A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Delaney was somehow shocked by the idea of Stanton making what hay he could in the shadow of Danielle’s illness. All sexual pride suddenly drained, however, from Stanton’s face. “Lot of good all that’s going to do me.”

  “Danielle better now?”

  “She’s all right. Compared to the others. Jesus, Rudi had a fit just after you left.”

  Delaney laughed. “Upset, was he?”

  “No, a fit. A fair dinkum … you know … fit. What do you call it? Paroxysm.” Stanton explained how, at the start of a shift, Rudi Kabbel had appeared from the hallway whimpering and biting his lips, and a stream of urine falling crookedly down the legs of his deep blue pants. His hands were raised in front of his face and were trembling very fast, which made Stanton think of epilepsy. He whimpered like a child. Danielle ran from the arms cabinet and dragged him roughly from the room by the hand. Later she came back and told an amazed Stanton that it was Rudi’s childhood. He’d suffered awfully, she said.

  This news aroused in Delaney a vague and painful urge to rescue Danielle from her father. But before he could ask too many questions about this incident, about Rudi’s trembling and his unleashed bladder, Stanton reverted to the sale of Uncle. “You can’t tell me that if one of those big companies want to buy without any encumbrances that Rudi will hold out for poor bloody Stanton.”

  Delaney couldn’t tell him that.

  “This time I’m going to apply for my own gun license. I’ll rob banks.”

  Delaney smiled and patted Stanton’s arm. His friend had said that before, but apart from his innocent intrusion into Dyson, society remained safe from him.

  37

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  The last Staroviche winter was sweet and by no means seemed to me to be the last. The house was full of Miss Tokina’s instructive voice and of Belorussian police billeted in servants’ quarters upstairs and at the back of the house. They were very happy to be here instead of thrust forward into some frozen village among partisan-ridden forests. My mother treated them with an absent-minded generosity. They flirted with Genia. They spoiled me—it delighted me to see they knew I was the kid the partisans had nearly finished, it enabled me to adopt a certain style. Even at night I was not afraid of bullets, yet I needed to sleep with my mother, given that I dreamed so often of that awful sense of a large mistake, of myself transfixed in the high corner of Onkel Willi’s dining room and my father rescuing from beneath the table the wrong child, the shell of Radislaw, the stranger. As I said earlier, I was safe from tutors. It seemed to me that because of the shock both of Onkel Willi’s kiss and of Onkel Willi’s murder no one would ever have the right to try to make me learn algebra again.

  My father was back and forth to Minsk almost continuously that January. He attended meetings of the Belorussian Central Council and talked to the various regional chiefs of the Defense Force. He was the foreshadowed Minister for Relocation. The Minsker Zeitung and the local Belorussian papers both said so. I have to confess I was pleased he was away so often. I felt I could no longer pose as his little boy. Events had made me a brat, as Miss Tokina had converted Genia into an occasionally charming, less hormonally stormy adolescent. The feeling that my father knew too much about me, had seen me in too many extremities, had not abated. That he was locked up in the Europa Hotel in Minsk and was planning the Belorussian Republic and all its works and all its pomps seemed entirely suitable to me. I was at ease. I did not foresee the spring, as my intelligent mother did.

  There had been winter Russian offenses in the south, but the Smolensk front on which we depended remained steady. The combination of oil and railways down south made assaults inevitable. Up here in the north we were innocent of oil, and the Germans still held all the railway junctions. So it looked like a situation that could last forever: the Germans encompassing Leningrad and holding far Novgorod and Staraya Russa, a Belorussian garrison in the house, my father away on most important Belorussian business, Genia neutralized by Miss Tokina, my mother anxious in the tradition of mothers but never with a blade to her throat, and no threat of a blade developing.

