A Family Madness (29 page)

Magic day, best for weeks. Gina there. Life's honest pleasures
.

41

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

For some reason our stay at the widow Frau. Zusters's house in a tree-lined residential street running off Kaiserin Augusta Allee in Berlin seems more remote than my remoter early childhood. I do not remember it as I remember the holiday at Puck instigated by my godfather Ostrowsky, or the Ganz picnic in the Brudezh forest. Frau Zusters was kind in a dazed remote way that suited my state of soul and made me think of her as ancient, even though I now realize she was no more than forty-five years. Her husband had been an engineering contractor working with the Wehrmacht in the oil fields of Romania and had sadly been killed in a daylight raid by the Americans. I realize it was her widowhood that gave her her agelessness and put anxious tucks in the flesh of her face. My father worked assisting Ostrowsky in offices provided by the Germans in Alexanderplatz, somewhere over to the east of the city, a place I would never visit. I heard him complain to my mother, “I'm a damn housing and supply officer. Mrs. Stankievich came to me to complain she couldn't get ham! No one's happy with their apartments, they think they're back in Minsk. I have to say, ‘Look around you! Is this a city with a housing glut?' They're behaving so badly. I suppose it's shock.”

They say that Dr. Goebbels in the late summer of 1944 sent an album of air-raid-damage photographs to Hitler, but that Martin Bormann sent them back to Goebbels with a note reading, “The Führer has no time to occupy himself with irrelevancies of this nature.” I suppose I suffered from the same sort of detachment. I imagine myself as a small blond boy with a Slavic face sitting composedly in Frau Zusters's cellar while the Allies pounded away at the Chancellery, the Reichstag, the War Ministry in Bendlerstrasse—in fact at the fabric of everything. This child reads and even sleeps through the terrible noise, which seems to occupy a great part of the day and a crucial segment of the night. He spends most of his waking time looking through Herr Zusters's stamp collections—the widow lets him take them with him into the cellar. He wishes he could have known Herr Zusters, who must have been a character. Between the wars Zusters worked and collected stamps wherever there were oil fields—East and West Africa, the Persian Gulf, Mexico, Borneo, Texas. In his photographs he wore long thin mustaches and crooked ladykiller smiles. He had married a houseproud, housebound girl, perhaps so that he knew there was an ordered home in Charlottenburg waiting for him when he needed it. Now he was another dead cowboy, like Onkel Willi.

I had my nightmares during the silences, the pauses in the bombing, when in the small street it was almost as quiet as a suburb in time of peace. My mother associated the dreams with the air raids and with my Belorussian experiences. She was wrong about the air raids, right about the other. They were not nightmares however to do with being under Oberführer Ganz's table, but rather dreams of being riveted high in the corner while my father bent among the shambles to extract
that
child from his place beneath the cornered tablecloth.

My mother would discuss my bad dreams, the excessively bad dreams, the ones involving trembling of the limbs and loss of bladder control, with Frau Zusters. I was aware they were a comfort to each other, the two women, as, to quote Frau Zusters's homely but exact image, the world fell apart like a boiled onion. But it did not occur to me how frightened they were, how frightened Genia and Miss Tokina her tutor might be. The state of the city shocked the Kabbelski women. The great official buildings all around Tiergarten were in ruins. In residential streets gray-faced men and women in what had once been good summer clothes pushed wheelbarrows loaded with broken furniture. Everywhere very young or very antique firemen were digging for the dead, or for those who might be happier dead, the trapped. My mother had known things were bad in the East, that the Russians were racing to the San and the Bug, but she had not expected such visible chaos at the heart.

