A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  You must forgive the inevitable tone of censure, or of mockery of my parents’ views, in what I tell you. It is not intended, I am merely trying to prove to my brother, who would at the time have absorbed my parents’ view of the romance with Albert, that I wasn’t acting out of pure willfulness.

  By the end of the winter I was pregnant, but with Albert’s access to black market goods it was easy for us to find in Stuttgart a highly qualified obstetrician to help us out. Neither of us liked the idea, but Albert knew that if things were not arranged this way it was likely that some of Father’s huskier Staroviche cops would fall on him one night and at best leave him neutered. Pressure was perhaps increased by the fact that he called me Heloise, and even though he was no Abelard, he remembered what Heloise’s uncle, the Dean of Paris, had done to the body of that great philosopher out of jealousy and vengeance.

  Our parents as it turned out knew nothing of my pregnancy. Security on the matter was absolute. As you were to find on your grief, you poor little fellow, security on other matters was dubious.

  This has got to be a rather long-winded letter. It has been very cold in Paris this February and I am getting to an age where despite central heating the ice at the core begins to be felt. I shall continue this letter in the morning.

  51

  It was as Golder promised. The young Queenslander became briefly famous by dazzling his way past two disoriented defenses in the first games of the new season. “You watch,” Eric Samuels told Delaney. “The opposition’s going to wake up to him. Sure, he’s got a few nice tricks. But he’s brittle and his sidestep’s too easy to read. You watch, you watch. The first good lock he plays against is going to kill him.”

  To Delaney the success of Golder’s Queenslander was only a token annoyance and stood for the deeper derangement of the world. He had therefore played two tough and vengeful games in reserves, and through this accident found himself much praised in the clubhouse, as if his new ferocity was a deliberate tactical choice he had made based only on considerations to do with the game.

  In the third encounter of the season, the Queenslander met the good lock Eric Samuels had predicted and was choked off all day and left the field limping. According to Golder’s promise, he would now have only half a game left to recover form. Delaney however did not quite believe Golder’s promise, or anyone’s.

  In the fourth game, before a rabid crowd at Saint George, a tendon snapped in the Queenslander’s calf. Delaney came on five minutes after halftime and helped halt a tide of Saint George tries. It was announced on the evening news that the Queenslander would be on crutches for six weeks. The following Tuesday night a Herald photographer came to training and took a photograph of Delaney running with the ball. It appeared with the announcement that Golder would be using him at five-eighth for some time, perhaps forever.

  There was always a ferocity in the air at Redfern. They called this team the Rabbitohs, after the Depression days when the unemployed of South Sydney used to hunt rabbits in that low country of sand dunes and sell them door-to-door. Half the crowd seemed to have the toughness of Depression survivors, old men with the shadows of a hard life on their faces, old women who knew their football backwards and wore green and red beanies on their heads. And then, lots of dangerous kids, the kind you saw rioting on English football fields in the evening news. It was exactly the sort of fierce crowd Delaney welcomed that Sunday—an away game, and the world against you. And a new ferocity inside.

  Once when he was young he had met a great Saint George forward and asked the man what he did on the morning of a test match against the poms—what time he woke, what he ate, what he told himself? The forward replied that he got up about nine, ate a steak half an hour later, and when he ran onto the Cricket Ground he repeated the proposition, “I’m the toughest bastard here.”

  The young Delaney had been a little shocked. Five-eighths got by on craft, by niftiness. A five-eighth could not credibly promise himself that he was the toughest bastard there. The young Delaney himself was not in it for the aggression, had been sure he never would be. These days though he understood the veteran. As he ran onto Redfern Oval, down the wire-caged walk placed to prevent the crones of South Sydney from attacking players or referees, his jaw was retracted, his teeth slightly apart, his mouthguard tight in his fist.

  Gorrie, the Gilgandra boy, was playing second row that day, in tandem with Tancred. The selectors still stuck with Tancred. On a heavier winter day like today, he had time to pull his Yorkshire tricks.

