Next he would replace the sheet and slash about with his loaded brush, producing a violent and hypnotic abstract. “This is Kandinsky. Don’t be put off by the Soviet-style name. This one lived in Munich.”
I knew that I would never meet another human as clever as my friend Oberführer Ganz.
15
FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE.
Old police problem: don’t know whether the boy who shot Mrs. Kuzich is very brave or very stupid. Certainly stupid, a woodcutter from over Gomel way. Question of his bravery hangs in balance, though he’ll certainly die well. Apolitical. The Germans unleashed the Latvian militia on his village last autumn—Ganz speaks with some sense when he says that sort of thing creates Bolsheviks. Sturdy boy with wiry hair. Opaque eyes, all the transparency of childhood long vanished.
Two of my men caught him in the lane behind Sorokin’s department store. Sergeant Jasper had the right to interrogate him for military purposes. Just begun when Obersturmführer Harner turned up from SD office next door demanding the boy. What that undergraduate will find out, said Harner to me, wouldn’t fit under a thumbnail. Said Harner, “I want to get at the partisan before Ganz invites him round for dinner and a little buggery.” Fashionable for the SD to talk like that about our friend and provincial governor Oberführer Ganz.
As for Jasper, he finds out enough in his quiet, cultivated way. (His Russian much better than the boy’s.) Found out the boy did not know Mrs. Kuzich. Had been given a pistol and her name. The idea is, he says his commander told him, all collaborators will be gunned down. There exists a list with all our names on it. I would not dare tell my wife this. Her fancies are already adequately tormented.
The news, uttered so frankly across the table by a Belorussian peasant who could have, with equal ease and a slight shift of history, been one of my own men instead of Mrs. Kuzich’s assassin, goes through one like a knife. One feels like shouting, “You bastard! I loved my country well enough to supervise the Gomel road liquidations. I saw children squirming in the pit and pregnant girls singing the Shema Y’israel. I skirted insanity and dishonor for the sake of my nation! And now you want to add to the nightmares which spill out of my own bed and infest my children?”
Asked him, “Did you know you were killing the mother of three children?”
Intonation flat as he answered, “My sister was mother of two pups and it didn’t seem to cramp the Latvians’ style much.”
The other information Jasper got from the boy was that a party official from Gomel, in hiding since the Russian military withdrew, had moved into the area of the five villages the Latvians had been let loose in and had formed a partisan band out of the males and few surviving women. The group was armed with 100 rifles left behind by the retreating Reds. The boy spoke with some pride of their small victories: severed railway lines, an attack on a small party of German engineers near Rogachev, the execution of five Belorussian police on a road west of Bobruisk. He told us matter-of-factly that only twenty-four out of the nearly seventy who had joined the partisan group were still alive. Could see it was useless threatening him with death. Was almost politely doubtful he should give us his leader’s name. Said the leader complained a lot about lack of instructions from either the Red Army or the NKVD. This killing of Mrs. Kuzich the first time they’d been ordered from above to do anything specific. “Was your leader Trutkov?” asked Jasper, and I had to admit to myself the sergeant had a gift for interrogation—a telegram had just arrived from Rogachev announcing the capture of a wounded partisan, previously a party official under the Reds and named Georgi Trutkov.
The boy looked at Jasper as if he were omniscient.
“Trutkov has been captured and killed by the SS in Rogachev,” said Jasper, improvising a little.
After that the boy opened up. Toward lunchtime handed him to Obersturmführer Harner so that SD could get their slice. He bowed to Jasper and me as they led him next door. “Poor little bastard,” Jasper told me. As if all the children were still children and harmless. Jasper as always the Bavarian sentimentalist. At least the SS, people like Brigadeführer Ohlendorf, understand what life is like here in the East, that the rules of history and even social exchange have always been different here. Said to Harner it was essential for morale of my co-nationals that Mrs. Kuzich’s killer be executed by my police. H. replied absentmindedly that that seemed appropriate.
Afternoon, had to open a Wehrdorf, a fortified village at Krotinitsa. Idea pioneered by Ostrowsky himself—put in a tough section of our Belorussian police, create a local watch or village militia, install a patriotic mayor. Surround the place with redoubts and barbed wire. Impossible for partisans to penetrate at night and apply muscle to the villagers.
