A Family Madness (20 page)

This was worse, pity from a recent shirttail crackler, a trouserless goon. Delaney hissed at him—stuff about Stanton having enough disasters of his own without worrying about Delaney's. This is the end of all friendship, Delaney thought.

In the morning, signing off his .38, he asked Danielle to follow him to the car. “Does your father know?” he asked. She stood blinking in the sunlight. He had never seen her before with the sun in her eyes. It was one of those sharp, sunny winter mornings.
The world's best winter!
said promoters of Sydney, not always exactly, since it could rain like a hose.

“Does your father know?” he repeated. And Warwick? Who had listened calmly to the erotic chat of the chicken king.

“He knows I make my own decisions,” she said. She bravely raised her jawline to the sun. He would long remember both the claim and the gesture. She said, smiling beneath her lowered eyes, “You never think other people are catching on. But they do.”

“We ought to get out of the house. Out of your room. We ought to go somewhere else.”

“Where would that be?” she asked.

“I'll look around.” It was impossible to see himself and above all Danielle booking into some motel. The Travelodge? The Pasadena? The Rio Bravo? (Here in the west of Sydney motels seemed to be named after Clint Eastwood movies.) It was impossible to see
this
pair of lovers disconnecting the alarms at Dyson Engineering and climbing through a window to the mean comfort of an old sofa and a two-bar radiator.

“What I turn up with will be all right with you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She considered her hands and smiled again. “Yes. Within limits.”

28

It was after midnight, in the meat of Delaney's shift. Warwick found him in front of the Datsun dealership in Blacktown. “Quick, Terry,” he said. “Leave your car, I'll drive you back.”

Delaney asked him why. But he could not complain that his routine was being broken. It had been broken often enough since he became Danielle's lover and sole desire.

“Something you'll be interested in,” said Warwick. “Promise you that.”

Is this the family intervention? Delaney wondered. I'm driven to a paddock behind Rooty Hill and shot in the head with cold Warwick's Magnum. All done with that same smoothness you saw when he switched over to earphones on the scanner. Getting into the car beside Warwick, he placed his hand, for the first time in his security career, on his .38, stretching against the handle of the thing as if it were a walking stick.

“I thought you should see this,” said Warwick, driving off. “Since Scott's still got his problem.” Scott had gone to a little shack the family owned out beyond Lithgow to let the burns heal. Scott, Kabbel had said, loved the bush. In the meantime, Warwick seemed to be arguing, Delaney was the substitute Scott.

Warwick turned the car back down Main Street toward Seven Hills. Delaney had to be careful what questions he asked. He did not want to provoke any reference to Danielle. He didn't want to hear what Warwick thought of the affair, whether it amused or outraged him.

“Come on,” said Delaney in the end, an ordinary formula but painfully chosen, “tell a man where in the hell we're going, eh?”

Warwick reached between them and switched on a shortwave under the instrument panel. The bell-clear voice of a taxi dispatcher filled the car. “Lalor Park to Ryde,” it said. “Marsden Hospital to Girraween. Blacktown Tenpin to Merrylands.” Warwick switched the volume down and smiled modestly at Delaney. A prince of technology. “Our mate Mr. Stevens has just called a cab from Wentworthville Leagues Club.”

“Oh yeah?” said Delaney, liking less than ever all this lifting of sound waves Warwick was so keen on, this electronic thievery. “We're five minutes from Stevo the vandal's place in Pretoria Road,” Warwick told him. “We'll be there long before him.”

“No,” Delaney yelled. “No way. I'm not here for any of that.”

Warwick kept on in a level clinical way. “You were injured, after all. Getting pictures which some clown of a boozing mate of Stevo's loses down the back of a filing cabinet. I mean, Delaney, we can go round pretending we're saving society by shaking hands with doorknobs and shining torches at windows. We don't make a dent on the core of things, you know, the protected species.”

Delaney writhed in his seat. “Jesus, we've got protected judges and casino owners, and bookmakers and politicians shoveling smack straight into the veins of sixteen-year-olds in King's Cross, and you want to bring the axe down on poor bloody Stevo. I don't care enough about him. I won't touch him. I won't let you touch him. I mean it, Warwick. Bloody hell!”

