A Family Madness (31 page)

People would drag their desperate limbs up this road only to have them blown off by Warwick. They talked in those terms, bearded and well-built young men Delaney saw on the satellite news, infecting the world with their cool blue-eyed panic. They had no doubt that once the Wave struck or the sun fell they would have to defend their chosen acre against those other members of the race who stumbled up to their fence. They couldn't wait. You needed a wealth of landmines, plastique, shotgun pellets, because the darkness—or so they boasted—would last an age.

Delaney began to call but knew there was no one there. His voice went racing away into that gorge beyond the house, into that unownable country on which the contracts had not yet been signed.

45

He met Doig in the new coffee shop opened in Main Street that winter by two women rumored to be lesbians and so, in Penrith terms, fantastic creatures. Doig, boyish in his white shirt with the crosses on its collar, seemed to enjoy a rapport with them he lacked with many of his older parishioners. “Their carrot cake is a triumph,” he confided to Delaney, and Delaney dutifully ordered some.

After a handsome girl in overalls and head scarf had served them, Delaney tried to explain that Doig was the only neutral party he could talk to. He rushed to say he did not seek confession, or what they called these days “the rite of reconciliation.”

Doig put a firm hand on Delaney's elbow and spoke urgently through the residue of crumbs which had half glued his mouth up. “Wherever two friends talk to each other,” he said, “that is a rite of reconciliation.”

It was September, and what Danielle called “his game” was over. Delaney had played in the semifinals—again it was only the third-graders who carried the honor of Penrith to the Cricket Ground. There were rumors that Alan Beamish, the first-grade coach, would be sacrificed in the manner of unproductive generals in armies and football teams, would be replaced by an old international from Queensland, and would take into exile in his hometown, Cobar, the blame for the failure of all strategies. He would also take with him a regard for Terry Delaney. After Deecock's fumbling season, a new coach would probably make it one of the conditions of his contract that Terry be let go, and being unfamiliar with the reserves, would probably have some Queenslander in mind as a replacement.

This scale of development would have once put Delaney into a fever. Now it seemed a minor matter. What was significant was that the Kabbels had vanished from the earth. On weekends he tried to trace them at the pub at Newnes, but they were not in residence in their sandstone canyon. Yes, said all the drinkers, contracts had been signed, settlement had taken place. Did any of them know if the Kabbels had used a local attorney to handle the purchase for them? A lawyer from Lithgow say? No, none of them knew that.

It was clear to Delaney that the place in the wilderness was reserved only for
after
the catastrophe. So, where were they dug in now? He called information for Sydney and Penrith every day in the hope a telephone had been connected. Now and then he would call a string of county councils. Waiting for the Wave, the Kabbels would need electricity. He would pretend to be a clerk in a rental company. As he told the story, one R. Kabbel had applied for a rental agreement on a refrigerator and he wanted to know if R. Kabbel paid his electricity account punctually. With some councils it worked, but there were no Kabbels, no Uncles, not under any initials. No Kabbels at all. No Kabbels switching lights on anywhere.

Delaney explained all this to Doig. His coffee grew cold as Delaney stated what had to be done. He had to leave Gina. Even if the Kabbels had disappeared forever—and he knew they hadn't—the claim of Danielle and the baby made Gina's life awful, absolutely bloody degrading.

“Claim?” asked Doig. “What sort of claim?”

“To be rescued,” said Delaney. “You know. From the other Kabbels.” The urgency claimed him once more, making acid in his stomach as he spoke. “Rudi Kabbel believes there'll be something—a Wave or a flood or some damn thing—which will finish off the known world. Then the Kabbels will be king. He'll breed—or the brothers will breed—from his own daughter. The idea of that sort of thing is in the bugger's head already. Where does that put my child, Andrew? Eh? Tell me that.”

Doig asked the usual questions. If the Kabbels thought like that, was he sure the child was his?

“It's certainly mine,” he said.

“Why
certainly?
” asked Doig. “From what you say …”

Delaney felt he could not convey his instincts about Danielle, not to a priest or even to a swinging heretic like Doig.

