A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Again, Delaney thought, he sounded a little like a supervisor, a consulting physician, something like that. The curtain around Scott’s cubicle opened, and a doctor who seemed no older than Delaney came out and spoke to the huddled Kabbels.

  “World ahead of him,” murmured Stanton. Delaney had thought the same thing: I could have been that young quack if I hadn’t once been mistakenly sure I’d play five-eighth for Australia and enter the pantheon.

  “By the end of the century,” he said, echoing his father, “doctors won’t earn any more than a metalworker. Society won’t be able to maintain them at their present level of luxury.”

  “So,” said Stanton, “the little bastard has sixteen years to make a killing. Wish I could say that.”

  The young doctor said, with that authority doctors still had though priests had lost it, that as far as he could tell the burns would cause no permanent impairment. Scott Kabbel lay behind him, visible through the parted curtain, pads over both eyes. “You’re fortunate it didn’t happen at home. When these things happen at home people run for boracic washes, which increase the area and depth of the burn. People are brought in here screaming. It wasn’t a Turk who sprayed your son’s eyes?”

  Kabbel said, in a voice deliberately accented, as if declaring war on the Anglo-Saxon dominance, “It was an old Australian who did the spraying. Someone who learned to be a barbarian here.”

  “It’s a favorite weapon of the Turks and the Armenians out this way.” The doctor looked tired all at once and not as assertive. “My parents were Italian.”

  Scott had to remain under observation, said the young doctor (now exposed as a voyager like everyone else in the casualty ward). The eye specialist would have the final word in the morning. Even then the burns could take some weeks to heal entirely. Reassured, Kabbel now began to think of his clientele, whose property had gone unsupervised for the past two hours. He sent Warwick and Stanton back out on the job. At first Stanton resisted the idea. He tried not to say so, but Delaney and the Kabbels could see that he thought Kabbel might be sending him back out on the road so that there’d be no one but Kabbels present when the question of Delaney’s medical expenses arose.

  “My God,” Kabbel said, casting his head back and looking at the roof, “I am no amateur organization, Brian. Do you think I keep a company health insurance going because I am in love with actuaries? Everything he needs will be met by my insurance.”

  “Well then,” asked Stanton, looking away but sticking fraternally to the business of Delaney’s interests, “what about his match fee if he can’t play on Sunday?”

  “Please, please. Does anyone carry such insurance as that, Mr. Stanton? Games insurance? Please go and see that the new anarchy has not ruined my business. I shall look after Terry like a son or a cobber.”

  Though Delaney’s shoulder still roared, he kept his eyes on Warwick, who had hardly spoken since the Golden Style fracas. It was another case of the Kabbel family’s stillness, its lack of gestures. Excepting Kabbel’s own plentiful gestures.

  So Warwick and the appeased Stanton left together, murmuring to each other beyond the glass doors about the order of business for the rest of the night. Delaney saw the lovable and doomed earnestness of Stanton, nodding, nodding, a good employee. A brisk nurse appeared with a wheelchair and told Delaney to sit in it. Kabbel and Danielle fussed him into it. Within seconds it was hissing down empty corridors toward Radiology, Danielle pushing him. Kabbel had remained by his blinded son, the nurse had stayed in casualty. It seemed reasonable at this hour, in this set of events, in a short-staffed hospital, that Danielle Kabbel should be hurtling him past closed doors marked ENDOSCOPY and VENESECTION toward one of the race of radiographers Delaney had met so often after football injuries. He considered beginning a conversation with Danielle about how radiographers were the most consistently bored people he had ever met, bored with their techniques and their machinery, with telling the human race to hold its breath, bored (when it came down to it) with pain. In their company you could practice conversation with Danielle Kabbel and they would not know what you were doing, they would not be diverted. They were lined with lead—like most of their equipment.

  “How great is the pain?” he heard Danielle ask him. It sounded a strange sentence, as if she’d been influenced as a little girl by her father’s oddity of speech.

  “It’s all right till I move.” He did move, trying to crane around to see her, and his injury sang.