Warwick clucked at Delaney's extravagance. “Neither of us'll touch him. How's that for a promise.”

Delaney hauled himself across the vinyl seat closer to Warwick, inspecting his face. A handsome, studious face. It broke into laughter. “Honest, Terry,” said Warwick.

The houses of Pretoria Street sat low among the telegraph poles.
I am the happiest man in Australia, berserkly in love as I have always wanted to be since old Aubin brought the print into class. I have found the woman in the pavilion surrounded by lions and unicorns, kangaroos and emus. The woman at the middle of things
.

Yet the world had never looked meaner or more a cause for shooting yourself than it did in Pretoria Road after midnight. At the heart of each bungalow a love which had soured and flaked together with the first hopeful nuptial coat of paint, which had spawned large punks whose high-axled and spray-painted wrecks were parked everywhere on pavement and lawns. A street of no manners, no grace, no hope. The street where you'd expect to find Stevo living. All his connections and barbarisms and old mates hadn't brought him further than this. You just had to look at the place to know that Stevo had brought his own vengeance on himself.

Warwick parked close in to the pavement by a corner house and beside some kid's scarlet Torana. “See the place down there?” he asked Delaney. “Open carport, low brick fence. That's Stevo's castle. His wife's a diabetic and on holiday in Queensland. Stevo celebrates by visiting all the licensed clubs. He'd like to find a woman to bring back with him in the cab, but they still haven't made them that low.”

Delaney said, “If you try to run the poor loveless old bugger down I'll get in your way.” He grasped the parking brake between the bucket seat and jerked it on two extra notches.

“Anyone would think,” said Warwick, “Stevo was a relative of the Delaneys.”

And in a way he was. Stevo was a man Delaney had till recently thought he could never become. But now that Delaney was the happiest man in Australia any disaster could overtake him.

“Just so you're clear on that,” said Delaney.

“How much in match fees did he cost you?”

“Not a cent. The coach cursed me last Sunday, but even a champion's entitled to one bad game.”

“It might all come against you later,” murmured Warwick.

They saw a taxi then, edging along Pretoria Road from the other direction, the driver looking for letterbox numbers with probably damn-all help from a drowsy Stevo. The cab found the place and braked. Stevo took an age to emerge. Watching Warwick keenly for any mad movement, Delaney pictured Stevo grunting and farting and trying to find his money. By the light of a streetlamp Delaney saw him open the door—the front-seat door, Stevo willing to be the cab-driver's mate all the way home from Wentworthville Leagues. Stevo stood by the driver's window for a time, chatting, settling on or arguing about a tip. Through all this Delaney went on taking readings on Warwick's face. It remained composed, empty of any berserk intention.

Stevo went to his gate, leaned on it, swung it. It exploded with a small neat phosphorus flash about the size of a bowling ball and a noise adequate to turn sleeping neighbors over but, in a street of bombs and hot rods, not to wake them. Stevo stood under the streetlamp holding his right hand up by the wrist. It streamed blood. Even at that distance Delaney surmised that segments of Stevo's fingers were gone. Stevo flopped onto his hip but continued to hold and examine his hand. The cabdriver ran to him.

“There you are,” said Warwick. More or less in the shadow of the scarlet Torana, he backed his car slowly around the corner, made a casual turn, and drove away, not however putting on his headlights until he had rounded a further corner by a high school.

“God almighty!” said Delaney, finding his voice.

“Well,” said Warwick, beginning to breathe more loudly, “he blinded Scott. In older societies he would have been blinded himself. I mean, Delaney, there's not enough obvious retribution these days. That's what drives people mad and makes everyone sick. I'm not going to be made sick.”

Delaney yelled at him. His fury though was partly aimed at himself, for losing his way in a foreign tribe who booby-trapped front gates. “You stupid prick! Your brother's burns will heal. You going round to give Stevo back his fingers then?”

“Come on, Delaney! You're upset because a no-hoper like Stevo lost his aerosol finger?” He laughed. He knew exactly that it was a lack of bearings that worried Delaney.

