A Family Madness (40 page)

In saying that, I'm temporizing. I'll get to the crux. I believe that Mother and Drusova had a pact. Mother fed Drusova certain information in return for immunity for her husband and children. Mother was already fed up with Belorussian politics, with flights from Minsk and other places. We knew that very well as children. It is a truism that some people like to pretend that the reason there are more men in politics than women is that women are oppressed. The fact is that women so often have a different kind of politics imposed on them by their biology. Some women anyhow. There is always Rosa Luxemburg and Jeanne d'Arc, and I'm unsure what they do to my proposition.

But the deal between the partisans and Mrs. Danielle Kabbelski was that we had immunity. It is quite possible that if all the plenteous guards had been withdrawn from around our house in Staroviche, we would still have lived. Your experience under the table indicates that.

At nine o'clock on the night of the deadline, Father went to Redich and told him that he hoped within the hour to be able to produce the culprit. The hatred which ran between my father and Redich must have been unspeakable, but Redich would have welcomed that, was the sort of man to whom politics was hatred.

And so when Father came to Redich promising results, Redich took improper joy in telling Father there was no need to drum up a fake culprit. The true informer had already turned herself in. She was locked in a storeroom. She was Danielle Kabbelski. She had given enough detail to condemn herself, and in that process she had of course condemned Galina.

Remember Daskovich? He was a promising young civil administrator they put out in one of the villages in the hope that he would run it in a model manner, that that particular village would be a lighthouse for the whole province. And Daskovich was apparently gunned down on the road home after a conference in town. Well, old-timers who were at the trial tell me that that was one of the things Mother confessed to—setting Daskovich up for the partisans.

Father spent most of her immediate and so-called trial in a daze. He was shamed, an old man told me, but he wanted to save her. He objected that Drusova, working in the mayor's office, would have known about Daskovich's itinerary without needing to be told by my mother.

Standing before those gangsters, Mother expressed no enmity of Galina. Poor Galina had been blackmailed by the NKVD, she said. When Galina recruited her, it had been in a sisterly manner. Galina had said something like “I need a few names to keep Sedlov's people happy. It would be best if they were men with real crimes in their past. Do it or I might be killed by the NKVD. Do it or the Soviets might be moved by frustration to unravel the whole business of forged identities, might come in here and take everyone.”

Albert, who gave me the crucial news that Mother had not suicided, and all the old men who later confirmed the story, say—as if it is to be a consolation for me—that she died well. These bumpkin Belorussians who have all of them shot Jews and villagers in the neck yet play with the concept of honorable and dishonorable death! In any case, she made her contrition, signed a forged suicide note, and was hanged from the rafters—a degrading business, a woman hanging in front of men. They all tell me it was quick, but they would say that anyhow. According to their vision of what is proper, some say that Father and Mother embraced before the hanging, and others that he showed a proper reserve toward a traitor.

Galina's body was never found. One would not want to imagine her death. Mother had said at the trial that in a panic the evening before Galina had tried to strangle her. I can understand the poor bitch's panic. She was no doubt carried out of the camp as you were and set upon in the woods behind the old forced-labor camp, then tormented and murdered. Colonel Nouges would be easily convinced she had gone missing. That tart was always clearing off to Stuttgart with her boyfriend.

Immediately after the execution, Father was taken out of the camp to the latrine pits where Redich said you were hidden. They uncovered the one your abductors pointed to and found nothing. It was the one, however, since blankets could be seen down there, and the marks of your remarkable escape were visible on the edges of the pit. They followed your tracks and found you behind a pile of lumber, raving about that Uncle you always spoke of in your fits, the Uncle I always thought was an extension of Onkel Willi, someone who was not too busy with history-making to play a few stupidly wise games with children. You would of course always maintain that he had hauled you out of the pit, but poor little sod! You had hauled yourself out. The state of your fingernails showed that. You were treated for pneumonia and exposure, told that Mother had committed suicide, that the uncertainty of her life had become too much for her.

