A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Having spent so long to find the house, Delaney did not now want to approach it too fast. He parked his car in the ill-curbed and guttered ordinary street which ran past the entrance to the development and walked in. Number seventeen was in the head of the T. It was quiet around the corner. Everyone seemed to be a considerate neighbor. A man of about Delaney’s age was kicking a plastic football to his toddling son, who—wearing a frown—picked it up slowly with hands splayed from the wrist. At number eleven a man with slicked hair, wearing both the well-scrubbed after-work look of someone who perhaps labored in a foundry as well as the prosperous look of someone who cops plenty of overtime, was washing a new Camira. Delaney recognized Rudi Kabbel’s Toyota, pride of the fleet of Uncle Security, standing in front of seventeen. He stood for a while contemplating it, then he turned in past it to the front door and knocked. By his left shoulder were the kitchen windows, but their blinds were pulled down. It was Delaney’s intuition that they were down at this hour, when anyone would want them up to catch the last of the afternoon sun, for defensive reasons. The Kabbels were inside, he knew, and they knew he could tell it. He did not need to knock again. Someone was sure to answer. Peculiarly, he believed he would only know what to say if it was one of the boys.

  It was one of the boys. It was Warwick. He opened the door carefully, as if there had been trouble with the hinges. He said hello in his polite, deliberate way. It reminded Delaney of the deliberateness with which the man’s son, a few seconds before, had picked up the football.

  Delaney asked him how he was. The house had what Delaney thought of as a cold breath, as if the Kabbels had switched off all lights, all radiators, refrigerators, blenders, lest light and warmth and whirring give Delaney delusions of welcome.

  “Warwick,” said Delaney, “I’d like to see the baby. And I’d like to talk to Danielle too.”

  “Well, that’s all very well,” said Warwick, frowning. “Danielle doesn’t want to talk to you though.”

  “Is Rudi there?”

  “Rudi’s busy.”

  “Look,” said Delaney. He had none of the eloquence he thought he would have when first seeing a Kabbel again. “Let me see her. And it’s my daughter. Not yours. Let me see my daughter.”

  “A second,” said Warwick.

  He closed the door on Delaney. There would be a Kabbel conference, a busy affair, a hushed one. Delaney stood in the last of the sun and could hear nothing. When Warwick came back, he believed he would tell him, “I hope you gave Danielle a vote. I’m voting for the child.”

  Warwick opened the door again. He carried a shotgun in his hands, the breech opened and pointed to Delaney so that he could see both barrels were loaded. With that workmanlike calm of his, Warwick closed the breech and pointed the barrels at Delaney’s chest.

  “Now listen, Terry,” said Warwick. “None of us want to see you. We want you to stay away. You know what I’m capable of, eh?”

  Even threatened like this, Delaney was still straining to gauge the air of the house, the nuances of scent. Later he would tell himself it was his long experience of teams calloused by defeat which now helped him pick up one of the strains—the acrid trace of faith lost. He remembered now his source at the Newnes pub, the single, never since repeated fully loaded visit of the Kabbels to their canyon.

  Without any fear, but out of a conviction that there was a balance inside the house which could easily turn on the baby, Delaney himself reached for the door handle and shut the door on the gun. If the balance was disturbed, armies couldn’t save the baby girl. Delaney walked past the carport and out onto the pavement with a confidence that the thing could be done. Warwick’s politeness would help do it. Social workers and child-care people could negotiate that politeness.

  As he passed the man with the Camira, the well-scrubbed man of number eleven, Delaney saw him wink.

  “Come to cut something off, mate?” the man asked him. Delaney did not understand. Because of vibrations in his legs, he would have liked to sit for a while at the man’s feet. But a Camira owner might be appalled by that sort of behavior.

  “They’ve got nothing left on,” said the man, nodding toward the Kabbels’ place. “Telephone disconnected, electricity. I reckon someone will cut their water off pretty soon.”