  “Silly fellow,” she told him and, taking her right hand away from the chair handle, pushed his head downward and to the front, to the exact angle at which the pain turned off. As if his movement and flinching were a form of doubt, she said, “My father will pay for everything, you know. It’s a matter of honor. People from Eastern Europe are like that. They have these rules, different rules from us.”

  “I trust your father,” said Delaney. “You can’t blame Stanton for sticking up for me.”

  “Who could blame Stanton?” she said, and she laughed fondly.

  Delaney said Stanton was a good bloke who’d had too many disappointments.

  “So he’s your old mate?” she asked with a gentle edge.

  “That’s right.” But you, Danielle Kabbel, you are more than mateship, blood, and bride; you strike sharper than snake or coronary inside the chest cage. Ti mon seul desir.

  The radiographer carried in his eyes the misty lack of engagement Delaney had expected to find there. He asked Delaney to enter a cubicle and take his shirt off. Danielle Kabbel protested. “He doesn’t have the use of his left arm.” As Delaney stood in the doorway of the cubicle she told him to raise his right arm while she took his blue sweater off it. “Now over your head,” she instructed him. He was dazed and happy to follow her orders. She eased the sweater off his left arm and then, while he watched her small hands, undid the company shirt and took it off his back. The radiographer positioned him against an X-ray plate and told him to hold his breath. He could see with a corner of his vision Danielle standing behind the radiographer smiling as if to encourage the tissue of his damaged shoulder. He thought, You will be with me when I’m my father’s age, and everything is going—waterworks, old footballer’s joints. When they fill the aging Delaney with barium meals you’ll be smiling behind the new generation of X-ray technicians.

  She dressed him again and wheeled him out. An hour later the young doctor of Italian parentage told him it had turned out to be no more than savage bruising.

  21

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Sept. 16, 1943

  Asked to lunch. Kappeler visiting again from Kaunas. It’s him, Bienecke, Harner at SD/Gestapo headquarters, Natural History Museum. They have Moselle wine—it is astonishing the things that come east at a time when the front is imperiled, especially in the Don/Donetz area. I have not finished the first glass when they ask me about Ganz. What do I think of his theory of anti-terrorist behavior?

  I am fortunate to be able to say what I now know. “This is a test of savageries, gentlemen. I believe that to hope that a policy of mildness will somehow inhibit the recruitment of partisans is a seductive but impractical recourse. Above all, I am sure that young Daskovich—if he were here—would argue against it. He ran Krotinitsa in a rational and exemplary way. This made him more not less of a target. It would be nice to administer this oblast in an Artistotelian manner. Unhappily the partisans will not join the dialogue.”

  Might have been mixing my Plato with my Aristotle, but Kappeler did not seem to mind—seemed delighted with my response. He rang a small bell which sat beside the cruets of oil and vinegar. His secretary appeared, carrying a file. Kappeler told the young man to hand the file to me. Its cover was marked by a system of abbreviations and numbers. There were a few intelligible words—“Juden,” “Ganz,” the initials RMORKO, which all Ostministerium documents carried, and “Bstar,” the symbol for Staroviche. Inside many letters sealed up with tape, so that file opened straight to
a copy of a letter written last March by Dr. Kappeler to Oberführer Ganz, going something like:

  “I request a report on the Jewish situation in the Generalbezirk of Staroviche, especially about the extent to which Jews are still employed by German and Belorussian agencies as interpreters, chauffeurs, tutors, mechanics, etc. I would appreciate a prompt reply because it is the intention of our office to order a swift solution to the Jewish question in your area.”

  The answer from Ganz came six weeks later, in early May, Ganz doing his trick of implying the discussion was theoretical, like an exchange of chess moves by letter, and had nothing to do with daily policy. In cooperation with the Security Forces in the Generalbezirk of Staroviche, he was subjecting the question of further repression of Jewry (he used the word Zurückdrängen, a word both too gentle and too direct by Ministry standards) to constant exploration.