Most of the bombed houses in the district were further to the east, Frau Zusters had noticed. She used the term “further to the east” as if she were referring to Poland instead of to collapsed houses only a block or two away, toward Moabit. Frau Zusters proposed that the survival of her house may have been due to its being only half a kilometer from the Charlottenburg Palace. “They are not total barbarians, you know,” she would tell my mother. This axiom of Frau Zusters's seemed to give the women no help once a raid began and they were forced to sit in the cellar, sometimes caressing, sometimes catatonically drawn back from each other. Yet though it may sound foolish, and in spite of the 10,000-kilo bombs the Allies would sometimes drop on the city, trying to crack the crucial cellar—the serpent's egg of a bunker where Hitler sat—there was no bomb capable of shaking the composure of
that
little boy, of the Kabbelski brat.

Except therefore for the nightmares and my envy of Bernhardt Kuzich, whose father had allowed him to be conscripted as an antiaircraft gunner to a battery in the Grunewald, I was totally free of any destructive emotions, and looked forgivingly at the terror of the four women (my father only rarely there) with whom I was locked up every day.

We had special ration cards provided by the SS and most of our food was obtained by my father at canteens and stores around Alexanderplatz and brought home in the crowded limousine reserved for ministers of the Belorussian government in exile. One day however, just for morale reasons, we all went out to stand in line for food with Frau Zusters, who had a normal ration card, as did Miss Tokina. All rations, theirs and ours, were then democratically pooled. My mother, as much as she appreciated the better quality meat and preserves my father brought home, had told Frau Zusters that she missed the therapy of shopping. The shopping line, she said with an apologetic laugh, was the only way you could discover that you really
were
better off than others.

This day, a sharp morning in the autumn of 1944, Genia and I sat on a park wall opposite a grocer's while the women gratefully immersed themselves in the sisterhood of the food line, exchanging histories, particularly the histories of their menfolk. Genia and I noticed a squad of young men wearing some indefinite security uniform turn up in a Volkswagen at the door of a dental surgery two doors from the grocery. They rang the bell and, when the door was answered by an elderly man, pushed past him and into the building. They returned to the street quickly, dragging a young man in a surgical coat, the dentist, who hobbled unevenly into the center of the street. One of the young gang addressed the shopping line in an educated voice, “This man has been spreading defeatism to his patients. You all know how it is, ladies. First he numbs their mouths and makes them open to full stretch. Then he breathes his poison into them.”

The young men then began to beat him, cracking him over either ear with truncheons, driving the blunt end of their sticks into his midriff. He fell crookedly, and with a metallic noise, to the pavement. Genia left her perch beside me and ran into the street screaming at the young men in Belorussian, curses she had never learned at home. I remember that I focused at once on my mother over the road in the shopping line, saw her excusable instant of hesitation before she ran into the street and grabbed the spitting Genia around the upper body, begging pardon in accented German, saying, “This poor child has had awful experiences in the East.” She dragged her back to the fence beside me, though I confess I did not want to be associated with the embarrassment. I understood perfectly why my mother had taken this direction, hauling Genia toward the park instead of into the line. She was trying to emphasize that Genia was a mere child, beneath the age of standing in line for essentials. That was embarrassing too; I knew the young squad would see right through it.

But they paid me little attention. Before they crawled back into their car, they pulled up the dentist's left trouser leg to show an artificial lower leg and a strange metal knee. They unstrapped the brace which attached the apparatus to the dentist's body, lifted it and dropped it clanking across the man's stomach.

Genia was weeping. “I've had enough. I'm going to live in Paris,” she told my mother and Frau Zusters. The entire line of women were looking at her, more than they were looking at the defeatist dentist. The sight of him raised the obvious question of who was going to restrap his leg and get him off the street? Whereas you could exercise a responsibility-free interest in that foreign girl over there.

“You're not going home?” my mother asked placidly.

“I'm going to live in Paris,” yelled Genia, “and read all the time.” Some of the women in the line laughed.

42

Deecock, the first-grade five-eighth, after coming off with nausea before halftime, was diagnosed as having a mild case of glandular fever. Late the following night the club secretary announced to the press—who were interested because the club had won four of the six they needed to achieve the semifinal berth, and who were throwing around such imagery as “Cinderella team”—that they were going to run young Terry Delaney at five-eighth next Sunday. It was a reward, Delaney could not help believing, not for virtue but for returning to the life cut out for him. His elevation seemed to put the Kabbels at a distance, and served as a distraction from the ache for Danielle. It was a victory for his game over the games of the likes of Warwick.