“Gina can live on if the marriage finishes. It's the other two who don't have a future.”

Doig said, “Are you telling me you're going to give up a marriage so that you can dedicate yourself to a search for people who might have gone anywhere—Tasmania, New Zealand? They're both good places to await the end of the world in.”

“No. The Kabbels are still here. They've bought land on the other side of the mountains. For when it happens, you know. And it won't happen. So what will Rudi do then?”

Doig groaned. It struck Delaney for the first time that Doig might be a man of compassion and not just a fashionable priest in an unfashionable parish. “You may have to leave this girl and her child to destiny, Terry. You have a marriage contract, and
that
is binding. Whereas your responsibility to the girl is vague.”

“No,” Delaney said. “Sorry. It's the other way around. For Christ's sake, it's the
kid
, don't you see? I can't let it be born into that lunatic's family.”

“What if Gina had a child?” Doig seemed for a second pleased with himself for coming up with this new and unsettling idea. “Yours? What would that do to your plans?”

Delaney shook his head. It was obvious Doig believed a crucial blow had been landed.

“Pardon me if I speak like an old-fashioned priest,” he said. He didn't want to, was fearful Delaney would storm out. In fact Delaney was excited that at last Doig might be about to do his professional duty, bring down on him a condemnation he could react to, use as a springboard. “Look,” said Doig, “I blame the church for a lot of this.”

So he reneged instantly on his promise of severity. He said, “You are taught from babyhood that sex can destroy you. If you believe it, then you'll be destroyed.
I
have been nearly destroyed in my time, believe me.” He paused and inspected the bowl of amber sugar crystals. “But sex is a matter of rational negotiation, like buying a car or a house. You have to be deliberately calm. If you think you're going off to save this woman, Delaney, don't make it a matter of fated destiny, of rescue on a grand scale. You're going off for your own sake. Because there
are
other possibilities. You can rescue her and not marry her. You can support the child without leaving Gina. You see, a rational balance.” Doig frowned. “Do you get what I'm saying?”

“I can't do it that way.”

“No. Because the church told you your sexual passions were runaway monsters which would tear your house down. You have to tear your house down now the monster is out of its cave. Now that there's such a thing as desire, you have to throw Gina away.”

“She won't stand for it. Support of a bastard. Support of a girlfriend or an old girlfriend. She can't take that, and I can't hide it from her.”

“Bring her to me, Delaney. The two of you—”

“No. No.” Didn't he understand anything about Italians? “She couldn't take the shame.”

Doig pushed his chair away from the table. “You've decided she can't.”

“No. I know she can't.”

Doig grabbed Delaney's wrist. “I want you to bring her to me. We'll make an arrangement, the three of us.”

His belief that he could make a peace they could live by was so childlike Delaney did not like to trample on it. But he knew there wasn't any compact anyone could draw up. “I'll see if she'll be in it, Andrew,” Delaney lied.

46

F
ROM THE
J
OURNALS OF
S
TANISLAW
K
ABBELSKI
, C
HIEF OF
P
OLICE
, S
TAROVICHE
.
Feb. 2, 1945, Berlin

The lieutenant we visited today at Dahlwitz in bad way with pulmonary inflammation and thigh wound. He lies in his own room in infirmary at commando school. He would be better off surrounded by other humans in a general ward, but his superiors believe he would spread alarm.

Last time I was at Dahlwitz was just prior to Christmas, when out there with Ostrowsky to review Black Cats and other Belorussian operatives soon to be parachuted home. Atmosphere then very sanguine, confidence high, men looked magnificent. Hard to believe the proud personnel of that day have been reduced to this one gibbering officer.

He looked up from bed at us and said, “You can't go back, no one can go back! No use threatening agents we left behind, no use saying go on working for us or we'll spill the beans to the Soviets. The Soviets know everything. I tell you, every damned thing!”

This statement of faith, delivered from clogged lungs and a constricted throat, contracted during what must have been a pitiless and unhinging escape through the frozen Belovehz forest, across Poland, across occupied Germany, flashing forged papers, hiding his thigh wound, surviving by wit. Now his wit is at an end.

