A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Delaney shook his head. It was obvious Doig believed a crucial blow had been landed.

  “Pardon me if I speak like an old-fashioned priest,” he said. He didn’t want to, was fearful Delaney would storm out. In fact Delaney was excited that at last Doig might be about to do his professional duty, bring down on him a condemnation he could react to, use as a springboard. “Look,” said Doig, “I blame the church for a lot of this.”

  So he reneged instantly on his promise of severity. He said, “You are taught from babyhood that sex can destroy you. If you believe it, then you’ll be destroyed. I have been nearly destroyed in my time, believe me.” He paused and inspected the bowl of amber sugar crystals. “But sex is a matter of rational negotiation, like buying a car or a house. You have to be deliberately calm. If you think you’re going off to save this woman, Delaney, don’t make it a matter of fated destiny, of rescue on a grand scale. You’re going off for your own sake. Because there are other possibilities. You can rescue her and not marry her. You can support the child without leaving Gina. You see, a rational balance.” Doig frowned. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “I can’t do it that way.”

  “No. Because the church told you your sexual passions were runaway monsters which would tear your house down. You have to tear your house down now the monster is out of its cave. Now that there’s such a thing as desire, you have to throw Gina away.”

  “She won’t stand for it. Support of a bastard. Support of a girlfriend or an old girlfriend. She can’t take that, and I can’t hide it from her.”

  “Bring her to me, Delaney. The two of you—”

  “No. No.” Didn’t he understand anything about Italians? “She couldn’t take the shame.”

  Doig pushed his chair away from the table. “You’ve decided she can’t.”

  “No. I know she can’t.”

  Doig grabbed Delaney’s wrist. “I want you to bring her to me. We’ll make an arrangement, the three of us.”

  His belief that he could make a peace they could live by was so childlike Delaney did not like to trample on it. But he knew there wasn’t any compact anyone could draw up. “I’ll see if she’ll be in it, Andrew,” Delaney lied.

  46

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Feb. 2, 1945, Berlin

  The lieutenant we visited today at Dahlwitz in bad way with pulmonary inflammation and thigh wound. He lies in his own room in infirmary at commando school. He would be better off surrounded by other humans in a general ward, but his superiors believe he would spread alarm.

  Last time I was at Dahlwitz was just prior to Christmas, when out there with Ostrowsky to review Black Cats and other Belorussian operatives soon to be parachuted home. Atmosphere then very sanguine, confidence high, men looked magnificent. Hard to believe the proud personnel of that day have been reduced to this one gibbering officer.

  He looked up from bed at us and said, “You can’t go back, no one can go back! No use threatening agents we left behind, no use saying go on working for us or we’ll spill the beans to the Soviets. The Soviets know everything. I tell you, every damned thing!”

  This statement of faith, delivered from clogged lungs and a constricted throat, contracted during what must have been a pitiless and unhinging escape through the frozen Belovehz forest, across Poland, across occupied Germany, flashing forged papers, hiding his thigh wound, surviving by wit. Now his wit is at an end.

  Ostrowsky sat beside him like an uncle, calming him. In no time the boy was again calling him “Mr. President.” “Tell us precisely what you believe the problems are back there,” asked Ostrowsky soothingly. “In the homeland.”

  The boy began by weeping, but his account was clear. Clear too that what has happened to the Black Cats is the largest Belorussian reversal since last December at Biscenson when Germans unwisely insisted on throwing the Belarus Brigade up against General Patton’s armor in a blessedly brief encounter. (For which, of course, Abramtchik unjustly blames Ostrowsky.)

  His face therefore a mess of tears and sweat, the lieutenant began to tell us how the Soviets manage security. The lieutenant and his squad parachuted into the Kaminetz area on midwinter’s night. They had been given the names of Belorussian loyalists still supposedly to be found in the villages north of the Pripet and the Bug. They found the villages totally deserted and empty of food. It had been intended that they live off the villages. Now, within two days of landing in the woods, they were in a desperate and famished condition. They moved north looking for Vitushka’s platoon. On the way they met a very frightened, very elderly charcoal burner, living with his wife in a hovel in the woods, who told them that the Russians had simply cleared the area. Along the Belorussian-Polish border, they had emptied every village and relocated the villagers in encampments to the east. Hence they now knew that anyone found in the woods was a fascist spy. The old man and his wife, who had escaped this extraordinary relocation, were terrified that that would be their fate.

