A Family Madness (23 page)

Delaney's legs seemed to him to contract, he felt an electric touch at the back of the neck. He was far from home now, with this foreign woman from a weird clan. “He got you to go to Melbourne for a séance?”

“Not a séance. Not talking to spirits. Though in some ways yes. We all sat together, linked hand to hand, and the old lady made it real to us, the things that separated us from Rudi.”

“Did you hear voices?” asked Delaney in dread, breathing harshly himself now.

“It was more that we all felt the most terrible terror and then the greatest relief and safety. So it wasn't like a voice. It was like Rudi had predicted: a powerful hand against the small of the back.” She smiled as an apology. “That's the trouble with the Kabbels. None of us ever felt as secure, really secure, as we did that night.”

“If you felt secure as all that,” Delaney asked, the logic crackling at the back of his throat, “why did you end in Northmead?”

“I hadn't worked out what to do,” she explained. “Which way to jump. I
was
a good mother, Terry. Being called a bad one was the price for the other thing.”

“The other thing? The hand in the small of the back?”

She smiled up at him. “You're a very bright fellow, Delaney. I love you very much.”

Delaney felt the awful bleakness of that Melbourne séance, he could sense the fetid cold of some old Coburg terrace, smell the strangeness of the clothing, picture the old medium's creased lips.

“Why did he need a séance?” asked Delaney, remembering something he had heard from Kabbel on the night of the hubcaps. “I thought he could talk to this old uncle of his in Parramatta any time he chose to?”

“It's not his uncle strictly speaking. He goes and talks with an old man in Parramatta who reminds him of the old man who pulled him out of a hole in the ground once, one my grandfather's enemies put him in. And this old man—the one in Parramatta—Rudi only found him a few years back.”

“And do the lot of you sit on the floor and listen to this old fellow and do whatever he says?”

“Of course not. We can't speak Belorussian for a start.”

“Is he the one who suggested to Rudi blowing Stevo's hand off?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she told him, choosing to laugh. “We don't intrude between Rudi and the old man.”

“Does the old man talk about the bloody Wave, Danielle?”

“Everyone does, Terry. Even the afternoon papers.”

He considered where he could take Danielle, what Rugby League and pearl-diving port in far Queensland where she would be safe from calls to séances. Where she could live on a beach beyond the radius of Rudi's terrible Belorussian infancy.

32

F
ROM THE
J
OURNALS OF
S
TANISLAW
K
ABBELSKI
, C
HIEF OF
P
OLICE
, S
TAROVICHE
.
Dec. 2, 1943

Would not let them question the boy. To hell with Bienecke! What can he stand to learn from the miraculous survival of my son? Since he had urinated and was shivering, I wrapped Radek in a blanket and drove home with him. Behind us, Bienecke and Harner had the bodies of the assassins placarded and hung from lampposts.

Radek was popeyed and wore an excited half smile. You'd think he'd been given a present. “Shock,” Yuri told me with heavy wisdom. He reached his hand over into the back seat as if he would gladly offer it when needed.

Halfway home the boy began to babble like a sleepwalker, using bits of words, putting syllables and ideas together with their wrong partners. Shook him gently and at last he stopped. Then held him against me—he lay half across my lap. What he told me then astonished me somewhat. “The oldest one,” he said—you'd think he was telling me an exciting detail of an excursion—“looked under the table and said, ‘It's the Kabbelski brat.'”

I blinked and gave thanks the absolutely reliable Yuri was at the wheel and not some Bienecke planted spy.

Leader of the assassination team is believed to be Semyanov, major in the NKVD. Credible he might know the members of my family on sight, though to believe so makes me feel naked. Harder to understand his acquitting of Radek from the same sentence he had just imposed on Willi Ganz. Both sides in these brutal exchanges have not stopped before for children. Both sides have raised the stakes to include the very young, the very old, all women including and, by report, especially those bearing children. Semyanov therefore had every ideological reason to do to Radek what the SS have done to the children of villagers. That he didn't could be a temperamental thing, a pulse of compassion and therefore, in partisan and NKVD terms, a lapse.

