A Family Madness (15 page)

Dr. Kappeler spoke next. Said there was good reason in the Herr Kommissar's argument. But what about the partisans themselves? They thought so little of their fellow countrymen that they had planned to poison the water supply in Vilnius. If they wished to recruit a village that had thus far proved loyal, they killed Wehrmacht or SS men in the area just to invite retribution on the place.

All the more reason, said Ganz, not to play into their hands with excessive retaliations.

Kappeler said in emphatic scholarly way he didn't entirely agree. These tricks were amply described in the press and on the radio and the populace was warned not to be taken in by them. But have you seen some of these villages? Ganz protested. Only the priests are literate and possess a radio!

“I take it then,” said Kappeler, “that in the
Bezirk
of Staroviche you have pursued an active policy of engaging the assistance of the clergy at village level, as outlined in the December 1941 directive of the Political Section of the Ostministerium.”

Ganz now sighed too dramatically and called both on myself and on young Daskovich to comment on the role of the priests in maintaining social order in the villages. Daskovich was very happy with his relationship with the Orthodox priest in Krotinitsa, a pastor actively committed to the survival of his flock. The man was capable, said Daskovich, of drawing on an Ostministerium directive for a sermon text. He was a strong Belorussian nationalist, and regularly took the line with his flock that the hope of nationhood could only be fulfilled through cooperation with Christian Germany in an unremitting attack on Jewish Bolshevism.

My very point, said Ganz, is that hundreds of such right-thinking people had been slaughtered in retributive actions carried out by the German penal battalions, by the Latvian militia, by our corps of 20,000 anti-Bolshevik Cossacks, by the Kaminsky Brigade, which, while annihilating villages, wears the St. George Cross, red on white, the symbol of Belorussian nationalism. It is not the people who die who are a problem to state security. It is the proportion of survivors who see the White Russian nationalists and the Germans as suddenly less desirable than the Bolsheviks, who abandon the Cross of St. George for the Red Star. And for each one who makes that shift, units which could be more profitably engaged at the front have to be detailed for anti-terrorist action.

Ganz then called on us all therefore to show restraint and wisdom. Wants this policy of moderate severity and judicious but civilized force to operate within the limit of Ostministerium and Reich Security Central Office directives. He is grateful to Dr. Kappeler for coming over to Staroviche to attend our meeting and hopes that the Political Section will watch with interest the successes achieved by the Security Forces operating in the
Bezirk
of Staroviche under the twin policies of strength and moderation.

Cannot help but feel Ganz ill-starred. Behind him lies a divorce—his wife was Viennese—and a slightly tainted career—from 1937 till February 1940 he was
Kreisleiter
of Bohemia. He may have displayed there the same fulsomeness of speech so odious to servants of the state such as Dr. Kappeler. In any case Staroviche is something of a demotion.

His argument has some force, and might have an outside chance of being implemented if it were not for this evening's events. Young Daskovich ambushed and killed on the forest road back to Krotinitsa. Have just been out to the site, for all the good that does. A low stretch of road with slushy snow on it, that whorish snow which will turn to ice tonight and to mud tomorrow. The forest never looked more dangerous, not even in a child's nursery story where forests are always full of imps and deep threat. It's a squalid stretch of road to lose someone like Daskovich on, a man so young and educated and coherently nationalistic. Hauptsturmführer Bienecke likes to say the 42 percent of Belorussia controlled by partisans is all solid forest and so doesn't count. But when you're out there in a foul dusk beside D.'s corpse, that 42 percent becomes a very weighty figure.

Amazed at the vehemence of my wife's reaction to tonight's news. She barely knew Daskovich except as a peripheral guest, the young man from Kuzich's office who was brighter than Kuzich. Clearly D.'s death just another piece of bad news to go with all the other bad news, but this was the item which drove her over the limit. Wept pitiably and needed sedation, but would not go to sleep until I'd prayed with her—insistent on that, one decade of the Sorrowful Mysteries for the repose of D.'s soul, an Act of Contrition for ourselves, the enunciation in her case slurred by the dose of brandy and laudanum.

She rarely paints in the garden now, rarely goes out there with the children and the easels unless Ganz drags them all out. That is why I am glad Hirschmann, for all his faults, is still in the ghetto. Can't be denied he provides companionship for my besieged children.

20

Danielle's standby for the control room was Bernadette, a plain girl in her late twenties who went to the WEA with Danielle, worked in some state government department, and was saving to buy a spinster's unit in North Parramatta. Delaney knew these details from Stanton, who flirted with, disarmed, and teased Bernadette in a way which Delaney thought proclaimed too clearly “You're no threat. No one will raise a knife for you.” Bernadette was willing to be called in an emergency at any hour, and the blinding of Scott Kabbel with paint was an adequate emergency.

Danielle Kabbel arrived at Westmead Emergency almost as soon as the column of defenders from Golden Style. Delaney saw her appear in the lobby as Scott Kabbel was forced down yelping with fright and the pain of his seared eyes onto a gurney. Delaney himself sat crookedly in a seat in the waiting room, favoring his shoulder and wondering if he could play on Sunday. Past rows of empty chairs, Danielle ran to the gurney's side as it disappeared behind a curtain, lunged and made transitory contact with Scott's hand, and was satisfied, as if her touch and her scent were enough for her injured brother.

Likewise she said nothing to Kabbel, but came and stared into his eyes. “They don't know yet,” the Kabbel patriarch said simply. “He took photographs of the vandal which any superintendent of police will find hard to ignore.”

Stanton's doubting voice seemed sacrilegious cutting in. “They'll challenge them as evidence,” he said.

“Evidence,” said Kabbel—the voice sounded fierce but came out tremolo. “It's not for evidence he took these photographs. I have no hope in court in these mad days. I give the photographs to Golden Style, who send copies to the police. Who say to the barbarian, ‘Enough, Stevo!' I am not interested in transforming the dungheap into gold, dear Mr. Stanton. Only in moving it from one corner of the farmyard to another. I shall arrange an X ray for Terry.”

He announced it like a hospital functionary, but he did not yet move, instead planting a muscular kiss on the middle of Danielle's forehead. Delaney flinched.
Easy!
he nearly said, fearing that the shield of bone beneath the girl's forehead was thin as a membrane. As often as he'd envisaged putting his mouth to her brow he had never imagined such a pile-driver kiss.

“You understand,” Kabbel continued to his daughter, “they won't know anything until they have put dye in his eyes to tell the extent of the burns. They can't use anything strong, anything chemical, since it would react with the acids and alkalis in the paint.”

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.