  And he was certainly good weight in the scrums. Penrith won the first two but were cramped—the Rabbitoh back line standing at least a meter offside, forcing Delaney to run too wide, and the referee too intimidated by the partisans in the grandstand to chastise the local team. Delaney found himself cut down brutally from the flank by the South Sydney center, the young one named Lynch, another whiz kid. Lynch had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney’s eyeball with his blindside thumb. A home crowd would have seen it and protested. This crowd cheered.

  Delaney had not regained clear vision when Lynch took the ball in midfield and ran forty meters with it, leaving the forwards standing. Except for Gorrie, who, being young and from the country, did not know when he was up against a champion, and so ran the man down ten meters out from the goal line.

  Now came a passage of frantic defense, the ecstasy of the crowd breaking like a surf behind the goal line. Delaney himself was in an ecstasy, tackling low, letting the ones who didn’t know how to go in higher on the bodies of the Rabbitohs. Lynch wore all the time a cat’s smile on his face, and if possible, when tackled, always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney’s face. When the Rabbitoh try came, it was the result of a movement between Lynch and their young second-rower, their fast Queensland winger. Even Gorrie was left shamed and standing. Tancred blinked, flat-footed and bemused, like a parent whose children were beyond him. By halftime it was 12 to nothing, the crowd were singing a taunting chant: “Look at the scoreboard!” Delaney knew the commentators would be saying that the Penrith lads were lucky it wasn’t 24 to nothing. Golder’s halftime exhortation was full of obscenities, and Delaney found himself, for the first time since his childhood, very nearly denouncing another player to his coach, very nearly accusing Tancred of stupidity, cowardice, malice.

  Delaney ran back on head-hunting for Lynch. As Golder had said, the bastard was opening up the defense as if it was a can of bloody dog food.

  The Rabbitohs, it seemed to Delaney, were winning all the scrums now. Running on a diagonal, gathering an intimidating speed, Lynch was coming through, yelling to his five-eighth for the ball. Delaney felt a lightness, a certainty. Sometimes, when you’re out of oxygen and elated and fierce, you got those certainties, the pattern became apparent. He was sure he could stop Lynch and no one else could. It was one of those rare times when you did not worry about position, and you ran any distance to achieve the ordained result. He had Lynch’s measure. He knew which way he would turn with the ball before the ball was even in his hands. For a time he was certain he would go in low, but three or at most four paces from Lynch he realized it must be high, in case Lynch had a colleague further out moving at that same pace, and got the ball to him. Exultantly, Delaney straightened, brought his arm up to collect Lynch’s shoulder. He felt nothing but raw delight when the arm took Lynch’s face and something parted there and Lynch’s clever eyes glazed.

  Lynch lay flat and unmoving on the paddock. Delaney heard with a strange surprise the ranting of the crowd, saw the referee waving someone off the field. In a few gasps, with a little more oxygen to the brain, he understood it was him. He looked at the referee’s hands, fixing on the fingers, which would tell him whether he was gone for five or ten minutes. But the referee did not use his fingers, used merely a backhanded gesture of total banishment. Leaving the field, Delaney would not have survived the hatred of the harsh natives of South Sydney had it not been for the w
ire cage.

  52

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  The second part of the letter from my sister, reflecting on the events of 1945–46, follows.

  Paris,

  Jan. 28, 1984

  Dear Radek,

  A fierce wind today and I saw from my window three Gypsy children move in on a woman and steal her purse with enormous skill, so deftly she was left in the middle of the pavement with her hands extended, weeping. But that piece of news does nothing to soothe your confusion about Michelstadt, so I shall take that business up where I left off yesterday.