Already concerned that whatever happened in Ganz's apartment, Bienecke might conclude Radek had had some form of exemption, and would ferret away at that idea. We have already done enough for the man without feeding him fancies as well. So hastily put together a compact with Radek in the back of the car that we would not tell anyone about Semyanov's words, that it was to be a secret like Hirschmann's medal but better kept.

Willi Ganz buried quickly. Disgraceful funeral—all the Belorussian officials but no one from Minsk or Kaunas, no one from General von Gottberg's office and only a minor secretary from Dr. Kappeler's Political Section. Messages of condolence from von Gottberg to the people of Staroviche on the loss of their beloved Kommissar were read by priest during sermon of Requiem Mass, likewise messages from the Ostministerium. But everyone supposedly too busy with current emergencies—hardly more intense than the emergencies of the past six months—to come to Staroviche and say a Pater Noster for poor sybaritic Ganz or to throw a clod of Belorussian earth into his grave. Fool of a cleric preached on Jeremiah: “Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings.” He predicted the Soviets would be smitten specifically for this death, which is a little unworldly of him if he really believes so. I'm sure Willi Ganz, at least in his better days, would have preferred something a little less vengeful and grim. Maybe something about many mansions and seraphim and cherubim, a heaven of sweet Italianate limbs and good food.

Miss Tokina, the children's tutor, insisted on attending with Danielle, and but for them would have been no tears at Ganz's grave. Danielle has begun to speak as if Ganz had offered his life for Radek's and it would be too cruel to disabuse her. Bienecke stayed away, not out of sensitivity, but from contempt, and sent his deputy Harner. Major Gnauck, a young one-armed officer—we get lots of physically or mentally maimed garrison commanders here—newly appointed to command the Staroviche garrison, told me Willi Ganz's ancient father and former wife petitioned von Gottberg for the return of their son/spouse's corpse to Germany but that request was denied on “war effort” grounds.

Only when, having briefly celebrated my son's deliverance, I was traveling to Minsk in a convoy which included old Oberst Lustbader's battalion—they going into transit camp for eventual posting to the Front, Staroviche receiving Gnauck's even more geriatric garrison in their place—only then had time to consider particular implications of Semyanov's (it
was
Semyanov) words: “It's the Kabbelski brat, kid.” One implication that my family has some kind of immunity, that I am somehow understood by partisans, that they see me as a moderate influence. They did not however see the even more moderate Ganz in such a light. Other possibility that occurs is that they want to save me for show trial if Staroviche falls to Soviets. They are saving all their cruelty, including that which would usually be directed against Radek, till then. They might intend the same for Ostrowsky and other of his lieutenants. They should know we are professional exiles, will go into exile again, and when the Soviets fall to the West return again, carrying—it can confidently be expected—guarantees of Belorussian sovereignty. So reprieve of Radek, and what Semyanov said, goes largely unexplained.

Bienecke, though, would love to know all this, would play with the suspicion I am somehow in communication with
partizanskie kraya
, the partisan machine. Wouldn't seriously believe the idea but would use it as a lever. In even more desperate days than these, could use it as pretext for my assassination.

33

It was nearly noon and not all the mists had risen out of the groins of earth in which Aldo Terracetti grew his tomatoes. Spiked with wooden stakes, the Terracetti land ran at a small cant down toward a creek called Lowes Creek, and under all this vapor looked something like Delaney's mental image of rustic Italy. Delaney himself stood on a cemented embankment outside Aldo's poolroom and unofficial winery and sipped a Resch's Pilsener, eschewing the Terracetti grappa. Aldo, his brother Eduardo, and his son Joe drank beyond the glass doors behind Delaney. His hands were numb, except for the middle finger of his right hand, which he had corked against the spine of a Saint George center the day before. It sang like a stone bruise in the cold air. As well a shoulder ached and the muscles of his lower abdomen—subject to the various strains of his true profession, his new fear of the Kabbels, his true and foredoomed marriage to Danielle, his unterminated and cruel marriage to Gina—tolled with pain.

