A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  “In case of what?” There was an ashy dryness—disappointment and the rasp of jealousy—at the back of his throat. Later he would remember this as the first second he would think of himself as her deliverer.

  “In case you … No, I’m not going to bloody buy in, Terry. I’ll show you my scars, if you want. This is the same sort of setup as the one that uprooted my life. It’s like playing Rugby League in France—you think you know the rules but you don’t.”

  He would have liked to ask Stanton whether his love was so clear, like a mark on the forehead that Gina, her parents, his parents could read. But the question itself would be a giveaway.

  In the opening chapter of The Tin Drum a man is running from the Prussian police in a potato field somewhere around the borders of Poland and Germany. Delaney intended at some stage to look up the location more exactly, but felt no urge to, preferred in fact for the young fugitive’s politics to be vague and for the location to be no man’s land, a land still to be invented. To escape the police, the escapee slides in under the skirts of the narrator’s grandmother, who at that stage of history is still young and is picking potatoes in the field. While the Prussian police run back and forth among the furrows, the hidden escapee exploits his privileged position by entering the girl/grandmother. She flushes as the police rage up and down the furrows. She has met her man.

  This event recurred in Delaney’s sleep. He was running from the persecutors who inhabit dreams, the persecutors who require neither names nor motivation. In he rushed, beneath the succoring skirts. Under them lay Danielle Kabbel’s bird-boned yet ample flesh. To reach it was to reach home, a stranger home than he had ever known to exist.

  These days he drove to work agitated, trying to get there before Stanton, usually succeeding. “The punctual Mr. Delaney,” she told him one night when she was already in the control room and he did not have to go through the boyhood thing of waiting for the particular fragrance of Danielle Kabbel, for that particular gait, a step both more familiar and less robust than Gina’s.

  “The punctual Mr. Delaney. If my father had his way, you’d be managing director inside a month.”

  “But you don’t have a managing director.”

  “No,” she said, smiling deftly. “We only have the family.”

  She had begun reading and writing notes in a new book, a slimmer one, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. He knew the film—Maureen O’Hara aging elegantly and giving off a high-bred sexual radiance. He remembered the fun and trickery of the plot, and wondered what in her strangeness she thought of it. Later, out shaking doorknobs and shining a torch at mute panes of glass, he fell back on what he knew of the book as a sort of irrational proof of innocence. The atmosphere of the story was homely, humane: There were heroes and villains. Whereas in The Tin Drum there were escapees sheltering in weird and joyous places; a mother and an uncle loved each other; midgets could break glass with their voices; horses’ heads squirmed with eels; and a woman ate herself to death with fish oil. In the dark atmosphere of that book, adding its power to the dark wave in Warwick’s paintings—as reviewed for Delaney by Stanton—you could nearly believe in Stanton’s accusation. But not by the calmer light of Our Man in Havana.

  One night when he arrived, the whole known Kabbel family were gathered in the control room around one of those little machines called scanners. Warwick the artist was tuning the controls with calm, delicate movements involving only his index finger and his thumb. Stammers of distorted conversation emerged from the scanner and faded back into static and noises resembling a saxophone played by an inexpert child. The family was so riveted around the thing that Delaney hesitated at the door and considered going away for five minutes. Then Danielle turned her head. She was frowning as if she wanted to help the circuits inside the machine with her concentration. Then her eyes focused, her eyebrows arched, and she smiled, making Delaney welcome to whatever the secret was. A second later Kabbel looked over his shoulder. His eyes glittered. He grinned and waved at Delaney to come closer. When Delaney had crossed the room, Kabbel slung his arm around his shoulder.

  “Warwick’s been engaged in counterespionage,” Kabbel whispered, not wanting to be so loud as to cloud anything definite Warwick could get from the scanner. “Like his grandfather the chief of police.” Dressed as a Telecom technician, Warwick had managed to get into the office of Rooster Time, the company at war with Golden Style. He’d even been permitted into the garage, where, left alone for a few minutes, he broke into the managing director’s BMW and took the number of his car telephone. Kabbel had reason to suspect that the managing director made contact with those who were breaking Golden Style’s windows and spray-painting its brickwork and parking areas with offputting slogans like “Chicken Poison” and “Shit Food,” while he was driving to and from the office.