And Father lost his camp leadership and its attendant privileges, and Tokina let herself waste away and turned her face to the wall during the following summer, and Albert was honorably discharged, and I went with him—yes, I even have Father's signature on a form. Father had become a passive man and had lost faith in the whole business. I knew that if I went wherever he intended to go, it would be the end of me.

I believe that Father emerged from this passivity once in the ensuing years, in 1955, when Redich fell from a train in Sydney. If you have ever wondered about this incident, it is now all explained. Most of the old-time Belorussians here in Paris take it for granted that Redich was pushed, and that he deserved to be. You were already in Australia, studying to become an Australian, when the whole factional thing came to its head in 1951. Abramtchik's people had a lot of support from an American secret service organization called the Office of Policy Coordination. This organization was betting both sides of the factional fence, and decided to do what the Germans had done before them, to train both Abramtchik and Ostrowsky people at a parachute training school in West Germany with the intention of dropping them into Belorussia and the Ukraine. The Office of Policy Coordination would spend a fortune getting these people ready and would drop them behind the lines—that is how they saw it—and the next time they would lay eyes on them was when they saw film footage of their press conferences in Moscow where they would point to the Western equipment issued to them for their missions and would beg pardon of the Soviet People. This happened so much to Abramtchik's people that he began to lose his hold on the Allies; and Ostrowsky, over in South River, New Jersey, was the man the Americans in particular came to trust.

It turned out that both Ostrowsky and Abramtchik came to believe that the bipartisan blight on their efforts behind the Soviet lines was Redich. Redich had a friend, a spy named Kim Philby, who worked in the Office of Policy Coordination. Philby eventually had to flee to the East. Redich they sent to Australia on a fund-raising expedition. There he could meet the one man they were sure would not let him alight from a train unharmed.

The old-timers here tell me that in those days the doors on trains in Sydney did not pneumatically shut. That did not matter, because Australians were innocents and had no ancient grievances against each other. In European cultures they have to be far more careful in such matters.

So Ostrowsky simply sent the news to Father that Redich was—as they say—a mole, that Redich may have been a mole even in Michelstadt, and that Mother might have died merely to protect his coyer. I hope Father gave him a good heave and that he did not die at once.

There it is, Radek. Since it is now late at night and I am exhausted, all I can do is to leave you with the burden of this family news. You must swallow it as I did. You have my affection and best wishes.

Your loving sister, Genia

PART THREE

57

Delaney had put on his best suit for the visit to the Sinclair Funeral Home, an old and gracious farmhouse which the town, in growing westward toward the river, had subsumed. His mind had for the past week been steadied only by his daily call to Penrith detectives to discover when the bodies would be released for burial. Sergeant Dick Webster—an old footballer who in the time of innocence had sometimes put a meaty, approving hand on Delaney's shoulder on Leagues Club Sunday nights—had warned him that in view of the wounds there could be no question of open coffins. But it was still worthwhile going to visit the place. Webster had seen enough of the mystery of death and the paradoxes of mourning to know that.

Delaney got there early in the afternoon of a fine day in early May. He shared the waiting room with a slight, frayed blond woman. The place was well provided with magazines on sailing and photography, as if this were a dentist's waiting room. Perhaps whoever Sinclair was saw it in those terms, saw himself as the kindly dispenser of the novocaine of funeral rites.

The blond woman was trying to read a boating magazine. She had turned the pages back on glossies of twelve-meter yachts, none of which she could ever expect to own. She kept glancing at Delaney.

At last she said, “My condolences.”

Delaney had to force his vocal cords. “And mine to you,” he muttered.

“Is it a … a parent of yours, perhaps?”

“No, it's a girlfriend.” He began crying, and she came and sat beside him and placed a dry hand on his hand.

“You're here for the Kabbels, aren't you?” she said. “You know my daughter Danielle.”

The odd use of the present instead of the past was the only betrayal of grief. He looked at her amazed. From this woman came Danielle!