  Could have told Kappeler but didn’t that in that first week of May, Danielle revived and began to take the children to the garden to paint in the afternoons, and that every afternoon Ganz was there rallying her spirits—for which I am grateful—but hardly exploring the idea of subjecting Staroviche Jewry to futher Zurückdrängen. In any case, wrote Ganz, concluding his letter, the reduction of the Staroviche ghetto with its remnants of skilled Jewish labor was a slow, grinding process.

  A further letter from Kappeler asked for regular reports on the speeding up of this slow, grinding process. No report or reply was however visible in the file. In July Kappeler wrote asking for news of progress. Ganz’s reply was that the skilled Jewish workers remaining in the ghetto had been now reduced to a level beyond which the war effort and the welfare of various agencies would begin to be affected.

  In the end Kappeler wrote straightaway to Bienecke to ask him whether Special Treatment had been carried out on the Jewish population of Staroviche. Bienecke replied quickly, saying that apart from some new arrivals from Latvia in June, who had been immediately subjected to resettlement (Ansiedlung, Bienecke’s euphemism), the population of the ghetto, added to the small number of Jews who lived outside the ghetto to perform special services, had remained steady as a matter of the Kommissar’s, that is Oberführer Ganz’s, policy.

  The last item in the file was a recent confidential memo addressed to Kappeler from Dr. Lohse, Kappeler’s chief. Lohse had been to Minsk and been in conference about Ganz with General-kommissar Kurt von Gottberg, Ganz’s superior, and with SD chief of Belorussia, Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch. Lohse explained in the confidential memo that Ganz’s equivocations in the matter of the remaining Staroviche Jews were demonstrated to these two distinguished leaders through the letters Ganz had written. Obstf. Strauch, notoriously brutal and a bad enemy to have, is reported in this confidential memo to have said that Ganz reminded him of the late Generalkommissar Kube, who had been similarly slack in this matter. Strauch had complained so bitterly to the Minister about Kube that Minister had sent one of his secretaries of state to give Kube a serious warning, and Himmler himself had been pressing for Kube’s dismissal and disgrace when the partisans had done everyone a favor—one of his chambermaids had planted a bomb under his bed and it went off at three in the morning. The point is, said Strauch, you could not really depend on the partisans to deliver the Reich of a second great embarrassment—Ganz. Generalkommissar von Gottberg had concluded the conference by saying, “Lohse, I recommend that your office initiate an executive measure aimed at Oberführer Willi Ganz.”

  When finished reading, Dr. Kappeler asked me what I thought. We all knew what an “executive measure” is, Executivmassnahme, a classic “soft word” whose intent can be convincingly denied long after the corpses are counted. The truth was that the two most powerful men in White Russia seemed to want poor, soft, amusing Ganz assassinated, though no one could say it in those terms. Given that he is a familiar at my house and that since last July twelve months my men have been engaged in his protection, with only a token SS guard participation, the thing can’t be done without my cooperation.

  First reaction to the proposal is to think of Danielle and to realize with a clarity I have not enjoyed until now that Ganz has in fact taken from my shoulders the task of attending to the mental well-being of both my wife and children. The whole bleak, besieged experience seems all at once intolerable without this gentle fool, who obviously has the talent but not the stomach for government, government as it is practiced in this brutal world, in this penultimate age of the history of man.

  Found myself growing irritable. “You expect us to go on giving and giving,” found myself saying to Kappeler. “You take advantage of the fact that the Belorussian view of man and his destiny coincides so closely to your own. What are you really offering us for all our cooperation, all our engineering of society.” Kappeler said, “You people are prodigious patriots.” He was smiling when he said it. Then he told me that the final meetings between von Gottberg and Ostrowsky were in progress to set up a Belorussian National Parliament in Minsk. Told me, “You can easily check, since Ostrowsky’s your boy’s godfather, I believe. All I can say of this happy circumstance is that your exemplary work, Herr Kabbelski, has been one of the determining factors in the evolution of Belorussian independence.”

  Naturally ecstatic myself. Bienecke seemed to take a load off me by saying, “All we want is for Mrs. Kabbelski to ask Oberführer Ganz to your house to drink tea.”