Drove out there and shared the platform with Ganz. Very enthusiastic about the Wehrdorfer program. Told me, “I favor pacification in the literal sense, my dear Kabbelski. Not in the sense the Roman legions and the SS use the term: to make a desert and to call it peace. Literal pacification makes sense in the economic and military sense. Its only limitation is that it fails to appeal to the hate glands.”
We traveled in convoy with an armored car—Ganz has been assigned one.
When I got back at dusk found that the SS—i.e., our friends Bienecke and Harner—had hanged the boy partisan from one of the pipes in their cellar. Barely an apology from them.
16
Delaney got a game going with Danielle. He was allowed, according to the game rules, to lean over her shoulder and read a few paragraphs of whichever novel she was studying. So he encountered by a game of stealth Muriel Spark and her school ma’am Brodie, Salinger and his acned malcontent Holden Caulfield, and one from his schooldays, Graham Greene’s whisky priest, a priest light-years away from Doig, and in whom Brother Aubin seemed to find manifested the grace of God.
“Why two Graham Greenes?” he asked her. He could smell her hair, which struck him as more vegetable than Gina’s—Gina’s hair had an honest carnivore smell to it. Sometimes she complained of the unsuitability of various shampoos. It was the olive oil of her Sicilian ancestors seeping from her pores, Delaney would tell her.
“Why two?” Delaney asked Danielle Kabbel again.
“It’s the style,” she told him. “Ron says that he’s got the best style in the English-speaking world and is also the best narrator.”
“So there,” said Delaney.
“So there,” said Danielle.
Delaney was not as anxious any more about Warwick. The incestuous, he reasoned, encountering a randy conversation on the scanner, would not protect their sister from hearing unless that sister was a sister in the traditional sense. Warwick’s painting, which Delaney had not gone out of his way to see and did not want to view, was therefore a painting of an intense brotherly feeling, but there was no horror in that. Delaney’s concern had therefore switched itself to the opinionated Ron of the WEA, a young writer who had done occasional episodes of Sons and Daughters and was trying to write a novel up at Hazelbrook in the mountains. Sometimes Delaney saw him as a pole to himself—a sort of third-grade five-eighth of literature. Once a week Ron drove down to Parramatta to conduct Danielle’s WEA course. Delaney hoped he was a faggot, but since his own contacts with Danielle were all beneath the shadow of world-famous prose style, and although some of them featured crudities in their first paragraph—Holden Caulfield took five lines to get to crap—there was something in the unspoken regulations governing the delicious contacts Delaney had with Danielle that made it impossible to ask questions about (as they said on the current affairs programs) Ron’s “sexual preference.” What he feared of course was that Ron’s sexual preference was Danielle.
Delaney had courted Gina through his junior football games, the competitions which bore such names as Jersey Flegg and President’s Cup. (If you belonged to a Jersey Flegg team you had honor in your neighborhood and your future was limitless.) Gina—maybe because her body and blood had been laid down in an isla
nd which had seen so much hectic action—could be excited by warrior skills and physical courage. On the Sunday nights of their courtship, when he was bruised and his thigh muscles ached, she admitted him and herself closest to the peak, and a few times over the crest and into the valley of calmer touch and conversation beyond. In that way too therefore the workers’ game, Rugby League, had been kind to him.
But the Kabbel family seemed to exist outside the hemisphere of sport. It was, Delaney thought, the strange Belorussian seriousness of the father. Delaney’s meager renown as a five-eighth seemed to be one of those things the Kabbels didn’t choose to look into, any more than into the rhythm of his breath or the fluctuations of his pulse.
Some nights when Delaney arrived, Warwick, Scott, and Rudi would have already finished listening in on the scanner to the chicken king Bill Tracey’s homeward progress. On other nights Stanton and Delaney stood with them while they studiously listened to Tracey’s hot talk, and the low laughter and breathiness of Tracey’s girlfriend. “I get a hard-on just listening,” Stanton confessed. “She might be a stupid bitch but you can tell she bangs like a windmill.”