“I'm Mrs. Kabbel,” she said. “I married Rudi in 1955. We had to put the wedding off because of that other fellow, Redich, falling out of a train at Lidcombe. But oh yes, I knew that all this was going to happen. I left as if my life depended on it. Soon as Scott was thirteen. Dear God, I can't believe he'd do it, though I knew he would.”

“He?” asked Delaney. “Which he?”

“All of them,” she said, her eyes unfocused.

It was the right time to state his holy intention. “I'm going to take the baby. And Danielle, needless to say. The baby's my own.”

“Oh no,” she said, staring at the mid-distance. “No sense in that. Let them go down with Rudi. Danielle wanted to be some sort of chosen person. Let her go down with damn Rudi. The state runs to not such bad funerals for murder victims who leave a bit of property. Let the state put them all down together. Don't you think?”

But he knew the woman was mad. The term “put them down”—it was a giveaway. As if two Pekingese she owned were pissing on the carpet.
Put them down!
She wanted the Kabbels and the child disposed of in a lump. For that reason he recognized her at once as an enemy.

“Listen,” he said, finding himself with some surprise on his feet. “Don't try that! Don't try that on. You're bloody tired of them, eh? I'm not tired of them, you callous bitch. If I could I'd bury them in bloody northern Queensland.”

The woman rose because she thought he might offer blows. She was angry enough to return them.

“Don't talk to me like that, you damned lout! Because you slept with Danielle a few times doesn't give you any right! I carried the whole mess for years—the voices and the séances and that terrible old father and the talk about Belorussia and people whose names all ended in
chik
and
sky
. I saw Rudi through his fits. So don't call me a bitch or mess up my funeral plans. My husband, my damn children! And I want to be finished with them at one hit!”

Delaney seized her by the upper arms. Full of the ruggedness of a woman who has only to see one simple thing done before she can breathe again, she struck him across the face with her handbag, broke the hold more effortlessly than most professional footballers had in the past two seasons, and fled out into the reception room. Delaney pursued her. A young man in a suit turned up from the inner chambers of the funeral home, the place where Danielle and Alexandra were lying, inadequately prepared for the earth. The receptionist was standing at her typewriter and telephone, wide-eyed. At a nod from the young man in the suit, she called a number. Delaney was sure it was Penrith police the girl had called. He had time for his mad plan. He had not been strong enough to hold Rudi Kabbel's wife, yet he believed he might yet carry away Danielle and the child.

He explained the scheme to the young man. The young man said, “Sir, you should compose yourself. It isn't your place. There was a document the police found with the bodies. I hope you understand that. Requesting a communal grave.”

Delaney decided to fight his way through into the place where the dead were kept, but the young man, a muscular pallbearer beneath his good suit, did his best to block him. And now, Delaney could hear behind him, Mrs. Kabbel had found her tears, was loudly keening.

“Cheryl,” the young man groaned, struggling with Delaney, “tell them to hurry!”

Another man, middle-aged, suntanned from standing beside summer graves and dressed in a more sepulchral suit than the young one, appeared from behind a curtain and helped hold Delaney immobile. This second one was tough. Delaney found himself on the floor, a strong forearm garbed in black serge clamped across his chest. Delaney raved and pleaded, but realized that by his craziness he had forfeited the right to be heard. The argument therefore that at least the child should not be buried with its murderers meant nothing to either muscular undertaker.

He heard the sirens drawing close down Main Street, heard the police arrive, heard three sets of boots on the parquetry. He saw old Dick Webster's ageless and ravaged face above him. “Let go of the man,” Dick Webster told the two undertakers, and only then asked Delaney whether he would do the right thing, if he was going to be sensible.

By now Delaney was beyond sense of resistance. In a short time, without remembering what moves were made to achieve it, he found himself in the back of a patrol car, hunched over his knees, between which he sheltered his hands, and drenching his shirt with tears and saliva.