner tables, did not attend meeting. Sent an aide instead. It is clear Ganz will be happier when Special Action Group D packs up and rolls on to another city, and when Kappeler returns to the Ostministerium in Kaunas. Ganz’s absence noted with a few significant remarks by Ohlendorf. Ohlendorf concerned about other actions carried out using Belorussian police and marked by drunkenness and sexual assaults. (I wonder why he thinks I didn’t bother inviting my alcoholic deputy Beluvich.)

  In tomorrow’s action, a quarter liter of vodka is to be the maximum ration per man. I put forward proposal for two shifts of men—3:30 A.M. to noon, noon to 8:30 P.M., and for a liquor ration to be issued at beginning and end of each shift. No one quarreled with the idea that the men involved in the action required some fortifying.

  Mayor Kuzich and Dr. Ohlendorf, the latter having already had some experience in these matters, have chosen an area three miles west of the city on the Gomel road. Kuz
ich made tedious speech about the potential influence of mass graves on municipal water supply—how his experience as an engineer had helped him obviate it.

  Made my speech then. Used the term “Jewish Bolsheviks” a great deal, since it is one much favored by the Reich Security Central Office. Said that Belorussian patriots had never seen a place for such people in the yearned-for Belorussian Republic, but that our cooperation with Special Action Group D was to be seen not only as a gesture of fraternity, based on common beliefs, but that it should also be seen as yet another element qualifying us for self-government. Speech well received by both Ohlendorf and Dr. Kappeler. As of course by all Belorussians present.

  Got home to find Oberführer Ganz has organized a picnic for tomorrow, in Brudezh woods north of the city. Intended to send Danielle and children on picnic with Kuzich family tomorrow anyhow, but Ganz has horned in. Cannot help feel the charming Ganz very vain—wants the Belorussians to remember him as a beloved and wise occupier. In fact once the Germans permit us our Republic he won’t get too many mentions.

  Would have thought his place tomorrow would be, if not out on the Gomel road, at least at his desk in town. There are historical imperatives in operation which no man can evade, even if he can send the children on a picnic. But to go on a picnic himself indicates he does not understand this swine of a century at all. The fact you can’t get anything done anymore unless you get mud on your boots.