  We went to Minsk for Easter, traveling by troop train. It was slow—a small locomotive traveled ahead at a crawling pace, looking for tampered-with rails and hauling a tender carrying a German railway repair unit. Once we were parked for two hours while track was replaced. Toward dusk, as we edged along, shots were heard from the front of the train and an officer came through to our compartment and asked us to lie on the floor. Genia and my mother obeyed him so thoroughly that I was able, in the spirit of the guarantees I had received under Onkel Willi’s dining-room table, to look out through the shuttered window. I saw, edging through long grass and cornflowers, a strong detachment of German infantrymen from our train. I saw them all pause and pour fire into the woods. These fellow travelers of ours were on their way ultimately to take up a line along the Beresina south of Minsk, should that be necessary. It was yet another of those lines which the more knowledgeable of our house garrison said could last an age.

  We reached Minsk toward midnight, and my father was there to meet us. We heard klaxons on the way to the Hotel Europa. My father smiled at my mother. “It’s never quiet at night,” he said. That Easter morning we heard Mass in Latin at the church of the Bernardine monastery. It was a sharp, clear Resurrection Day. For two such nationalists my parents had an unself-conscious preference for the Latin Mass over the Belorussian-Byzantine style, for a French Christ resurgent over a Russian or Greek one. For my parents were among that 20 percent who used Belorussian only to communicate with their fellow nationals but who believed that a knowledge of the Latin responses made one an heir to Western culture and was as good as a visit to Paris.

  In the car on the way to breakfast at the Europa, my father told my mother, “You should stay in Minsk. General Busch intends to make Minsk into an irreducible stronghold. Besides, I’m only nominally police chief of Staroviche now.”

  We drove past a strongpoint on a corner guarded by young Belorussian conscripts in new but shabby uniforms which echoed those of the SS.

  “I don’t want to give up the house in Staroviche,” I was delighted to hear my mother tell him. “And Genia must have Miss Tokina or she’ll go mad.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” said my father, smiling and indulgent. “We won’t relinquish the lease on the Staroviche house.”

  We haven’t relinquished it to this day.

  38

  Old Greg Delaney had been able to come in off the road at the age of forty-five when he achieved the post of dispatch clerk at Pioneer Frozen Foods in Parramatta. Here his days began hectically—if he dropped dead on the job, he always said, it would be between seven and nine in the morning—but the rest of the shift was calmer. He had time to read two newspapers and be opinionated as drivers and supervisors from the factory drifted through his office. What gave him piquant joy was that he knew management were relaxed about him, that he kept the bookwork and the drivers straight. That freed them from suspicion and him from supervision. The managing director had come down to his booth by the loading docks the week before Christmas 1982 to hand him his bonus check, to sip a scotch with him, and to assure him that an independent consultant had discovered that Greg had saved the company $98,000 in pilferage during the previous tax year.

  That visit from the management intrigued Delaney—the fact the man had uttered a specific sum and that it was large enough simply to be equated with riches in Greg’s mind, but that Greg considered his $1,500 bonus abundant reward. And that the managing director knew that—knew the figure he reeled off would not appear to Greg an achievable or possessable sum, meant to Greg no more or less than say the number of light-years between Earth and Alpha Centauri. And this was not because Greg Delaney was stupid. It was because he was a happy man and therefore incorruptible.

  His son made him professionally uneasy by asking him for a job. “It isn’t what your mother had in mind for you. Driv
ing a truckload of frozen peas around Sydney.”

  “Tell her it’s only temporary,” said Delaney.

  It was possible old Greg didn’t want his son crowding him in at Pioneer, invading his glass booth, making special claims on him.

  “Mrs. Terracetti called your mother with a pretty garbled story about some brawl between Gina and yourself. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  Delaney admitted it.

  “You know she’s a bloody wonderful girl, Gina.”

  Delaney nodded. “Do you think I’m going to say the opposite?”

  “Don’t come into Pioneer. Start something of your own. I should have made you go to university.”

  “My grades weren’t high enough.”

  “Then to one of those advanced education places.”

  Delaney said he needed a breathing space. “After that I’ll go and found my own multinational.”

  Whatever his reasons, Greg Delaney continued to fight the idea. “Look, Pioneer’s minting money. There’ll be a generation of kids who believe vegetables grow in little plastic packets with a bloody pioneer wagon on it. But I ought to give any job that comes up to a married man.”

  “Shit, I’m a married man.”

  “A married man with kids. Listen, a word of advice. Not the word you’re expecting. Don’t take your problems to that idiot Doig.”