If Danielle was in the room, Warwick would put on the earphones and sit with the fingertips of his left hand to his brow, while Danielle inspected the arms register and booted the computer for the night’s vigilance.
Delaney was there when at last Tracey’s voice was heard in tones that meant pure business.
“That you, Stevo?” Tracey was heard asking.
“That’s Jack Stevens,” said Warwick, whispering as if Stacey, cocooned in his BMW, might overhear and be warned. “Former copper fired for a tow-truck rort.”
“Now he vandalizes for profit,” murmured Rudi with a wide smile.
“Stevo?” Tracey asked again.
“Here,” a second voice said.
“Wanted to talk to you about Blacktown. Doing a lot of business in Blacktown. I mean … reckon you could get inside and bugger up some of the stoves and rotisseries and so on?”
“Not inside, mate. Don’t want to buggerize round in there with alarms going off all round. Paint job and glass. That’s the limit.”
“Windows as well though?”
Stevo said he meant the usual—windows, and broken glass all over the parking lot.
“And graffiti?” asked Tracey, wanting his money’s worth.”
“No problem.”
“Walls and parking area?”
“If time allows. Don’t always have as much time as Van bloody Gogh.”
“And I haven’t spoken to you, right?”
“Listen, just take it easy. I drink with the local superintendent. He knows I have to make a bloody living.”
Tracey said he wanted the sort of damage they couldn’t afford to go on repairing, wished Stevo good night, and could be heard putting the phone down between the bucket seats of the BMW.
“True police work!” sang ecstatic Rudi to his children. (Delaney saw Danielle smile and shake her head.) “Tonight we make democracy safe for fried chicken!”
17
No later than half an hour past midnight the total manpower of Uncle Security Services had encircled the Blacktown branch of Golden Style. The way this had been achieved made Delaney uneasy. After all his speeches about not involving them in this sort of direct operation, Kabbel had offered Stanton and Delaney double time and asked them after all to take part, to make up the numbers. “After all,” he said lightly, “it’s no more dangerous than the standard business of being a member of the species Homo sapiens.”
Now in the shadow of the railway bridge sat Rudi Kabbel’s Toyota, Scott in the back hunched between the seat and floor, armed with Polaroid and flash. Warwick Kabbel, whom Delaney and Stanton had now privately and innocently nicknamed the Censor, sat appropriately alone in the middle-aged Datsun in a corner of the Franklin parking lot where the fronds of one of those stocky Queensland palms that resembled pineapples caused any vehicle parked there at that hour to look like the car of lovers or of someone staying late at a nearby party.
The back of Golden Style was separated by a narrow ditch from the Blacktown Workers’ Club, a red brick palace of Babylon. In the parking lot, a short step from the ditch, Delaney and Stanton waited in Delaney’s Holden. Arrived at his station, Delaney now began to enjoy himself. The Workers’ was redolent for him of grand political excitements. When he was eleven his father had brought him here for the launch of the political campaign of the Labor demagogue Gough Whitlam. They had stood in a packed gallery for two hours and had seen Gough’s speech only on a television screen, but the crowd, in a strangely un-Australian ecstasy, a frenzy more appropriate to some other and less stable nation, kept the younger Delaney agog. Later the hulking leader appeared below the gallery on his way to the bar—political assassinations were unknown in Australia and politicians could safely drink with any of their fellow Australians.
Whitlam had fallen bloodlessly three years later, half the people rejoicing and half choking with nationalist shame. But the excitement of his rise would always be associated with this unlikely building, and its memory tonight was augmented for Delaney by the likelihood of Stevo’s nearing discomfort. These were lesser elations though; they were nothing beside his greater Danielle obsession.
Stanton slept. His daughter, this time the one who was always calmed and hypnotized by television, had been home all day with a violent stomach virus. He had argued with Denise. He was very pleased with this chance to lie still. “What do you reckon the Kabbels talk to each other about when they’re on their own?” he had asked earlier. “Bloody Rudi and the Commonwealth Censor? Do you think they talk about bloody Russian buffaloes?”