  Starving and ill from exposure, the lieutenant and his men located Vitushka in the woods near the Pruzhany road. Vitushka confirmed the old man’s story. Along a border of 150 miles, and to a depth of fifty miles, everything had been cleared. Ostrowsky agents in the villages had been executed. Travel by urban people in Grodno, Kaminetz, Brest, Kobrin, and so on was not permitted. The city dwellers were locked up, the villagers were gone.

  Could not help feeling an awe and admiration for such a degree of thoroughness. This is relocation on a scale which would be beyond my resources and Redich’s gifts.

  The boy related that a supplies drop on New Year’s Eve and a few successfully stalked stags saved them from starvation. It was apparent however that they had a choice only between dying in perfect security in the forests or trying to contact Ostrowsky agents in the cities.

  Moving south now, they encountered a Russian patrol-in-strength at night while trying to cross the Brest Litovsk—Minsk highway. Only six of them escaped death or capture and, after two more cruel days passed, stood on the northern outskirts of the city of Kobrin. Vitushka and two others decided to penetrate the city and make contact with the Ostrowsky cell there while the wounded lieutenant and the others waited in the woods. Vitushka, he said, had behaved very well through all their sufferings. When he could, he did his party trick, which was to sing black American jazz songs in a gravelly voice. The lieutenant described how in his peasant coat, Vitushka emerged from the woods on an edge of a country road. Away in the dimness of late afternoon was that most miserable of low-lying Belorussian towns, with its shabby wooden suburbs and its unkempt timber mills. And Vitushka stood there for a moment singing for the benefit of the two going with him and the others who would wait, “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”

  During the night one of the lieutenant’s two companions swallowed his cyanide pill. It was after dark the next night before one of Vitushka’s small party turned up again. He too was ready to end his life. Soviets had a ten-thousand-man intelligence division in the town—at least one man attached to each household. Nothing in the slightest way remarkable could happen in Kobrin or in any of the border cities. Vitushka and one of his men had approached the Kobrin address given them during their training at Dahlwitz and had been instantly captured. The third man, the one who had now reached the woods again in a state of moral collapse, had been posted in the doorway of a grocery shop and had seen the arrest. He had instantly tried to cover his connection to Vitushka by showing his papers to the grocer and buying one of the few items which were for sale—a can of pickled cucumbers. These he took to a timber yard, where he spent a miserable night in hiding. Somehow he talked his way through a patrol next afternoon. By then loudspeakers were announcing that the fascist Vitushka and one of his lieutenants would be publicly paraded through Kobrin and that the parade would be filmed by a newsreel camera crew.

  The lieutenant lost one more of his companions through suicide and another was shot by a Russian
sentry near Bialystok.

  Ostrowsky continued to comfort the lieutenant during our time with him today, but we need no intelligence officer to explain to us the significance of the boy’s experiences. Belorussia must be recaptured frontally. It cannot be recaptured by infiltration. The President’s network of agents has been obliterated.

  Ostrowsky continued to hide his true feelings from me. Atmosphere dismal in the car returning to Alexanderplatz. On arrival the President asked me not to go home yet but to join him for a drink in his office. Friendly drinking after office hours was not at all characteristic of him, and the oddity of the request made me accept.

  He poured the vodka himself, quickly, in case I changed my mind and went home to Danielle. Both of us drank the first shot at the same hectic pace. As they say, if ever men needed it …

  Ostrowsky said, “There are agents, Soviet agents, working among us. It is amply apparent that they’re from the other faction.”

  Wondered if it was amply apparent, but Ostrowsky too tired and heartsick to argue with.