  “Well,” asked Delaney, “is there a job?”

  “Will be in two weeks. A Greek driver’s going back to Salonika. Reckons the standard of living’s better there. What have they done to our beautiful country!” This was a constant exclamation of Mrs. Delaney’s. “I’ll get you an application form.”

  “Will you put a word in for me?”

  Old Delaney—a man who had saved his company $98,000 and was willing to save them from his son as well—snorted and said nothing.

  He had seen it in films.

  Films had in fact provided the bulk of his education, outside marriage and his affair with Danielle, on these matters, and he wondered if people now made love, mimicking the erotic gestures of Julie Christie or Burt Reynolds, in a different way than their grandparents.

  Or even than their parents. For the Delaneys senior tolerated pictures only from the fifties in which June Allyson and Cary Grant shared twin beds and displayed toward each other lots of amiability and not an amp of passion. Questions of potency and orgasm did not arise. But in a Goldie Hawn movie a husband dies of a heart attack at climax. And in others there was a modern standard scene where an unsure hero gets a spectacular woman to bed, there is a cut to her wistful and him ashamed, and she sighs, “It could happen to anyone.…” It was always a comic scene and the audience laughed, delighted to find confirmed that which their homely wisdom and honest women had already taught them: Too much desirability can freeze a man’s engine.

  In the fornication palace at North Parramatta, on a Tuesday evening after training, Delaney found that this scene from comedy, this take from that other effete and sated world parallel to the real world and never touching it, had interposed itself between himself and Danielle, and that Danielle was saying, with less flagrant disappointment than the movie vamps, “But it’s nothing to be worried about.”

  That afternoon she had bravely appeared in time to meet him, asserting herself, her own woman. But it seemed to Delaney that the withdrawal of Rudi’s approval reduced everything, made the whole business meaner. Despite himself he began to hear noises from other rooms, a jovial voice, a murmurous discussion of erotic preferences, a sound of furniture bumping harshly, a post-coital shower turning on. It had been necessary to Danielle Kabbel and Delaney both, one of the basic terms of their infatuation, to believe that everyone else in the place was a lover of a different and lower order than themselves. They were fated, but the people next door were just in it for the fun. The illusion lifted now, the whole arrogance of the affair vanished. The walls grew thin. Delaney could see a sort of stain of weariness on Danielle’s forehead, and his own limp seed failed to move.

  That first.

  The following morning Gina did not let him sleep late. She woke him by placing on his bare shoulder one of those frozen plastic containers of coolant people put in their picnic baskets to keep the beer and the meat fresh. They were going picnicking, she told him grimly, even if it cost her her job. She dragged him into the kitchen and showed him what she’d gathered—ham, tomatoes, mozzarella, sundry dips, a barbecued chicken in a foil bag, two beers, a bottle of Frascati. “Well,” he said, “you Dagos know how to put a picnic together.” But he was blind with misery. How could they find their way to a cliff face and force this stuff down their throats? He tried to restrict the time she might demand of him. “Why don’t we go up to Springwood at lunchtime?” he suggested.

  “Bugger that!” roared Gina, pointing at him. You’d almost believe a curse was in it for him if he didn’t go along. “We’re going to the beach.”

  He groaned. The cement promenades of Bondi rose in his mind.

  “Palm Beach,” she said. “You know, there’s a lighthouse there. We’re going up the lighthouse. Come on, no resistance. You’re supposed to be fit, Mr. Delaney.”

  It was better than he thought, a clear winter’s morning with a sort of frank bland light which didn’t suit that species of crucial conversations Steve Mansfield called “deep and meaningfuls.” In the spirit of the enforced expedition to the beach, Gina drove and made careful and polite talk.