  At the end of the winter of 1946, two of Redich’s men—both former police lieutenants from Rogachev, and one, Gersich, a delegate from Rogachev to that famous meeting in the Minsk Opera House where Ostrowsky outfoxed Abramtchik—were called to Colonel Nouges’s office to find three armed officers of French counterintelligence and two American officers of 12th Army Counter Intelligence, similarly armed, waiting to arrest them. My unofficial fiancé of the time, Sergeant Pointeaux, filled me in on the tragedy of that arrest. Gersich and his friends were tumbled straight into the back of a truck, driven to the border of the Russian zone north of Bayreuth, and handed over to officers of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The camp doctor back in Michelstadt had to sedate Mrs. Gersich that night. She knew her husband had disappeared into the void.

  There was a great deal of anxiety in Michelstadt that other arrests might take place, and that Belorussian patriots—as some of those coarse clowns called themselves—might be seized and sent prematurely east. (Remember that term from our childhood in Staroviche? Sent east?)

  Our father suffered from this fear, of course. But there was the additional problem that the papal gang suspected that he or someone else in the Ostrowsky setup had betrayed Gersich and his colleague to the Soviets. As you know, most of us were masquerading as Poles, or as humbler refugees from Belorussia than in fact we were. Subtle misspellings of our names, forged papers, the general good will of the French and the Americans, gave us protection. For Gersich and his friend to have been arrested, someone—and Redich was certain it was someone in Michelstadt—must have betrayed Gersich’s and the other man’s identities, must have sent information and photographs to General Sedlov. Someone in Michelstadt must therefore be a Soviet agent. Redich wanted that agent uncovered and punished. That is why Redich kidnapped you and put you in the pit.

  RADISLAW KABBEL

  Because Sergeant Pointeaux was courting my sister, I was treated as something of a favorite by the guards. I would sit with them in the guardhouse, read their comic books, both French and American, and shamelessly extract chocolate from them. My father might have abominated Sergeant Pointeaux, but my connection with both men gave me more stature than probably any other brat in Michelstadt. It did not occur to my father, to Albert, or to me that I might be used for leverage between the factions, and so my liberty to wander in the camp and beyond it was virtually unrestricted.

  I was returning from the guardhouse to my parents’ suite in Hut 11-C one early dusk. It is very likely that I was singing or talking to myself. In both Regensburg and Michelstadt I had returned to being what my mother called a “normal child.” There had been cessation of the mild seizures which had occurred fairly regularly in the last days of Staroviche and in Frau Zusters’s house in Charlottenburg. So, a normal child, I sang my way home toward a plentiful supper.

  In this particular late February dusk the camp had already begun to recover from Gersich’s capture by the Russians. The mess halls, where I would sometimes eat with other children, telling by instinct that they liked me better if I avoided the mess where the camp leaders and their families ate, were full of talk of immigration. The first officials from Canada, the United States, Australia were just beginning to appear in places like Michelstadt, touting their version of the new world, looking for faces that would fit it. New York, New Jersey, Boston, Montreal were invoked. Of Australia, people knew little other than kangaroos and genial Aboriginals. The vacancy of what was known made the place seem highly desirable to many people in the mess, people who never again wanted to be at the storm’s eye.

  That evening, I was equally at peace both with the idea of a future of prairies, exotic wildernesses, deliciously serrated city skylines, as with the present benefits of Michelstadt.

  Four huts from home I was intercepted by a beefy young Belorussian, probably in his late twenties. He told me he had served with my father in Staroviche. My father didn’t want me to go home—instead he had sent this man to tell me to meet him in the recreation hut for some exciting news. “A surprise, a surprise,” said the young former policeman. “Though I suppose you’re nearly too grown up for surprises now.”

  I walked ahead of him but was aware, as if he had bifurcated, that there were now two of him. I looked around to see a second young man, thinner but equally tall. The second young man was smiling too. I smiled back. They were full of a sort of peasant good will. They seemed to be following me precisely so that they could witness that first flush of amazement on my face when my father announced the unexpected.