“How did you learn to do that sort of thing?”

“Survivalist manuals from the States.”

“Survivalist?” Delaney asked, feeling nausea, his stomach, heart, lungs, all those parts they called in the Bible “the reins,” blazing and churning, and the delicious and terrible hook of Danielle in his gills. “Surviving what?”

“The Wave. The tsunami. Everyone knows. There'll be one in the end. Nothing surer.”

“A wave? How do you know there'll be a wave? Are you a scientist?”

“I use the term as a figure of speech,” murmured Warwick, pausing at the lights on the Great Western Highway and watching the semitrailers roar by, laden with beer and sheet metal for Bourke or Broken Hill, drivers intent on death or a bonus. “There'll certainly be an end to all this madness.”

29

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

My father found it hard to find an appropriate substitute for Herr Hirschmann, since the whole population seemed to be swept up into war efforts of one kind or another. He located at last a seventy-year-old woman, living in retirement in a house in Pushkina Street, who had graduated in law and letters in Cracow in the days of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, whose empire then controlled that city. She must have been a prodigy in her day, even to the progressive Austrians, and she had taught most of her life in Warsaw and Vienna. Staroviche was the town of her ancestors to which she had retired. My father would sometimes say of her after a drink, “Never retire anywhere near the Warsaw–Minsk–Smolensk highway. There are always Goths and Vandals marching up or down it.” But the advice came too late. Her name anyway was Miss Tokina; she had a serene face and an instinct for controlling Genia as if the age difference between them were only a few years instead of over half a century. She got Genia reading the German classics—turning my sister's inchoate adolescent energies onto Heine and Goethe.

Miss Tokina however did not come until just before the final scene in Onkel Willi's life. Because of the events of Kommissar Ganz's fall, I would for most of the period of Miss Tokina's tuition in the house therefore be in a privileged position, like that of a recuperating survivor of a shipwreck or of an African hunter who has emerged wraithlike from the tyranny of a swamp fever caught on safari. My Belorussian education would by then be virtually at an end. I could pretend nausea or a headache and my mother would exempt me from Miss Tokina's sessions. I believe that my frequent absence from her classes bound Tokina and Genia closer and that her ultimate death of malnutrition and pneumonia in the Michelstadt Displaced Persons Camp in 1946 would help drive Genia away from the family and into the arms of Sergeant Pointeaux. But to mention Miss Tokina's death and Sergeant Pointeaux's venality is to take the family history ahead by years and not by days. I return therefore to May 1943, when the great news had just been telephoned to my father in the middle of the night by my godfather Ostrowsky himself that a Belorussian Republican Congress would hold preliminary meetings before Christmas in the Minsk Opera House.

This information transfigured the household. I would hear my mother sing in the mornings, and there were a few days when she began to sketch with charcoals even though it was that point of time when the year seemed darkest, between the last of the rain and the first of the snow. My father's vision of the world improved, and I remember a suppertime when he uttered the peculiarly rosy view favored by most of the visitors to our house—the Germans and their allies would hold indefinitely their shortened line from the Leningrad front through Vitebsk and along the lower swamplands of the Pripet. Give or take a mile or two, the Russians had stalled along the borders of godly Bela Rus, and this seemed to my mother like an answer to prayer. The Russians spoke grandly of their First, Second, and Third White Russian fronts, but Bela Rus remained intact. It was said at our table by many a Belorussian official and even by the colonel of our garrison, Oberst Lustbader, who understood military affairs, that “the antiquated bludgeon of the Red Army has now outrun its logistical possibilities.” It was a formula that seemed to bring great satisfaction to everyone at the Christmas party my father held early that year, since he had to leave for Minsk to confer with the great Ostrowsky and with General von Gottberg.

So there would be a stalemate in the East, a negotiated peace in the West, one of the codicils of that peace being America's, Great Britain's, everyone's recognition of the independence of a Belorussian Republic under the presidency of my Lincoln-like godfather Ostrowsky. Finally there would be a devotion of all the world's resources to the destruction of Russia, and then a thousand years of peace and sanity.