Yesterday's game had been played on Saint George's hard ground in front of a fanatic crowd. He seemed to himself to spend all the time tackling, preoccupied with the deceptive thighs and upper legs of their young lock, the seventeen-year-old the club heavies said would play for Australia before he was twenty. The kid had all the confidence of someone who doesn't know yet that the game was a furnace, that it was fueled on unrefined talent, and few gave a damn if unrefined talent was consumed in the flames.

According to the administration of the game, Saturdays were reserved for the second most important game of the round. It was a rule of thumb hard to believe in when Penrith first grade had lost the last five on the trot. That statistic detracted from the glory of Delaney's team, which had won the last seven, and through grueling defense and a small margin of very ordinary brilliance made it eight in a row against the Saints. Delaney had not even bothered to write the game up in his diary. He supposed he never would. Love of Danielle had made the game petty and brutish to the happiest man in Australia.

Gina was inside like the rest of the family. Upstairs where women were loading the tables with ham and salads, she stole glances at her eternally wed aunts, the skeletal one Uncle Eduardo had married, for example, and wondered how they had managed it, why their marriages were like institutions—the Stock Exchange, the Vatican—and why the gates of hell had not prevailed against them. It was cruel to watch her with a smile on her face, rushing about with plates and forks, pretending to be one of them, hoping to pick up the tricks they had not yet confessed to. To Delaney Gina possessed the horrifying look of a woman already widowed. “Hey,” he heard someone call from a point directly above where he was standing. He looked up to the sundeck upstairs. Gina's sister-in-law Susie was standing there blowing smoke into the cold air. “The Italians won't let me smoke inside,” she told him. “Mama Terracetti says it buggers the prosciutto. Come up and say g'day to your old sister-in-law.”

He couldn't say no.

Susie was what Delaney's mother called “well-groomed.” She was proud of her husband's career (state sales manager, greeting cards), proud of the two sullen and intelligent children she had borne. She lived in North Rocks in a good street. In company she made indirect references, with lots of eyebrow-raising, shaking of the head, and small innocent moans, to the fact that Joe Terracetti was endowed like a drafthorse and drove her to the craziest roaring peaks. She represented therefore all the news, all the certainty Delaney least wished to hear this Sunday of the Terracettis' wedding anniversary.

“How's the football?” she asked.

“Like the Vietnam War. We're losing even though we're winning.”

“First grade next year?”

“If they don't bring in a banana-bender or a pom. They probably will, you know. They only pay lip service to the local blokes.”

“Most important question of all, what's wrong with Gina? And with you, if it comes to that?”

He couldn't say anything. He couldn't manage even a lie like “Teething troubles.”

“Listen, Terry,” said Susie, “you know I'm a woman of healthy desires. By the same token I don't go around talking in a pornographic way; I've got no interest in that. But what I'm going to say I said to the husband of a friend of mine when their marriage looked absolutely
finito
. It's this. The clitoris is a rudimentary penis. All right? That should tell you what a woman needs. All right? Forgive me if I offend you by being direct. But it's probably something the Marist Brothers didn't tell you.”

Delaney began to laugh, not because she was funny; her seriousness was worth respecting. He laughed with a sort of longing for the innocence Susie had, the idea that a willing hand properly placed could heal. Clutching the wrought-iron railing, he rocked and wept, and then with horror saw Gina staring at him from beyond the glass of the living room, an awesome grievance in her face. It was clear when she slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the veranda that she took his laughter as an insult large enough to justify what she had not intended to do at her parents' anniversary—parade her injury in front of frowning relatives, weep openly, yell reproaches. Her shoulders were straight and her hands gathered into fists. “You put me to shame in front of my parents,” she said.

“Oh bugger!” said Susie. “Do you want me to leave you to it?”

Gina closed her eyes. Her long lips were set in a line of exquisite sorrow. It was terrible to face her dignity. He was awed to discover that the happiness of a thoroughbred like her could depend on a third-grade five-eighth and security man.