  “It’s essential the Americans don’t find this out. We must be able to offer them networks. We can tell them later the networks have gone and have to be rebuilt. But in the first instance, at the first meeting with them, they must not know what happened to Vitushka or what the lieutenant found out.” The proposition that it as well that the lieutenant will not live to meet the Americans hung for a moment in the air.

  Remarked that the Soviets themselves might let the United States know. But Ostrowsky is sure the Americans will believe us and not their Godless and temporary allies.

  “Two men,” he said, “of whom I can be sure neither have Soviet affiliations. Yourself and Hrynkievich.”

  Do not consider it a compliment being compared to Hrynkievich, who runs Belorussian self-help here in Berlin. The good Dr. Hrynkievich cunning, venal, not very clever.

  “I call upon you again, Stanek, for something of a special contribution. At a given moment, I would like yourself and Hrynkievich to go as my representatives and to make contact with the Americans, preferably with Patton, in Bavaria.”

  Proposal is of course attractive. But thought at once of Danielle. Asked a question which in my good will toward Ostrowsky I would never once have asked. “Hrynkievich to lead the mission?”

  Ostrowsky nodded. “He has seniority as my Minister of Welfare.”

  Mentioned to Ostrowsky Danielle’s unease about the coming flight from Berlin. Her anxiety would treble if she knew I would be gone somewhere to the west and that she had to make it unaccompanied.

  He poured another glass of liquor like a supplicant. He would be very grateful, he told me.

  As I drank second glass, became increasingly enraged at him. He would shackle me to a barely competent minister like Hrynkievich and send me out on the roads of Bavaria to offer the Americans a nonexistent agent network. Later he might be able to say to General Patton, “After all, I cannot be responsible for what a fool and a junior minister tell you.”

  Idea was that I should discuss the thing with Danielle and give Ostrowsky an answer—no doubt a positive one—in the morning. As I drank, found the true answer come out of my mouth of its own accord. “I regret, Mr. President, that any idea of leaving Danielle behind me in Berlin would amount to a betrayal worse than adultery.”

  “But I would see her safely to the West when the appropriate moment came,” he assured me.

  Delighted to find myself unrelenting. “I am afraid those are guarantees that in the circumstances would bring her no comfort, Mr. President.”

  Leaving his office, felt more of a free agent than I have in a dozen years. In back of car on way home, found myself saying aloud, “Let him send Redich.”

  47

  As the weather turned humid, Delaney found his own flat in Saint Mary’s. Gina resisted the urge to return to Bringelly and adopt the status of wronged child, preferring to live on in Penrith as a wronged woman, too proud however to speak openly of the damage which had been done her.

  Delaney’s flat was one bedroom, no phone. He had to continue his search for the Kabbels from public telephone booths. He drove a $1500 Holden with rust problems. You had to avoid poking it with your index finger lest you knock a hole in the door paneling. In it he traveled around Parramatta, looking in ethnic coffee bars for Kabbel’s Belorussian “uncle,” the one he’d heard about from Danielle and from Kabbel himself. Swarthy men of indefinable origins watched him, his Celtic fairness, as he approached the bar owner and asked did they know a man called Kabbel, a Belorussian who perhaps visited and chatted With any elderly relatives the proprietor might have. Searching for a Belorussian coffee shop owner with an uncle, he traveled as far east as Aunurn, even though they were mainly Turks and Armenians there.

  With half an absent mind on his career, he went to his parents’ place for dinner twice a week, knowing that the dormant player within him needed Mrs. Delaney’s comprehensive meals. An air of baffled forgiveness made the evenings painful. Once Mrs. Delaney stood over him and asked plaintively was there any chance of him and Gina reconciling, but then fled the kitchen in tears as he prepared a flinching answer. Old Greg poured Delaney a beer and said, “You’ve got to remember the sort of place Penrith was when your mother and I were young. You could walk for miles, pass gate after gate, fence after fence, and every adult was married and stayed married.” Old Greg winked. “Of course, there was plenty of misery and boredom though. Not hard to come across the old misery!”