But he had not wanted to pursue the matter. “Police work!” he murmured, already half asleep but quoting Rudi. “This isn’t bloody police work’s backside.”
What did Rudi say to Danielle? Delaney asked himself as Stanton tossed and slumbered awkwardly in the back seat. Their conversation couldn’t be imagined. As he attempted to imagine it, the earth cooled around him until he was shivering, the smells of the day’s exhausts and fried food congealed in the shopping center’s sulphurous night and he felt berserkly happy.
Some time after two a station wagon crawled across the Workers’ parking lot and halted a few hundred yards from Delaney and Stanton. Delaney woke Stanton. Like cops in television dramas they sat low in their seats. From the station wagon appeared a large and, by the sharp light from the street, jowly man of middle age and two ratty-haired blond young men. Stevo, according to Kabbel, had a pool of employees who all drank at the Station Hotel in Parramatta. By the blare and fluctuating light of such rock bands at Split Enz, Flaming Hands, Australian Crawl, Stevo did his interviews and set the terms of employment.
Stevo opened the back of the wagon and took out the raw materials of his trade—some heavy hessian bags of broken glass. The big blonds lugged them across the ditch into the parking spaces of Golden Style and emptied them on the macadam, spreading the fragments with sweeping movements of their feet. To Delaney their work seemed leisurely. Leisurely, Stevo shook the can of spray paint in his right hand and wrote SHIT TO EAT on Golden Style’s side wall.
Two honks from the direction of the railway bridge told Delaney and Stanton it was time to move in. As they left the car and jumped the ditch, one of the blond boys had taken up a rubber-coated mallet for eventual use on the windows. Stevo strode to the front of the building to write a further slogan, this time on the paved and tabled area set aside for al fresco devouring of chickens. Delaney felt wonderful and deliciously waited before crying out his prepared sentence: “Fixing the site, gentlemen?” He had in his line of vision both the oblivious blonds and Stevo the professional vandal.
Before he could speak he saw Rudi and Scott Kabbel appear behind the man. There was a sharp burst of light from the camera in Scott’s hands. Then the whole event, as Stanton would later pungently detail it, burst open like a garbage bag dropped from a height. One of the blond
boys began to run back toward Stevo’s station wagon, and Delaney brought him down with a classic head-behind-the-hamstrings tackle, as if it were turf and not gravel and tar which were waiting to receive them as they fell. Delaney slid painlessly across the glass-strewn surface of the parking lot. He heard cries of pain however from the boy he had felled and saw him lift to the streetlights the cut pad of his right hand. The damage was not enough to stop him from retrieving the mallet and bringing it down on Delaney’s shoulder, emitting as he did it a grunt worthy of the martial arts. As Delaney rolled on his side and vomited onto Stevo’s pavement graffiti, he could hear the evil breathless screams of someone savagely hurt rising behind him. It happened that Stevo had sent a blast of acidic paint straight into Scott Kabbel’s eyes.
18
FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE.
Children and Danielle went under escort to a party given by Willi Ganz at his apartment. Occasion: young Radislaw’s ninth birthday. Delightful event. I looked in and spent over half an hour. My leisure not as great as our dear Kommissar’s. Pathetic to see the joy of young Radek—a joy threatened on all sides by the partisans. Last night for example, in fortified village of Krotinitsa, the jewel of our pilot scheme, partisans raided police outpost and took my men to a barn and shot them. Left them obscenely arrayed, flies open and hands placed as if engaged in self-abuse. Cold night, and villagers did not dare move the dead; hence found them frozen this morning in these horrendous postures. Spent the morning lying to their relatives in town here.
Partisans further hanged the Krotinitsa mayor from a telegraph pole. Have moved in stronger detachment of my men, and Kuzich appointed young Daskovich from the city office here to look after Krotinitsa’s civil side, since none of local people willing to take risk. All this barbarity continues; both Germans and Russians behave like savages; we bear it for the sake of Bela Rus. And in the midst, like the well-known jewel among the dungheap, my son smiles. Genia more sullen, no longer a child, suffering the double assaults of womanhood and the awful life we are forced to lead here.
A Family Madness Page 10