Ostrowsky sat beside him like an uncle, calming him. In no time the boy was again calling him “Mr. President.” “Tell us precisely what you believe the problems are back there,” asked Ostrowsky soothingly. “In the homeland.”

The boy began by weeping, but his account was clear. Clear too that what has happened to the Black Cats is the largest Belorussian reversal since last December at Biscenson when Germans unwisely insisted on throwing the Belarus Brigade up against General Patton's armor in a blessedly brief encounter. (For which, of course, Abramtchik unjustly blames Ostrowsky.)

His face therefore a mess of tears and sweat, the lieutenant began to tell us how the Soviets manage security. The lieutenant and his squad parachuted into the Kaminetz area on midwinter's night. They had been given the names of Belorussian loyalists still supposedly to be found in the villages north of the Pripet and the Bug. They found the villages totally deserted and empty of food. It had been intended that they live off the villages. Now, within two days of landing in the woods, they were in a desperate and famished condition. They moved north looking for Vitushka's platoon. On the way they met a very frightened, very elderly charcoal burner, living with his wife in a hovel in the woods, who told them that the Russians had simply cleared the area. Along the Belorussian-Polish border, they had emptied every village and relocated the villagers in encampments to the east. Hence they now knew that anyone found in the woods was a fascist spy. The old man and his wife, who had escaped this extraordinary relocation, were terrified that that would be
their
fate.

Starving and ill from exposure, the lieutenant and his men located Vitushka in the woods near the Pruzhany road. Vitushka confirmed the old man's story. Along a border of 150 miles, and to a depth of fifty miles, everything had been cleared. Ostrowsky agents in the villages had been executed. Travel by urban people in Grodno, Kaminetz, Brest, Kobrin, and so on was not permitted. The city dwellers were locked up, the villagers were gone.

Could not help feeling an awe and admiration for such a degree of thoroughness. This
is
relocation on a scale which would be beyond my resources and Redich's gifts.

The boy related that a supplies drop on New Year's Eve and a few successfully stalked stags saved them from starvation. It was apparent however that they had a choice only between dying in perfect security in the forests or trying to contact Ostrowsky agents in the cities.

Moving south now, they encountered a Russian patrol-in-strength at night while trying to cross the Brest Litovsk—Minsk highway. Only six of them escaped death or capture and, after two more cruel days passed, stood on the northern outskirts of the city of Kobrin. Vitushka and two others decided to penetrate the city and make contact with the Ostrowsky cell there while the wounded lieutenant and the others waited in the woods. Vitushka, he said, had behaved very well through all their sufferings. When he could, he did his party trick, which was to sing black American jazz songs in a gravelly voice. The lieutenant described how in his peasant coat, Vitushka emerged from the woods on an edge of a country road. Away in the dimness of late afternoon was that most miserable of low-lying Belorussian towns, with its shabby wooden suburbs and its unkempt timber mills. And Vitushka stood there for a moment singing for the benefit of the two going with him and the others who would wait, “Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone.”

During the night one of the lieutenant's two companions swallowed his cyanide pill. It was after dark the next night before one of Vitushka's small party turned up again. He too was ready to end his life. Soviets had a ten-thousand-man intelligence division in the town—at least one man attached to each household. Nothing in the slightest way remarkable could happen in Kobrin or in any of the border cities. Vitushka and one of his men had approached the Kobrin address given them during their training at Dahlwitz and had been instantly captured. The third man, the one who had now reached the woods again in a state of moral collapse, had been posted in the doorway of a grocery shop and had seen the arrest. He had instantly tried to cover his connection to Vitushka by showing his papers to the grocer and buying one of the few items which were for sale—a can of pickled cucumbers. These he took to a timber yard, where he spent a miserable night in hiding. Somehow he talked his way through a patrol next afternoon. By then loudspeakers were announcing that the fascist Vitushka and one of his lieutenants would be publicly paraded through Kobrin and that the parade would be filmed by a newsreel camera crew.