  Delaney played cricket on Saturdays for the sake of his sanity. He had once liked to believe that if he’d had an inch or two more in height he would have been a good pace bowler. He was beyond such vanities now. But his medium-pace deliveries, the occasional wrong’un thrown in, earned him some respect from local batsmen.

  On a night of berserk heat in January, Delaney sat on the apron-sized balcony of his bachelor flat drinking beer and watching the migraine-yellow lights along the highway. On such a night he had first met Kabbel, and this happened to be very nearly the anniversary. Somewhere out to sea, beyond the harbor, a merciful south wind was said (just as on that night of the meeting with Kabbel) to be gathering itself. The Penrith squads were already in training in this subtropical stew of humid air for a winter which seemed even more remote than the promised cleansing wind. When his door knocked he went to it without enthusiasm. It was Stanton, sweat standing in globules all over his face. One of his arms was thrust up against the doorjamb for support and he was panting. His left hand held a shopping bag.

  “I’m sick,” he said. He ran to the tiny bathroom. It sported, in fact, no bath, just a basin, a loo, a shower, with space between them for someone slim. Delaney heard Stanton run his hip against the rim of the basin. He did that himself every time for the first few weeks. While the shopping bag stood abandoned in the middle of the hallway, Stanton threw up near the base of the toilet and lay for a time gasping, with his head against the cool tiles. Delaney went and got him some iced water. On the way with it he toppled the bag with his foot, and could make out inside it notes in bunched form and the muzzle of something like the .38 with which he and Stanton had armed themselves every night of their career at Kabbel’s.

  “Bloody hell!” Delaney said. “You’ve done it.”

  It was Stanton’s office in life to talk about these things. You had to have other talents altogether to do them.

  Stanton seemed to agree. He began to weep. “I’ve been hurt once before. Hurt a dozen times if you could count the bloody scars. I’m shit-scared of bodily damage.” His face contorted further. “I can’t do any more of them. I can’t do any more of the bastards.”

  “How many have you done, for Christ’s sake?”

  “This is the second. I had to do one at Christmas, Terry. The kids don’t understand economy. It’s those bloody irresponsible television people. They show the kids one goodie after another. There’s no mention of these things costing cash—the message is that everyone has these things as a matt
er of bloody course. I stole a Commodore in Villawood and held up a service station in Liverpool. I didn’t mind that one. The bloke was a student or something—he was reading an accounting textbook. It was like doing business. I asked for the money and he gave it to me very politely. Only $380—they have people running around to those places all night so that the money doesn’t accumulate in the till. The boy knew what it was worth, knew what the exchange rate was. I was buying Christmas, and he was buying a future in a nice brick house in North Rocks and a nice wife and two ankle-biters. A really sensible, businesslike kid! Listen, Delaney, do you have scotch or brandy or something?”

  “Come outside,” said Delaney. The bathroom did not smell fresh.

  “I’ll clean it up after my scotch,” Stanton offered, rising painfully from the tiles. His face was still swollen and muddied with tears. The picture of a man doing his duty as parent, husband, wild colonial boy.

  Outside, at the doll’s table large enough, as Delaney often told himself, for four anorexic Vietnamese, he poured some whisky for Stanton. He had placed Stanton’s bag at that end of the table, against his friend’s leg. Stanton’s match fees, appearance money, premiership bonus. “And tonight’s little raid?” Delaney asked.

  “Stole a car in a quiet street in Lalor Park, drove it to Wentworthville—a little too far, I reckon—and another service station. This bloke scared me. He was on speed or something. They reckon those blokes are dangerous to be mugged by, but it’s dangerous to hold them up, too; they’re likely to do anything. He obeyed everything I said, but he kept laughing in a stupid way, as if he had an alarm or a weapon behind the counter. He was slow and bloody theatrical as hell emptying the till—it was more than $600—and when I was running to the car I was sure he’d do me some harm, shoot me in the back or run after me with a knife. I was in a hell of a fright; otherwise I would have thought to lock him in the men’s. Had an awful drive back to Lalor Park, to where I’d left my car. I was wearing driving gloves see. In this weather! Not during the holdup, but driving.”