  They told me, in the vicinity of the crudely built Catholic church, that my father wasn’t really in the recreation hut—that he was in the old part of the camp. To get me to him, they intended to put me in a garbage bin and pass me off as refuse when they came to the French sentry by the soccer field. It was of course essential for this escapade that I remain quiet and still. With all my soul I pledged quietness and stillness.

  So they found me a garbage bin and I sat in its yellow reek of early putrefaction as they toted me past the sentry. I heard them nominate a destination beyond the old huts, the huts which would have been primitive accommodation even in the days of the German forced labor.

  Beyond these ancient huts were a covered row of old latrines. That was where they took me. They set me down and dragged the lid of one of the pits away. I was tumbled forth from the bin. There was no father. Only the dirty snow and the burningly cold earth. The genial-looking policeman who had first approached me said, lifting me by the armpits and lowering me into the dark, “You’re going down, sonny.”

  I told him no. Nonetheless I fell into the dark earth, landing at last with a fierce jolt on a deck of planks someone had placed halfway down the pit. I could barely see the monitory faces of the two Belorussians high above me in the lesser dark of the February dusk. “If you get thirsty,” said the one who had done all the speaking, “you’ll find lumps of ice on the walls.” Saying that, they threw in two blankets, and I wondered whether these would be adequate.

  Then they dragged the lid across the pit. The darkness was absolute. Without being dramatic one could say that I was buried alive.

  The earth could not accommodate my terror, but man is such an efficient machine that in the end I felt for moisture on the foul walls. Even in a miasma of terror I pursued the mechanics of being human or, at least, animal. Given time on my wooden platform deep in the pit I would have become a hunter, scrabbling for worms and bugs in Europe’s subsoil, delving for the insects which had maintained their wise politics through all Europe’s surface changes, the changes which only we believed to have penetrated to the center of the earth. I was astonished that it had happened again in my life so soon: I believed the guarantees I had been given beneath Oberführer Ganz’s dining-room table had exempted me from all future anguish of this scale. It was all very well for that Belorussian voice named “Uncle” to have promised me a Wave. In the pit, the Wave was no consolation.

  I did not begin to feel cold until sleep, normal functional sleep, began to overtake me. I fought it, since I believed this sort of unconsciousness would not give me any height from which I could look down on the child in the hole.

  I was blessedly wrong. Asleep, I wavered atop a light pole above the ancient latrines. A dead light bulb, one which had probably shone in the days of the Polish slave laborers, sat in the mantle by my right shoulder. I was aware o
f the radiant anxiety of the child in the latrine, that child affrighted to sleep. I could see the lit camp and hear voices and jazz music. They were not alarmed voices, they were not voices asking where Radek Kabbelski was. They were voices full of the expectation of America and Canada. They were voices more stimulated now, since the Allies had failed to sweep on over the Russians, by the prospect of New South Wales or Winnipeg or Massachusetts than by memories of the forests and the Belorussian buffalo.

  There were very few people in the open, for it was a dismal evening. The drizzle which descended from low, soggy clouds would later turn to sleet. I saw my father walking quickly past the playing fields, around the perimeter. Stopping to talk to a French sentry, he was—on account of his stature—permitted out the gate and into this old section of the camp. The ground in this area was, I was aware, littered with the debris of condemned huts, timber, and iron roofing stacked for some further use but never taken away. My father advanced halfway across this wasteland. My sister Genia, I saw, appeared behind him on the playing fields, striding straight across the middle of the soccer pitch. As my father looked behind one pile of stacked lumber and then another, Genia began to speak animatedly to the young sentry who had permitted him into the open. My father turned, saw her, and strode back to the gate. He began gesturing to Genia, shouting, though I could not catch what he said. I could see though that the sentry was embarrassed. I was astounded, aggrieved enough to curse him, as I saw him gesture Genia back toward the huts from which the music and the voices rose. My father had been distracted from finding me by the easy delights of chastising Genia, of calling her a slut.