There were two journalists and three photographers at the loading dock of Pioneer when he got there the next morning. “Listen,” Greg told him, “Don't say you work here. Tell them you're helping me out. I don't want your mother carrying on because you're called a truck driver in the newspapers.”

“What does she want me called? A computer expert?”

“I suppose she wouldn't object to that. This could be the start of good things for you. Don't let the world think you're some sort of roustabout!”

The photographers however wanted to get him loading frozen dinners into the back of the truck. It was a standard device to interview newly promoted players at their workplace, toting barrels, carrying bricks, at the controls of a bulldozer.

Smiling on the tailboard, he could see Greg staring wanly from his glass booth, beyond a line of other delivery men whistling and yelling. “Show a bit of leg, Terry!”

Pioneer gave him Friday off, since Alan Beamish, the first-grade coach, wanted the team to spend the day together looking at video replays of Manly's last six games. Manly's fullback was poor under pressure, and both their second-rowers played too wide, like centers, for most of the games. Their game plan was for the heavy men to take it up the middle and soften the defense, and then spread it wide and play merry hell. Above all their five-eighth, the oldtimer Warren Thompson, wasn't to be given room to distribute the ball. Terry was to be given a private video showing of the way Thompson moved, backed up, and got away placement kicks. It had all been edited for him by one of the committee-men. The videos ran silently, no movie-projector clicking or ratcheting to distract the players from the essence of the enemy's game. The tension and glamour of first-grade football!

What Delaney learned, of course, was no more than he already knew, no more than Alan Beamish said to him late on Friday night. “On his bad days he gets swamped by the defense. But on his good ones he's slippery as a pig in grease and he reads the play as if it was the bloody stock exchange report.”

It was one of Thompson's good days. Not at first. For the first ten minutes Delaney was relentlessly on him, smothering tackles under which the old international went down without struggling. It was as the videos had shown, though. Their big fast men probed up the middle to soften the defense and found it fragile. Then they picked up speed and threw high looping passes to the centers. Delaney could not believe the mysterious submissiveness of his own forwards—it reminded him of all the stories of rigged games, of players running dead. In reality, he was sure, it was a sudden loss of soul, and leading the moral decline was the vaunted Yorkshireman Tancred. After Manly's first try Delaney raged around the ingoal listening to Tony Ellis, the captain, haranguing his failed pack. He wanted to yell, Don't pick today to run lame! But he knew that wouldn't be tolerated. Their slackness could ruin him just the same. When short of breath and trying to swamp Thompson, he had the lightheaded certainty that that incompetent Penrith pack could debase the game for him and raise the option of the Kabbels again. “Fucking
tackle!
” he screamed at a prop who had once played for New South Wales, while a Manly second-rower broke two more tackles and scored near the posts.

When Delaney himself put up a little kick and regathered among the tired Manly forwards and danced over in the corner, the commentators said—so Gina would later tell him—it was a reward for not giving up all day. He should have been delighted, would have been a year ago. All that entered his mind was: Small rewards. There wasn't enough nourishment in them.

They played him one more time in Firsts, a successful game against Cronulla in which he played adequately but without ridding himself of that malignant doubt placed in him by his own pack, six forwards lacking speed and heart and grandeur. Then Deecock recovered from his mild bout of fever and Delaney was returned to reserves. It was a matter of course, involving no culpability on Delaney's part. Greg Delaney seemed to suspect, though, that his son had been given two chances to play dazzlers and had decided instead just to play well. Delaney himself felt he had been taken to the heart of things and had found it hollow. He made up for it in reserve grade with a new unremitting toughness and a high tackle count, which delighted the reserve-grade coach.