  “How do you know he isn’t already home?” Delaney asked. “Watching Country Practice with his kids?”

  Kabbel winked, a broad Slavic wink, heavily supported by the rest of his features. “Scott put a bug in his office a month ago. Ten minutes ago our gentleman called his wife and told her he’d be home in half an hour.”

  Delaney frowned. Electronic subterfuge disturbed him. The family looked sinister with their intent, genetically echoing postures around the scanner.

  Kabbel increased the pressure on Delaney’s shoulder. “Don’t start fretting. I’ll never use you for any of these rascal activities.” And then, as if he could spot the growing question in Delaney’s eyes, “Nor do I ever use Danielle. You and she are both too good at what you already do, and that’s fair enough with Rudi Kabbel. Warwick, Scott, and I are the partisans, the guerrillas, the outlaws.”

  Warwick said aloud, “Twenty-five minutes to his place from the office. He’s been on the road for a quarter of an hour so far, and not a word.”

  Young Scott, blond as his sister, murmured, “Might have to bug his house.”

  Danielle caught Delaney’s eye and smiled opaquely at him. It wasn’t as if she condoned the talk of bugs. It was as if all her brothers’ hard muscular utterance was beside the point. All at once the scanner conveyed the sound of dialing, of a telephone pealing distantly, and broke into clear speech. “Hello,” said a female voice. “Sweet William,” said a male. (The managing director’s name, Delaney would later discover, was William Tracey.) The woman called him darling, and in an aspirating voice he asked her about her honeypot, her nectar, and began to use the sort of cheap images you found in letters at the front of Penthouse.

  “His girlfriend,” said Warwick. “I don’t think we need listen to this.” But what he meant was that he didn’t want Danielle to listen, perhaps didn’t want Delaney to listen in Danielle’s presence. He picked up earphones, put them on. The sound of William Tracey’s part-time desire was lost to all but Warwick. Everyone waited in silence for that call to finish, and as it did and Warwick removed the phones, Stanton entered and found them all intent and listening to nothing.

  The Kabbels got nothing further out of William Tracey that evening. Later, on his own, driving, shining his flashlight, hoping that no open window or faultily wired alarm would distract him from his torment, he wondered would one of the Kabbels penetrate Tracey’s home. He hoped beyond reason that, even given the squalor of Tracey’s spirit, they would not try it.

  FROM THE MATCH DIARY OF TERRY DELANEY

  Penrith v. Manly, home game. Good crowd because Manly so full of internationals and fancy imports. Everyone likes to see them get beaten too—they have this reputation for being wealthy, aristocrats of League, and they live on the beaches and so on. Old Roy Masters when he was coach of Wests dubbed them The Silvertails, and the name’s stuck. We were scrappy first half—lots of dropped ball. “I won’t tolerate this bloody dropsy,” Paul Tuomey said at half time, passing round the Stick-it. I still use resin—that’s what Brother Aubin always made us use, and beside him Paul Tuomey isn’t a coach’s bootlace. Second half our forwards tore into them and I started to combine real
ly well with Skeeter Moore and Eric Samuels in the centers. Faulkner scored a ninety-yarder down the sideline with ten minutes to go.

  Penrith 32–Manly 7.

  Slaughtered us in reserves and firsts though. Came on last ten minutes of reserves, but they kept me bottled up. Sent up a few good bombs, but the bounce doesn’t suit you when you’re being walloped. First grade: no defense from the forwards, no nip from the halves, no penetration from the fullback and centers, and the wings didn’t see the ball. Another sad post mortem at the Leagues Club. Old Dick Webster the copper put his arm around me and yelled, “Why don’t you give this young bloke a run in Firsts. At least he bloody tackles.”