  Delaney went to turn back to number seventeen, to take up this matter with Warwick.

  The Camira man wanted to be fair though. “Nice enough people. Dress well. You’d never know there were four people in the place. Five including the baby. And they like the baby O.K. Give it a fair bit of sun.”

  “But no heat,” said Delaney.

  “I suppose they bundle up,” said the man.

  56

  RUDI KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  My sister’s letter continues, speaking of happenings inside Michelstadt during my abduction.

  … Albert, my sergeant, had an idea of what had happened to you. Not perhaps a concise idea. But he knew it was Belorussian vengeance. All the French guards were in the same position. They knew that it was all beyond the control of Colonel Nouges, that the inmates were dominant, that they might yet have to watch the factional version of gang warfare.

  Redich wanted Father to find and cough up the Soviet informer. If he could not do that, he would never see you; or perhaps he would see some savaged part of you—a limb or a head. And you still like Belorussians?

  Father was of course desperate. On a visit to the family suite of rooms, I heard him tell Mother that he had more chance of finding where they had hidden you than of producing a supposed Russian agent. I have heard from old Belorussians here that sometime that night Redich and Father met, and Father put forth an argument he had rehearsed with his—believe me on this point, Radek—inconsolable wife. The argument was this. Suppose there happened to be a Soviet agent or informer but he was in fact a member of the Redich gang. He could well have denounced Gersich as a means of dividing the two factions, of rendering them impotent with mistrust.

  Redich would not buy it. He imposed a time limit though. The delinquent had to be surrendered before midnight the next night. Father and his lieutenants had only some thirty hours in which to find the informer, or if they could not do that, at least deliver to Redich someone they could plausibly call the informer. And Father would have found a scapegoat: Police work had prepared him for that sort of expedient. Unhappily, he would not have to find any substitute victim. The true victim would present.

  Any small intelligence I could extract from Albert and the soldiers, and which I then tried to pass to him later in the night, was spurned. It did not matter anyhow. Amazingly, neither the French nor most of the Belorussians knew about the latrines in the old camp. Even if I had known and had tried to pass him the news, he would have looked upon that as an unwelcome distraction. He had room only for his vanished son. He couldn’t deal at the same time with his floozy daughter.

  Most of the searches that night were therefore carried on discreetly and within the camp. Father’s intelligence setup told him that none of the Redich lieutenants was outside the wire. That indicated that you also were not outside the wire, but were perhaps trussed and hidden in some ceiling. Although Redich had counseled Father not to bother, somehow these little quests were achieved. Or perhaps Redich tolerated them. In any case, you were sought that night not only in ceilings but in broom closets, in the lockers where the UNRRA sporting equipment was kept, in the freezers which were America’s gift to Michelstadt, in the tool shop and the generator house. The camp doctor had to sedate Tokina, whose recitation of the Rosary for your deliverance had become more and more hysteric.

  This woman, my truest friend, had allied herself with Father in the idea that somehow my wickedness had brought it all on. Needless to say, if they wanted to drive me into Sergeant Pointeaux’s arms they couldn’t have done a better job. But I am philosophic about all that now. It’s the way families generally operate. It is true though that during those two days I itched not only with panic for
you but with a sort of panic for myself, that my blame would be demonstrated somehow by a court of inquiry run by the French or the Belorussians or both, that everyone from Tokina to Major Knowles would be summoned as witnesses.

  You remember there was a young policeman named Kalusich. He was often attached to the guard at our house in Staroviche. You would certainly remember his childlike face—the cupid-bow lips and the bland eyes, combined with a relentless blue shadow of beard. Other members of the guard teased him about it, sometimes making jokes that weren’t proper and which therefore went through me like an electric shock, both pleasant and intolerable. I bet you remember him, because you used to hang around the kitchen too, being lionized, if you will pardon me for saying so, after the Onkel Willi affair.