  Realized gratefully that what they wanted in first place was not Ganz himself, but merely his Jewish chauffeur. I temporized, saying that to alienate the Kommissar might place my police force in an awkward position. Knew however, even as I left Bienecke’s office, that for political reasons of my own, I would make the arrangements Kappeler and Bienecke required.

  Sept. 17, 1943

  SS and SD Headquarters in one wing of old Natural History Museum. You approach Bienecke’s office through a door in main facade protected by sandbagged emplacements, then through galleries of dusty cases containing wolves stuffed and mounted at the end of the last century, and heaps of stone axe blades as used by our swamp-dwelling neolithic ancestors. Always the impression that you’re entering a medieval bestiary when you come in here—ambience must have a strong effect on the feelings of prisoners brought here for interrogation.

  Bienecke and Harner both in office and Bienecke’s secretary Lena, the tidy dark-haired girl who always seems so proper. Beluvich says she responds to drink tempestuously—B. saw her sitting on Bienecke’s lap with her blouse undone during the interrogation last month of the mechanic found with explosives in his garage. Bienecke’s office during interrogations a venue which, in spite of the stereotypes the public applies to those who have the task of grilling the enemy, would not normally be considered romantic even by a policeman’s woman. Lena’s posture can’t have contributed much to the seriousness of the boy’s examination.

  However, demeanor of all parties very correct today. Was able to assure Bienecke Ganz would be out of his office from 10:45 tomorrow morning, would be at my place drinking coffee with Danielle. Harner repeated his earlier tired witticism about how wonderful it is for a man as busy as I to have found a continual and proper companion for his wife. Looked them both in eye and said that I treasured the Herr Kommissar’s friendship and that I was sure that in his way he loved Danielle. They did not dare smile, and Lena nodded, as if touched by noble sentiment.

  “Further,” I told them, “it is essential for my relationship to the Oberführer, who is after all the provincial governor, that it be clear that the order for tomorrow’s action originates here with the SS, or if you wish with Dr. Kappeler’s Political Section. I do not wish my Belorussian police blamed for the initiative, or put in bad odor with Herr Kommissar Ganz.”

  Bienecke gave assurances. We planned allocation of squads for tomorrow—two platoons of my men to operate with SS in ghetto, groups of roughly section strength to collect interpreters, mechanics, and so on scattered round the city. Party of Russian POW’s preparing site this afternoon on Mog
ilev road. Bienecke and Harner show their contempt for Ganz by code-naming the operation Kaffee Aktion.

  Got home early to find Hirschmann there, tutoring away, treating Radek and Genia to French irregular verbs. Called him into my study—clearly Hirschmann expected reprimand over one or other aspect of his educational approach. Gave him half pack of cigarettes and filled him a glass of brandy. Thanked him for taking my earlier remarks concerning the content of his teaching to heart. Thanked him for the influence he was having on Radek. After three astonished mouthfuls of his brandy, he said, “Sir, I regret I have not been altogether as successful as I would have wished in your daughter’s case. Her interest has been diffused both by the terrible state of the world and if I dare say so the first flush of womanhood.” Says it’s a phenomenon he has become professionally accustomed to. Said it with such military forthrightness and correctness—even after all this time in ghetto—that I remarked, “I have had the exact same thoughts about her. I can see Herr Hirschmann that with your intuitive grasp of others you must indeed have made a good soldier.”

  So encouraged, he began chatting. “In battle,” he said, “in battle all your values are different, they are all related to death. Death seems as reasonable—or worse still as insignificant—as sneezing. Coming out of the lines and seeing women again and having leisure—that was painful to me, like being reborn.” He smiled. “I was more troublesome at such times.” I really didn’t mind him talking with such familiarity. He was a man who understood how things went. He was saying, Your children have restored me to the values of life, but I know that is temporary, that in the end I have to go into the line.

  As much as any educated man, Hirschmann is aware of the direction of history. I let him take the rest of the bottle back to the ghetto to console himself. I sent a covering note in view of fact he would inevitably be searched.

  22