  When Greg Delaney had driven his adolescent son to Palm Beach on summer Saturdays it had always taken two hot hours or more. Delaney and Gina got there this winter’s day in one and saw the whole long strand of ocean beach all but empty under the sun. At the northern end a shred of sand dunes ran toward a great and separate headland, almost its own island, on which the lighthouse stood. Delaney felt an instant wistful urge to climb to it but wasn’t sure how you got up there. It was as if Gina had read the guidebook though. She parked on the edge of the dunes, on the inland side, by the great sweep of water named Pittwater after one of those British ministerial Pitts, Delaney wasn’t sure which one. “Hands out,” she ordered him as she landed the picnic basket in his arms. She led him off along a narrow stillwater beach, the sand soft, the surf from beyond the dunes resonating in his ears. The Wave, the bloody Wave. It would drown the filament of dunes and lap the sandstone ledges of the headland. To Kabbel therefore all this lovely shore was already done for.

  “This is beautiful,” said Gina, walking unevenly beyond the tidemark.

  There were fishermen’s huts ahead, below the cliffs of Barrenjoey headland, on this back side of Palm Beach. Delaney suspected there weren’t many fisherman left in the area and that the shacks were probably leased by trendies from the Eastern Suburbs. Whatever the case, past the first one Gina led him right and up a track fringed with tall boulders, by banksia and vines, acacias and melaleucas, and other arrantly Australian vegetation.

  “Ancient,” said Gina. “Ancient country.”

  They climbed the uneven sandstone track. Walls of scrub and great boulders did what they liked with the sound of the sea, blunting and slowing it at one bend, bouncing it at them fast at another. Rosellas skittered across their vision, leaving a stain of scarlet and blue. There was no one else there. It was as if the guidebook had promised Gina there would be no one.

  The lighthouse seemed smaller when they reached it, but the mouth of Broken Bay immense, and the illimitable coastline swept away northwards. Gina clung to him for a while in case space devoured her. Off among the low salttough bushes sat ledges of sandstone. They were exactly the places to spread a picnic blanket.

  Delaney and his wife went looking off in the scrub for the right slab for them. They moved stooped over an overgrown track—the spiny vegetation needled their arms and legs. On their right a fenced grave appeared. Fred Mulhall, born in 1815 in Somerset, made the long interstellar journey to Australia, kept the light on Barrenjoey till the light took him—a bolt of lightning frittering him in th
e 1880s. His wife was laid with him. Conjugal lessons seemed to be following Delaney even into the bush.

  They defused them by sharing a laugh at poor Fred’s epitaph.

  All ye who come my grave to see,

  Prepare in time to follow me.

  Repent at once without delay,

  For I in haste was called away.

  They found a platform at last, open to the sun and lightly fringed with wax-tongued banksias.

  He read the Rugby League news in both Herald and Telegraph with at last, after weeks of being adrift, some sense that it was—as Danielle had once said—his game. In the Herald, a piece on Bernie Swift, the Saint George five-eighth. Delaney had once played against him, Metropolitan Catholic Colleges versus Combined High Schools, curtain raiser to Australia versus France at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Swift had had everything then—wonderful understanding with his halfback, could scurry and then open up with a change of pace like a center. Brilliant on the little kick. So I had the message when I was seventeen that there were blokes better than me. Perhaps I thought the buggers would move to Queensland. No, what he had thought then, when he was seventeen, was I will learn, I will learn. The sun however spread its consolations across the page. Besides, he had some of his father’s tranquillity. When it came to ambition he had not been swallowed whole.

  As he found out after eating lunch and urinating grandly like Adam from the edge of the rock, this was Gina’s seduction venue as Dyson Engineering had been Stanton’s. Delaney was dazed by a full-blooded winter sun, by half a bottle of Frascati, and by an unusual sense of the world being right. Gina moved with that same knockabout gruffness she’d employed to force the picnic on him. She had been sunbathing topless (as her mother had never done in the Mediterranean sunlight), a bathrobe around her thighs. She shifted and laid herself across his lap, and later it occurred to him that if he had not shown any interest she would have lost everything—the day, her pride, her friendly calm—and been forced to hurl the bottle at him and curse and gouge him. He touched her breasts and found her honest moisture nearly without thinking, certainly without thought of the Kabbels and Danielle. What he said after these opening movements wasn’t what he meant to say. He tried to assert a sort of fidelity to Danielle, but that didn’t come from his mouth. What came from his mouth was, “I’m not out of the Kabbel thing yet.”