  Well, by the noon of the day of grace Father had from Redich, this young naif was being groomed as the “informer.” One of Father’s sergeants of police, who had served with the Belarus Brigade and survived the rout at Biscenson, and who now lives in Paris, told me when I visited him in an old people’s home here. For I went through that phase too—a desire to find out everything that had happened during those few days, an uneasiness about the accepted version. The old man told me that it was proposed both to lie to Kalusich about the other faction’s intentions, to minimize what could happen to him, and at the same time to threaten him with worse things if he did not allow himself to be served up to the papal gang. They were going to force-feed him his lines. The old man told me that at the time he didn’t think it would fool Redich. But Father was desperate. His judgment had gone.

  As for the rest of the incident, and as for what happened with Mother—Pointeaux has always known what occurred. As I remarked earlier, he is the sort who always knows what’s going on even though intuitions of survival generally tell him not to put his hand into the machinery. It was as a result of my inquiry among old Belorussians of both factions here in Paris—the Abramtchik crowd are very strong here and some of them work for French intelligence—that Pointeaux decided he had better be the one to inform me. He said that he used to wonder if I discovered the true story from some old duffer in a hospital how I would manage to drive home. I have known the facts now for nearly ten years.

  You remember how that partisan officer put his head under Onkel Willi’s table and said, “It’s the Kabbelski brat,” and didn’t do any more. I think Father was troubled by that, though not in the same way as if he had lost you. Remember another incident—you may not, in fact. But there was a very fashionable young clerk in Mayor Kuzich’s office. Her name was Drusova. She was an agent of the partisans. In the end she vanished in the cellar of the Natural History Museum—remember Bienecke? Hauptsturmführer Bienecke. He was sentenced to eight years by the West Germans—that was in the late ’60s. In any case, back to Drusova. She had not been betrayed by anyone—Kuzich had found her stealing documents. The reason you came out of the shambles at Onkel Willi’s had much to do with Drusova being caught through her own folly rather than through the work of an informer.

  In saying that, I’m temporizing. I’ll get to the crux. I believe that Mother and Drusova had a pact. Mother fed Drusova certain information in return for immunity for her husband and children. Mother was already fed up with Belorussian politics, with flights from Minsk and other places. We knew that very well as children. It is a truism that some people like to pretend that the reason there are more men in politics than women is that women are oppressed. The fact is that women so often have a different kind of politics imposed on them by their biology. Some women anyhow. There is always Rosa Luxemburg and Jeanne d’Arc, and I’m unsure what they do to my proposition.

  But the deal between the partisans and Mrs. Danielle Kabbelski was that we had immunity. It is quite possible that if all the plenteous guards had been withdrawn from around our house in Staroviche, we would still have lived. Your experience under the table indicates that.

  At nine o’clock on the night of the deadline, Father went to Redich and told him that he hoped within the hour to be able to produce the culprit. The hatred which ran between my father and Redich must have been unspeakable, but Redich would have welcomed that, was the sort of man to whom politics was hatred.

  And so when Father came to Redich promising results, Redich took improper joy in telling Father there was no need to drum up a fake culprit. The true informer had already turned herself in. She was locked in a storeroom. She was Danielle Kabbelski. She had given enough detail to condemn herself, and in that process she had of course condemned Galina.

  Remember Daskovich? He was a promising young civil administrator they put out in one of the villages in the hope that he would run it in a model manner, that that particular village would be a lighthouse for the whole province. And Daskovich was apparently gunned down on the road home after a conference in town. Well, old-timers who were at the trial tell me that that was one of the things Mother confessed to—setting Daskovich up for the partisans.

  Father spent most of her immediate and so-called trial in a daze. He was shamed, an old man told me, but he wanted to save her. He objected that Drusova, working in the mayor’s office, would have known about Daskovich’s itinerary without needing to be told by my mother.