  14

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  That winter it would have been impossible to go on the Ganz-style picnics we had enjoyed all the autumn. The weather was not entirely the reason. Genia and I were aware that Moscow and the tyrant had not fallen. I believe we even knew the name of Marshal Zhukov, who had somehow created the crisis which was felt right back here in Staroviche, the crisis being that the survival of Moscow encouraged partisan groups. Genia and I went by car with the Kuzichs to school, two motorcycle policemen preceding the limousine, an armed driver at the wheel, an armed policeman riding with us in the back. This policeman made a fuss of us—he was only a young man, a farmer from the Staroviche area. One day he let us all briefly handle his submachine gun, take its blue-gray oily weight into our own hands. The exercise made me uneasy, because I wondered what would happen if the partisans attacked our car then, while the weapon was in my grasp or Genia’s.

  It was known though that the partisans were forest people. Like goblins they came to town only on the most extraordinary occasions. There was that consolation—the thought of them only caused unease in a darkened room at night. They had blown up some railway lines. We heard that the way children hear most hard news, by eavesdropping hungrily on adults. They had severed for a day or two the Minsk—Smolensk line and even the Staroviche—Orsha rail, closer to home. It was of small importance, everyone said, since the Germans sent most of their supplies by road. So that was established: The partisans were woods creatures who dared not show their faces on a street.

  Until on a late January day of black ice—the sort of day on which you would expect goblins to invade hearths, black and white cows to stand suspended in the air, and the crackle of strange laughter to be heard in bare treetops—an eighteen-year-old partisan walked into the Hungry Shepherd Café in the old town square and shot Mrs. Kuzich dead—three shots, I heard my aghast mother whisper. An eighteen-year-old. The wickedness! We knew he was eighteen, because my father caught him, a capture which set the world right again.

  The Catholic bishop of Staroviche buried the victim and promised us a Mrs. Kuzich perfected in death by Christ’s passion. I imagined, as children will, a lighter and less voracious Mrs. Kuzich. I couldn’t believe that it had happened in the Hungry Shepherd, among the coffee cups and the plum dumplings and sour-milk pancakes.

  We all sang the Belorussian anthem, a good song for winter forests, a song about yearning for the summer of independence. I was very impressed that the bishop had called Mrs. Kuzich a Belorussian martyr. I had always imagined Belorussia’s past heroes as shafts of flame incarnate. Mrs. Kuzich showed me they were normal and even overweight people.

  It was announced at the graveside that the partisan who had done it had died without remorse the same morning and gone to hell. Therefore an atmosphere of grim satisfaction seemed to prevail at Mrs. Kuzich’s graveside.

  Genia and I could no longer attend the school. Occasionally we made heavily escorted visits to SS and Wehrmacht film theaters. And like the Kuzich children, we acquired a tutor.

  His name was Herman Hirschmann, a hopeful little man with a mustache. He had been a schoolteacher in a gymnasium in far-off Saxony. He taught us German grammar, French, algebra, geography, and geometry. No history. History, he told Genia and me, is all up in the air, and no one will know anymore what history is until the leaves settle. Every day he walked two kilometers from the ghetto to our house, and was escorted both ways by one of my father’s blue-clad policemen bearing a rifle. The Belorussian Jews who had occupied the ghetto had been “sent east.” Our mother used the term without any irony. I think she believed they had been relocated, and that the SS had not, in fact, shot them. But if the SS had shot them, we children were forgiving about it. The Soviets had done worse things. The Soviets had killed Mrs. Kuzich.

  The ghetto had stood empty for some months. There were rumors it was infested with rats and typhus. Then new Jews from further west turned up and were allocated a place there: among them Herr Hirschmann and his wife.

  One day when Genia was out of the parlor where we took our lessons from Herr Hirschmann, he told me he had a secret, and I could be let in on it if I swore to keep it from everyone, even my sister. After I had given the guarantees he wanted, Mr. Hirschmann opened up the seam of his coat and took out something I had seen only on the uniform of Onkel Willi Ganz—an Iron Cross.

  “Are you a hero, Herr Hirschmann?” I asked him.

  “So they told me for a while,” he confessed.

  “Why did they give it to you?”