  Standing before those gangsters, Mother expressed no enmity of Galina. Poor Galina had been blackmailed by the NKVD, she said. When Galina recruited her, it had been in a sisterly manner. Galina had said something like “I need a few names to keep Sedlov’s people happy. It would be best if they were men with real crimes in their past. Do it or I might be killed by the NKVD. Do it or the Soviets might be moved by frustration to unravel the whole business of forged identities, might come in here and take everyone.”

  Albert, who gave me the crucial news that Mother had not suicided, and all the old men who later confirmed the story, say—as if it is to be a consolation for me—that she died well. These bumpkin Belorussians who have all of them shot Jews and villagers in the neck yet play with the concept of honorable and dishonorable death! In any case, she made her contrition, signed a forged suicide note, and was hanged from the rafters—a degrading business, a woman hanging in front of men. They all tell me it was quick, but they would say that anyhow. According to their vision of what is proper, some say that Father and Mother embraced before the hanging, and others that he showed a proper reserve toward a traitor.

  Galina’s body was never found. One would not want to imagine her death. Mother had said at the trial that in a panic the evening before Galina had tried to strangle her. I can understand the poor bitch’s panic. She was no doubt carried out of the camp as you were and set upon in the woods behind the old forced-labor camp, then tormented and murdered. Colonel Nouges would be easily convinced she had gone missing. That tart was always clearing off to Stuttgart with her boyfriend.

  Immediately after the execution, Father was taken out of the camp to the latrine pits where Redich said you were hidden. They uncovered the one your abductors pointed to and found nothing. It was the one, however, since blankets could be seen down there, and the marks of your remarkable escape were visible on the edges of the pit. They followed your tracks and found you behind a pile of lumber, raving about that Uncle you always spoke of in your fits, the Uncle I always thought was an extension of Onkel Willi, someone who was not too busy with history-making to play a few stupidly wise games with children. You would of course always maintain that he had hauled you out of the pit, but poor little sod! You had hauled yourself out. The state of your fingernails showed that. You were treated for pneumonia and exposure, told that Mother had committed suicide, that the uncertainty of her life had become too much for her.

  And Father lost his camp leadership and its attendant privileges, and Tokina let herself waste away and turned her face to the wall during the following summer, and Albert was honorably discharged, and I went with him—yes, I even have Father’s signature on a form. Father had become a passive man and had lost faith in the whole business. I knew that if I went wherever he in
tended to go, it would be the end of me.

  I believe that Father emerged from this passivity once in the ensuing years, in 1955, when Redich fell from a train in Sydney. If you have ever wondered about this incident, it is now all explained. Most of the old-time Belorussians here in Paris take it for granted that Redich was pushed, and that he deserved to be. You were already in Australia, studying to become an Australian, when the whole factional thing came to its head in 1951. Abramtchik’s people had a lot of support from an American secret service organization called the Office of Policy Coordination. This organization was betting both sides of the factional fence, and decided to do what the Germans had done before them, to train both Abramtchik and Ostrowsky people at a parachute training school in West Germany with the intention of dropping them into Belorussia and the Ukraine. The Office of Policy Coordination would spend a fortune getting these people ready and would drop them behind the lines—that is how they saw it—and the next time they would lay eyes on them was when they saw film footage of their press conferences in Moscow where they would point to the Western equipment issued to them for their missions and would beg pardon of the Soviet People. This happened so much to Abramtchik’s people that he began to lose his hold on the Allies; and Ostrowsky, over in South River, New Jersey, was the man the Americans in particular came to trust.

  It turned out that both Ostrowsky and Abramtchik came to believe that the bipartisan blight on their efforts behind the Soviet lines was Redich. Redich had a friend, a spy named Kim Philby, who worked in the Office of Policy Coordination. Philby eventually had to flee to the East. Redich they sent to Australia on a fund-raising expedition. There he could meet the one man they were sure would not let him alight from a train unharmed.

  The old-timers here tell me that in those days the doors on trains in Sydney did not pneumatically shut. That did not matter, because Australians were innocents and had no ancient grievances against each other. In European cultures they have to be far more careful in such matters.