  “For killing Americans in Saint Mihiel before you were born. I am a true German, you see. I bear the same first name as our beloved Reichsmarschall Goering.” He made an ironic squeaking noise with his lips, and I looked at his neatly shaven face, his exact mustache, his skin gray from hunger. He and Mrs. Kuzich had altered my estimation of heroes forever.

  I was disappointed two weeks later when Genia told me that Herr Hirschmann had shown her the medal. It meant he was showing everybody—that there was no secret. I suddenly had no doubt he had shown it to the servants and even to my mother, who sent him back to the ghetto with cake and bread in his pockets.

  One night she said, “We cannot expect God to protect us from the partisans if we are not kind to unfortunates.”

  As kind as my mother was, as much as we liked Herr Hirschmann, my father thought he was sly, and one morning called him into his study to tell him so. We could hear Father’s voice raised. “Influence the children in this underhand manner,” was a phrase I could hear entirely through the heavy door. Herr Hirschmann gave out only a low murmur of apology.

  After that Herr Hirschmann was less given to asides and little anecdotes, no matter how hard we tried to distract him from Euclid. Our lessons became more and more wooden. To compensate, my mother would arrange to ship in children under guard to play with us, but their arrival made Genia and me realize we were very nearly imprisoned in our own house.

  There were two escapes. First, the films we saw at the elegant Paris cinema, where among the crowd we would spot the motherless Kuzich children. Onkel Willi Ganz often came with us, collecting us from the house in his Mercedes driven by Yakov. We made a foursome—Mother, Onkel Willi, Genia, myself. Though Kommissar for the province of Staroviche, he seemed to have more time on his hands than my father. Perhaps he lacked Stanislaw Kabbelski’s ferocious industry. In the warm darkness of the Paris, between my fragrant mother and equally fragrant friend Oberführer Ganz, cocooned—it seemed to me—in their combined glamorous musk, I gave my prepubescent heart to Paula Wessely, the German schoolteacher in Homecoming. In Request Concert my eyes itched with tears as the young German soldier was reunited with his girlfriend by courtesy of a request program on radio. It was a film which made the world very safe: Request Concert and the partisans who had killed Mrs. Kuzich did not belong to the same planet. Ohm Kruger and Bismarck were classics which, because Germany lost the war, were condemned in the end as mere propaganda films (as if Mrs. Miniver was not a propaganda film).

  After the screenings we would have coffee in the manager’s office, and Onkel Willi would tell the three of us stories about the making of the films and details of the lives of some of the stars. I found to my grief that Paula Wessely, that essential virgin of the screen, was married.
I remember too that Oberführer Ganz told us Emil Jannings, the star of Ohm Kruger, had had an argument with Dr. Goebbels, the German propaganda minister. He nicknamed the doctor Hinkefuss—Lame Duck—and had tried to get a laugh by imitating his limp in The Broken Jug, a film which Onkel Willi had seen, though Dr. Goebbels had tried to get it suppressed. In revenge Dr. Goebbels had forced Emil Jannings to act in Ohm Kruger, a film largely written by the Propaganda Minister himself. One of those lines was spoken by Kruger/Jannings to his nurse. “If one repeats a lie often enough it is believed.”

  Onkel Willi’s film anecdotes astounded my innocent mother as much as they riveted Genia and me. It made the stars seem close, as if at any stage they might be seen wandering in the streets of Staroviche. (If they had turned up of course, Genia and I would have seen them only through the thick glass of Oberführer Ganz’s Mercedes.)

  The other escape during that late-winter house arrest, which would continue into spring and summer and autumn and another winter, were the art classes in the garden. Even on still days in winter it was possible for us to rug up and go out with our three easels. Mother was a landscapist, which meant that Genia and I became landscapists too. Like the film theater, the garden seemed superbly safe when we were in it together with our watercolors. But the great art days were those when Oberführer Ganz turned up. His apparently magical knowledge of the film world was matched only by his knowledge of art. He would sit at, say, Genia’s easel and dip the brush and say, “This is the trick of the pointillists.” Then in lightning speed he would produce a picture of the snow-clad garden. “Pure Seurat!” he would tell us. “Now let me show you how to do, even in Belorussia, a very convincing south of France Cezanne.”